DWK's Notes On Life

Purposeful Leisure

2007-06-03T07:50:00.002-07:00

This is the brief description of the life I want to have
I want to live in an environment of leisure, but I want to use my leisure time purposefully
I want to give back to the world
I want to practice – with my mind, my hands, my back – the art of charity, the art of assistance, the art of giving.
I want to feel that I have made a positive difference in people’s lives

Gratitude

2007-06-03T07:50:00.001-07:00

I have and have had an amazing life.
I live in a beautiful part of the world, in a comfortable house.
I have a job that allows me to pay my bills and to own and do everything I want to do.
I have a wonderful, loving wife who supports me whether or not I give her reason to
I have a beautiful, wonderful daughter who will grow into a happy and productive adult
I have an extended family and friends who love me for the person they see in front of them, not the person I have stressed over not being
I have so much
I am grateful for all that I have

Thrift and Abundance

2007-06-03T07:48:00.001-07:00

It is important to understand that these are not contradictory concepts. The one leads to the other; the one supports the other.
We can achieve abundance if we practice thrift.
This may mean that we do things that contradict our preconceptions: Wear a shirt that belonged to someone else, buy and repair a broken appliance rather than a brand new one; serve dinner on a mismatched variety of plates and eat it using an abundance of mismatched cutlery.
We can create abundance if we practice thrift.

Addictions

2007-04-01T15:44:00.000-07:00

What occurred in our family that led us to this program?
The way I generally describe it is that our daughter had "too much sex, drugs and rock-and-roll at an early age."
She became an addict -- I use the term in a generalized way because the addictions ranged from cutting to bulemia to alcohol to drugs. She was having sex and smoking cigarettes as well, but I don't know if she was "addicted" to either of those -- understanding addiction to mean a dependency that is destructive to other aspects of life.
Where did this come from? While parents don't deserve and can't take all of the blame for a child's choices, I do believe that my decision to take up smoking again, after an eight-year lapse, had some effect on the way my daughter looked at substance abuse. I remember how upset she was the night she caught me smoking a cigarette in the back garden of our house. She had always known that I was a non-smoker. This event disrupted a major belief for her, I think. Was it the "cause" of her later addictions? Surely not. I cannot cause another to become an addict any more than I can cause another to become an athlete or a scholar. But by bringing on a traumatic event in her belief system, I think I had something to do with setting the scene for her to "try" dangerous behaviors and substances.
Nicotine has been the most serious addiction in my life. I've tried lots of other drugs and even enjoyed a few of them, but nicotine is the one that has followed me around and that I have, in turn, followed around. Thirty years and running. It is behavior that I once nearly changed (that eight-year break, brought on by my daughter's birth) but that once I slid back into an old pattern, I have not been able to fully break from. I can spend months away from cigarettes, and I don't seem to have much trouble giving them up initially, but I always seem to head back to them.
Believing as I do that a part of conquering additions is will power, I know that I need to practice my belief. I know I do not want this nicotine addiction (I say nicotine, but I'm actually not sure if it isn't just the behavior pattern of smoking rather than the drug nicotine that I am attracted to) in my life when my daughter returns home from her residential program.
I guess I am in the initial stage of looking at my addiction. I'm not resistant, I am open, and I want to have a different family life and am willing to look internally to get there.
Music: One question in this week's assignment asked us parents to look at our music and what might act as triggers for our teens. My daughter and I do share some musical tastes. Beck, Pink, Maroon 5, Nelly, Eminem. Eminem is the only one of these that gives me pause, because I do suspect that his lyrics led her to try some negative behaviors. Not that I think Eminem's music is the culprit -- I mean, listen to his songs and you hear a major theme of parental irresponsibility and easy blame on the culture -- but I'm not sure the kids get that theme, and I suspect that at least one type of substance abuse in my daughter's case, Vicodin, came from Eminem's lyrics about it.
I want to go through my daughter's music collection and mine with her to understand what her trigger music was. She has (had) a lot of musical tastes I do not share -- Linkin Park, Rom Zombie, My Chemical Romance, etc. -- that may have been her strongest triggers.
I also want to understand how she got so much music -- was she shoplifting, as I suspect? Or was she making money on the side, dealing drugs or sex? All part of the continuing journey toward understanding.

Some Artists I Admire

2006-12-21T07:49:00.000-08:00

A list of personal favorites, for no good reason other than that I would like to write about them:

Ezra Pound
Louis Sullivan
Claude Bragdon
Francesco Borromini
John Coltrane
Billie Holiday
Pola Negri
Joni Mitchell
Charles Ives
Tennessee Williams
Eugene O'Neill
Jorge Luis Borges
Caravaggio
Eugene Delacroix
Charles Dickens
Thomas Hardy
Victor Hugo

What links these artists, besides my taste for their work? Perhaps it is that all are -- to some extent -- difficult and challenging artists, whose work has been controversial, whose aims have outreached their grasps, who in different ways have been misunderstood, neglected, undervalued.

In my eyes, at least.

A Note On Identity

2006-12-20T11:42:00.000-08:00

From Sepharad by Antonio Munoz Molina:

The most burdensome aspect of our identity is based on what others know or
think about us. They look at us and we know that they know, and in silence they
force us to be what they expect us to be, to act according to certain habits our
previous behavior has established, or according to suspicions that we aren't
aware we have awakened. To the person you meet on a train in a foreign country,
you are a stranger who exists only in the present.

Brilliant, I think. We set the traps with our own behavior. Others police those traps and force us to remain inside them.

Don't Take Anything Personally

2006-11-25T15:09:00.000-08:00

From The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz:

"Whatever you think, whatever you feel, I know is your problem and not my
problem. It is the way you see the world. It is nothing personal, because you
are dealing with yourself, not with me. Others are going to have their own
opinion according to their belief system, so nothing they think about me is
really about me, but it is about them.
"You may even tell me, 'Miguel, what you are saying is hurting me.' But it
is not what I am saying that is hurting you; it is that you have wounds that I
touch by what I have said."

Never thought of it that way.

Can We Stick to the Subject?

2006-11-19T18:08:00.000-08:00

This week's assignment was to pay attention to how people listen to me. Also, to understand the devices I use to get people to pay attention.
Much harder than to pay attention to how I listen. I gave it a good try.
Here's what I found. Since I am a person who does best when conversations are kept on topic, short and to the point, I find that I tend to do that with others. In meetings, I resist attempts to "open up" the discussion to topics not on the agenda. As soon as I get an opportunity, I try to summarize what I have heard others say and then move the conversation back to the topic we started out to discuss.
I find I do this in personal conversations as well as business conversations. I am not good with "changing the subject." I want things in focused, manageable portions.
Does this work?
In business, it does, generally, as long as the meeting started out with an agenda or topic. They understand the statement that we need to get back to the topic we planned to discuss. I have found little resistance, although sometimes people struggle to get in a final word about the "side" topic before they agree to move back to the main topic.
In personal conversations, it's more difficult to do. People want to be heard, and many people tend to ramble. Since I find I have little patience for this, I am sure that I offend people by displaying that in various ways (losing focus, looking or sounding bored, looking for opportunities to end the conversation).
Empathetic listening was not one of my strong points, so I guess it makes sense that I don't particularly look to strike empathy when I am speaking to others. I want others to pay attention to me on the topic I started out to discuss.
Do I need to work on my ability to tolerate "chit-chat"?

Listening

2006-11-11T11:04:00.000-08:00

The first constructive criticism I received in my new job was that I needed to listen more. My boss praised me on my perceptions, but said that some of my co-workers felt I didn't listen closely to them when they were talking. He recommended that I actively force myself to step back after a colleague made a statement, repeat it in my head and take a moment before I responded.
The advice surprised me, because I had considered myself to be a good listener. But this week I have been paying attention to my listening patterns -- following the listening test I took at seminar last weekend -- and I'm surprised by how much and how easily I tune out.
The test showed that I am primarily an "evaluative" listener: I listen for facts, try to figure out what the speaker is saying, argue in my mind if I don't like the message, and ultimately tune out if it doesn't interest me.
Well, damned if that isn't exactly what I do.
As instructed by the homework assignment this week -- and of course, just by life -- I listened to a sales presentation (a webcast on a Business Intelligence technology), a colleague (my boss, actually) and my wife.
In the first two cases, the sessions were lengthy, and, while I was interested in the subject matter, I found it difficult to pay full attention after a while. Note: These were both phone conversations, so I did not have the visual stimulus of the speaker's facial expressions and proximity to deal with. Because I was paying closer attention to my listening patterns than I normally would, I noticed that it didn't take long for me to become impatient, to want to "skip ahead," to bypass the storytelling and get to the point. Based on the reading I did and the instructions of my homework assignment, I did my best to stay focused on the speaker. Although it would have been easy to "multi-task" -- or, more accurately, to stop paying attention to the speaker and do something else, such as checking e-mail, I forced myself not to do so. But here's what I found myself doing: Pacing, looking out the window, glancing here and there.
Each time I caught myself doing this, I forced my focus back on the speaker. As I said, I was interested in the subject matter in both cases, so I did try to keep track of where the speaker was going. But it was hard to stay focused.
Looking back on both meetings, I can see that in addition to listening in an evaluative mode, I was also listening for comprehension. I was trying to get the "big picture" of what the speaker was trying to say. And, of course, I always listen for a joke or an entertaining anecdote, so I perked up on those. That maps to appreciative listening.
In listening to my wife, what I found interesting is that I think she has learned to speak to me in ways that play to my listening modes. Since my wife, like me, tracks most strongly to evaluative listening, I think we have learned to talk to each other in ways that we know the other will listen to. Our conversations tend to be relatively short and to-the-point. It's not that we are abrupt, it's that we focus on the topic when we talk to each other. After 22 years together, I guess that makes perfect sense.
Interesting exercise.

I'm Ready To Fly

2006-11-09T12:52:00.000-08:00

This song has been playing in my head for the past day or two, since I returned from my most recent parent seminar. It’s a song that is played when “key holders,” attendees who have completed the entire program of seminars, are held up to “fly” by the rest of us. We hold them aloft, arms outstretched, eyes, closed, in a moment of celebration of their achievement.

I don’t know who sings the song. It’s obvious why it was chosen. It’s inspirational. I’m finding my cynicism broken down by these seminars. Ifrequently wipe a tear from my eyes as I hear the song play itself over in my head.

Am I ready to fly? Not yet. First of all, I’ve got three more weekends of seminars to go. And even then, I’m not sure. I know I am learning things about myself and about the ways I have learned to respond, react. Am I changing some of these ways? To the extent that I am more conscious of my standard reactions and when they “aren’t working” for me, I suppose so.

I recently learned that what I suspected is true. There is a strong philosophical connection between this program I am in and the EST seminars that people attended in the ‘70s. I made fun of those self-actualization programs, but now I think I understand better their power. I don’t know that I could ever get “it,” as the EST-ies used to say, because I am too unwilling to give myself over. But I see value in this kind of self-examination.

I’ve got secrets and fears that I may never part with. That’s my choice. I recognize it as a choice, and I’m somewhat comfortable with it. A lot of what we are taught in this program is that our life is largely what we choose it to be. I remember my EST-ie roommate taking this notion to an illogical extreme, arguing that physical illness is a choice. I’ll never buy that. But I do see that many things I have ascribed to “fate,” or to factors beyond my control, are in fact things I had control over. I could have made many different choices from the ones I have made. I continue to make choices every day; many of them are guided by my choice not to give up certain comforts and pleasures that I have in my life. That’s okay. I am glad I am more conscious of this. It helps to resolve the feeling I sometimes have of being “trapped” in my life.

Does this help to make me ready to fly? Understanding the degree to which I control my life has to help. It also will help me be consistent in the message I send to my daughter.

I think at some level I always understood this “choice” thing, and yet it’s easy, on a daily basis, to feel that my choices are more limited than they are. What I need to keep in mind is that certain choices are limited by other choices. To truly change, I would have to be willing to make some choices to unsettle things that are well-settled in my life.

Things that I value, like physical and economic comfort. Do I fear the consequences of changing these? Sure, I do. I’;m curious how I might handle a real “break” from these comforts. But I don’t know that I really want anything I might gain from that break. That’s what I would have to decide in order to make it happen – that what I really want is possible only if I make a break.

Could that day come? Maybe. It’s not here yet.

So what are my values? Creativity, for sure. Intellect, indubitably. Endurance, I find. I never thought of that as a value, but it really is. I highly prize the decision to “stick with” a course, to hold on through rough times, to endure. Are there other names for this? Loyalty, maybe, but that only applies to personal relationships, and I’m not sure that is where my concept of endurance ends.

I’m suspicious of the more commonly stated values: Integrity, Spirituality, even Honesty. I find them all easy to say and hard to live by. There’s a part of the program that says your values are the things you live by every day. So I think Creativity, Intellect and Endurance are there. I’m pondering whether Comfort is a value. It’s a condition, but what is the value that leads to it. Security, maybe? Safety?Freedom from want? Right now, Security is standing out as the best word for it. How does that mesh with my stated contract: I am a creative, fearless, adventurous, confident man? Fearless, adventurous and confident seem almost antithetical to the idea of security, but do you need security in order to be those other things? Can you be fearless if you are insecure? Can you be confident? Can you be adventurous if you don’t have some notion of security?

I get into these circular patterns of thought, but they’re good, I guess. At least I’m thinking.

A Wrenching Decision

2006-10-31T20:56:00.000-08:00

A couple in my support network – a group of parents who have children in programs similar to the one in which my daughter is enrolled – is going through an extremely difficult time. Their daughter, who left her program without completing it at age 18 and is living as a prostitute, just gave birth to a baby boy. The daughter, after agreeing to get off the street, enroll in parenting classes, job training, etc., has now disappeared, apparently back to her pimp, leaving the child in the hands of the state.

