Greed, The Grinch and Ebeneezer

The forces of greed, corruption and obstinacy have a firm grip on our body politic in Washington, and all this fiddling while Rome burns is doing nothing to advance the cause of the Commonweal. Indeed, it is tearing apart the very fabric of our constitutional curtain, showing the stage behind it that has been left  bare and bereft of bold men with big ideas, but occupied instead by little men with greedy self serving limitations. The spirit which is the darkest among us is holding sway, and Mighty Mouse is no where to be seen yet to save the day.
     How did we come to this point? How did we let the darkest side prevail? Why have we weakened our bolder , nobler selves so much that we have given way to the Darth Vaders in our body politic to dominate the day?
    We thought we had voted again for hope, and at least some change, and the truth is , we did. But the Captains Queeg who are manning the Congesssional ship of state have refused to let go of the wheel, and have opted instead to head for the nearest iceberg.
    We have survived Mayan Aramageddon, but not the  four horsemen of our self inflicted apocalypse : greed, corruption, obstinacy and power lust. It has become such a spectacle that the spokesman for one of most well heeled and powerfully monied lobbying organizations, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA, has even publicly embraced the idea that to do do away with gun violence, all we need is more guns! Armed guards at every schoolhouse gate. That's the answer!
    The Faustian bargain that has been struck here is one of historic proportion. Money has so dictated our politics that the Lobbysist Lords like LaPierre, and Grover Norquist won't allow their Congressional minions to vote on either sensible gun regulations or a fairer system of taxation.  Ebeneezer Scrooge and  The Grinch have forged an alliance with the Dark side, and Obie Wan Kenobi is no where to be found.
    What's really wrong? To paraphrase a gritty old Cajun pol, " It's the money, Stupid!" How can we be so blind? Until we get the money out of politics, we have little future to look forward to . We will flounder and fulminate ourselves along the craggy cliffs of the abyss as long as we let greed and avarice rule our roost.
  Maybe we just have to let all the tax cuts expire, and all the budget cuts go into effect before we can awaken ourselves from the nightmarish scenario that has taken center stage in Washington . Before we can collectively cry "Out, out damn spot!" From politics, let money be gone, and principle return! Tis the only way to truly re-ennoble ourselves, and to awaken the American spirit of common purpose and goodwill . Away from us ye Jacob Marleys! The angels of a better spirit await.

Custer,  Bluster,  and diminished luster

As the old saying goes, "Denial is a river in Egypt", and the Republicans  are still somewhere between the Gaza Strip and Benghazi in their river of deep denial.
      They would have you believe that Mitt Romney lost because he was not a  good enough snake oil salesmen. It apparently does not matter to them that the snake oil he was selling was more like cyanide for the middle class than castor oil, which is always good for what ails you. The voters refused to drink the Kool Aid.
    In the end, as it turns out, the American people were just not as stupid as the Republicans thought. They couldn't be bought. They couldn't be bamboozled, and they would not let their votes be suppressed. They showed up when it really mattered, and it did matter. Elections always matter. They also have consequences.
     We have seen the great wealth of this country be disproportionately husbanded by those at the top of the scale in ways that are reminiscent of the old Robber baron days. One joke making the rounds is that the CEO of Hostess twinkies calls a final meeting with the union boss and one representative worker. There are a dozen Twinkies  on the table. The CEO walks off with 11 of the twinkies and says to the employee, " You'd better watch out for that union guy, or he'll eat most of your twinkie".
     There are the greedy pizza barons who live in multi million dollar mega mansions, but are threatening to lay off their employees if they have to invest 12 cents per pizza of their profit in employee health care. There are the coal barons who are laying off their miners because they didn't work hard enough to produce , not coal, but votes, for the one percenter agenda.
     It is reminiscent of the slaveholder mentality which caused us to take up arms against one another to defend the right of some men to enslave others in pursuit of profit. Has our civil war never really ended? What's wrong with this picture? Who is painting our political landscape?
     The answer is not surprising. It is the small cadre of omnipotent oligarchs who place their greed above the good of the planet and their fellow human beings. They have tried to buy their way into the think tanks and the universities to manipulate the national agenda, and to deny anything or anyone who stands in the way of their unbridled self aggrandizement and hubristic hegemony. They have sprinkled the fairy dust of social issues among the great unwashed to insure that people vote against their own economic issues. They have tried to manipulate the numbers of those who vote, so that their agenda is vouchsafed for their undemocratic plutocratic dominance.
     They have failed to achieve success on the national level, but they have achieved some degree of success in manipulating the Congress and many state legislatures to champion their causes. They have done so by rigging the bidding process and drawing the lines of The Congressional and state legislative districts in such a way as to insure their success. They have further undermined democracy by opening up the flood gates of political bribery, ala Citizens "Un-United". They are acting like the Joker in a Batman movie sequel, and there seems to be no stopping point. It is a far flung and semi successful conspiratorial effort to bend the will of the majority to advance their cause, and the real joke is that they have done so while invoking the concept of liberty and justice for all. That is the ultimate irony, and the joke is on us.
     Give me you tired, your poor, your weary, your befuddled masses, and we shall manipulate them to our advantage, and crush any hopes they might have to climb the socioeconomic ladder. Their philosophy is ' I've got mine the hell with you, and if you try to climb up into this boat on that rope ladder, I'll Step on your fingers". The other side's philosophy is more like " I've got mine, how can I help you get yours"!
     The American people are not stupid.  They have made their choice. It is now up to the losers to show some grace and some common sense, and to remember that there are still many more things that bind us together than divide us. The American dream still beckons for us all. Clearly, we need to trim the budget, and pay down the deficit as well. The solvency solution is broader than just raising taxes on the well to do. But, If the Custer-like last stand of a defeated Republican agenda really is to hold out against tax hikes for the top two per cent of the country, the moral bankruptcy of that position will end up bankrupting us all. Lord have mercy. We deserve better than that.

