All Foreign Wars, I Do Proclaim, Live on Blood and a Mother's Pain

In memory of James Riekena. James' sister was a welcome presence in our house for three years. She is currently a member of the United States Marine Corps...

Dulce et Decorum Est

There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all Hell.

William Tecumseh Sherman, June 19, 1879

Photo of the Gettysburg National Cemetery by Mike Davis.

I'm of two minds about Memorial Day. It's fitting to remember those who fell in battle, even in service of a dubious cause. Each soldier who died sacrificed a life for his or her country; their sense of duty and patriotism was the same whether death came in a justifiable cause like the Civil War or in a vain slaughter like the the Iraq War.

What concerns me about Memorial Day is the romanticizing of death in war. This weekend, we'll read newspapers accounts and see TV stories about grieving families. The stories will have an air of unreality, as scenes from a novel or film. As we honor the dead, it's important to recall that these victims are not abstract heroes from a movie. No: They are markers in the never ending tally of the cost of war. Each stone in the photo above represents a son, a husband, a brother, a cousin, a neighbor, a friend -- someone who had a life and lost it, someone whose loss diminished other lives. Each died mutilated and often in unbearable pain. Setting aside their suffering and reducing the pain caused by their deaths to a 60-second TV news spot makes the next war that much more likely.

Perhaps nothing has expressed the futility, loathsomeness, and inhuman barbarity of war as honestly  Wilfrid Owen's poem "Dulce et Decorum Est," written in the trenches of World War I:

Dulce et Decorum et
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen was killed in action on November 4, 1918, a week before the end of World War I...

President Obama explains why Memorial Day is at the end of May and requests that we "hold our fallen heroes in your hearts and, if you can, ...lay a flower where they have come to rest." Too bad he's an America-hating communist...

Will Texas history books remember these vets?...

Tricycle with window and milk cans...

De wolf in sheep's clothing...

Quaking aspen leaves...

"We will be back"...

Nobody seemed to know me, everybody passed me by...

The Marshes of Glynn...

I can't tame wild women, but I can make tame women wild. Scroll down to number eight...

Mouse has Fred Astaire singing one of the great songs ever (scroll down)...

PWALLY bides her time. After all, revenge is a dish best eaten cold...

The Sunday Funnies will return next week...

Tears of Rage?

Rep. Charles Melacon (D-LA) breaks down at a Congressional hearing about the oil spill:



I have no doubt that Mr. Melacon's expression of grief is sincere. But I suspect that it is more complex than meets the eye. Since 2004, oil and gas interests have contributed over $312,000 to him, and the overall contributions from the energy and natural resources sector equal nearly $550,000. In 2006, he worked for a bill that opened up the Gulf of Mexico for additional offshore drilling. He opposed the America Clean Energy and Security Act (cap-and-trade) and successfully stripped the FY 2010 budget of $30 billion in new taxes on oil and gas producers. (BP alone had $239 billion in revenue in 2009.)

Again, I'm not questioning the sincerity of Mr. Melacon's tears. But I can't help wondering whether there's disillusionment, guilt, and remorse mixed in with the grief. And I remain cynical that, when all is said and done, the votes of any Gulf Coast politician will change one bit.

The leak is not going to be plugged. Period. If it could have been, it would have been by now. Not even as feckless an organization as BP would begin with the operation that had the least chance of success. At the risk of sounding overly cool and detached, the odds of success decline with each ensuing attempt. The leak will be controlled when the relief wells are ready 30-60 days from now, and not before. The honest thing to do is to prepare people for that.

The Gulf Coast is reaping the whirlwind of thirty years of deregulation and federal hiring of industry insiders to oversee what little regulation there is. Having lived on the Gulf Coast, I have little doubt that politicians and people there supported this development. No one deserves what has happened and the ultimate responsibility for it lies with BP, as foreign as the word "responsibility" may be to them. But environmentalists have been warning about of the possibility of a spill for years; they've been ignored and, in some quarters, even despised. Once again, we have met the enemy and he is us...

JUST A SONG: Come On In My Kitchen...

Memorial Day at Carrollton Cemetery...

R.I.P. Dennis Hopper:

South Texas Soul

San Antonio is the music capital of South Texas. This excerpt from the documentary South Texas Soul explains how the music of Mexico, Germany, and Czechoslovakia melded with rock-and-roll and later country-and-western to create a distinct regional sound. The video also includes some fine exterior shots of San Antonio neighborhoods, landmarks, and businesses:



The Texas Tornados -- comprised of the late, great Doug Sahm, the late, great Freddy Fender, the great Flaco Jimenez, and the great Augie Meyers -- cut loose on Sahm's Tex-Mex arrangement of "Is Anybody Goin' to San Antone:"



Back in the late 70s, Augie Meyers often came into the bar where I worked. His drink, as I recall, was Tanqueray and tonic. He liked me, probably because I was generous with the Tanqueray. Here he is singing "Hey, Baby, Que Paso?", the San Antonio national anthem:



The Allman Brothers had nothing on Augie and Flaco's twin accordions!

Girl in a Coma is one of the new San Antonio bands. This video of their song "El Monte" is exquisite:



I don't write much about San Antonio here, but I loved going to school there and living there after. It's my favorite city, although it might be more accurate to call it a big small town. The Riverwalk is fine, but the old neighborhoods, especially the King William District, give San Antonio almost as much of its character as the people...