Should this couple, who are nearing retirement age, take in their grandson? Do they have the physical and emotional capacity to raise this child? Can they stand, on the one hand, the trauma of having their daughter show up to try to claim the child, or, on the other hand, the uncertainty of giving up this baby to the foster care system and not knowing his fate?

They worry about their age. They worry that their grandson might grow up not knowing he has grandparents who love him. They worry about losing their independence, of taking on a new 18-year commitment that will limit their choices in their retirement years. They try not to worry as much about their daughter, arguing to themselves that she is living a life she has chosen – but of course, they remain wracked with pain and guilt over the choices this girl has made.

As the parent of a teenager, I feel their pain acutely, and could easily see myself in their shoes. How would I react? I can’t imagine that I would not do my damnedest to claim this baby, keep him as part of my family. My emotions would take over. I applaud my friend for trying to step back and look at the reality of taking on a new baby at his age. I can imagine my wife being the realist in a situation such as this, and I can picture myself battling with her over this baby.

I do think that if my daughter turned up pregnant, I would counsel her to seek an abortion. As painful as that decision might be, I think it would be the best choice for her under the circumstances, and quite possibly the best choice for the unborn child. But if she determined to carry the child, and then behaved as my friends’ daughter has done, I doubt that I could turn this baby loose.

One of the most difficult realizations I made in sending my daughter off to her therapy program was that I could not handle the situation by myself. That’s a tough call for any parent, I suspect, and for someone as invested in “self-reliance” as I am, it was extremely humbling and painful. The lesson that there are things I cannot handle by myself is one that I am still trying to absorb and deal with; a second painful lesson on letting go of things you love is one that I have not accepted. I want my daughter to come home. I want my family to be whole again. I want us to live together, and for our family dynamic to “work.”

Going through this program is a lot of hard work – hard internalization of the situation, hard recognition of my own patterns of “dealing” and my assumptions, attitudes and beliefs; hard acceptance of the fact that my family is “broken” and needs mending.

As parents, we face these humbling truths out of deep love. We want our children to work their way back to health, mentally and physically. We want their future to be as bright as we thought it was back when we first held them in our arms.

That’s what we always hope for in future generations. That’s why the decision about whether to give up a grandchild is one of the most wrenching that I can imagine.

Autoepiphanography

2006-10-31T18:31:00.000-08:00

When I was prompted to start thinking about my personal values a few months ago, “self-reliance” spring to mind quickly. The drive to prove that I can “do it myself,” that I can “go it alone,” that I can figure out how to do things without assistance from others, has been important to me throughout my life. It may be what got me into Harvard, what makes me good at school work in general.

But I wonder if this determination to shun the assistance of others has limited me as much as it has helped me. I am reluctant to ask for advice or assistance. When things become difficult, I tend to retreat inside my head – to figure things out and move on, in the best of cases, but just as often to stew, to simmer, to sit still, to justify inaction with the thought that I need to figure this out.

I know that when I graduated from college, I was particularly reluctant to let anyone help me – the idea of using my Harvard “connections” was anathema to me. I needed to feel that I was going to get somewhere “on my own merits.” What I neglected at the time – and what I still neglect to a large degree, is that the connections I have made, the network I have built, is available to me when I need help.

Recently, I have talked to my wife a little bit about this tendency of mine. She knows it well, having been shut out of my thoughts for more than 22 years now. She has learned to retreat when she sees me enter that “private” space, when I don’t want anyone to offer advice or assistance.

Yes, I have figured many things out this way. I am a reasonably successful person by all of the measurable standards. But how much more successful could I be – at whatever I want to do – if I were willing to reach out and ask for help when I need it?

Is my belief that I need to “go it alone” limiting me rather than supporting me? Is my retreat into my mind a “safe place” that allows me to justify inaction rather than supporting my efforts to move ahead?

This is a lot for me to think about. It’s going to be even harder for me to do something about, given how long and how aggressively I have nurtured this tendency. But do something about it I will – at least when I recognize it and see someone that I can ask for assistance. This is my new commitment: When I feel trapped by a problem, I will think of the person most likely to have an answer or be in a position to offer aid, and I will ask that person for help.

What a novel concept. It means admitting to myself that I can’t do something. It means acknowledging that others may have expertise or experience that outweighs my own. It means being vulnerable to criticism.

I think it’s the fear of criticism that has sent me off into the limited world of “self-reliance” in the first place. Somewhere early on, from my family, whose criticisms I remain keenly aware of, I learned that it is dangerous to ask for help. I learned that I might be accused of being stupid or incompetent. I also learned that I am pretty good at figuring things out on my own. That made it both easy and comfortable for me to retreat, and to believe that I was doing something productive. “Go figure it out yourself” is not always bad advice – but I need to recognize that sometimes it is a recipe for sustained frustration. Working through frustrations and getting to an answer can be a very good thing, but so can the recognition that others can help you get there move quickly and more effectively.

Somehow, I think this all goes back to my lack of self-confident, my inability to believe that people could love or respect the real me. I have often thought of myself as an imposter – have often believed that I am loved and respected only to the extent that I can keep up the act of who I am.

This has got to change. I will be 50 years old next month. I need to be able to seek help. I need to be able to express my desires, my needs, my wants, my fears and my frustrations and to seek the help I need in resolving them.

The fact that I have become pretty good at doing things myself should become part of an arsenal of tools, not my only tool.

The fact that I enjoyed myself so much on Sunday, in a woodworking class with a group of strangers (all men, no less) should tell me something. It’s okay to admit you don’t know something. It’s okay to seek to learn, to seek improvement, and to ask others for help getting there.

I think that in this area, like so many others, the only solution is to force myself to change the pattern. I need to find those areas – particularly at work, where I am extremely frustrated at the moment – where I need help and I need to openly and aggressively seek it. Others do this and survive. I see it, I know it can work.

It means taking a chance.

It means risking the perception of incompetence.

It means acknowledging imperfection.

It means letting the world know that Icannot do everything alone.

It means being part of a community.

It means engaging with life.

It means stepping away from my private space and into public.

How odd that I live so much of my life in public, and yet retreat so completely into my own thoughts when things become difficult. Being needy is such a scary thing for me. Look at how this has shown up for me. I have set up a world where I have – or think I have – very little “wiggle room.”

I’m not happy right now, and I don’t know how to change it without making sacrifices that I’m not sure I’m ready to make. Way back when I first met my wife, I thought about the possibility that I might be able to survive without working for a living. But when I tried it – quitting my job and going back to school – I found that I couldn’t live with the lack of control over my own destiny. The idea that I was dependent on my wife became odious to me. I had to prove I could make it on my own, earn a living, have a career. Well, I’ve done that. I’ve proven I can have a career, that I can earn money and be successful. And I’m not satisfied with the result because I’m not doing anything I love.

So what’s the answer? I need to get to a point in my life where I can spend time doing things I love. What do I love doing?

I’m never so happy as when I am in some kind of creative pursuit, whether music, woodworking, art, writing, or whatever. That’s when I feel fulfilled. That’s what makes me tick. There’s some creativity in the work I do, but it’s limited. How do I get to the point where I can spend my time being creative?

I can’t do it alone. I need Eliza. I need the support of the people who love me and believe in me. I need to trust that they will love and believe in me even if I am taking huge risks of failure.I need to devote time to the things I love doing.

I need to stop avoiding failure in the creative arts – which I tend to do by filling my time with other things, including the damned television. I haven’t done a lot of reading lately, and I do love reading, but reading about things rather than doing them is a trap as well.

I need to structure my life so that I prioritize the act of creation.

Creativity really is what I value. It’s what makes me feel worthwhile. It’s what seems riskiest to me, because if I fail, I fail at what’s most important to me. That’s exactly why I need to prioritize it in ways I never have.

What can I do when I am traveling, when I am on business, to support my need to create?
Writing is the most portable of the creative pursuits I love. I should focus on that when I am on the road. Music is more difficult. Art and woodworking are the most difficult of all – the least portable.

I also need to prioritize staying at home. I’m tired of traveling. I want to live in my house and surround myself with the things I love. To do that, Eliza and I need to focus on financial independence. I may have to give up my mountain retreat, but since I haven’t been able to stay in retreat there, that’s not such a sacrifice. There may even be a way I can retain it. I need to be willing to let Eliza be in the driver’s seat with financial decisions – which she most often is anyway. I pay the household bills, but I also contribute to running them up. Can we re-structure our lives to be more financially independent, less reliant on a paycheck? I won’t know unless I talk to her about it.

This is another thing I need to force myself to do. I need to sit down with Eliza and be honest with her about what I want and the kind of life I want to live. I did that to some extent in August when I was considering a change in jobs. Now I’ve done that, and I know that the job isn’t going to fulfill me. So how do I get what is going to fulfill me?
We need to talk about that. Eliza is the best and strongest relationship I have – troubled as ours is – and I need to rely on that. I need to tell her that I am unhappy in my career, and that the specific company I work for isn’t making a difference.

Values and Self-Limiting Beliefs

2006-10-31T18:29:00.000-08:00

Easier To Write

2006-10-30T16:16:00.000-08:00

Lots of short posts today.
I'm a little gunshy of writing too much without posting, because I lost about 30 minutes worth of thoughts earlier today.
I continue to find it easier to write than to do other types of creative activity.
The years of practice? Probably a big piece of it.
I want to express myself in other forms of art, but writing comes more easily to me.

Funny

2006-10-30T14:19:00.000-08:00

Two months into a new job and I'm back into my old ways big-time.
Nothing's really changed except I'm not living up to my "potential" in a new setting.
Yes, I'm collecting my salary. I'm coming through on the small things.
But I am holding back. I'm not pushing what I really want because I still lack confidence in my ideas.
What is the risk for me?
Not much.
I'm losing respect and self-respect on a daily basis the way things are.
Why not push into a chancy area?
Why not insist on getting things done my way?
Why not learn?
The evidence is all there that when I do absorb something new and test it out, it goes over well. I am a learning creature and a persuasive one at times, just not consistently.
How can I get to the point where I am pushing something new every day, making it go there into the unknown?
What do I have to lose? My job? Am I not kind of trying to do that anyway?
Why not go out in a blaze?

Untitled

2006-10-30T14:16:00.000-08:00

The cryptic note below is the result of having typed down thoughts for roughly 30 minutes, then having them disappear during the "publish" process. Frustrating, but in this case no big loss. I wasn't onto anything profound, just musing about the things I think I want and why I'm not willing to give up anything I have to get them.
Generalized dissatisfaction. That's where I am today.
Nothing's really wrong, but nothing seems right.

What Do I Want?

2006-10-30T13:33:00.000-08:00

Can I get anything to appear here?

Why Should I Want More Than I Have?

2006-09-04T10:41:00.000-07:00

The follow-up to the "want" list was to create a list of 10 things you want from the person with whom you are in a relationship. According to the directions, after my wife and I create these lists, we are supposed to get together and share them, then each agree on three things we want from the other.
I'm stuck logistically on this because my wife hasn't caught up on the homework, but I'm also stuck conceptually. My wife and I talked about this assignment last night, and we aren't sure if we can each come up with 10 things we want from the other -- if the rule implies that they have to be 10 things we don't already have. The assignment doesn't explicitly say these have to be things we don't already have, but it does say the sharing should be in terms of a "request."
The implication is that we all have unfulfilled wants in our lives and in our relationships. I'm not sure this is so -- at least not to the degree implied in the assignment.
So how do you complete the homework if you don't want what you haven't got? We agreed that when she gets caught up and the time comes, we won't be bound by the rule that the requests have to be for things we are "missing" in our lives. We'll just share what we want out of our marriage, and know that in most cases we already have it.

I Want

2006-08-27T13:37:00.000-07:00

Homework last week was to create 10 index cards a day, each of which documents something "I want."
The first 10 were easy, but by the time day 7 came along, thinking of 10 things I wanted was a daunting task.
What I noticed about my "want" list was that most of it had to do with personal achievement and recognition. Even "social" items, liking wanting my home to be a destination for friends, had a lot to do with how I am perceived. Guess self-image is an important aspect of my psyche, huh?
No wonder then, that my daughter has problems with her self-image. She got her concerns from Dad.
When I got to the end, the last card I wrote said, "I want achievement to be easy." Don't want to work hard, just want the results. I always have said that I'm not afraid of hard work. I guess what I have seen is that hard work doesn't always pay off.
Yes, I've achieved some things in my life, but it often seems to me that most recognition comes as a result of self-promotion, not hard work. The work is necessary, but without the self-promotion comes that danger that your (my) hard work will be co-opted, that credit will be taken by a manager. I've had that happen way too many times, particularly since I entered private business. Fortunately, there are always other roads.
Tomorrow, for example. I fly to San Francisco in the morning to start a new job. One that I got through recognition from a man who didn't know my previous company or my previous boss.
Something to think about as I enter this new corporate setting. I think I will have easy and constant access to the CEO at this company. Let's see how I handle it.

