the rix mix

A high school student in Newark NJ requested that he be permitted to leave school early, in the afternoon. For some reason permission was granted. He was shot & killed a block away in a targeted execution.  Police say they have "determined a motive."   Councilman Ras Baraka called it "crazy." Indeed. Crazy has become the norm in Newark.

But I'm  not writing about this particular murder.  Rather, I'm writing about the white people from the suburbs who always have plenty to say in the comments below the story. These people inevitably decry the lawlessness, the poverty, with barely-concealed racism. The only reasons they care at all are: 1. They correctly perceive that urban crime & poverty affect their taxes. 2. They fear the crime will suddenly overtake them. But statistics  do not bear this out. The crime stays where it is.  The menace of crime to these people is symbolic. What they really fear are the ideas that come from cities. They don't give a damn about the humanity. It would be refreshingly honest  if they  admitted it.

Of course, many suburbanites love cities. They commute to them, go to concerts, museums, the events & places & culture  not available in the suburbs.  They appreciate the physical safety of the suburbs. It's not purchased cheaply. But other people find nothing useful at all in or about  cities. They hate cities.  They choose to reside in the suburbs because they believe it will isolate them not only from the crime & poverty - which it generally does (altough there are increasing numbers of poor folks in suburbia struggling to maintain), but also from everything else that cities provide, mainly, a liberal spirit. Not only  political liberalism. In that sense, a political  conservative  residing in most American cities is like a liberal residing in the Bible Belt*; you're in the permanent minority, so get used to it. But urban culture & ideas have ways  of making themselves felt, & gaining acceptance, outside cities. An easy current example is marriage equality, which spread remarkably fast.

If indirectly paying the cost of crime in Newark makes you believe you're a victim in the safety of your suburban shelter, you're entitled to believe it & vent online.  But don't forget that the real victims of urban crime & poverty are the people directly affected by them.    What you really fear is something else.

* Christianity began as a dangerous idea from the cities. 

Labels: bully pulpit, in the news, justice, New Jersey

I can see the beginnings of a long-term strategy for gun reform. It will be very difficult to fight. It will take a few years to really take effect.  It involves a kind of ju jitsu of values, turning the "power" of the more rabid gun owners against them, because the "rights" they claim are fundamentally tied to the power of gun posession itself as much as to their Constitutional arguments. The tendency of these gun owners is to speak their minds too freely, rely too much on slogans, & wrap their grievances in paranoia & threats.

Every screwed up teenage suburban boy who walks into a school with loaded gun is the son of an angry  gun owner. The latter enabled the former.

Every enraged murderous man locking himself in a house, shooting his wife & firing out the windows at police is the angry guy in his home with his stash of guns. The latter became the former.

Every madman on a mass murder spree in a public  place is the angry  guy claiming he needs guns to defend against the madman.  The latter is potentially the former.

After every nationally reported gun crime using guns purchased legally,  the resultant angry defense of guns further exposes the insanity of gun   culture & makes the defenders sound like people who would commit those crimes, even commit seditious acts against the United States.

The NRA is not the extreme "legal" gun culture in America. This is:



The NRA doesn't have the influence to silence men like this. Yes, there is some demonizing involved,  tying conservative   gun owners to crazies like the one in the video. But keep in mind that this man is quite representative of a large segment of American gun culture,  A mild mannered relative of my posts  angry defenses of all gun ownership on Facebook every day & expresses seditious  sentiments, never in his own words, but through graphics he shares from other FB pages, including spurious quotes from Thomas Jefferson.  If he is made to seem a lunatic, that's his problem. All he can do is say, "I am not a lunatic," & proceed to come across like one.

Labels: bully pulpit

Here's a strange one:

Stolen Valor Act: Is lying about being a hero a right?


When Xavier Alvarez stood up and introduced himself at a local water district meeting in July 2007, he had no idea he was about to commit a federal crime.

“I’m a retired Marine of 25 years,” he told the other board members in Pomona, Calif. “I retired in the year 2001. Back in 1987, I was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. I got wounded many times by the same guy. I’m still around.”


In most social situations, such statements might elicit interested nods, admiring smiles, and perhaps heart-felt thanks for his brave service to the nation.


But it turns out Mr. Alvarez never served a day in the US military, had never been wounded, and – most important – was never awarded the Medal of Honor.


How much do you know about the US Constitution? A quiz.


After his false claim was exposed, the Federal Bureau of Investigation showed up. Alvarez was soon indicted for allegedly violating the Stolen Valor Act of 2005, a law that makes it a federal crime to falsely claim to have been awarded a military medal.


His lawyer attacked the indictment as a violation of the First Amendment, arguing that Americans have a free-speech right to make false and outrageous claims about themselves without facing criminal prosecution from a government truth squad.


A federal judge upheld the indictment, but a US appeals court panel reversed.


On Wednesday, Alvarez’s case arrives at the US Supreme Court, where the justices are being asked to decide whether the Stolen Valor Act is an unconstitutional regulation of free speech or an acceptable effort by the government to punish an alleged liar.

Alvarez is just plain stupid. No military medal is easier to verify than the Congressional Medal of Honor. There are websites (including wikipedia) listing every recipient & how it was earned. Alvarez's lie is so huge, so dishonorable as to suggest he is crazy. But he didn't do it to falsely claim veteran's benefits.

A former Mayor of Atlantic City for years claimed he had served in Special Forces, doing things  too secret to reveal. He mentally cracked up when he was exposed, so shamed he literally ran away & hid. But he was exposed because he had applied for & was receiving benefits he hadn't earned, & the feds caught up with him. He committed the crime of fraud. The irony was that the man had in fact been a good career soldier, serving two stints in Vietnam (where  any soldier could get blown up while off-duty  sitting in a cafe), &  received an honorable discharge. But some guys feel a military career without battle heroics is incomplete. In modern wartime, most military personnel never see  front line battle. We don't hold that against them. In Iraq & Afghanistan no place is really safe.

