Brushes with fame

As a journalist I have had many opportunities to meet and interview famous people over the years. Combined with the random encounters I’ve had with famous people outside of my work experience it makes for an interesting list. 

 Autographs sought and found: 

Lyndon Johnson - Found autographed copy of his biography “Vantage Point” at a Library book sale in Connecticut. 

George McGovern - Had him autograph my program after listening to him speak at Texas A&M when he was running for president in 1984. 

Al Gore - Saw him at an airport campaign rally in College Station in 1988 and had him sign a slip of paper. 

Molly Ivins - I have two of her books autographed - one by mail and one in person.

Barney Frank - Found an autographed copy of his book at a used book store.  

Burt Ward (Robin) - Parents took me to see him during a promotional gig at a car dealership in Indiana in the early 1970s. He autographed a promotional photo for me. Bob (Cowboy Bob) Glaze - Parents took me to see him at some event in Indiana in the early 1970s. Got a signed promotional photo of him on his horse. 

Luis Tiant - Former pitcher for the Boston Red Sox signed autographs at Missions baseball game in San Antonio last year. 

E. Gary Gygax - Had him autograph my program while attending Gen Con, a gaming convention in Madison, Wisconsin in 1983. 

Al Warden - NASA astronaut my dad took me to see at Grissom AFB in Indiana. Dave Scott - NASA astronaut (Same as above.) 

Eddie Albert - Actor signed autographs to promote dedication of Admiral Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg, Texas. 

Cliff Robertson - Same as above. 

Dolph Briscoe - Former governor of Texas. Had him autograph a book after I interviewed him. 

Robert Earle Keen - Purchased a CD that he had signed. 

Tish Hinojosa - Had her sign a CD at the Kerrville Folk Festival in 1993. 

Dalhart Windberg - Had him sign a print of one of his paintings I purchased at the Kerrville State Arts and Crafts Festival in 1994. 

Alabama band members - Had all the band members sign a publicity photo after a concert in San Marcos in 1982. 

Joe Diffie - Bought an autographed copy of his CD after watching him perform at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. 

Max Lucado - Autographed a book for me after an interview. 

Sister Helen Prejean - Bought her book "Dead Man Walking" and had her sign it at a book show. 

Nelson Wolf - Former Mayor of San Antonio and Bexar County Judge signed a copy of his book. 

 Interviewed: 

George W. Bush - Multiple interviews before and after he became governor, but not after he became president. 

Rick Perry - While running for Lt. Gov. and again after he became governor. 

John Sharp - While running for Lt. Gov. 

Phil Gramm - Came to Lubbock to promote something at Texas Tech shortly before launching his presidential campaign. 

Victor Morales - The guy with the white pickup truck came to Lubbock during his Quixotic bid for the U.S. Senate. 

John Cornyn - When he was a moderate Republican running for attorney general, before he became a crazy wingnut senator. 

Kay Bailey Hutchison - At some event in Lubbock. 

Laura Bush - Promoting reading or something in Lubbock. 

George Stephanopolous - On a speaking tour in Lubbock. 

James Carville - Same as above. 

Ken Starr - Gave the commencement address for the Law School at Texas Tech and then ducked out the back and breezed past me with a smile and a nod while ignoring my questions. 

Gary Mauro - While running for governor. 

Susan Combs - While running for Ag Commissioner. 

David Dewhurst - While running for Land Commissioner. 

Barney Frank - Interviewed him on the phone about the Superfund toxic waste cleanup issue when I was in Connecticut. 

Bob Bullock - Interviewed him on the phone when I was in Kerrville. 

Chris Dodd - Spoke with him at a pubicity event at the submarine base in Groton, Connecticut. 

Lowell Weicker - Talked with him after a speaking engagement in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. 

Clayton Williams - Interviewed him on the phone after he was inducted into the Texas Business Hall of Fame. 

Dolph Briscoe - Interviewed him for a feature story at his bank office in Uvalde. Max Lucado - Wrote a feature story on him in 2006. 

Rick Riordan - Wrote a feature story on him in 2007. 

Other Congress critters I’ve interviewed at one time or another: Ciro Rodriguez; Lamar Smith; Charlie Gonzalez; Larry Combest; Mac Thornberry; Henry Bonilla; Charles Stenholm; Sam Gejdenson; Rosa DeLauro 

 Met at social event: 

Ann Richards - Saw her at political mixer at A&M during her first gubernatorial campaign. 

Carol Channing - Was campaigning for Ann Richards at same event as above. Victor Navasky - Publisher of Nation Magazine held a mixer in New York during the 1992 Democratic National Convention. My wife and I rode the train in from Connecticut and attended. Saw Ralph Nader and Molly Ivins there. 

 Chance encounter: 

Jackie Sherrill - Texas A&M football coach. I rode an elevator with him at Rudder Tower - just the two of us - about 1985 or so. Didn’t say a word. 

Drew Gooden - Basketball player currently with the Spurs. Rode an elevator with him at a hotel downtown when he was still with the Cavaliers. 

David Robinson - Walked into Wal-Mart at I-10 and DeZavala one time and saw this really tall guy who turned out to be David Robinson. 

Greg Oden - Walked into McDonalds at I-10 and Wurzbach during the Final Four Playoffs and stood in line behind this really tall guy who turned out to be (I figured out the next day) Greg Oden, who would go on to be the No. 1 NBA draft pick that year. 

 Saw live performance: 

Patrick Stewart - Saw him perform with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Texas A&M before he was tapped for the role of Capt. Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation. 

Alabama - At Southwest Texas State University in 1982 

Cheap Trick - Opening act for Night Ranger at Texas A&M in 1983. 

Night Ranger - See above. 

Trans Siberian Orchestra - A Christmas concert in San Antonio 2002. 

Blue Man Group - Saw them perform in New York in 2001 or 2002. 

Peter Yarrow - Of Peter, Paul and Mary, at the Kerrville Folk Festival. 

Itschak Perlman - Performed at Texas A&M as part of OPAS concert series. 

Dixie Chicks (pre-Natalie Maines) - In Kerrville at YO Ranch Social Club. 

Tanya Tucker - Same as above. 

Robert Earle Keen - Performed several times at July 4th Missions baseball games. Ani DiFranco - At Kerrville Folk Festival 

I saw all these folks over a number of years at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo: Barry Manilow; Joe Diffie; Asleep at the Wheel; LeAnn Rimes; Michael Martin Murphy; Kenny Rogers 

The Fifth Dimension - Performed at outside park in Houston. 

Lyle Lovett - Saw him perform in San Antonio. 

Weird Al Yankovic - Saw him perform in San Antonio. 

 Watched live speaking event: 

George H.W. Bush - He was the commencement speaker for my graduation from Texas A&M in 1989. Also saw him speak during the dedication for the Admiral Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg. 

Bill Clinton - Saw him give a speech to the Middletown Chamber of Commerce in Connecticut when he was running for president in 1992. 

Hillary Clinton - Saw her give a speech at Yale University when she was campaigning for her husband in 1992. 

Al Gore - Saw him give a speech at a college in Middletown, Connecticut during the 1992 campaign. 

John Kenneth Galbraith and William F. Buckley Jr. - Watched a debate they had as part of a lecture tour at Texas A&M. 

Rob Bell - Saw him in San Antonio during one of his lecture tours. 

 Saw them at live sporting events: 

Johnny Bench - Saw him hit a home run at the Astrodome when the Reds played the Astros in 1978. 

Billy Williams - Saw him hit a home run at Wrigley Field when the Cubs played the Astros in 1973. 

Bo Jackson - Saw him play in the Cotton Bowl against the Texas Aggies after he won the Heisman Trophy. The Aggies stopped him on a 4th and goal situation and won the game. Whoop!! 

Chuck Knoblauch - Watched him play baseball at Texas A&M before going to the majors where he was Rookie of the Year. 

Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, Tony Parker, Kawhi Leonard, etc. - Saw them at numerous Spurs basketball games.

Network TV executives hate me

TV Guide gives a rundown on the status of TV shows for next Fall.

First, of the shows that have already been canceled, I regularly watched:
Boston Legal
ER
Life on Mars
My Own Worst Enemy

Of the shows that have a “poor” chance of returning, I am regularly watching:
Dollhouse
The Unusuals

The only show with a “good” chance of returning that I watch is:
Castle

And the only show that has been officially renewed that I watch is:
Lost

Network TV sucks.