Sixteen Candles

2006-08-24T08:21:00.000-07:00

Sixteen years ago tonight, I first learned of my daughter's existence. Yesterday (about 10:30 pm EDT) was her birthday, but it was today (about 7 pm EDT) when I got a call from our adoption lawyer telling me that a beautiful bi-racial child had been born at the local university hospital. The birth mother had made no pre-natal plans for adoption, but had called our attorney that morning.
Were we interested?
The question came at a busy and difficult time in our lives. We were both in school -- I was working on my master's degree and teaching undergraduates, my wife was working on her bachelor's degree. That evening, my wife had left for a weekend visit to her mother, about 100 miles south of where we were living and going to school.
Although we had signed up with an adoption attorney, six weeks earlier, our expectation was that it would be a year or two before we got the chance to adopt -- we'd be finished school and ready to embark on our next adventure.
We didn't have a name, a bottle, a diaper, or a crib. But here was our opportunity to become parents. I called my mother-in-law, and asked her to have my wife call me as soon as she arrived at the parental homestead. She did, and turned right around and came home, so that we could see if this would work out.
We didn't see our daughter that night, of course. The next day was an insanely busy one. Friends of ours came up to help us shop. The birth mother asked to meet us, so we went to the hospital, where she had our baby in the room with her. We were supposed to be escorted by a hospital social worker, but shortly before we arrived, a young boy drowned and the social worker was with the family, offering consolation. Could we go up to the room ourselves and make our own introduction?
We did, and spent a couple of hours talking with the young mother, and holding, feeding and changing the baby that we knew immediately was ours.
The mother was 19, unmarried, and the mother of a 3-year-old. Her fiance was in jail, and was not the father of our child. The father was a corrections officer at the jail, with whom our child's birth mother had had a brief affair. The birth mother had successfully hidden her pregnancy from her fiance, and needed to move on with her life.
It's hard to describe the bond that began forming as soon as I laid eyes on my daughter, but I know that I fell quickly and completely in love with that child that afternoon. We spent the evening shopping for baby necessities with our friends, setting up the nursery, and phoning family members with our news.
There was some skepticism in the family. A bi-racial child? We were lily-white on both sides of the family, although my wife's family included some mixed marriages and bi-racial children.
But we had no doubts -- at least I didn't. I know my wife was somewhat frightened by the entire prospect of parenthood, but knew how important it was to me. She knew she could handle the obvious responsibilities, but I know she felt unsure about the challenge. Still, she was ready to dive in and take it on.
How did that difference in enthusiasm affect our marriage? I know that I took on primary responsibilities for many aspects of parenthood -- making bottles, getting up at night for feedings, etc. We shared many others. But I remember a comment my wife made -- her fear that I didn't need her anymore now that I had the baby I wanted.
I told her I never signed up for single parenthood, and that we needed to be in this together.
But I know something did begin to change when our daughter entered our lives.

He Who Smelled It, Dealt It

2006-08-18T08:51:00.000-07:00

A funny saying, but I am coming to see the truth in it.
I have always considered myself a strongly analytical person, able to spot bullshit and point it out.
What I am coming to realize through a great deal of soul-searching, is how I have missed spotting the bullshit in myself. I smelled it, but didn't realize how much I have dealt it.
In recent months I have characterized a new executive at my former company as "the ultimate handjob" -- someone who spent all day jacking off and, when he came all over his hand, thought he was discovering something profound.
Man, is that a description of the person I have been.
In the past few days, as I struggled with resigning my position and accepting a new challenge, I have come to realize how much of my job I have done "in my sleep" for the past couple of years, and how little I have challenged myself. If that's not a handjob, I don't know what is.
So many of us go on autopilot in our lives. I have done that in my marriage, in my parenting, in my friendships as well as in my career.
Could I have reached this realization and made a go of it in my previous job?
Probably. And I would have had to deal with an enormous amount of baggage that I carried with me every day.
Taking on a new challenge forces me to confront several major fears -- of change, of risk, of not being good enough. By changing jobs, I have no choice but to confront all of this in myself and to work my ass off at accepting change, confronting risk, rising to the occasion.
We all make choices in our lives. What I am seeing today is that whatever choices we make -- and whether others see them as good or bad, wise or foolish -- we can make them work for us if we are willing to confront fears and face up to the challenges.
That's what I start doing right now.
Here's to the future.

No, No Pig. That's Not Fear. That's Excitement.

2006-08-17T13:37:00.000-07:00

Today, I resigned from the job I have held for the past four years to accept a position at a rival company. For obvious reasons, this decision has been an emotional roller-coaster for me. But in making the decision, I have been able to rely on several tools I have picked up through the seminars I have attended as a program parent.
I have had a tendency throughout my life to deal with situations I don't like in the following way:

Keep quiet
Become resentful and frustrated
Ultimately explode in anger

Recognizing this in myself, I chose to handle my current situation in a very different way. While I was quite frustrated by some things happening in my organization, I dealt with them by first establishing a basis of strength -- a job offer which I did not pursue, but to which I opened my ears and mind. Change like this is difficult for me. I have been a fearful person in many aspects of my life, but I have learned that without facing fears you cannot grow.

The statement that heads this post is a mantra from the parent seminars my wife and I attend, and silly as it sounds, it has been a useful guide to me as I struggled with my decision.

Next, I took the time to write out a long and detailed plan for what needed to happen in my current (now previous) company to convince me to remain on board. I faced the source of my frustrations -- the CEO -- and insisted on a meeting to discuss these. Based on his feedback, I was able to make a clear and comfortable decision to change.

There are of course, many people I will miss from the job I have left. That has made today a somewhat wistful one. But that wistfulness is mixed with excitement over new prospects.

A New Start

2006-08-16T13:58:00.000-07:00

I'm making a new start with this blog, after an absence of several months. The reasons for my absence have been many, but my return today has a purpose: To use this forum as a journal of my experiences as the parent of a child in a residential rehabilitation facility.
My wife and I made the very difficult decision in March to enroll our 15-year-old daughter in a rehab facility for teens who have succumbed to the temptations of drugs, alcohol, sex and other dangerous substances and activities.
The decision was made after attempts to address these issues through counseling, outpatient rehab, stricter parenting, and all the other usual suspects. Nothing had worked, and our child had gotten to the point where we could no longer provide the safety and control she needed.
A rehab counselor told us that if we did not get our child into a facility, she would likely not live to see her 18th birthday. Within five days, our daughter was at her new home and we were addressing our guilt and anger.
In one way, we lucked out. Our daughter went willingly to the facility -- even filled out her own paperwork --and so we were spared the horrendouse experience many families undergo of having her "transported" by a team of strongmen.
In fact, our trip from our home in Southern California to Southern Utah was filled with pleasurable reminiscences despite our trepidation about dropping her off and leaving her in the hands of total strangers.
It has now been more than five months since we have seen our child. We have had four one-hour phone calls with her, most recently this morning. We exchange letters on roughly a weekly basis, and we talk on alternate weeks to her therapist and to a "family rep" who keeps us up-to-date on our daughter's activities and progress.
My wife and I are participating in a series of family seminars, in which we focus not on our daughter but on ourselves. We all carry around enormous baggage -- our attitudes, assumptions and beliefs -- that needs to be examined and challenged. The concept of our program is not that our daughter's difficulties are the fault of the parents, but that something important has broken in the family and the whole family needs to work together to fix it.
I believe this much more strongly today than I did five months ago, when we sent our daughter away. I have spent a lot of time reflecting on the mixed messages I received in my own upbringing, and the coping mechanisms I developed during those years and have used over the rest of my life --withdrawal, frustration, resentment, blame, anger.
I want to use this blog as a vehicle for reflection and I welcome feedback from anyone who stops by. More later.

Enemies List

2006-01-05T16:21:00.000-08:00

This is outrageous.
James Moore, author of Bush's Brain, a book critical of Karl Rove, was put on the Department of Homeland Security No Fly Terror Watch list a year ago, meaning he has to go through a special clearance process each time he travels by plane.
Of course, because this is a counterterrorism program, nobody is willing or obligated to explain to him how his name got on that list.
Seems obvious to me.

The Manchurian President

2006-01-05T11:51:00.000-08:00

Richard Condon's novel, The Manchurian Candidate, and the John Frankenheimer film based on it, begin by taking literally a then-current cocktail party put-down: "So-and-so couldn't be doing the communists any more good if he was actually working for them."
In the novel and film, a right-wing presidential candidate turns out to be the stooge of a communist operative, who is also secretly manipulating a decorated Korean War hero.
George W. Bush's out-of-touch demeanor has long suggested that he, too, is a stooge for a behind-the-scenes manipulator. While I have argued against this, believing that it absolves Bush of responsibility for his destructive acts, speculating on who his puppeteer might be is certainly an entertaining pastime.
Dick Cheney, of course, is seen by many as the master manipulator. But to whom should we speculate that Cheney reports in this parlor-game scenario? Osama bin Laden? Saddam Hussein? A right-wing media mogul like Richard Scaiffe or Rupert Murdoch? Some lower-profile (to most Americans) villain such as Vladimir Putin?
Hard to say, although the way that Bush's actions have threatened both our traditional values (such as the quaint concepts of personal liberty and privacy) as well as our security (through misappropriation of Homeland Security funds to small midwestern towns, sapping the strength of the military in the ill-conceived and poorly executed war in Iraq, etc.) in the aftermath of the September 11 attack suggests that ultimately, he works for Osama bin Laden. Makes sense, too, given the close ties of the Bush family to various Saudi oil billionaires.
While it's surely a pipe dream, finding out that Bush really is a pawn of the terrorists in an elegant global conspiracy would tie together a large number of loose ends and explain a lot of otherwise mystifying developments.
Anyway, the guessing game is fun.

A New Year For Blogging

2006-01-04T11:47:00.000-08:00

Welcome to 2006.
As I look back over the first year of this blog, what I see primarily is my loss of energy and interest in posting. I have gone from daily posts to roughly weekly posts to -- most recently -- skipping an entire month.
It's not entirely that I've had nothing I've wanted to say, or that I've been too busy. Mostly, it's the case that I'm easily distracted.
I've had a few readers who started to become regulars, before either my lack of interesting content or lack of consistent new material turned them off. But I thank all of them for stopping by: iddybud, Oyster, Scott, Pusillanimous Wanker, JulieB, Francesca, JR and the others. Some of you have had consistent and interesting blogs yourselves. Others have suffered from the same inconsistencies of time and interest that I've been subject to.
I've done some interesting things in the past year: Started woodworking again after a lapse of almost a decade. Started writing fiction and poetry again after an even longer lapse (see The Practical Press for my infrequent posts there). In the last few months, I've even headed back to the gym with a vengeance. I'm not sure how long any of these refound interests will stick around -- but even if they wax and wane, they're fun while I'm focusing on them.
This year, I would like to set as a goal a weekly post on this blog with at least a little bit of substance. More than a comment or a link. Something that expresses some thought, some reflection -- which of course was the primary rationale for starting up this thing.
Here's to the new year.

Some Worst Things

2005-11-28T16:56:00.000-08:00

1. The worst thing about Michael Brown starting a business as a emergency planning consultant is that he probably will get some clients.
2. The worst thing about Randy "Duke" Cunningham's guilty plea and resignation is that much of America will greet the news with a shrug, having grown to expect that politicians will be dishonest and greedy.
3. The worst thing about George W. Bush's plummeting popularity is that now even scary Halloween witches like Michelle Malkin are criticizing him. Does that mean that she has become my political ally?

Be Afraid

2005-11-15T06:05:00.000-08:00

Everyone who cares about American democracy should be concerned about the election 2005 story told by Brad Friedman in the Huffington Post yesterday. Brad Friedman, one of the world's best bloggers, has done an admirable job writing over the past year about problems and potential problems with the Diebold electronic voting machines being introduced in many districts around the country.
In this story he writes about the very curious (some -- like Brad -- might say impossible) discrepancy between pre-election polls and voter tallies on four Ohio ballot propositions. Perhaps the gun isn't smoking, but it's definitely warm to the touch and deserves to be examined more closely.
As one of the conspiracy theorists who found the exit poll vs. voter tally results in the 2004 presidential election troubling, I am even more disturbed by these enormous discrepancies in Ohio. Comments on Brad's blog have recommended examining results county by county (about half of Ohio's counties used Diebold machines this year). I would heartily agree that every possible clue be pursued here.
These machines have been shown to be easily corrupted, anjd have been disallowed in California for this reason. Officers of Diebold promised in 2004 to deliver the election to Bush -- and may have done so.
It would be very simple for electronic voting machines to include a paper trail (it happens at the grocery store every day, where electronic cash registers produce receipts). Diebold's resistance to including such a feature in its machines is suspect on the surface.
Many thanks to Brad Friedman for doing his part to keep a close eye on what is happening.

An Explanation for George's Policies

2005-10-28T05:39:00.000-07:00

From the BBC:

Chimps fall down on friendship
Captive chimpanzees fail to help others in their social group, even when it causes no inconvenience, a behavioural study in Nature journal has found ... Humanlike attributes shown by chimps include tool use and maybe rudimentary language skills, but this study suggests altruism is not among them.
But other researchers said that captive chimps may be less socially inclined. A team led by Joan Silk of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), set captive chimpanzees tests in which they obtained a food reward.
The chimps were presented with two reward options. One option allowed a chimp only to serve itself with food. The other secured the same reward, but also delivered food to another chimpanzee in an enclosure next door.
Dr Silk's team found the 29 chimps tested in the study were no more likely to pick the second option than the first, even though it allowed them to do a "good deed" at no cost to themselves.

Heh-heh-heh.

A Richness of Embarrassments

2005-10-11T16:43:00.000-07:00

The tale of Harriet Miers and George W. Bush just gets more and more entertaining. Today came the revelation of admiring notes written by Ms. Miers to that dashing devil W. The content makes it clear that Ms. Miers has what amounts to a schoolgirl crush on the president.
The New York Times reports that Ms. Miers comments included patently absurb statements such as, "You are the best governor ever," and "Hopefully Jenna and Barbara recognize that their parentsare 'cool' -- as do the rest of us," and "The state is in great hands."
All of this sounds like Ms. Miers spent her evenings kissing George's yearbook picture and hoping against hope that he would ditch Laura and ask her to the Homecoming Dance.
It's ugly. And scary. And further proof that this woman does not possess a mind that belongs on the U.S. Supreme Court.
I loved Bill Maher's comment the other night that, "You know her as TV's 'Hazel'," although I was a little dismayed that he wasted five minutes agreeing with Ann Coulter on the subject of Ms. Miers' lack of qualifications.
The worst thing about that segment was that I had to recognize that the ghoulish coke-whore Ms. Coulter made one good point: She conceded that Ms. Miers is a nominee who would likely vote to overturn Roe vs. Wade, but noted that there are so many other constitutional questions she would be asked to consider that we really do need a constitutional scholar in the job. Not a profound point, but a good, solid one that I would not have expected from Ms. Coulter, despite the fact that she claims to be a lawyer.