In any town in America, what Alvarez falsely claimed would mark him as the worst kind of fool & turn him into a social outcast shunned by all. Why would someone risk that unless driven by some psychological disorder? It's that outrageous. Any Vietnam vet would know Alvarez was lying after just a few minutes of conversation. He must have  avoided those encounters.   But does it make him a criminal? He didn't "steal valor" from anyone. The valorous are no less valorous because of Alvarez. The living valorous are also modest, because they know the most valorous of all were killed doing their acts of valor, often without witness to their heroic sacrifices. 

Our natural urge is to punish Alvarez in some legal way. But how? Jail him? We don't need to be protected from him & it costs money to keep people in jail.  Fine him?  Make him do community service? Tar & feather him?

Constitutional speech protections aside, the law itself is unnecessary, passed in one of the fits of patriotic fervor congress has when it's unable to accomplish anything constructive.  Like holding visible public hearings to investigate how we were paying for two foreign wars & how much of the money we borrowed & spent was being utterly wasted,

Labels: bully pulpit, in the news

Backpacks, supplies will be distributed to 6,000 Elizabeth students

ELIZABETH — Thousands of children who might otherwise return to school next month without proper supplies will not enter the classroom empty-handed.

On Tuesday,for the third year, B4K, an organization that advocates for education reform in New Jersey, the United Way and the Elizabeth Development Co., a nonprofit economic development corporation, will distribute backpacks filled with school supplies to 6,000 Elizabeth students in need.

Something about this seemingly positive, innocuous article that reads like a cut & paste press release set my political jive antennae vibrating. A mere five minutes of Google search revealed that B4K (B4NJKids) is a rather mysterious education "reform" group, anti-union, pro-Chris Christie, with a Director who sits on the boards of two Catholic schools. The group has produced a pro-Christie video & buys internet ads that show up on other pages after the web page tracking cookie buried in one's browser remembers one has visited the B4NJKids site. The organization is is not listed as a partner on the County United Way website.

Elizabeth has many poor & under-privileged kids; I'm hardly suggesting they not receive free school supplies. But we should always be aware of who seeks  influence in public schools & education policy  (I'm aware the NEA is already there, but so is  an elected Board of Ed), & avoid as much as we can  in these lean times the corporatizing (or branding) of public schools.  Those gifts may be Trojan horses. Once they're in it'll be the dickens to get them out. & keep an eye for B4NKids, that organization's real  goal may be to  bust up public school systems & create special interest charter schools that have taxpayers paying for what were  private schools with  limited  scope, that is, parochial, using union-busting as a wedge issue. More on that later. 

Labels: bully pulpit, education, Elizabeth NJ

My liberal/left readers will enjoy Was Marx Right? It's Not Too Late to Ask by Terry Eagleton in Commonweal magazine (hope the link works  for you). "Commonweal is an independent journal of opinion edited by lay Catholics."

What made Marxism seem implausible, then, was not that capitalism had changed its spots. The case was exactly the opposite. It was the fact that as far as the system went, it was business as usual but even more so. Ironically, then, what helped beat back Marxism also lent a kind of credence to its claims. It was thrust to the margins because the social order it confronted, far from growing more moderate and benign, waxed more ruthless and extreme than it had been before. And this made the Marxist critique of it all the more pertinent. On a global scale, capital was more concentrated and predatory than ever, and the working class had actually increased in size. It was becoming possible to imagine a future in which the megarich took shelter in their armed and gated communities, while a billion or so slum dwellers were encircled in their fetid hovels by watchtowers and barbed wire.

It's a lengthy article & drags on a bit. But the important point is that Marx (who was not Lenin, Stalin, Mao, or Kim Jong Il) offered up the most comprehensive, intelligent critique of unfettered exploitative capitalism, &  the failure of botched, bloody, imperialistic, totalitarian regimes that would have dismayed Marx himself does not invalidate the use of Marx & socialism to examine & critique the inequities of wealth & income in America. America needs wealth redistributed downward, & by downward I mean to the middle & working classes, because the poor depend on the economic expansion of these classes in order to move up into them. For "safety nets," government programs are far more reliable than largesse of wealthy people or religious groups.

Europeans & Canadians do not want to do away with their state-guaranteed medical benefits - there are a variety of national health services, every nation manages them differently.  Western Europeans  - people & businesses - do not suffer the anxieties over medical care that afflict Americans. They are healthier than us even when their lifestyles aren't as healthy. When you hear a middle class Canadian or Brit gripe about health care, invite them to America & listen to th answer you get: "No way!" They know we're bad. Brag all you want about Columbia-Presbyterian hospital in Manhattan, but chances are, if that's the top-of-line care  for your special illness, you'll have to mortgage the house & live in hotel, all the while pleading with your insurance provider over out-of-group specialists & uncovered tests,  A few years ago a friend of mine came down from Vermont to be treated for a rare, life-threatening illness. He was treated, went back to Vermont, & died.

"Socialism" is menacing word in America that we tend to think of as meaning a  monolithic political philosophy of oppressive government  when it in fact has many variants.  Marxism is an obscenity. So nobody wants to be a socialist or a marxist. But we desperately need  the hope of community solutions, the empowerment of the weak & powerless (like when only white, male property owners could vote, or one was taxed to vote, or forced to submit to "literacy tests" with questions even the questioners could not answer, or one was a woman & a constitutional amendment was required to extend the vote to females.

Unions were considered communistic. Didn't help that some of the early ones were. But the great growth of unionism occurred when unions pulled away from the ideologues & concentrated on  building a better lifestyle for workers; a living wage, safer working conditions, health care, more leisure time,  & after WWII a house in the suburbs & a more comfortable retirement than Social Security alone could provide.

The proof of the success of unionism was that unionized workers earned more than nonunion  workers in the same jobs. So forcing unions to accept wages & benefits that are the same as non-union workers  will be the death blow to organized labor.Or will it? Perhaps the "sleeping giant"  is not the Tea Party, but unionized workers, their families, friends, allies, & all those who wish they could organize a union at their workplaces.


I have more notes on this. Maybe tomorrow's blog.