60 votes afterall

I certainly wasn’t expecting Sen. Arlen “Magic Bullet Theory” Specter to switch parties today, but it was most certainly a welcome development for Democrats. Especially after the more obvious candidates for party switching over the years have resisted - from James Jeffords of Vermont who became an Independent rather than associating with us Dems, to Lincoln Chafee who ended up losing his Senate seat in Rhode Island because he stubbornly refused to switch parties.
But rather than following Chafee into the abyss, Specter decided to take the plunge in a bid to salvage his political career. And the odds are good now that it will work. And now Democrats are on the verge of a 60-vote filibuster-busting majority in the Senate as soon as Al Franken takes his rightful place as the next senator from Minnesota.
So Republicans are really hurting, especially in light of their loss in the New York District 20 race last week - A one-time Republican stronghold that stayed in Democratic hands despite their best efforts.
But believe me when I say that “I feel their pain.” Yes, I can actually feel just the slightest twinge of sympathy for my misguided Republican brothers and sisters on this one. That’s because I can still remember how I felt in 1994-95 as one conservative Democrat after another took turns jumping ship and stabbing the party in the back.
Remember Sen. Richard Shelby? Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell? Or how about all those turncoat Congressmen shortly after the start of the Gingrich Revolution — Billy Tauzin, Nathan Deal, Mike Parker, Jimmy Hayes, Greg Laughlin...
Yeah, it’s no fun when the shoe is on the other foot. Pretty soon there may be others like Olympia Snowe following Specter’s lead. But there shouldn’t be too many if for no other reason than the party has already shrunk down so small that there just aren’t that many people left who could conceivably make the switch. The moderate wing of the Republican Party can already hold its caucus meetings in a phone booth.

GOP thinks Swine Flu preparation is “Pork”

73 cases of swine flu confirmed; hundreds more feared

Seventy-three cases of swine flu have been confirmed worldwide, the World Health Organization said Monday.
Forty of those cases are in the United States, 26 in Mexico, six in Canada and one in Spain, a WHO representative said.
Later Monday, health officials in Scotland said two cases of swine flu had been confirmed there.
Hundreds more cases are suspected, especially in Mexico, where as many as 103 deaths are thought to have been caused by the virus, the country’s health minister said. More than 2,000 cases have been reported but not confirmed in the country.
Federal officials confirmed 20 new U.S. cases on Monday.

It would be wonderful if our government had been prepared for this type of occurrence. Unfortunately, Republicans stripped funding for Pandemic Preparedness out of the recent stimulus package.
That was $900 million that would come in handy right now in dealing with this swine flu crisis except that “fiscally conservative” Republicans axed it from the bill. They called it, ironically enough, “pork.”
Oh, and if fighting to keep the government ill-prepared for a pandemic crisis such as this one wasn’t enough, we can also thank Republicans for the fact that we still don’t have a Secretary of Health and Human Services in place in the midst of the biggest health care crisis in years because they have beenholding up her confirmation on account of her pro-choice position on abortion.

Spurs reboot

Yeah, I know it ain't over yet. But I'd pretty much decided it was over before it started anyway. The Spurs' playoff chances, that is.
I didn't figure they would make it all the way this year even with a healthy Manu Ginobili. Now with Manu out, it looks like they are going to get bounced out of the playoffs in the first round for the first time since 2000.
But, hey, at least they made it to the playoffs - and won their division to boot. So we should be happy with that and look forward to doing better next year.
Only, what will the Spurs look like next year?
I'm betting we will see a major shakeup of this team almost to the core. The way I see it there are only three indispensible players right now - Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili. Everyone else is expendable at one level or another.
I'm thinking they will hang onto Roger Mason Jr. and George Hill, and I kind of hope that they will keep Drew Gooden around as well. But everyone else may be cleared out before next year rolls around. Michael Finley and Bruce Bowen may both retire. Kurt Thomas and Fabricio Oberto will be cleared out to make room for some younger and more aggresive rebounders. Ime Udoka and Matt Bonner are too inconsistent and Jacques Vaughn is being pushed out by Hill.
Of course, I don't know if there are contractual obligations that could keep some of these guys around longer. And I don't know the availability of people who could possibly replace them. But I just know that we aren't going to get any further with the same crew in place anymore and something will have to change.
The last game against Dallas should have made that clear. Tony Parker plays his heart out and scores 43 points while Tim Duncan contributes a solid 25 points and yet the Spurs still lose 99 to 90. How did that happen?
If you look at the stats for the Dallas Mavericks you see that only one player on the team scored more points than Tim (and just barely - Josh Howard had 28 points). But because everyone on the team contributed they still won.
How pathetic were the rest of the Spurs? Finley had a weak 7 points after playing 36 minutes. Bowen had 5 points in 31 minutes. Bonner played 22 minutest and scored squat. Udoka was in for 19 minutes at scored 1 point and Mason was in for 17 minutes and scored nada. That's pathetic! There is no excuse for losing a game like that.
The reason the Spurs are struggling right now is because they didn't bring someone in to help Timmy out under the basket the way Timmy came in early in his career to help out David Robinson. But now there is no one around to help him out as he goes into the twilight of his career.
Another problem is whoever the coaching wizard was who found Parker and Ginobili for the Spurs must be gone now, because that person surely would not have let Luis Scola slip away like the Spurs did. Now Scola is helping the Houston Rockets go to the next round of the playoffs rather than helping the Spurs.
Do you think we could trade the latter half of our team to Houston now and get him back? No, I didn't think so.

Torture retribution can wait

I know Ann won't be happy but I fully support President Obama's position resisting a Congressional investigation of the Bush era torture policies.

Mr. Obama said a special inquiry would steal time and energy from his policy agenda, and could mushroom into a wider distraction looking back at the Bush years...

That is exactly right. I know that President Obama can walk and chew gum at the same time, but the problem is that the rest of the country can't. And to accomplish the gargantuan task of repairing the damage to our economy from the gross negligence and mismanagement of the Bush years will require the full support and attention of the country.
Paul Krugman argues today that we must procede with a full-scale investigation now in order to "reclaim America's soul."
Now, I love Krugman and I generally agree with him on most things. But this is a case where we can see the divide between liberal idealism (Krugman) and liberal pragmatism (Obama).
Krugman says that

America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for.

Well, that's a nice sentiment and all, but the reality is that we are NOT "a nation of moral ideals," we are a nation of people all with our own flaws and shortcomings and all more intent on taking care of our day-to-day needs than worrying about upholding moral ideals. I can tell you right now that if I lose my job and am forced to give up the house where I intend to raise my children, I'm not going to give a damn whether Dick Cheney and his cronies spend any time in jail or not.
I think Obama understands this. He does not want his agenda to get bogged down in a long slog through the past sins of the Bush administration. That doesn't mean that we just forget about it and push it all under the rug, but this is not the time to be pushing all of this stuff up to the front burner.
The USS Titanic just hit an iceberg and it's time to have all hands on deck and find some way to salvage the situation. It's not time to start a tribunal to prosecute the guys who ran us into the iceberg.
Sen. Harry Reid is right that we should just let the process play itself out for now and not rush things.

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, and other top Senate Democrats endorsed Mr. Obama’s view on Thursday, telling reporters at a news conference at the Capitol that they preferred to wait for the results of an investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee expected late this year...

Just remember that the people who ran this torture regime are now out of power. And the best thing we can do now is to make sure that they stay out of power for the indefinite future. The way to do that is to demonstrate to the American people that the current administration's policies will work to pull us out of this mess. Otherwise, I'm afraid that a slim majority of people could be persuaded to put them back into office again and then before you know it we will be back where we started.

I agree that we need to regain America's soul, but we don't do that through retribution. We do it by pursuing the right course and demonstrating once again that it is the best path.

Texas Republicans hate America

A new poll just out confirms that half of all Texas Republicans are dumber than rocks.

Forty-eight percent of (Texas) Republicans said they favor secession, the same percentage that said they didn’t in a Research 2000/DailyKos poll released Thursday.

How incredibly embarrassing.

Filibusters and Reconciliation

I absolutely believe that the Democrats will have to use the reconciliation process to push Obama’s agenda on healthcare, energy and education through Congress. Republicans are going to throw a huge hissy fit when this happens, but all I can say to that is “Bring it on.”
As this graph aptly illustrates:

Republicans have not been shy about using the filibuster to derail legislation that they can’t defeat on a majority vote. The filibuster is an arcane Senate rule that has been abused in recent years to enforce a 60-vote supermajority on almost everything. The only way to avoid this abuse is to consider the legislation under rules known as reconciliation. This is not an uncommon practice as noted here, and has been used many times in past by Republicans - most recently to pass Bush’s tax cuts for the rich.
So, if Republicans can use reconciliation to screw up the economy, Democrats should be able to use it to put things right again. I think it is imperative that Obama get his agenda through Congress (assuming that it has majority support) and not allow it to be derailed by Republicans who are presently pulling out all the stops to keep Al Franken from taking his Senate Seat just so they can deny Democrats what may be a crucial vote needed to override a Republican filibuster.
The economic crisis facing the nation today is too critical to allow political gamesmanship to override the will of the electorate. The public voted in November. As Republicans were fond of saying back when they used to win elections - “Elections have consequences.”
They can squeal and protest and wave teabags all they want, but Democrats and the Obama administration need to stay focused on cleaning up the mess and putting the country back on the right track or else, God forbid, the Republicans may get back in there again and screw things up even worse, if that is even possible.

Tweet!