One Pill Makes You Small

2005-10-08T08:48:00.000-07:00

Interesting post on Watching the Watchers suggests that one reason people aren't as likely to be outraged by the war today as they were in the 1960s is the prevalence of antidepressants and other mood-altering pharmaceuticals. Harder to be outraged when you're on a drug that prevents you from being enraged at all...

Why Not The Worst? Part III

2005-10-08T08:01:00.000-07:00

Here's what Dan Coats, the former Republican Senator tasked with ensuring Harriet Miers' ascendency to the Supreme Court, had to say about her to CNN (as quoted in The New York Times this morning):

If great intellectual powerhouse is a qualification to be3 a member of the court and represent the American people and the wishes of the American people and to interpret the Constitution, then I think we have a court so skewed on the intellectual side that we may not be getting representation of America as a whole.

Whew. Is this man really promoting the idea that we should be ruled by the stupid?
While I find this comment hilarious, I also am frightened by it. Are there really people who do not understand that when it comes to interpreting the Constitution, we need the best, brightest, most experienced legal minds our nation can produce?
Do people really not understand that elevating stupidity -- or even ignorance and inexperience -- puts all of us in danger (what have they been doing for the past five years?)
If we want stupid judges, shouldn't we also demand stupid doctors, stupid accountants, stupid architects, stupid engineers? After all, it seems that the goal of people like Mr. Coats is to have the halls of justice come crashing down on our heads. When that happens we would want bad doctors to botch our emergency care so that we could go to court represented by a stupid lawyer for a damage settlement that would then be lost to arithmetic errors made by an accountant who can't count.

Why Not The Worst? Part II

2005-10-08T07:52:00.000-07:00

If Bush's recent female appointees are "work mommies," his male appointees throughout his 5 years in office have mostly been in the mold of fraternity brothers.
The latest frat bro to hit the headlines is Timothy Flanigan, who withdrew his nomination as Deputy Attorney General on Friday because of growing questions about his relationship with indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Preznit Bush's All-Fun DC Fraternity seems to consist largely of the circle of friends around Abramoff and Grover Norquist. Alberto Gonzales is in there, along with Mike Brown, Mike Chertoff and a whole band of other nincompoops that Bush has elevated to cushy, highly paid positions designed to keep them off the welfare rolls for another three years -- except that his strategy seems to be falling apart.
Work mommies and Frat boys. What's the connection? Many would say it's a simple matter of surrounding himself with sycophants. I think there's another explanation: Bush wants to be surrounded by people willing to take a paddle to his presidential butt.

A New Fed Chief? Why Not The Worst?

2005-10-07T12:01:00.000-07:00

So today we hear that Bush is "close" to announcing a new chairman of the Federal Reserve, to replce Alan Greenspan. Well, W has had an extraordinary record recently in naming nanny-ish women to top jobs -- the bovine Karen Hughes insulting Middle Eastern women at State, Harriet Miers poised to wear her choir robes to Supreme Court hearings. Now he has a chance to name a new chairman of the Federal Reserve.
While the effort to promote women into important leadership roles in government is generally to be applauded (and I will clap my hands raw when Hillary becomes president), Bush has made a mockery of the idea. If Condi Rice is Bush's "work wife" as has been said, Hughes and Miers are more in the mold of "work mommies," fiercely loyal yet hectoring substitutes for Big Babs.
I recommend he continue the trend. We need a "mommy" to oversee the Fed. My choice: Jean Stapleton, formerly Edith Bunker of "All In The Family." She carries a big purse, knows a lot about money from balancing the family budget, and managed to make ends meet on her husband's blue-collar salary in pricey New York City. And hey, the New York aspect of it should make her a shoo-in for Blue-Staters.

A New Strategy

2005-09-29T17:26:00.000-07:00

Karen Hughes, our nation's Undersecretary of State tasked with making us look less threatening and evil to the Arab world, appears to have adopted a new strategy in her career-long effort to make George W. Bush look less dumb -- she's decided to be even stupider than he is.
Sidney Blumenthal provides an account in Salon of Ms. Hughes' first trip to the Mideast in her new role. The article is both hilarious and frightening. Read it. Here is an excerpt:

"Many people around the world do not understand the important role that faith plays in Americans' lives," she said. When an Egyptian opposition leader inquired why President Bush mentions God in his speeches, she asked him "whether he was aware that previous American presidents have also cited God, and that our Constitution cites 'one nation under God.' He said, 'Well, never mind.'"

The phrase cited by Ms. Hughes never, of course, appears in the U. S. Constitution. Even the second-graders who have to recite it daily know that it was added to the PLEDGE OF ALLEGIENCE in 1954, to distinguish our fair people from the Godless Soviets.
But apparently that bit of history escaped the bovine Ms. Hughes.

The Blame Game

2005-09-28T07:59:00.000-07:00

Former FEMA chief Michael Brown's laughable performance before Congress yesterday was the latest move in the Bush administration's attempt to play the "blame game" by pinning its failure to respond appropriately to the Hurrican Katrina emergency on state and local elected officials who just happen to be Democrats.
On Monday came the outrageous news that "Brownie", who resigned in disgrace just two weeks ago, is still on the administration's payroll -- as a consultant to the very organization he shamed. Making this even more shocking was the disclosure that he is being paid to analyze the failures in the response to the hurricane.
Tuesday's performance made it clear that the "analysis" will be a brazen attempt to fix the blame on others, once more shirking responsibility for one of the worst failures of government to protect its citizens in our history.
The Bush administration has shown over the past five years that it considers governance to be nothing more than performance art. Any situation, no matter how serious, can be reduced to a photo op or a sound byte.
Last weekend, in just one egregious example, Bush made a big deal about how he needed to waste fuel and hinder emergency preparedness activities by making a site visit to a command center in Texas, then abruptly cancelled the visit when his handlers learned that the weather in San Antonio was likely to be sunny rather than rainy and windy. Clearly, if he couldn't pose like Anderson Cooper and Geraldo Rivera, he wasn't interested.
This is completely in character for a president who insisted on making a long, moody walk through the darkness in a New Orleans park to deliver a worthless address on recovery, who thought nothing of cancelling chemotherapy for patients at a San Diego hospital so he could get his picture taking (while Katrina was raging in the Gulf of Mexico), who donned his Village People drag to prance across the deck of an aircraft carrier to proclaim victory while lives were being wasted in Iraq.
This former governer of Texas insisted last weekend that one of the reasons he needed to visit the emergency control center the state he formerly governed was to see how state and local officials work together.
George W. Bush has become something less than a laughing stock. He is a disgrace to this nation, a politician who has shown himself to have less character than Richard Nixon, less of a connection to the people than his father, the notoriously out-of-touch George H.W. Bush, less regard for the facts than Ronald Reagan.
And we've got three more years to go.

Still Trying to Dodge the Bullet

2005-09-13T07:09:00.000-07:00

Wonkette reports that W. and his spinners continue to try to convince us that anyone believed, or reported, that New Orleans "dodged the bullet" in the hurricane. From a press briefing yesterday:

Q Did they misinform you when you said that no one anticipated the breach of the levees?
THE PRESIDENT: No, what I was referring to is this. When that storm came by, a lot of people said we dodged a bullet. When that storm came through at first, people
said, whew. There was a sense of relaxation, and that's what I was referring to. And I, myself, thought we had dodged a bullet. You know why? Because I was listening to people, probably over the airways, say, the bullet has been dodged. And that was what I was referring to.

Sheesh. That lie didn't work when Michael Chertoff told it. Why are they still trotting it out?

Another Stunt From the Chimp

2005-09-13T06:59:00.000-07:00

When will George W. Bush and his trainers realize that we the people are totally over his brand of photo-op leadership?
The White House has announced that he will address the nation "from Louisiana" Thursday night. Jeezy peezy. Maybe he should sit down at his desk and do some work some time, instead of wasting taxpayer money flying himself, a ton of staff, security detail, cameras, etc., into the flood zone.
At a time when fuel prices are rising in front of our eyes, his decision to waste money on a stunt is deplorable.

The New Most Offensive Katrina Quote

2005-09-12T06:03:00.000-07:00

"I believe the devastating hurricane that hit the United States occurred because people in Iraq or Afghanistan -- maybe a mother who had lost her son or a son whose parents were killed or a woman who was raped -- were praying for God and God accepted their prayers." -- Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

The right will, of course, pounce on this quote as evidence that those of us who have spent time and effort to make sure the Bush administration is held accountable for its inaction and poor judgement are comforting the enemy.
But the left needs to hold its ground and make sure that the truth is understood: That the administration, through five years of poor judgement, bad faith and malfeasance has created a situation in which al-Zarqawi and his ilk have become forces of influence in Iraq.
Bush has made his bed on several continents now. His lies cannot be allowed to be enough to get him out of the trouble he has created.

Unbelievable

2005-09-11T12:05:00.000-07:00

The Bush administration is evidently still trying to cut funds for agencies that provide hurricane protection. The only good thing about it is that even Republicans are starting to cry foul.

*****

And the administration has dispatched 195 emergency workers armed with 47 vehicles, three huge field kitchens and portable emergency water treatment equipment sent as aid by our neighbors in Mexico -- to San Antonio, Texas, which has plenty of both. And they can't even tell us why! Seems they're playing their version of the "blame game" -- agencies pointing the finger at each other for an explanation of the decision.

Words That Will Live in Infamy

2005-09-11T10:39:00.000-07:00

My personal top 10 vile, asinine, heartless, arrogant, obnoxious comments from the Katrina disaster:

"Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job." -- George W. Bush
"Almost everyone I’ve talked to says we're going to move to Houston ... What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this [she chuckles slightly] is working very well for them." -- Barbara Bush
"I remember on Tuesday morning picking up newspapers and I saw headlines, 'New Orleans Dodged The Bullet.'" -- Michael Chertoff
"Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?" -- Tom DeLay
"I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." -- George W. Bush
"I think all of those remarks are disgusting, to be perfectly frank, because of course President Bush cares about everyone in our country." -- Laura Bush
"We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did." -- Rep. Richard Baker, R-La.
“Michael Brown has done everything he possibly could to coordinate the federal response to this unprecedented challenge.” -- Michael Chertoff
"Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch." -- George W. Bush
"They're all very thankful where they find themselves right now." -- Dick Cheney

This Makes for Incredible Reading

2005-09-09T17:01:00.000-07:00

This timeline is making the rounds of the blogosphere, and rightfully so. It's just a staggering portraint of the incompetence and lack of concern our criminally negligent president showed in the face of disaster.
I hope he enjoyed that baseball game while people were drowning in the Big Easy.

I Wish I Understood...

2005-09-09T16:55:00.000-07:00

...why all of my postings have migrated way down to the bottom of the page. I can't see what is causing this but it gets on my nerves...

Dr. Ben Marble, American Hero

2005-09-09T12:38:00.000-07:00

He's the young emergency physician who told Vice President Dick to go fuck himself yesterday. For his efforts, he was handcuffed and detained by Cheney's goons for 20 minutes or so. Read all about him at OpEdNews.com.
Here's a brief sample of the excellent article:

So let’s get this straight: A physician with a newborn baby loses most everything he owns in the hurricane, does what most of us WANT to do and “echoes” Cheney’s words he spoke on the Senate floor last year, walks away harmlessly, mission accomplished, and then once the media cameras leave, he is treated like a foreign terrorist as Cheney’s goons waving M-16s handcuff him in front of his destroyed home? Had it not been for the media cameras filming the initial scene, I doubt Cheney’s goons would have just let Marble go after 20 minutes.America, land of the free?

The Media Falls Back Into Line

2005-09-09T06:10:00.000-07:00

After a few days in which it seemed that the U.S. media might have developed a spine in its dealings with the Bush administration, things have gone back to normal. Once again they are toeing the administration line and defending the Bush team's criminal incompetence.
Media Matters for America has the best summary I have seen of the inept, dishonest coverage of Nancy Pelosi's recent comments about her meeting with Bush.
Shameful.

Go Fuck Yourself, Mr. Cheney

2005-09-08T17:14:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to join in the chorus of praise for the anonymous well-wisher whose greeting to Vice President Dick made it onto CNN this afternoon. Thanks for making sure VP Dick's opportunistic photo op didn't go off as planned. I hope the right-wing thugs who attacked you didn't hurt you.
Here's the clip.

My "Katrina Day" Prayer

2005-09-08T17:01:00.000-07:00

So the orangutan-in-chief has declared September 16 a "Katrina Prayer Day" for those who don't have an earthly prayer of getting help from this incompetent, lying, cheating, thieving administration.
Here's my personal prayer: That those dang red-staters have learned their lesson and go for Hillary in '08.

Rules of Republican Governance

2005-09-08T06:52:00.000-07:00

In today's news:
1) Don't Let the Legislators Legislate: California's idiot governor Arnold has announced he will veto the gay marriage bill that was passed by both houses of the state legislature. His reasoning: That this issue should be decided in the courts or in the polls. Heaven forbid that the legislature should actually pass a law! This from a man whose political party never tires of complaining about "activist" judges -- we should let the courts decide this issue!?!?!?!?
2) Don't Let the Deliberators Deliberate: The Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives has voted to disallow debate on and amendments to the $52 billion hurricane relief bill on its docket for today. Democrats want amendments that include measures to restructure FEMA -- an agency broken thanks to Bush's criminal mismanagement -- but the Repugnicans have ruled out debate without even letting members read the bill.

