Marriages and Tornadoes and Terrorists, Oh My !

I certainly share the ambivalence felt by many over the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. I heard the news, as many did, while watching baseball on ESPN, the Mets at the Phillies (Mets 2-1 in 14 innings). There was ninth inning irony in the players’ ignorance as the crowd chanted “USA, USA, USA” after viewing their phones and twitter feeds while the athletes just played ball.

My own twitter feed started bringing in satisfaction (@DanielPink “RT @markknoller: Cheering crowd outside White House estimated at 2500.”) and angst at the President’s delay (@HeatherOsborn “I love that it took approximately 10 minutes for people to start bitching about Obama being late. I'm gonna go ahead and believe he is BUSY.”) and jokes (@TheThomason: “Obama: ‘Anybody else wanna see my birth certificate?’ Drops mic. Walks away.” Or: @CaitKitt “Also, now that we killed the dude, can the TSA stop fondling all our junk? #prettyplease” 9:54 PM May 1, 2011)

Unlike a lot of other people who first heard of OBL’s death while watching TV, but like a fair number of other North Alabamians, I was in a hotel room dozens of miles or more from home. We were avoiding the 600,000 person power outage that resulted from the “April Fury” tornadoes. Our house was fine, other than one downed tree top and one leaky window, and some slowly spoiling food as our fridge and freezers lost their cool. We are very fortunate to afford to simply drive to a Nashville suburb and check into a La Quinta with hot showers, clean sheets and breakfast. Many of my neighbors took this option, or went to relatives in nearby towns. We’re “rich” Americans. It’s incredible. But it’s also incredible how fragile our way of life is. Without electricity and Internet and gasoline and open stores and cell phones we were quickly reduced to land line phones (those of us who still have them) and battery powered radios. Hello 1952.

But those weren’t the problems that haunted me in the La Quinta in Smyrna, Tennessee on May 1st that kept me from truly processing the news of the death of bin Laden. Nor were they the problems that had kept me from gagging on the syrup drenched royal nuptials of William and Kate two days earlier, marriage coverage that censored the anti-austerity protests pervading Great Britain. I’ve gone without electricity enough in my life not to sweat it much. What was nagging at my mind was the damage from swirling storms that don’t even get names but, acre for acre, do much more damage than hurricanes. And the stories from friends and acquaintances that kept spinning out to me through the phone, the e-mail and the web (yep, wireless internet in the hotel, too).

A colleague runs a swim club with his son as a side business and it got hit; he was at the pool between storms, but went home at the urging of son and girlfriend just in time. I’m sure the pool office and bathhouses are gone. We saw what’s left of the bordering trees, snapped and twisted, from the adjacent highway on our drive home. Next to the highway we saw a house with only rafters for a roof left, the next house was just the concrete slab and debris – nothing bigger than a few feet long. Across the highway and into a subdivision a newlywed couple we know from the running community lost their house, and so far their cat. She runs about my speed, when I’m in shape. Their brick house disintegrated around the young woman, one wall at a time and even the rug she was on got sucked away (the husband wasn’t home). Their car was in the driveway and is now a neighbor’s lawn ornament, but the woman is banged up but okay. They would be staying at her parents’ home in nearby Tanner, Alabama, except that their house was also destroyed by one of the tornadoes.

A local photographer, who we also know from running, has posted an offer to provide free disks of photos she'd taken for anyone if they lost theirs in the storms.

A friend family’s daughter was in Tuscaloosa, she goes to the University of Alabama there, at her boyfriend's apartment. They are fine, but the gas station directly across the street is gone, as is the sideview mirror from her car. The neighbor of another friend’s daughter also went to Alabama; she won’t be coming home. They cancelled finals at UA, students get the grades they had, or they can schedule a final with their instructor. Tuscaloosa had one of the biggest tornadoes and it was the one to hit the most populated area. 5,000 homes damaged or destroyed.

600 people attended the funeral yesterday of a 12 year old girl who was the classmate of another friend’s son. There were 8 family members in a trailer, none escaped injury, but it was the youngest who was taken.

