Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Chamber of Horrors

"U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform President Lisa Rickard complained bitterly about lobbying on Capitol Hill. The objects of Ms. Rickard’s ire were attorneys who had dared to meet their congressional representatives (letter to the editor, 'Trial lawyers storm Capitol,' Oct. 3).
The irony is, of course, that no one invests more in lobbying than Ms. Rickard’s group. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, over the last decade the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its fake 'think tank,' the Institute for Legal Reform, have plowed more than $338 million into lobbying Congress. Its largess has been double that of any corporation, association or trade group in the country.
In fact, this lobbying is a moneymaker for Ms. Rickard. The chamber has made a fortune shilling for corporations in return for massive contributions and board seats for President Tom Donohue. In 2001, The Wall Street Journal noted that Mr. Donohue’s most effective coffer-filling innovation had been 'to offer individual companies and industries the chance to use the chamber as a means of anonymously pursuing their own political ends.'
Whether it was pharmaceutical manufacturers paying $1 million each to undermine the Medicare prescription drug bill, or auto manufacturers trying to avoid liability for defective products, Ms. Rickard and Mr. Donohue have offered a front for everyone and anyone with a suitcase of money. It doesn’t even have to be an American company, as Boeing found out when the chamber went to work for Airbus. If your money’s good, it’s good enough for the chamber."
Chamber outspending everyone on lobbying From Jon Haber, CEO, American Association for Justice

Mr. C is Cool Workin On His Third. He'll Rest & Have Cake When The Weeds Is Whuped. Sorry I Wasn't There To Help.

Friday, October 26, 2007

Happy World Serious

"I believe in the Church of Baseball. I've tried all the major religions, and most of the minor ones. I've worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I heard that, I gave Jesus a chance. But it just didn't work out between us. The Lord laid too much guilt on me. I prefer metaphysics to theology. You see, there's no guilt in baseball, and it's never boring..." Annie Savoy

Actually, Buddhists, not Catholics use 108 beads, but this factual error does not take away from Annie's truth.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Suki, Circa 1987-2007

Thank you for the 17 wonderful years you gave us. We don’t know what you did with your first three, except that you were spayed, and were terrified of small children. We guessed that you swatted one who was torturing you and your family dumped you. It was their loss. You were shy and coy when you came. You made us laugh when you rubbed Reggie’s nose in his food. You turned into a fierce hunter and fighter. You were also a wonderful healer, trickster, and loyal companion. Here's your story according to Barbara whom you called Barbar:
We've always called Suki our "Cosmic" cat. When we moved to the lake in August of 1990 we decided we would like another cat so that our cat Reggie would have a companion. Besides, the place was like a piece of cat heaven, co
mplete with a catwalk, critters, trees to climb and fish in the lake. I loved our friends' Siamese cat and sometime in the fall decided that was what we would look for. Within a few weeks this part-Siamese or Burmese mix turned up in our driveway (literally the end of the road), wanting us to befriend her but afraid just the same. We named her "Suki" because we thought she should have an Asian name to go with her looks. Ironically we later discovered that was the last name of one of our neighbors, just spelled differently. It still makes me smile imagining what they thought if they heard us yelling their name when we were trying to locate our cat.
The following January I was in my last semester of law school and Suki would often lie across my lap while I studied. One day I felt a lump in my lower abdomen. I felt sure it was a recurrence of endometriosis and decided I didn't have time to deal with it until school was out. Within a few weeks we discovered a growth on Suki's stomach almost exactly the same shape and size as the one I had and exactly where her stomach touched mine. The miracle of it was that my lump had disappeared and didn't return for over a year and a half. It's still hard for me to dismiss her turning up like she did and the tumor transfer as mere coincidences.
Sometime later she got caught under the garage door as I was trying to open it with the remote. The door kept rebounding up and down off her back as I panicked trying to stop it, like some funny but horrible thing you'd see on "America's Funniest Pets." Amazingly she was unhurt physically but it gave her another reason not to trust humans and their machines. After that and my taking her to the vet to have the lump removed she didn't want much to do with me. Jim became her favorite and she would follow him around like a lovesick teenager and spend as much as a half-hour grooming the hair on his head while he watched TV. She also loved to bury her head in his shoes and smell the the nasty things. After a few minutes she would look up crossed-eyed like she was intoxicated from an overdose of catnip.
She was terrified of the vacuum cleaner and for many years any of our visitors -- so the housekeeper was a double-whammy for her. Her favorite hiding place was the lower corner cabinet in the kitchen. She figured out how to get it open with her paw (the only one of our cats that has ever done that) and would make a dash for it anytime she felt threatened.
Life with Suki has been a lesson in patience and acceptance. She was often pissy and unpredictable. One minute she's let you wrap her around your neck like a fur stole and the next minute she might swat your hand if you didn't figure out she'd had enough, sometimes leaving you lacerated. She only barely tolerated the other cats and refused to cede any ground to them, except for fearless (brain-damaged) Luna who never figured our she was supposed to be terrified. She also got her bluff in on the two dogs we used to have by lacerating their noses. Suki was the Queen-Bee-800-Pound-Gorilla-Alpha-Female Cat in the house. She hated and fought with raccoons, but tolerated possums. She loved to hunt at night when the moon was out and she's probably the reason we saw few snakes or mice around the place.
She mellowed in later years and we made our peace and had many good talks. She eventually established a relatively peaceful co-existence with the other cats and even began to tolerate visiting dogs and children. I've never had a pet this many years -- almost a third of my life. I began to think that she might go on forever and now that I know she's not I can't imagine life without her.
So goodbye old friend. You made us laugh, cry, love and grow. Thank you for all the memories. Today your spirit returns to the Cosmos having enriched our lives like the best friends do.