Labels: bully pulpit, in the news, justice, what I'm reading

Labels: bully pulpit, in the news, Mahalo, music, video

Unlike the more homogeneous right wing gatherings & protests (white, middle-aged & older, conservative Christian), liberal/progressive rallies & marches tend to be heterogeneous, with a wide variety of people young & old, multi-colored. Fringe groups & crackpots come out of the shadows & attach themselves to these events. They have their own complaints & agendas, sometimes only peripherally related to the major issues. In one of his tweets, Wisconsin UCC Pastor Dan Schultz (watching on TV) noted with  relief the absence of giant caricature puppets in Madison; these eye-catching & oft-offensive (but amusing) things - the creations of art school leftists - are common in European street actions & strikes.

Liberal rallies also draw identity groups that offend conservatives merely because they openly exist at all, like lesbian public school teachers. Of course, lesbians have long been a considerable percentage of teachers, since teaching was one of the few professional occupations available to unmarried, educated  women, those "spinsters" who lived alone or shared a home with another Miss Somebody.

Some people are simply rude & vulgar. & the young folks are inclined to behave as young folks.

The difference  is that the right wing spectrum, though diverse in its own limited way, is so much narrower overall. One gets the impression that the loonies & bigots are in the middle of it. Moderation is anathema, ideologues are championed.  A majority of those identifying themselves as Republicans are "birthers." Delegates to the Republican National Convention see nothing racist or offensive about wearing "funny" hats with Barack Obama clenched in the jaws of an alligator. They're the base, the mainstream of their party. For them, scientific inquiry & methods are  in eternal struggle with religious doctrine. They move smoothly from Republican organizations - which one would hope are the larger tents  - to doctrinaire religious & right wing organizations.

Most of the Democrats I know in Jersey are first of all Regular Party People, with a few general but firm  beliefs about the role of government, & are rather old-fashioned (meaning "urban machine") about how the party functions. The latter irritates reformers, particularly those from suburbia. A few Democratic demographics  do have a difficult time of it. But many liberal/left people consider themselves outside the Democratic Party mainstream, or outside the Party altogether. There's much resentment toward the Democratic establishment for not purging so-called "Blue Dogs" the way Repugs have purged or rendered powerless their "RINO" members, & because President Obama & the Clintonistas are considered too cozy with Wall Street & K Street.

Anyway, I'm not apologizing for any offensive signs & expressions found among the crowds in Madison WI.  The over-whelming majority of the folks in the crowds vote Democratic when they vote (although some of them voted for Gov. Walker & now regret it). Union members at the core of the protests may be pains-in-the-asses to deal with, but radicals they are not anymore. They're teachers, accountants, clerks, computer programmers,  truck drivers, janitors, nurses, paralegals, police officers, firefighters, EMTs - our neighbors & the glue of government. Again, those kinds of mass gatherings are traditionally grabbed as opportunities for fringe people to show their stuff. At the peace marches of the Sixties, the "Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh" shouters made the biggest noise - you hear them in old news films -  but they actually were a  very small portion of the crowd, which detested their presence. That group wanted to stir up trouble.  But what could one do? Just try to shout louder.

I assume there are nutty,  insensitive  people in the crowds at Madison protesting Gov. Walker.  Just wade into the crowd with a video camera & single  them out. Maybe Heritage Foundation or a Koch Brothers shadow organization  will pay you to do it (you'd be foolish to do it for free).  But they're not running for higher elective office, & if they try they won't win. It's the Repugs who  elect  Rep, Michelle Bachman  & allow her prime time center stage to spout nonsense. That they may do so reluctantly is of no matter.  She represents their base now.

Labels: bully pulpit, count the yoyos, in the news

Christopher Hitchens wrote of the Tea Party & Glenn Beck's followers, one "can feel sympathy with the pulse of nostalgia."

I do.   But nostalgia is a sentiment, not a value. Also, "restoring honor" & "traditional American values" are not solutions. I love tradition.  But the value of tradition is  that as a guardian of values it is perhaps the most adaptable of values, & makes no distinction  between the values it guards, good or bad. Tradition serves any purpose it is made to serve. Traditions  change. We've had plenty of lousy "traditional American values" as well as good ones.

As for "restoring honor," exactly what is that "honor," when did we lose it, & how do we get it back? By waving the flag & having more wars?

The most puzzling & frightening of Beck's "solutions" is "returning to God." There's never been a consensus on what that means. Humans kill each other over it. I heard Thomas Friedman on the radio the other day saying that we made the error two decades ago of getting involved in a battle between the Saudi Islamic far right & the Saudi Islamic far far right. The Saudi far far right insists that its values are the Islamic values.  I wish some of the wiser folks over on the Tea Party side would notice it & not make the same kinds of claims. We're already the most believing, the most churchy of western nations.  If everyone in America went to church (or synagogue, temple, or mosque), we'd still have a thousand points-of-view & differences  on what are acceptable behaviors & lifestyles. We'd still have a left & a right, Democrats & Republicans & independents & undecideds & don't care one way or the other.

Why isn't the Tea Party screaming for ethical corporate behavior? Why is it just guvmint & maybe the unions at fault? Is it wrong to call the private sector to account? What evidence is there that big business & the super-rich look  out for the best interests  of ordinary Americans? Why do they get a bye? If you're assaulting the Fortress of Power, at least understand who's in it. How can you attack it while simultaneously defending it? Why is Beck's God the protecting  divinity of the Fortress? How was America more godly when we had slavery & were committing genocide on Indians? How was America more "Christian" when workers had no rights or protections, children labored in coal mines & sweatshops, & rivers were open sewers?

You're free to believe  God is more offended by taxes & a failure to pay lip service with public prayer than by war & injustice.

I can imagine myself  in the crowd at last Sunday's rally; a white guy raised in a two parent Republican, non-religious mainline Christian family, anxious about America's changing demographics, losing "traditions"  I knew & loved that served as a psychic safety net.  But, you see, the America for which I feel nostalgic mostly disappeared in the Sixties, not under the weight of Great Society programs, which I easily connected to Franklin Roosevelt, but because America split down the middle over Vietnam, left against right, older  against younger, & the culture shifted. People bought air-conditioners & no longer sat on front porches on summer evenings, & they bought clothes dryers & laundry stopped flapping on lines in backyards, &  cheap Japanese cars began appearing on roads, & factories started shutting down, & the suburbs became streets without shady trees, sidewalks, & corner stores.    If I had my way, we would've taken Dr. King's Dream, & the civil rights legislation,  & marched black & white together, hand in hand, back into the Fifties, & done that decade over.

