.
I received an e-mail today from a political friend asking for help in answering a viral e-mail she had received. It was all about health care, and it started out so ridiculously that I have to pass it on.
It seems the writer believes that Natasha Richardson died because she was not med-evaced out of the ski area where she received the head injury that killed her. In actuality, Ms. Richardson was taken to a clinic immediately after the injury and refused to be taken to a nearby hospital for further tests to make sure her injury was not life-threatening.
When further symptoms made it clear that she should have taken the doctors’ advice, an ambulance was called, and the emergency medical technicians worked on her while she was driven to the hospital, a trip that took less than 15 minutes. Unfortunately, the swelling of her brain had caused damage that was irreversible.
Now, the e-mailer was using this tragedy as a jumping-off point to rail against health care reform, specifically Obama’s health care reform. If Ms. Richardson had been injured in America, the writer opines, she would still be alive because the U.S. has a superior health care system – including med-evac helicopters. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.
Later, the writer says that Obama wants to change the American health care system to be just like Canada’s and England’s. Unfortunately, she seems unaware that Canada and England have very different health care systems. Canada’s is a single-payer system, where providers are private but apply to the government for payment of fees for services. England’s is a national health system where doctors are employees of the government.
As I describe the e-mail, you may think that it requires no response, because it is so weak. Unfortunately, that is not true. These viral e-mails circulate back and forth across the Internet, sometimes morphing into truly hateful messages that accuse Democrats of total irresponsibility, if not corruption.
It takes time to write a response – or even to find the one you wrote before and modify it to fit the version of the e-mail you’re receiving this time, but it is very important that all Democrats learn the truth and “fight such bad speech with good speech.” If we remain silent, the people who receive these e-mails assumes they are true.
The e-mails are generally written by cutting and pasting from rightwing bloggers and websites, often mixing apples and oranges. Of course, no sources are provided for the assertions. You have to do the research yourself to find out where the stories come from so that you can fashion a rejoinder. But sometimes you’ll receive one that is so cleverly put together, mixing half-truths with whole lies to twist the mind of the reader, that it probably was not written by a private individual. Those are the ones that are truly viral.
Someone once said that you could have your own interpretation of the facts, but you couldn’t have your own facts. That is no longer the case. The extremes on each side not only pick and choose what information they will trumpet, but they make up information, if it fits their purposes, regardless of the truth.
What does it say about our society that there are people out there who willfully refuse to accept the truth of a situation? And what more does it say about us that there are people who make a living – often a very good living – misleading others in this way?
Nothing good.
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Thursday, July 9, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Going Home
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They say you can’t go home again, but I’m about to prove them wrong for the umpteenth time: I’m heading for Nevada, Missouri, to visit my mother for a few days.
I do this about a dozen times a year now. Mother is eighty, and I worry about her. Not as much as I used to, however, because she now has a boyfriend, Bill, who takes her out to lunch every day and helps her run the few errands that occupy her time. And my brother lives with her. Even though he works long hours, I know that if anything were to happen, he would be there, eventually.
So, I really go back because I enjoy her company and because the visits are so pleasant. I don’t have to feel responsible for anything while I’m there, although I try to do the dishes a few times and help her some with the notebooks she is assembling about the lives of my father and the two brothers who never had families to collect their mementoes.
But I don’t go back to visit my hometown. I have almost no interest in Nevada. I didn’t have much when I lived there. I was always intent on getting old enough so that I could go to college and get out of there. That’s such a common thread running through so many teenagers’ lives.
Now I wish I had been less dismissive of the community activities that mark the passage of the years in a town like Nevada. I never participated in the Little Miss Bushwhacker Days contest; I never entered anything into the County Fair contests; I never even read the newspaper.
Part of that was because I had so few friends to draw me into such activities. I was always the odd duck, the girl everyone thought was stuck-up, when I was really only a peculiar sort of shy. As one of five children, I didn’t miss having friends much and so I never learned how to make them. I had my brothers and sisters to pal around with – at least until my older brother and sister went off to college. Then I was left with two brothers years behind me, who didn’t really want to have much to do with a sister.
So I have no friends there to catch up with. The most I do is ride around the square and try to remember which stores have closed and opened since the last time I was there. My husband actually does a better job of that. He is more observant than I am, and he remembers what he notices. So he tells me what has changed, and I say, “Really?” and nod like I’m interested.
But I do notice what has changed in Mother’s world, and I am interested in her news, even though so many of our conversations repeat themselves. How my sister, Sharon, doesn’t listen to her and acts like she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. How Sharon’s sons are struggling with their finances and what Mother has done to help them out. What funny things the great-nieces and great-nephews have said recently and how they are doing in school or pre-school.
It’s comforting to know that some things never change, that home is still home and will be until Mother’s gone. At which point I won’t be able to go there any more.
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While I'm in Nevada, I won't have access to e-mail, so no blog from me until Saturday.
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They say you can’t go home again, but I’m about to prove them wrong for the umpteenth time: I’m heading for Nevada, Missouri, to visit my mother for a few days.
I do this about a dozen times a year now. Mother is eighty, and I worry about her. Not as much as I used to, however, because she now has a boyfriend, Bill, who takes her out to lunch every day and helps her run the few errands that occupy her time. And my brother lives with her. Even though he works long hours, I know that if anything were to happen, he would be there, eventually.
So, I really go back because I enjoy her company and because the visits are so pleasant. I don’t have to feel responsible for anything while I’m there, although I try to do the dishes a few times and help her some with the notebooks she is assembling about the lives of my father and the two brothers who never had families to collect their mementoes.
But I don’t go back to visit my hometown. I have almost no interest in Nevada. I didn’t have much when I lived there. I was always intent on getting old enough so that I could go to college and get out of there. That’s such a common thread running through so many teenagers’ lives.
Now I wish I had been less dismissive of the community activities that mark the passage of the years in a town like Nevada. I never participated in the Little Miss Bushwhacker Days contest; I never entered anything into the County Fair contests; I never even read the newspaper.
Part of that was because I had so few friends to draw me into such activities. I was always the odd duck, the girl everyone thought was stuck-up, when I was really only a peculiar sort of shy. As one of five children, I didn’t miss having friends much and so I never learned how to make them. I had my brothers and sisters to pal around with – at least until my older brother and sister went off to college. Then I was left with two brothers years behind me, who didn’t really want to have much to do with a sister.
So I have no friends there to catch up with. The most I do is ride around the square and try to remember which stores have closed and opened since the last time I was there. My husband actually does a better job of that. He is more observant than I am, and he remembers what he notices. So he tells me what has changed, and I say, “Really?” and nod like I’m interested.
But I do notice what has changed in Mother’s world, and I am interested in her news, even though so many of our conversations repeat themselves. How my sister, Sharon, doesn’t listen to her and acts like she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. How Sharon’s sons are struggling with their finances and what Mother has done to help them out. What funny things the great-nieces and great-nephews have said recently and how they are doing in school or pre-school.
It’s comforting to know that some things never change, that home is still home and will be until Mother’s gone. At which point I won’t be able to go there any more.
-------------
While I'm in Nevada, I won't have access to e-mail, so no blog from me until Saturday.
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Monday, June 15, 2009
Real Health Care Reform
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We’ve heard a great deal lately about health care reform, but that isn’t what they’re really talking about. They’re talking about health care insurance reform. In other words, how do we get everyone covered by some form of health insurance so that they will have access to the health care system we already have?
Well, I’m not particularly in favor of that. I’d rather see us reform the health care system so that we can afford to give proper health care to everyone for far less money. Whether the health care insurance industry is involved, indeed, whether it even survives that reform, I don’t care. I want a system where a sick child can be taken to see a health care professional to make sure that the cold the child is suffering from isn’t pneumonia and doesn’t turn into pneumonia. And the same for the adult with bronchitis.
Lowering the cost of health insurance won’t get us to that point, because all health insurance involves co-pays and deductibles, which very poor people can’t afford. It does us no good to limit individual payments for a doctor’s visit to $25 each if the sick person can’t even afford a co-pay of $5.
Personally, I think the only reasonable route is to institute a system of free health clinics, run not by doctors but by nurse practitioners, in neighborhoods that need service, and supported directly by tax dollars. This is the backbone of the system in England, and it works pretty well for them.
The clinics act as a triage filter, treating the sniffles, even setting broken bones, but sending the pneumonias to a “real” doctor and the shattered ulnas to the emergency rooms. That frees the doctors from being overwhelmed by patients whom they don’t need to see and allows local hospitals to maintain emergency rooms for the good of people who face real medical emergencies.
I’ve grossly oversimplified this, of course, and I know that this basic idea would be far more difficult to implement than just renting storefronts and hiring nurse-practitioners, but I can’t think of any other system that really reforms the medical system we have today, which rations care to those who can afford to pay for it while encouraging doctors to prescribe unnecessary laboratory tests and computer imagings because the doctor gets a kickback – or even owns the lab or the machinery outright.
But the people in Washington are not talking about any such reform to the medical system. They’re just talking about reforming the way we pay for a system that is broken. In my opinion, that will be a waste of taxpayer dollars.
.
We’ve heard a great deal lately about health care reform, but that isn’t what they’re really talking about. They’re talking about health care insurance reform. In other words, how do we get everyone covered by some form of health insurance so that they will have access to the health care system we already have?
Well, I’m not particularly in favor of that. I’d rather see us reform the health care system so that we can afford to give proper health care to everyone for far less money. Whether the health care insurance industry is involved, indeed, whether it even survives that reform, I don’t care. I want a system where a sick child can be taken to see a health care professional to make sure that the cold the child is suffering from isn’t pneumonia and doesn’t turn into pneumonia. And the same for the adult with bronchitis.
Lowering the cost of health insurance won’t get us to that point, because all health insurance involves co-pays and deductibles, which very poor people can’t afford. It does us no good to limit individual payments for a doctor’s visit to $25 each if the sick person can’t even afford a co-pay of $5.
Personally, I think the only reasonable route is to institute a system of free health clinics, run not by doctors but by nurse practitioners, in neighborhoods that need service, and supported directly by tax dollars. This is the backbone of the system in England, and it works pretty well for them.
The clinics act as a triage filter, treating the sniffles, even setting broken bones, but sending the pneumonias to a “real” doctor and the shattered ulnas to the emergency rooms. That frees the doctors from being overwhelmed by patients whom they don’t need to see and allows local hospitals to maintain emergency rooms for the good of people who face real medical emergencies.
I’ve grossly oversimplified this, of course, and I know that this basic idea would be far more difficult to implement than just renting storefronts and hiring nurse-practitioners, but I can’t think of any other system that really reforms the medical system we have today, which rations care to those who can afford to pay for it while encouraging doctors to prescribe unnecessary laboratory tests and computer imagings because the doctor gets a kickback – or even owns the lab or the machinery outright.
But the people in Washington are not talking about any such reform to the medical system. They’re just talking about reforming the way we pay for a system that is broken. In my opinion, that will be a waste of taxpayer dollars.
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Saturday, June 13, 2009
Transfer of Power
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Watch what happens in Iran over the course of the next few days – and compare it to what happened in Florida in November and December 2000.
In the United States, a disputed election meant lawsuits and people poring over ballots with other people leaning over their shoulders. In Iran, a disputed election has alredy meant clashes between young people and the police. Here, we called about 30 people in a corridor a “riot.” There, the police have raised translucent shields and are chasing looters up and down the streets.
The peaceful transfer of power from one leader to another is one of the primary hallmarks of civilization. The methods developed in Britain and the United States have been copied all over the world. Britain arrived at its method after centuries of uprisings any time a ruler died or aroused the ire of the populace. We arrived at our method after only eight years of the failed Articles of Confederation and less than twenty years of the Continental Congress.
Only once did the election of a President cause armed conflict (and that might have been avoided had the South not forced the issue). This is a blessing we take for granted.
One half of this country will continue to believe that Albert Gore was cheated in 2000; the other half will continue to believe that election fraud was narrowly averted. In the next few days, we will see what Florida could have been if either half had adhered less to the rule of law and surrendered more to the passions of the moment.
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Watch what happens in Iran over the course of the next few days – and compare it to what happened in Florida in November and December 2000.
In the United States, a disputed election meant lawsuits and people poring over ballots with other people leaning over their shoulders. In Iran, a disputed election has alredy meant clashes between young people and the police. Here, we called about 30 people in a corridor a “riot.” There, the police have raised translucent shields and are chasing looters up and down the streets.
The peaceful transfer of power from one leader to another is one of the primary hallmarks of civilization. The methods developed in Britain and the United States have been copied all over the world. Britain arrived at its method after centuries of uprisings any time a ruler died or aroused the ire of the populace. We arrived at our method after only eight years of the failed Articles of Confederation and less than twenty years of the Continental Congress.
Only once did the election of a President cause armed conflict (and that might have been avoided had the South not forced the issue). This is a blessing we take for granted.
One half of this country will continue to believe that Albert Gore was cheated in 2000; the other half will continue to believe that election fraud was narrowly averted. In the next few days, we will see what Florida could have been if either half had adhered less to the rule of law and surrendered more to the passions of the moment.
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Friday, June 12, 2009
A New Couch?
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We need a new couch.
We've needed a new couch for a long time. Years, even. In the past, we never had the money when we had the time to look, and vice versa. Now we have the money and we could easily find the time, but . . .
My husband works for a company that sells services to newspapers. The newspaper industry is dying. None of his company's customers appears to be in danger, but . . .
So we're holding off on buying that couch or making any other major investment until such time as the dust settles and we know where we are and what we'll need, to keep us where we want to be.
Unfortunately, a lot of people are doing what we're doing, and it isn't doing the economy any good.
That is the biggest irony of our economic situation: to get the economy out of its rut, we need to consume; to get our personal finances under control, we need to save.
Our household has decided to follow Isaac Newton's advice: moderation in all things.
We're going out to eat less, not making unnecessary trips in the car, using our ceiling fans more and leaving the thermostat at its energy-efficient, computer-controlled level more often. But at the same time, we're not switching to the store brand on items where brand means something to us, not haunting the thrift stores looking for bargains, not walking to the grocery store that is less that five blocks away (but on the other side of Tyler Road).
Whenever I have to make a financial decision, no matter how small, I find myself thinking of this balancing act. Should I save a few pennies or should I help the economy? It's kind of corny, but I believe, no, I know that the future of the country rests on all those little, everyday choices.
So what do you think? Should we buy that couch, after all?
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We need a new couch.
We've needed a new couch for a long time. Years, even. In the past, we never had the money when we had the time to look, and vice versa. Now we have the money and we could easily find the time, but . . .
My husband works for a company that sells services to newspapers. The newspaper industry is dying. None of his company's customers appears to be in danger, but . . .
So we're holding off on buying that couch or making any other major investment until such time as the dust settles and we know where we are and what we'll need, to keep us where we want to be.
Unfortunately, a lot of people are doing what we're doing, and it isn't doing the economy any good.
That is the biggest irony of our economic situation: to get the economy out of its rut, we need to consume; to get our personal finances under control, we need to save.
Our household has decided to follow Isaac Newton's advice: moderation in all things.
We're going out to eat less, not making unnecessary trips in the car, using our ceiling fans more and leaving the thermostat at its energy-efficient, computer-controlled level more often. But at the same time, we're not switching to the store brand on items where brand means something to us, not haunting the thrift stores looking for bargains, not walking to the grocery store that is less that five blocks away (but on the other side of Tyler Road).
Whenever I have to make a financial decision, no matter how small, I find myself thinking of this balancing act. Should I save a few pennies or should I help the economy? It's kind of corny, but I believe, no, I know that the future of the country rests on all those little, everyday choices.
So what do you think? Should we buy that couch, after all?
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Thursday, June 11, 2009
Confronting the Hate
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I have a nephew who was a Holocaust denier. May still be.
My sister's boy Eric was indoctrinated in that hatefulness by one of his high school teachers. My father tried to counteract it by taking him out to hear the stories of a friend who helped liberate one of the death camps. I don't think Eric was convinced. If he had been, I don't think my father would have told me the story.
I've never asked Eric about it. If he still holds those opinions, I don't want to know. I don't know him well, and I'm not sure I like him. But he's family, and I really don't want to have any reason to like him less. Besides, there's no point in being confrontational with someone I see at most twice a year -- is there?
My ambivalence probably mirrors the reaction of most of us to racial hatred. We don't want to know that our neighbor, our co-worker, our friend is a racist. So we shy away from discussing the issue until the other person has given us some sign of where they stand. Then we either relax or tighten up completely, depending. The result is that the quiet haters, the ones who give aid and comfort to the violent ones, are rarely confronted with the truth.
James von Brunn is one of the violent ones. He appears to be an equal-opportunity hater -- against Jews, Catholics, blacks, Hispanics, and government employees. He isn't happy with the world as it is, and he is willing to take matters into his own hands to change it, no matter the cost -- to him or to others.
Haven't we seen enough of that lately? I wonder if he realizes that he is a comrade-in-arms of the suicide bombers who kill our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. But fanatics rarely have true self-awareness.
Maybe I'll bring that up at Thanksgiving dinner this year.
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I have a nephew who was a Holocaust denier. May still be.
My sister's boy Eric was indoctrinated in that hatefulness by one of his high school teachers. My father tried to counteract it by taking him out to hear the stories of a friend who helped liberate one of the death camps. I don't think Eric was convinced. If he had been, I don't think my father would have told me the story.
I've never asked Eric about it. If he still holds those opinions, I don't want to know. I don't know him well, and I'm not sure I like him. But he's family, and I really don't want to have any reason to like him less. Besides, there's no point in being confrontational with someone I see at most twice a year -- is there?
My ambivalence probably mirrors the reaction of most of us to racial hatred. We don't want to know that our neighbor, our co-worker, our friend is a racist. So we shy away from discussing the issue until the other person has given us some sign of where they stand. Then we either relax or tighten up completely, depending. The result is that the quiet haters, the ones who give aid and comfort to the violent ones, are rarely confronted with the truth.