My Little Town

I've often thought about South Texas that, whatever one might say about it, I come from a place that is like nowhere else.

By the turn of the 20th Century, it had become populated enough that prominent citizens wanted to extend a railroad line to Brownsville, on the Mexican border. The massive King Ranch donated land; in 1904, the town of Kingsville began to take shape. (The community wasn't actually incorporated until 1911.) What is now the Union Pacific Railroad began operating a passenger line, and shortly thereafter opened an office in Kingsville.

Businesses opened to serve the railroad and its employees, and the town grew. In the 1920s, a new cotton mill and the discovery of oil in the area attracted more people. The South Texas Teacher's College (later Texas A & I University and now Texas A & M University-Kingsville) opened in 1925; World War II saw the establishment of the Kingsville Naval Air Station. Humble Oil (now Exxon) opened an office in 60s, but closed it in the 80s during a worldwide slump in oil prices. The population of Kingsville peaked at close to 30,000 in 1985; today, a little over 25,000 people reside there. (Source: The Handbook of Texas Online.)

Among those 25,000 people is my 82-year old father. In 1967, he accepted an offer to become the head librarian at Texas A & I, and moved his family to Kingsville from Columbus, OH. Until then, neither he nor my mother had ever lived west of Indiana or south of Washington, D.C. I was 12. My brothers were 11, 9, 7, and 5. We arrived in an August heat as stifling and brutal as a Pennsylvania steel foundry. As extreme as the heat could be, the humidity was unlike anything we thought could occur on the planet Earth: The mere act of stepping outside drenched us in sweat.

I began school later that month, and -- somewhat to my puzzlement -- joined the rest of my Texas Geography class in tracking the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. A few weeks later, the 120-mph winds and the 100+ tornadoes of Hurricane Beulah swept through Kingsville, clarifying the intent of the exercise. Shortly thereafter, Dad came home from work one day and found my mother in tears. Don't worry, he said, we'll move in a year or two.

To me, the town was impressively exotic. Cicadas buzzed endlessly all summer long in the stubby mesquite trees whose shade provided respite from the sun but not the heat. The trees broke up a landscape so flat that central Ohio seemed positively alpine in comparison.

I had never seen a Mexican-American in my life; suddenly, I was part of a demographic minority.

Men and women, boys and girls, wore cowboy hats. Occasionally, I'd see someone riding a horse around town, although I never witnessed anyone actually using one of the hitching posts scattered about downtown.

Like just about everyone else in Kingsville, we lived in a one-story house with a flat roof and no basement.

Pick-up trucks were ubiquitous, and some even had rifles on display. (I had never seen a gun before, either. That I had never fired a gun was a fact beyond comprehension for other kids my age.)

There was an annual rattlesnake roundup.

Radios played country-western weepers and Mexican polkas.

The mosquitoes were the size of sparrows. Because Kingsville had no drainage system, there were plenty of them.

My brothers and I got our hair cut at Andrews' Barbershop, Kingsville's leading black business and an social center for the town's African-African males. One of my brothers once requested something other than the usual buzz cut (even in Kingsville, it was the 60s). "I know your daddy," said Mr. Andrews in reference to my father's crew cut, "And you're getting it short."

I discovered later that we didn't patronize certain restaurants because even in the late 60s they reserved the right to refuse service.

And the birds. They were everywhere, and seemingly of every kind. We lived in a veritable aviary of cardinals, doves, kingfishers, cedar waxwings, owls, purple martins, bluejays, greenjays, and hawks. Along the coast one could see pelicans, plovers, oyster catchers, herons, and sandpipers. And more, I have no doubt. I later learned that Kingsville is on the Central Flyway, a migratory channel beginning in Canada that funnels through South Texas on a path to Central and South America.

Ferruginous pygmy owl. For more King Ranch bird photos, click here.

School was different. An acquaintance confided to my parents that the junior high I would be attending, Memorial, was the better of the town's two schools because it had more Anglo students (another new word for me). As it transpired, this meant that Memorial was half-Anglo and half-Mexican, with a few black students thrown in for good measure. There were no other ethnic groups represented at all.

The brown kids called themselves "Mexicans," and the Anglos called them that, too. To the Hispanic students, the word was an expression of heritage and pride. And while I never heard an Anglo student use slurs like "greaser" or "spic," they often used "Mexican" with disdain, a pejorative implying laziness, stupidity, a natural inferiority, and other traits rarely if ever actually witnessed. The open bigotry was a new experience and ran contrary to the values I had learned at home. Though repelled, I was too new and too foreign (a "Yankee," I was informed. But, I nearly said once, I'm a Red Sox fan. I hate the Yankees) to feel comfortable speaking up.

 Memorial Junior High School. Click here for more photos of historic Kingsville.

In eighth grade American History class, I, along with James Gibson, George Gillespie, and James Hill, learned that their ancestors had had it pretty good as slaves -- what with three squares, roofs over their heads, and steady work -- and that the Civil War pushed the slaves into a freedom that they weren't ready for. Moreover, the war itself was all about States' Rights and won by the North only because the drunkard Grant took dishonorable advantage of superior numbers to defeat the noble Lee in a fight he would never have lost had the odds been even. Reconstruction was only slightly more benign than the Nazi occupation of Poland, and the whole country -- especially the newly freed "nigra" -- was better off when the North eventually saw the light and decamped. The South, of course, waited out Reconstruction with the forbearance of Francis of Assisi.