Labels: blogging against theocracy, bully pulpit, in the news, religion

or fall one by one.

Every year on Dr. King's birthday I lament the mainstream appropriation of his image & causes. We (white people) want him to stop preaching the tough love at us.

I've said it again & again: The most dangerous thing you can do in America is try to form a political coalition of the economic underclasses. Which is what Dr. King was up to when he was murdered. All those years exposing himself in the deep South, & he gets killed in Memphis while supporting a labor union. It could have happened anywhere in 1968.

Racism is The American Ruse. The poor white could not be permitted to make a peaceful alliance with the poor black for mutual advancement. Blacks had to be at least a little poorer, & oppressed by law rather than the cultural conventions that kept "white trash" down.

Dr. King saw that Vietnam & the military draft were the tragic levelers; America's underclass young men, white, black, brown, all the colors, thrown together to blast a little nation on the other side of the world on behalf of ... who? what? The Army was the most integrated institution in America, an experiment in integration. The draft actually functioned to keep young male labor out of the job market after high school - the only logical reason for having a peacetime draft until a war could be found to justify it. Now we fill the enlisted ranks through financial incentives: learn a trade, pay for college, support your children, get out of the 'hood & drive a Humvee.

Labels: bully pulpit, holidays

Maybe The Prez should have made his own brief statement before sending Sec. Napolitano out to explain. But there's nothing he can do in Washington at this point he can't do in Hawaii. It isn't like he needs to consult personally with Rep. Peter King. King does no good ranting about "enemy combatant" & "military trial." Pete's had some dubious connections of his own to suspicious organizations & potentially dangerous aliens. The surest way to put Umar Farouk away for good is to protect whatever constitutional rights he has & prove him guilty of criminal acts in a federal trial.

Americans want but have no patience for the kind of airport security used by Israel's El Al, the only nearly fail safe system. El Al passengers don't need constant, alarming reminders & elevated security threat levels. It doesn't take an Umar Farouk incident for El Al to tighten security. El Al assumes there's always an Umar Farouk trying to get on the plane, & that's why many people fly El Al. El Al also thinks about possible Farouks on the ground with missile launchers.

We're in a hurry.

We ought to be more concerned than we are about potential homegrown Islamic terrorists; disaffected American-born sons of honest, loyal immigrants who came here & worked 16 hour days in corner convenience stores to put those sons through American colleges. Some young people become radicalized because they aren't yet wise enough to accept that reality never fits ideals perfectly & never will. They're merely educated. They're attracted to older people who don't believe in adapting ideals to positive, practical purposes; the ideologues. The ideologue teachers don't want to be the martyrs. They feel guilty for not having become martyrs for their ideologies when they were younger. So their personal practical purpose has become teaching the ideology.

I was fortunate. I came of age in an era of radicals. I've always been attracted to egalitarian ideas & lifestyles, but I dislike when they are strictly codified. I saw that the "meritocracy" of radicalism, left & right, sectarian & secular, is dominated by blowhards & bullies. When you play in a rock & roll band & smoke pot, you don't have much patience for tracts, sermons, & manifestos, much less people telling you your music isn't contributing to The Revolution. Sorry, pal, but what you don't understand is that music is the freakin' revolution. You're the bummer bystander who won't dance.

Poet Phillip Whalen wrote that the poems of Frank O'Hara are more important than the Sayings of Chairman Mao. They are, in fact, more important than the Sayings of Jesus, because when you reduce a life, any life, to bunch of printed & memorized sayings & rules, you lose the person. Jefferson's Bible lost Jesus. So does the red letter Kings James in the hands of a fundamentalist. The sayings of Chairman Mao lose the human being responsible for the deaths of many millions. I'm not using Whalen's statement to teach about Whalen or O'Hara. Go read their poems. There's little doubt in my mind that young, middle class men sitting at the feet of radical, bearded mullahs lose Mohammed.

Do we want to submit to random bag searches at train stations? After 9/11, I wanted police to search my backpack before I got on PATH, because it was usually filled with old records & weighed about fifteen pounds. They never did. This jazz group is led by a tuba player. I was offered $30 for The Misfits 45. Remember The Blues Magoos?

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, bully pulpit, in the news, WFMU

Corzine, Christie disagree on emergency funding for feeding the hungry

PATERSON -- With the recession draining the budgets of soup kitchens and food pantries around the state, Gov. Jon Corzine today said he is working on an emergency proposal to dig up more state funds for organizations that help feed the hungry.

But Gov.-elect Chris Christie — who had called for a freeze on new spending before the legislative session ends and he takes office in January — said he is leery about expenditures by the outgoing administration as the state grapples with a projected $8 billion budget deficit.

Of course, I support Corzine. But I recognize there's two sides to this. Christie isn't unsympathetic, but he takes office in a month & doesn't want any new decisions on spending before he gets there. The state already contributes. Demand has increased & prvate donations haven't kept pace. My gripe is about the kind of online comments this topic generates, & the deteriorating situation itself.

The people decrying government "give-a-ways" of a necessity as basic as food, & demanding private charity do more, are just as likely to say the charities themselves are bunch of commies, including Catholics, because they don't discriminate enough among the hungry & feed the undesirables, drug addicts, drunks, & illegal immigrants. Or maybe they want more Bible-thumping on the menu, which even the Salvation Army doesn't lay on too heavy. All of the larger food pantries look for some verification of need from those expecting to pick up a box of food every month. Some of them give first-timers an emergency bye. The kitchens, the free meals & Saturday sandwiches are available to all comers. Not even many people who can afford only the Burger King value menu want to sit down & share a simple meal with the needy & homeless just to save a few bucks. But on the other side of the serving table & in the kitchen are volunteers who drive in from the 'burbs to help out, signing up for regularly-scheduled duty.