My office is still without power. Internet came back at my house late yesterday and is still out for many people so I don’t yet know who else has a story to tell. So I’ve been brooding on these twisters, these nameless micro-hurricanes that last for minutes rather than days, and it has kept me from digesting the death of Osama. But I know I’m glad that he, and his twisted soul, are gone.

No Activist Judges !? Hrmph !

"No activist judges!" That has been the refrain from the far right, from the "conservative" talk radio and Fox TV hosts, and the politicians they embrace. Well, we now have a U.S. Supreme Court with a Chief Justice and a majority that is favored by these "more moral than you" types, and this week that high court brought us one of the most revisionist decisions in decades.
Not content with the issue before them, they continued to broaden the scope of the complaint until it allowed them to override enough precedents to establish the law in the manner in which they saw fit. Don't take my word for it, Justice J. Stevens, in his dissenting opinion, writes, "Our colleagues’ suggestion that 'we are asked to reconsider Austin and, in effect, McConnell,' ante, at 1, would be more accurate if rephrased to state that 'we have asked ourselves' to reconsider those cases."

(Since some of you may be wondering which decision I'm referring to, it's "CITIZENS UNITED v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION", decided Jan. 21, 2010. The effect will be to remove electioneering restrictions on corporations, i.e. they'll be able to spend as much money as they want, as close to election date as they want, directly in favor or against candidates.)

Both the decision, and the opinions are available on line, and are surprising readable. In fact I was a bit surprised by the informality of some of the language. The decision repeatedly uses the expression "chilling effect" and variations there on, to refer to the law's impact on political speech. The crux of the majority's argument is that free speech applies to corporations (and unions, etc.) just as much as to real persons. I disagree; Justice J. Stevens argues this nicely: "The basic premise underlying the Court’s ruling is its iteration, and constant reiteration, of the proposition that the First Amendment bars regulatory distinctions based on a speaker’s identity, including its 'identity' as a corporation. While that glittering generality has rhetorical appeal, it is not a correct statement of the law. ... In the context of election to public office, the distinction between corporate and human speakers is significant. Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. They cannot vote or run for office. Because they may be managed and controlled by nonresidents, their interests may conflict in fundamental respects with the interests of eligible voters."

Justice J. Stevens goes on to present a laundry list of precedents, some dating back a hundred years, that the court has overturned with this ruling, in violation of the principal of stare decisis, i.e. making rulings based on prior decisions. Maybe the "more moral than you" crowd will now change their mind about judicial activism, they certainly have changed it about whether it's okay to criticize a sitting President. I guess there's no reason not to be hypocritical about the third branch of our federal government. Sigh.

Noticeable Serendipity: Roseanne Cash Two Times

Now I realize that authors and artists sometimes have a product to pimp, or even two, so things that at first seem highly coincidental are really not so spectacular. But Roseanne Cash isn't exactly a "celeb ubiquite" (that's faux french), so when she popped up on my not-so-mainstream mass media twice last night in the space of an hour and a quarter, I noticed. First she was on public radio's World Cafe on my drive home about 9:20 with a song ("Sea of Heartbreak" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3LSrcKksCo) from her new record. I found it curious that Bruce Springsteen was singing the harmony (I previously liked the harmony she did with her dad on "September When it Comes" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2WilM6ljUg, but she won't be doing that anymore as The Man In Black is no longer among the living; at least until technology can repro his voice, say, 2021?).

Then I flipped to Steve Colbert at 10:30 and he was soon disparaging Bruce Springsteen's "The River" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAUyAogHtYk ) as a good candidate for use as a torture song at our Guantanamo Bay prison (wow, that makes me cringe, calling it "our" prison, but that's what it is and I feel the shame). Bruce is a pretty big name, so two mentions didn't raise my eyebrows. I flipped to soccer, Houston and Seattle still tied at zero after 70-some minutes of hard play; that's soccer.

Hey, Colbert, whatever your view of The Boss (I've never been a huge fan), he's still got some grit and some great lines: from "The River": "Is a dream a lie if it doesn't come true?"