James von Brunn is one of the violent ones. He appears to be an equal-opportunity hater -- against Jews, Catholics, blacks, Hispanics, and government employees. He isn't happy with the world as it is, and he is willing to take matters into his own hands to change it, no matter the cost -- to him or to others.
Haven't we seen enough of that lately? I wonder if he realizes that he is a comrade-in-arms of the suicide bombers who kill our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. But fanatics rarely have true self-awareness.
Maybe I'll bring that up at Thanksgiving dinner this year.
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Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Political Dilemma
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Last week, I began walking door-to-door in my precinct, and I finally met someone I have been hearing about all my political life: A Democrat registered as a Republican so that she can vote in Republican primaries.
I was told about such people when I first became active in Democratic politics in 1988 in Somerset County, New Jersey. Somerset County at that time was the third richest county in the country. It was home to estates owned by Jacqueline Onassis, the king of Morocco, and Malcolm Forbes, among others.
There had been no Democratic member of the County Board of Chosen Freeholders since the days of Lyndon Johnson. Most of the state legislators from the districts including part of the county were Republicans, and the two Democrats were anti-choice and fairly conservative. Both of them were replaced by Republicans during the time I was active.
In other words, the Republican candidate on the ballot in November was sure to be the winner of the race. The only voters who had a say in who would be their representative at the county or state level were the people who voted in the Republican primary. Many Democrats, we were told, registered as Republicans in order to vote in those primaries.
But I never met one, probably because I didn't do a lot of door-to-door canvassing. It was something everyone there pooh-poohed as old hat, no longer effective. The secret to winning elections at that level, they thought, was to send out more and better mailings, which meant more and better fundraising.
Obviously, many Democratic candidates here in Sedgwick County have proven them wrong. For example, in 2006, Terry McLachlan was out-spent by his opponent, but he walked his district, identified his voters, and mobilized them to turn out and vote. He won by 51 votes. Terry was ill during the 2008 election and couldn't walk as much. He lost by 52 votes. It is said that Raj Goyle walked his district three times in 2006 and he beat Bonnie Huy by a large margin.
But what to do about this woman who was registered as a Republican but voted Democratic? I will mark the information in my part of the database provided by the state party so that the eventual candidate in my district will know to treat her as a Democrat, but that begs a larger question. If there is a Republican primary in my state house or senate district, do I want her to vote for the candidate I think will be the better legislator or do I want her to vote for the candidate who will be easier for the Democratic candidate to beat in the general election?
In some cases, the answer to those questions will be the same person. The person who holds the opinions close to mine will be the person that Republican voters will be less invested in and therefore will be less likely to turn out for, meaning that high Democratic turnout will be able to beat low Republican turnout.
But in other cases, the opposite will be true. The person easier to beat will be the more conservative candidate, because he or she is too far "out there" and will turn off all but the most ardent Republicans. A good example would be a candidate from the John Birch Society. The other candidate, however, although still staunchly conservative, might make decisions from a perspective closer to the middle, but not close enough to be decisions I want to see coming from my legislator.
Do I want her to vote for the John Bircher, giving the Democratic candidate a better chance of winning? Or do I want her to vote for the more rational conservative, keeping the John Bircher out of the running but making it more difficult for the Democratic candidate to win?
In other words, do I want her to vote like a moderate Republican or like a Democratic spoiler? I don't know, which is one reason I'm not a registered Republican.
What would you do?
.
Last week, I began walking door-to-door in my precinct, and I finally met someone I have been hearing about all my political life: A Democrat registered as a Republican so that she can vote in Republican primaries.
I was told about such people when I first became active in Democratic politics in 1988 in Somerset County, New Jersey. Somerset County at that time was the third richest county in the country. It was home to estates owned by Jacqueline Onassis, the king of Morocco, and Malcolm Forbes, among others.
There had been no Democratic member of the County Board of Chosen Freeholders since the days of Lyndon Johnson. Most of the state legislators from the districts including part of the county were Republicans, and the two Democrats were anti-choice and fairly conservative. Both of them were replaced by Republicans during the time I was active.
In other words, the Republican candidate on the ballot in November was sure to be the winner of the race. The only voters who had a say in who would be their representative at the county or state level were the people who voted in the Republican primary. Many Democrats, we were told, registered as Republicans in order to vote in those primaries.
But I never met one, probably because I didn't do a lot of door-to-door canvassing. It was something everyone there pooh-poohed as old hat, no longer effective. The secret to winning elections at that level, they thought, was to send out more and better mailings, which meant more and better fundraising.
Obviously, many Democratic candidates here in Sedgwick County have proven them wrong. For example, in 2006, Terry McLachlan was out-spent by his opponent, but he walked his district, identified his voters, and mobilized them to turn out and vote. He won by 51 votes. Terry was ill during the 2008 election and couldn't walk as much. He lost by 52 votes. It is said that Raj Goyle walked his district three times in 2006 and he beat Bonnie Huy by a large margin.
But what to do about this woman who was registered as a Republican but voted Democratic? I will mark the information in my part of the database provided by the state party so that the eventual candidate in my district will know to treat her as a Democrat, but that begs a larger question. If there is a Republican primary in my state house or senate district, do I want her to vote for the candidate I think will be the better legislator or do I want her to vote for the candidate who will be easier for the Democratic candidate to beat in the general election?
In some cases, the answer to those questions will be the same person. The person who holds the opinions close to mine will be the person that Republican voters will be less invested in and therefore will be less likely to turn out for, meaning that high Democratic turnout will be able to beat low Republican turnout.
But in other cases, the opposite will be true. The person easier to beat will be the more conservative candidate, because he or she is too far "out there" and will turn off all but the most ardent Republicans. A good example would be a candidate from the John Birch Society. The other candidate, however, although still staunchly conservative, might make decisions from a perspective closer to the middle, but not close enough to be decisions I want to see coming from my legislator.
Do I want her to vote for the John Bircher, giving the Democratic candidate a better chance of winning? Or do I want her to vote for the more rational conservative, keeping the John Bircher out of the running but making it more difficult for the Democratic candidate to win?
In other words, do I want her to vote like a moderate Republican or like a Democratic spoiler? I don't know, which is one reason I'm not a registered Republican.
What would you do?
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Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Letters and Comments
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There were a couple of nasty letters and at least one nasty comment about religion and the abortion issue in yesterday’s paper that I can’t resist responding to.
The first letter asked “Who really killed George Tiller?” and proceeded to lay the blame everywhere but where it belonged. The pro-choice movement did not kill Dr. Tiller. The anti-choice movement did. I am not saying that Operation Rescue gave the killer actual aid in terms of buying him a gun or helping to buy the gas that got him to Wichita.
But I am saying that the constant drumbeat from so many in that faction that abortion is murder and that anyone performing abortions is a murderer and that murderers should be executed and that if the government won’t execute them, then private citizens should, provided the environment that egged on the likes of Scott Roeder to do more than picket outside clinics. Don’t get me wrong, however: the killer is the one who killed Dr. Tiller and he deserves to be punished to the full extent of the law.
The second letter was in support of the National Day of Prayer and against the lawsuit that has been filed protesting that the government sponsoring such an event is a step too far over the wall separating church and state. The writer says “Atheists do not have to pray if they don’t want to and their rights should not take priority over the rights of those who do pray and follow God’s way.”
This is inside out. If the rights of atheists should not take priority, then why should the rights of the religious take priority? There is no right to hold a national day when the government urges everyone to pray. The government’s endorsement of such a day does not mean that the day cannot take place. But the government’s endorsement of such a day does mean that atheists or other non-Christians are subjected to the prayers of the Christian religion. And don’t tell me that it's not just a day of Christian prayer, that Jews and Muslims are urged to pray in their way. When was the last time you saw a non-Christian leading any of these groups in prayer?
This is like the canard that prayer is no longer allowed in schools. The proponents of school prayer are not satisfied with the right of each student to say a quiet prayer before lunch or an algebra test. They want prayer broadcast over the school’s public address system so that every child is forced to say a particular prayer at a particular time. That is not freedom of religion. That is indoctrination.
Finally, there is the caller who says, “I am tired of all the Christians being bashed because of the killing of Tiller. It had nothing to do with the Christians. It was all from the devil.”
Have you heard any commentator bashing all Christians for the murder of Dr. Tiller? I have not. Even the ones who talk about the responsibility of the extremists who advocate murder as political free speech are careful to say that these are not the views of all Christians or all anti-choice people. In fact, I think the discourse over this issue has been remarkably free of vitriol.
I am not someone who sings in the choir every Sunday, but I do believe that everyone has the right to believe as they see fit. I do not hold ardent Christians in contempt. Why do they seem determined to hold me so? People who truly live by the example of Christ are to be admired and encouraged. But people who advocate murder in the name of God are to be watched carefully and punished when their actions step over that line.
And that’s all I’m going to say about that – at least for today.
.
There were a couple of nasty letters and at least one nasty comment about religion and the abortion issue in yesterday’s paper that I can’t resist responding to.
The first letter asked “Who really killed George Tiller?” and proceeded to lay the blame everywhere but where it belonged. The pro-choice movement did not kill Dr. Tiller. The anti-choice movement did. I am not saying that Operation Rescue gave the killer actual aid in terms of buying him a gun or helping to buy the gas that got him to Wichita.
But I am saying that the constant drumbeat from so many in that faction that abortion is murder and that anyone performing abortions is a murderer and that murderers should be executed and that if the government won’t execute them, then private citizens should, provided the environment that egged on the likes of Scott Roeder to do more than picket outside clinics. Don’t get me wrong, however: the killer is the one who killed Dr. Tiller and he deserves to be punished to the full extent of the law.
The second letter was in support of the National Day of Prayer and against the lawsuit that has been filed protesting that the government sponsoring such an event is a step too far over the wall separating church and state. The writer says “Atheists do not have to pray if they don’t want to and their rights should not take priority over the rights of those who do pray and follow God’s way.”
This is inside out. If the rights of atheists should not take priority, then why should the rights of the religious take priority? There is no right to hold a national day when the government urges everyone to pray. The government’s endorsement of such a day does not mean that the day cannot take place. But the government’s endorsement of such a day does mean that atheists or other non-Christians are subjected to the prayers of the Christian religion. And don’t tell me that it's not just a day of Christian prayer, that Jews and Muslims are urged to pray in their way. When was the last time you saw a non-Christian leading any of these groups in prayer?
This is like the canard that prayer is no longer allowed in schools. The proponents of school prayer are not satisfied with the right of each student to say a quiet prayer before lunch or an algebra test. They want prayer broadcast over the school’s public address system so that every child is forced to say a particular prayer at a particular time. That is not freedom of religion. That is indoctrination.
Finally, there is the caller who says, “I am tired of all the Christians being bashed because of the killing of Tiller. It had nothing to do with the Christians. It was all from the devil.”
Have you heard any commentator bashing all Christians for the murder of Dr. Tiller? I have not. Even the ones who talk about the responsibility of the extremists who advocate murder as political free speech are careful to say that these are not the views of all Christians or all anti-choice people. In fact, I think the discourse over this issue has been remarkably free of vitriol.
I am not someone who sings in the choir every Sunday, but I do believe that everyone has the right to believe as they see fit. I do not hold ardent Christians in contempt. Why do they seem determined to hold me so? People who truly live by the example of Christ are to be admired and encouraged. But people who advocate murder in the name of God are to be watched carefully and punished when their actions step over that line.
And that’s all I’m going to say about that – at least for today.
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Thursday, June 4, 2009
The Ultimate Choice
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“I do not want – and I am sure the vast majority of Americans will agree with me – my family's lives put in jeopardy because some half-wit in government thinks that is what our Constitution requires. Such a person should be instantly fired.”
-- rick0101
That is a quote from a comment on a news story about Guantanamo and torture. It fairly leaped off the page. It is perhaps the clearest statement I’ve read of the quandary that is the American political scene today.
Do we protect our loved ones first and foremost, or do we protect the ideals that make our country great?
Our country was founded on some pretty simple ideas. We sum them up in some pretty simple phrases: All men are created equal. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Habeas Corpus. Freedom of speech, assembly, religion, the press. There are people who claim that the abrogation of any of these tenets will mean the end of civilization as we know it.
That’s until there is any credible threat to them or their families.
Perhaps that old saw that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged and a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested is really true. Tip O’Neill, after all, said that all politics are local. What’s more local than your child’s welfare?
When does the good of everyone trump the good of any one person? I suspect that we all have a different answer. And I also suspect that we won’t really know the answer until we are in a position where we’ll really need it.
.
“I do not want – and I am sure the vast majority of Americans will agree with me – my family's lives put in jeopardy because some half-wit in government thinks that is what our Constitution requires. Such a person should be instantly fired.”
-- rick0101
That is a quote from a comment on a news story about Guantanamo and torture. It fairly leaped off the page. It is perhaps the clearest statement I’ve read of the quandary that is the American political scene today.
Do we protect our loved ones first and foremost, or do we protect the ideals that make our country great?
Our country was founded on some pretty simple ideas. We sum them up in some pretty simple phrases: All men are created equal. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Habeas Corpus. Freedom of speech, assembly, religion, the press. There are people who claim that the abrogation of any of these tenets will mean the end of civilization as we know it.
That’s until there is any credible threat to them or their families.
Perhaps that old saw that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged and a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested is really true. Tip O’Neill, after all, said that all politics are local. What’s more local than your child’s welfare?
When does the good of everyone trump the good of any one person? I suspect that we all have a different answer. And I also suspect that we won’t really know the answer until we are in a position where we’ll really need it.
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Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Spaghetti Thoughts
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I spent the day tidying up my office. I organized the piles into folders, coiled some of the cords running between the various peripherals on my desktop, and recycled anything I could. I wish I could do as much for the swirling thoughts in my head. But my mental spaghetti cannot be untangled so easily.
I worry that I will give in to the despair that follows a senseless act of extremism, the sense that no matter how hard my cohorts and I struggle against adversity, there’s always a nut out there poised to do more than shoot down our arguments. The longer I am involved in politics, the more it seems that issues are never put to rest. We wrangle endlessly over the same ideas with merely incremental results.
The current campaign against the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor is a case in point. As the Senators dance the minuet of the confirmation process, the usual suspects are taking the usual positions and making the usual comments. All that has changed is the methods used as the Republicans back away from their “up or down vote” position and find nice words to say about the filibusters they decried during the confirmations of Justices Roberts and Alito.
The hypocrisy has been breathtaking. That Rush Limbaugh would have the nerve to call anyone else a racist leaves me gasping. My husband likes to say that Republicans engage in political projection, accusing Democrats of bad intentions because that is how the Republicans would act if they were in the Democrats’ position.
I think they just engage in selective memory. Dick Cheney’s recent assertion that George Tenet is to blame for the mistaken impression that Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda were allies is a good example of this. George Tenet did not cherry-pick intelligence to back up a belief he couldn’t bear to give up. Nor did he go on news show after news show to state categorically that there was such a connection.
Someone once asked me why I am a Democrat. I thought for a moment, and then replied, “Because Democrats care.” I wasn’t just thinking about Social Security, affirmative action, and welfare. I was thinking that the Democrats I have known have been concerned that what they say is both true and accurate. We not only know that life is full of nuances; we are determined to help others understand those nuances.
It is very difficult for the Democrats I know to limit themselves to sound bites and daily messages. They want what they say to make sense. They are not cynical about skirting the real story in order to tell the story they think will get them quoted in the newspapers and on TV. (This is one reason we sometimes have so much trouble winning elections.)
We don’t want to put out twisted statements that, like spaghetti, arrive tangled on the table.
.
I spent the day tidying up my office. I organized the piles into folders, coiled some of the cords running between the various peripherals on my desktop, and recycled anything I could. I wish I could do as much for the swirling thoughts in my head. But my mental spaghetti cannot be untangled so easily.
I worry that I will give in to the despair that follows a senseless act of extremism, the sense that no matter how hard my cohorts and I struggle against adversity, there’s always a nut out there poised to do more than shoot down our arguments. The longer I am involved in politics, the more it seems that issues are never put to rest. We wrangle endlessly over the same ideas with merely incremental results.
The current campaign against the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor is a case in point. As the Senators dance the minuet of the confirmation process, the usual suspects are taking the usual positions and making the usual comments. All that has changed is the methods used as the Republicans back away from their “up or down vote” position and find nice words to say about the filibusters they decried during the confirmations of Justices Roberts and Alito.
The hypocrisy has been breathtaking. That Rush Limbaugh would have the nerve to call anyone else a racist leaves me gasping. My husband likes to say that Republicans engage in political projection, accusing Democrats of bad intentions because that is how the Republicans would act if they were in the Democrats’ position.
I think they just engage in selective memory. Dick Cheney’s recent assertion that George Tenet is to blame for the mistaken impression that Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda were allies is a good example of this. George Tenet did not cherry-pick intelligence to back up a belief he couldn’t bear to give up. Nor did he go on news show after news show to state categorically that there was such a connection.
Someone once asked me why I am a Democrat. I thought for a moment, and then replied, “Because Democrats care.” I wasn’t just thinking about Social Security, affirmative action, and welfare. I was thinking that the Democrats I have known have been concerned that what they say is both true and accurate. We not only know that life is full of nuances; we are determined to help others understand those nuances.
It is very difficult for the Democrats I know to limit themselves to sound bites and daily messages. They want what they say to make sense. They are not cynical about skirting the real story in order to tell the story they think will get them quoted in the newspapers and on TV. (This is one reason we sometimes have so much trouble winning elections.)
We don’t want to put out twisted statements that, like spaghetti, arrive tangled on the table.
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Sunday, May 31, 2009
Dr. Tiller
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I didn’t really know Dr. George Tiller, but I liked him.