About seven months after we arrived, James Earl Ray assassinated Martin Luther King. Upon hearing some white students mutter that King had had it coming, a teacher whispered that she agreed, then urged them to keep quiet about it. These same kids no doubt cheered the exploits of Karl Douglas, Texas A & I's howitzer-armed black quarterback who later played for the Baltimore Colts.

South Texas is as flat as an ironing board and as wide open as the sea. A farm road intersects Highway 77 between Kingsville and Corpus Christi at a 45-degree angle. When a truck approaches 77 via the road, you can see clear under it to the land beyond. The sky is enormous with sunsets pale pink and purple. We often went outside to take them in, the evening birds fluttering and swooping on their twilight hunt for insects.

Despite my father's prediction, he and my mother settled in Kingsville. She passed away in 1998; he lives there still in the only house he's owned. I left Kingsville for college in 1973 and, except for summer vacations, have not lived there since. I retain an unmatched affection for South Texas and feel the calmness and comfort of true home there. At a class reunion a few years ago, friends who had stayed in Kingsville greeted me like a long lost brother. It hit me that with all of its drawbacks, if the currents of life ever returned me to South Texas, I'd have an instant community welcoming me back.

The Rainbow Connection

The Army withdrew the ROTC scholarship of University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill senior Sara Isaacson after she revealed in a written statement that she is gay. Because her action violates the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy, Isaacson must return the $79,000 in scholarship money that she has already received. Said Cadet Command spokesman Mike Johnson, "To accept the scholarship, the kid signs a contract and agrees to serve X years in the U.S. Army." Isaacson's father Ken had a different take: "It's disappointing that our country doesn't want her. But she will find some way to make her mark."

On July 26, 1948, President Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which desegregated the military. Until then, African-American soldiers served in separate units, typically commanded by white officers. Now, it occurs to me, why not do something similar for gay soldiers? I don't mean an executive order ending discrimination: I'm talking about the next step on the way to that. The Army could form a separate-but-equal Rainbow Brigade of gay and lesbian soldiers, commanded (naturally) by straight officers. There would be no concerns about unit cohesion and -- let's face it -- most barracks and foxholes could use some decent interior design.

The benefits for gay soldiers, starting with an improved social life, are obvious. No longer would they have to lurk in a psychological dark alley, at terms with their sexuality and yet unable to express it. Instead, they could seek refuge in the safety of a rainbow asylum, free from ridicule (outside of the occasional bit of playful graffiti sprayed on their barracks by soldier boys being soldier boys). When going out on the town, they could band together openly for protection. The Army could even design a special rainbow-colored service ribbon that would prevent misunderstandings in places like restrooms at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. The Navy could paint designated cruisers (the ships) in rainbow camouflage.

Gays have served in the military at least since the days of ancient Sparta. In an only-in-America tale of tolerance and liberality, patriotic homosexuals have, over the span of a few brief millennia, attained the enviable position of being permitted to serve their country as long as they lie about the nature of the most fundamental part of their humanity. A Rainbow Brigade would be the next proud step on the gay journey to the American Dream. But for now, could they maybe walk on the other side of the street?...

Riccobono's Panola Street Cafe...

Two studies in brown...

No bathing suits in the lobby...

Scenes from the macro-world...

What am I gonna do on a submarine?...

Rah Rah Ree, Kick 'Em in the Knee. Rah Rah Ralls, Kick 'Em in the...

Wall Street to Obama: "Okay, first you slap us in the face, now you kick us in the balls. Enough is enough. I mean, we’re done." If you can stand it, read this account of how the most politically tone deaf and gluttonous gang of thieves to ever curse the earth with its presence resents minimal requirements to clean up an act that came close to ruining the global economy. Not only that, the mildest rebuke of their obscene bonuses induces the thin-skinned tantrum of a five-year old who doesn't want to give back the ball he's stolen...

Paul Krugman writes that they don't want to pay their taxes, either? Well, you wouldn't, either, if you had to scrape by on an eight-figure income...

JUST A SONG: Los Tigres del Norte and "La Granja"...

Twitter updates from the Deepwater Horizon Joint Information Center here (thanks, Annette)...

Republicans say that Rand Paul is just a young guy, a regular Nuke LaLoosh who hasn't yet learned to keep his convictions to himself when being interviewed by mad dog reporters like Rachel Maddow. Says Sarah Palin (with a straight face):

...this lesson that I have learned and Rand Paul is learning now is don't assume that you can engage in a hypothetical discussion about constitutional impacts with a reporter or a media personality who has an agenda...

Once again, earth to SP: What reporter doesn't have an agenda, and when did you ever "engage in a hypothetical discussion about constitutional impacts" ("constitutional impacts'?) with anyone. I can just hear her in a dorm room at one of the many colleges she attended: "Let's not troll for just any group of guys when we go out tonight. Let's find some with whom we can have a meaningful hypothetical discussion about constitutional impacts. I so go for guys like that."

Notice that she's transformed a softball question from Katie Couric about magazines into an ambush by Mike Wallace about the nuances of the Constitution...

While the conventional wisdom has it that Arlen Specter's defeat in Pennsylvania represents a political setback for President Obama, history suggests otherwise. Setting aside 1998 and 2002, which occurred under unique circumstances, presidents have rarely displayed coattails in off-year elections. (It's an overrated phenomena anyway.) You have to go back to John Kennedy in 1962, when Democrats gained four seats in the Senate and held House losses to six, to see any evidence of coattails...