I flipped back to The Colbert Report, and he's introducing Roseanne Cash, in person at his desk. Now I've noticed the serendipity (editorial aside: and we have our blog post title) and get engaged in their banter -- and its good, partly because Colbert is trying hard to maintain his right wing persona but his distaste for the goings-on at Guantanamo is seeping through. He signs her petition asking that our government (there's that "our" again) release the list of songs used to torture the detainees there. He signs, he says, "because it'll make it hard on Obama" (since he hasn't made good on his promise to close that facility). You can see the whole Colbert bit video at http://www.closegitmonow.org/.

Capitol Steps, Falling Down

Caught a bit of the Capitol Steps latest production on NPR at noon today. It was less than stellar. They riffed on Sarah Palin to the tune of "A Holly Jolly Christmas", but it had no insight, stale jokes about Russia being nearby and such. Then they think they need to find faults with Barack Obama's performance. I think, I hope, there are other ways to find humor than just finding fault. They dissed his handling of the Boston arrest of a black Harvard professor breaking in to his own house. Sure, he gave the loonies an opening by using a slightly offensive word - "stupidly" I think it was (yep, pretty inflammatory, huh?). But the transgression was by the police, using too much suspicion and not enough parsimony. The Capitol Steps also picked up on Obama's win of the Nobel Prize for Peace. Simply removing the old regime of Bush W, Cheney, Rice, Rove and Rumsfield was enough. It's like a weeklong cloud cover of gloom and storms has been rolled back and the sun is shining on the happy valley again. That's no small feat; to turn a scorched earth atmosphere into one where hope prospers. Sure, hope is more promise than reality; but hope is more peace than oppression, exploitation, lies and torture. If that transition isn't enough for the Nobel Peace Prize, then it is indeed a noble prize; I expect he will rise to it in any case. I plan to support him as I can and push him as he needs it. Shouldn't we all?

Health Care and Burning Houses

I don't always agree with Dave Winer's take on the world. But we align on health care. This post from him is short and worth reading.

We've Got To Relieve... Health Care Burdens

I was thinking about the health care morass on an airplane the other day; thinkin hard enough to jot down some notes. My thoughts aren’t all good, but this is important stuff and needs to be fixed. I heard back from my Congressman, Parker Griffith, who is a retired medical doctor. He used a Hippocratic Oath analogy: “first we need to do no harm to our current system.” I didn't swallow that cod liver oil. His is a misguided anthropomorphism – our health care system is not a human being. If you break it completely it may actually help you to rebuild it better than it was. Besides, there’s no reason to think that doctors and hospitals will stop treating sick people during a transition from one payment system to another. What else they gonna do?

We need meaningful reform. We need it on moral grounds, to help people who don’t get care for routine and treatable ailments. We need it on financial grounds, to make our businesses stronger and independent of the yoke of health insurance. We need it on equitable grounds, to stop the arbitrary nature of who has coverage and who doesn’t, just depending on which way the labor market winds are blowing. We need individual coverage that can negotiate the same rates that groups can. No more small group "death spirals".

We need to align the monetary goals of providers with healthy consumers. We need to flip the pay-per-treatment or “fee for service” system on its head. A pay-per-patient system is possible and being tried in certain places. I worry that that method incentivizes not performing needed treatments, at least in the short run. Maybe there could be monetary penalties if a treatment was skimped – this is basically the old HMO model and didn’t work out well in the US(although similar models work in other countries). The salient differences should be explored and overcome.

Or pay doctors via a salary, with bonuses for healthy patients. This seems pretty reasonable, but has a couple of pitfalls to guard against. For one, “the talent” will no longer be automatically getting paid for their high skills. Management will be seeing the cash flow (both on the insurance company side and on the hospital administration side), and they’ll rake off as big a share as they are allowed to. So it needs regulating, which is unsavory, but sane. Absolute control of the monetary pipeline leads to money-drunk plumbers -- I may have mixed my metaphors there, but unfortunately we need watchers when money is involved. And people to watch the watchers.