I spoke to him at some length once when he called to thank me for some work I was doing on the Pro Kan Do database. I was in his presence perhaps another dozen times, several of them just to hear him speak, but I could tell that he was a decent man, who thought about what he was doing and why he was doing it and did his best to do what was right.
I didn’t always agree with him on that. Third-trimester abortions bother me. I wouldn’t have one myself and would discourage anyone else from having one. But I figure that I’m not alone in those sentiments and that most of the women who have a third-trimester abortion do so for reasons more compelling than forgetting to make an appointment to end the pregnancy before the end of the second trimester.
Whatever their reasons, however, it’s their business, not mine.
That is part of where I differ with people motivated by the ideas held by the man who is now in the custody of the Wichita police. But it is only part.
The real question, of course, is how we define human life.
The other side believes that a sperm and an egg become a human being at the moment of fertilization. I don’t.
I do believe that a fetus that can survive outside the womb without heroic measures is certainly a human being. Some in the pro-choice movement would deny humanity even then, holding that the woman has the right to end her pregnancy right up to the moment she goes into labor.
Somewhere between those two moments, the fetus stops being a fetus and becomes a baby. I don’t know where that dividing line falls, and I’m willing to let each woman make that determination for herself. It’s her business, not mine – or yours.
The people who like to call themselves “pro-life” think it is their business. They think not only that the woman should not be allowed to make that decision, but that no one should. They think every pregnancy must take its course. Every life is sacred, they say.
This morning, someone who agreed with them walked up to Dr. Tiller and shot him dead as he stood in the foyer of his church.
There is no doubt that Dr. Tiller was a living human being.
I guess his life wasn’t sacred.
-------------------------
Let’s not rush to judgment.
Police have taken a suspect into custody. The media report that the evidence is compelling. But mistakes have been made in the past, and suspects are still “innocent until proven guilty” in this country.
Try to avoid talking as though this man has already been convicted.
.
I didn’t really know Dr. George Tiller, but I liked him.
I spoke to him at some length once when he called to thank me for some work I was doing on the Pro Kan Do database. I was in his presence perhaps another dozen times, several of them just to hear him speak, but I could tell that he was a decent man, who thought about what he was doing and why he was doing it and did his best to do what was right.
I didn’t always agree with him on that. Third-trimester abortions bother me. I wouldn’t have one myself and would discourage anyone else from having one. But I figure that I’m not alone in those sentiments and that most of the women who have a third-trimester abortion do so for reasons more compelling than forgetting to make an appointment to end the pregnancy before the end of the second trimester.
Whatever their reasons, however, it’s their business, not mine.
That is part of where I differ with people motivated by the ideas held by the man who is now in the custody of the Wichita police. But it is only part.
The real question, of course, is how we define human life.
The other side believes that a sperm and an egg become a human being at the moment of fertilization. I don’t.
I do believe that a fetus that can survive outside the womb without heroic measures is certainly a human being. Some in the pro-choice movement would deny humanity even then, holding that the woman has the right to end her pregnancy right up to the moment she goes into labor.
Somewhere between those two moments, the fetus stops being a fetus and becomes a baby. I don’t know where that dividing line falls, and I’m willing to let each woman make that determination for herself. It’s her business, not mine – or yours.
The people who like to call themselves “pro-life” think it is their business. They think not only that the woman should not be allowed to make that decision, but that no one should. They think every pregnancy must take its course. Every life is sacred, they say.
This morning, someone who agreed with them walked up to Dr. Tiller and shot him dead as he stood in the foyer of his church.
There is no doubt that Dr. Tiller was a living human being.
I guess his life wasn’t sacred.
-------------------------
Let’s not rush to judgment.
Police have taken a suspect into custody. The media report that the evidence is compelling. But mistakes have been made in the past, and suspects are still “innocent until proven guilty” in this country.
Try to avoid talking as though this man has already been convicted.
.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Two Enlightening Books
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I just finished reading one very interesting book and I’m about 2/3 of the way through another about the experiences of black people just before and during the Civil War.
The first book is “Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery,” by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. It is a refutation of the widespread belief that all slaves were malnourished, ill housed and ill clothed, and the victims of sometimes daily, brutal physical punishment.
Instead, it paints a portrait of a class of people over whom care was taken to make sure they had not only the tools they needed, including healthy bodies, to perform their duties but in some cases skills so valued that the slave became a source of income for his or her master when leased out to other plantations. The authors even prove that sometimes the slaves were allowed to keep a sizable percentage of the payment received for their services.
The second book is called “The Negro’s Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union,” by James M. McPherson. It is a collection of contemporary writings showing how the Civil War affected both slave and freedmen and what they were able to do to advance their case.
I’m not a scholar of the Civil War, and it is difficult for me to judge the accuracy of the portraits drawn in these books, but I find myself drawn to both arguments. It always seemed counterintuitive to me that slave owners would have abused chattel that cost them so much money and could earn them so much more. Oh, I didn’t doubt that whippings happened. There is too much evidence that they did. But whippings that disabled a slave for work just weren’t reasonable.
(Not that the authors or I want to suggest that slavery without whippings and starvation is somehow acceptable. Slavery is immoral. It never should have been allowed to come to our shores, and the United States should have followed England’s lead when they abolished it peacefully.)
I’ve never cared for the picture of black people sitting passively by, just wishing and hoping that freedom would come some day, not doing anything to better their condition, except maybe lying to get out of work. That did not comport with what I know of the human spirit. To accept that picture was to accept the canard that slaves somehow were not human.
Instead, it is in the long quotations from Civil War newspapers, private letters, and military reports that I find the indomitable black spirit that I believed was there. I believed that even when others most insisted that freedom had been handed to the slaves, that they had done little or nothing to wrest it from the hands of Confederate plantation owners.
One startling sentence with two statistics says it all: “By October 20, 1864, there were 140 Negro regiments in the Federal service with a total strength of 101,950 men.” Until I read that line, my knowledge of black service in the Civil War had begun and ended with the story told in the movie “Glory” of the Massachusetts regiment that fought so gallantly and was sacrificed so cruelly in the assault on Fort Wagner. That is only one in a litany of acts of courage and resolve by slaves who ran away to become black soldiers – and the freedmen who volunteered in droves.
The black community of today can look back on the slaves and freedmen of the Civil War era with justifiable pride. The racism rampant in that day and for a century and more since then may have dismissed blacks as somehow inferior, but we do not have to extend that error one more day into our time.
.
I just finished reading one very interesting book and I’m about 2/3 of the way through another about the experiences of black people just before and during the Civil War.
The first book is “Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery,” by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. It is a refutation of the widespread belief that all slaves were malnourished, ill housed and ill clothed, and the victims of sometimes daily, brutal physical punishment.
Instead, it paints a portrait of a class of people over whom care was taken to make sure they had not only the tools they needed, including healthy bodies, to perform their duties but in some cases skills so valued that the slave became a source of income for his or her master when leased out to other plantations. The authors even prove that sometimes the slaves were allowed to keep a sizable percentage of the payment received for their services.
The second book is called “The Negro’s Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union,” by James M. McPherson. It is a collection of contemporary writings showing how the Civil War affected both slave and freedmen and what they were able to do to advance their case.
I’m not a scholar of the Civil War, and it is difficult for me to judge the accuracy of the portraits drawn in these books, but I find myself drawn to both arguments. It always seemed counterintuitive to me that slave owners would have abused chattel that cost them so much money and could earn them so much more. Oh, I didn’t doubt that whippings happened. There is too much evidence that they did. But whippings that disabled a slave for work just weren’t reasonable.
(Not that the authors or I want to suggest that slavery without whippings and starvation is somehow acceptable. Slavery is immoral. It never should have been allowed to come to our shores, and the United States should have followed England’s lead when they abolished it peacefully.)
I’ve never cared for the picture of black people sitting passively by, just wishing and hoping that freedom would come some day, not doing anything to better their condition, except maybe lying to get out of work. That did not comport with what I know of the human spirit. To accept that picture was to accept the canard that slaves somehow were not human.
Instead, it is in the long quotations from Civil War newspapers, private letters, and military reports that I find the indomitable black spirit that I believed was there. I believed that even when others most insisted that freedom had been handed to the slaves, that they had done little or nothing to wrest it from the hands of Confederate plantation owners.
One startling sentence with two statistics says it all: “By October 20, 1864, there were 140 Negro regiments in the Federal service with a total strength of 101,950 men.” Until I read that line, my knowledge of black service in the Civil War had begun and ended with the story told in the movie “Glory” of the Massachusetts regiment that fought so gallantly and was sacrificed so cruelly in the assault on Fort Wagner. That is only one in a litany of acts of courage and resolve by slaves who ran away to become black soldiers – and the freedmen who volunteered in droves.
The black community of today can look back on the slaves and freedmen of the Civil War era with justifiable pride. The racism rampant in that day and for a century and more since then may have dismissed blacks as somehow inferior, but we do not have to extend that error one more day into our time.
.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Solving Problems
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How do you solve a problem like . . . North Korea.
With apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein, that tune from “Sound of Music” has been cycling through my head all day. Of course, the original is a problem like Maria, who has the nuns flummoxed because she keeps failing to follow the rules, not so much in a spirit of rebellion as in a sort of absent-minded impulsiveness.
Sounds kind of like Pyongyang, doesn’t it, although the spirit of rebellion is definitely present in our relations with Kim Jong Il. But at one time it appeared to me that so much of what Kim was doing was the result of immaturity. I thought he might grow into the leadership of his country and learn to get along with us. He was a spoiled child whose indulgent parent had died, but he wasn’t really a bad boy.
He showed us that when he negotiated with the Clinton administration to exchange his nuclear program for food for his starving people. Unfortunately, the Bush administration reneged on part of the deal and Kim began to pout and stamp his feet. But like a spoiled child, he still could have been talked back into a better frame of mind.
Then he had that stroke. If he’s still alive, he’s more than likely the captive of one group or another, and they’re calling the shots. Now we have to deal with some very bad players.
We have seen the result: atomic explosions and missile launches – plus the repudiation of a treaty that has maintained a sort of peace for more than 50 years. Can we afford to wait to see what comes next? Already there is a faction here that wants us to nuke North Korea before it can nuke South Korea or, worse, us. A less extreme group wants to invade, trusting that the resulting turmoil in the North Korean government won’t lead to a mushroom cloud – at least not one on our soil.
Obama, as always, will act with restraint. He may talk tough, but talk he will before he does anything. I think that’s a good thing. In fact, that mind-set is one of the things I find most appealing about him. He thinks things through carefully before he acts. He is never irrational – or impulsive.
Let’s hope we can say the same about whoever is in charge in North Korea these days.
.
How do you solve a problem like . . . North Korea.
With apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein, that tune from “Sound of Music” has been cycling through my head all day. Of course, the original is a problem like Maria, who has the nuns flummoxed because she keeps failing to follow the rules, not so much in a spirit of rebellion as in a sort of absent-minded impulsiveness.
Sounds kind of like Pyongyang, doesn’t it, although the spirit of rebellion is definitely present in our relations with Kim Jong Il. But at one time it appeared to me that so much of what Kim was doing was the result of immaturity. I thought he might grow into the leadership of his country and learn to get along with us. He was a spoiled child whose indulgent parent had died, but he wasn’t really a bad boy.
He showed us that when he negotiated with the Clinton administration to exchange his nuclear program for food for his starving people. Unfortunately, the Bush administration reneged on part of the deal and Kim began to pout and stamp his feet. But like a spoiled child, he still could have been talked back into a better frame of mind.
Then he had that stroke. If he’s still alive, he’s more than likely the captive of one group or another, and they’re calling the shots. Now we have to deal with some very bad players.
We have seen the result: atomic explosions and missile launches – plus the repudiation of a treaty that has maintained a sort of peace for more than 50 years. Can we afford to wait to see what comes next? Already there is a faction here that wants us to nuke North Korea before it can nuke South Korea or, worse, us. A less extreme group wants to invade, trusting that the resulting turmoil in the North Korean government won’t lead to a mushroom cloud – at least not one on our soil.
Obama, as always, will act with restraint. He may talk tough, but talk he will before he does anything. I think that’s a good thing. In fact, that mind-set is one of the things I find most appealing about him. He thinks things through carefully before he acts. He is never irrational – or impulsive.
Let’s hope we can say the same about whoever is in charge in North Korea these days.
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Wednesday, May 27, 2009
The Value of Her Education
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A funny thing happened while I was listening to KMUW this morning. On “All Things Considered” they were talking about, you guessed it, the nomination of Sonya Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. One of the people interviewed was the woman who had the highest grade-point average in Sotomayor’s high school class. What was funny was when she mentioned the year in which they graduated: 1972.
Now, I graduated from high school in 1970. Both Sotomayor and I wound up at Princeton University. Clearly, we were there at the same time, she one year behind me. (I took a year off in the middle and graduated a year later than I should have.) As far as I know, our paths never crossed. And I think I would have remembered a name like Sotomayor.
I mention this to make two points.
First, I have reached the age when the professional people around me are younger than I am. It’s another “official old geezer” moment. As if I needed one.
Second, I’d like to refute Karl Rove’s suggestion that a woman who graduated second in her class at Princeton is either unintelligent or unintellectual.
It’s true that, like George Bush, I got through an Ivy League institution without either turning into a scholar or developing any better idea of what I wanted to be when I grew up than the one I arrived with, which was none. I don’t blame Princeton for that. I still haven’t figured out what I want to be when I grow up, and as I said above, I’m all growed up.
But to graduate summa cum laude, which means with highest honors, and second in her class at that, Judge Sotomayor had to put in a lot of hard work and even that wouldn’t have got her there if she hadn’t had the native intelligence to make all that hard work, work. Like most universities, Princeton is different experiences to different students. If you want to truly excel there, however, you have to take a track that is grueling. And you have to be willing and able to compete like hell.
So tell any of your right-wing friends (Come on, we all have them.) that they don’t have to worry about whether Sonya Sotomayor is smart enough.
She is.
.
A funny thing happened while I was listening to KMUW this morning. On “All Things Considered” they were talking about, you guessed it, the nomination of Sonya Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. One of the people interviewed was the woman who had the highest grade-point average in Sotomayor’s high school class. What was funny was when she mentioned the year in which they graduated: 1972.
Now, I graduated from high school in 1970. Both Sotomayor and I wound up at Princeton University. Clearly, we were there at the same time, she one year behind me. (I took a year off in the middle and graduated a year later than I should have.) As far as I know, our paths never crossed. And I think I would have remembered a name like Sotomayor.
I mention this to make two points.
First, I have reached the age when the professional people around me are younger than I am. It’s another “official old geezer” moment. As if I needed one.
Second, I’d like to refute Karl Rove’s suggestion that a woman who graduated second in her class at Princeton is either unintelligent or unintellectual.
It’s true that, like George Bush, I got through an Ivy League institution without either turning into a scholar or developing any better idea of what I wanted to be when I grew up than the one I arrived with, which was none. I don’t blame Princeton for that. I still haven’t figured out what I want to be when I grow up, and as I said above, I’m all growed up.
But to graduate summa cum laude, which means with highest honors, and second in her class at that, Judge Sotomayor had to put in a lot of hard work and even that wouldn’t have got her there if she hadn’t had the native intelligence to make all that hard work, work. Like most universities, Princeton is different experiences to different students. If you want to truly excel there, however, you have to take a track that is grueling. And you have to be willing and able to compete like hell.
So tell any of your right-wing friends (Come on, we all have them.) that they don’t have to worry about whether Sonya Sotomayor is smart enough.
She is.
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Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Crazy Horse Revisited
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The Crazy Horse Memorial is far more than a carved mountain.
It is already an outstanding Native American museum as well as the obligatory visitors’ center with observation deck and gift shop. Between the visitors’ center and the mountain, however, the sculptor (Korczak Ziolkowski) and the visionary (Henry Standing Bear) who started all this imagined a University and Medical Training Center for the North American Indian. On that campus will rise a hogan-styled Museum of the North American Indian – and more than 50 other structures, all to be built using mostly lumber logged on the mountain and the stone that is blasted off it.
In some senses, that vision is coming to life now. Already the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation has amassed what must be one of the largest collections of Native American art and artifacts in the country and hosts internships for university students to work in that collection for college credit. Furthermore, the Foundation gives out hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships to Native American college and high school students.
Just now, however, it is the carving of the mountain that dominates the activities at the site. Crazy Horse Mountain is quite a bit larger than Mount Rushmore. There are no statistics on the mountains themselves, but the Rushmore carvings could fit into the area that will be Crazy Horse’s windblown, flowing hair. George Washington’s face is 60’ high, while the Crazy Horse face is 87.5’. The head of the pony Crazy Horse rides will be more than 210’ tall. His outstretched arm is 263’ long and his hand will be 33’ tall. Overall, when finished, the carving will be 563’ high by 641’ wide – and it will be three-dimensional.
Even when you are on the observation deck looking at the model and the mountain, apparently side-by-side, it is difficult to comprehend the enormous effort that has been and will be required to realize the sculptor’s dream. More than 8.5 million tons of rock have been blasted away so far, and at least 2 million remain. Those numbers should not be interpreted as meaning that the carving is more than 80% finished, however: it is the more delicate details that take the most time.
For example, the decision to finish the face was made in 1987; it was not completed until 1998. But much was learned in that process, and the work at the end was done far more quickly than the work at the beginning. It took four months to carve Crazy Horse’s right eye, but only two weeks to complete his left. In other words, it is almost impossible to make projections about how long it’s going to take to get it all done.
But it is certain it will take decades more – and the work of the Foundation will never end, because it will always be working to improve the university and museum. They’ve done an excellent job so far, as everything appears to be first class. Even the gift shop is free of cheap kitsch but filled instead with the works of Native American artists.
I could go on, but words and numbers don’t really tell the story. You have to see it for yourself.