The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment | The New York Review of Books

Peter Beinhart is not exactly my favorite liberal, but this piece -- in which he predicts an increasing rightward and racist drift by the Israeli body politic and the American Jewish establishment -- is worth reading.

The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment The New York Review of Books

Gone To Texas

Back Monday or Tuesday.

Why Race Matters

Paul Krugman writes that, somewhat to his surprise, voters often turn to the right during economic hard times. The Nobel Prize winning economist admits to naivete in thinking that the financial meltdown, a direct consequence of deregulation, would turn people against the free market ideologues of the Republican party. He cites a recent study indicating that economic downturns do in fact push many voters to the right, regardless of the cause of the downturn.

But why? Krugman minimizes President Obama's race, agreeing that it is a factor but probably not the main factor. If he means that Obama's individual blackness is not the sole trigger for the right's vitriol and for the electorate as a whole to consider voting for the very party that most rigidly espouses the ideology that ruined the economy, he's probably correct. Nonetheless, race plays a key role in polarizing an electorate that all reason says should unite against the plutocrats who drive the economy's ups and downs. As president, Obama serves as a highly visible reminder that the United States has reached an unprecedented place when it comes to race.

The Great Depression, the worst economic crisis faced by the United States, forced a decisive political turn to the left. Franklin Roosevelt's policies -- like Social Security, the Wagner Act, and the Glass-Steagall Act -- stabilized the American economy for decades until Reaganism poisoned the body politic and turned loose the ideologues who pushed the economy to the brink. So it's not the case that economic crisis automatically means a right turn.

But the country was much whiter when Roosevelt took office in 1933. Absorption of the 20,000,000 immigrants who arrived between 1870-1915 was underway, and the Immigration Act of 1924 set quotas that seemed to assure that most future immigrants would be from Northern Europe. As with today's migrants, those immigrants served as imported cheap labor, but their presence was officially sanctioned and then limited by law. And the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans ensured the relative effectiveness of the new law. Bigotry remained, but there was no ongoing crisis.

Moreover, African-Americans were second-class citizens in every sense of the word. Far from designing New Deal programs to raise black economic circumstances, New Dealers found that support from powerful southern Congressmen depended on restricting programs to white males. Thus, it was easy for the white electorate to support legislation aimed at benefiting themselves. Massive unemployment had reached deeply into white communities; as people have done for time immemorial, whites not only expected the government to help, they reflexively knew that they would be first in line.

And they still want that. But what conservative whites perceive is a government that takes their money and gives it to investment banks and undeserving blacks and browns. (Regarding the former, they've got a point.) They believe that when Hispanics reach 30% of the population (as is expected), it will be because of illegal immigration rather than a high birth rate. They see an establishment more concerned with the rights of illegal immigrants than the disappearance of the verities of American life, which seem to have no more steadiness than the sands of sinkhole. Which makes right-wing politicians prey on these people, stoking their anger and convincing them that they can turn back the clock by repealing health care reform, building a border fence, and keeping the government out of business.

But why oppose business regulation when deregulation produced the current crisis? Because supporting regulation means allying with the liberal Obama-loving tree huggers who make common cause with minority groups and who want to take away guns, ban big cars, murder babies, and trash the Constitution. It means admitting that progressives -- people that their hero Glenn Beck wants to eradicate -- were right and that Glenn and Rush and Bill and Ann and Sean were wrong.

And that's out of the question in the political world of the right, a world of Us v. Not Us.

In this world, anyone Not Us are liberal Democrat Nazi socialist fascist communists led by a president who wasn't even born here. The puzzling contradiction of melding completely disparate political philosophies into one incoherent lump makes perfect sense once we realize that to the extreme right, all are equally antithetical to the American values personified by Us and represented by gun ownership, states' rights, and the purity of free enterprise. When the Not Us oppose Us, they oppose America; therefore anything they support must not only be un-American, it must be an attack on Us. And it must be motivated by hate, for why else would anyone oppose the real America?

When the Us resort to extremes, it's to fight back against the Not Us who run the country and who hate America. In other words, it's the Not Us who are the haters; the Us simply speak the truth and carry on the tradition of the American Revolution. (Somehow, the Civil War never enters the discussion.) Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, after all, and self-defense is what the Us are all about.

When the Us say they want their country back, that's exactly what they mean: Liberty and justice for them. The Not Us aren't real Americans anyway...

Empty New Orleans room...

The Treme scene at McAlary Manor was like something out of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer...

Rastamick hopes that Democrats are better than the likes of Richard Blumenthal...

Kentucky Republican senate nominee Rand Paul opposes the Americans with Disabilities Act as being unfair to business...

The myth of trickle-down economics...

The scenic route...

Confidential to CK readers: Any time anyone approaches you with a free Bible or a tract or wants to talk about your relationship with God, tell them that you're an atheist. So far, it's stopped them in their tracks every time. Saying that you're a Catholic works well, too, but doesn't draw the same stunned expression of disbelief...

Sweet Home Alabama

After this commercial hit the Alabama airwaves, Republican gubernatorial candidate Byrne, not about to be Swift Darwined, screamed bloody murder and declared, "I believe the Bible is the Word of God and that every single word of it is true." He went on to attack "powerful government insiders," "corrupt Democrat and AEA (Alabama Education Association practices," and "power mongers" as being behind "these despicable attacks." He proudly concluded by saying, "Like so many other Alabamians, I was raised in a conservative-minded Democratic household," but changed parties fifteen years ago because of the Democratic party's "liberal social policies, wasteful spending habits and big-government expansion." Well.