Haven't We Had Enough of Barbara Bush, Too?

2005-09-06T05:43:00.000-07:00

She's just as obnoxious as her son.
At least we know where he inherited his supercilious sense of entitlement.
Here's what the superannuated sorority girl cum battleaxe-in-chief had to say about the Hurricane Katrina victims, as reported in Editor & Publisher and Salon:
"Almost everyone I’ve talked to says we're going to move toHouston ... What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this [she chuckles slightly] is working very well for them."
So compassionate. So motherly.
Heh-heh-heh.

A Perfect Time For Politics

2005-09-02T13:39:00.000-07:00

When should politics come to the forefront? When the government is not doing its job, as is the case at the moment, in the response to Hurrican Katrina.
The government's lapses are so apparent that even right-wingers are questioning the wisdom of the policies put in place by their Godhead, George W. Bush.
Still, some of the loonies in and around the administration insist that now is not a time for politics.
Baloney!
Now is time to shine a harsh light on the mismanagement that has been passing for government over the past five years.

New Orleans Got the Blues

2005-09-02T06:35:00.000-07:00

Cheney's still vacationing,
Condi's buying shoes,
Rove is playing politics,
New Orleans Got the Blues.

Bush is taking copter rides,
Landrieu is kissing ass,
Hastert says it's all a joke,
The people can't buy gas.

The prez has his priorities:
Cutting brush and aid,
Protecting all the rich folks' kids,
While thousands wash up dead.

A photo op, that's what we need,
That's what'll ease the pain.
Let's prance around in front of press
While hope goes down the drain.

He'll prob'ly wipe away a tear,
Won't stain that costly suit .
He'll pray the zillionaires are safe
While poor folks get the boot.

The National Guard's all been deployed
To far-off desert sands.
Their relatives at home seek help,
They cannot lend their hands.

Another day, no end in sight,
Seems there's no good news.
The preznit's playing guitar while
New Orleans Got the Blues.

How Dare They Call Themselves Christians?

2005-08-31T15:06:00.000-07:00

Jesus would weep, I believe, over the hatred being propogated in his name by the members of a vile death cult calling themselves Columbia Christians For Life. Thousands may be dead in New Orleans, and these scumbags have announced that the reason for this deadly "act of God" is that Louisiana has 10 abortion clinics.
These people are worse than scum. It is an insult to scum to call them that. But I don't know what else to call them ... words are failing me.

The Fatwa Against Science

2005-08-31T10:17:00.000-07:00

So now it appears that U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, R-TX, has declared a fatwa against scientists whose research on global warming produces results unfriendly to the oil companies. The Guardian reports that Barton, chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, has demanded large volumes of paperwork from three scientists. Says the Guardian:

Mr Barton, a Texan closely associated with the fossil-fuel lobby, has spent
his 11 years as chairman opposing every piece of legislation designed to combat
climate change.
He is using the wide powers of his committee to force the scientists to
produce great quantities of material after alleging flaws and lack of
transparency in their research. He is working with Ed Whitfield, the chairman of
the sub-committee on oversight and investigations.
The scientific work they
are investigating was important in establishing that man-made carbon emissions
were at least partly responsible for global warming, and formed part of the 2001
report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which convinced most
world leaders - George Bush was a notable exception - that urgent action was
needed to curb greenhouse gases.

The Republican Party's war on science is not confined to evolution. It is an all-out battle against facts that are inconvenient to the party's favored industries and issues. Truth be damned!
Biology, Chemistry, Physics -- research in all of these areas is at risk because of the Republican stranglehold on government. So far they haven't attacked mathematics, but I suppose when they figure out that mathematical formulas and equations are responsible for all of the other scientific conclusions, there will be attempts to ban Algebra and Calculus.
Algebra, Al-Qaeda, what's the difference?

The City of New Orleans

2005-08-31T06:55:00.000-07:00

Our thoughts today are with the people of this great city. We wish them great good fortune in recovering from the damage of Hurricane Katrina.

Intelligent Design

2005-08-30T09:11:00.000-07:00

Those who cite the complexity of the human species -- or even the diversity of life on Earth in general -- as proof of intelligent design are sadly off-base, I think. Yes, living things are staggeringly complex, but in many cases that complexity is far from elegant.
Anyone with an understanding of science knows that in almost every case, the simplest explanation is the best. And when you try to explain some of the strangeness evident in living things, invoking God leads to more and more circuitous, convoluted reasoning.
On the other hand, the theory of evolution provides simple and direct explanations for some of these things.
Why an appendix? Why wisdom teeth? Why are some humans born with vesigial tails or gills? If you pin these on God, you either posit that God makes mistakes, is a perverse trickster or is coldly insensitive to the pain endured by some of his creatures, whereas the scientific, evolution and genetics based explanation for all of these makes perfect, logical sense.
So where is the evidence of God?
Here's where I turn: Numbers.
If you want to see a system that is simple, elegant, consistent and yet capable of infinite complexity, turn to your calculator. The beauty of mathematics provides all the evidence of God that I need. Humans didn't invent numbers, except in the sense of giving them names. Numbers were there to be discovered. They always work.
Talk about your intelligent design.
All God had to do to set the universe in motion was to provide this elegant system, and to make it applicable to every aspect of his creation. From simple counting to atomic theory. Everything else is explicable by science.

Bush Approval Rating Continues to Circle the Drain

2005-08-26T13:29:00.000-07:00

I found these historical ratings to be an interesting point of comparison

Approval Ratings for Second-Term Presidents the Summer After Re-election

Harry Truman: 58%
Dwight Eisenhower: 63
Lyndon B. Johnson: 65
Richard Nixon: 34
Ronald Reagan: 61
Bill Clinton: 61
George W. Bush: 43

Forty-three percent was Bush's average rating over three Gallup polls conducted this month. His approval rating in the most recent of the three polls was a mere 40% -- right down there in Richard Nixon territory.
Nixon, despite his paranoia, egomania, etc., was self-aware enough to resign the presidency when the picture got convincingly bleak.

Be Careful What You Read

2005-08-26T06:15:00.000-07:00

This morning we get the word that the ACLU has confirmed the first case of the feds demanding reader records from a public library, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, under the USA Patriot Act.
I don't know about you, but my reaction to this sort of thing tends to be, "Give 'em something to worry about." So I plan to go my local public library today and check out every book I can find on radical Islam, infectious diseases and paramilitary operations.
It probably won't be many, but maybe it'll give 'em something to occupy their tiny minds.

Is It Any Wonder That No One Believes The Media?

2005-08-25T12:31:00.000-07:00

Here's a gem I saw on the Iddybud blog: Mort Kondracke on Faux News comparing Cindy Sheehan's questioning of the war in Iraq to Pat Robertson's call for the assassination of a sovereign leader.
Sheesh!!!

One of the Many Faces of Shamelessness

2005-08-24T14:15:00.000-07:00

Pat Robertson on Monday: "If he [Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez] thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think we really ought to go ahead and do it," said Robertson Monday. "It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war."

Pat Robertson today: "I didn't say 'assassination.' I said our special forces should 'take him out.' And 'take him out' can be a number of things, including kidnapping; there are a number of ways to take out a dictator from power besides killing him. I was misinterpreted by the AP [Associated Press], but that happens all the time."

Does he really think nobody will check up on these things????

Are The Commandments Optional?

2005-08-22T16:01:00.000-07:00

God: Thou shalt not kill.

Pat Robertson: You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he [Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez] thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war ... We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability.

Missing Links

2005-08-21T07:23:00.000-07:00

It's not surprising that some of those who provide the best evidence for evolution -- including, now, the simian missing link George W. Bush-- are those who argue for divine intervention in the creation. As if a divine intelligence were needed to come up with the likes of them. If anything, the existence of George W. Bush and his supporters provides evidence for the fallibility of God. Yes, S/He too can make mistakes.
What is most exasperating about the current techniques of the creation-theory supporters is their insistence that they are arguing in the interests of science and fair play. No serious scientist doubts the theory of Darwinian evolution. The evidence is overwhelming, in the fossil record, in genetics, in observations of nature. To give attention in science classrooms to the tenets of Judeo-Christian theology is to say that scientific observation and discovery should be muffled if they conflict with the mythology of a particular religion.
Equally exasperating is the rhetoric that holds that Darwinian evolution is an "unproven theory." The very statement betrays a profound lack of understanding of science and of scientific method. Anyone who has paid a modicum of attention in a well-taught science class (and yes, I realize that modifier will eliminate many) knows that a theory is simply the best available explanation for the observed conditions, and that everything from gravity to thermodynamics to quantum physics is theory.
Any theory can be superceded if either a better (generally simpler), more consistent theory is posited, or if conditions are observed which cannot be explained by the prevailing theory. Thus, even the notion that steam is a gaseous form of water could be replaced if a better explanation came along. All science is subject to questioning, to testing, to displacement. That is what makes it science.
Theology is not subject to the same rules. It may be probed, questioned, by those on the edges, or the outside, but it is not at all subject to replacement by the culture that holds it as a central precept without great upheaval, as in the Christianisation of Rome or the introduction of Islam in the Middle East.
Thus, to stand a belief system -- Judeo-Christian creationism -- against strong, solid science -- Darwinian evolution -- is an absurdity, an unfair battle that can never be won by either side.
Should the Judeo-Christian creation myth be taught in schools? Yes, alongside other creation myths, in classes devoted to world culture, to history, to literature, to art. It is one of the ironies of modern life that the Bible is often avoided in these classes -- where it is an essential foundation block of the disciplines and, of course, of Western culture (try understanding Milton or Shakespeare or Pound or Michaelangelo or Bernini or the Enlightenment or the settlement of North America by the Europeans without understanding the Bible!) -- and yet is inserted into any perceived chink in the armor of science.
The current argument by Bush and his ilk is that schools should "teach the controversy." That would be a sound and reasonable position if the controversy were taught in a social studies classroom. But to have the argument presented in a science classroom is a clear and simple political strategy to give a veneer of credibility to a hypothesis (not theory) that has no scientific underpinnings. This, of course, has been the overarching strategy of the Bush administration with regard to science, whether it be over evolution, greenhouse gases, or medical research: Ignore the science and regard the political debate as a scientific one. In this way, they strive to create a scientific debate where none exists, and to obfuscate the evidence which in virtually every case is the best argument against their political positions.
Back to evolution.
Many of us consider ourselves both scientists and Christians, and see no discrepancy between the two. How do we do this? We understand the Bible for what it is: A vast patchwork of metaphor, fable, history, romance, poetry, and philosophy that has been compiled, edited, translated, mistranslated, subverted, suppressed and reshaped over five millenia. It is an overwhelmingly great and enduring expression of belief. It is not literal truth, and it is not the literal word of God.
Science is the vehicle we use to better understand the greatness of God's gifts. It allows us to explore every question, to gain wisdom, and, possibly, to move toward grace.
The Bible is not a work of science and On The Origin of Species is not a work of theology.
Both should be understood and appreciated for their greatness, but the one should never be confused for the other.

P.S. I've been away from this blog for nearly a month, my attentions consumed by my job and by the creative writings I have been posting at The Practical Press. I hope to get back into the swing of things now that my company's annual conference has passed successfully. Thanks to those who noticed I was gone.

No Analysis Necessary

2005-07-24T07:12:00.000-07:00

So the administration is letting out the word -- and Darth Cheney is working in the background to send the messsage -- that President Bush will veto the 2006 Pentagon authorization bill if it includes an amendment, being prepared by Republican senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham and John Warner, that would:

Bar the military from hiding prisoners from the Red Cross
Prohibit cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees
Use only interrogation techniques authorized in a U.S. Army field manual

That the administration would oppose these three provisions says it all. No further analysis is necessary.

When the CIA Becomes The Good Guys

2005-07-22T12:21:00.000-07:00

I don't consider myself unpatriotic, just profoundly non-patriotic. By that, I mean that patriotism is a foreign concept to me. I don't feel any stirrings of emotion when I see the flag or hear the national anthem. I'm an American because I was born and raised here, and thus it's more convenient to stay here than shop around for another place to live (although I will tell anyone who asks that I felt much more at home during the two years I lived in the United Kingdom).
Having come of political age during the late '60s/early '70s, I've always been accustomed to thinking of the CIA as a dangerous organization. Thus, it's disconcerting to find myself appreciative of the patriotism of the former agents who have taken a stand in defense of Valerie Wilson. They are unwilling to let pass without comment the untruths and distortions being spread by the Republican smear machine and parroted by their allies in the MSM.
But there you have it. People are endlessly surprising (except for the Bush team, who always seem to do the most dastardly and offensive thing in every situation). These former agents have remdinded me that patriotism, while it may be the "last refuge of a scoundrel" (thank you, Dr. Johnson) or even "the first" (thank you, Mr. Bierce) can also engender behavior that is noble, loyal, honest and true.

Injustice Roberts

2005-07-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

I wasn't sure I had a strong reason to dislike John Roberts, whom George W. Bush has nominated to the Supreme Court. Then, this morning, The New York Times carried a short piece with the information that Roberts had acted as an advisor to Jeb Bush in the aftermath of the 2000 Presidential election in Florida -- you know, the one that the Bushes stole, the one for which Democratic absentee oters like me were denied ballots?
If Roberts had anything to do with engineering what I believe to be a coup against our democratic system, he should be ineligible to the bench, and instead eligible for time behind bars. We all have our hot-button issues. This happens to be mine.
Well, at least knowing this has made my decision about whether to oppose him simpler ...

