Ethics
George W. Bush should pick up the check
Sep 5th
From an article in today’s Washington Post:
By Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes
Sunday, September 5, 2010Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration’s 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war.
This StoryBut today, as the United States ends combat in Iraq, it appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war’s broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low. For example, the cost of diagnosing, treating and compensating disabled veterans has proved higher than we expected.
Beck admits his lie
Sep 4th
Glenn Beck, presenting himself these days as the voice of God, lied at his “Restoring Honor” revival meeting. He told a moving story about having held George Washington’s farewell address in his own hands and been wonderfully inspired by that.
The moving story was a fabrication; Beck never held the document; and he was inspired only by the quest for cash and self-glorification. [See prior entry.]
Having been nailed by Keith Olbermann, Ed Schultz, and others, Beck finally owned up:
After being called on a white lie he told during his Restoring Honor rally, Glenn Beck admitted Thursday that he stretched the truth because he “thought it would be a little easier.”
Beck had claimed that he held George Washington’s handwritten first Inaugural Address in his hands at the National Archives, but a spokeswoman at the institution said he did no such thing. Keith Olbermann, Ed Schultz and others called him out for the fabrication.
Thursday on his radio show, Beck copped to the lie. (RELATED: Lies By Prominent Americans.)
“I thought it would be a little easier in the speech,” Beck said, than to go into the following elaborate explanation (via Mediaite): [Explanation follows.]
Wanna bet against the likelihood that in the wingnut blogosphere people will remember only Beck’s stage act and not the fact that the fake saint lied his sorry ass off? Reminds me of a Stephen Crane poem:
The wayfarer,
Perceiving the pathway to truth,
Was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds.
“Ha,” he said,
“I see that none has passed here
In a long time.”
Later he saw that each weed
Was a singular knife.
“Well,” he mumbled at last,
“Doubtless there are other roads.”
Democrats’ lack of enthusiasm.
Sep 3rd
Glenn Greenwald has a post on Salon titled:
Glenn Greenwald
Thursday, Sep 2, 2010 10:03 ET
The profound mystery of the “enthusiasm gap”Here’s an excerpt, providing some of the relevant factors Greenwald cites:
(3) Substantial polling data makes clear that Latinos are among the most disenchanted Democratic voting bloc, as they are furious at the White House for repeatedly violating promises on immigration reform.…
(4) At Daily Kos, Joan McCarter documents that progressive and even Democratic Party journalists are now openly acknowledging what has long been clear: President Obama’s Deficit Commission was structured so as to ensure recommendations for, among other things, cuts in Social Security benefits, to be voted on right after the election is nice and over with (an election the Democrats are trying to win by parading around as the protectors of Social Security). Also at Daily Kos, Laurence Lewis describes how similar this dynamic is to prior political controversies, where Democrats held themselves out publicly as believing one thing while privately working for the opposite.
(5) Following Robert Gibbs’ announcement that liberal Obama critics should be drug tested, and before that, Rahm Emanuel’s declaration that the same group is “fucking retarded,” a new book by former Obama “car czar” Steven Rattner describes how Emanuel worked to thwart union interests and declared, in the midst of the auto bailouts: “Fuck the UAW.”
These are among the reasons I myself find this election so difficult. They focus on the White House. I cop to being among those Emanuel and Gibbs were referring to. I feel betrayed. I have a very, very hard time imagining I’ll feel any different in 2012. In fact, if the suspicions about Social Security prove accurate, I’ll feel even worse about Obama.
But that isn’t the whole story. In this district, I’ll be voting in November for a member of Congress, a U.S. Senator, a governor, and several candidates in the state administration (attorney general etc.). I don’t know if it’s really true that all politics is local. But I do know that I’m very enthusiastic about this year’s local election. I will not be voting for or against President Obama. I will be voting for candidates who will think and act independently and not according to White House scripts.
A suggestion for Beck and his picnickers…
Aug 31st
Glenn Beck claims he wants to recover America’s lost honor. I suggest he start by asking George Bush, the person who lost it.
In the cartoon that follows, I’ve suggested Bush and Beck might start by looking where the infamous WMDs Bush joked about went missing. The difference is that the WMDs never existed. America’s honor did once exist, and Bush really did cause it to go missing.
(For younger folk, this still is from a “joke” Bush made at the 2006 White House Corresponds Dinner. Persons whose loved ones had been killed or maimed in Iraq didn’t find the joke too funny.)
Classic Girl
Aug 12th
American Apparel uses some nasty ads! Though not nasty in the same way as some Peta ads. This is the original ad. I changed just one word in order to draw attention to what’s already there.
GOP demands that GOP policies not be adopted. Demand it!!
Aug 4th
This really has to start showing up in Democratic ads!