Health itself is not and healt care also is not and will not be, egalitarian. Maybe there is some solace for the less-well-heeled in that. That is, that everyone can fall ill or get injured, and all of us get old. Waiting for routine and typical care as a method of cost control is unacceptable. That is, back door rationing of health care through curtailed availability cannot be a solution. Apparently that is a diminishing state of affairs in Canada and the United Kingdom at this point. Their waits are often no more than ours for the same specialists. Have you tried to get an appointment with a dermatologist? Your best hope is for a cancellation to open something up -- or to look up a good poultice on the Interweb.

Extraordinary care remains another matter. Extremely expensive and experimental treatments have to be uncovered (except as part of research studies, but that's a special case). But the bar needs to be high and the decisions open and transparent. I'm sorry, it's not worth 2 million dollars to extend anyone individual's life by 6 months -- not to society (i.e. the rest of us). If there is a rich benefactor, okay, it's their money. But when it's our money, we can extend a lot of other people's lives a lot more than 6 months with $2MM.

Risk takers are a tough area for me. I haven't got that figured out. In some cases of course their health care is cheap -- if they fall while rock climbing and die, well, it's their funeral. If they only break their back, though, then it's everyone's bank account. I think in those cases they need to cough up some personal funds to help with coverage -- but which things are risky? Smoking? Of course (if you weren't already addicted in 1965). Failing to exercise? Eh. Over-exercising? Hmmm. Maybe we better hope this one comes out in the wash, that it evens out over the pool of citizenry.

Penultimately, I want to address what the correlation between health insurance and business should be: none. There's no rational connection. Health insurance should be more like the fire department; businesses can pay their share through taxes. Different businesses shouldn't pay different amounts per employee depending on the type of business they are, how big they are, etc. In the U.S., employer paid health insurance started as a differentiating fringe benefit. It's no longer effective in that role, except to stifle small businesses, consultants and entrepreneurs. And it allows large business management (and their customers) to squeeze the employees through passing on ever higher health insurance costs to the employees through higher co-pays and decreased coverages.

And finally, I find myself agreeing with some European voices that I respect, that treating the health misfortunes of others should not be a ticket to riches for anyone. It's just plain wrong.

Franken Still Slogging Forward

I've finally posted a quick review of Al Franken's Lies ... A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Here's a quote: "Sure, Franken uses humor to make his points, but he's largely 'kidding on the square'. "

Kennedy Family Puts a Dog in the Whitehouse

After failing for decades to put another (human) family member in the Whitehouse, including the tragic deaths of Bobby and John Jr, the unsuccessful candidacy of Teddy and Caroline eschewing even a Senate seat, the Kennedy family has finally managed a different feat -- putting a dog in the Whitehouse.

American Democracy vs. Richard John Neuhaus's Kind

I heard this story on NPR on my way home from work last night; it's about recently deceased theologian and author Richard John Neuhaus. Somewhere in the middle author George Weigel lauds Neuhaus as "a genuine democrat with a small 'd'" -- apparently Neuhaus was a proponent of Christianity driving public policy in the U.S. I don't know if he plainly argued against our separation of church and state (or Christianity and State, the way these things tend to be; no one gets much of a hearing who is against the separation of non-Christian religions and U.S. government), but these people continue to miss the most basic point of this tenet of our democracy: codifying separation of religion and government was explicitly done (and continues) to protect the most faithful.

Yes, almost exclusively Christians at first. The founding fathers were not particularly concerned with protecting Jews, Muslims, Hindus or atheists in the late 1700's. For one thing there just weren't very many around in post-colonial America.

When Weigel said Neuhaus was a "democrat", I thought "No way;" but had to correct myself. Yes, technically a democracy is ruled by the will of the majority. So he can be genuinely democratic -- but that doesn't make him a tremendous supporter of American democracy. True little 'd' democracies, though, are characterized by the tyranny of the majority against the minority. American democracy has a great pillar in our "Bill of Rights", a set of tenets that protect individuals and minorities and that can't be overturned by a simple majority -- they require a strong super-majority to change them, being, as they are, a part of our Constitution.

Protection of the minority (and individual) is in all of our best interest -- sooner or later we all find ourselves as a minority of one kind or another, or standing alone in some predicament either on principle or through unfortunate happenstance.