Ken Burns’ The War: Moving, But Strangely Unsatisfying. By Bobby Davis

Like anyone with an interest in history, I was excited when Ken Burns’ latest documentary event, this time about World War II, premiered in September. Much of The War justifies that enthusiasm; Burns’ trademark montage of period film footage, sound effects, and poignant interviews and documents read aloud vividly depicts the American experience of war. Somehow he succeeded in finding scads of combat footage not seen a dozen times, and he explores stories not often told, such as the Japanese-American soldiers of the Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which became the most highly-decorated unit in the history of the U.S. Army, even though their families were confined in detention camps, and the prisoners of war in the Philippines and Japan. He effectively examines both the fetid misery of combat and some of the revolutionary changes in American domestic life engendered by the war. Burns brings us to tears at times and altogether bolsters patriotic feelings for the people who endured and triumphed in the most terrible war in history.

Yet The War often feels cursory and incomplete. It is parochial by choice, focusing almost exclusively on the American experience. Although some critics have condemned this exclusivity, it is a defensible choice. Pragmatically, it allows Burns to keep his creation to a manageable size, and historically, he can focus on the war’s unique impact on the United States. Even if you grant Burns the right to leave out the Soviet, British, French, German, Chinese, and Japanese experiences, however, and accept that he explains almost nothing of the causes and consequences of World War II, The War does not do even its more limited topic justice. Ultimately, it panders to a nation’s need to feel good about itself rather than probe in depth and look critically at its real history.

Unlike his greatest documentary, The Civil War, Burns skimps on essential aspects of the conflict, frequently mentioning important events or people but providing little background or context. The War would have been greatly strengthened by setting the stage before Pearl Harbor of a battered nation suffering in the dregs of the Depression, wrought by fierce disagreement over whether to get involved in the widening global conflict. One would never know from The War that American hero Charles Lindbergh was pro-Nazi and vociferously opposed involvement in the war, or that rumors of submarines operating along American coasts and subversion by German and Japanese spies provided an anxious undercurrent to pre-war life. American life before 1941 wasn’t all apple-cheeked innocence, nor were all Americans were as ignorant of world affairs as Burns would have us believe. Some Americans had already joined up in England to fight Fascism before the Pearl Harbor attack, while a few thousand German-Americans joined Hitler’s war machine.