  Challenge lies in finding way to meet in middle

PITTSBURG, Kan. — To secede or not secede should not be the question. Whether ’tis nobler to suffer the indignity of losing an election, without much recourse for the next four years, or to just throw in the towel, or move to Canada is not the reality of choice we citizens face.

The real challenge lies in finding ways to meet in the middle and avoid driving off the cliff like Thelma and Louise.

I am old. I have actually lived through and voted in 11 presidential elections. Sometimes I have been happy about the results, and sometimes I have been sad. As I told my students, sometimes you are the windshield, and sometimes you’re the bug. Elections have winners and losers (usually), and elections do have consequences. Majority rule does indeed mean majority rule.

Sometimes I have even been downright indignant about the result, as in 2000, when I felt that the real winner of the contest was denied the right to take office by a Supreme Court 5-4 intervention that was unprecedented, unwarranted and, I think, ultimately unwise.

But I never threatened to secede from the union. It took me nearly a year to accept the leadership of the presidential annointee of 2000, and only when our nation was challenged in a direct and unimaginable way on Sept. 11 did I rally, emotionally, behind our politically appointed president. But rally I did. So did many of my fellow doubting Thomases who questioned the ascendancy of George W. Bush. For better or for worse, he was the only president we had, and I had to learn to accept that fact. Whether he achieved office as a result of electile dysfunction or mendacious manipulation of the electoral process was no longer the issue. There was reason to unite, and go forward. Just as there is today.

At least today there is no doubt about the result of the election, no doubt about the result. It is clear who won, with a solid majority, albeit not a landslide. Most elections are never decided by landslide votes; they are more often a 50-plus to 49-minus situation. The difference in this last election involved more than 3.5 million popular votes, and 126 electoral votes. In the end, it wasn’t even close. No need for a recount. No hanging chads, No butterfly ballots. No court manipulation of the results. There was a clear winner.

In terms of coming to grips with the enormities of the challenges we as a nation face, the longer we kick the can down the road, the more perilous becomes our predicament. Failing to address and solve the issues — of entitlement reform, tax reform, climate change, energy independence and educational backsliding — will have far-reaching consequences for the hegemony of our great nation. We will either continue to lead or slide into the status of a back-bencher wannabe country whose best times are past and whose future is unsecured. That is the choice we face.

Much of the energy of the opposition party for the past four years has been focused on denying the legitimacy of the re-elected leader we have. The strategy was to hope he would fail and to trip up his efforts to succeed at every turn, even if it resulted in tripping up the country itself, temporarily. Help was on the way (they thought). Well, it didn’t happen, and we now have the same president for the next four years, and it’s time for the opposition to suck it up and deal, and live to fight another day. We all need to take a deep breath and not waste time on silly things like threatening to secede.

There are even some citizens on the other side of the spectrum who would be happy to see the red states of the former confederacy and cow country just go away. They are just as wrong as their secession-threatening brethren. In the end, we are still “E Pluribus unum,” one from many. Let’s just remember that. Our partisan thorns will surely resurface four years hence, but for now, in the immortal words of Rodney King: “Can’t we all just get along?”