Byrne, an insider himself who has held elective office off and on since 1994, is apparently the first candidate ever to run for high office because he is uninterested in power. And in Alabama, no less. As for the "conservative-minded Democratic household," that's Newspeak for saying that he was raised to believe in segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.  Does anyone doubt that his parents voted enthusiastically for this man?

But what about the ad? Does Byrne have a point? Yes, sort of. Apparently, the ad was placed by a right-wing PAC called True Republican that outs Byrne as a closet liberal (!) not in touch with Alabama values. The AEA, which has tangled with Byrne for years, helped finance True Republican, evidently on the theory that attacking Byrne from the right will bear greater fruit in Alabama than an assault from the left.

Which has left Byrne crying foul and claiming that he has been smeared, but for what? Telling the truth about natural selection? Not as he sees it: Byrne claims that he has never told the truth about Darwin, and he may be on to something: As a member of the Alabama Board of Education, he supported a science curriculum that includes this:

Explanations of the origin of life and major groups of plants and animals, including humans, shall be treated as theory and not as fact. When attempting to apply scientific knowledge to world problems, no social agenda shall be promoted. 

I'm not even going to comment on that last sentence.

Byrne's opponent has avoided the controversy, focusing instead on another critical issue faced by a state with 10.9% unemployment and that ranks 46th in per capita income:



According to Sarah Palin, "we're all Arizonans now." Sure, but which Arizonans? I wonder how many times Sarah Palin had been to Arizona before John McCain decided that she would help him get elected president. It wouldn't surprise me if she hadn't even heard of it...

McCain not only created the Palin Frankenstein, he bears responsibility for the demise of ACORN, which began when he made accusations of voter registration fraud that he must have known were groundless (which has been shown again and again and again). Nonetheless, his words stuck in the most impressionable ears outside of a four-year old who believes in Santa Claus, and the relentless hectoring of a respected community organization got underway. Now that he's pandering to the worst elements of the Arizona electorate by tangling himself in stained political bedsheets with the deranged Russell Pearce, McCain is certain to end his career as a bitter crank who willingly sacrificed his integrity because he couldn't bear to leave the U. S. Senate...

Sunday Funnies and Arts

As always, click to enlarge...

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Back in Black - Glenn Beck's Nazi Tourette's
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Life on a BP deep water platform: "After safety, the one thing on almost everyone’s mind is how to keep the oil and gas flowing at the best possible rate."

Other tidbits from the BP web site:

These are manmade structures at sea, and every centimetre of space has been designed to provide workers with safety, the tools they need and perhaps, after a hard day’s work, a few comforts.

To work here you need to wear a safety helmet, earplugs, protective clothing and plastic glasses.

If watching a movie or sporting event on satellite TV isn’t enough to fill the rest periods, the sea offers its own entertainments. There might be whales to watch, or sea lions or migrating birds.

People come and go frequently from a platform...

Whatever we do, wherever we do it, we always strive to preserve and improve the surrounding environment...

We also recognise the need to constantly look at and improve our own organization. So, for example, we work to rigorous health and safety standards...

We hold all new projects to a set of environmental requirements.

We deliver on our promises through continuous improvement and safe, reliable operations.

Our reputation, and therefore our future as a business, depends on each of us, everywhere, every day, taking personal responsibility for the conduct of BP’s business.

We also regularly invite our customers, shareholders, suppliers and others to tell us what they think of BP.

Be my guest: Tell 'em what you think...

You can't beat a station wagon full of nuns: Distributor Cap tears Pat Buchanan a new one (not that Pat needs it)...

Mrs. Williams and children "at promise"...

Thanks John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas. This one is at your door. So is this racist drivel:


The ad is courtesy of Americans for Job Security, a murky, euphemistic group that refuses to identify its members:

Our members are businesses, business leaders and entrepreneurs from around the country. AJS does not disclose or discuss its membership further than this.

They go so far as to not disclose the identity of their board, either, and yet they're allowed to spend unlimited money on political campaigns.

The ad also is a page of an old and depiscable conservative playbook: It pits the unemployed of Arkansas against the poor of Bangalore, which has a per capita income of $690 (that's right: $690). I've got think that the real enemy of both are the phantom members of Americans for Job Security, who hide their identities behind the robes of the Supreme Court and chortle with contempt at working people...

Dirty minded Texas Republican uses the right's obsession with porn to kill funding for scientific research and math and science jobs. What's the matter, Ralph? Afraid that if kids learn to add it all up, they won't see it your way?...

Saul Friedman says that government health care works everywhere it's been tried...

Christian Soldiers Dept: If Jesus won't protect you from Satan, a handy sidearm will do the job just fine...

Teabaggers oppose the American people in the name of liberty. What's next? The Fourteenth Amendment? Given the leeway, these people would strip the Constitution they profess to love down the the Second and Tenth Amendments...

GOP senators: TARP worked but -- get this -- the nuances are lost among the tumult and the shouting. According one senator of the party who has made exaggeration, dissembling, and blunt force its political life's blood:

If you can get above all the hyperbolization and misrepresentation and get the facts out, I think you can be very effective...

"The laws are intended to make people fearful"...

SUNDAY PLAYLIST
Time to Get Alone...