So unless, Father Neuhaus, you plan to always be in the majority, you and those you would have in your flock, please help us to preserve our protections; to solidify our rights and embrace our separations where they are emplaced to deny tyranny and injustice. If you are comfortably ensconced in your majority, here's just one example of how majority can be fleeting, if you are a U.S. citizen and caucasian you are currently in the majority. Reuters tells us that you likely will not be by the year 2050 -- you'll be a plurality, i.e. less than 50% of the population, not enough to vote your will onto society even in a little 'd' democracy. So if you are under the age of 35, there's a good chance you'll live to be in a racial non-majority. Let's keep the Golden Rule in mind. Let's bring morality into our government as often and deeply as possible, but we can do that without the accoutrements of organized religions.

Rest in peace.

Obama Bandwagon

I'd swear I'm seeing more Obama bumper stickers now than ever before. Right up until the election you really had to keep your eyeballs peeled in order to spot the handfull of cars with Obama propaganda on them. Ever since then it seems the percentage of cars on the road here in Northern Alabama with "Obama '08" or "Yes We Can" (still not many "Alobama" slogans around) has been, it seems to me, steadily increasing. Now even a short ride to the store often contains a sighting.

Not that it's a problem for me. I'm as enthusiastic as ever about our choice for "next President", even if the timing, what with the economy wretching, is a bit of a downer. And I'm psyched to see more and more people jumping on the Obama Bandwagon -- I hope we really do all rally around him and our new Congress and make this a greater country and a great time to be in it. Only a dozen more days until the swearing in!

Freedom of Speech

With the impending inauguration of a new President, one that appears to be cut from a different cloth than our current one, maybe a different cloth than any in the last couple decades, it appears that more than just myself are reflecting on Freedom, and the ongoing fight to maintain or regain it right here in the good old USA. Neil Gaiman put down his credo a few weeks back; I could only fail to try to agree more. It's here; and well worth the time.

I often quote from the Alan Shepard speech in the movie "The American President" written by Aaron Sorkin (the full speech is here) when trying to express my own thoughts on our freedom:

America isn't easy. America, is advanced citizenship. You've gotta want it bad, 'cause it's gonna put up a fight. It's gonna say, "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center-stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest." Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.

I also hear Al Franken, reading from one his books today, talking about the home of the brave, and how it is a mature love that liberals have for our country, to want it to be better and to own up to its mistakes. It takes a brave people to do that -- and that'd be us.

Straight Talk from Al Franken

As the recount in Minnesota continues, I just started listening to Al Franken's audio book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right (from 2003). Now I wish I had more directly supported Franken's Democratic Senatorial bid, we could use the plain talk and fact checking. Man, he rips Ann Coulter up, down, and sideways. I don't know anything about her, but now I know too much (not that I've checked Al Franken's facts, and I really should, but he cites enough examples and sources to be pretty credible). I'll give a rating and brief review whenever I get through the whole thing, if I ever do (I think it's 10 hours of audio tape. As Dave Winer would say, "Oy."

Obama's Initial "To Do" List

This piece was recently in The New York Times:
"(Obama) has begun an effort to tamp down what his aides fear are unusually high expectations among his supporters, and will remind Americans regularly throughout the transition that the nation’s challenges are substantial and will take time to address."

Sorry Mr. President-Elect, that boat has sailed. We expect miracles, or at least heroic efforts on the substantive and addressable problems that you are about to inherit. Not on the economy -- the economy is a long term issue and very difficult to control -- and it is likely to self correct, don't let it be an albatross around your neck -- get something else done.

Here's a nice place to start, a mini-rant by a well-informed friend of mine. Go ahead, pick any 3 to get done in your first 100 days; that'll be a good year's accomplishments and you'll have 265 days to work on less solvable issues, like the doling out $700 Billion dollars to someone that might do some good with it:

“…the Bush administration destroyed so much of what works in government that the Democrats should have a relatively easy time making corrections, like giving Bankruptcy judges the power to revise mortgages, giving Medicare the authority to negotiate drug prices with the big drug companies, closing Guantanamo, not torturing captured terror suspects, not illegally spying on Americans, no (or less) snowmobiles in Yellowstone, no roads in roadless federal areas, not butchering the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act, ending don’t ask don’t tell in the military, not letting the navy torment whales, not giving health care providers a conscience opt out on abortion and other female health issues, not appointing right-wing Federalist Society judges, not wasting money on abstinence education, getting out of Iraq, capturing Bin Laden …”