 

Blinded by partisan hubris

     The highlight of election night for me was when Karl Rove, an on-air host for Fox TV, publicly challenged the decision of the Fox News analysts that President Barack Obama had won Ohio, and thus the election.
     Not so quick! Rove even got one of his co-anchors to lead the charge against the Fox News decision desk. They were, in effect, demanding a recount.
If nothing else, this points out the dangers of trying to serve two masters. Rove was posing as a pundit, but acting as a partisan — and a  partisan who was totally, especially financially, invested in a Republican victory.
     His two super PAC s — American Crossroads, and the dark super PAC Crossroads GPS, the one where we never get to find out where the money came from — spent upward of $300 million on organizing and on buying ads, mostly for naught.
Perhaps that is why Karl could not see the forest for the trees. He was blinded by the light of his own partisan hubris.
     He was shell-shocked to see the reality of losing that was staring him in the face. The reality that he, Karl Rove, boy genius and Bush's brain, was wrong. Not just wrong, but profoundly and completely wrong in his assessment of the state of the campaign, and the election.
The indelible image of the Wicked Witch of the West comes to mind: "I'm melting! I'm melting!"
Or perhaps an even better analogy would be that of the Great Wizard of Oz trying to crank away behind his velvet curtain, saying, "The great and powerful Oz has spoken!" while all the while Toto was nipping at his heels, and pulling back the curtain for all to see the Great Wizard in his diminished glory.
     Face the facts, Karl. Obama now owns the presidential megaphone for the next four years. If he plays his cards and utilizes his bully pulpit right, he could be every bit as much a transformational figure in American politics as was Ronald Reagan.
     Tuesday night, on national TV, the time had come for Rove to face his moment of truth —the truth of his failure and its enormous consequences. Yet he just couldn't do it, and his reluctance to accept the reality of the moment apparently helped to delay Mitt Romney's concession speech.
Ultimately, sanity prevailed. Romney conceded, and eloquently so. The need to heal the nation and move forward trumped Rove's clinging to his charts and his convictions, while reality was knocking ever more loudly at his front door.
     America has indeed arrived at Karl Rove's Crossroads. The American people have chosen a road diverging in the woods. That, at last, has made all the difference.
Time to move past your own crossroads, Karl, and get on with the business of fixing the future of the body politic in this great country.
Forward! Not backward, and not sideways. Forward.
     As Lee Iacocca so famously put it, "Time to lead, follow, or get the heck out of the way."
Move over, Karl. The train has left the station, and you are no longer on board.

Wrongway Corrigan/Brownback


Who is Douglas Corrigan, and what does he have to do with Sam Brownback? Corrigan earned the  nickname "Wrongway Corrigan" when he flew his single engine plane solo over the Atlantic in 1938, after filing a flight plan to go from New York to Los Angeles.. This was before radar. He claimed that he had a broken compass, and that's why he flew for 28 hours in the wrong direction, crossing the Atlantic ocean instead of the American continent.

     He was heralded by a depression weary American population for his “wrong way” flight, and even feted with ticker tape parades in New York and Chicago. Truth be known, he simply lied about it. He had  been denied the right by aviation authorities to cross the Atlantic in his single engine plane because aviation officials deemed it unsafe to fly. They told him he couldn’t do it, so he figured a way around them, leaving in the pre- dawn hours from Long Island, and heading out to sea. Despite his filed flight plan, which said he was heading west…he headed east.  He actually developed a leak in his gas tank while flying, which caused gas to spill into the cockpit, so  he poked a hole in the cockpit  floor to let the gas drip out to the ocean below,  instead of accumulating and causing an explosion.  In short  he knew what he was doing,, and he was hell bent for leather to do it.       So ,  Why the comparison?  Governor Sam Brownback and Wrong way  Corrigan have a lot in common. Damn the torpedoes...full speed ahead!  And so it is with Governor Sam Brownback.

     When historians come to judge the Kansas Governor's stewardship at the helm of state, it may be written of him that,  like  Corrigan,  he was a fierce pilot who flew his plane  with lots of guts and gusto, but in the wrong direction.  They both thought they were aiming correctly.   While the initial result for Corrigan was a ticker tape parade,  he became an historical footnote,  and poster child for bullheaded reversity.  Corrigan was literally flying blind  across the Atlantic. He could not see out of the front of the plane because of the gas tanks that obfuscated his vision, but that didn’t matter, because they fueled his journey, and buoyed his grit and determination to do what no one else, save Lindbergh, had ever done. And so it is with Sam Brownback.  Anyone who is standing in the way of his vision of a Kansas without an Income tax, which he believes will reverse the fortunes of and bolster the economy of the state, is to be ignored, or to be end run arounded.