Just A Song: Natalie Merchant and "Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience"...

All we are saying is give peace a chance...

30 Days Out reviews Peter Frampton, the Court Yard Hounds (i.e., the Dixie Chicks minus Natalie Maines), Shelby Lynne, and Graham Parker...


PHOTO GALLERY
Decatur Street pirate...

Aerial image of the BP/Halliburton Oil Spill...

Shadow Shot Sunday...

Cedar waxwing along Hazard Road...

You never knew what I loved in you; I don't know what you loved in me. Maybe the picture of somebody you were hoping I might be. This one goes out to the good folks at BP/Halliburton:

Oil Man River

The New Orleans Ladder continues to be the place for up-to-the-minute reporting and exposes about the BP/Halliburton River of Oil...

Earth and sky...

The Maine Republican Party carries the fight to Portland's King Middle School. More here. Apparently, it's one thing when free copies of the Constitution come from the Heritage Foundation and quite another when they come from the ACLU. If you ask me, the Heritage Foundation could save a bundle on costs by printing only the Second and Tenth Amendments...

Obama to GOP: NO!...

The Education of T*E*A*B*A*G*G*E*R*S...

And I thought Red Velvet was a cake. I stand corrected...

John Hayes at Robert Frost's Banjo thinks that Natalie Merchant's success in revealing all aspects of childhood raises Leave Your Sleep from a worthwhile project to a whole other level...

Deeply concerned by the possibility of invasion from a country with a GDP 7% of that of the United States, Arizona strikes back by banning ethnic studies...

Don't buy it at the station/You can get it now for free/Just come down to the shore where the water used to be. Steve Forbert's "The Oil Song" is now "The Oil Song 2010" (free on-line listen)...

T-Bone Burnett: There's a river of love that runs through all times:

Why Not Single Payer?

Like most progressives, I responded with disappointment to President Obama's decision not to pursue a form of single-payer health care. It seemed obvious to me then (and now) that single-payer is the most efficient way to provide health care access to the greatest number of people: Single payer would not only guarantee health care to everyone, it would reduce costs in the bargain. Barack Obama is not a stupid man; if I know this about single payer, there's little doubt that he does, too. But he never considered single payer because, I believe, support for it doesn't exist outside of a political minority of progressives.

Darlene commented here recently:

I will die cursing the day that this country failed to pass a single payer health care system. The power of the insurance/pharmaceutical complex matches that of the military industrial one. Pogo was right; the enemy is us.

She's right: The insurance/pharmaceutical complex is a massive and insuperable object in the absence of a movement powerful enough to overcome it. And that movement doesn't exist. So, why have liberals not been able to build a committed constituency for single-payer outside of themselves? It comes down to seven factors:

Right v. Privilege. That is, in this country is access to adequate health care a right or a privilege? Although he never pursued health care reform, Franklin Roosevelt provided a liberal rallying point when he included it in his Economic Bill of Rights. Progressives argued this question successfully, but only to a point.

Abstract. It's a curious reality that Americans can't envision a disaster until it actually happens, no matter how many experts foresee it. (See the broken levees in New Orleans and the financial meltdown.) Sure the health care system might collapse, but people might be crying wolf, too. It's difficult to organize a movement to ward off future possibility, even a likely one.

Difficulty. Health care reform is a long march; keeping an American political movement mobilized across generations is a rare thing, and a successful single-payer movement requires this. Moreover, the Congressional system of lobbying, filibusters, multiple committees to hear the same piece of legislation, competing proposals, and arcane rules render it incredibly difficult to pass major legislation. In the absence of contravening pressure, compromise based on the existing system is Pragmatism 101.

Priority.  Most people are insured so there's never been the general sense of urgency that single-payer requires. It's asking (in their minds) most Americans to risk something that meets their needs for the benefit of other people. On this issue, progressives seem unable to get others to connect the dots between rising health care costs and stagnant wages, increased co-payments, and rescission. Moreover, one administration after another has faced multiple issues competing for attention with health care reform and chosen to focus on more immediate problems. More than one observer believes that Barack Obama erred in addressing health care when he did for just this reason. (Personally, I find this to be a narrow tactical argument that fails to consider the history of health care reform, which suggests that to be successful, a president must move early in his administration.) A single-payer movement, if one existed, would always find its voice to be one among many, and would have the added burden of constantly having to justify single-payer as a priority in a political environment geared to the emotions of the moment.

People Don't Trust the Government. Despite the obvious examples of Medicare and Social Security, people don't trust the government to administer health care. I mean, look at how bad the systems in Canada and France are, right? Never mind that the Canadians and the French like their health care (or that France does not have single payer and that Canada technically doesn't either), it's easier to extrapolate a few horror stories to a general conclusion supporting the Reagan dictum that Government Is The Problem.

Free Market Ideology. Even a solid voter coalition of liberals and independents would require support from business groups (such as the Chamber of Commerce) and major employers to offset the political access of Big Insurance and Big Pharma. One might think that Boeing, General Motors, and Microsoft, to name a few big businesses, would be screaming for the federal government to provide relief from the burden of insurance benefits. But slavish fealty to the ideology of the free market prevents that.

It's easier to be against something. It's difficult to sustain a long-term movement in favor of an abstract change. Say what you will about the teabaggers, they showed up and protested. But, then, "no" is a simple word that requires no further explanation, especially in the context of a dishonest debate casting health care reform as a threat to individual freedom characterized by death panels and jail terms.

