It Looks Like This (sorry, no ice cream) 

No Guts

It is simply inexcusable that only six US Senators showed up to vote on Bush's $87 billion Iraq bill. If my senators (I can't bring myself to capitalize that word considering their cowardice), Feinstein and Boxer, can't articulate a reason for voting one way or another on an issue of such magnitude, then perhaps they ought to get the hell out of the way and let somebody else actually do the job they were sent to Washington for. What a couple of useless human beings. As has become usual over the last year, only Robert Byrd among Democrats distinguished himself in this affair.

My Patriotism

Excuse me, may I have your attention for a minute? Thank you, I just want to remind you of something. Except for in Dick Cheney's fevered dreams, THERE WAS NO CONNECTION BETWEEN 9/11 AND IRAQ!!! Whatever it really was, THE INVASION OF IRAQ WAS NOT A STRIKE AGAINST TERRORISM!!!

Why, you ask, do I bring this up? Because ads prepared by the Republican National Committee accuse those who oppose Bush's policy in Iraq with opposing the war against terrorism.

I can't speak for anybody else and don't want to try to. With my countrymen, with much of the world, I was stunned and horrified by the events of 9/11. I supported Mr. Bush when he took us to war against those who had been identified as the perpetrators of the horror, Al Qaeda, and those we were told were their prime supporters, the Taliban government of Afghanistan.

I quailed at the Patriot Act, however, failing to understand how strengthening our government's ability to spy on its citizens makes us a stronger, freer nation. I got nervous when told of Total Information Awareness, wondering how a failure of our nation's law enforcement agencies to "connect the dots" before 9/11 and identify pebbles of relevant information in a vast mountain of irrelevant information would be corrected by enlarging the mountain. I scratched my head and wondered when I was told that especially in times of war, tax cuts were the most important thing for America. And when Mr. Bush started us down the path of war with Iraq I resisted in every way I could think of, marching and protesting in the street, writing to my local newspaper, to my Senators and Representative, and to Bush himself, urging them not to take us down that path.

Since the war began we have learned that the war against Iraq actually weakened our offensive against Al Qaeda, by drawing intelligence and other units from Afghanistan and putting them into the campaign against Iraq. We have seen the Taliban regain strength in Afghanistan and seen Al Qaeda lash out across the southern Mediteranean and south Asia.

Mr. Bush, through his lackeys on the RNC questions the patriotism of those who oppose and speak out against his policies and actions. We are accused of giving support to our nation's enemies. And often we are accused of hating America.

Again, I speak only for myself, but none of those critics who question my patriotism, who challenge my motivation and my right to question the policies of my nation's government, love my country, the United States of America, more than I do. But my love of my country requires me to stand up and speak out when I believe it is doing wrong. It requires me to try to change my nation's path when I believe it has strayed from that which is right. It requires me to stand up and challenge it when I see it sacrificing freedom, liberty, due process, all the beliefs embodied in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address in the pursuit of naked power and profit. I see a President, working with his allies in Congress and on the RNC, who has used the tragedy of 9/11 to opportunistically ram through a social and economic program that serves only to further entrench and enrich those already in power, while undermining the social programs that Americans have come to rely on since the days of the great depression. Who pursues a foreign policy that purports to promote democracy abroad while he and his fearful Attorney General work to destroy it at home. My love for my country requires me to urge my friends, family, and neighbors to stand up against this administration, to remove these criminals from the offices they have defiled, and to restore our nation's honor.

Arnold, Again

Ah, Arnold. He ran for governor without revealing any plan for how he would overcome the state's budget deficit, but promised that he would provide "leadership." In his fourth day in office his well of leadership apparently bottomed out, as he threatened state legislators that there would be severe casualties in the election next year unless they adopted his plan to pass the budget problems of the current generation of Californians on to the next generation by borrowing our way out of this mess.

Unfortunately for Arnold, he didn't get elected on a mandate to deal with the budget by borrowing. He wouldn't reveal during the campaign how he would attack the deficit other than to promise to eliminate waste. In fact, he didn't even get half the vote, so he had no mandate at all. So his threats to campaign up and down the state next year to defeat those who oppose him now is kind of empty. It is not at all clear that what he is now offering is what the people of California want or thought they were buying.

It's time to get down to business Arnie. You wanted the job. You got it. Now shut up and do it.

Oh, Arnie, one more thing. You're a politician now. By choice. It's no good to try to call those who oppose you "politicians," as you did yesterday, intending it as a slur, and leave yourself out of that grouping. You ran for office. You won. Politician is your new profession. Deal with it.