OK, I finally took the leap onto Twitter. You can find all my Twittering here.
Up until now I had resisted jumping into Twitter on account of the fact that I don’t own a cell phone and I had assumed until just recently that it was only for people texting one another on their cell phones.
But it seems that it encompasses the Web as well so even Luddites like me can join in the fun. I don’t know that I will have much to Twitter about myself or if I will just use it to follow other Twits. But it was fun setting it up and finding my initial group of Twits to follow. For some reason the site won’t take any of the photos I’ve tried to upload so I remain faceless in the Twitosphere for now.
So for anyone else out there still resisting the temptation to Twitter, I can now say ‘Come on in, the water’s fine!’

Rick Perry's Secession Obsession

Knowing he is going to face a tough primary challenge next year from Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, Gov. Rick Perry has lately been trying to raise his profile with the conservative base of his party. So it was no surprise that he went out of his way to embrace the recent "Tea Party" protests.
But he may have gotten more attention than he anticipated when he decided to dip his toe into the part of the pool occupied by the most fringe elements of his party - the anti-government secessionists. Just by broaching the topic of secession, Perry put himself outside the mainstream of American politics and gave political legitimacy to the lunatic fringe wing of his party. If this actually helps him in a Republican Primary, it is a sad testament to the pathetic state of the GOP today.
But as the sitting governor it is completely innappropriate and irresponsible for Perry to be raising this issue at all. He is smart enough to know that it is completely asinine and stupid, but apparently still thinks exploiting this intellectually handicapped segment of the population will prove beneficial at election time. I hope he is wrong.

Tea Party aftermath

How stupid was that?
I mean, what exactly were these people protesting yesterday? Taxes that haven’t gone up in 10 years and were actually cut just a few weeks ago? Government spending which is currently keeping the economy from falling into the abyss?
I think what we really saw was a great big pity party for a lot of people still upset because they got their butts whooped in the last election. Seriously, isn’t it a little late (or at best way too early) to be threatening politicians with ouster? The election was just three months ago! They lost and now they CAN’T get over it. So at the behest of the shrill rightwing noise machine they marched around yesterday shaking their fists and denouncing the government. Yawn.
At best there were a lot of people who are just a little confused and misinformed about how the world works (and particularly how the government works). At worst you had some extreme elements angry because a black guy (i.e. a “socialist”) got elected president and now they are ready to secede, revolt, whine or whatever. In some ways the protest reminded me of the anti-government militia groups I used to cover in the mid-90s out in the Texas Hill Country before the Oklahoma City bombing sent them all scurrying back into the woodwork.
There was one event that I covered in Boerne sometime around 1994-95 that was called Patriots for Freedom or something like that. It featured a lot of the far-right fringe groups, offshoots of the John Birch Society, secessionist anti-government groups and the militias - gun-toting nutjobs threatening to revolt over taxes. They had all kinds of booths set up with vendors selling automatic weapons and artillery, books on how to avoid paying taxes, lots of literature about how the federal government is illegitimate and, of course, Impeach Clinton bumper stickers.
I imagine that some of the people who went to that Boerne confab were probably at the Tea Party yesterday. The Express-News estimated the crowd to be about 5,000, which is a lot, but apparently not enough for the Tea Party organizers who inflated that number to 16,000 on their web site.
Some people objected to the group using the Alamo as a backdrop for their protest. That doesn’t bother me. The Alamo belongs to everybody. As long as they weren’t relieving themselves on the wall outside or otherwise trashing the place, I have no problem with them holding a civil protest in the vicinity. But the spectacle of these people wrapping themselves in the flag and gushing over the Pledge of Allegiance and God Bless America while at the same time ranting about how much they hate the government and want to secede from the union would have been an embarrassment to our forefathers if they had been here to see it.
I, of course, did not attend the Tea Party. I hate big crowds and avoid them whenever I can. Plus there were much more important things to do last night, like watch the Spurs play. But I’ll be curious to see what the wingnuts do next as the glow of their big party wears off and they recede back into the political obscurity that the 2008 election results gave them.

Update
I just saw this at Daily Kos and had to add it:

So here’s the basic lesson of the teabagging hissy fit. The new Republican “theory” of democracy:
GOP wins: “Mandate! Elections have consequences!”
GOP loses: “Tyranny! Fascism! Revolution! Secession!

A Citizens Guide to Tax Demagoguery

Robert Reich has a great post up that answers and counters many of the bogus claims made by the clueless teabaggers yesterday.

No one likes to pay taxes, so tax day typically attracts a range of right-wing Republicans, kooks, and demagogues, all of whom tell us how awful we have it. Herewith a short citizen's guide (that is, a citizen's guide that's short rather than a guide for short citizens) responding to the predictable charges:

1. "Americans pay too much in taxes." Wrong: The United States has the lowest taxes of all developed nations.

2. "The rich pay too much! The top ten percent of income earners pay over 72 percent of all income taxes!" Misleading: The main reason the rich pay such a large percent is they've become so much richer than the bottom 90 percent in recent years. If you look at what they pay as individuals -- the percent of their incomes over and above the highest rate below them -- you'll see a steady decline over the years. When Republican Dwight Eisenhower was president, the marginal rate on the highest earners was 91 percent (after deductions and tax credits, closer to 50 percent); by 1980 it was still up there, at 70 percent (an effective rate of closer to 45 percent); under Bill Clinton, it was 38 percent (an effective rate closer to 28 percent).

Look at the after-tax earnings of families and you'll see what's really going on. Between 1980 and 2000, the after-tax earnings of famlies at the top rose more than 150 percent, while the after-tax earnings of families in the middle rose about 10 percent. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 raised the after-tax incomes of most Americans by a bit over 1 percent -- but raised the after-tax incomes of millionaires by 4.4 percent.

3. "The bottom 60 percent pay only 3.3 percent of the taxes!" Misleading again. Most Americans are paying more in sales taxes than they ever have. Property taxes have also been rising at a steady clip. And Social Security taxes have also risen (thanks to the Greenspan Commission), while earnings over about $100,000 aren't subject to Social Security taxes. So-called "sin" taxes (mostly beer and cigarettes) have also skyrocketed. All of these taxes take a bigger bite out of the paychecks of people with lower incomes than they do people with higher incomes.

4. "Obama is raising your taxes!" Wrong. Obama is cutting taxes for 95 percent of Americans, by about $400 per person a year -- not a whopping tax cut, to be sure, but not a tax increase by any stretch. Only the top 2 percent will have a tax increase, but even this tax increase is modest. Basically, they go back to the rates they were paying under Bill Clinton (their deductions will be limited to 28 percent, which is only fair). And they won't start paying this until 2011 anyway.

5. "The huge debts we're wracking up will cause your taxes to rise!" Wrong again. When it comes to the national debt, as I've said before, the relevant statistic is the ratio of debt to the gross domestic product. The only sure way to bring that debt down and make it manageable in future years is to get the economy growing again -- which requires that, in the short term, the government spend a lot of money (because consumers and businesses won't). In the long term, the biggest source of concern is rising health-care costs. And that's something Obama and Congress are aiming to tackle.

6. "We have a patriotic duty to stand up against Washington taxes!" Just the opposite. We have a patriotic duty to pay taxes. As multi-billionaire Warrent Buffett put it, "If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you'll find out how much this talent is going to product in the wrong kind of soil. I will be struggling thirty years later." President Teddy Roosevelt made the case in 1906 when he argued in favor of continuing the inheritance tax. "The man of great wealth owes a particular obligation to the state because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government."

An acquaintance from law school, now a partner in one of Washington's biggest and wealthiest law firms, explained to me one day over lunch how he and his partners use tax rules to create offsetting taxable gains and losses, and then allocate the gains to the firm's foreign partners who don't pay taxes in the United States. That way, they keep the losses here and shelter their income abroad. I noticed he had an American flag lapel pin. "You're supporting our troops," I said, referring to his pin. "Yup," he replied, entirely missing my point.

True patriotism isn't cheap. It's about taking on a fair share of the burden of keeping America going.