Even in the current economy, there's no legit reason food pantries in Jersey should be short & free kitchens unable to pull together large enough pots of stew, with bread, & a donut for dessert. Americans waste food like nothing else, in restaurants, in supermarkets, in home kitchens. Dunkin' Donuts tosses 30 gallon garbage bags of edible cake donuts - the kind without fillings - into the dumpsters, & the birds & squirrels gather daily to tear those bags open. It's logistically difficult to collect the prepared food while it still can be eaten; organized donations of canned goods are more sporatic than on-going for civic & religious groups. So supermarkets collaborate with food pantries to make it easy for those who don't want to dig through their kitchen cabinets or buy extra & deliver it themselves to a collection point. They'll add any amount as low as a dollar to a shopping bill & purchase & donate the food for you. Nobody has to actually rub elbows with the poor to keep them from starving. Of all our social problems, the collection & distribution of much more food to pantries & free kitchens in an economic downturn is possible, because it's something Jerseyans will do if they are constantly reminded & given convenient opportunities to contribute.

Many of those "poor" are unemployed or underemployed working folks with families, not eligible for food stamps, but behind in their mortgages & other bills. Would you want to choose between feeding your kids & losing your house? Or selling a reliable car you need to find employment? There are thousands of seniors relying on cheap or free senior center lunches to help make ends meet, & those lunch programs may rely on The Community Food Bank of NJ for some of the food.

Put it this way: Anyone who thinks state guvmint does too much to feed the hungry has an even greater obligation to pick up the slack. Except for the anonymous heartless bastards on the NJ.com comments pages.

Labels: bully pulpit, jersey shore, New Jersey

The best thing was that New York City went ahead & elected a mayor of moderate political & nonalarmist temperament who, from his own business experience, took a long economic view & understood it wouldn't do to turn Manhattan into a fortress island. He believed the city had a hopeful future & gambled on it.

Many of us were wondering at the time if we should put more distance between ourselves & the Port of New York.

We're still here.

The worst thing was a president who couldn't build on the good will of a shocked world, who couldn't finish the dangerous & difficult task we had generally agreed upon in Afghanistan & instead lied & manipulated America into a war-for-profit that his backers had intended to wage before he had taken office.

There's the contrast. A nation bogged down in two wars; a revived Taliban; a national economy in tatters; an irrational, paranoid, extremist right more obsessed with the new president's birth certificate than with bin Laden & Al-Qaeda or our own economic recovery. & in New York, a vibrant international city toughing out a recession, & a mayor - like him or not - about to accomplish what "America's Mayor" couldn't pull off from a smoking pit using the bullhorn of fear in the anxiety following 9/11: a third term.

I don't care for midtown Broadway as a pedestrian mall. But it could have become a desolate, scary place patroled by National Guard in Humvees. It might have been unimaginable for thousands of people to pack the streets outside Ed Sullivan Theater as Paul McCartney performed from the marquee, as they did last month. Downtown may have been largely abandoned by major businesses.

The shame of it is so much of America didn't learn from New York City. The place is too diverse, too broad-minded, too unconcerned with matters that future Americans will regard as petty, reactionary, bigoted, & foolish. That's how great cities are; New York, L.A., San Francisco, Chicago. Tough, resilient, & hopeful.

The President advises children to study hard, & some seriously unbalanced Americans go nuts. New York, having constructed two new baseball stadiums, begins digging a new trans-Hudson rail tunnel & debates the long-term revitalization of Coney Island.

9/11 Day is different around here. Everyone lost someone or has friends who lost someone. We've met people who were downtown that morning. It's personal.

We're still here.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, bully pulpit, George W. Bush, in the news

The embattled white anglo-european minority. Teabaggers. Screaming at healh care reform town hall meetings. A lot of them are recipients of government health insurance called Medicare. My own position is the same it's always been; a form of Medicare should be offered as a public option with income-based fees. Even President Nixon was attracted to the idea before he began drowning in Watergate & had to shelve it.

It surprises me a little that so many people (apparently) have not lost their health insurance through a layoff - unable to afford it independently, have not been screwed over by an HMO, do not know a family struggling under the financial burden of special needs child & running up many thousands of dollars of unpayable debt. I'm surprised so many people believe they have health care choices they don't really have,

I think this isn't really about health care.

We don't want to believe what we suspect - & numbers tend to confirm, that Canadians, Brits, French, Germans, Dutch, Danes, Norwegians, Swedish, are generally more content & have better lifestyles than us. No matter how much the people in those nations gripe about their national health care, America reminds them of what they don't want. They don't want our workplace conditions, either. We just scoff at them, Hah, we're Americans & you're not. Terrific. Take that to the bank in the global economy.

But what constitutes America & Americans is inevitably changing; the time coming soon enough when even a majority of the white Anglo-European populace will be a minority.

We're already in an America of great hopes but lowered expectations. Who with any sense expects their income to rise much faster than the cost-of-living, staying in the same job? Who expects loyalty & generosity from corporations, no matter how long one works for them or how profitable those companies are? We ceded regulatory control of financial institutions & look what it got us.

How long can they keep fighting? How many prejudices can they juggle & maintain? How many objectionable "others" can they have? Centuries of effort staying above & apart from African-Americans. . Then the absurd contradiction of grudgingly, slowly, conceding equality for women while holding to an opposing set of religious beliefs in which women are not & can never be equal. Then gays & lesbians became the despised "other," the alien, not worthy of equal rights. Now Latinos are the outsiders, native born & immigrants regardless of legal status. & perhaps most perversely, so demonizing whites of moderate political views - progressive on one or two issues - that there's small possibility of regaining them as allies in anything. The most shocking thing about President Obama is that it became possible to elect Obama president. The conditions favoring his election may change & go against him, but the demographics of his victory are the future.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, bully pulpit, in the news

You knew it was coming eventually.

I stop in DD after the library, sit down with my decaf, with a view of the TV, CNN, hope to learn something about Iraq withdrawal, Iran, Honduras, health care bill, maybe a Karl Malden tribute or Al & Franni arriving in D.C.

Freakin' Michael Jackson.