Be a Man, Daschle

I don't know the process by which Senate minority leaders are chosen, but if Daschle doesn't oppose the energy bill he has got to be ousted. Sometimes a man just has to stand up and do what's right, no matter how popular ethanol subsides are out there on the lonesome prairie.

Bush Bits

Hmmm...something seems amiss here. George Bush is too busy to attend the funerals or otherwise acknowledge the ultimate sacrifice of the more than 400 American service people slain so far in Iraq, yet he can attend a memorial service for the British killed? Somebody 'splain this to me.

I've been kind of laying off of Bush lately. Not because he's earned a break, more because I get tired of the sameness that creeps in anytime I write about him. "Bush lied about blah blah blah..." "Bush's policy on blah blah blah benefits only the (choose one or more: rich, energy companies, Republicans, politically powerful, big business)while destroying (choose one or more: the environment, the middle class; etc.)" It get's old, you know?

How's that Justice Department investigation into the Valeris Plame Wilson leak coming along? Ready to wrap it up right on Schedule? Say...December, 2004?

Ah-nold Time

Okay, I gave Arnold two days before coming after him. I think that's more than fair.

So, his new plan is to cut taxes and borrow to close the deficit. Hmmm...why does that sound familiar?

Remember all that blather during the campaign about how he was going to come to Sacramento and trim the waste in the state budget? Apparently that waste is more elusive than WMDs. Perhaps he left his shears in Malibu. The only tool he had available to balance the budget was a gold card. Unfortunately, the bills will come to the rest of us.

Although some apologists are already claiming that Ah-nold would have been elected even if he had come out election day and said his plan to balance the budget was to borrow more money, does anybody with two brain cells to rub together believe this? And since he didn't do that, does it matter now?

Let's see if we can keep the lies straight. He said he wouldn't accept donations, then accepted millions. He said he wasn't in the pocket of big business, but he accepted those millions from real estate interests and big growers. And oh yes, let's not forget those meetings with energy execs. He said he would have an investigator look into the groping allegations after the election but hasn't (and won't). Sounds like he's about ready for the White House.

Kucinich and Flag Burning

I found a link in which Dennis Kucinich kind of explains his vote several years ago in support of a law banning flag burning, and kind of explains why he no longer feels such a law is appropriate. In an article in the Pasadena Weekly, he is quoted saying, " Let's talk about the context. Let's do it," he said. "The context of that vote came from a time when America was not at war and wasn't conducting aggressive warfare. Now the meaning of the flag has been changed. And the flag is being promoted by an administration in such a way as to imply aggression. I think Americans have to be free to express their opinions. I mean the flag does stand for our nation. But I regret that our nation is standing for war today."

What this implies is that whether flag burning is acceptable or not depends on what the flag stands for at the time it is burned. When he supported such a ban, he thought the flag stood for good things. Now he apparently believes it symbolizes bad things. That's not acceptable. The biggest problem is that he apparently feels it's okay to regulate speech, at least symbolic speech, according to its content. In other words, I'll let you hang that sign or burn that flag as long as I agree with what your message, but not otherwise. That is antithetical to basic free speech protection, which holds that limitations on speech must be value neutral.

Another problem is that burning a flag, though it obviously has a significant emotional impact on those who witness it, and I presume, on those who do it, is a particularly inarticulate form of symbolic political speech. Unless the act is accompanied by words explaining it, nobody can be sure just what the burner's message is. We know he is angry at his country (or maybe not, maybe its just his government), but beyond that we don't know much. If we're not clear on the burner's message, how can we know if we agree with it so we can allow it?

I don't mean to pick on Kucinich here. I think he has taken a lot of stands during this campaign and throughout his political career that I agree with and admire. If voting were held today, I'd vote for him. But I worry about the kind of fuzzy thinking that could produce a rationale like this (not as bad as Dean's death penalty rationalizations, but worthy of mentioning in the same paragraph). I think he could and should do better.

Against an Anti-Flag Burning Amendment

I have to admit that I am somewhat taken aback at the notion that any of the Presidential candidates honestly believe that it would be appropriate to have a constitutional amendment banning flag burning. A glance at a table in the local paper the other day revealed that about half of the Democrats running for President support such an amendment. My wonderment at anyone seriously taking this position resides at several levels.

First of all, there is the problem itself. How often does anybody burn an American flag in this country? Is this really a big problem? Is it of such great moment that it requires that the fundamental document on which our National Government rests, a document that has been amended but 27 times since its conception, only 17 times since the adoption of the Bill of Rights be amended again to address it? How can anyone seriously argue that this is the case?