Tea Party program

Anyone curious about who is going to speak at the big San Antonio "Tea Party" in front of the Alamo? Here is the agenda from their website:

6:00p.m.-6:10p.m. - Prayer/Welcome (Adam McManus)
6:10p.m.-6:15p.m. - Pledge of allegiance (Seth Alfaro and Gavin Carmona)
6:15p.m-6:20p.m. - “God Bless America” (Jean French)
6:20p.m.-6:30p.m. - “The Alamo: A Line in the Sand” (Julia Hayden)
6:30p.m.-6:40p.m. - Opening Remarks (Glenn Beck)
6:40p.m.-6:50p.m. - National Anthem (Ted Nugent)
6:50p.m.-7:00p.m. - “An Immigrant’s Story” (Katharine Moreno)
7:00p.m.-7:10p.m. - “The Duty of a Citizen” (Edward Jaax)
7:10p.m.-7:20p.m. - “The War on Economic Freedom” (Phil Pepin)
7:20p.m.-7:40p.m. - “Texas for Sale” (Terri Hall)
7:40p.m.-8:00p.m. - “Freedom at Risk” (Doug Phillips)
8:00 p.m.- 8:15 p.m. - “What You Can Do Now
8:15 p.m. - “We Must Take America Back” Steve Vaus

The first thing that strikes me is that it is going to take a half hour just to get through the prayer, pledge of allegiance and "God Bless America". Then they foolishly think that Glenn Beck and Ted Nugent are both going to give up the microphone after just 10 minutes.
But who are all these other people speaking at this "non-partisan" event? I did a little Googling and this is what I came up with...
Edward Jaax appears to be a graduate of something called Patriot Academy, which bills itself as the "premier conservative political training camp in the nation" and "a five-day political training program where students age sixteen to twenty-five learn about America's system of government from a Biblical worldview." It sounds creepy to me.
Next is Phil Pepin, a Ron Paul supporter who is connected with something called CampaignForLibertySA. So this must be where the "non-partisanship" comes in. The teabaggers range from far-rightwing Republicans to far-rightwing Libertarians.
Next is Terri Hall who I am assuming is the person associated with the Texas Toll Party, a rightwing activist group opposing toll roads.
Doug Phillips must be this guy. He apparently sells books and other merchandise targeted toward homeschoolers. This is from his website:

Everything on our site is an expression of our mission: to rebuild Christian family culture. At Vision Forum, we are unabashed advocates for the historic, biblical ideal for motherhood and fatherhood; we rejoice in the revival of biblical education promoted through the home school movement; and we dare to believe that it is still noble and virtuous to train our sons to hold the doors for our daughters...

OK, then.
And finally, it looks like attendees will be subjected to a song from Steve Vaus.
It all sounds like sooooo much fun!

A very balanced panel of judges

A three-judge panel in Minnesota has looked at all the evidence and the arguments surrounding the tedious, lengthy recount of the Senate election and has determined unanimously that Al Franken is the winner.
And yet, Republican Norm Coleman is still going to appeal the results to the state Supreme Court.
So was the three-judge panel not good enough? Were they biased against Coleman? What was the political makeup of the panel?
It turns out the panel was exceedingly well balanced with one judge appointed by a Democrat, one judge appointed by a Republican and one judge appointed by an independent (Jesse Ventura). You can’t get much more balanced than that. And did I mention that they were unanimous in their decision?
But none of that really matters to Coleman or the Republican Party which at this point is simply trying to keep Democrats from getting another vote in the Senate for as long as possible.
One question that I have. Since Franken was elected to a six-year term in the Senate, when does the clock start on that term? When he finally gets sworn in? Or has it already started back on election day?
It hardly seems fair if that is the case.
Here is hoping that the Minnesota Supreme Court will bring this to a rapid conclusion and I hope the voters in Minnesota won’t soon forget how Republicans screwed them out of representation and seniority in the Senate.

Of Puppies and Pirates

I was having to defend President Obama this weekend over his supposed mishandling of the pirate hostage crisis off the coast of Somalia. We apparently weren’t being tough enough and were sitting around holding hands and singing Kumbayah or something. But before the day was over I learned that we were doing a bit more than hand-holding and hymn-singing. Three of the four pirates ended up with holes in their heads courtesy of Navy SEAL sniper fire and the captain of the vessel who was taken hostage was free and unharmed.
You really couldn’t have asked for a better ending, unless of course you are a fanatical, far-rightwing Obama-hater like this guy.
Beldar, who I lost all respect for long ago, is not satisfied with this outcome. His thirst for blood is not satiated and he wants the fourth pirate, now in captivity, to be put to death. He also goes on to spit at Obama and try and twist the story to make it seem like he was guilty of intentionally prolonging the crisis. The rightwing radio yakkers quickly followed suit. It was truly ridiculous and people who are not wrapped up in the cult could see that it wouldn’t have mattered what Obama did or didn’t do. He could have swum out there and personally slit the throats of all the pirates and STILL would have been criticized by the wingnuts as being soft on terrorism or piratism or whatever.
Obama’s recent trip to Europe was nitpicked at every opportunity for percieved improprieties or lack of protocol. They sniped about the gift he gave the Queen. They complained about Michelle Obama breaking protocol by hugging the queen. They went completely nuts when Obama bent down to grasp the Saudi King’s hands saying it was a “bow.”
With the economy starting to turn around, the stock market beginning to recover and banks starting to pay back their TARP loans, it’s like the right has become extremely desperate to find something - anything! - to bash Obama over the head with.
That became even more evident when Newt Gingrich grumped that the news stories about the Obama family’s new dog were “fairly stupid” and whined that nobody cares where the dog came from.
What was really stupid is why the news media keeps interviewing Newt Gingrich. Who cares what he has to say?

Life on Mars canceled

I just learned today to my great despair that the TV show "Life on Mars" has been canceled after just one season. It now joins Firefly as one of my favorite shows to last only one season.
The only good news is that they gave the show's creators enough forewarning that they were able to film a series finale episode that resolved the show. I haven't seen it yet, but my understanding is that they did a good job wrapping up the series.
But still, there is no reason why the show couldn't have continued for several more seasons at least. It was a fun show with a terrific cast. I am so depressed.
All I can figure is that the TV executives closely monitor my viewing habits and use it as a reverse poll, canceling shows that I watch and promoting shows that I avoid. How else to explain the sudden death of Boston Legal last year. The early demise of My Own Worst Enemy early this season. The end of ER, which I watched regularly, and now the end of Life on Mars.
Lately, I have also been watching Dollhouse, the news series by Buffy the Vampire creator Joss Whedon, and Castle, the crime drama starring Nathan Filion of Firefly fame. So be warned because both these shows are sure to be canceled as well. I would be shocked if either is approved for a second season.
Since the network TV executives are working so hard to prevent me from having any shows to watch on TV, I may have to oblige and finally give in. When Lost finally ends in another year or two I may be completely out of options.

The NRA rules their world

The Houston Chronicle has a good editorial today about the idiotic bill before the Texas Legislature that would force public universities to allow handguns on campus.

the most troubling, irresponsible one of all is a bill to allow concealed weapons on college campuses. Authored by Rep. Joe Driver, R-Garland, it seems to have enough support to pass the House. In the Senate, 13 of the 31 members have promised their support for an identical bill authored by Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio.

It’s a horrifying thought. It is our fervent hope that cooler heads in the Senate will prevail and block its passage. Students have enough on their plates without having to worry that horsing around, drinking or otherwise acting like a college student could result in an unintended tragedy.

There are excellent reasons why all major car rental agencies require that a driver be at least 25, or pay a hefty premium if younger. Psychologists are well aware that the ability to foresee the consequences of one’s behavior is still developing long past adolescence.

The arguments that having a concealed weapon would help prevent tragedies such as Columbine and Virginia Tech are discounted by experts, who cite statistics that being in possession of a handgun can be a dangerous proposition in itself, on or off campus. Texas colleges seem to agree: Campus police departments and more than 40 colleges have voiced their opposition, noted the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Within the last month, 57 people have died in eight mass shootings around the country. Just a week ago yesterday, a gunman shot and killed 13 people in Binghamton, N.Y., before killing himself. The next day, three Pittsburgh police officers were killed, hours after a man killed his five children and then himself in Washington State. Eight died the week before that in a nursing home in North Carolina; four police officers in Oakland. … Most of the killers were registered gun owners.

We live in a violent country. And firearms are the weapons of choice. They have no place on a college campus.

Most of the lawmakers who are supporting this outrageous legislation are doing so simply because they don't want to risk losing their 100 percent rating with the NRA. The fact that they would allow an extremist organization like the NRA to dictate to public universities that they have to allow guns on campus (private schools would be conveniently exempt), despite the opposition of the very people charged with protecting the students on these campuses, shows just how completely irresponsible and morally bankrupt they have become.
These moronic cowboy fantasies that gun nuts have that they will whip out their concealed handguns and stop some campus shooter are as likely to happen as they are to repel an invasion of space aliens. More likely to happen is that they will screw around with their gun at some point and get themselves or someone else shot.
Some letter writers to the Chronicle had a great suggestion for these jerk lawmakers. Since they are going to force handguns onto our college campuses, the bill should also contain a clause opening up handguns to the state Capitol and their legislative offices.
Such idiots!