-------------------------
So that’s our vacation: four days of driving and three monuments in three days. It was remarkably pleasant, and I actually returned feeling rested rather than merely stressed in a different way.
Tomorrow, I’ll get back to politics, I promise.
.
The Crazy Horse Memorial is far more than a carved mountain.
It is already an outstanding Native American museum as well as the obligatory visitors’ center with observation deck and gift shop. Between the visitors’ center and the mountain, however, the sculptor (Korczak Ziolkowski) and the visionary (Henry Standing Bear) who started all this imagined a University and Medical Training Center for the North American Indian. On that campus will rise a hogan-styled Museum of the North American Indian – and more than 50 other structures, all to be built using mostly lumber logged on the mountain and the stone that is blasted off it.
In some senses, that vision is coming to life now. Already the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation has amassed what must be one of the largest collections of Native American art and artifacts in the country and hosts internships for university students to work in that collection for college credit. Furthermore, the Foundation gives out hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships to Native American college and high school students.
Just now, however, it is the carving of the mountain that dominates the activities at the site. Crazy Horse Mountain is quite a bit larger than Mount Rushmore. There are no statistics on the mountains themselves, but the Rushmore carvings could fit into the area that will be Crazy Horse’s windblown, flowing hair. George Washington’s face is 60’ high, while the Crazy Horse face is 87.5’. The head of the pony Crazy Horse rides will be more than 210’ tall. His outstretched arm is 263’ long and his hand will be 33’ tall. Overall, when finished, the carving will be 563’ high by 641’ wide – and it will be three-dimensional.
Even when you are on the observation deck looking at the model and the mountain, apparently side-by-side, it is difficult to comprehend the enormous effort that has been and will be required to realize the sculptor’s dream. More than 8.5 million tons of rock have been blasted away so far, and at least 2 million remain. Those numbers should not be interpreted as meaning that the carving is more than 80% finished, however: it is the more delicate details that take the most time.
For example, the decision to finish the face was made in 1987; it was not completed until 1998. But much was learned in that process, and the work at the end was done far more quickly than the work at the beginning. It took four months to carve Crazy Horse’s right eye, but only two weeks to complete his left. In other words, it is almost impossible to make projections about how long it’s going to take to get it all done.
But it is certain it will take decades more – and the work of the Foundation will never end, because it will always be working to improve the university and museum. They’ve done an excellent job so far, as everything appears to be first class. Even the gift shop is free of cheap kitsch but filled instead with the works of Native American artists.
I could go on, but words and numbers don’t really tell the story. You have to see it for yourself.
-------------------------
So that’s our vacation: four days of driving and three monuments in three days. It was remarkably pleasant, and I actually returned feeling rested rather than merely stressed in a different way.
Tomorrow, I’ll get back to politics, I promise.
.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Devils Tower
.
So, continuing on our magical mystery tour of the Black Hills, we decided Tuesday to use our extra day in Rapid City to take in Devils Tower.
Devils Tower is possibly the most extreme example of a single granite rock rising up through the skin of the earth. You probably remember it from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” but let me remind you that it is one solid, relatively cylindrical stone with nearly vertical, grooved sides rising out of a landscape of rolling hills, with no other “mountain” around it. The movie does a pretty good job of communicating its size. You can see it from quite far away.
What I found most interesting is that there are several different scientific explanations for how it was formed, not to mention a wonderful Native American legend: Indian children were pursued by a bear who, in trying to climb the sides of the mountain, created those vertical grooves by scratching the sides with its claws as it climbed, then slid back down the sides. This led to the name “Bear Lodge” being given to the formation. Its name was changed by white settlers in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The Park Service calls those grooves “columns,” by the way, but they look more like reverse columns, being concave, usually, rather than convex. The rangers have no real explanation for how any them were formed. The tower has belonged to the Park Service for a long time, having been the very first National Monument.
There’s not much more to do there than look at the tower. There is a trail that surrounds the base, but I didn’t walk it, fearing it would be too long and too rough for my abilities. John did, however, and he said there is one point where you can actually touch the bottom of one of the columns and look straight up the side of the mountain.
I suspect my vertigo would have made that quite uncomfortable. I know, how can vertigo affect you when you’re at the bottom of a wall, you wonder. I don’t know. I just know that it does if the wall is tall enough. I don’t like being too close to monolithic heights from any perspective. And it gets worse every year.
As much as Devils Tower is a natural wonder, however, there doesn’t appear to be much study of it going on. If there are measurements and samples being taken, there is no visible sign of it. Every year, a certain number of climbers scale the sides, but that is being discouraged more and more. There’s always the danger of an accident and, anyway, Native Americans consider it sacrilegious.
That restraint on the part of the Park Service and the public at large fascinates me. We are a people who think nothing of carving up a mountain, yet we recognize the uniqueness of this natural object and seek to maintain that uniqueness.
What do those two sides to our behavior have to say about our characters?
.
So, continuing on our magical mystery tour of the Black Hills, we decided Tuesday to use our extra day in Rapid City to take in Devils Tower.
Devils Tower is possibly the most extreme example of a single granite rock rising up through the skin of the earth. You probably remember it from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” but let me remind you that it is one solid, relatively cylindrical stone with nearly vertical, grooved sides rising out of a landscape of rolling hills, with no other “mountain” around it. The movie does a pretty good job of communicating its size. You can see it from quite far away.
What I found most interesting is that there are several different scientific explanations for how it was formed, not to mention a wonderful Native American legend: Indian children were pursued by a bear who, in trying to climb the sides of the mountain, created those vertical grooves by scratching the sides with its claws as it climbed, then slid back down the sides. This led to the name “Bear Lodge” being given to the formation. Its name was changed by white settlers in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The Park Service calls those grooves “columns,” by the way, but they look more like reverse columns, being concave, usually, rather than convex. The rangers have no real explanation for how any them were formed. The tower has belonged to the Park Service for a long time, having been the very first National Monument.
There’s not much more to do there than look at the tower. There is a trail that surrounds the base, but I didn’t walk it, fearing it would be too long and too rough for my abilities. John did, however, and he said there is one point where you can actually touch the bottom of one of the columns and look straight up the side of the mountain.
I suspect my vertigo would have made that quite uncomfortable. I know, how can vertigo affect you when you’re at the bottom of a wall, you wonder. I don’t know. I just know that it does if the wall is tall enough. I don’t like being too close to monolithic heights from any perspective. And it gets worse every year.
As much as Devils Tower is a natural wonder, however, there doesn’t appear to be much study of it going on. If there are measurements and samples being taken, there is no visible sign of it. Every year, a certain number of climbers scale the sides, but that is being discouraged more and more. There’s always the danger of an accident and, anyway, Native Americans consider it sacrilegious.
That restraint on the part of the Park Service and the public at large fascinates me. We are a people who think nothing of carving up a mountain, yet we recognize the uniqueness of this natural object and seek to maintain that uniqueness.
What do those two sides to our behavior have to say about our characters?
.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Mount Rushmore
.
Awe inspiring.
That’s really the only phrase that applies to the sights we saw this week. Every one of them inspires awe – at what man can do, what nature can do, what the human spirit can dedicate itself to.
We started with Mount Rushmore Monday morning after two days of driving through a surprisingly diverse landscape. I was taught in grade school that Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota were part of the Plains States, miles and miles of a sea of grass stretching as far as the eye can see. There are some vistas like that, but there are also the rolling hills left behind by the sheets of ice that once covered North America, some of them composed of sand, some of red clay, some of clearly rich soil, given the verdure that grows on them.
And that’s all before you get to the Black Hills, mere foothills to the precipitous grandeur of the Rockies, but larger mountains than you will find in an eastern state like New Jersey.
The area around Mount Rushmore, however, has more than mountains. It also has massive upthrusts of solid granite, more like huge boulders than craggy peaks. Some of those upthrusts are narrow enough to have been dubbed “needles,” but others are immense pieces of almost solid rock. If they were smaller, we’d call them boulders. One of those boulders was chosen by Gutson Borglum in the early 1920s as appropriate for a monument to the great men who gave us our republican form of government and preserved it when it was in danger of dissolving.
Aside from a few pine trees, nothing much grew on Mount Rushmore before Borglum began chipping away at it, a ton of rock at a time. There were and are quite a few pine trees at the bottom of it, but they grow in the earth that has gathered there in the wind and rain of centuries. The face of the rock was and is uncovered by soil.
There’s no room here for me to tell you the story of the carving of the mountain, of the mistakes made, the lessons learned, the titanic wills that brought it into being, then laid it to rest just as one could see one’s way to the end of the project. There’s an excellent book, “The Carving of Mount Rushmore,” that lays all that out, and I’ll happily lend it to you if you’d like. Better yet, go visit the monument. You will be awed.
If you’ve been there before but not in the past decade or so, think about visiting again. Between 1994 and 1998, a new visitors’ center and viewing terrace were built that vastly improve the presentation of the carvings. There’s even a gentle trail that leads you down to the bottom of the mountain where you can get close enough to get a better perspective – where even my father would have had to admit that things don’t look “just like the pictures.”
Well, I didn’t mean to say so much, but it’s hard to sum up such an endeavor in only a few words. I guess Devils Tower and Crazy Horse Mountain will have to wait ‘til tomorrow.
.
Awe inspiring.
That’s really the only phrase that applies to the sights we saw this week. Every one of them inspires awe – at what man can do, what nature can do, what the human spirit can dedicate itself to.
We started with Mount Rushmore Monday morning after two days of driving through a surprisingly diverse landscape. I was taught in grade school that Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota were part of the Plains States, miles and miles of a sea of grass stretching as far as the eye can see. There are some vistas like that, but there are also the rolling hills left behind by the sheets of ice that once covered North America, some of them composed of sand, some of red clay, some of clearly rich soil, given the verdure that grows on them.
And that’s all before you get to the Black Hills, mere foothills to the precipitous grandeur of the Rockies, but larger mountains than you will find in an eastern state like New Jersey.
The area around Mount Rushmore, however, has more than mountains. It also has massive upthrusts of solid granite, more like huge boulders than craggy peaks. Some of those upthrusts are narrow enough to have been dubbed “needles,” but others are immense pieces of almost solid rock. If they were smaller, we’d call them boulders. One of those boulders was chosen by Gutson Borglum in the early 1920s as appropriate for a monument to the great men who gave us our republican form of government and preserved it when it was in danger of dissolving.
Aside from a few pine trees, nothing much grew on Mount Rushmore before Borglum began chipping away at it, a ton of rock at a time. There were and are quite a few pine trees at the bottom of it, but they grow in the earth that has gathered there in the wind and rain of centuries. The face of the rock was and is uncovered by soil.
There’s no room here for me to tell you the story of the carving of the mountain, of the mistakes made, the lessons learned, the titanic wills that brought it into being, then laid it to rest just as one could see one’s way to the end of the project. There’s an excellent book, “The Carving of Mount Rushmore,” that lays all that out, and I’ll happily lend it to you if you’d like. Better yet, go visit the monument. You will be awed.
If you’ve been there before but not in the past decade or so, think about visiting again. Between 1994 and 1998, a new visitors’ center and viewing terrace were built that vastly improve the presentation of the carvings. There’s even a gentle trail that leads you down to the bottom of the mountain where you can get close enough to get a better perspective – where even my father would have had to admit that things don’t look “just like the pictures.”
Well, I didn’t mean to say so much, but it’s hard to sum up such an endeavor in only a few words. I guess Devils Tower and Crazy Horse Mountain will have to wait ‘til tomorrow.
.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Crazy Horse
.
I didn’t blog last night because I was busy preparing for a trip to South Dakota. We start tomorrow for four fun days of driving and three days in the area near Rapids City. What fun will we fill those three days with? We’re going to re-visit two monuments: Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Mountain.
We first saw both on a trip taken with my parents in 1977. My father’s reaction has become a family joke. He was disappointed, he said, because Mount Rushmore looked just like the pictures on the postcards. Did you expect it to look different from the pictures, I wanted to ask. Years later, Daddy explained that he had expected to be able to get closer to the monument so he could “get a real good look at it.”
Crazy Horse, on the other hand, didn’t look like the postcards because there weren’t many and the photos for most had been taken years before we saw it. The project was started not long after Mount Rushmore was abandoned (the original plans for the monument called for three-dimensional figures) by a man who had worked on Mount Rushmore and learned how to sculpt on such a massive scale.
I don’t remember whether the mountain was his idea or if he was approached by the Sioux Indians, but by some method, he wound up buying a mountain to be changed into the three-dimensional figure of the Oglala Sioux chief Crazy Horse, sitting astride his horse and pointing towards the horizon, perhaps to the afterlife awaiting all his people, perhaps to the lands in this life which were taken from them.
When we saw him 32 years ago, Crazy Horse was little more than a vague form: the shelf that would be the top of his arm had been leveled and his head had begun to take shape. That was pretty much all there was to see. Since then, I know that his face has been completed and unveiled in a firelight ceremony, and I have been agitating for more than a decade to make the drive to see him again.
Why does he fascinate me so much? I suppose because he’s the last great undertaking of his kind. Once, big, public projects were, if not commonplace, at least less rare than they are today. I’m talking about really large tasks like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis or the Statue of Liberty. The most recent I can think of is the bas relief carving of Robert E. Lee on the side of a mountain outside Atlanta, and that was completed nearly 30 years ago.
(You could also lump into the mix the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam – not art, but massive works requiring thousands of people to complete. How many of those have you seen started lately? I should also point out that, unlike these projects, Crazy Horse is being entirely funded by private contributions and the small fee charged to visit it, not by taxpayer dollars.)
So when did we stop mounting (no pun intended) these massive projects? When did our viewpoint become so firmly fixed on what is at our feet that we lost sight of the horizon? The Democratic part of me would like to say that it was when the tax reformers got hold of our souls, but we had stopped such undertakings long before Ronald Reagan became president.
My grandmother used to say of things like Mount Rushmore or events like the River Festival that they were “just a bunch of foolishness.” They didn’t put any meat on anyone’s table and just encouraged people to spend money they didn’t have, she’d say. It sometimes seems to me that sentiment has come to rule our lives. If it doesn’t have a practical application, we shouldn’t do it.
We need to know that our reach exceeds our grasp, the poet said. Before we can know that, however, we need to reach in the first place.
------------------------
My laptop having given up the wireless ghost some time ago, I don’t know how often I will have Internet access over the next seven days. I’ll do my best, but daily blogs will almost certainly be impossible. They will resume next Saturday.
.
I didn’t blog last night because I was busy preparing for a trip to South Dakota. We start tomorrow for four fun days of driving and three days in the area near Rapids City. What fun will we fill those three days with? We’re going to re-visit two monuments: Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Mountain.
We first saw both on a trip taken with my parents in 1977. My father’s reaction has become a family joke. He was disappointed, he said, because Mount Rushmore looked just like the pictures on the postcards. Did you expect it to look different from the pictures, I wanted to ask. Years later, Daddy explained that he had expected to be able to get closer to the monument so he could “get a real good look at it.”
Crazy Horse, on the other hand, didn’t look like the postcards because there weren’t many and the photos for most had been taken years before we saw it. The project was started not long after Mount Rushmore was abandoned (the original plans for the monument called for three-dimensional figures) by a man who had worked on Mount Rushmore and learned how to sculpt on such a massive scale.
I don’t remember whether the mountain was his idea or if he was approached by the Sioux Indians, but by some method, he wound up buying a mountain to be changed into the three-dimensional figure of the Oglala Sioux chief Crazy Horse, sitting astride his horse and pointing towards the horizon, perhaps to the afterlife awaiting all his people, perhaps to the lands in this life which were taken from them.
When we saw him 32 years ago, Crazy Horse was little more than a vague form: the shelf that would be the top of his arm had been leveled and his head had begun to take shape. That was pretty much all there was to see. Since then, I know that his face has been completed and unveiled in a firelight ceremony, and I have been agitating for more than a decade to make the drive to see him again.
Why does he fascinate me so much? I suppose because he’s the last great undertaking of his kind. Once, big, public projects were, if not commonplace, at least less rare than they are today. I’m talking about really large tasks like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis or the Statue of Liberty. The most recent I can think of is the bas relief carving of Robert E. Lee on the side of a mountain outside Atlanta, and that was completed nearly 30 years ago.
(You could also lump into the mix the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam – not art, but massive works requiring thousands of people to complete. How many of those have you seen started lately? I should also point out that, unlike these projects, Crazy Horse is being entirely funded by private contributions and the small fee charged to visit it, not by taxpayer dollars.)
So when did we stop mounting (no pun intended) these massive projects? When did our viewpoint become so firmly fixed on what is at our feet that we lost sight of the horizon? The Democratic part of me would like to say that it was when the tax reformers got hold of our souls, but we had stopped such undertakings long before Ronald Reagan became president.
My grandmother used to say of things like Mount Rushmore or events like the River Festival that they were “just a bunch of foolishness.” They didn’t put any meat on anyone’s table and just encouraged people to spend money they didn’t have, she’d say. It sometimes seems to me that sentiment has come to rule our lives. If it doesn’t have a practical application, we shouldn’t do it.
We need to know that our reach exceeds our grasp, the poet said. Before we can know that, however, we need to reach in the first place.
------------------------
My laptop having given up the wireless ghost some time ago, I don’t know how often I will have Internet access over the next seven days. I’ll do my best, but daily blogs will almost certainly be impossible. They will resume next Saturday.
.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Speed and Luck
.
I’ve been trying to become more environmentally responsible. I started recycling more than the aluminum cans and newspapers that Dillons takes, I try to remember not to run the water when I’m brushing my teeth, and I’ve decided to drive more slowly when I can.
So I set myself the goal of going no faster than the speed limit and, when reasonable, to use the cruise control to keep myself down to a speed at least 10% less than the speed limit or 5 mph below it, whichever is less. “When reasonable” means that I try not to hold up traffic at rush hour, especially on Kellogg, or in work areas where traffic is down to one lane and the people behind me can’t get around.