The impetus for single payer began to wane in the early 70s. Ronald Reagan established an anti-government gestalt that to this day pervades the thinking of most Americans even as they rely on government services and programs. Proponents of single-payer tout its rationality, but on Capitol Hill, that and $4 will get you a cappuccino...

Don't miss Jill Lepore's "Letter From Boston" in The New Yorker. Writing in the magazine's signature understated style, Lepore reports on the 1773 Boston Tea Party (which wasn't actually named that until 1834) and shows how today's teabaggers connect to competing efforts to coopt the original event during the Bicentennial celebration in 1976. Lepore introduces some of movers and shakers among today's Massachusetts teabaggers, including:

• the state head of a movement that detests government and elites, but who sees no contradiction between that and his federally funded job at MIT;
• a recent Ohio immigrant so appalled by Massachusetts politics that she leads an effort to ban same sex marriage. I doubt I could get a bookie in Vegas to take the bet that she thinks immigrants ought to learn English and adapt to local customs;
• a nurse who believes that government ought to spend money on defense, the post office, and roads ("maybe"). It either doesn't occur to her that half of her patients are likely on Medicare/Medicaid -- and therefore paying her salary -- or she simply detests them;
• A bitter policemen who thinks that because years ago he had to take second job to pay for his daughter's 10-day hospital stay, everyone else should have to, too. Again, the stunning refusal to connect the dots: In this economy, anyone looking for a second job competes with people who desperately need a first one. And, today, a 10-day hospital stay would bankrupt almost any middle-class family without health insurance. One might think that he'd hope that no one else has to share his experience, but one would be wrong.

The 'baggers earnestly discuss how to keep out the Obama=Hitler signs from the rallies without experiencing a shred of insight as to why they might appeal to that element in the first place. As one jovially introduces Lepore to his buddies, he patronizingly refers to her as "Jane Goodall." The reference escaped me until I figured out that it has something to do with Lepore's presumed acceptance of Charles Darwin's nutso theory of evolution by natural selection...

A close friend's nephew -- a fine young man in his 20's -- has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer that resists chemo and radiation. There is, however, a pill that may help. He has no insurance, and the cost of the dosage -- if successful -- will run into tens of thousands of dollars, an amount that no doubt exceeds what his widowed mother makes at the job which, in this economy, she's happy to have. But the head Massachusetts 'bagger has a ready explanation for why this is just and right:

Can you imagine if the British said not only do you have to pay a tax on the tea but you have to buy the tea and you have to buy tea for you neighbors?

After all, we wouldn't want to be our brothers' keepers or anything as silly and naive as that...

Throw me something, mister...

Gas pump scenery...

A repentant Ken Starr defends Elena Kagen and says this right-wing bit done got out of hand...

The babies are coming, the babies are coming!...

Tomorrow is a long time...

Leaving Lesbos for the Isle of Man...

The Ad Fox Wouldn't Run

An ad salesman for the network whose viewers' knowledge level ranked next to last in a recent survey said that Fox rejected the ad because it was "too confusing." For some reason, Fox did not reject the following ad, perhaps because it features an Iraq War veteran who was awarded a Purple Heart:


If you think more people should see these ads, help them go viral. Publish them on your blog and on your Facebook wall by pressing the "Facebook Share" button on the sidebar to your right.

For more about VoteVets.org, the voice of America's 21st Century patriots, click here.

Elena Kagan

President Obama yesterday nominated Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court opening created by the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens. In announcing Kagan's nomination, Obama said:

Elena is respected and admired not just for her intellect and record of achievement, but also for her temperament -- her openness to a broad array of viewpoints; her habit, to borrow a phrase from Justice Stevens, “of understanding before disagreeing”; her fair-mindedness and skill as a consensus-builder. 

Said Kagan:

I have felt blessed to represent the United States before the Supreme Court, to walk into the highest Court in this country when it is deciding its most important cases, cases that have an impact on so many people’s lives.  And to represent the United States there is the most thrilling and the most humbling task a lawyer can perform.

The Solicitor General served as Dean of the Harvard Law School, Professor of Law at both Harvard and the University of Chicago, and Associate White House Counsel under Bill Clinton. She also clerked for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

The initial Republican opposition to Kagan is typically crass. It augments a whispering campaign about her sexuality with implied support for gay marriage and the implication that opposition to military recruiting at Harvard has something to do with her supposed lesbianism. (Harvard objected to campus recruiting on the basis the the Don't Ask/Don't Tell policy conflicted with an institutional commitment that barred discrimination on the basis of sexuality.)

In a convoluted and nearly incomprehensible argument, neocon gay blogger Andrew Sullivan tries to have it both ways. He appears to argue that, while Kagan's sexuality is irrelevant, senators ought to grill her on it anyway in the hopes of luring her out of a closet she may not be in, which would somehow be a victory for all concerned. And in any case, we had better be certain that if she is gay, it won't affect her decisions.

Does Sullivan think that a heterosexual judge would be predisposed to an anti-gay vote in a gay rights case? If the Senate questions a Supreme Court nominee based on the notion that there's something dark and hidden about an unmarried, 50-year old career woman, shouldn't that be standard for every nominee to any position? And is the broad category of gay or straight enough? Shouldn't they ask about habits (faithful or not, degree of promiscuity either way) and predilections? Any porn addiction (I guess that one has been covered, and it's o.k.)? What web sites is the nominee a member of or has ever been a member of? What web sites has the nominee even looked at? How old was he or she the first time they, you know? How often did they do it? How regularly did he or she have sex in college and law school? (If the content of school papers are fair game, why not sex lives?) Will he or she supply the names of each sexual partner they've ever had? Naturally, he or she should make public the results of AIDS/STD tests.