The Cult of Conservatism

I've often wondered why it is so hard to have a political discussion with some conservatives. Rational argument seems impossible when the reponse is always a random spewing of meaningless nonsense. (See the comments in the post below for a good example).
I have a theory as to why this is. I believe a large segment of today's "conservative" movement has essentially developed into a cult. Like the classic definition of a cult, these people isolate themselves from regular society and adhere to a strict set of doctrine dictated to them by a small group of high priests and priestesses.
The isolation comes in the way that they shut themselves off from all forms of news and information except those that are approved by the cult - Fox News, Washington Times, NewsMax, rightwing radio, rightwing blogs, and so forth.
All other forms of communication are viewed as suspect and dismissed as heretical and false. The media personalities on these few approved outlets serve as the high priests of the cult - Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, etc.
They are the gatekeepers of truth for the cultists. Until they say that it is OK to believe something, it is rejected by the cult followers. They are, as a rule, paranoid and distrustful of all other forms of media as well as all forms of government and just about anybody and everybody not directly connected to their cult network.
I think this is why a cult leader like the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who runs the Washington Times, fits in so well with the rightwing movement today. Conservative cultists aren't bothered by Moon's beliefs that he is the "messiah", because he has the two things that the cult followers truly prize and worship above all else - money and power.
Now not all "conservatives" are total adherents to the cult. Mark for instance is not fully vested in the cult because his devotion to Catholicism overrides it in some instances. Others may be only partial converts at this point, but the clear direction of the Republican Party today is towards full embracement of the cult mentality.
Like the Scientologists that they resemble, the conservative cultists have an irrational fear of things they don't fully understand. For Scientologists, it is the fear of psychology. For conservatives it is the fear of "socialism" by which they mean any government program or initiative that veers away from a strictly hard-right ideology.
More on this later....

Wingnuts on Parade

Next Wednesday, April 15, San Antonio will pay unwitting host to a rightwing pity party and protest event being billed as the San Antonio Tea Party.
What will distinguish the San Antonio Tea Party from the hundreds of other tea parties scheduled for that same day in other cities (and the dozens that have previously been held) is that the Mad Hatter himself - far-right talk radio host Glenn Beck - will be at the San Antonio event in an effort to exploit the city’s shrine of liberty - The Alamo - for his partisan political purposes.
While researching this issue prior to writing this post, I was surprised to learn that the person heading up the local event is none other than Robin Juhl, aka Ranten’ Raven, my old blogging buddy and sparring partner.
Raven is the one who (with his lovely wife) planned and organized the one and only San Antonio Blogger BBQ, a pleasant gathering that brought together locally-based political bloggers of all stripes. It was with great sadness that I reported two years ago the demise of Raven’s blog. So I am happy to see that he is still doing well, although not so delighted to see what it is that has been keeping him busy lately.
But I must say that he has done some good work organizing this event as you can see by the website and blog that has been set up. And I appreciate their efforts to keep the gathering as civil and peaceful as possible as evidenced by the “Rules” they have listed on their site:

RULE 1: No Violence
We are not anarchists. We are concerned citizens using the freedoms secured by our nations founders and declared in the Bill of Rights to petition our government. Any who advocate, in general, any act of violence or other active civil disobedience will be told (not asked--TOLD!) to leave our reserved area. Any who advocate, in specific, any act of violence will be reported to the San Antonio Police or to the US Secret Service, as appropriate. Our Founders gave us the Bill of Rights and we will use them. Talk of “battles” must be reserved to the context of “Battle of the Flowers” and “political battles.” We will act in a peaceful, lawful manner, period. PERIOD. Your alternative is to form your own protest, separate from ours. We have no problem with those who want to organize their own Tea Party. Good luck, and may God Bless your efforts.

Of course, if they actually do uphold this rule then they will have to ask Glenn Beck to leave as soon as he shows up. The same goes for that wild-eyed fascist freak Ted Nugent who is planning to show up and butcher the National Anthem on his electric guitar.
As Steve Benen noted today, these tea party protesters seem a bit confused about what they are supposed to be protesting. They don’t like all of the spending and the deficits, but for some reason they didn’t seem to be bothered by it too much when it was going on for the past eight years under a Republican president. Apparently, a Republican president spending hundreds of billions of dollars to repair infrastructure in Iraq is OK, but a Democratic president spending hundreds of billions of dollars to repair infrastructure in the U.S. is not. And nevermind that the point behind the spending boost is to try and pull the country out of the economic death spiral created by the Republican administration’s failed economic policies.
The organizers of this event have gone to great lengths to say that it is not supposed to be a partisan, anti-Obama, anti-Democrat affair. But it is hard to see anyone who supports the current administration showing up for an event meant to protest everything they are trying to do to save our economy.
I guess the thing that disturbs me the most about it is just that - the extreme anti-government tone of the event. It is hard to see how these people can claim to love their country when they seem to despise every aspect of it other than the symbolism. Sure, they loooooove the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, the National Anthem, pictures of bald eagles, and so on. But they absolutely hate the U.S. government, even when its being run by rightwing Republicans, and they can’t stand most of their fellow Americans on whom they blame most all of their problems on, whether its the “liberals” or “Hollywood” or immigrants or welfare recipients.

Mean as a snake

I’m sorry, but hearing Republican congressmen refer to Speaker Nancy Pelosi as “mean as a snake” and “Tom DeLay in a skirt” strikes me as very funny and very much deserved. For them, that is.
Personally, I think she is like DeLay in the sense that she is very powerful and runs a tight ship, but she is also very different in that she is not a corrupt little weasel like the ex-bug exterminator was.

Take Me Out to the Ballgame

I’m very glad to see George W. Bush back doing what he does best.

I’m also glad to see that baseball season has started up again, especially since the Spurs season is, for all practical purposes, over.

Copies of copies of copies

This is a fascinating article.

But almost immediately, Ehrman ran into a problem. It was an intellectual problem at first, but it soon became larger and harder to quarantine. In one of the first classes he took at Moody, he learned that none of the original texts of the New Testament exist. All we have are copies, made years later -- usually, many centuries later. In fact, the copies are copies of copies, and they’re filled with errors or intentional changes made over decades or centuries by scribes. Burning with fervor to discover the true word of God, the authentic divine voice that had been obscured or changed by all-too-human writers, Ehrman decided to begin a serious study of the New Testament. He completed his undergraduate studies at Wheaton College, where he began studying ancient Greek, the original language of the New Testament. But there was still no answer to his original question: How could we know what the word of God was if all we had were error-riddled copies?
So Ehrman decided to plunge all the way in and immerse himself in the academic study of the texts of the New Testament. He entered the Princeton Theological Seminary, home to the world’s leading authority in the field, Bruce Metzger. His literalist faith in and his devotional approach to the Bible were under increasing strain, but he managed to hold onto them for a while -- until a professor jotted a casual comment on one of Ehrman’s papers. Ehrman was attempting to explain a passage from the Gospel of Mark in which Jesus refers to an event that took place “when Abiathar was the high priest.” The problem is that the book in the Old Testament that Jesus is referring to states that not Abiathar but his father Ahimelech was the high priest. Ehrman came up with a convoluted argument to reconcile the contradiction, using Greek etymology to prove that Mark did not mean what he apparently said. Ehrman believed that his professor, a beloved and pious scholar named Cullen Story, would appreciate his argument as a fellow believer in biblical inerrancy.
Story’s response, Ehrman wrote in his best-selling 2005 book “Misquoting Jesus,” “went straight through me.” “Maybe,” Story scrawled at the end of Ehrman’s paper, “Mark just made a mistake.”

Greatest moments on TV

I am shamelessly swiping this idea from Donna. This is a list of my picks for the greatest TV moments. I am trying to stick to things that I saw when they happened and not re-runs
This is really a hard list to do because while I can think of lots of TV shows that I loved to watch, it is hard to come up with one memorable scene that stands out above all the rest as one that I found especially funny, inspiring or entertaining. But here it goes:

Mork and Mindy: Mork (Robin Williams) goes into the kitchen and finds some eggs. Spaceships on his planet are shaped like eggs. He takes an egg, tosses it into the air and says “Fly and be free!” The look of shock on his face when the egg splats on the table is priceless.

Carol Burnet Show: Tim Conway playing the old man who does everything slooooooowly. At the end of the sketch he accidently falls out of a high-rise window. You hear him fall and crash at the bottom. There is a momentary pause and then he screams “Aaaaahhhhhhhh!”

SNL: Steve Martin performing “King Tut” live for the first time.

1988 VP Debate: Lloyd Bentsen knew than Dan Quayle was going to try and compare himself to John F. Kennedy at some point and he was prepared with the knockout punch. There has never been a more devestating takedown in the history of political debates.

1988 Democratic National Convention: Michael Dukakis makes his grand entrance with lights flashing, crowd cheering to the thumping, invigorating music of Neil Diamond singing “Coming To America.” I knew at that moment that he was going to be out next president.

Speed Racer: The mysterious Racer X lets the audience know for the umpteenth time that he is Speed’s long-lost older brother and pulls him out of yet another scrape before slinking away without revealing his secret.

Sesame Street: Depending on the number of the day, a pastry chef would stand at the top of a long flight of stairs and announce “Six coconut creme pies!” before inevitably tripping and falling down the stairs and covering himself with icing and/or pie filling. It delighted me everytime he did it.

Wide World of Sports: Evel Knievel attempts to jump the Snake River Canyon. (Also, anytime the Harlem Globetrotters were on).

Happy Days: Richie Cunningham strutting off singing Fats Domino’s “I Found My Thrill...” everytime a girl would agree to go out on a date with him.