Time to Change the Subject

2005-07-19T13:13:00.000-07:00

It must have been a brutal shock to the Bush administration to find the White House press corps still on the Rove-Wilson case for a second week in a row. Uncurious George and company have never had to worry about actual reporters asking actual questions before.
So, it's no wonder that after yesterday's brutal press briefing, they decide that today is the day to announce Bush's nomination to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by Sandra Day O'Connor.
"Let's change the subject and make them talk about something else," you can hear Karl Rove say, if you listen just a little.
But let's not let that happen. Let's continue to talk about the malicious leaking of national defense secrets in order to exact political retribution.
Sure we can talk about the Supreme Court pick -- it is, after all, a critically important selection -- but let's not let it get in the way of the other important story still unfolding.

Update: Reuters is confirming my suspicions that the timing of the Supreme Court announcement has everything to do with distracting attention from the Rove case.

Ideas In The Middle Of The Night

2005-07-18T07:08:00.000-07:00

Another late posting, written on that same trip to Germany:

Ideas are floating through my head tonight when I should be sleeping. I finished reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and started Nice Big American Baby, and I think the forced juncture of Jonathan Safran Foer and Judy Budnitz has produced strange progeny in my head.
The story about the cell phone virus, which began as a dream. I remembered a dream. Something that rarely happens.
The story about the friend who leaves his wife, remains friends with the husband of the couple they were closest to, moves in temporarily, gets closer and closer to the husband.The letter to my daughter, which has expanded into chapter after chapter about my strong feelings of love for her as she has grown up.
I want her to know that I am proud of her, that I understand that the difficulties we have gone through in her adolescence are just that -- the struggles of an adult to emerge from all of the cacaphonous experiences of childhood. I need for her to know that I have watched her with wonder from the day I first met her in the hospital. I need for her to know that I have some understanding of the difficult time she must have resolving things -- why her birth mother gave her up to adoption, why her two white parents chose to adopt a bi-racial child, why we have so much trouble understanding the impulses that seem perfectly logical to the adolescent mind.
I need to get to sleep. I need to write.I want my child to understand most of all that I am proud of her, that I see in her kindness and goodness that are far more important than the Algebra grade I may seem to be obsessed with. That I really, truly enjoy spending Saturday's riding around Laguna Beach with her, taking tours of homes for sale that we can't afford to buy, dreaming about that perfect life of leisure on the beach.
I need to sleep. I need to write.I want to write about the evening in Seaside, Florida, a few days before Christmas, when I watched her roll over for the first time. I don't remember whether that first roll was front-to-back or back-to-front, but I know that one direction followed the other within a day or two and I had a child who was strong and mobile and clever.
I want her to know about the first Christmas, when we took her to dinner at a hotel in Mobile, Alabama, and old people who were eating at the buffet came over to admire her. This baby in the middle of the table made them happy, and their happiness elated me.
I remember the Sunday morning when she first sat up, on the floor of our house in Gainesville, Florida.And the day she told me that Bogart, our dog, "loves me in the whole wide world" (I used to tell her every day that I loved her more than anything in the whole wide world. Why is it that these kinds of words come so easily when your child is small, but are hard to fit into the day when you spend it arguing with a teenager over television and homework and cleaning up your room?)
I want her to know that I admire her insistence on fairness, whether it applies to her friends or to political issues. It's her standard of judgment and it's the right one.

Walking Through Frankfurt

2005-07-18T07:04:00.000-07:00

I wrote this during my trip to Germany last April, but never posted it. Coming across it in my files, I decided I wanted it to be out here:

Walking across a footbridge over the river Main this afternoon, I listened to a saxophonist playing a familar jazz tune whose name I can't recall, accompanied by the incompatible oompah of an accordian. It was the aesthetic highlight of a pleasant yet uneventful day; I made sure to leave a Euro in the player's hat.
I ended up in Frankfurt a day early for the conference I am attending, due to the mysteries of international airfares. To leave and return on the appropriate days would have cost my company an extra thousand dollars.
And so, after sleeping until 1 pm -- the flight over knocked the wind out of my sails more powerfully than I would have expected -- I spent the afternoon wandering the city in solitude. That kind of solitary exploration is something that helps my soul. I think about virtually everything. I regain perspective.
Today, as I wandered, stopping here and there to finish up my reading of the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, I thought about the connections in my own life, the relationships, and how I want those I love to understand my feelings for them.Like the characters in the novel, I want to leave behind messages that explain how I feel. Like them, I know how hard it is to express love to those you really love in a way that doesn't seem prosaic or insincere or both. We say "I love you" to our spouses and children and parents as a matter of course, but if we were gone tomorrow, would we really leave behind enough evidence to convince them that all those words were true?
Most days, we get caught up in the trivia of life. We struggle to make a living, put food on the table, get to where we're going on time, and in the course of doing that we often seem to resent the people and activities that are most important to us. How dare they get in the way when we are doing the things we do for their benefit.It's not just an idle wish of mine to be able to focus on what is important. I would do it if I knew how, and if I knew that an effort to do so would not backfire on me.
For example: Would it make sense to quit my job and move my family back to Florida, where my wife wants to live? Maybe in one way, and yet it would put us in much too close a proximity to the man who molested my daughter, who denies it and goes unpunished because of a lack of evidence. I'd have to find a new way to make a living, as the kind of 50-year-old white man who is not really in demand in the job market. I fear I'd be trading one problem -- my wife's dislike of living far away from her family and home -- for a myriad of others.If I acceded to my daughter's wish to live at the beach -- which I tend to pooh-pooh as the idle wishes of an idle teen, but which I know are also part of that struggle we all go through to find a fresh start in ideal circumstances -- I'd be putting myself in financial straits and putting my wife in a place where she had even less chance to do the things she likes to do.
What I do now -- working at a job that is not unpleasant but is far from stimulating, which pays well but is not making me financially independent -- seems like a compromise for all of us, but maybe the best compromise given our circumstances.We have a lot of problems, but we are a loving and caring unit. My wife complains endlessly but is always there and always doing; my daughter is working through a slew of emotional issues, but gives evidence every day of being the fine, thoughtful, caring person that I have always wanted her to become. I have time to read, and to write (at least in my blogs) and to think about the world around me.
So while I wish I could focus more explicitly on the things I care about, I know that at least they are never out of my thoughts. I get through the trivia and have time to care. I want to do more, but I hope I am doing enough.
Fankfurt is a pleasant enough city -- not really interesting, nothing compared to the European capitols I love, like London, Paris, Brussels, Stockholm, Rome, but certainly worth a spring afternoon's stroll. I had coffee on the old central plaza, the one you see on the postcards, I strolled through quiet neighborhoods colored by the unmistakable bright green of spring emerging, I crossed bridges and railroad tracks, looked up at skyscrapers and listened to conversations in a language I know virtually nothing of. I had a good Thai meal in a basement bistro I stumbled up to, and talked to colleagues back in the states on my mobile phone, which works amazingly well while wandering the streets of a city thousands of miles from home.
I was distant and alone, and yet connected. That's an important feeling for me. I don't know when I'll get to post this essay -- my hotel isn't equipped with high-speed Internet in the rooms -- but I'm glad a got a chance to meander on paper in something like the way I spent the day meandering on foot.
Guten Nacht.

Democrats Discover the Power of Fair Play

2005-07-17T08:32:00.000-07:00

Matt Bai's article, "The Framing Wars" in this morning's edition of The New York Times Magazine suggests that Democrats have belatedly discovered that the public responds to issues that appeal to their sense of fair play.
It posits the recent battle over the filibuster as one in which Democrats were successful at painting Senate Republicans as "arrogant," bent on destroying 200 years of tradition, changing the rules in the middle of the game and, most importantly, not playing fair.
Why has it taken this long?
I would have thought anyone who paid any attention to Bill Clinton's successes in his eight years as president would have understood that -- to a great degree -- he won his battles by doing just this: Making Americans aware that what he was trying to do is give everyone a fair shake.
Democrats should have seen this in the Republican strategies of the past generation as well. Although their logic didn't hold up to scrutiny, they were able to convince large numbers of people that unions, affirmative action, the Equal Rights Amendment, the estate tax, environmental protection, etc., were offenses against fair play. They weren't, of course, but that argument took hold and won elections.
I'm glad that Democrats may have finally caught on to the notion that what defines the body politic in the United States may be a strong sense of what is and isn't fair. People really believe that we are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They believe it with regard to civil rights, they believe it with regard to religious freedom (and freedom from religion, despite the rhetoric of the right), and I think once the issue is framed properly, they will even believe it with regard to gay rights.
So while Bai's article is interesting, it is also depressing in a sense: How could it have taken this long for Democrats to figure this out?

Rove-ing Reporters

2005-07-15T14:24:00.000-07:00

The most amusing moment in the recent coverage of the Karl Rove-Valerie Plame story was Jon Stewart's stage-whispered comment, after showing a clip of a testy White House press briefing, to the effect that, "We've secretly replaced the White House press corps with real reporters."
It shouldn't be surprising that the most pointed commentary on the story has come from The Daily Show. We've grown used to that. There would have been no worthwhile televised commentary on the 2004 presidential election campaign had it not been for Stewart and company.
There has been some other good writing about the Rove-Plame story. Andrew O'Hehir's two pieces this week in Salon, arguing that the jailing of Judy Miller is an outrage that should transcend whatever negative feelings we may have about her and her reporting, were very fine.
But there really isn't a whole lot to say about the actual coverage in the daily newspapers and on the scream channels. True, The New York Times has led twice this week with stories on Rove's involvement. But today's story actually has given the mad screamers comfort -- they're using it to try to sell the angle that Rove was the recipient, rather than the source, of information about the identity of Valerie Plame (or Valerie Wilson, as she prefers to be called) as a covert CIA operative.
That argument, by the way, is plain ridiculous. The account of the conversation between Karl Rove and right-wing columnist Bob Novak clearly shows that Rove was confirming this information to Novak, thus removing any doubt that he was one of the two senior administration officials Novak relied on for his column outing Mrs. Wilson. And it does nothing to erase the fact that Rove also discussed this information with Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper.
We still have a lot to find out before this story can be put to rest. If Mr. Rove was the second source for Novak's story, who was the first? There has been speculation -- including some from me -- that Judy Miller herself was responsible for helping to spread the word on Valerie Wilson. But surely Miller cannot be considered a "senior administration official" even despite havinghe foolishly trumpeted the Bush/Chalabi line on WMDs in the buildup to the Iraq invasion. Besides, she had to get the information from someone.
So far, there's nothing to suggest that anyone in the MSM is interested in pursuing that angle, other than a few columnists. That would be investigative reporting; that would be hard work, and the U.S. press hasn't been up to that kind of labor for at least a decade.
Already, the TV screamers are beginning to parrot the White House's Through The Looking Glass spin that reporters leaked Plame's identity to Rove. If that story gets traction, everyone is off the hook and we can go back to worrying about shark attacks, runaway brides and pedophiliac entertainers.
As for Judy Miller, we will need much more information to understand why a reporter who wrote nothing about the leak is sitting in jail while Rove, Novak and George W. Bush are at liberty to terrorize the nation and the world.
There's a lot to say about Judy Miller, not much of it good. I even have a personal connection to her that justifies my saying that. More than 25 years ago, I was a research clerk in The New York Times Washington bureau, where Miller was a reporter. After all these years, I still remember her as one of the most unpleasant characters with whom I have ever had to deal -- rude, demanding, self-centered. I have heard suggestions that she shares these traits with Sy Hersh, but I have to differ. I also worked in the newsroom with Sy, and even did research on the side for his book about Kissinger, The Price of Power. Sy was demanding and opinionated, but also good humored and quick to express gratitude for a task well done. Judy, by contrast, seemed to be in a constant huff, perpetually ungrateful and just plain nasty to those around her.
There also are serious questions about the intersection between her professional and personal lives. Others have written recently -- and I recall from office gossip -- that she made a habit of dating men in powerful positions in government and the media. David Stockman, Les Aspin, Richard Burt, Steve Rattner and others. This even led, at one point, to Arthur Sulzburger Jr., then a young reporter in the Washington bureau, commenting on a Washingtonian magazine cover story on the "50 Hottest Couples in Washington": "They're all Judy Miller."
However, having said that, her personality -- or even her journalistic ethics -- are not the story here. What is important is that a reporter has been jailed for ostensibly receiving information from someone during a confidential conversation. It could be any reporter. Judy at least deserves some credit for not caving in the face of impending jail time, and for standing on principle.
I have written here before that I am a First Amendment absolutist. Because of that, I salute Judy Miller today (although I wouldn't care to hear from her).

The Traitor

2005-07-12T14:58:00.000-07:00

Whether or not Karl Rove is guilty of the specific crime of revealing a cover CIA operative's identity (and we are hearing that the criteria for prosecuting this crime are difficult to meet), the large issue of whether he is a traitor has been settled.
The answer is yes.
What Karl Rove did in spreading the Valerie Wilson story was to make petty vengeance against an administration critic a higher priority than the war on terror. He sold out the country to bolster the political fortunes of his boss, George W. Bush.
Mrs. Wilson is a specialist on Weapons of Mass Destruction. By publicizing her identity, Mr. Rove at the very least inhibited her ability to conduct the research that presumably is central to her mission. Even if Mrs. Wilson was by the time of the leak occupying a desk at Langley rather than working covertly abroad, discretion is critical to the ability to gather intelligence. Besides the fact -- and one that is mentioned very little if at all --he may have endangered the lives of Mrs. Wilson's sources, who presumably live in the countries about which she was gathering information. And that puts all of us in greater peril, which is the simple reason why Mr. Rove should be prosecuted for treason.
But of course Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush don't really care about research, do they? They want to draw conclusions first and then distort or manufacture evidence to support their conclusions. That's what the Downing Street Memos show.
Shakespeare's Sister lays it all out much more effectively than I can.