While your advisors are busy lowering expectations, could they also discourage, just a little, the focus on your being the first African-American elected to the Presidency of the United States. I really don't care -- I mean it's great indication that maybe our nation is maturing, but I didn't vote for you because you are African-American or to prove that such a person can be elected. I voted for you, and I think so did a lot of others, because you are eloquent and visionary and persuasive and strong and you seem to be honest and moral and "in touch" and forthright but still clever; and those are the qualities we need in a leader right now, no matter what color his (or her) skin is.

Please find the issues that we can make quick progress on and make it. I'm looking forward to it.

Go Parker Griffith!

It's tough enough to be an informed voter without having candidates with similar names running for the same position. In this case its Parker Griffith(D) vs. Wayne Parker(R) in Alabama's 5th Congressional district. To compound the confusion the Democrat is using red signs and the Republican is using blue signs. Come on, guys, help us out a little here! We want to vote for the right guy -- the one who has the strong family values and the fiscal restraint and looks like he can keep the good jobs coming into the Tennessee Valley just like our retiring Congressman, Bud Cramer (D) did for years. We want Parker Griffith. He's a medical doctor, an M.D., so he's clearly smart enough for the job. He's got experience in elected office as a state Senator and he has the endorsement of our Blue Dog Conservative, Representative Bud Cramer. Maybe a little mnemonic device would help: "Go with Griffith"? "Griffith is Great"? "Gee, wouldn't going with Griffith be great, y'know, the one with the 'G' in his name"?

Bailout Bill Bunk

Why should we support the $700 Billion bailout of Wall Street? While I understand that their failures can impact the economy as a whole so it is a bit of a scorched earth strategy to let them go down. They did their jobs poorly; they ran their businesses badly and the result of that is that they failed. And the people who caused the failures should not be rewarded and they should have a lot of trouble finding another job in that field. I’m reminded of President Ronald Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers – they paid for it with their jobs, and we all suffered a bit. How is this so different? Wall Street screwed up. Throw them out and bring in fresh financiers.

I don’t pretend to understand all the vehicles of high finance. But I shouldn’t need to. I’ve earned two graduate degrees, in Mathematics and in Management; if I can’t make some sense out of this in short order then it is intrinsically too complex. I haven’t heard anyone say that it is not too complex. That brings me to a second point: Why do we think that the bailout will either, a) be enough; or b) really be needed in the long run, i.e. we may either need to pour in more money to actually prop these institutions up; or there may be flat failures of some institutions but won’t others just become stronger – we’ve still got the same world, with the same natural and human resources. The financing is just an organizational framework imposed on those resources – a system of catalysts and rewards. Other institutions will fill those voids; people will work, technology will evolve – with or without a bailout.

So there’s one more point to make: we need to consider the source of the panic. This is coming from an administration that has lied to us, deceived us and denied us access to information on a consistent basis over the past eight years. They’ve used the excuse of “security” to pretty much do as they saw fit, from hiding their dealings with big oil companies to lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, to not disclosing discussions in the White House of torture as an option. Now it’s "financial security" and it firstly effects their ex-colleagues in the financial world and they want to hand them a lot of money and see if it helps. I’m sorry; they’ve cried wolf too many times. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Not this time, not now.

My own Congressman Bud Cramer makes a compassionate argument in his September 29 letter: "Without action, the store owner, the farmer, the homeowner and the senior have their hands tied and could lose their store, farm, home or pension." I haven't found the perfect analogy, let's try this one: paying "protection money" to a gang of thugs so that a store can stay open in a tough neighborhood and serve the locals isn't a proper solution -- clean out the thugs first and reestablish the store when you can.

David Corn posted the memo from Congressman Brad Sherman in his blog. Sherman is squarely against imposing this burden on the taxpayers: "...the Bailout Bill allows million-dollar-a-month salaries to executives of bailed-out firms, and it allows hundreds of billions to be used to buy toxic assets currently held by foreign investors."