Laverne & Shirley: “Hallow!!” Lenny and Squiggy would always make their entrance at the most inappropriate or inopportune time.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: When Spike first realizes that he has fallen in love with Buffy and gets really upset about it but can’t do anything to change it.

Blame the Democrats!

Jonathan Gurwitz’ latest column is a textbook example of partisan hackery, diverting attention away from the chief culprits of our economic crisis and trying to cast the blame at the feet of Democrats in Congress who have been practically powerless until just two months ago.
Democrats may have gained a majority in Congress after the 2006 mid-term elections, but they have not had the power to actually change the direction of the government until just recently. Republicans still had the upperhand with a president who could veto legislation and a Senate that would filibuster everything else.
And Gurwitz is also disingenuous when he claims the problem began with “failed congressional oversight”, as if we elect our Congressmen to regulate and police the banking system and not the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC, of course, was defanged over the past eight years by a Republican administration committed to its ideological deregulation agenda. The stage was set by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 which was never debated in the House or Senate and was slipped into an omnibus budget bill at the last minute by Sen. Phil Gramm.
The bill contained a provision that has come to be known as the “Enron loophole,” which exempted most over-the-counter energy trades and trading on electronic energy commodity markets. The “loophole” was drafted by lobbyists for Enron working with senator Phil Gramm seeking a deregulated atmosphere for their new experiment, “Enron On-line.”
But rather than acknowledging this deregulatory boondoggle, Gurwitz wants to distract readers with the totally innocuous issue of congressional payraises. Every year it’s the same thing, conservative government haters criticize the cost-of-living adjustment for Congressional salaries. If it wasn’t for the bipartisan compromise that made the increases automatic, Congress would never get a pay increase because no Congressman would ever want to take all the criticism and abuse for voting for it. Then we would end up with a situation where only the very wealthy could afford to be in Congress, which is already the case for many public offices anyway. And just remember that these automatic COLAs were in place the whole time Republicans were running Congress, but conservatives never complained about it until Democrats retook control.

Obama still riding high

James Carville thinks Obama's having the best time of his presidency right now.

Obama's first foray onto the world stage since being elected cannot be dubbed anything but successful. Obama appeared to be quite comfortable and confident as president of the United States at the G-20 summit that produced an unprecedented global economic recovery package.

The president's polling numbers at home are coming in at an impressive rate. A Democracy Corps poll taken this week found that the percentage of likely voters saying the country is going in the right direction is up to 38 percent, the highest level recorded in more than three years.

His budget is sure to be passed by Congress. And the recent special election in New York's 20th Congressional District in which Democrat Scott Murphy initially trailed by more than 20 points -- but wound up slightly ahead before officials count absentee ballots -- shows that the GOP is making few, if any gains among voters.

To top it all off (at least for now), the financial markets are expressing confidence in the president's leadership as they are expected to close up for the fourth straight week.

I have to agree. It looks like the economy is poised to start making a recovery just as Obama is getting his budget through Congress with every Republican in opposition.
When the only thing Republicans can find to complain about is
the gift Obama gave the queen, then things must be going well.

Morally repugnant, Part II

Revisiting a topic discussed here more than a year ago, it seems that Ron Suskind’s groundbreaking reporting on the futility of the Bush administration’s torture policy has now been backed up and verified by reporting in the Washington Post.

When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him.
The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.
In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.
Moreover, within weeks of his capture, U.S. officials had gained evidence that made clear they had misjudged Abu Zubaida. President George W. Bush had publicly described him as “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations,” and other top officials called him a “trusted associate” of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a major figure in the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. None of that was accurate, the new evidence showed.
Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda, according to a portrait of the man that emerges from court documents and interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcement and military sources. Rather, he was a “fixer” for radical Muslim ideologues, and he ended up working directly with al-Qaeda only after Sept. 11 -- and that was because the United States stood ready to invade Afghanistan.

Dan Froomkin has more on this sad, sordid tale:

Abu Zubaida was the alpha and omega of the Bush administration’s argument for torture.
That’s why Sunday’s front-page Washington Post story by Peter Finn and Joby Warrick is such a blow to the last remaining torture apologists.
Finn and Warrick reported that “not a single significant plot was foiled” as a result of Zubaida’s brutal treatment -- and that, quite to the contrary, his false confessions “triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms.”
Zubaida was the first detainee to be tortured at the direct instruction of the White House. Then he was President George W. Bush’s Exhibit A in defense of the “enhanced interrogation” procedures that constituted torture. And he continues to be held up as a justification for torture by its most ardent defenders.
But as author Ron Suskind reported almost three years ago -- and as The Post now confirms -- almost all the key assertions the Bush administration made about Zubaida were wrong.
Zubaida wasn’t a major al Qaeda figure. He wasn’t holding back critical information. His torture didn’t produce valuable intelligence -- and it certainly didn’t save lives.

But we won’t ever hear a mea culpa from the denizens who used to haunt the defunct ATC blog. They grew bored with their warblogging and torture cheerleading and have moved on to other pursuits now, such as shrieking about “socialism” anytime someone does anything to try and clean up the huge mess that the Bush administration left behind.

John Cornyn hates democracy

Our U.S. Senator John Cornyn thinks democracy sucks. At least, that’s his opinion whenever things don’t go his way.
Take the Minnesota Senate election, for example, where Democrat Al Franken has come out ahead after a long recount process. Cornyn doesn’t like that result and he is threatening “World War III” if Democrats try to seat Al Franken in the Senate before Norm Coleman can pursue his case all the way through the federal courts.
Nevermind that it could take years to resolve. Cornyn has no problem hamstringing democracy with frivolous lawsuits whenever things don’t go his way. I can guarantee you that he would not be insisting on waiting for a years long court battle to resolve itself before allowing Minnesotans to have their full Senate representation if it was Al Franken doing the litigating. And furthermore, I believe that Democrats would never try and drag out the case that far anyway. That’s because Democrats, as their name says, actually believe in and respect “democracy.”
Not so with Sen. Cornyn. Just look at his response to the Brewing Battle Over Reconciliation in Congress.
Democrats are considering using the budget reconciliation process to resolve several contentious issues over budgetary matters involving healthcare, energy and education. That would mean that the legislation could actually be approved with a majority vote of the Senate. What a novel concept!!!!
But what does John Cornyn think about the idea of “majority rules” which is a keystone of democracy?
“It stinks,” he says.
Cornyn thinks every piece of legislation should have to pass with a 60-vote supermajority, allowing a minority of Senators to kill legislation that has the support of the majority of Americans. But, of course, he only thinks this is fair when Republicans are in the minority. He didn’t think that was such a hot idea when Republicans were in the majority, and he won’t in the future if and when Republicans are ever in the majority again.
But for now, majority rules is out the window as far as he is concerned and so are democratic elections whenever he doesn’t like the end results. Screw democracy.

No more term limits

T.R. Fehrenbach, the conservative historian who writes a weekly column for the Express-News, is proposing limiting U.S. presidents to single terms.
He makes an interesting case based on history, however I am still completely opposed to the idea. I don't think it is true that every president's second term has been disasterous.
It is true that Lincoln may have had a tough time politically during a second term had he not been assassinated, but I think there can be little doubt that he would have still been much better than Andrew Johnson or Ulysseus Grant or any of the other corrupt, post-war presidents we ended up with.
FDR's second term was certainly not a disaster, as Fehrenbach implies, and his subsequent term was successful as well due to his leadership during WWII.
Eisenhower's second term wasn't much different from his first one. Kennedy had the potential to do very well had he had a chance at a second term.
Nixon, of course, was impeached during his second term, but the things that set Watergate into motion happened during his first term.
Reagan clearly had troubles during his second term with Iran-Contra, but it wasn't enough to sour his political support and he probably could have won a third term easily, but instead passed it on to George H.W. Bush.
Bill Clinton's second term was a huge success other than the distraction of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But as far as things that actually impacted people's lives, he had great successes during his second term.
And George W. Bush obviously was awful during his second term, but I would argue that he was awful during his first term as well but managed to cover up his failures and incompetence in the aftermath of 9/11. Osama Bin Laden was responsible for Bush's second term more so than Karl Rove.
Now that we have Obama in there, Fehrenbach is suddenly raising the spectre of limiting presients to one term. Why wasn't he making that argument four years ago?

E-N laysoff the last liberals

Just noted today that one of the victims of the mass layoffs at the Express-News was the weekly column by Mansour El-Kikhia, which was the closest thing they had to a politically liberal opinion from a local source. I wasn't a big fan of El-Kikhia, but he did on occasion provide a badly needed counterpoint to the GeorgeWillCalThomasRichLowryAustinBayJonathanGurwitzKathleenParkerRubenNavaretteMonaCharen neocon worldview so amply on display at the E-N.
But at least El-Kikhia still has his day job at the university. Not so for John Branch, the local editorial cartoonist who got a pink slip as well.
Now that this idological purge of liberal contributors to the op-ed page is complete, I wonder what they will do next?