Turd Blossom

2005-07-11T16:26:00.000-07:00

Finally, the pieces of the story have started to come together.
I don't think we're there yet. I think we'll learn more with regard to the suggestions that Judy Miller and Karl Rove may have been collaborators in spreading the Valerie Plame story rather than simply reporter and source. And I think that will shed the necessary light on the seemingly vindictive pursuit of Ms. Miller's testimony.
But as of today we know that, clearly, Karl Rove was at the center of an effort to exact revenge on an administration whistle-blower by leaking the identity of a covert CIA operative to the press.
Just as clearly (although we knew this all along) this man has no business collecting a salary from the United States public, and should have no role that gives him access to sensitive information. He is nothing but the slimiest sort of political operative, and almost certainly one who has committed crimes in pursuit of his boss's agenda.
The only honorable course for Mr. Rove would be for him to step down while the investigation comes to its conclusion. But I fear that Mr. Rove has no honor.
The proper course for the president would be to suspend Mr. Rove indefinitely, until all questions are settled. But we know that Mr. Bush has no sense of propriety.
So I suspect they will hunker down and try to hold out.
The press temporarily developed some courage today and peppered the White House Press Secretary with questions about previous statements made by him and others. How long their courage holds out is a big question. An even better question: Can the White House come up with a diversion that will draw them away from this line of questioning and set them back on their previous, ass-kissing, genuflecting track?
There's a lot more to say about the developments of the past few days. I may even get around to saying some of it. But for right now, the only thing I can say is that if Mr. Rove is to receive his just deserts, the attention of the left must stay narrowly focused on his actions.

Losing O'Connor

2005-07-01T08:03:00.000-07:00

Sandra Day O'Connor's just-announced retirement from the Supreme Court gives George W. Bush a dangerous opening. For most of this year, the common belief was that William Rehnquist would be the first justice in 11 years to step down. Having Bush replace Rehnquist could have done little damage -- it's hard to imagine he could have found anyone more likely to vote the wrong way on virtually every case.
But O'Connor is a different story. She has been an important swing vote on the court, and has kept its decisions moderate on any number of issues, including reproductive freedom of choice. To lose her to a right-wing ideologue, as Bush will surely attempt, could bring about a generation of destructive decisions from the court.
The best we can hope for is that Bush will make the kind of choice his father did with David Souter or that Eisenhower did with Earl Warren -- a good Republican whose instincts for justice outweigh his political affiliations. At worst, we'll get someone like Papa Bush's other appointment, the horrendous and unqualified Clarence Thomas.
Either way, right now Bush has the power to make the most dangerous decision of his presidency.

Pennsylvanians, Beware Of The Celebrity Candidate

2005-07-01T07:16:00.000-07:00

So Lynn Swann, former wide receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers and now a sports commentator, wants to be governor of Pennsylvania. As one who is suffering under the governorship of a celebrity with no political experience and few political skills, I would like to take this opportunity to warn my fellow citizens on the opposite coast -- Be afraid!
Celebrity can get you elected, but it can't give you the knowledge and expertise you need to govern. Out here in California, Arnold Schwarzeneggar is demonstrating daily the dangers of putting know-nothing celebrities in office. He is in so far over his head that it's hard to imagine he can ever swim to the surface again.
Somehow he seemed to believe that his fame and fortune were sufficient weapons for him to take on four groups that he labeled as "special interests": Teachers, nurses, firefighers and police officers. Needless to say, his folly has backfired spectacularly, sending his popularity down into the range that led to the recall against Gray Davis that originally put Schwarzeneggar in office.
Like Arnold, Lynn Swann is backed by a Republican machine that believes it can unseat a Democratic governor by fronting a candidate with unusual appeal. Swann is not only a popular entertainer, he is black, which supposedly would appeal to citizens of color -- well, at least those who put celebrity-worship over their own well-being.
Celebrities have the same right to run for office as the rest of us. They are equally citizens. However, we all need to be careful to view their performances with a particular skepticism. These people are trained to appeal to the public. They practice their communications and seduction skills daily. That they can smile winningly and speak campaign slogans artfully does not mean they can govern.
The odious Ronald Reagan is, of course, our most illustrious example of a celebrity drawn to power beyond his skills. He sent the federal budget into a tailspin the likes of which have only recently been exceeded by our current office-holder, who exemplifies a different but equally dangerous species: The know-nothing child of privilege.
Americans seem to be torn when it comes to elected officials. On the one hand, they want people who seem like themselves. On the other hand, they worship celebrity. So what we are getting time after time are celebrities playing "down-home reformer" to the crowds. They portray themselves as a "different kind of politician" who will cut through the crap and get to the heart of government. Remember Jesse Ventura?
As legislators, these characters may be less dangerous (Fred Thompson, Sonny Bono) but in executive office, they constitute one disaster after another.
So wake up Pennsylvanians and learn from the pain we in California are feeling.

The Lies About Hillary

2005-06-22T07:14:00.000-07:00

I hate the idea of supporting the right wing financially by purchasing their cruddy books. Generally what I try to do is stand around the bookstore and read from the right-wing garbage bin, so that I have some idea what lunacy they are trying to spread -- and I always, of course, re-shelve the book upside down or place a left-wing book on top of the pile or something like that -- or wait until the public library has wasted its money on the trash.
But I may be compelled to buy and read the latest scummy attack on Hillary Clinton, Edward Klein's The Truth About Hillary : What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Become President, just because I feel it's important to understand the particular lies they will be spreading in the run-up to 2008.
I think one of the biggest mistakes made in 2004 was the delayed response from John Kerry to the scurrilous Swift Boat attackers. By waiting a month before responding, the Kerry campaign allowed the lies to become part of the public consciousness -- hell, some otherwise reasonable people seem to still believe there are questions to be answered on the Kerry issue.
The Clintons have done the right thing by immediately denigrating the book as the fiction it surely is, but it seems to me there needs to be a concerted, continued effort to place this book firmly in the trash bin where it belongs, especially in light of the somewhat respectful profile of Klein in Salon yesterday.

Playing Politics

2005-06-21T09:11:00.000-07:00

Goergie boy has me confused again.
Why is it "playing politics" for the Democrats in the Senate to demand documentation on John Bolton's past official actions before voting on his nomination to the post of UN Ambassador, but not "playing politics" for the President to refuse to provide the information, and to hint that hemay circumvent the Senate approval process on Bolton by making a recess appointment.
Why is it not "playing politics" when the president makes the inflammatory selection of a dangerous, confrontational idealogue for a post leading international diplomacy?
And isn't this whole controversy over something that normally is called a "political appointment"?

Insecurity

2005-06-21T07:55:00.000-07:00

This one is simply unbelievable. George W. Bush ran for re-election last year largely on the false premise that he was the candidate who would keep us safe from the terrorists. And now we find out that illegal aliens have been working at our nuclear facilities??!?!?!?!?
Fuckin' A.
Thanks to Americablog for pointing it out. I'm actually having a hard time believing that CNN found it worth mentioning ...

Frustration

2005-06-19T17:42:00.000-07:00

There is absolutely nothing I can easily do right now that I feel like doing.
I'm not hungry. I don't feel like watching TV. I'm not in the mood to read. I may take an egg out of the fridge and start a pysanky later on, when it comes to temperature, but I'm not sure I feel like doing that either.
If I have my workbench and some scrap wood I might saw some things up.
But I don't.
And that's my problem -- nothing that is at hand appeals to me at the moment. I could go to the gym, or to a movie, but neither option excites me.
Am I bored with my life?
Right now, I guess.
Sad thing is, I know that tomorrow when I have to work, I'll want to do all of the things stated above that I don't feel like doing now.
What a sucky Sunday afternoon.
I spent the last 7 hours in the car, driving my daughter up to the mountains to summer camp, then back with my wife and mother-in-law (I made my wife drive home, and sat, surly, in the passenger seat).
Maybe it's that I miss my daughter terribly, even though she is such an angry teenager that in some ways it seems a relief she'll be gone for two weeks. I like having her around, though. Somehow, we understand each other even when we're feuding.
Maybe that's the whole of it. My comfort zone is about to come apart for the summer. My wife and mother-in-law are leaving for a summer trip to visit family later this week. When my daughter gets out of camp, she'll fly east and join them. So it's pretty much going to be me and the pets for the next several weeks.
I'm looking forward to it and dreading it at the same time. Solitude is great when you want it, but not when others foist it on you.
I'll be better later, I guess.

Pissing Sand

2005-06-18T15:07:00.000-07:00

Had lithotripsy on Wednesday. This is an ultrasound procedure that breaks up a big kidney stone into sand-like particles that can be passed. The cost to me, above and beyond what my insurance would pay, was $1,420. I'm told insurance paid 90 percent, so an hour on this machine went for $14K! Damn. Seems like I should have at least gotten off for that much money.
The worst of it was Wednesday night, after the morphine wore off. By 11 pm, I was in so much pain that my wife drove me over to the emergency room. There, I waited for hours to be seen by another doctor, who shot me up with more morphine, and wrote me a prescription for Percocet. Arrived home at 3:30 am, and spent most of Thursday and Friday in a Percocet haze.
Although they took an imprint of my credit card at the emergency room, I haven't seen any charges against my account yet. Can't wait.
It's probably too soon to go into another rant about national health insurance, but I sure wish we had us some. My wife spent Friday near tears over her own medical issues -- couldn't get the pharmacy to give her two months worth of her prescriptions because she is going on a summer trip. She has to go see her doctor next week in order to get it straightened out.
Our health system is so badly broken that I can't believe anyone still is suffering under the delusion that we have the best health care in the world. We have shorter life spans, higher infant mortality rates, more paperwork and much, much bigger costs than the rest of the industrialized world. The fantasy that we benefit because we can choose our doctors is ridiculous.
Ever tried to see a doctor who wasn't on your "plan"?
Ever been caught between a doctor who recommends treatment and an insurer who won't authorize it because it isn't listed on their actuarial tables?
When the accountants are determining the course of medical treatment, the world is upside down.
Some days it's hard to decide which is worse -- the doctors or the insurance companies. I guess it would have to be the insurance companies, though. They're the ones that have trained today's doctors to be afraid of their shadows. It's safer to take the day off and play golf than to actually treat a patient.
Don't blame the lawyers. They're just reacting to the ridiculous situation that the health care industry has created. I'm tired of lawyers being the target. Everybody hates them until they need one.
Wow, this really is a rant. I don't care. The whole situation pisses me off.
Anyway, I've been pissing sand and blood clots for the past 3 days. The kidney pain has more or less abated, although I did take some drugs around noon today when I felt a twinge. I don't need another round of emergency room treatment. Interesting thing is that actually passing the granules is much less painful than it is when they leave the kidney and enter the urinary tract. I thought it would be the opposite.
I'm glad to have it over. I've dutifully collected all my sand particles in a jar so they can be analyzed and the docs can try to figure out what caused my kidney stone. I would be very happy to do whatever it takes to avoid another one.

Jeb Bush's Crusade Against Reason

2005-06-18T07:51:00.000-07:00

Two days after the release of the autopsy reporting that shows conclusively that Terri Schiavo was indeed hopelessly brain-damaged, Jeb Bush announces that he has ordered an investigation into the timing of Scott Schiavo's call to 911 more than 15 years ago.
To what end?
Having failed miserably at gaining public support for his crusade against Scott Schiavo in the courts, Gov. Bush now decides to launch a vindictive personal crusade against Schiavo. Evidently he plans to hound him through the rest of his life. The reality of Terri Schiavo's condition means nothing, nor does the family's need to finally put this sorry story to rest.
The entire Bush family is a stain on the American body politic and on humanity. They are the exact opposite of public servants -- they are petty, vindictive, small-minded and behave in virtually every instance in a way contrary to the public good.
They are the shame of the nation.

The Right Wing's Attack On Science Continues

2005-06-15T06:46:00.000-07:00

Having staked out strong positions against the medical community (stem cell research), biologists (evolutionary science) and environmental scientists (global warming), the right wing has broadened its battle by taking on the very idea of scientific research.
Today's New York Times reports that the right-wing Heritage Foundation has released a report that "rebuts" two recent studies by Columbia and Yale scientists that showed that young people who take virginity pledges are more likely to engage in oral and anal sex, and developed sexually transmitted diseases at about the same rates as teens who did not take pledges.
The Heritage Foundation found -- big surprise -- that virginity pledges do not correlate to risky sexual behaviors and result in lower STD rates. Only problem -- their "scientific" research flies in the face of accepted research techniques.
Their statistical analysis showed a "glaring error" in the significance level, according to an independent reviewer, and relied on self-reporting of STDs, rather than actual testing, meaning that levels were likely to have been significantly underreported.
Bottom line is that here we have another example of the right wing attempting to misuse and distort the language of science when actual science does not support its ideological ends.
Odds are that there are a significant percentage of people in the scientific community who have voted Republicans into office over the years. The evidence is mounting that such people are contributing to the trivialization, if not the destruction, of their professions and their intellectual disciplines.