Another nagging worry, according to one comment, is whether her (presumed) homosexuality affects her judgment because -- and I kid you not -- "passion clouds reason." Now, no one would ever raise this issue in connection with a straight nominee, although perhaps they should: I speak as someone whose judgment has been clouded by rampant heterosexuality more than once.

Or, we could just not care ask and about something important.

The other Republican line of attack concerns a speech in which Kagan expressed sympathy for Thurgood Marshall's contention that the Constitution as originally conceived was "defective." The first African-American justice, Marshall, in a 1987 speech observing the bicentennial of the Constitution, inexplicably took issue with its Three-Fifths Compromise before articulating the classic liberal understanding of the law of the land:

We will see that the true miracle was not the birth of the Constitution, but its life, a life nurtured through two turbulent centuries of our own making...

(The complete text of Marshall's marvelous speech is here.) If the thrust of the conservative attack on Kagan is to be sordid insinuations about her personal life and comparisons to Thurgood Marshall, then I say bring it on: It ennobles her and abases them.

Progressive reservations about Kagan appear to be little more than cherry picking. In an uncharacteristically flabby report for The Nation, John Nichols asserts that

[The national] conversation should begin with an honest admission that Kagan's record does not suggest that she will be as great, or as liberal, as Stevens.

The problem with this claim is obvious: When Gerald Ford nominated John Stevens, nothing about his record that he would become either liberal or great. So how can anyone make such a prediction about Kagan?

Nichols then takes a long time to get around to his next point, which has to do with doubts that Kagan will oppose Bush-like encroachments of executive power on the legislative branch. But literally every president in the history of the country has sought a free hand when conducting a war. The notion that because Solicitor-General Kagan argued for Barack Obama when he wanted to retain a couple of Bush war powers means that he and she envision a Bush/Cheney imperial presidency is ludicrous. Certainly, senators should question Kagan on her views of the separation of powers; they should question every nominee for the federal bench on that subject. But to start from the perspective that she's a closet monarchist seems out of line.

Nichols also quotes approvingly an assault on the supposed "paucity" of Kagan's legal scholarship. I'm not remotely qualified to render an informed opinion, but I do wonder how someone could attain Kagan's academic credentials without being a decent scholar. More to the point, I'd like someone to produce the study that correlates legal scholarship with excellence on the Supreme Court bench.

Finally, Nichols gives the back of his hand to "...the talk about social and even economic issues that may come before the court." Maybe these issues are not important to him, but they will be to rest of us: During Kagan's tenure the court may well review continued attempts to undermine Roe v. Wade, the new health care law, and suits brought to break up the banking and finance trusts that plague our economy and threaten our way of life.

The consensus appears to be that she'll move the court to the right because she can't possibly be as liberal as Stevens. That's unknown. But nothing about Elena Kagan's career suggests that she'll suddenly make common cause with John Roberts. You don't have to be John Paul Stevens to stand in opposition to Robertsism. It's Roberts and Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia who have moved the court to the right; it's them we must resist...

JUST A SONG: When I saw those thrashers rolling by...

The butler did it...and did it...and did it...

French Quarter gardenia...

Deepwater Horizon survivor tells his story...

I'm nothing special, in fact I'm a bit of a bore...

A recovering Catholic returns to church for the first time in thirty years...

Premium T.'s Tuesday Poem...

Robert Frost's Banjo has the "Rainy Day Blues" on his new Gold Tone Paul Beard resophonic guitar...

Jim Wallis attempts to open a dialog with Glenn Beck, who prefers to cower in the safety of his studio (thanks, Darlene)... 

School art...

R. I. P., Lena Horne:

Second Bill of Rights

It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station or race or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of farmers to raise and sell their products at a return which will give them and their family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

And, finally, the right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being...

For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, January 11, 1944

Audio of Roosevelt setting forth the Second Bill of Rights here...

Sunday Funnies and Arts

As always, click to enlarge.

























Watching this video of Neil Young's "Thrasher," I was struck by the differences in the iconic images of a man with a guitar and a woman with a guitar. Young's energy flows outward: He conveys a message by seducing the audience. The guitar is, if not an instrument of aggression, a second microphone that amplifies his intent to connect a personal vision. Compare Young's presence with Patty Griffin's as she sings "Be Careful":



The size of the guitar nearly overwhelms the petite Griffin, forming a protective barrier. She sings and plays with great maternal presence, drawing the audience toward her, attempting to elicit a personal empathy for the emotional vulnerability of young women...

Photo Gallery
Cacophony...

Mother's Day Peace Rose...

View of Mt. Hood...

Bow, wow, wow...

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in Missouri (1933)...

Spring and all in Newport...

Rose and stepmom...


Jazz funeral for the Gulf...

Critter's Crap has more Sunday funnies here ...

Wealthy Americans tell everyone else that they have to tighten their belts...

Onward, Christian bankers...

Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play...

Houston has had some great music over the years...

Lord Balderdash can neither confirm nor deny that he found that strip club "pleasant nor unpleasant..."


Happy Mother's Day! (Thanks for the reminder, Cliff.)