Update
And now I see that the next thing they will do is make the newspaper even narrower, shrinking it from 12.5 inches across to just under 11 inches. Essentially, it's going to get to the point where the newspaper will look like a really long magazine.
To accomplish this next level of shrinkage, they are going to dump several advice columns and puzzles out of the lifestyles section. It remains to be seen whether they will drop any more comics.
And last week they made yet another cut of the editorial pages, shrinking the Sunday Op-ed pages, which used to have its own section, from 3 pages to 2. That means that Jonathan Gurwitz' weekly wrap-up of interesting quotes is no more. Even though his choices irritated me on many occasions, it was still a section of the paper that I would read each week without fail. Also, it seems like Robert Selzer's column slot is now eliminated so what do they still need him for?
It's really sad that the paper has been forced into this position. Thanks for the sucky economy President Bush. Heckuva job!

China skews death penalty report

An interesting report in the New York Times today says that executions around the world doubled in 2008.
That is pretty surprising considering that we have really scaled back on executions here in the U.S., but it turns out the main culprit behind the jump in executions was China which had 72 percent of the total for 2008.

The number of executions worldwide nearly doubled last year compared with 2007, according to Amnesty International, and China put to death far more people than the rest of the world put together.
In its annual report on the death penalty, Amnesty International on Tuesday chronicled beheadings in Saudi Arabia; hangings in Japan, Iraq, Singapore and Sudan; lethal injections in China; an electrocution in the United States; firing squads in Afghanistan, Belarus and Vietnam; and stonings in Iran.
In all, 59 countries still have the death penalty on their books, but only 25 carried out executions last year. Two nations, Uzbekistan and Argentina, banned the death penalty last year.
Amnesty International said at least 2,390 people were executed worldwide in 2008, compared with its 2007 figure of at least 1,252.
With at least 1,718, China was responsible for 72 percent of all executions in 2008, the report stated. After China were Iran (346), Saudi Arabia (102), the United States (37) and Pakistan (36), according to the group.

The U.S. only had 37 executions last year, but that was still enough to rank No. 4 in the world behind China, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Frankly, I’m not happy being in the same company with those countries. There is really no reason why the U.S. can’t join with most of the Western civilized nations and ban this outdated, barbaric practice which serves no public purpose.
The good news is that Amnesty International says the worldwide trend is still going away from the death penalty even though the Butchers of Beijing are currently skewing the data.

Amnesty International, which has long opposed the death penalty, said Europe and Central Asia have become “virtually a death-penalty-free zone” with only Belarus, a former Soviet republic, continuing to execute prisoners.
“In the Americas, only one state — the United States — consistently executes,” the group said, noting that the number of its executions last year, 37, was the lowest since 1994.

NPR sets ratings record

Good news for National Public Radio:

The audience for NPR’s daily news programs, including “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” reached a record last year, driven by widespread interest in the presidential election, and the general decline of radio news elsewhere. Washington-based NPR will release new figures to its stations today showing that the cumulative audience for its daily news programs hit 20.9 million a week, a 9 percent increase over the previous year.

20 million listeners!!! Hmmmmm. Where have I heard that figure before? Oh yes! That is the figure that Rush Limbaugh always throws around claiming it as his listener base. But it turns out that the figure Rush uses may just be pulled out of thin air.

Obama Is No Socialist

It’s kind of sad that this article even had to be written, but such is the state of our political discourse these days.
Former Federal Reserve Board member Alan Binder penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal to make the point that Obama Is No Socialist:

Ever since President Barack Obama released the budget last month, we have been hearing a fusillade of criticism claiming that the president, contrary to previous advertising, is not a centrist, but a “leftie” intent on leading the country down the path of socialism.
Let’s see. Socialism means public ownership and control of businesses, right? So which industries does the president propose to nationalize?
Banking? Well, no. Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner has made it clear that he opposes nationalizing banks, despite much outcry from the political left -- and even some from the right -- to do just that. Yes, it’s a valid criticism that we are still waiting for Mr. Geithner’s banking plan. But the budget commits an outrageous act of accounting honesty by including a $750 billion allowance as “a reserve for further efforts to stabilize the financial system.” Given the popularity of bank bailouts, that was a courageous thing to do.
What about health care? Doesn’t Mr. Obama want “socialized medicine”? No. He wants to reform the current system so that it costs less and covers more people. Disgracefully, the United States is the only advanced nation in the world that fails to cover every citizen -- even though we spend vastly more on health care than other nations.
Some reformers want the U.S. to adopt a single-payer system like other countries, such as “socialist” Canada and England -- which run firmly capitalist economies, by the way. But regardless of whether single-payer is a good idea, it’s not Mr. Obama’s. His health-insurance reform plan emphasizes choice (keeping what you have if you like it), greater efficiency (partly by utilizing information technology), and portability (your health coverage will follow you from job to job). Which part of that is socialist?
And, once again, the Obama budget recognizes, rather than hides, the need to pay the bills. Half the cost of health reform would be covered by a tax provision that has really raised a ruckus: Capping itemized deductions at the 28% bracket rate. Let’s consider how socialist that idea is.
As the law now stands, when a family that does not itemize deductions on its tax return donates $100 to its favorite charity, the donation costs the family $100. But when an itemizing family in the 25% bracket donates $100, it costs them only $75 after tax. And when an itemizer in the 35% bracket donates $100, the after-tax cost is only $65. Thus the richer you are, the less it costs. Is it socialistic to say that seems a little backwards?
If that tax treatment strikes you as fair, try another example. Suppose those same three families each pay $10,000 a year in interest on their home mortgages. The cost to the non-itemizer is the full $10,000. For the family in the 25% bracket that itemizes, the net cost after taxes is only $7,500. And for the upper-income family in the 35% bracket that itemizes, the net cost is a mere $6,500. Just imagine a member of Congress proposing a homeownership subsidy like that directly, rather than through the tax code: 35% to the rich, 25% to the middle class, and nothing to the poor. Would anyone support it?
Enter Mr. Obama, the alleged leftist. Does he propose to end this “class warfare” on the middle and lower classes? No. He only wants to mitigate it slightly. He would reduce the 35% subsidy rate to 28% -- which would still leave the costs of charitable giving, mortgage interest, and much else far lower for the rich than for the poor. That’s hardly a radical proposal. Indeed, it has been under discussion since the 1980s.
It’s true: The president would like to do a bit more. Elsewhere in the budget, he proposes letting the Bush upper-bracket tax cuts expire in 2011, meaning the top rate would revert to where it was during the Clinton years: 39.6%. And Mr. Obama would still cap deductibility at 28%.
Unsurprisingly, the president’s proposal to let the top rate return to 39.6% has unleashed a firestorm of criticism from people who claim that such radical redistribution would prolong the recession, destroy entrepreneurship, and pretty much end capitalism as we know it -- just as it did during the Great Prosperity of the 1990s, I suppose. Some claims parody themselves.
So where does all this leave us on the road to socialism? If Mr. Obama is able to get all of these proposals through Congress, the U.S. will have a fully private banking system, propped up with temporary government support; a uniquely American health-care system that covers virtually everyone; and a somewhat more progressive income tax.
If this is socialism, then let’s make the most of it.

Why rightwing radio is so popular

Why does the far-right dominate all the talk radio stations in most markets? Conservatives would have you believe that it is because their ideas are more popular with the general public and they treat it as an affirmation of their political views. That explanation seemed plausible enough earlier in this decade when Republicans controlled the White House and both branches of Congress as well as most governships and state legislatures. But now that the pendulum has swung back the other way and Democrats are acscendent once again that explanation doesn’t work anymore. Now, even though the country voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama and the Democrats in the last election, we still have the same hard-right mix of opinions on talk radio. This is clearly not a business model that is trying to expand its market share by providing consumers what they want. I believe this is because the means of distribution are controlled by corporations like Clear Channel Communications and News Corp. which are run by hardline conservatives.
My friend Mack Harrison also makes an excellent point in the comments about the regulatory hurdles to setting up new radio stations which makes it hard for the industry to react to changes in the political landscape. As Mack points out, on the Internet where those barriers don’t exist, liberals are competing quite well and in some cases are outperforming their conservative counterparts.
But it can still be argued that these radio stations are making money and draw a large base of listeners. Why is that?
As I mentioned in the comments to the previous post, I think one reason why rightwing radio is popular is because it is designed to appeal to our baser instincts. Rightwing radio tells its listeners what they want to hear, not what they should hear or need to hear. It says that YOU are always right and that THEY are always to blame for all of the worlds’ problems. It tells them that they are justified in their prejudices and bigotry and intolerance. It tells them that they don’t have to feel guilty or responsible for any of the nation’s problems. And they are constantly spoonfed a steady diet of propaganda propping up these beliefs and offering up a litany of boogeymen and scapegoats on whom they can vent their outrage and hatred.
Conservative talk radio is fun and entertaining and it reinforces the listener’s own high opinion of themselves, provided that they don’t identify with those awful, hated Liberals. Furthermore, rightwing radio never challenges its listeners with inconvenient facts and regularly dismisses complex problems that liberals tend to fret over or ignores them completely.
On rightwing radio, you don’t have to worry about Global Warming because they have declared it to be a hoax perpetrated by liberal academicians and scientists just looking for government handouts. There is no moral conundrum over torture because the “terrorists” all deserve whatever they get anyway. Huge deficits can be easily solved by eliminating “earmarks” and cutting more taxes. The energy crisis would be over if Liberals would just let them “Drill, baby, Drill!” And so on.
Listening to talk radio is like eating a steady diet of candy. Over at NPR they try to make you eat your vegetables!