Burns avoids addressing key historical controversies, such as whether American leaders itching to participate in the war knew of the Pearl Harbor attack plan beforehand and let it happen, or the supposed “sellout” of Eastern Europe to Stalin at the Yalta Conference. He certainly could have added an episode on the aftermath of the war and the immediate post-war events that helped determine the political legacy of that world-changing event. It is rather bizarre to see a documentary on World War II that does not mention the Nuremburg Trials, the occupation of Germany and Japan and transformation into democracies, the birth of the Cold War, or the Baby Boom. It is true that Burns purposely chose to omit aspects of the war that have been covered extensively elsewhere, but many of his editorial choices did not work.

He tells his story mostly from the viewpoint of ordinary people from four American towns – Mobile, Alabama; Waterbury, Connecticut; Luverne, Minnesota; and Sacramento, California. Their testimony immerses us in the drama of common people thrust against their will into a terrible political conflagration, and their words provide the backbone of this documentary. No one can be unaffected by Glenn Frazier’s recollections of being interned at Bataan and then Japan itself, knowing his captors would murder all prisoners as soon as the Americans attacked, and how his mother, aunt, and sister all fainted when he called home in 1945 because they had been officially notified of his death a year before. Or the Italian-American infantryman writing sweet, optimistic letters home from Italy to his doting mother and family, sparing them mention of the hardships he was facing. When his sister tearfully reads on camera his last letter home, you realize that he was killed before his family read it—just days before his twenty-first birthday. To hear a pilot from Luverne talk about how he stopped making friends because so many of his friends died in battle, or a Jewish sniper-turned-medic still overwhelmed by the scenes from Nazi death camps, makes one understand how, to paraphrase Marine pilot Sam Hynes, this may have been a necessary war, but never a good war. Burns appeals to deep emotions, and does it well, but The War illustrates the limitations of this approach.

Burns sacrifices broad historical perspective and analysis in favor of individual stories, so that viewers share the limited understanding of participants, who did not know the ultimate outcome. In doing so, however, The War too often goes no further than these blinkered views. He could have interviewed many more historians of the war to provide context, as he did masterfully in The Civil War. Also in contrast to The Civil War, Burns provides no thumbnail sketches of the major political and military leaders. One learns nothing substantive about the man who led us through nearly the entire conflict, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman might as well have been a minor military aide for all the attention he merited. Truman’s ascension to the presidency upon the death of Roosevelt is barely discussed, except to say that many soldiers didn’t even know his name. Burns does little to evoke the political genius of Eisenhower as a general leading an egotistical, nationalistic band of generals from different countries, Patton’s tenacity and tactical skills, Curtis LeMay’s “bomb them into the Stone Age” strategy of air warfare, the myriad abilities of our Pacific naval commanders, Admirals Nimitz and Halsey, or their constant battles with the egomaniac MacArthur. Such pastiches would have helped to humanize these men who played such a vital role in the action described so vividly on screen.

Burns frequently glosses over important issues, most critically the development of the atomic bomb and the decision to drop it. There is no discussion of economic issues, or the fear among American leaders of taking on enormous federal debt to pay for the gigantic costs of waging war on two fronts thousands of miles apart. Burns made the curious decision, given China’s current development into a Great Power, to ignore completely the China and Burma theaters of action. Other than to note the loss of war industry jobs in Mobile and Waterbury after the war, he fails to convey the great anxiety of returning service men and women that the Depression would resume once the war ended. And, even though the story of Japanese citizens unjustly interned as potential spies occupy an important part of the film, Burns never mentions the whites in California who saw an opportunity to acquire their valuable property at a steep discount. In the end, Burns leads us to assume, they simply reoccupied their lost properties. In fact, many never got their homes and businesses back. This is the worst sort of whitewashing.