Look, Michael lived under continuous stress for 50 years. For the first 21 or so, the stress was imposed from the outside. But after that the stress was increasingly of his own making. Poor career decisions. Clueless choices in his personal life. A prisoner of his own whims & obsessions. Whatever the doctor did, whatever drugs he prescribed, Michael Jackson wasn't murdered. There's no one else to blame. Not Papa Jackson, not Berry Gordy, although the "values" of those two exploitative men served him badly in the long run. Not his hangers-on & sycophants. Not Liz Taylor or the Sheik of Dubai, his "friends." Not the paparazzi. Doesn't matter who inherits his catalogue, estate & his debts & his test tube children. It's all product. Michael Jackson made product. Sometimes great product, all through his recording career. But he saw it as product.

He wasn't like Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, foundering on a "masterpiece" his damaged psyche wouldn't let him finish.

Michael Jackson had no sooner crowned himself "King of Pop" than three smarter, new megastars, Prince, Madonna, & Springsteen, damned near knocked the crown clear off his head. Hip hop rendered any "message" he had irrelevant. His own sister Janet wasn't messing around.

Which brings me to the opinion I've held for two decades. Following the unparalleled success of "Thriller," Jackson made a decision that revealed his tragic flaw & his Motown indoctrination. Rather than understanding the uniqueness of the achievement, the opportunity it presented, Michael set as his primary ambition the making of an album that would sell bigger than "Thriller." Not a better album. He had no clear idea how to accomplish this feat, & he didn't quite possess all the skills (or vision) he needed to do it. He didn't use the success of "Thriller" to develop his songwriting, to work on a point-of-view, to embark on some dreamed of personal artistic project, to get his life & finances on solid ground, maybe do some psychotherapy to control his demons. He bought a monkey & built Neverland & wrecked his face.

Michael Jackson was one fucked up man. In that regard, he truly did top Elvis. The other King, after a few years of bad movies & non-hits, shook off the indifference & a stifling manager, Colonel Parker, long enough to give us an incredible comeback, a trim figure, & some great records before he reverted to form, missing out on the beautiful support the new generation extended to Johnny Cash & Roy Orbison, & which would have revitalized him yet a third time.

A good king has a capacity for reigning wisely at least some of the time.

Labels: bully pulpit, Elvis Presley, media madness, music, obituary, Showbiz

There's a passage in a Raymond Chandler novel where Philip Marlowe stakes out a diner called "Mom's Home Cooking" & amuses himself by trying to figure out how many lies are contained in those three words. He stops before he's done counting, but it's a literary moment that stops the reader. In four years of high school English, I had only one teacher who cautioned us about the manipulative uses of language, & what I call "Sayin' makes it so" language. I wonder if secondary school teaching has improved any since then.

Sen. Lindsay Graham: "And I know this; our party's politics is closer to America ideologically than President Obama, but he's connected with young people. We lost ground with the Hispanics, we got to repair the damage there."

A glib, nothing statement we expect of politicians, went by me at first. Then I backed up.
Do Americans have an ideology? What is it? Is connecting with young people significant or insignificant? Do young people have an ideology? Why have the Repugs "lost ground with the Hispanics"? How do Repugs "repair the damage" if they advocate mass deportations? What is the "damage"? This is chatter, the background noise political culture churns out 24/7 now. Newspapers used to filter the language, & the job of reporters was to pick it apart. Page space was limited. But TV time is abundant. Go ahead & blab & when time is up we'll change the graphic on the screen & someone else blabs. James Carville blabbing. Chris Dodd blabbing. Tim Pawlenty blabbing. Columnists A, B, C, & D blabbing together. "Out of time. That has to be the last word, B. Next up, former invisible undersecretaries of the Interior from the Clinton & Bush adminstrations discuss the Obama vegetable garden in the segment, Are the Obamas ignoring the health threat of doggy doo doo?"

Labels: bully pulpit

The president's staff made a calculated pick of a date for a presidential appearance on a late night talk show. NCAA basketball on CBS had Letterman locked into a repeat, so there was no favoritism or ratings bomb; it's probable some promise was made for a future appearance by the president or the First Lady. Letterman, after all, provided the Obama campaign with one of its best weeks when McCain abruptly canceled an appearance to rush to Washington & save the economy but was caught live on the CBS news raw feed taping a segment with Katie Couric in New York at the same time he would've been in the Late Show guest chair. Letterman is also a sharper interviewer than backslapping Jay, pleading ignorance with politicians before zinging some pointed question his researchers prepared for him.

As for Obama's "Special Olympics" slip with regard to his bowling score, the cranks complaining the loudest also oppose stem cell research.

We Americans have small patience for details unless they involve gadgets, recipes. & celebrity scandals (see 9/11=Iraq+WMD). So while it's good that we're raging at A.I.G. bonuses & capitalist exploiters, we still don't get it; the facts of the astounding greed & legal scams have been available to us for many years. The indignation of America's only native criminal class - congress - is laughable. They've always known the details, from long before Wall Street was ripping off the Federal Guvmint directly & merely playing three card monte on the American people with the consent of both political parties. It's sickening to hear Pelosi's evasions (disgraceful recent interview with Charlie Rose) & Republiban lies (every day). The moment a politician prefaces a statement with the adverb "Frankly," you know you're about to hear bullshit.

I don't think Americans expect the President to lose his cool. Outrage isn't his personality. We do expect him to get control of his economic team & make it clear to them that they aren't working for Wall Street anymore; they're working for him & us. Because they aren't feeling the anger. & pretty soon, the American people will decide he isn't feeling it, either. We don't care about the damned White House garden.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, bully pulpit

2 Pa. judges sued in kickback scheme

ALLENTOWN, Pa. A lawsuit has been filed against two Pennsylvania judges accused of taking more than $2 million in kickbacks to send youth offenders to privately run detention centers.

The suit names Luzerne County Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan and 14 other defendants. It was filed in federal court late Thursday on behalf of hundreds of children and their families who were alleged victims of the corruption.

"At the hands of two grossly corrupt judges and several conspirators, hundreds of Pennsylvania children, their families and loved ones, were victimized and their civil rights violated," plaintiffs' attorney Michael Cefalo said in a statement Friday.