It is surprising to me how many other drivers go the speed limit or lower. I often come up behind a car and have to slow down because they are dawdling along. I don’t know if they are out enjoying the sights or simply unable to drive faster for some reason, but when I first started following my semi-irrational rules, I found those drivers incredibly irritating.
Then one day I told myself to just chill. Was the world going to end if I took an extra two or three minutes to reach Dillons? Would the library close if I returned my book at 10:03 instead of 10:01? Would I really die if I didn’t hear the sign-on music of “Countdown?”
What is the hurry?
Hurry makes us do things badly. We’re in a hurry, so we don’t really stop at the stop sign. We’re in a hurry, so we don’t read all the instructions on the error message. We’re in a hurry, so we mis-type and screw up the project.
We trust to luck that there won’t be a car coming, that the error message wasn’t important, that we won’t mis-type too often and can make amends with a simple apology.
But luck only gets you so far.
George W. Bush was in a hurry after 9/11 to prove that he wasn’t a bad president. He attacked Afghanistan before his people had really had time to scope the place out, so he placed too much trust in the warlords that used him to conquer their closest enemies. After the “shock and awe” (Oh, I bet they wished they’d come up with that phrase earlier.), searching for Bin Laden was too slow, so he turned his attention to Saddam. Saddam was who he really wanted, after all.
I surely don’t need to detail the rest of the story. He couldn’t be bothered to wait to learn about Iraq, so he got rid of all the people who said things he didn’t want to hear. Planning for the time after “mission accomplished” would have wasted time, so he just went with the easy form of warfare Donald Rumsfeld said was the latest thing.
Now we hear that he was so impatient to prove that Saddam had ties to Al-Qaida that he had people tortured until they “confirmed” it , even though he had been warned that these “enhanced interrogation techniques” would elicit only false and inaccurate testimony.
Yes, hurry makes us careless. What can you say about a man so careless he killed more than 4,000 American soldiers and uncounted thousands of innocent civilians, just because he couldn’t be bothered to take the time to get it right?
I’d say his belief in his luck took us too far too fast.
.
I’ve been trying to become more environmentally responsible. I started recycling more than the aluminum cans and newspapers that Dillons takes, I try to remember not to run the water when I’m brushing my teeth, and I’ve decided to drive more slowly when I can.
So I set myself the goal of going no faster than the speed limit and, when reasonable, to use the cruise control to keep myself down to a speed at least 10% less than the speed limit or 5 mph below it, whichever is less. “When reasonable” means that I try not to hold up traffic at rush hour, especially on Kellogg, or in work areas where traffic is down to one lane and the people behind me can’t get around.
It is surprising to me how many other drivers go the speed limit or lower. I often come up behind a car and have to slow down because they are dawdling along. I don’t know if they are out enjoying the sights or simply unable to drive faster for some reason, but when I first started following my semi-irrational rules, I found those drivers incredibly irritating.
Then one day I told myself to just chill. Was the world going to end if I took an extra two or three minutes to reach Dillons? Would the library close if I returned my book at 10:03 instead of 10:01? Would I really die if I didn’t hear the sign-on music of “Countdown?”
What is the hurry?
Hurry makes us do things badly. We’re in a hurry, so we don’t really stop at the stop sign. We’re in a hurry, so we don’t read all the instructions on the error message. We’re in a hurry, so we mis-type and screw up the project.
We trust to luck that there won’t be a car coming, that the error message wasn’t important, that we won’t mis-type too often and can make amends with a simple apology.
But luck only gets you so far.
George W. Bush was in a hurry after 9/11 to prove that he wasn’t a bad president. He attacked Afghanistan before his people had really had time to scope the place out, so he placed too much trust in the warlords that used him to conquer their closest enemies. After the “shock and awe” (Oh, I bet they wished they’d come up with that phrase earlier.), searching for Bin Laden was too slow, so he turned his attention to Saddam. Saddam was who he really wanted, after all.
I surely don’t need to detail the rest of the story. He couldn’t be bothered to wait to learn about Iraq, so he got rid of all the people who said things he didn’t want to hear. Planning for the time after “mission accomplished” would have wasted time, so he just went with the easy form of warfare Donald Rumsfeld said was the latest thing.
Now we hear that he was so impatient to prove that Saddam had ties to Al-Qaida that he had people tortured until they “confirmed” it , even though he had been warned that these “enhanced interrogation techniques” would elicit only false and inaccurate testimony.
Yes, hurry makes us careless. What can you say about a man so careless he killed more than 4,000 American soldiers and uncounted thousands of innocent civilians, just because he couldn’t be bothered to take the time to get it right?
I’d say his belief in his luck took us too far too fast.
.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Torture is back on the radar
.
Torture is back on the radar, big time.
Dick Cheney is all over the television machine telling us that enhanced interrogation techniques are not torture and that anyway they worked, really, really worked in “keeping the country safe after 9/11.” Yet he cannot name one piece of solid intelligence that came out of those torturous interrogations.
Will President Obama seek to prosecute the torturers? I doubt it. But Eric Holder at the Department of Justice? The jury is still out.
As I’ve said before, I believe that we need to investigate this issue thoroughly, then prosecute where appropriate. I don’t think this should become the hallmark of the administration. I think it should be worked on quietly but purposefully and with great determination on the part of the investigators and prosecutors.
Of course, we are faced with the question of how far up and how far down the chain of command we want to go.
No one really wants to see a former President of the United States sitting in the docket being questioned about his actions while in office. No one even wants to see a former Vice President in the same situation, but we may have no choice if Mr. Cheney continues to advertise to the world that he knew these techniques were being used, that he knows for a fact that former President Bush knew they were being used, that Donald Rumsfeld approved them, that the whole point of the famous torture memos was to provide comfort for the people down the chain who otherwise probably would have objected and refused to take part in them.
That’s the down the chain piece. It’s easy to see that Mr. Yoo should be punished. He knew better than that. It’s easy to me to see that the Secretary of Defense and the head of the CIA and the people just below them should be punished. These are not naïve people. They have been dealing with the question of the Geneva Conventions for decades, and surely they should know that there is no excuse for looking away. If nothing else, they must have seen “Judgment at Nuremberg” at some point in their lives.
Part of me is gleeful that Mr. Cheney keeps hanging himself and his friends. Part of me wants to give him some more rope. But part of me also wants him to SHUT UP! I am already upset that this happened. Not so much horrified, although there is some of that. No, more embarrassed and ashamed.
How can I ever face anyone from a country that we have condemned for torturing prisoners? I learned the moral bankruptcy of “Do as I say, not as I do” when I was a child. It never worked for my parents and, for the most part, they didn’t do things they didn’t want me to do. When I had a child, the sentiment led me to clean up my act in many ways, from quitting smoking (twice) to getting involved in making the world a better place.
I’m not saying that America is the world’s parent, any more than we can be the world’s police force.
What I am saying is that we have to stop acting like we’re a spoiled pre-teen who thinks rules are meant to be broken.
.
Torture is back on the radar, big time.
Dick Cheney is all over the television machine telling us that enhanced interrogation techniques are not torture and that anyway they worked, really, really worked in “keeping the country safe after 9/11.” Yet he cannot name one piece of solid intelligence that came out of those torturous interrogations.
Will President Obama seek to prosecute the torturers? I doubt it. But Eric Holder at the Department of Justice? The jury is still out.
As I’ve said before, I believe that we need to investigate this issue thoroughly, then prosecute where appropriate. I don’t think this should become the hallmark of the administration. I think it should be worked on quietly but purposefully and with great determination on the part of the investigators and prosecutors.
Of course, we are faced with the question of how far up and how far down the chain of command we want to go.
No one really wants to see a former President of the United States sitting in the docket being questioned about his actions while in office. No one even wants to see a former Vice President in the same situation, but we may have no choice if Mr. Cheney continues to advertise to the world that he knew these techniques were being used, that he knows for a fact that former President Bush knew they were being used, that Donald Rumsfeld approved them, that the whole point of the famous torture memos was to provide comfort for the people down the chain who otherwise probably would have objected and refused to take part in them.
That’s the down the chain piece. It’s easy to see that Mr. Yoo should be punished. He knew better than that. It’s easy to me to see that the Secretary of Defense and the head of the CIA and the people just below them should be punished. These are not naïve people. They have been dealing with the question of the Geneva Conventions for decades, and surely they should know that there is no excuse for looking away. If nothing else, they must have seen “Judgment at Nuremberg” at some point in their lives.
Part of me is gleeful that Mr. Cheney keeps hanging himself and his friends. Part of me wants to give him some more rope. But part of me also wants him to SHUT UP! I am already upset that this happened. Not so much horrified, although there is some of that. No, more embarrassed and ashamed.
How can I ever face anyone from a country that we have condemned for torturing prisoners? I learned the moral bankruptcy of “Do as I say, not as I do” when I was a child. It never worked for my parents and, for the most part, they didn’t do things they didn’t want me to do. When I had a child, the sentiment led me to clean up my act in many ways, from quitting smoking (twice) to getting involved in making the world a better place.
I’m not saying that America is the world’s parent, any more than we can be the world’s police force.
What I am saying is that we have to stop acting like we’re a spoiled pre-teen who thinks rules are meant to be broken.
.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Un-American to the last
.
OK, it’s official. I am un-American.
I’ve suspected it for a long time. Ever since the day I first objected to the addition of “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, I’ve known that this day was coming.
After all, I hold such unpatriotic notions as that the Bill of Rights is a good thing and that any organization that seeks to protect it is OK by me. That’s right. I have been a card-carrying member of the ACLU. All I can say in my defense is that I have failed to pay my dues this year. I’d better put that on my “to-do” list.
I’ve tried to persuade myself that it’s OK to indoctrinate children with publicly led prayer. I find myself remembering fondly the second-grade teacher who every year visited each classroom with her felt storyboard and told us how Christ rose from the dead on Easter morning. Was that so bad? This was in white-bread, totally Christian, Middle America, after all, where the only ethnic minority was Catholics. But that is begging the question. I would never have allowed my son to sit in on such a session.
But my perfidy goes even further. I support my local NPR and PBS stations. I listen to Rachel Maddow most nights. I think Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart rock. I believe that nobody needs a submachine gun, either to bring down a deer or for personal security, and I believe that it is possible to pass laws regulating these weapons without destroying the Second Amendment.
But now, now I know that I am forever lost to the ranks of right-thinking Americans. What have I done to reach this moment? It’s a sin so unconscious that I didn’t even realize I was committing it. But when all is said and done, I must bow my head in mortification.
I like mustard on my hamburgers.
.
OK, it’s official. I am un-American.
I’ve suspected it for a long time. Ever since the day I first objected to the addition of “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, I’ve known that this day was coming.
After all, I hold such unpatriotic notions as that the Bill of Rights is a good thing and that any organization that seeks to protect it is OK by me. That’s right. I have been a card-carrying member of the ACLU. All I can say in my defense is that I have failed to pay my dues this year. I’d better put that on my “to-do” list.
I’ve tried to persuade myself that it’s OK to indoctrinate children with publicly led prayer. I find myself remembering fondly the second-grade teacher who every year visited each classroom with her felt storyboard and told us how Christ rose from the dead on Easter morning. Was that so bad? This was in white-bread, totally Christian, Middle America, after all, where the only ethnic minority was Catholics. But that is begging the question. I would never have allowed my son to sit in on such a session.
But my perfidy goes even further. I support my local NPR and PBS stations. I listen to Rachel Maddow most nights. I think Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart rock. I believe that nobody needs a submachine gun, either to bring down a deer or for personal security, and I believe that it is possible to pass laws regulating these weapons without destroying the Second Amendment.
But now, now I know that I am forever lost to the ranks of right-thinking Americans. What have I done to reach this moment? It’s a sin so unconscious that I didn’t even realize I was committing it. But when all is said and done, I must bow my head in mortification.
I like mustard on my hamburgers.
.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Once more into the breach, I guess
.
The trouble with a blog is that you often find yourself, not so much with nothing to say as with nothing to say that seems worth saying. Who am I to be telling others how to think about the world? I have enough trouble figuring out what I think myself, without taking on the role of teacher.
If I am to resume posting to this blog, I must find some meaning in it for myself. Writing down my thinking each day helps me know what I really think. Occasionally, I find myself starting to write directly contradictory items. I am sure that I do not always catch these incidents and correct them before they are posted. This is embarrassing, but human.
My worst fear, however, is that I will simply repeat myself, too often having no really new insights into a problem but feeling compelled to say again what I have said before.
I hoped to start more of a conversation, but there have been few comments on my posts. I know this is not because what I say is so insightful and expertly expressed that no one feels the need to add to it. I fear it is because what I say is so obvious to my readers that they don’t want to encourage me. Reality, of course, lies somewhere in between those two extremes.
Despite these fears, I have once again set myself the goal of writing something every night. Only time will tell.
.
The trouble with a blog is that you often find yourself, not so much with nothing to say as with nothing to say that seems worth saying. Who am I to be telling others how to think about the world? I have enough trouble figuring out what I think myself, without taking on the role of teacher.
If I am to resume posting to this blog, I must find some meaning in it for myself. Writing down my thinking each day helps me know what I really think. Occasionally, I find myself starting to write directly contradictory items. I am sure that I do not always catch these incidents and correct them before they are posted. This is embarrassing, but human.
My worst fear, however, is that I will simply repeat myself, too often having no really new insights into a problem but feeling compelled to say again what I have said before.
I hoped to start more of a conversation, but there have been few comments on my posts. I know this is not because what I say is so insightful and expertly expressed that no one feels the need to add to it. I fear it is because what I say is so obvious to my readers that they don’t want to encourage me. Reality, of course, lies somewhere in between those two extremes.
Despite these fears, I have once again set myself the goal of writing something every night. Only time will tell.
.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Hope
.
Did you watch the speech?
Of course, you watched the speech.
I feel so determined, so full of steel in the spine, so confident that we can make it through this dire time without having it turn into an even more dire time. I know now why so many people revered Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
I felt this way – a little this way – once before, when Bill Clinton was elected President. That night in 1992, I was invited by a small, low-powered TV station to be one of their commentators on the local elections. Inevitably, the question of Clinton’s election came up. I remember that I said that Clinton was a man with greatness in him. I predicted he would accomplish great things. But I also said that he had great weaknesses, and that it remained to be seen which would dominate his Presidency.
I was really sorry to be right in that prediction. I wanted him to succeed so badly. And he did accomplish some great things. He brought us out of the budget mess we were in and he made us face up to the need to reform the welfare system. He took us boldly into the global economy. But he also brought us more deregulation – and Monica.
But Obama.
It’s not that I think he is the Messiah, as the Republicans would have you believe. I don’t. He will make mistakes. He has already made some. Not everything he proposes will work, but at least he will try.
But most important, he makes me believe in myself again. He makes me believe that the American spirit is different. We can find a way to better ourselves as a nation. We can hold fast to stern principles in the face of adversity. We can do whatever we really set our minds to.
And I think he will help us set our minds to solving this problem, to great things.
I feel hopeful again.
.
Did you watch the speech?
Of course, you watched the speech.
I feel so determined, so full of steel in the spine, so confident that we can make it through this dire time without having it turn into an even more dire time. I know now why so many people revered Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
I felt this way – a little this way – once before, when Bill Clinton was elected President. That night in 1992, I was invited by a small, low-powered TV station to be one of their commentators on the local elections. Inevitably, the question of Clinton’s election came up. I remember that I said that Clinton was a man with greatness in him. I predicted he would accomplish great things. But I also said that he had great weaknesses, and that it remained to be seen which would dominate his Presidency.
I was really sorry to be right in that prediction. I wanted him to succeed so badly. And he did accomplish some great things. He brought us out of the budget mess we were in and he made us face up to the need to reform the welfare system. He took us boldly into the global economy. But he also brought us more deregulation – and Monica.
But Obama.
It’s not that I think he is the Messiah, as the Republicans would have you believe. I don’t. He will make mistakes. He has already made some. Not everything he proposes will work, but at least he will try.
But most important, he makes me believe in myself again. He makes me believe that the American spirit is different. We can find a way to better ourselves as a nation. We can hold fast to stern principles in the face of adversity. We can do whatever we really set our minds to.
And I think he will help us set our minds to solving this problem, to great things.
I feel hopeful again.
.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Kindergarten
.
One day, when my son was in kindergarten, I picked him up after school and asked, as every Mother asks, “How was school?” He responded, as almost every child responds, “OK.”
Trying to get a little more information, I asked him “Well, how was reading?” This response gave me a great deal more information than he intended:
“Lonely.”
“Lonely?” I asked. “How so?”
“Well, I’m the only one in my reading group,” he said.
This should not have surprised me, because J.R. had started teaching himself how to read at the age of three and by five was reading at a fourth-grade level. But reading wasn’t everything, and I didn’t like the idea that J.R. was isolated from the other children. So I went into school with him next day and told the teacher that it was not my goal that he be reading at a fifth-grade level when he left kindergarten, and that I was far more concerned about his social skills. Could she move him down into the next-highest reading group?
I thought she was going to kiss me.
This was a private school, you see, and most of the parents were shelling out the money for the classes in order to make sure that Dick and Jane got into a good prep school and a better college. That afternoon, when I asked J.R. about school, he said that he was in a new reading group and had a new book to read.
“It’s just a nonsense book, Mom,” he said. “It’s not serious. It’s about rhyming and stuff.”
I don’t know how well my ploy worked, because J.R. struggled with social skills all through his school life and on into his adulthood. He was an only child, and he spent too much time reading and watching educational programs on TV. But I often think of that day, and I wonder how other parents and other teachers would have handled the problem.
We ask a lot of our teachers, and it looks like we’re going to be asking even more of them in the future. We expect them to keep our children in line, help them learn basic skills like organization and tidiness, on top of teaching them to read, write and do arithmetic. Sometimes, they are challenged to teach precepts like “Honesty is the best policy,” and “First come, first served.” Certainly when they accidentally teach the opposite, we come down on them like a load of bricks. No one wants their child taught “Me first – I’m the teacher’s pet.”