For a documentary that focuses so heavily on the home front, The War leaves out a great deal. The United States experienced three great social revolutions born in the war years in ensuing decades: the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s movement, and the Sexual Revolution. Burns does a poor job of explaining how the war helped create these revolutions, and he could easily have done so using interviews with survivors. Given his sensitivity to issues of race in The Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz, he spends shockingly little time discussing the role of African Americans in the war and its tremendous impact in building an army of men and women who would later fight their own war at home to destroy Jim Crow. He never mentions the great union leader A. Philip Randolph standing down FDR on the issue of giving blacks equal wages in war industries by threatening to lead an embarrassing March on Washington. He alludes to but does not explore the changing social relations of white and black workers working together in war industries, which created both racial tension and racial progress. The Tuskegee Airmen are mentioned, a few black faces are seen in battle scenes, but the Japanese 442nd Combat Team merited far more attention in The War than the much more numerous and important black soldiers. Burns could have more deeply explored the fascinating tension between men willing to die for their country on foreign soil and a hypocritical country that treated them as subhuman. Black American soldiers have frequently commented bitterly on the experience of being denied service while in uniform by restaurants that served food to German POWs. Burns interviews only one black former soldier to illuminate the issue of racial prejudice.

He gives equally short shrift to the revolutionary changes in the roles and expectations of women. People like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem are most commonly hailed as feminist heroes, but the millions of women who went to work and served in the armed forces in World War II provided the shock troops of social change in the American household. Without that experience, feminism would have remained the province of an intellectual and social elite. They are shown going to work in great numbers and in the usual factory scenes, they receive due “credit” in Burns litany of heroism, but the real stresses and challenges women faced as industrial workers and caregivers are given scant attention. Watch Connie Field’s wonderful documentary The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1980), with its eye-opening interviews with strong and diverse women, to get a deeper sense of what women really experienced. The vast numbers of women who escaped the household and proved capable workers in men’s occupations changed relations with men forever in this country, yet none of the interviews touch on this. It is also not unfair to mention that Burns never discusses the important role of women in the armed services, many of whom died for their country.

The documentary alludes obliquely to the very active sexual lives of servicemen and women, but Burns never explores their broader social implications. Millions of young men and women were shipped all over the United States and twelve million went overseas, where they experienced a sexual freedom and activity unheard of back in Luverne, Minnesota. Millions of women were suddenly liberated from family and neighborhood restraints and placed in contact with a horde of sometimes attractive strangers. “Victory girls” became a type, women whose idea of urgent patriotic duty included sexually servicing the men who might not survive combat. Soldiers received fairly frank sex education from the armed services, and military officials accepted the sexual needs of the men. The pinup girls and USO tours of World War II led to Playboy Magazine in 1953, led to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the pornography culture of today.

Two essential self-limitations handicap The War: Burns focuses primarily on small towns rather than cities, and he wants to present Americans of that era as supremely united. His work suffers badly from trying to fulfill “The Greatest Generation” myth. Mobile and Waterbury certainly were representative of small cities suddenly becoming boom towns for war industry, but New York, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington DC also welcomed tens, even hundreds, of thousands of new people into their crowded tenements and factories. California, Florida, and the entire “Sunbelt” changed tremendously as result of the population boom that started during the war and continues today. Washington DC in the 1930s and ‘40s went almost overnight from a sleepy Southern town to a major American city in which most of the nation’s power brokers gathered. By using only four representative towns, Burns misses much of the diversity and complexity of life on the home front. By focusing on small towns, he can adhere to the Norman Rockwell image of that earlier America that many people cherish.

Yet it was the cities that showed the harsher stresses of war and belied the conventional myth of absolute unity and small-town values ascendant. Burns barely mentions the vicious race riots in Detroit and Harlem, and ignores the “Zoot Suit” riots in Los Angeles that involved American servicemen and Mexicans. Labor conflict never appears, even though the labor wars of the Depression era continued to some extent during and after World War II. Although unions were strengthened and the government enacted important progressive labor policies, workers engaged in fairly frequent strikes (often white workers protesting the hiring and promotion of black workers) and owners continued to exploit workers just as they always had, even as they enjoined the workers to be patriotic and not ask for higher wages. Compared to what came in the 1960s, Americans certainly worked together far more and debated basic issues far less, but the nation experienced serious conflicts internally as well as with Germany and Japan. In this area, The War engages in mythmaking, not illumination.