Prosecutors allege Ciavarella and Conahan took $2.6 million in payoffs to put juvenile offenders in lockups run by PA Child Care LLC and a sister company, possibly tainting the convictions of thousands of juvenile offenders.

The judges pleaded guilty to fraud in federal court in Scranton on Thursday. Their plea agreements call for sentences of more than seven years in prison.
***
The lead plaintiff is Florence Wallace, whose 14-year-old daughter Bernadine was charged with terroristic threats after getting into an argument on MySpace. The lawsuit said the teenager was not advised of her right to an attorney and was pressured to plead guilty. She was taken from Ciavarella's courtroom in shackles and spent time in PA Child Care and at a youth wilderness camp.

As a result of the judges' corruption, parents were forced to pay for the "wrongful incarceration" of their children, the suit said. Some parents had their wages garnished, public assistance benefits taken and social security benefits seized.

Seven years, eh? The number of lives these shit hole judges & their cohorts ruined doesn't seem to count for much (just like with crooked legislators, financiers, & the entire Cheney adminstration.). Kids needing counseling & maybe some tough love. Some who may have required no more than a warning. Perhaps others innocent altogether. Most no doubt from the struggling Eastern PA underclasses. Privatize the criminal justice system, make it profitable to incarcerate, buy off some corrupt public servants. Everyone gets to drive a fuckin' Lexus. It was bound to happen. Let's finish the job & have Xe (rebranded Blackwater) supply our police & subcontract the courts to Halliburton.

Labels: bully pulpit, in the news

Part Two to yesterday's grumpfest:

Whenever there's a devastating tornado, hurricane, flood, wildfire, entire neighborhoods of two bedroom prefabs are wiped out. Often they are pleasant homes, well-maintained, & sometimes not so pleasant. What's long puzzled me is why the people in those houses believe they are middle class. It's one of the great bamboozlements, a hugely successful ruse, foisted upon Americans by the upper classes, mainly through control of the popular culture, & the use of culture in bending political opinion with misdirection. I think of Hank Hill in the cartoon series, King of the Hill. I like the cartoon family. They're more "realistic" than any filmed sitcom. Some episodes are tweaked into fantastic scenarios, others given over to ordinary family dillemmas in which Hank & Peggy, decent church folks in Texas, squirm through situations requiring ethical adjustments that don't resolve easily using the hard, either/or Biblical morality they probably get from the preacher in the pulpit.Peggy, though naive in some ways, is more knowing of human foibles & desire, & more adaptable than Hank. The puzzlement is why Hank & Peggy think they're in the middle class. Hank's possession of a lawn tractor for his small yard, his middle class bling, may push him over an illusory line. Upper middle class guys also drive their tractors for kicks, but contract landscapers for lawn maintanance. But it's how the Hills think, the reflection they see of themselves. They're clearly only a couple of paychecks away from economic disaster - episodes have dealt with the possibility. Hank has a capricious boss at the propane depot. Peggy is better educated & is a resourceful Jill-of-all-trades, but at heart she's an old-fashioned homemaker & volunteer do-gooder. The son, Bobby, is a pudgy, unathletic impulsive kid who wants mostly to be accepted & liked (Hank is a "Glory Days" high school football type). They aren't financially secure. Nor, so far as I can tell, are any of Hank's beer-drinking buddies.

Hank's street in Arlen, Texas is the kind of neighborhood we see on the news in a pile of rubble flattened by an F-4 twister, including Hank's manufactured house that looks all of 600 sq ft. It's also, I would imagine, overwhelmingly Republican. Hank believes he has a freedom & flexibility in his life that just isn't there. He doesn't try to exercise enough liberties to understand how few he really has. Hank has a common, largely unwarranted hubris regarding his position & importance in America's economic scheme. Hank would consider a politicized class consciousness as unpatriotic, even unamerican.

In my town, the Hank Hills were union guys, & they earned better than Hank, & most had larger homes, old frames & newer split-levels, & some smaller houses that grew dormers & finished basements, & they were patriotic enough to have risked their asses for America.

There were two kinds of people in my town with second, summer homes. One were the professional guys, the lawyers, accountants, business-owners, a few Wall Streeters & upper middle-management. They had vacation homes on the lakes in North Jersey & on Long Beach Island (not as upscale then as now, but no bargain). There weren't a whole lot of them in town. The others were autoworkers at the GM & Ford plants, & skilled tradesmen, who jumped at overtime & got good financial advice somewhere. Union men all. They had places in the new developments around Seaside Heights & Barnegat Bay ranging from cottages on dredged bayfront canals to very modest 1/2 shacks in locations with names like Ocean Beach 1, 2, & 3. Environmental disasters for the most part, but hardly anyone raised that issue at the time. These union dads, for all their griping about union dues & shop stewards, had tough, adversarial attitudes toward corporate management. They came from struggling ethnic neighborhoods in Jersey City, Bayonne, Newark, Brooklyn, growing up during the Great Depression, they liberated themselves at they same time they liberated the world from Hitler & Tojo. Italians, Irish, Polish, Germans, Catholics & protestants. My town was a big step up for them, one square mile of safety & whiteness where nobody was too rich or too poor (with a few notable exceptions). They thought of themselves as working class even as their incomes surpassed the average white collar families in town. There was, in these union families, so much pride in going to college that many of my friends & acquaintances became teachers even though that meant earning less than their fathers. The encouraged career goal was clean, physically undemanding work in jobs with no layoffs.

I recall one dad, who had a house down the shore & two late model vehicles in his driveway, sitting at a picnic table on the lovely patio behind his house, still wearing his GM assembly line work clothes, drinking a Schlitz after supper in the cool spring twilight, saying to a collection of bored adolescents, "Don't do what I do." The surroundings suggested that we ought to do what he did, follow in his footsteps. But what he did was the same thing day in day out, with no variety, whipped along by time management experts who came down from the offices carrying clipboards, wearing ties & hard hats. For his lifestyle he relied entirely on his union contract & the desire of the American consumer to purchase the cars his employer was selling, which he knew were absurdly designed. He, in fact like Hank Hill, drove a very plain, very reliable red pickup truck, but from his own factory,* a steel box in the bed holding his fishing gear for quick Friday getaways. In the summer, his wife & kids relocated down the shore while he stayed in town during the week by himself, a separation he admitted, with a chuckle, didn't bother him, as he ate his suppers at the Legion Hall or Peterson's (a legendary hot hog & burger stand), watched ballgames on TV in peace, & went to bed earlier. He was good guy. His son became a high school history teacher. A union man, too.