That was a couple days ago. Now the Senate has loaded up the bailout with candy for everybody. If there was one good thing about the Paulson proposal it was that it was clean. Now we've got tax breaks and disaster relief melded into a banking bailout bill. No wonder we don't understand why things break. We let this crisis ferment for years and now we shouldn't panic to fix it with a barage of money and perks in just two weeks. No big bail out, just the FDIC insurance that was already in place -- oh, and let's make everybody play by the rules in the stock market, no naked short selling, for one; there's already a rule against that, the SEC just doesn't enforce it.

But no bailout, it's bunk.

Senator Shelby Says Paulson has been Staggering

I was heartened to hear my Senator, Richard Shelby (R - AL) this morning on National Public Radio urging caution on the financial bailout as proposed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. I appreciate Mr. Shelby saying: "We don't know the endgame in this, and I'll tell you, what bothers me about this is that I believe that the chairman of the Fed and the Treasury secretary, Paulson, with all due respect to them, they've been staggering from crisis to crisis, and they haven't even said today that this will end the crisis."

I hope he continues to work with Senator Chris Dodd (D- CT) to ensure:
1) Accountability and transparency through oversight provisions
2) That taxpayers are first in line for any monies recovered (including prevention of any large payouts to senior executives at the impacted financial institutions)
3) That the mortgage crisis itself is addressed, i.e. that homeowners and lenders submit to a judge and get a restructuring of terms rather than all the failures.

(Dodd was interviewed on NPR this morning.)

By the way, it was nice to hear Alabama on the national news in a positive light, rather than about the Don Siegelman/Richard Scrushy mess or a judge that won't keep church and government separate.

Troopergate Lives

Another Sarah Palin flip flop: NPR aired a story this morning noting that Todd Palin is refusing to testify in the “Troopergate” investigation in Alaska , despite a legal subpoena to do so. Governor Sarah Palin has already instructed her aides to disobey their subpoenas. This is not the transparency in government that she pledged in her campaign for Governor and that she has been speaking strongly about in her VP appearances (from her speech on Sept. 11): “the ethical standards that had led to closed doors and closed door dealings and self-interest: it's gone." I guess not.

NPR also kept attributing the “McCain Campaign” as saying that the investigation has now become political and that it is no longer legitimate. Firstly, I’m not sure why the McCain campaign has any standing to participate – this is a state matter that pre-dates Palin’s involvement with the Presidential campaign. She should deal with it as Governor of Alaska, just like ex-Governor Don Siegelman has had to deal with apparently politically motivated accusations here in Alabama .

But if this is the measure of how long Sarah Palin and the McCain Campaign will stick to their pledge of transparency and cooperation in government, that is, only until it inconveniences themselves, then we don’t need them. We don’t need eight more years of disobeyed subpoenas and constitutional overstepping.

A President Who Can Think on his Feet

In a speech that reminded me of some of the strongest moments from the film The American President (full script here, I’ll add a sample below), Barack Obama demonstrated that he can inspire, that he can be tough, that he has an open mind, that he values fairness and American values in all their diversity and, most encouragingly, that he can articulate these points without fumbling; that he can give a 45 minute speech without veering off into incoherent sentence structures and without inadvertently flipping what he means to say into its own opposite. George W. Bush can’t do it and I have yet to see John McCain get passionate and stay coherent on any topic.

Some quick quotes (full speech text is online here too):

“This, too, is part of America 's promise -- the promise of a democracy where we can find the strength and grace to bridge divides and unite in common effort.”

"That's why I stand here tonight. Because for 232 years, at each moment when that promise was in jeopardy, ordinary men and women - students and soldiers, farmers and teachers, nurses and janitors - found the courage to keep it alive."

“You don't defeat a terrorist network that operates in 80 countries by occupying Iraq .”

"I don't believe that Senator McCain doesn't care what's going on in the lives of Americans. I just think he doesn't know. Why else would he define middle-class as someone making under five million dollars a year? It's not because John McCain doesn't care. It's because John McCain doesn't get it."