Vast movement, not the stability of small-town life that Burns celebrates, marked the war years above all. Tens of millions of Americans moved to a new place during those years, thrown into military barracks, new work situations, and large, faceless cities. America was probably never so much a true melting pot for ethnic, regional, and racial diversity than during the war years. It was exhilarating, but also frightening, and it is no accident that one of the enduring genres of film from the ‘40s and early ‘50s is film noir. Noir’s claustrophobia, fear of strangers and sudden, violent death, its “tales of the city” that seldom had a happy ending, expressed the dark undercurrent of fear that thrived beneath the dominant themes of togetherness and triumphant nationalism.

Interestingly, in light of Clint Eastwood’s film Flags of Our Fathers, which explores the gap between selling a bowdlerized victory story to a war-weary public and the grim human cost of combat, Burns gives little attention to the importance of propaganda and public relations. The role of Hollywood in explaining and selling the war, not just war bonds but a particular image of America, is never explored--a rather strange and glaring omission, since one of our most important postwar presidents, Ronald Reagan, was a famous actor active in World War II propaganda efforts and used the war experience to help sell his message to a new generation of voters. Stranger still that Burns would ignore this important aspect of the war when his leading historian, Paul Fussell, made it a central feature of his bitter recollection of the war years, Wartime.

Fussell’s presence is ironic in a documentary that, for all its hard-edged scenes of military carnage, is essentially hagiography for veterans. A 21 year-old second lieutenant when he was severely wounded in France in 1945, Fussell went on to become a professor of literature specializing in 18th century British poetry. He wrote his masterwork, The Great War and Modern Memory, in 1975. Focusing on both the “Troglodyte World” of trench warfare and the ways that the Great War poets helped Britain digest and memorialize that spirit-shattering war and the radical social changes it ushered in, Fussell had finally found a means to help confront the lifelong rage and depression his own war experience engendered. He wrote Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (1988), which expressed the gratitude of soldiers who had gone through months and years of terrible combat, and faced the prospect of a virtual suicide mission in attacking the Japanese homeland, given an abrupt reprieve by the atomic bomb. Burns’ extensive use in The War of the recollections of Eugene B. Sledge, a Marine from Mobile who survived the Pacific war, comes straight from Fussell, who has often praised Sledge’s unsparing memoir With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa.

Fussell’s Wartime (1989), part analysis and part memoir, takes a radically different viewpoint than Burns. Wartime is almost relentlessly negative (as limited, in its way, as “The Greatest Generation” tripe), focusing on the soldiers’ boredom, deprivation, cynicism, and heavy use of alcohol. He exposes the facts of bombers that often don’t hit their targets, frequent death by friendly fire, hiding the prevalence of death and dismemberment from civilians in propaganda films, and other official lies. Fussell’s evocation of the subversive GIs, with their contempt for incompetent leaders and the sunny, sanitized messages about the war that saturated the media back home, is rarely to be found in The War, though Fussell appears several times on camera. Unfortunately, this man with unique and powerful insights, who could have been to this documentary what Shelby Foote was to The Civil War, is reduced to just another veteran. He has long been an outspoken critic of the romanticization of war and especially the rosy glow attending the American experience of World War II, yet in The War he participates in a project that, in the end, buries its gruesome content in a mist of nostalgia.

We are given a glimpse of the profound and lingering pain of the war when Sledge is quoted: “Something in me died at Peleliu. Possibly I lost faith that politicians in high places who do not have to endure war’s savagery will ever stop blundering and sending others to endure it.” But Burns has essentially left us with an evocation of The Good War. The fools and swine who populate Joseph Heller’s great novel of the war, Catch-22, are nowhere to be found in The War. It is a feel-good elegy to the men and women who survived, but leaves out huge and complicated aspects of the experience. As Walt Whitman said of the American Civil War, “the real war will never get in the books.” For all its emotional power and often-fascinating detail, Burns only partially gets at the real World War II.


Bobby Davis is a damned smart guy and a FOV. Thanks Bobby.


Don't Forget To Remember.