Base Details
Aug 2nd
The English poet Siegfried Sassoon writes ironically about the eagerness of old men to send young men and women to die in war. Sassoon (English, as I said, despite his German first name) was himself one of those young men, losing his life in the First World War. Hearing the eagerness of old men like McCain and Gingrich to fight yet another war simultaneously, one can see that not much has changed.
Gimme, gimme, gimme…
Jul 31st
Deadlines come and go. Some are no doubt important immediately (federal matching fund type stuff). Others are important indirectly: You raise money and meet your goals, then you look viable to the secret donors who control the serious money. Still others are just the meaningless equivalent of a TV spiel: “But wait! If you call right now! within the next 15 minutes! we’ll double the offer.” Total bullshit.
Here are a sample of the email appeals I’ve received just today. One day! A representative sample, mind you, not an exhaustive inventory. Now, anyone even remotely familiar with me or what I do and write will know that I belong to the Democratic Party, and I support strongly liberal/progressive social, economic, and political values. I’m on lots of mailing lists. (Not telephone lists, but I hang up on them.) I’m sure that Republican friends who mirror my profile receive their own inventory of solicitations, each and every day.
Place these individual, “little guy” appeals in the context of the Citizens United SCOTUS decision. Too complicated a phenomenon to be dealt with meaningfully in a short post. Read the book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. Or, if you prefer documentary films, rent and watch The Corporation, based on/inspired by the book. But if you have a really short attention span, here’s your executive summary:
- Corporations began as associations of persons, chartered for a limited time and for a limited purpose (like building a highway or digging a canal).
- Later (with collusion of conservative “activist judges”) corporations appropriated the right to be treated, not as associations of individually responsible private persons, but as imaginary, abstract “persons” in and of themselves.
- The salient implications? (a) The owners (stockholders) and the managers of these imaginary “persons” risk almost nothing, apart from an obvious fraud like Enron. (b) The corporate (pretend) person is required by its charter to promote private profit above all else. Ethics? Morality? Public interest? National interest? Piffle! If behaving morally and ethically earns you money, then cool. Otherwise? Fuck ‘em!
Remember that these are mostly multi-national corporations who “squat” in whichever nation best protects them from paying fair taxes and accepting legitimate liability. (Check the places where the “players” in the most recent BP environmental rape are chartered. Owners of the lease. Owners of the drilling equipment. Owners of the drilling platform. These are not U.S. corporations. They don’t care Jack Shit about U.S. citizens.)
- Fast forward to the Citizens United decision. Effectively, it means corporate pretend “person,” either international or floating from one temporary legal anchorage to another, as corporate self-interest dictates, are free to buy U.S. elections. Secretly. With no accountability.
Oh, did I mention? The Corporation book and documentary stipulate that a corporation is a “person,” as the SCOTUS insists. Then they measure the behavior of these corporate persons by a standard behavioral checklist: one that determines a person’s sanity. Result? Corporate “persons” are psychopaths. Scary! Still, these psychopaths can contribute as much as they wish toward buying elective office for their political puppets. Anonymously. Either directly or through front groups like the so-called “Freedom Foundation.”
Keep that in mind as you consider the appeals:
Caught in the act!
Jul 27th
On the one hand, I’ve always been an idealist in the sense of believing in honor and fair play. That part of me continues to be puzzled and outraged by those who trample such basic human standards. I’ll give you an example of how naive I’ve been.
Some years back I yielded to cajoling and agreed to play on our racquet club’s tennis league team. First meeting I attended, people were complaining about the practice of “stacking lineups.” (The rule was that teams would assign players top to bottom on the basis of ranking and success rate. “Stacking” means putting the weakest player in 1st position as a sacrifice, then moving everyone else down a level so as to gain an overall competitive advantage.) I raised my hand and said, “I can’t believe anyone would cheat that way! The only thing at stake is a cheap-ass plastic trophy and personal satisfaction. But how could anyone take satisfaction knowing that he or she had been able to win only by cheating?”
Obviously I was a rookie as well as an idealistic liberal. My comment was greeted universally by derisive laughter.
Fast forward to when I began to get practically interested in politics. We live on a busy street, and candidates began to ask if they could put signs in our yard. We supported the candidate, we agreed. We didn’t support the candidate, we politely declined, explaining why. I felt good. We had (have) always voted, but now we were participating more directly in the democratic process. We were being responsible citizens.
But then they began to steal or destroy our yard signs, or in some cases to replace them with nasty homemade insults. Fuck! Another kick in the jock strap for my fatuous idealism.
I imagined all sorts of ways to identify the violators and make them answer… but life is short, responsibilities are many… The guy who shot this video actually followed through, though. Right here in the strange state of Florida, where my wife and I were born, reared, and continue to live. The cool thing is that this is one Republican catching another Republican and spouse, well, acting like Republicans.