“ -- that at defining moments like this one, the change we need doesn't come from Washington . Change comes to Washington ”

Sure, the speech was pre-written and well-rehearsed and not so different from the one I saw months ago in Birmingham (Alabama), but he delivered it with interest, on tempo, with vitality and with sincerity. A President we can believe in.

Here’s a bit of Michael Douglas as Alan Shepherd in The American President:

“Bob's problem isn't that he doesn't get it. Bob's problem is that he can't sell it. Nobody has ever won an election by talking about what I was just talking about. This is a country made up of people with hard jobs that they're terrified of losing. The roots of freedom are of little or no interest to them at the moment. We are a nation afraid to go out at night. We're a society that has assigned low priority to education and has looked the other way while our public schools have been decimated. We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious men to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, friend, I promise you, Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: Making you afraid of it and telling you who's to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.”

I hope we all stay in touch with this inspirational vision and that we elect Obama and reject the continuity offered by John McCain as he has moved closer to George W’s policies of war for oil’s sake and gotten tighter with the closed minds of ultra-conservative religious minorities.

Let’s bring a fresh quick mind with a powerful vision to the Presidency – we should never settle for anything less.

McCain’s Desperate Gambit

Sarah who? Governor of which state? For how long? John McCain’s running mate is in her second year as Governor of one of the least populous states in the country, Alaska . It’s not lost on me that Alaska is an oil state, too; although apparently she’s been a critic of big oil to some extent, still her state receives a big pile of oil money every year. So McCain wanted a woman, one with “maverick credentials”, to me that’s because he’s lost his own set. He began losing his independent voice sometime before 2006 when he visited Alabama and cozied up to some very right-wing religious groups, some with ties to white-supremacy and other hate groups; and shredded the rest as he has backed George W. Bush’s plays in Iraq and the former Soviet Union. But I can see why he picked a woman, and why he didn’t want her name out in the media on his short list. He wanted to let Obama pick a non-woman, i.e. someone other than Hillary Clinton, and then he’s hoping to swoop in and pick up the disenfranchised Hillary supporters, particularly in the large swing states of Ohio and Pennsylvania , where Hillary did better than Obama. I’m sure most of the Clinton-ites will see right through this. Sarah Palin is not Hillary Clinton. She is not a statesman the way Hillary grew to be as First Lady and has carried on now as a 10 year veteran of the U.S. Senate. We know Hillary’s passions and foibles. Sarah Palin is an unknown and there is not enough time now for the American public to ensure that she is qualified to be one heart beat away from the Presidency. She is younger than Obama, but we know that he can handle pressure, we’ve seen him on the campaign trail for 18 months; we saw him at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. What was Sarah Palin doing in 2004? Can she stand up to the pressure of the office that she now seeks, or the one that might be bequeathed to her suddenly? We can’t find out in the next 68 days, but we would need to in order to be swayed to their ticket. It’s a desperate gambit by a man seeking an office where desperate gambits can put us all in harm’s way.

Preamble Rambling

My daughter just started seventh grade. They’re studying US history, presently The U.S. Constitution. It’s heady stuff. She’s had to memorize the Preamble, and while there is some uncommon language it’s all pretty straight-forward – and powerful. I was going to just point to a copy on the web at, say, http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html, but it’s worth duplicating it here (and copyright should not be an issue, :-) ):

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

That’s about as strong an opening on as serious of a topic as there is in our civil life, yet our general citizenry in this day and age only really pays attention to it when they’re in secondary school. “… secure the Blessings of Liberty”, not just for the framers (who were largely regular citizens) and their contemporaries, but for their posterity (that’d be us, now). And they were sure to include tantamount precepts like separation and balance of powers and the Bill of Rights for individuals.

Just to take one example from that Bill, the first amendment, again is strong stuff:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

In the face of that founding right, how do we have stories like the one coming out of Minneapolis today where 3 videographers had their cameras, equipment and notes confiscated by police (Minneapolis cops confiscate cameras)? Prima facie it flies against the most basic tenets of our government and I don’t understand why it’s not the top news story of the day. Maybe someday my daughter will explain it to me.