We cannot, we must not, ever forget what happened in Europe a little over 60 years ago, because it could happen again. Anyone, any group, could be the target and any extremist group, of whatever ilk could be the next perpetrators. We all have a responsibility to remember the consequences of unchecked and unquestioned governmental power and abuse and not to let it happen again, either on monumental or minimal scales. Thanks to Bobby.
This has been going around the internet, with a twist singling out Islamic extremists as the next mass murders perpetrators. Christians, Jews and "True Believers"of any kind are just as capable of killing for God or some other worthy cause.

Saturday, October 20, 2007

If Only The Nominal Christians & Jews In Congress Had The Compassion & Courage Of Pete Stark.


"Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) is exactly what a Fighting Democrat looks like and we desperately need to see more like him. If we had more Democrats like Pete Stark, we'd be out of Iraq! Conservatives are shocked! Stark has gone beyond the bounds of deceny!" This is What a Fighting Dem Looks Like -- Rep. Pete Stark on Iraq and S-CHIP
"CNN is reporting that 88% of those voting in their Friday morning online poll say there is no reason Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) should apologize for remarks blasting President Bush on the floor of the House of Representatives." Stark Should Not Apologize -- Say 88% in CNN Poll

DAMN! He did apologize, but I can't imagine that he meant it.

Saturday, October 13, 2007

The More Things Change All Over Again Again.

Bush & Gore -Their True Colors Are Shining Through.

"There are several layers of irony and poetic justice wrapped into this honor. The first is that the greatest step for world peace would simply have been for Gore not to have had the presidency stolen from him in November 2000. By every just measure, Gore won the presidency in 2000 only to have George W. Bush steal it from him with the critical assistance of the US Supreme Court. It's worth taking a few moments today to consider where the country and world would be without that original sin of this corrupt presidency. And yet this is a fitting bookend, with Gore receiving this accolade while the sitting president grows daily an object of greater disapproval, disapprobation and collective shame. And let's not discount another benefit: watching the rump of the American right detail the liberal bias of the Nobel Committee and at this point I guess the entire world. Fox News vs. the world. And not to forget what this award is about even more than Gore. If half of what we think we know about global warming is true, people will look back fifty years from now on the claims that "War on Terror" was the defining challenge of this century and see it as a very sick, sad joke -- which rather sums up the Bush presidency. But more than thinking only of what might have been, where can we go from here?" On Gore by Josh Marshall
Thanks to Cousin Sally.

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Do I Believe In The Bible? Believe In It? Hell, I've Seen It.

The odds are 3:1 that faith & belief are not the same.
There "
. . . is a conflict between two visions of the Christian life--one that emphasizes believing and one that emphasizes relationship. Within the earlier paradigm or way of seeing the Christian life, believing has been central--believing in God, believing in Jesus, believing in the Bible, believing in Christianity, believing in the creeds, and so forth. Within the emerging paradigm relationship, not believing is central. It is a relationship with God as disclosed in the Christian tradition, but the Christian tradition itself is not the object of belief. . . .
. . . the original meanings of the English words believe and believing are relational. They do not mean agreeing to accept dubious or problematic propositions to be true. They don't even mean believing divinely revealed propositions to be true.
To relate this to the four meanings of faith . . . originally the word believing covered all of these meanings. It was synonymous with faith in all of the senses I've described. Thus, in the Modern Period we have suffered an extraordinary reduction in the meaning of believing. We have reduced it and turned it into propositional believing, believing a particular set of statements or claims to be true." Faith, Not Belief by Dr. Marcus Borg This article was revealed to me by Peter, The Big Fisherman.

Monday, October 08, 2007

Happy Indigenous People's Day. Real Italians Celebrate It.

"Endless testimonies ... prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives. . - . But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if they tried to kill one of us now and then.... The admiral, it is true, was blind as those who came after him, and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes against the Indians...." Bartolome' de las Casas
"If Columbus had been expecting to land in Korea instead of India, the North American native peoples would today be known as Koreans. " S.H.E.

We're Number One! Aren't We? It Don't Get Any Bettern This. Does It?

"There’s a nice piece in the Washington Post called the '5 Myths About Sick Old Europe.' . . . Europe has a better economy, better jobs, and, of course, there are all those cradle to grave citizen benefits (which Sicko barely touched on) over which Americans are sick to death with envy. . . . Europe has happier, healthier, and more productive citizens. Here in the miserly USA, we are not even close." From Europe is Better.