But now we are adding to a teacher’s plate items like financial literacy and parenting skills. When I hear of an attempt to insert “life skills” into the curriculum, I often think of a very fine book and movie called “To Sir, With Love.” The movie starred Sidney Poitier and came out in the late 60s. It told the story of a British engineer temporarily out of a job who took on a class of teenagers for a term and decided to teach them how to get along in life instead of boring them with academics.
The math he taught them involved making a budget and taking advantage of bargains; the reading was where to learn about the safety and value of products; the writing was filling out a job application and writing a resume. He also taught them how to take care of a baby, how to make decisions about big-ticket items like washers, dryers, and cars, and when to challenge the precepts on which they had been raised. Towards the end of the story, a close relative of the only minority student in class dies, and the teacher makes them understand that they should not be intimidated by “what people would think” into staying away from the funeral just because the boy and his relative are black.
This is a heart-warming story, and I recommend you find the book or the movie, but I found myself wondering if that approach would have worked with a class of college-bound students. The British school system ruthlessly categorizes its students almost from the day of their enrollment. The children of lower-class parents are pushed into classes that stress the practical and end at the age of 15, while the children of upper-class parents are aimed towards high school and college.
We say we don’t do that in this country, but looking at the results from inner-city school districts vs suburban school districts, it is hard to deny it. Where you are born has far more to do with your chance at success in life than almost any other factor. If you were born in Harlem, it will be a long, hard slog out of the mud; if you were born in Westchester, you have to work hard to fail. This is something I would like to change, but I have no idea how to make it happen.
Certainly, the parents are not likely to achieve it. They are usually the product of the system that is not working for their children. That’s why we’re asking the schools to take on so much of their job. In some areas, there is a non-profit (usually church-led) after-school effort to help kids with their homework and keep them out of gangs. These programs fill a gap, but in two or three hours a day they can hardly plug it.
No, time and again, we are forced back to the schools, the one place we KNOW students spend multiple hours each day. And we are forced to the conclusion that we must start younger than we are starting now, that actual damage may not be done but nothing positive is being built, either, when a child has little or no age-level-appropriate stimulation in the home.
So why not supplement the home? The conservatives call this impulse the “nanny state.” I think we should revel in the term. What these children need is an old-fashioned British nanny – or an old-fashioned mother and father. I don’t know how to return us to the nuclear family, but I do know how to get children out of the hands of mothers who don’t really want them and aren’t doing them any good.
I’m not suggesting that the state take full custody of these children – just that the state make sure they are receiving the intellectual care they need at a young age. Then the child is “given back” at the end of the day. If a mother wants to fight the system, she can – by proving that she does what’s needed at home. But if she can’t prove it, the child should go to the school during the day, where he or she learns to be one of a crowd, part of a team, citizen of a nation.
It would require a major investment – in appropriate classrooms, equipment, and teachers – but it would be a boon to the economy. All those young mothers freed to work at a job while the child is in school would mean a great deal of tax money coming into our government coffers – probably almost enough to pay for the program. In addition, we could have a means-tested scale of contributions paid by the mothers and fathers whose children were in the program.
If they were not employed, they would have no excuses for not looking for a job. If they were unemployable or if they wanted to rise, there would be no bar to them going to classes at technical institutes or community colleges. We ought to see a decrease in the number of child abuse cases as the parents have time to themselves to get themselves in order and on a track to success. Public service advertising could make all this seem “cool.”
In other words, giving the babies, toddlers, and pre-kindergarten children access to the stimulation and care they need might, just might, give the mothers and fathers what they need to build a better world.
And maybe more parents and teachers would be faced with kindergarteners who already know how to read.
.
One day, when my son was in kindergarten, I picked him up after school and asked, as every Mother asks, “How was school?” He responded, as almost every child responds, “OK.”
Trying to get a little more information, I asked him “Well, how was reading?” This response gave me a great deal more information than he intended:
“Lonely.”
“Lonely?” I asked. “How so?”
“Well, I’m the only one in my reading group,” he said.
This should not have surprised me, because J.R. had started teaching himself how to read at the age of three and by five was reading at a fourth-grade level. But reading wasn’t everything, and I didn’t like the idea that J.R. was isolated from the other children. So I went into school with him next day and told the teacher that it was not my goal that he be reading at a fifth-grade level when he left kindergarten, and that I was far more concerned about his social skills. Could she move him down into the next-highest reading group?
I thought she was going to kiss me.
This was a private school, you see, and most of the parents were shelling out the money for the classes in order to make sure that Dick and Jane got into a good prep school and a better college. That afternoon, when I asked J.R. about school, he said that he was in a new reading group and had a new book to read.
“It’s just a nonsense book, Mom,” he said. “It’s not serious. It’s about rhyming and stuff.”
I don’t know how well my ploy worked, because J.R. struggled with social skills all through his school life and on into his adulthood. He was an only child, and he spent too much time reading and watching educational programs on TV. But I often think of that day, and I wonder how other parents and other teachers would have handled the problem.
We ask a lot of our teachers, and it looks like we’re going to be asking even more of them in the future. We expect them to keep our children in line, help them learn basic skills like organization and tidiness, on top of teaching them to read, write and do arithmetic. Sometimes, they are challenged to teach precepts like “Honesty is the best policy,” and “First come, first served.” Certainly when they accidentally teach the opposite, we come down on them like a load of bricks. No one wants their child taught “Me first – I’m the teacher’s pet.”
But now we are adding to a teacher’s plate items like financial literacy and parenting skills. When I hear of an attempt to insert “life skills” into the curriculum, I often think of a very fine book and movie called “To Sir, With Love.” The movie starred Sidney Poitier and came out in the late 60s. It told the story of a British engineer temporarily out of a job who took on a class of teenagers for a term and decided to teach them how to get along in life instead of boring them with academics.
The math he taught them involved making a budget and taking advantage of bargains; the reading was where to learn about the safety and value of products; the writing was filling out a job application and writing a resume. He also taught them how to take care of a baby, how to make decisions about big-ticket items like washers, dryers, and cars, and when to challenge the precepts on which they had been raised. Towards the end of the story, a close relative of the only minority student in class dies, and the teacher makes them understand that they should not be intimidated by “what people would think” into staying away from the funeral just because the boy and his relative are black.
This is a heart-warming story, and I recommend you find the book or the movie, but I found myself wondering if that approach would have worked with a class of college-bound students. The British school system ruthlessly categorizes its students almost from the day of their enrollment. The children of lower-class parents are pushed into classes that stress the practical and end at the age of 15, while the children of upper-class parents are aimed towards high school and college.
We say we don’t do that in this country, but looking at the results from inner-city school districts vs suburban school districts, it is hard to deny it. Where you are born has far more to do with your chance at success in life than almost any other factor. If you were born in Harlem, it will be a long, hard slog out of the mud; if you were born in Westchester, you have to work hard to fail. This is something I would like to change, but I have no idea how to make it happen.
Certainly, the parents are not likely to achieve it. They are usually the product of the system that is not working for their children. That’s why we’re asking the schools to take on so much of their job. In some areas, there is a non-profit (usually church-led) after-school effort to help kids with their homework and keep them out of gangs. These programs fill a gap, but in two or three hours a day they can hardly plug it.
No, time and again, we are forced back to the schools, the one place we KNOW students spend multiple hours each day. And we are forced to the conclusion that we must start younger than we are starting now, that actual damage may not be done but nothing positive is being built, either, when a child has little or no age-level-appropriate stimulation in the home.
So why not supplement the home? The conservatives call this impulse the “nanny state.” I think we should revel in the term. What these children need is an old-fashioned British nanny – or an old-fashioned mother and father. I don’t know how to return us to the nuclear family, but I do know how to get children out of the hands of mothers who don’t really want them and aren’t doing them any good.
I’m not suggesting that the state take full custody of these children – just that the state make sure they are receiving the intellectual care they need at a young age. Then the child is “given back” at the end of the day. If a mother wants to fight the system, she can – by proving that she does what’s needed at home. But if she can’t prove it, the child should go to the school during the day, where he or she learns to be one of a crowd, part of a team, citizen of a nation.
It would require a major investment – in appropriate classrooms, equipment, and teachers – but it would be a boon to the economy. All those young mothers freed to work at a job while the child is in school would mean a great deal of tax money coming into our government coffers – probably almost enough to pay for the program. In addition, we could have a means-tested scale of contributions paid by the mothers and fathers whose children were in the program.
If they were not employed, they would have no excuses for not looking for a job. If they were unemployable or if they wanted to rise, there would be no bar to them going to classes at technical institutes or community colleges. We ought to see a decrease in the number of child abuse cases as the parents have time to themselves to get themselves in order and on a track to success. Public service advertising could make all this seem “cool.”
In other words, giving the babies, toddlers, and pre-kindergarten children access to the stimulation and care they need might, just might, give the mothers and fathers what they need to build a better world.
And maybe more parents and teachers would be faced with kindergarteners who already know how to read.
.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Taxes?
.
What is it about taxes and the American public?
Timothy Geithner and his accountant misinterpret the tax code, are notified of their mistake, and Mr. Geithner pays his taxes and penalties in full, yet some think this disqualifies him for the post of Secretary of the Treasury.
Nancy Killefer flubs the tax payments she should have made in regards to her household help, and withdraws her name from consideration to be Chief Performance Officer.
Then we have the case of Tom Daschle.
I didn’t have much detail, so I did some googling and found out that his sins were a little worse than either Geithner’s or Killefer’s. Not only did Daschle fail to pay tax on the use of the car – something I would consider an innocent mistake – he also failed to report income from consulting. His excuse that the company who paid him sent him an incorrect 1099 doesn’t hold water. I was a consultant once, and I knew what companies had paid me at the end of the year. If my numbers didn’t match the 1099, I looked into it, notified the company it was incorrect and got a corrected one – and I didn’t have an accountant.
As for Killefer, I have had household help and also business employees, and I can tell you that the information provided by the government to help you properly deduct taxes and deposit them with the government is pretty impenetrable. I could not afford an accountant, but I finally hired a service to do my payroll in my business – and I had only three employees!
But what does any of this have to do with whether these people were good choices for the jobs they were being considered for? I don’t have any qualms about their ethics – well, a little about Daschle’s (or at least Daschle’s accountant’s) – just because they ran afoul of the IRS (or the Washington, DC, government in Killefer’s case). My husband and I have made errors on our income taxes that have been caught at least twice. Once, we got a refund. The other time, an insignificant error had ballooned into a significant amount because it took the IRS 18 months to notify us of the error. That 1½% per month really adds up fast.
There’s just something about tax problems in the mind of the American public. For example, my father, probably the most dyed-in-the-wool Republican you’d ever meet, didn’t give up on Richard Nixon until he found out that Nixon had cheated on his taxes. A covert, political burglary, thousands of dollars in hush money, stonewalling the Congressional committee, money laundering, subversions of the Constitution – those didn’t concern him. But if a man cheated on his taxes, then he was a lowdown, Commie, unpatriotic, un-American no-good-nik.
The loss of Daschle – who now cannot serve the administration in any way – is huge. It’s hard for people not in politics to understand how important it is to have someone on your side whose calls will be taken. You see, you can’t persuade someone to your point of view or get their insight on a problem if they’re “in a meeting” every time you call. People take the President’s call, of course, but he can’t make all the calls we’ll need as we run these economic rapids.
Tom Daschle probably calls heads of state on a regular basis, even in his role as a private citizen. I’m sure there are other people who have an equally thick rol-o-dex, but Obama needs every one of them he can find and persuading them to leave uber-lucrative private life for uber-unprivate public service isn’t easy. But he’ll find some.
Let’s just hope they and their accountants have never made any mistakes on their taxes.
.
What is it about taxes and the American public?
Timothy Geithner and his accountant misinterpret the tax code, are notified of their mistake, and Mr. Geithner pays his taxes and penalties in full, yet some think this disqualifies him for the post of Secretary of the Treasury.
Nancy Killefer flubs the tax payments she should have made in regards to her household help, and withdraws her name from consideration to be Chief Performance Officer.
Then we have the case of Tom Daschle.
I didn’t have much detail, so I did some googling and found out that his sins were a little worse than either Geithner’s or Killefer’s. Not only did Daschle fail to pay tax on the use of the car – something I would consider an innocent mistake – he also failed to report income from consulting. His excuse that the company who paid him sent him an incorrect 1099 doesn’t hold water. I was a consultant once, and I knew what companies had paid me at the end of the year. If my numbers didn’t match the 1099, I looked into it, notified the company it was incorrect and got a corrected one – and I didn’t have an accountant.
As for Killefer, I have had household help and also business employees, and I can tell you that the information provided by the government to help you properly deduct taxes and deposit them with the government is pretty impenetrable. I could not afford an accountant, but I finally hired a service to do my payroll in my business – and I had only three employees!
But what does any of this have to do with whether these people were good choices for the jobs they were being considered for? I don’t have any qualms about their ethics – well, a little about Daschle’s (or at least Daschle’s accountant’s) – just because they ran afoul of the IRS (or the Washington, DC, government in Killefer’s case). My husband and I have made errors on our income taxes that have been caught at least twice. Once, we got a refund. The other time, an insignificant error had ballooned into a significant amount because it took the IRS 18 months to notify us of the error. That 1½% per month really adds up fast.
There’s just something about tax problems in the mind of the American public. For example, my father, probably the most dyed-in-the-wool Republican you’d ever meet, didn’t give up on Richard Nixon until he found out that Nixon had cheated on his taxes. A covert, political burglary, thousands of dollars in hush money, stonewalling the Congressional committee, money laundering, subversions of the Constitution – those didn’t concern him. But if a man cheated on his taxes, then he was a lowdown, Commie, unpatriotic, un-American no-good-nik.
The loss of Daschle – who now cannot serve the administration in any way – is huge. It’s hard for people not in politics to understand how important it is to have someone on your side whose calls will be taken. You see, you can’t persuade someone to your point of view or get their insight on a problem if they’re “in a meeting” every time you call. People take the President’s call, of course, but he can’t make all the calls we’ll need as we run these economic rapids.
Tom Daschle probably calls heads of state on a regular basis, even in his role as a private citizen. I’m sure there are other people who have an equally thick rol-o-dex, but Obama needs every one of them he can find and persuading them to leave uber-lucrative private life for uber-unprivate public service isn’t easy. But he’ll find some.
Let’s just hope they and their accountants have never made any mistakes on their taxes.
.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Trees in the Lake
.
Every week as I drive to and from Topeka, I pass a lake, a man-made lake. I know it is man-made, because sticking up out of the water are the skeletons of trees. Each time I see them, I wonder at the tenacity that keeps them upright. Their black arms and fingers stretch to the sky, but under the water there must be stubborn roots holding them straight. Why didn’t someone cut them down before damming up the river?
Too often, we come up with solutions in society that are like that lake. We flood the area with good intentions, but we fail to cut into the source of the problem and so it never goes away. One problem like that is fatherhood.
Recent studies have shown that seven in ten men who are incarcerated were the product of a family without a father. Think of that: seven in ten. More than half. Nearly three-quarters. I find that mind-boggling. We have known for a long time that children raised by single mothers have more trouble in school, are more likely to be juvenile offenders, and too often wind up in gangs. Until recently, those children have mostly been boys, but we are starting to see girl gangs now.
This flocking together is not a new phenomenon. What is new is that the initiations required are often violent and the gang members carry guns. A myriad of programs have tried to address the problem. Some believe in after-school centers where children can receive homework help or engage in sports in a secure environment. Some believe in midnight basketball to keep youths off the streets. Others support education, believing that classes in life skills will lead to better citizens.
The damage that leads to a life of crime is not done in the teenage years, however. It is done in earliest childhood, the time when children absorb the rules of life by watching the adults around them. If those adults are mostly immature teenage girls, the rules absorbed are not likely to be the ones we would wish for. Even if those adults do occasionally include the child’s father, that father is likely to be a teenage boy, and the child probably soaks in behaviors that will not lead to success in life.
So when we have teenage boys impregnating teenage girls and those girls trying to raise the resulting baby by themselves or with minimal help from their parents, we have a recipe for children who will grow up to repeat the patterns of self-indulgence and lack of discipline they have observed. Cutting those children loose from the roots of their behavior is a lot harder than helping them develop better core behaviors to begin with.
I’m not saying that there should be no programs to keep teenagers from sinking into gang violence or just general delinquency. Those programs are important. I am saying, however, that teenagers would need those programs less if we spent some time and effort on them as children. But who should provide that time and effort?
The best solution is for the child’s father to do so, but too often the child’s father not only doesn’t know how, he doesn’t know that he is needed. Many times, he doesn’t know what it means to be a man himself, so how is he going to teach his child?
We have many educational and support programs to help young women be better mothers, but few to help young men be better fathers. Maybe it’s time we re-examined those priorities. But we should help the young men as well as the young women, not instead of the young women. Children need two parents to learn from.
And if all children have them, maybe we won’t see so many trees in the lake.
.
Every week as I drive to and from Topeka, I pass a lake, a man-made lake. I know it is man-made, because sticking up out of the water are the skeletons of trees. Each time I see them, I wonder at the tenacity that keeps them upright. Their black arms and fingers stretch to the sky, but under the water there must be stubborn roots holding them straight. Why didn’t someone cut them down before damming up the river?
Too often, we come up with solutions in society that are like that lake. We flood the area with good intentions, but we fail to cut into the source of the problem and so it never goes away. One problem like that is fatherhood.
Recent studies have shown that seven in ten men who are incarcerated were the product of a family without a father. Think of that: seven in ten. More than half. Nearly three-quarters. I find that mind-boggling. We have known for a long time that children raised by single mothers have more trouble in school, are more likely to be juvenile offenders, and too often wind up in gangs. Until recently, those children have mostly been boys, but we are starting to see girl gangs now.