Secondly, I take issue with the sanctification of the flag that this amendment would create. For many people, the flag is already a sacred relic. To those people, the flag apparently symbolizes something so powerful, so essential to how they feel about themselves and their country, that to deface the flag itself is to assault those things that they hold most dear, to assault they themselves. It is to attack the things the flag symbolizes for them, be that the United States itself, the Constitution, freedom, liberty, whatever. Because of the gravity involved in amending the Constitution, because of the seriousness of that act, I dearly hope that those Presidential candidates, indeed that all politicians and public figures who advocate such an amendment count themselves among such people. But I have to point out to these people that burning or trampling on or otherwise defacing the flag is only to burn or trample the flag. The flag is but a symbol. Burning an individual flag destroys that flag but it does nothing to weaken those things the flag represents, it does nothing to weaken the country, to lessen freedom or liberty, to assail the Constitution. On the contrary, I believe that an amendment to the Constitution to prohibit flag burning constitutes a greater assault on those things than the burning of one or a thousand flags ever could.

As I mentioned, in over two hundred years, our constitution has been amended but 27 times. The vast majority of those amendments came about out of recognition that in the drafting the Constitution, either the Federal or State governments were given too much power and control over the life of its citizens. There are a handful of amendments that limit action citizens or states may take against the Federal Goverment or individual states. Most amendments, though, have aimed to limit the reach of government, to expand the freedom and liberty of its citizens. The most famous exception, the Eighteenth Amendment, establishing prohibition, was a spectacular and misguided failure, leading to its being repealed fourteen years later by the Twenty first Amendment.

The implication of an amendment such as the proposed flag burning one, is that we the people have too much freedom, too much liberty, too much freedom of expression and that it must be curtailed. I beg all the candidates and all citizens to challenge this notion. And I beg them to consider the further implications. Would such an amendment be the only step, or only the first step down the path to restricting our rights to express ourselves politically. Will there be others?

Who Filled the holes?

In Sebastopol, CA, a town near mine, somebody last weekend filled the holes in the sidewalk in which the boy scouts put their American Flags for events like Veteran's day. Though nobody has claimed credit (?) for this, the broad assumption has been that it was done by anti-war groups. I have to admit that was my first guess, too. Wouldn't it make sense, though, since that is almost everybody's first guess, for pro-war (anti-anti-war ?) groups to do something like this, knowing that it would make the anti-war groups look bad.

Am I getting too conspiracy-minded in my old age?

The Curse of Free Trade

I need help understanding something. I'm not a trained economist. I haven't taken an economics class since the eleventh grade, nearly thirty years ago. My grasp of this topic is limited to what I can actually see in front of me. And because of what I see, I fail to grasp the advantages, to the American people, of the free trade movement.

In his recent book, The Great Unraveling, much of which I profoundly agree with, Paul Krugman chides the American Labor Movement for their resistance to the free trade movement, saying that by resisting free trade they are "working against the interest of the world's poor." He argues that a total ban in this country on manufactured imports from third world countries would raise blue collar wages in this country no more than three or four percent. And it may be that from where he sits, that's the situation in the world. From Paul Krugman's vantage point that 3 or 4% doesn't make much difference. From the vantage point of a New York Times columnist, a Princeton Economics professor, a best selling author, that may be negligible. I'll wager that he could forego that kind of money and not notice it. From my vantage point it looks different.

I see Hewlett Packard lay off 1000 workers in the San Francisco Bay Area while opening a new manufacturing plant in Southeast Asia and I see 1000 jobs leaving this country that will not be replaced. A thousand homes with probably their chief source of income cut off. And that's a thousand jobs cut following 10,000 others that preceded them. These people are being thrust into a labor marketplace in which many, if not most, of them will never make the kind of money they had made before. Most will get some kind of job again. Again, for many, if not most of them, those jobs will be in the service sector, making just a fraction of their previous wages. They would love to see a cut of 3 to 4%.

I see Levi Strauss close the last of its US manufacturing plants while opening plants in Mexico. Again 100s of American workers are out of work, jobs taken out of the workplace that will not be replaced by equivalent jobs. 100s of families lost, many of them losing their homes as they can no longer afford a mortgage. For these people, the American dream has been turned upside down. And with Free Trade, with more American jobs going overseas, 100s of thousands, maybe millions more will join them.

I understand that some day an equilibrium will be reached. American wages will drop because of this glut of workers and this will balance against the added cost of shipping materials and goods across the seas. You can bet, though, that this drop in wages, which will affect the lifestyles of millions of Americans, won't affect Princeton professors or New York Times columnists. From the halls of academia, these are problems that affect other people.