The unions are largely gone. But we need the old union anger, the union understanding of have & have nots. We need to understand that the political message out of Washington D.C. & the front offices has been for years, relentlessly, successfully, that the people who are have nots or have not much are really part of the haves; that they are haves even as wages & the standard of living drop & wealth flows ever upward, carrying few with it.

* He bragged that every worker from the railroad dock to the storage lot driver knew his truck was coming through. No way to verify the claim.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, bully pulpit, culture, jersey shore

Why am I beginning to perceive Barack Obama as a weak president? While he enjoys high favorable numbers, he's seems unable to consolidate & focus that broad support (especially his core support) on passing his Stimulus Package, the most important raison d'être for his election - now that generic "change" is not sufficient. Inside the West Wing, he's practically twisting himself into knots trying to please groups that are just waiting for their chance to vote for Sarah Palin again.

I don't blame Obama so much for Daschle's dishonesty in filling out vetting questionnaires. Rod Blagojevich doesn't begin to understand the damage he caused to Obama through his efforts to become a footnote in history books during one of the most significant moments in American history.

For one thing, President Obama, in his cautious, honest, but gloomy assessments of the economy, is failing to strike the necessary hopeful note - a vision of what this immense pile of debt will accomplish in America's hometowns. Too much Lincoln, not enough Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We look back at the start of Lincoln's term & hear a president in public denial, with his calls to the "better angels of our nature," & an unsustainable belief in the strength of southern unionist sentiment that should have been more obvious at the time, as secessionists formed a government & armed themselves with confiscated federal weapons. F.D.R., a man of fearless partisan temperament, also unsure of what was to be done, was quite certain of who stood against him, & was prepared to flatten that opposition as necessary.

So far, the tone of this administration is "Team of Equals," after Doris Kearns Goodwin's recent popular history of Lincoln's cabinet; yet they trot out"The Boss" to sing "The Rising." There's a reason they call him "The Boss." (Clarence Clemons's tour contract gets him his own dressing room apart from E Streeters, & a can of caviar, but he doesn't call the tunes.) Obama's overtures & capitulation to Repugs & neoconservatives, which began before the election, have gained him nothing in real support except from a small group of evangelicals who believe ending employment discrimination against gays is serious common ground rather than a belated endorsement of rights that political & religious centrists were advocating (& occasionally securing) decades ago; & for whom "abortion reduction" remains unconnected to the more pertinent matters of reproductive rights, education, & availability in a nation where a dogmatic minimum wage drugstore cashier might refuse to ring up a package of condoms.

Do for the people that loves you, which includes the neediest & most powerless. There's a vast swath of working class Americans being dissuaded of a foolish & irrational belief that they were higher up the economic ladder than they had any good reason to think, & now they're seeing how close they always were to the bottom, how insecure, how distant are the upper reaches of that ladder, how few occupy those rungs, how much federal largess continues to reward the wealthy few at the expense of everyone else. Stir up some class conflict, it's long overdue. Go ahead & pound on the corporate elites. & the Repugnicans.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, bully pulpit

A president leaving office after 8 years no wiser than when he entered it. That must be a "first" in American history. One only has to recall President Eisenhower's Farewell Address, a speech concerned with balances, & a fair statement of the Republican suspicion of large government. It is a troubling speech still, for the prophetic warning of a "military-industrial complex" that controls our national defense more than ever; & because Eisenhower had known this for years without speaking out, in large part because the temper of the era prevented such criticism within the political mainstream. John Kennedy ran for president & won charging falsely that America had a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union. But Ike had wisdom. George has wiseass.

The single legitimate-sounding claim made for the "success" of the Bush administration is that America has suffered no further terrorist attacks on our homeland (from the outside. American suffers much homegrown domestic terrorism). There is no proof that the excessive measures used by the Bush administration - including the invasion of Iraq - were necessary to prevent attacks, of if they even did. Push a burning house over Niagara Falls & of course the fire will be extinguished, but it won't explain why there aren't more fires. The world is no safer, & the global economic malaise & diminished American leadership & example makes it all the more dangerous. Most of the world welcomes Barack Obama not because he'll present a weaker America, but because he promises a better America. He has to deliver on the promise, but the fact that we elected him so decisively - no vote count shenanigans changing the outcome this time - was our message to the world that we want to return to our ideals, & the election of the first black president itself demonstrates & advances those ideals, our "Yes, we can" in the most significant way we could.

We have risked much, placing our hopes in Obama & the responsibility on his shoulders. But look at where we are as Bush leaves office? Obama's unwillingness to steer as far left as I would like, his reliance on "establishment" politicians for advisers & cabinet, his friendly overtures to people I consider ideological enemies, is a candid admission of his need for cooperation & experienced counsel, & of his unwillingness to enter office on a tone of partisanship (although I think he will be forced to go there to get what wants). His confidence resides in proven capacity to lead, learn, make his own decisions, & meet challenges - in those he has few if any doubts. Unlike the outgoing president, he is not a facade for a closet junta presidency. There is no Cheney, no Rove, no Rumsfeld, no stink of a coup d’état ruling from "undisclosed" locations. Obama has in his administration several of the biggest egos in American politics, people who believe they can do his job in a perilous time, & even campaigned for it.

George W. Bush is convinced history will vindicate him on Iraq, & maybe it will. But that's all he has. He has been a disaster in the present. He leaves office with a worse reputation than Richard Nixon upon resigning. He doesn't even get a good will farewell bump from the American people in the polls. Democrats, Republicans, & independents have joined together in saying, "Good riddance."

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, bully pulpit, George W. Bush