One-sided opinion

I think rightwingers like to rant on and on and on about the mythical re-emergence of the Fairness Doctrine just because they know it ticks off liberals.
They know full well that there is no chance of the Fairness Doctrine ever coming back, but they go on about it anyway just to rub liberals noses in the fact that they are almost totally marginalized in the media.
There is no other way to explain how these conservatives who dominate the radio and television airwaves can possibly claim with a straight face that the Fairness Doctrine would result in their being censored.
A majority of voters in San Antonio voted for Obama this past election. And three of the four congressman representing the city are Democrats. But you wouldn’t know that from listening to the local talk radio stations. Here is the lineup from WOAI 1200, the biggest talk station in town:



A solid six-pack of wingnuttia for our everyday consumption. So what about the other talk radio station - KTSA 500? Surely they offer some variety, some alternative for people who don’t relish hearing non-stop far-right propaganda and lies 24-7. Nope. They simply offer the left-over wingnuts that WOAI discarded, like Bill O’Reilly and Neil Boortz along with local rightwingers Trey Ware and Jack Riccardi.
I was listening to Riccardi’s show this morning. For some reason I had gotten the impression that he was a liberal or at least moderate on some issues. But after listening to him trying to blame the Democratic Congress for the current Bushian fiscal nightmare we are in and then looking at his blog where he supported Mitt Romney for president, it is clear that he is just a slightly toned-down rightwinger, only moderate in comparison to the certified lunatics like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.
Interestingly enough, the local stations don’t even make an effort to have any ethnic or gender diversity in their lineups, much less ideological diversity.
Most San Antonians have responded to this situation by simply not listening to the local radio shows anymore, leaving just a small, concentrated audience of like-minded rightwingers to provide the stations with the excuse they need to continue ignoring and dismissing the vast majority of the local community.
I don’t know what a Fairness Doctrine would do, but it is quite clear that we currently operate under an extreme version of the Unfair Doctrine.

Update
I left out the one other station in San Antonio with a news/talk format: KLUP 930 AM.
Here is their weekly lineup: Bill Bennett, Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, Michael Savage and Hugh Hewitt.
All white, all male and all far-right looneytunes everyone. Yippee!

Twisted principles

Glenn Beck is seriously twisted, as Donna noted the other day.

Steve Benen and Blue Texan have good rundowns on the recent Beckian wierdness.
But I think what disturbs me the most is how this lunatic is becoming increasingly popular with the local rightwingers.
Nick at Conservative Dialysis linked approvingly to Beck’s paranoid reworking of the National Anthem and Andres Bocagnera of San Antonio Conservative has been taken in by Beck’s latest hyped up charade.

These “Nine Principles and 12 Values” (or the “Nine Prophecies of the 12 Sarcofagi” as Dennis Miller recently mocked on Fox) are worth a look to see just how badly this guy’s screws have come loose.

The Nine Principles
1. America is good.
2. I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life.
3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.
4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government.
5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.
6. I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.
7. I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.
8. It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.
9. The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me.

The first “principle” - America is good - seems like it should be followed by several exclamations of What!! What!!! as in today’s urban lingo when a hipster throws out a provacative statement and then openly entreats anyone to challenge him on it. Beck is just asking for anyone to question him so that he can denounce them as “unAmerican” or what have you.
But now compare Principle 1 with Principle 8. First you are saying that “America” is always good no matter what, but then you are declaring that you can still be critical of “authorities” without being called “unAmerican.” Just what do these people think “America” is anyway? Clearly to them it is some abstract concept which they can place up on a podium and pretend to “love” while at the same time they can vent their hatred and disgust at the American government and American authority figures. Because after you get past the first two principles, the rest is pretty much just a long-winded anti-government screed.
Or how about principles 4 and 5? Does anyone see any problems here? First they declare that “My spouse and I” are the ultimate authority, not the government. But then they declare that “If you break the law you pay the penalty”. But who makes the laws? The government, of course. So how can rational people not see a contrast between these “principles”?
“Justice is blind and no one is above it” is a nice saying. But it ignores the fact that laws are not always just and forcing someone to “pay the penalty” doesn’t always result in “justice.” But I guess I’m getting too complicated for the simple-minded folks who would buy into this stuff.
These “principles” can best be summed up as defensive, angry outbursts motivated by selfishness, greed and a deep distrust and dislike for one’s fellow Americans.

My Vacation

Just spent the last four days in Dubuque, Iowa....


It was beautiful, but it was also cold. It was 17 degrees when we got there.

We stayed at the Grand Harbor Resort Hotel....


Our room had a great view of the Mississippi River. I had never seen a river freeze before.


We took the kids to the indoor water park at the hotel....


It was warmer than I expected and great for our kids because most of the water was shallow.

We went to the National Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium....


Kept the kids entertained for most of one day and I learned a lot about the Mississippi River.

They call Dubuque the Land Where Eagles Soar...


They're not kidding. We saw several flying around our hotel while we were their.

TPA Roundup 3-16

It's the first of another week, so that must mean it's time to take a look at some of the best posts from last week by members of the Texas Progressive Alliance. Here are the submissions:

Vince of Capitol Annex took a new look at the latest creationist attack on science in Texas classrooms in Bill Would Make "Strengths and Weaknesses" Teaching Of Evolution State Law.

Bay Area Houston says State Representative Wayne Christian has filed a bill that would scare Texas citizens from filing ethics complaints against elected officials.

Off the Kuff takes a look at who would be affected by the voter ID legislation that is being pushed in the Lege by Republicans.

WCNews at Eye On Williamson posts on the turmoil facing some inside Texas GOP regarding Gov. Perry's decision to turn down$555 million dollars of unemployment insurance from the stimulus money, UI debate must be maddening for the GOP supporters of Hutchison.

Neil at Texas Liberal reads Malcolm X in a cemetery and says that Rick Perry has found his schoolhouse door to stand in and block.

The Texas Cloverleaf expands upon Capitol Annex's look at Garnet Coleman's proposed repeal of the anti-gay marriage amendment in Texas.

BossKitty at TruthHugger truly believes there is profit for everyone when wasteful and costly opposition to Medical Marijuana is brought in to the economy instead of keeping it out. The War on "Illegal Activities" should focus on smuggling Heroin and Human Trafficking. Can Marijuana Rescue The Economy In 2010 Like Booze Did In 1933

At Texas Kaos, Lightseeker highlights the Texas Shakedown for those who make the mistake of driving in Tenaha, Texas while not white.

CouldBeTrue at South Texas Chisme notes thuggery isn't the first choice for governing Democrats addressing drug cartel violence. Analysis and coordinated effort is.

Governor "Good Hair, Bad Policy" Perry starts his primary campaign against Hutchinson by piling on the unemployed. Libby Shaw over at TexasKaos has the details and the outrage.Pendejos Perry Says YES to Roads, NO to the Jobless

Mayor McSleaze of McBlogger returns from his holiday to post his thoughts on developments in the Wall Street infotainment industry.

nytexan at BlueBloggin is disgusted, but not surprised, by the new Republican strategy; >GOP: Divide and Conquer The Democrats, Then Do Nothing For The Country. As tent cities pop up in Sacramento, unemployment is at 10% in may states and the Wall Street continues a downward slide; the GOP response, to the past 8 year Bush disaster, is to lower approval numbers for Pelosi and House Democrats.

WhosPlayin is focused on local races for Mayor and City Council in Lewisville. This week he interviewed Shelley Kaehr and David Thornhill, who are running for Place 2.

There was harmonic convergence in the left and right Texblogosphere last week. See PDiddie's Brains and Eggs for what happened.

Xanthippas at Three Wise Men takes down the right-wing handwringing and disingenuous criticism over Obama's stem cell decision.

Gone Fishin'

I will be on vacation the rest of the week and most likely will have no access to a computer.

Golden Era of Capitalism

This graph from John Cole shows very clearly how insane the conservatives are who claim that Obama's meager tax increase on the very wealthy is going to drive us to socialism.
The period between WWII and about 1973 was known as the Golden Era of Capitalism. At no time during that period was the top tax rate lower than 70 percent. And yet, the economy grew like gangbusters and we became the most powerful nation on the planet. Amazing, isn't it.