Click Here For Our Strategery for Catching Up.

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Women Have Suffraged Enough

“If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It’s kind of a pipe dream, it’s a personal fantasy of mine, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting so stupidly, at least single women. It also makes the point, it is kind of embarrassing, the Democratic Party ought to be hanging its head in shame, that it has so much difficulty getting men to vote for it. I mean, you do see it’s the party of women and ‘We’ll pay for health care and tuition and day care — and here, what else can we give you, soccer moms?’”

The Beattitudes-Red Letter Edition

Bush/Dobson/Robertson Republicans are clambering to put them old ten commandments on everything (including courthouses). Yet you never see them showing much interest in displaying the Beatitudes, which are supposedly Jesus own words in the Sermon on the Mount. Of course if you read what Jesus supposedly said, its easy to see how it might make this current crop of republicans slightly uncomfortable. (Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted, Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth, Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled, Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy, Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God,
Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God, Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you)
I wouldn't mind seeing the one about blessed are the merciful being posted in all of our courthouses. That is pretty good stuff.
Thanks to Sammy, who was inspired by Kurt
Vonnegut's Man without a Country. http://books.google.com/books?id=T7J-Xg2bYKAC&pg=PP1&dq=inauthor:Kurt+inauthor:Vonnegut&sig=wjUk9QSCUiQTKzsejuDY7KzTl6Q#PPA68,M1

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Onward Christian Soldier-Bush Vetoes Children’s Health Insurance Bill.

"But it (the Clinton health care proposal) would do two important things. First, it would end the disgrace of America’s being the only advanced capitalist democracy on earth that does not guarantee health care to its citizens. Second, with any luck, it would create a slow-motion showdown between private and public health insurance. Given that private insurers spend around fifteen per cent of their budgets on administration—much of it devoted to keeping the sick off the rolls and, failing that, figuring out ways to avoid paying their medical bills—while Medicare spends two per cent, it ought to be an interesting and instructive contest." Hendrick Hertzberg,
Ghostbusters, New Yorker, Oct. 1, 2007.
35 For I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger, and you invited me into your home. 36 I was naked, and you gave me clothing. I was sick, and you cared for me. I was in prison, and you visited me.’

37 “Then these righteous ones will reply, ‘Lord, when did we ever see you hungry and feed you? Or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 Or a stranger and show you hospitality? Or naked and give you clothing? 39 When did we ever see you sick or in prison and visit you?’

40 “And the King will say, ‘I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters,[you were doing it to me!’ Matthew 25:35-40 (New Living Translation)

"'I believe in private medicine, not the federal government running the health care system. I do want Republicans and Democrats to come together to support a bill that focuses on the poorer children,' the president said, adding the government's policy should be to help people find private insurance." G.W. Bush, Oct. 3, 2007, following his veto of the SCHIP expansion bill.
See, Bush Vetoes Children’s Health Insurance Bill By DAVID STOUT

See, also, Jonah's Today's News and Matthew 25: 35-40Thanks to Jonah & Sammy for the tips.

Monday, October 01, 2007

Is The Pope Catholic? Nuns Aren’t Unless They Proffer Phallic Prayers.

“Sister Mary Theresa Dionne, one of the excommunicated nuns, said the group still plans to live in the convent, which it owns. 'We want to do God’s will, and we believe we are Catholic,' said the 82-year-old Dionne, the assistant superior of the convent. 'Even though they say we are not Catholic, this is not true.' . . . 'If you had asked me who are the people least likely in the state to commit heresy, I might have mentioned them,' said Hebert, who later choked up when discussing the excommunication. 'They are very orthodox, solid ladies who love God and love Jesus Christ.'" 6 Army of Mary nuns in Hot Springs excommunicated BY HEATHER HAHN

The Catholic Church is good at nothing if not chauvinistic misogynistic nitpickery. God knows that the Church leadership doesn’t have anything else to worry about now that poverty, war, & injustice have been eliminated from this world.
Sing it Luke!