This flocking together is not a new phenomenon. What is new is that the initiations required are often violent and the gang members carry guns. A myriad of programs have tried to address the problem. Some believe in after-school centers where children can receive homework help or engage in sports in a secure environment. Some believe in midnight basketball to keep youths off the streets. Others support education, believing that classes in life skills will lead to better citizens.
The damage that leads to a life of crime is not done in the teenage years, however. It is done in earliest childhood, the time when children absorb the rules of life by watching the adults around them. If those adults are mostly immature teenage girls, the rules absorbed are not likely to be the ones we would wish for. Even if those adults do occasionally include the child’s father, that father is likely to be a teenage boy, and the child probably soaks in behaviors that will not lead to success in life.
So when we have teenage boys impregnating teenage girls and those girls trying to raise the resulting baby by themselves or with minimal help from their parents, we have a recipe for children who will grow up to repeat the patterns of self-indulgence and lack of discipline they have observed. Cutting those children loose from the roots of their behavior is a lot harder than helping them develop better core behaviors to begin with.
I’m not saying that there should be no programs to keep teenagers from sinking into gang violence or just general delinquency. Those programs are important. I am saying, however, that teenagers would need those programs less if we spent some time and effort on them as children. But who should provide that time and effort?
The best solution is for the child’s father to do so, but too often the child’s father not only doesn’t know how, he doesn’t know that he is needed. Many times, he doesn’t know what it means to be a man himself, so how is he going to teach his child?
We have many educational and support programs to help young women be better mothers, but few to help young men be better fathers. Maybe it’s time we re-examined those priorities. But we should help the young men as well as the young women, not instead of the young women. Children need two parents to learn from.
And if all children have them, maybe we won’t see so many trees in the lake.
.
Friday, January 30, 2009
We Won
.
“We won,” Obama said, and everyone heard him. I don’t think the Republicans quite believed him, but he meant it. He was going to compromise only so far.
So the Republicans picked up their baseball and went home.
Didn’t get them very far, did it? The Democrats had plenty of baseballs of their own, so the game went on. I’m hoping that they’ll make the rescue package even stronger and pass it no matter how hard the Republicans huff and puff.
Is the quest for bipartisanship worth the trouble?
Obama thinks so, but I’m not so sure. It’s good to sit down with folks and discuss the issues. Makes them feel included. But offering too much legislative good will up front, as Obama did with the tax cuts, isn’t such a good idea. I think you’re better off proposing a strongly progressive program and changing it after they object, making each modification look like a major concession, something that they can tell their constituents they wrung out of the President.
That’s the way FDR got his programs through: he asked for 50% more than he really wanted, then settled for his original hope-for result in the end. It’s an old bait-and-switch tactic, but it still works.
I don’t understand why Obama didn't use it.
Like Rachel says, “Could somebody talk me down?”
.
“We won,” Obama said, and everyone heard him. I don’t think the Republicans quite believed him, but he meant it. He was going to compromise only so far.
So the Republicans picked up their baseball and went home.
Didn’t get them very far, did it? The Democrats had plenty of baseballs of their own, so the game went on. I’m hoping that they’ll make the rescue package even stronger and pass it no matter how hard the Republicans huff and puff.
Is the quest for bipartisanship worth the trouble?
Obama thinks so, but I’m not so sure. It’s good to sit down with folks and discuss the issues. Makes them feel included. But offering too much legislative good will up front, as Obama did with the tax cuts, isn’t such a good idea. I think you’re better off proposing a strongly progressive program and changing it after they object, making each modification look like a major concession, something that they can tell their constituents they wrung out of the President.
That’s the way FDR got his programs through: he asked for 50% more than he really wanted, then settled for his original hope-for result in the end. It’s an old bait-and-switch tactic, but it still works.
I don’t understand why Obama didn't use it.
Like Rachel says, “Could somebody talk me down?”
.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Be Glad You're Not a Legislator
.
Most of today was taken up with the budget debate on the floor of the Senate, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be finished today, no matter how late the Senators sit there. The Democratic leadership wants to present an amendment which will, in effect, be a substitution of their plan for the Republican plan. I doubt it will pass, but it’s important that the Democrats make it clear that they would have gone about fixing this budget mess in a very different manner. Specifically, they would have tried to blunt the impact on our most vulnerable populations and the education of our children.
There’s no way that I can see that there is going to be no impact on people with disabilities, the elderly, foster parents and the children they care for, or any other particular group, but some of these across-the-board cuts of 3.4% are so draconian that we may lose programs that save us money.
One example of this is the money allocated to drug and alcohol treatment programs. Although there is supposed to be only a 3.4% cut, in actuality, those programs will be cut by about 20%, partly because so much federal money will be lost without the state’s contribution. I can hear the conservatives saying, so what? Why should we be coddling drug and alcohol addicts? They made their beds; let them lie in them.
Ah, such short-sightedness!
First of all, drug and alcohol treatment programs rarely coddle anyone. Even in a fancy place like the Betty Ford Clinic (and there is nothing equivalent to it in Kansas), addicts are forced to look addiction in the eye and realize that the disease is ruining not only their lives, but also the lives of many people around them, especially any young children caught up in the situation. If you think taking stock of yourself and finding yourself completely wanting is easy, then you’ve never done it. No amount of comfortable bed and fancy board makes up for knowing that you have failed abysmally, that you are in a deep hole in all aspects of your life, and that there’s nobody but you to dig yourself out. Be glad you’ve never been there.
And most treatment programs don’t include a comfortable bed and even passable food. Many of them, in the first place, are not in-house programs but rather out-patient, where the addict tries to deal with addiction while still functioning in the every-day world. Out-patient programs are cost-effective in that it costs a lot less to treat the addict in such a way, but they’re not always addict-effective, in that a lower percentage of people treated that way get off addiction and stay off it.
Nevertheless, there are generally waiting lists to get into such programs. SB 2003-123, which set up a process for sending non-violent addicts to treatment programs instead of prison, has had very good success, but it could have been better if we had about 50% more beds, especially in western Kansas. About a third of the people who could have qualified went to prison anyway, because there was no treatment program for them outside of prison.
Surely, I don’t have to list for you all the reasons it is more expensive to have untreated addicts bouncing around society. Addicts tend to wind up on welfare, using Medicaid funds to treat their addiction as well as the other medical conditions associated with addiction, like AIDS, for example. If we can keep just one junkie from contracting AIDS from a dirty needle, we can save enough money to pay for treatment for 100 others. Addicts who are actively using also mess up their children, who wind up in foster care and mental health treatment, again often on Medicaid, at beaucoup cost to society. As we all know, the children of addicts are far more likely to become addicts themselves, leading to another round of expensive treatment and support.
For all these reasons, reducing drug and alcohol treatment by 20% probably will lead to increased need in a very short time.
But, you say, where ARE we going to get the money? The same arguments can be made for decreases in funding for education and elder care and SRS. You either pay some today or you pay some more later.
The trouble is, at the state level, we don’t have a lot of options. We don’t have any flashy programs like the Department of Defense that we can cut to the bone for a short time while we transfer that spending into the essentials. (Not that the Department of Defense is a luxury, mind you; I’m merely objecting to the multi-billion-dollar fighter jets and multi-million-dollar tanks that need servicing after a mile and a half.) Nor can a state government simply print money. And God forbid that we consider raising taxes!
My hope is that Congress will include help to the states in the stimulus package and will pass it soon. Increases in unemployment benefits also might keep the revenue intake on a somewhat even keel as more Kansans lose their jobs. People do pay taxes on unemployment benefits, you know, and those funds flow out of the hands of the unemployed into the hands of businesses where sales tax is collected. Both those factors will help the State of Kansas.
But they’re only stopgaps. We need solutions. People need jobs. I believe that the President’s focus on making the country less dependent on fossil fuels is the way to go for the next decade. I like the idea of people putting insulation in homes, installing solar panels on roofs, and erecting wind farms. It’s going to take a lot of pump priming, and there’s always the risk that we will give up before we get to that tipping point, but I think Americans are ready to put themselves to work making America better for everyone.
At least I hope so. In the meantime, the Senate is debating another amendment. It’s going to be a long night leading into another long day tomorrow. Be glad you’re not a legislator.
.
Most of today was taken up with the budget debate on the floor of the Senate, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be finished today, no matter how late the Senators sit there. The Democratic leadership wants to present an amendment which will, in effect, be a substitution of their plan for the Republican plan. I doubt it will pass, but it’s important that the Democrats make it clear that they would have gone about fixing this budget mess in a very different manner. Specifically, they would have tried to blunt the impact on our most vulnerable populations and the education of our children.
There’s no way that I can see that there is going to be no impact on people with disabilities, the elderly, foster parents and the children they care for, or any other particular group, but some of these across-the-board cuts of 3.4% are so draconian that we may lose programs that save us money.
One example of this is the money allocated to drug and alcohol treatment programs. Although there is supposed to be only a 3.4% cut, in actuality, those programs will be cut by about 20%, partly because so much federal money will be lost without the state’s contribution. I can hear the conservatives saying, so what? Why should we be coddling drug and alcohol addicts? They made their beds; let them lie in them.
Ah, such short-sightedness!
First of all, drug and alcohol treatment programs rarely coddle anyone. Even in a fancy place like the Betty Ford Clinic (and there is nothing equivalent to it in Kansas), addicts are forced to look addiction in the eye and realize that the disease is ruining not only their lives, but also the lives of many people around them, especially any young children caught up in the situation. If you think taking stock of yourself and finding yourself completely wanting is easy, then you’ve never done it. No amount of comfortable bed and fancy board makes up for knowing that you have failed abysmally, that you are in a deep hole in all aspects of your life, and that there’s nobody but you to dig yourself out. Be glad you’ve never been there.
And most treatment programs don’t include a comfortable bed and even passable food. Many of them, in the first place, are not in-house programs but rather out-patient, where the addict tries to deal with addiction while still functioning in the every-day world. Out-patient programs are cost-effective in that it costs a lot less to treat the addict in such a way, but they’re not always addict-effective, in that a lower percentage of people treated that way get off addiction and stay off it.
Nevertheless, there are generally waiting lists to get into such programs. SB 2003-123, which set up a process for sending non-violent addicts to treatment programs instead of prison, has had very good success, but it could have been better if we had about 50% more beds, especially in western Kansas. About a third of the people who could have qualified went to prison anyway, because there was no treatment program for them outside of prison.
Surely, I don’t have to list for you all the reasons it is more expensive to have untreated addicts bouncing around society. Addicts tend to wind up on welfare, using Medicaid funds to treat their addiction as well as the other medical conditions associated with addiction, like AIDS, for example. If we can keep just one junkie from contracting AIDS from a dirty needle, we can save enough money to pay for treatment for 100 others. Addicts who are actively using also mess up their children, who wind up in foster care and mental health treatment, again often on Medicaid, at beaucoup cost to society. As we all know, the children of addicts are far more likely to become addicts themselves, leading to another round of expensive treatment and support.
For all these reasons, reducing drug and alcohol treatment by 20% probably will lead to increased need in a very short time.
But, you say, where ARE we going to get the money? The same arguments can be made for decreases in funding for education and elder care and SRS. You either pay some today or you pay some more later.
The trouble is, at the state level, we don’t have a lot of options. We don’t have any flashy programs like the Department of Defense that we can cut to the bone for a short time while we transfer that spending into the essentials. (Not that the Department of Defense is a luxury, mind you; I’m merely objecting to the multi-billion-dollar fighter jets and multi-million-dollar tanks that need servicing after a mile and a half.) Nor can a state government simply print money. And God forbid that we consider raising taxes!
My hope is that Congress will include help to the states in the stimulus package and will pass it soon. Increases in unemployment benefits also might keep the revenue intake on a somewhat even keel as more Kansans lose their jobs. People do pay taxes on unemployment benefits, you know, and those funds flow out of the hands of the unemployed into the hands of businesses where sales tax is collected. Both those factors will help the State of Kansas.
But they’re only stopgaps. We need solutions. People need jobs. I believe that the President’s focus on making the country less dependent on fossil fuels is the way to go for the next decade. I like the idea of people putting insulation in homes, installing solar panels on roofs, and erecting wind farms. It’s going to take a lot of pump priming, and there’s always the risk that we will give up before we get to that tipping point, but I think Americans are ready to put themselves to work making America better for everyone.
At least I hope so. In the meantime, the Senate is debating another amendment. It’s going to be a long night leading into another long day tomorrow. Be glad you’re not a legislator.
.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Ice on the Windshield
.
There was ice on my windshield this morning. I didn’t have a scraper, so I set both the front and rear defrosters going and waited for them to do their magic. It seemed to be taking longer than expected, however, so I looked again. That’s when I discovered that I had pushed the button to turn on the air conditioning instead of the rear windshield defroster. I fixed that, and soon I could see well enough to drive.
It seems to me that Obama is in a similar situation with the economic recovery plan, a.k.a. the stimulus package. Instead of writing a bill that would do what he thinks needs doing, and only what he thinks needs doing, he tried to write one that would invite the Republicans to be bipartisan or post-partisan or whatever -- to get with the program. Instead, the Republicans are playing their old partisan games and complaining that the bill doesn’t do enough of what they want and does too much of what the Democrats want. In the meantime, the Democrats are complaining that it does too little of what they want.
Now, I know and you know that Obama is trying to find a proposal that will garner broad support in the Congress. But the Republicans clearly aren’t going to give him that. Faced with a bill that includes $300 billion in tax cuts, they are whining that it doesn’t have enough tax breaks for businesses. Never mind that the tax cuts for individuals will give them the money to buy the goods and services the businesses produce. If Obama sweetened the bill, I’ll bet the Republicans would complain that it doesn’t cut the capital gains tax.
It’s time to admit it. They’re not going to support the bill no matter how it’s written. They still haven’t got the message voters sent them in 2006 and again last fall that we’re tired of this constant bickering at the expense of getting the people’s business done – and that we don’t believe their economic theories are the right ones for today’s problems.
So I think Obama should withdraw this one and send a different package to the Hill. The new package should include even more spending on infrastructure, should have fewer tax cuts, and should increase the amount that is going directly into the pockets of unemployed, elderly, and TANF citizens so that it will be spent immediately on necessities. That would be a real stimulus.
And I think Obama should say right out that he gave the Republicans a chance and they didn’t take it. He tried to give them something of what they want in order to get their support for something that would be good for the whole country, but they wouldn't buy it. So now we’re going to do it the Democrats’ way.
In other words, I think he should turn on every defroster full blast and see if that doesn’t melt some of the ice.
.
There was ice on my windshield this morning. I didn’t have a scraper, so I set both the front and rear defrosters going and waited for them to do their magic. It seemed to be taking longer than expected, however, so I looked again. That’s when I discovered that I had pushed the button to turn on the air conditioning instead of the rear windshield defroster. I fixed that, and soon I could see well enough to drive.
It seems to me that Obama is in a similar situation with the economic recovery plan, a.k.a. the stimulus package. Instead of writing a bill that would do what he thinks needs doing, and only what he thinks needs doing, he tried to write one that would invite the Republicans to be bipartisan or post-partisan or whatever -- to get with the program. Instead, the Republicans are playing their old partisan games and complaining that the bill doesn’t do enough of what they want and does too much of what the Democrats want. In the meantime, the Democrats are complaining that it does too little of what they want.
Now, I know and you know that Obama is trying to find a proposal that will garner broad support in the Congress. But the Republicans clearly aren’t going to give him that. Faced with a bill that includes $300 billion in tax cuts, they are whining that it doesn’t have enough tax breaks for businesses. Never mind that the tax cuts for individuals will give them the money to buy the goods and services the businesses produce. If Obama sweetened the bill, I’ll bet the Republicans would complain that it doesn’t cut the capital gains tax.
It’s time to admit it. They’re not going to support the bill no matter how it’s written. They still haven’t got the message voters sent them in 2006 and again last fall that we’re tired of this constant bickering at the expense of getting the people’s business done – and that we don’t believe their economic theories are the right ones for today’s problems.
So I think Obama should withdraw this one and send a different package to the Hill. The new package should include even more spending on infrastructure, should have fewer tax cuts, and should increase the amount that is going directly into the pockets of unemployed, elderly, and TANF citizens so that it will be spent immediately on necessities. That would be a real stimulus.
And I think Obama should say right out that he gave the Republicans a chance and they didn’t take it. He tried to give them something of what they want in order to get their support for something that would be good for the whole country, but they wouldn't buy it. So now we’re going to do it the Democrats’ way.
In other words, I think he should turn on every defroster full blast and see if that doesn’t melt some of the ice.
.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Legislative Work
.
Will the 2009 legislature wait until the last moment to tackle the problems facing the state? Will there be a special session? How will the budget come out?
I’m not a prophet, so I can’t answer those questions with any degree of certainty, but I can tell you some things about the process.
The legislature will not wait until the last moment to tackle the problems facing the state. They are already working on them. The trouble is, the media will focus on only one or two problems, and those will be the most intractable. Some years that is education; most years it includes abortion and the death penalty; every year it is the budget.
The budget, which is the 800-pound gorilla of legislation of every session, is this year the 800-pound gorilla and his brother Bob. Not only do the legislators have to reconcile competing proposals for next year’s budget, they must re-reconcile the budget for this year. The governor has put forward her proposal; the Republicans have put forward theirs. The Democratic legislators, for once, are being supportive of the governor by not putting forward a different one for themselves.
The two proposals for next year are actually mostly in agreement. No one is arguing for cutting essential services like the State Highway Patrol or mandating across-the-board cuts in all services. Instead, they are making changes around the margins, for the most part.
But changes around the margins aren’t going to take care of this year’s budget problems. The governor has proposed cuts that will pare some waste and overlap, but the Republicans want to cut things to the bone. The difference is $150 million – and that’s real money in a budget as small as the state of Kansas’.