     Corrigan’s zealotry for  crossing the Atlantic in a plane that was not ever fit to do so, earned him initial public plaudits but eventual  retrospective ridicule. The end result for Brownback may be similar, in that he may be feted at  conservative conventions in Wichita and  Topeka for now, but he may be  less than revered by future historians.  Unfortunately, the real consequences of his studied actions may be to set Kansas back for decades, instead of propelling it forward to economic hegemony.  So convinced is he of the rectitude of trickledownomics that he has literally bet the ranch, his entire state, on it.  True zealots like him never fade away. They are either vaulted to the forefront by virtue of the success of their wild and speculative ways, or catapulted to the dung heap of history by the odiferous scents of their failed gambits that won't go away. Their  ideas may die, but the scent of their experiments hang ‘round for a long, long time. And so it may be with Brownback. He will either be lionized by future generations as a hero, or considered a bum who messed up Kansas' entire governmental and educational structure.

I hope it is the former, but my bet is on the latter.

So, move over "Wrong Way Corrigan"… Governor Sam Brownback is about to outdistance you in the Guinness Book of foolhardy records.  The problem is, the joke may be on Kansas,  and it’s people.

 Facts Matter..Ads shouldn't

The number of new jobs created last month again disappoints. And, yes, there is a reason for this disappointment.

Who to blame? President Barack Obama?
How about blaming the Republicans in Congress?

They continue to refuse to pass Obama's jobs bill which would have created hundreds of thousands of new jobs. The bill would build roads and bridges that are badly needed, and create enough jobs to bring the unemployment rate down by a full percentage point.

But wait. We can't have that before the election, so the Republicans are just saying no — and then criticizing the President for not creating jobs fast enough.
Gotcha! The way to play the game is to stick your foot out and trip your opponent, and then blame him for falling down.
Will the American people buy this bullying tactic and reward the Republican opposition for their obstructionism? Only if they don't connect the dots as a result of a great fog machine being sent into overdrive by unlimited Super PAC advertising, fueled by the donations of an oligarchic group of billionaires.

How can Mitt Romney's campaign be so dismissive of the truth? The answer is that it has the money to help defy the truth.
The fog will be so thick with 30-second negative advertising spots that by November, most Americans — at least those living in the swing states like Missouri, where I teach — will be crying, "I want my TV back!" The barrage of ads will be nearly unbearable.

Still, before you fling open the shutters and say you're mad as hell, and can't take it anymore, just take a deep breath, and join me in this vow: "I refuse to allow any 30-second TV ad to affect my judgment. I will pay attention only to the debates, to the news, and to the fact checkers."
Facts really do matter, despite what Mitt Romney's pollster Neil Newhouse says to the contrary.
If people ignore these Super PAC and partisan ads entirely, from both sides, and vote based upon the merits of the positions taken by both parties, we will all be better off. The platforms of the two major national parties are pretty clear in terms of the choices they are offering the American people. Read the platforms, stay informed on the issues through the news, and vote accordingly. You can make intelligent choices in so doing, and vote your own value system.

Tell these Super Pacs, enough already! I won't be bought. I am not as stupid as you think.
I think. I actually do think. And considering the magnitude of the issues this country faces, thinking before voting is critical to the preservation of our democracy. Thomas Jefferson perhaps said it best:
"A people who believe they can be both free and ignorant, believe that which never has been, and never can be."

     The Edge of the Waters


When I was growing up and taking citizenship classes in school, we were always taught that "Politics stops at the water's edge", and that "We only have one President at a time".

      I guess all of that went out the window on Wednesday morning when Mitt Romney, with less than cautious abandonment, dove into the precarious political waters of middle eastern uncertainty to heap scorn on the President of the United States at a time when unity of purpose , resolve, and response, would have made much more sense.

      Clearly, for whatever reason, Mitt Romney jumped the gun to inject himself into an ongoing crisis, when prudence would have dictated that he hold his fire, and shut his mouth, in the face of the death of an American diplomat, at least until the dust settles, and it becomes clear what has happened, and is still happening.

       Romney sounded almost as if he were the pseudo President, speaking in a manner as if he represented America, and attempting to undercut the credibility of our one and only President at a time when standing together in the face of attacks against our embassies and our personnel should be soundly, and roundly condemned. He is not elected to any office, and has no right to speak on behalf of the American people. He is simply a candidate for office. Nothing more...nothing less. Nor does  he "represent" us, or anyone, at least not yet, and with this type of performance, hopefully he never will.

      This move by Romney is nothing short of a knee jerk reaction, and a bone headed attempt to cash in and capitalize on a very volatile situation which should call for a demonstration of American resolve, and unity in the face of a common enemy: Intolerance, ignorance, and extremism in the guise of religious zealotry.

      If Romney had simply said, "We stand by the President and Secretary of State in this hour of peril, and are united in support of their efforts to see that justice is done, and that American values will be protected and defended." it would have better served him. Instead, he showed himself to be much smaller a man than his opponent, the President of the United States.