But the legislators, for the most part, have rolled up their sleeves and are looking at both proposals line by line. When I say “legislators,” of course, I mean the members of the two budget committees and the leadership of each house of the legislature. Individual legislators will pay attention to the budget for their pet projects, but few will pay attention to the overall budget until it actually comes to the floor of their respective house.
That’s actually true of the budget committees, too. They are broken up into small subcommittees of usually only three members, each of which will hear limited testimony and work the budgets for one department or set of agencies within a department. For example, one subcommittee last year oversaw the KPERS budget, another the Department of Administration, which includes the Governmental Ethics Commission, the Human Rights Commission, the Kansas Corporation Commission, and the Citizens Utility Ratepayer Board. Not all the subcommittees in the Senate have been set for this year, because there is a new Ways and Means chair, and he is reorganizing them. It will take almost to turnaround day for these subcommittees to finish their work, and then they will have to do it all over again on the opposite house’s budget.
In and around those considerations will be the considerations of many of the other bills in all the other committees. Here is where the power of the committee chairs is exercised. There are always too many bills to be taken up, and the committee chairs decide which ones will be worked. If no hearings are held on a bill, it will not be voted on in the committee. If it’s not voted on in the committee, it won’t be sent to the floor of its respective house.
The floor is where the leadership’s power is exercised. Not all the bills sent to the floor actually make it to a vote. The majority leader puts bills “below the line” or “above the line.” The line referred to is a line on each day’s General Orders, which is essentially the agenda of the Senate, or at least the part of it that refers to bills. Only the bills above the line will be considered that day. Some bills never make it above the line. The ones that do, of course, have to be voted on in the opposite house.
So the legislators are working, and working hard.
But inevitably, there will be tremendous amounts of work produced in the last week before turnaround day and the last week before the Senate adjourns. Things pile up, and the legislators can’t always get one another to take a firm stand until the deadline approaches. If a legislator doesn’t know what the outcome for his or her bill will be, he or she obviously will ask the leadership to hold that bill to allow more time for dickering with the other legislators.
And the more important the bill, the more dickering goes on. So, yes, the legislators may “wait until the last moment” to vote on important bills, but, no, the legislators won’t wait until the last minute to work on them.
And that’s enough of that for today.
.
Will the 2009 legislature wait until the last moment to tackle the problems facing the state? Will there be a special session? How will the budget come out?
I’m not a prophet, so I can’t answer those questions with any degree of certainty, but I can tell you some things about the process.
The legislature will not wait until the last moment to tackle the problems facing the state. They are already working on them. The trouble is, the media will focus on only one or two problems, and those will be the most intractable. Some years that is education; most years it includes abortion and the death penalty; every year it is the budget.
The budget, which is the 800-pound gorilla of legislation of every session, is this year the 800-pound gorilla and his brother Bob. Not only do the legislators have to reconcile competing proposals for next year’s budget, they must re-reconcile the budget for this year. The governor has put forward her proposal; the Republicans have put forward theirs. The Democratic legislators, for once, are being supportive of the governor by not putting forward a different one for themselves.
The two proposals for next year are actually mostly in agreement. No one is arguing for cutting essential services like the State Highway Patrol or mandating across-the-board cuts in all services. Instead, they are making changes around the margins, for the most part.
But changes around the margins aren’t going to take care of this year’s budget problems. The governor has proposed cuts that will pare some waste and overlap, but the Republicans want to cut things to the bone. The difference is $150 million – and that’s real money in a budget as small as the state of Kansas’.
But the legislators, for the most part, have rolled up their sleeves and are looking at both proposals line by line. When I say “legislators,” of course, I mean the members of the two budget committees and the leadership of each house of the legislature. Individual legislators will pay attention to the budget for their pet projects, but few will pay attention to the overall budget until it actually comes to the floor of their respective house.
That’s actually true of the budget committees, too. They are broken up into small subcommittees of usually only three members, each of which will hear limited testimony and work the budgets for one department or set of agencies within a department. For example, one subcommittee last year oversaw the KPERS budget, another the Department of Administration, which includes the Governmental Ethics Commission, the Human Rights Commission, the Kansas Corporation Commission, and the Citizens Utility Ratepayer Board. Not all the subcommittees in the Senate have been set for this year, because there is a new Ways and Means chair, and he is reorganizing them. It will take almost to turnaround day for these subcommittees to finish their work, and then they will have to do it all over again on the opposite house’s budget.
In and around those considerations will be the considerations of many of the other bills in all the other committees. Here is where the power of the committee chairs is exercised. There are always too many bills to be taken up, and the committee chairs decide which ones will be worked. If no hearings are held on a bill, it will not be voted on in the committee. If it’s not voted on in the committee, it won’t be sent to the floor of its respective house.
The floor is where the leadership’s power is exercised. Not all the bills sent to the floor actually make it to a vote. The majority leader puts bills “below the line” or “above the line.” The line referred to is a line on each day’s General Orders, which is essentially the agenda of the Senate, or at least the part of it that refers to bills. Only the bills above the line will be considered that day. Some bills never make it above the line. The ones that do, of course, have to be voted on in the opposite house.
So the legislators are working, and working hard.
But inevitably, there will be tremendous amounts of work produced in the last week before turnaround day and the last week before the Senate adjourns. Things pile up, and the legislators can’t always get one another to take a firm stand until the deadline approaches. If a legislator doesn’t know what the outcome for his or her bill will be, he or she obviously will ask the leadership to hold that bill to allow more time for dickering with the other legislators.
And the more important the bill, the more dickering goes on. So, yes, the legislators may “wait until the last moment” to vote on important bills, but, no, the legislators won’t wait until the last minute to work on them.
And that’s enough of that for today.
.
Friday, January 23, 2009
What a difference three days can make
.
What a difference three days can make.
Guantanamo is to be closed. The Iraq conflict is to end. Bush administration executive orders are to be reversed. Torture is ended.
And those are just the beginning.
I can’t think of a similar three-day period during my lifetime, and it just goes to show that it really does matter whom we elect President of the United States. If by historic we mean that which will be written up in the history books of the future, then this has been a truly historic week.
It makes the work of the State Legislature seem small by comparison, but that doesn’t mean that no matters of historic proportions were bruted in Topeka this week.
We have our own lobbyist reform bill in SB 2; a bill to institute disclosures by professional fund raisers in SB 6; a proposed requirement that all interrogations of persons suspected of felony violations be videotaped in SB 17; adjustments to the rules about campaign finance disclosure in SB 43 (state board of education) and SB 57 (electronic filing of reports); and three bills about the act of voting in SB 42 (state board of education), SB 55 (uniformed and overseas voters), and SB 56 (security of advanced ballots).
These last five bills affect the very foundation of our political life in proposing changes to the way campaigns are conducted and votes are cast, but just as important are “technical” bills like SB 3, a suggestion that a seventh member should be added to the Senate Confirmation Oversight Committee in order to give it a more bipartisan makeup. The Confirmation Oversight Committee is responsible for examining persons appointed to positions that must be confirmed by the Legislature before they can serve the Governor in her capacity as chief executive officer of the state. Currently the committee consists of five Republicans and one Democrat. Adding a seventh member would result in five Republicans and two Democrats, more reflective of the actual makeup of the Legislature.
More likely to affect people’s day-to-day life is SB 24, Senator Faust-Goudeau’s effort to divorce insurance premiums from people’s credit score. I’ll bet you didn’t know that if you have a low credit score, you can be charged a higher premium. This seems inherently unfair to me. Premiums should be based on the risk involved. For example, a person with a low credit score is no more likely than any other person with a similar driving record to have an automobile accident. What the insurance companies are trying to do, of course, is make sure their premiums get paid. Increasing the premium, however, is more likely to make sure the insured cannot afford to pay it, than to increase the likelihood of a claim being made against the insurance policy.
We have another concealed carry law this year. SB 19 would allow prosecutors and assistant prosecutors to carry a concealed weapon into a courthouse if they had fulfilled the requirements to have a concealed carry permit in the first place. The law also would apply to the attorney general and any assistant attorneys general he should designate.
What is already shaping up as the issue on which we get the most phone calls is the suggestion that the cigarette tax should be increased by 75 cents. Evidently, one of the cigarette companies is calling people, asking if they are smokers, telling them about the increase, then forwarding the call to the appropriate legislator for the smoker to express their opposition to the increase. Senator Faust-Goudeau has received more than ten of these calls already.
Then there is SB 4, which allows the Turnpike Authority to set different tolls based on the average speed of drivers on toll roads, such special tolls to be based on the added breakdown caused by speeding vehicles and the increased emissions from them. In other words, if it takes you only two hours to get from Wichita to Topeka on the Kansas Turnpike, you will pay a higher toll than if it took you two hours and ten minutes to cover the same distance. I haven’t decided how I feel about this bill. On the one hand, I believe that excessive speed is not a good thing. On the other, do I really want the state to go this way about addressing the problem or do I think this is an invasion of the privacy of the drivers?
Just as likely to stir up emotion, however, is SB 59, which increases the fine for not wearing a seat belt from $30 to $60 and extends the requirement to any occupant, whether front or back, and no matter what age. I can just see the libertarians exercising their index fingers to punch out those phone numbers – and flexing their hands before sitting down at the computer keyboard, too.
There are two bills, SB 64 and 65, concerning water rights and eminent domain, and several (SB 7, 9, 20, 21, 22, and 39) on different aspects of school finance. There are sure to be many more before the session is over. In fact, the session has barely begun. So far, only 64 bills have been introduced in the Senate. The final tally is likely to be 300. The really important bills – those involving the budget – are not likely to be introduced until the last minute, and they will be amended heavily in committee before coming to the floor of the Senate. And, don’t forget, the same process is going forward in the House of Representatives, as well, where already 49 bills have been introduced.
But the jockeying has begun, as Senators and Representatives sound one another out in the halls, lining up supporters, marking down opponents, doing their best to do their best for their constituents, knowing that they have only a few weeks – so few days – to make a difference.
.
What a difference three days can make.
Guantanamo is to be closed. The Iraq conflict is to end. Bush administration executive orders are to be reversed. Torture is ended.
And those are just the beginning.
I can’t think of a similar three-day period during my lifetime, and it just goes to show that it really does matter whom we elect President of the United States. If by historic we mean that which will be written up in the history books of the future, then this has been a truly historic week.
It makes the work of the State Legislature seem small by comparison, but that doesn’t mean that no matters of historic proportions were bruted in Topeka this week.
We have our own lobbyist reform bill in SB 2; a bill to institute disclosures by professional fund raisers in SB 6; a proposed requirement that all interrogations of persons suspected of felony violations be videotaped in SB 17; adjustments to the rules about campaign finance disclosure in SB 43 (state board of education) and SB 57 (electronic filing of reports); and three bills about the act of voting in SB 42 (state board of education), SB 55 (uniformed and overseas voters), and SB 56 (security of advanced ballots).
These last five bills affect the very foundation of our political life in proposing changes to the way campaigns are conducted and votes are cast, but just as important are “technical” bills like SB 3, a suggestion that a seventh member should be added to the Senate Confirmation Oversight Committee in order to give it a more bipartisan makeup. The Confirmation Oversight Committee is responsible for examining persons appointed to positions that must be confirmed by the Legislature before they can serve the Governor in her capacity as chief executive officer of the state. Currently the committee consists of five Republicans and one Democrat. Adding a seventh member would result in five Republicans and two Democrats, more reflective of the actual makeup of the Legislature.
More likely to affect people’s day-to-day life is SB 24, Senator Faust-Goudeau’s effort to divorce insurance premiums from people’s credit score. I’ll bet you didn’t know that if you have a low credit score, you can be charged a higher premium. This seems inherently unfair to me. Premiums should be based on the risk involved. For example, a person with a low credit score is no more likely than any other person with a similar driving record to have an automobile accident. What the insurance companies are trying to do, of course, is make sure their premiums get paid. Increasing the premium, however, is more likely to make sure the insured cannot afford to pay it, than to increase the likelihood of a claim being made against the insurance policy.
We have another concealed carry law this year. SB 19 would allow prosecutors and assistant prosecutors to carry a concealed weapon into a courthouse if they had fulfilled the requirements to have a concealed carry permit in the first place. The law also would apply to the attorney general and any assistant attorneys general he should designate.
What is already shaping up as the issue on which we get the most phone calls is the suggestion that the cigarette tax should be increased by 75 cents. Evidently, one of the cigarette companies is calling people, asking if they are smokers, telling them about the increase, then forwarding the call to the appropriate legislator for the smoker to express their opposition to the increase. Senator Faust-Goudeau has received more than ten of these calls already.
Then there is SB 4, which allows the Turnpike Authority to set different tolls based on the average speed of drivers on toll roads, such special tolls to be based on the added breakdown caused by speeding vehicles and the increased emissions from them. In other words, if it takes you only two hours to get from Wichita to Topeka on the Kansas Turnpike, you will pay a higher toll than if it took you two hours and ten minutes to cover the same distance. I haven’t decided how I feel about this bill. On the one hand, I believe that excessive speed is not a good thing. On the other, do I really want the state to go this way about addressing the problem or do I think this is an invasion of the privacy of the drivers?
Just as likely to stir up emotion, however, is SB 59, which increases the fine for not wearing a seat belt from $30 to $60 and extends the requirement to any occupant, whether front or back, and no matter what age. I can just see the libertarians exercising their index fingers to punch out those phone numbers – and flexing their hands before sitting down at the computer keyboard, too.
There are two bills, SB 64 and 65, concerning water rights and eminent domain, and several (SB 7, 9, 20, 21, 22, and 39) on different aspects of school finance. There are sure to be many more before the session is over. In fact, the session has barely begun. So far, only 64 bills have been introduced in the Senate. The final tally is likely to be 300. The really important bills – those involving the budget – are not likely to be introduced until the last minute, and they will be amended heavily in committee before coming to the floor of the Senate. And, don’t forget, the same process is going forward in the House of Representatives, as well, where already 49 bills have been introduced.
But the jockeying has begun, as Senators and Representatives sound one another out in the halls, lining up supporters, marking down opponents, doing their best to do their best for their constituents, knowing that they have only a few weeks – so few days – to make a difference.
.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Just a Newsletter
.
Here it is 6:30 p.m., and I’m still in the office. One of the comments from last night was that the Senator needed to hire more staff, and I don’t disagree. Unfortunately, she can’t afford to pay anyone, and the state provides only me. We do have an intern, but her focus is on following the Senator to committee and learning about the legislative process.
The Senator has decided to miss tomorrow’s pro forma session and go home tonight rather than tomorrow afternoon, so I will be alone in the office for the part of tomorrow I will work before I head to Topeka, too. That’s when I will really get the work done, of course – when there’s nobody else in the office. With any luck, the phone will be quiet, too.
What kept me late tonight was the Senator’s newsletter. The Majority Leader’s office does have staff – enough staff to have a manager – and one of those minions, Stefanie Grave, produces a generic newsletter each Thursday that we look through and modify a little here and a little there to make it our newsletter. I, of course, also read it looking for typos and style errors. Being a nitpicker does take time.
Newsletters are one of those things that legislators are expected to produce, but which really gain the legislator little credit. No one values it but everyone notices if it doesn’t appear. Much of politics is like that. People want their legislators to continually communicate with them, then they complain because they get too many e-mails or such like from them. Finding the balance between keeping the public informed and letting the public be as uninformed as they'd like is tricky.
I was very proud of the nearly weekly newsletters produced by the Majority Leader’s staff and tweaked by me in the first two years of my time with Senator Betts. But I was recently told that many people objected to getting so many and tossed them aside without reading them. Talk about throwing a wet blanket!
On the other hand, I don’t have to feel guilty any more that I wasn’t able to keep up the same pace in the second two years I sat in that tiny little office. Perhaps the occasional newsletters we sent out those years had more impact than the weekly ones. I guess I’ll never know for sure.
Well, I’ve maundered along long enough. Tomorrow I’ll be able to write in the morning, so it may be worth reading.
.
Here it is 6:30 p.m., and I’m still in the office. One of the comments from last night was that the Senator needed to hire more staff, and I don’t disagree. Unfortunately, she can’t afford to pay anyone, and the state provides only me. We do have an intern, but her focus is on following the Senator to committee and learning about the legislative process.
The Senator has decided to miss tomorrow’s pro forma session and go home tonight rather than tomorrow afternoon, so I will be alone in the office for the part of tomorrow I will work before I head to Topeka, too. That’s when I will really get the work done, of course – when there’s nobody else in the office. With any luck, the phone will be quiet, too.
What kept me late tonight was the Senator’s newsletter. The Majority Leader’s office does have staff – enough staff to have a manager – and one of those minions, Stefanie Grave, produces a generic newsletter each Thursday that we look through and modify a little here and a little there to make it our newsletter. I, of course, also read it looking for typos and style errors. Being a nitpicker does take time.
Newsletters are one of those things that legislators are expected to produce, but which really gain the legislator little credit. No one values it but everyone notices if it doesn’t appear. Much of politics is like that. People want their legislators to continually communicate with them, then they complain because they get too many e-mails or such like from them. Finding the balance between keeping the public informed and letting the public be as uninformed as they'd like is tricky.
I was very proud of the nearly weekly newsletters produced by the Majority Leader’s staff and tweaked by me in the first two years of my time with Senator Betts. But I was recently told that many people objected to getting so many and tossed them aside without reading them. Talk about throwing a wet blanket!
On the other hand, I don’t have to feel guilty any more that I wasn’t able to keep up the same pace in the second two years I sat in that tiny little office. Perhaps the occasional newsletters we sent out those years had more impact than the weekly ones. I guess I’ll never know for sure.
Well, I’ve maundered along long enough. Tomorrow I’ll be able to write in the morning, so it may be worth reading.
.
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