Missing In Action

2005-06-14T11:50:00.000-07:00

Should we be outraged at the lateness and paucity of the MSM's coverage of the Downing Street Memo? Of course.
Should we be surprised? Not at all.
I think the Downing Street non-coverage is, by and large, a byproduct of the right wing's success at burying the CBS coverage of George W. Bush's National Guard service lapses under a ton of diversionary baloney.
Another secret document surfaces. Is it authentic? Who knows. Should we try to verify its authenticity? Let's let somebody else do it first. That way, if a mistake is made, somebody else can take the heat and we can act all outraged that they didn't do a better job of authenticating it.
It's a pathetic but understandable response from a media that has been threatened and bullied for five years if its members even notice anything strange about the Bush administration.
It's safer and easier to focus on celebrity scandals and limit government coverage to repeating the press releases issued from the West Wing.
But now NBC News has begun authenticating the follow-up documents that surfaced in the United Kingdom last weekend. The Washington Post covered the documents over the weekend. Is there a new wave of courage coming on?
I doubt it. The media is responding to the outpouring of criticism it has received from the blogosphere and from its own watchdogs. At the moment, that criticism is louder and hurts more than the threats coming from the White House. Oddly, investigative reporting is today's path of least resistance.
So what do we do? Keep up the pressure.
The MSM will cover this story as long as people out there don't allow them to drop it. I suspect that even The New York Times, which has done a particularly shameful job on the story so far, will print a major thumbsucker on it, probably next Sunday.
The media are commercial enterprises. They respond to the loudest demands. For the moment, on this issue, those demands are coming in from the left. But if we stop, the shouts of the right will bury this story once again.

Scattered Small Thoughts on the Acquittal of Michael Jackson

2005-06-14T06:34:00.000-07:00

There's nothing important about the Michael Jackson case, but like much of America, I was riveted by the announcement of the verdict yesterday afternoon. I have nothing profound to say about it, but a few small thoughts to share:

Michael Jackson commands our attention because his has been the most spectacular celebrity train wreck of a career since Judy Garland's (with the possible exception of Garland's daughter, Liza Minnelli). Like Garland, Jackson was an astonishing young talent brought low in middle age by the inability to manage personal demons. In some ways, Jackson may be the most spectacular train wreck ever. Not only has he buried his enormous talent under an avalanche of scandal and speculation about his personal life, he has gone to the extreme of physically destroying himself with plastic surgery and skin-bleaching treatments. Twenty-some years on, it seems almost unbelievable that in the early 1980s, Jackson was best known for a series of spectacular recordings and videos that won him acclaim as the world's greatest young entertainer.

********

If there is a social benefit to all of the media attention to the trials of Jackson, Robert Blake, O.J. Simpson and others, it is in the reminder that the United States Constitution guarantees that each of us is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Jackson's acquittal, like those before him, is not an "exoneration," despite the overuse of that term by television announcers. Rather, it says that the state did not meet the burden of proof necessary to convict him. These jurors weighed the evidence and found it insufficient to send a man to prison.

********

That there was "reasonable doubt" in this case that should lead to acquittal was evident from the early days of the trial, when witness after witness was caught giving inconsistent, contradictory testimony. Many people, myself included, harbor strong suspicions about Michael Jackson's behavior around young boys, but it was clear from the outset -- and should have been clear to the prosecution before countless millions were wasted on this trial -- that questions about the veracity of these accusers was bound to doom the case before a conscientious jury.

********

Most of the blame and scorn for this case has been directed at the mother of the young accuser in this case. But it seems to me that a fair share should be targeted toward the prosecutor, Santa Barbara County District Attorney Tom Sneddon. If the accuser's mother is as tawdry a character and unconvincing a witness as has been described, how could this not have been apparent to an experienced prosecutor and his staff? If the inconsistencies and holes in the evidence were as glaring as they appear to be, wouldn't this have been obvious during discovery? Couldn't the prosecutorial team have made a decision -- before wasting countless millions of taxpayer dollars -- that there was not a supportable case here?
Mr. Sneddon has pursued various allegations against Michael Jackson for more than 10 years. Like Kenneth Starr before him, he tempts comparison to Javert, the relentless and, finally, pathetic, detective who pursued Jean Valjean to his death in Les Miserables. And unfortunately, that puts Michael Jackson in the position of the unfairly demonized Valjean.

********

Last night at 8 pm PDT, the beginning of prime time, I did a quick survey of the cable news outlets. On each and every one of them -- MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, CNN Headlline News, CNBC -- the fare was 100 percent Michael Jackson. Nothing else of note evidently happened anywhere in the world yesterday.
Finally, I turned to C-Span and watched a videotape of a press conference held by Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. It was pretty bad -- Hunter's defense of military practices at the Guantanamo detention center was based almost entirely on multiple recitations of a sample menu for detainees (Lemon fish! Fried chicken! Two kinds of vegetables! Two kinds of fruits! It's better than what the troops eat!) But it veered into the pathetically comic toward the end when Hunter attempted unsuccessfully to entice members of the press into tasting the sample meal he had laid out for their inspection. As the room cleared out, he moved folding chairs around a little table and did his best to strong-arm reporters into sitting down with him to enjoy (I'm not going to let this good food go to waste!)
A pitiful display of our democracy in action.
But at least it wasn't Michael Jackson.

Nazification

2005-06-13T14:10:00.000-07:00

For those of us who worry that the implications of the Bush administration's acts are more serious than is generally acknowledged, this site is interesting. I'm not sure I go along with all of it, but we stand warned.

Health

2005-06-13T10:00:00.000-07:00

So, for the past 10 days I've been suffering from a kidney stone. The pain has, fortunately, been intermittent, though at times quite intense. On Wednesday I go into the hospital for an ultrasound procedure to break up the stone. I'm not looking forward to the after-effects, which involve passing the fragments of the broken-up stone. Eww. Plus, the doctor tells me the ultrasound procedure works only 80 percent of the time.
Nevertheless, I've got to count my blessings (between self-pitying whines).
My itinerary over the past 10 days:

Saturday, 6/4: Phone conversation with my GP, who was on weekend call
Monday, 6/6: X-rays, Office visit with GP, who made a referral to a urologist
Tuesday, 6/7: Lab visit for blood and urine workup
Wednesday 6/8: Additional X-rays
Thursday, 6/9: Office visit with urologist
Friday, 6/10: Pre-op workup at hospital, with additional blood and urine workup

My medical outlay over the past 10 days: $25. That's $15 for a co-pay at my GP's office, plus a $10 copay on a bottle of Extra-Strength Vicodin. The urologist did not require a co-pay, nor were there charges at the X-ray or medical labs.
I shudder to think what the costs would have been were I not one of the "lucky" Americans with employer-provided healthcare (for which I pay significantly, by the way).
The pain was so intense the first night that I considered going to the emergency room, and might have if I did not fear emergency rooms on Friday nights more than pain, and if a fourth wave had come on before I fell asleep.
But the emergency room might have been my only option if I did not have insurance.
I'm quite sure that poor people get kidney stones. I don't like thinking they should have to suffer more pain than I did, without proper care. I would be more than willing to pay a higher tax rate to ensure a system that provided everyone with health care. I think most Americans who have suffered health-related pain would agree.
I consider supporting universal health coverage a moral value. And I am outraged that the "values" crowd and their political heroes do not support this issue. Ted Kennedy is calling it "Medicare For All." Sign me on.
I lived for a few years in the United Kingdom, and thoroughly enjoyed the convenience of the national health system. No paperwork, no co-pays, doctors who are in the profession because they care, and not because it affords them membership in exclusive country clubs.
Bring it on.

I Wanna Be VP

2005-06-13T09:55:00.000-07:00

I think I could do it.
From what I can see, there's not much to it. You curse at people who disagree with you, then feign indignation when people criticize you. Oh, yeah, and you hold top-secret meetings with your buddies in your tree house (sort of like the "He-Man Women Hater's Club" in Our Gang).
I'm not sure my wife could manage to be as phony as Mrs. VP, but I'm quite sure I could do the VP thing.

Google Torture

2005-06-02T10:01:00.000-07:00

In a fascinating display of twisted logic, the right wingers are now pointing to the fact that a Google search turns up more references to "human rights abuse" linked with "United States" than with any other country they searched as evidence that reports of abuse are false.
I read through the comments and I still don't get the logic. Evidently, the right-wingnuts believe this happens because the press is lazy. Well, the press is pretty lazy, but that doesn't mean that human rights abuses by U.S. personnel haven't happened. The logic for the connection isn't there. What happens when the press is lazy is that stories critical of the governments under which the press organizations operate don't get told. The laziness of the U.S. press has not a whole lot to do with the paucity of news coming out of Burma. Plus, doesn't it make at least a little bit of sense that the U.S. press, even the lazy members, would report a little bit more on abuses committed by our government than abuses abroad? Give it up, guys. Here's a rule that has generally worked for me: Where there's smoke, there's fire.

Deep Throat

2005-06-02T06:02:00.000-07:00

Tuesday' revelation that W. Mark Felt was "Deep Throat," the anonymous source who tipped off Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on some of the most important information in the Watergate story, has been a bit overwhelming.
Watergate, of course, was the news story that turned me and many of my generation towards journalism. Along with the Pentagon Papers a few years earlier, it illustrated the power of the press in the strongest possible terms. By unearthing the truth behind a seemingly minor burglary, a power-hungry U.S. president was brought down.
What a long and sad distance we've come since then.
Dozens of factors -- economic, political, personal -- have led to the decline in the media's independence and stature. Consolidation in the publishing industry has given rise to risk-averse, conservative press organizations that would rather concentrate on celebrity scandals than controversial investigations. The right wingers have learned to strike poses of phony outrage at the first sign that reporters may be getting too close to the truth of an issue, and have developed their own sense of the kind of scandal that can divert the attention of reporters away from the important stories and toward sensationalized trivialities. Contempt for and threats against journalists -- including, increasingly, the prospect of jail time for protecting anonymous sources of information -- have weakened journalistic resolve and undermined the sense that the press performs a vital public service. And, of course, there is the fact that it's a lot easier and less stressful to repeat the words of officials rather than challenge them.
I do feel for reporters today. The stress of daily journalism -- among other things, the unfairness of being called a liar when you have done your damnedest to tell the truth -- is one of the reasons I walked away from the profession at 30.
I hated being hated. But I also miss the adrenaline rush of working against deadline on a breaking story, of confronting someone with the evidence that they have lied to you, of knowing that you have exposed what someone worked feverishly to hide. I know journalism is still full of those who feel that thrill. If only they would direct their energy toward George W. Bush instead of runaway brides, human vegetables, and plastic pop stars.
Ted Turner was right yesterday when he said that CNN has descended into "pervert of the week" territory. The competition from Fox News has dragged them down this path to some degree, but so has Time Warner's corporate ownership and so has the pressure to prop up share value rather than provide public value.
The blogs seem to be where passionate journalism has gone to rebuild. Not this one, but folks like Brad Friedman and John Aravosis, who daily do what the MSM has given up on. Here's to you, guys. You earn and deserve our respect.

Correction

2005-05-30T17:33:00.000-07:00

Bush in his Memorial Day speech at Arlington National Cemetary this morning: "We must honor them by completing the mission for which they gave their lives; by defeating the terrorists."

Correction: Not a single one of those deaths did even a tiny bit to defeat terrorism. No, Georgie. Your phony war has only inflamed the fires of terrorism. You're wrong, you're a liar, you make us more unsafe every day, and you demean the office of the presidency.
Yes those men and women died honorably and we should honor their memory. But stop trying to kid us. Game's over.

Let Me Get This Straight ...

2005-05-30T16:55:00.000-07:00

... Dick "Go Fuck Yourself" Cheney has the gall to call something besides himself and his wife offensive?

Remember This On Memorial Day: Thousands Have Died Because Of Bush's Lies

2005-05-30T16:50:00.000-07:00

He is personally responsible for manufacturing the storyline that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the death of more than 1,600 American troops (so far) and of countless thousands of Iraqis.
Just exactly how is honoring him an act of patriotism?

Suppose They Gave A Tribute And Nobody Came

2005-05-29T16:17:00.000-07:00

Thanks to The Brad Blog for digging up information on the failed tribute to the oily Republican leader Tom DeLay. I had read about the event before it happened, and saw an item in the paper about it, but nothing that gave it the proper perspective.

It Only Has To Happen Once

2005-05-29T15:58:00.000-07:00

In his new book, The Ancestor's Tale, Richard Dawkins discusses the possible migration of monkeys from Africa to South America on floating mangroves, noting that, "It only had to happen once." He goes on to make the following, frightening observation:

The principle of nuclear deterrence, and the only remotely definsible
justification for possessing nuclear weapons, is that nobody will dare risk a
first strike, for fear of massive retaqliation. What are the odds against a
mistaken missle launch: a dictator who goe4s made; a computer system that
malfunctions; an escalation of threats that gets out of hand? The present leader
of the largest nuclear power in the world (I am writing in 2003) thinks the word
is 'nucular'. He has never given any reason to suggest that his wisdom or his
intelligence3 outperforms his literacy. He has demonstrated a predilection for
'pre-empive' first strikes. What are the odds against a terrible mistake,
initiating Armageddon? A hundred to one against, within any one year? I would be
more pessimistic. We came awfully close in 1963, and that was with an
intelligent President. In any case, what might happen in Kashmir? Israel? Korea?
Even if the odds per year are as low as one in a hundred, a century is a very
short time, given the scale of the disaster we are talking about. It only has to
happen once.

No wonder Bush hates evolutionary scientists. They, too, have got him figgered out.

Where's The Bliss?

2005-05-29T12:17:00.000-07:00

Four months ago, the Bush administration flung open the gates of paradise and welcomed the grateful Iraqi people to bask in the warm sunshine of democracy. The Iraqi elections were hailed near and far. The corporate MSM joined hands with the radical right to anoint George W. Bush as godfather of global freedom.
So, pardon me for being so ill-mannered as to ask, "Where's the improvement?" Just exactly what difference did they make? We were promised that a new golden era of democracy had begun. So, where is it?
I'm sure I'll be told that four months is not a long time, that we have to give freedom a chance to take hold. Excuse me for having a sense of history, but when the weapons inspectors asked for two more months to do their job, Mr. W said it was an unacceptably long period of time (he had his cooked-up intelligence all ready, and I guess he was afraid it would go bad if he let it sit on the back burner).
Come on, Mr. Bush. The world gave you a pass on sanctioning atrocities because it believed your heart was leading you in a direction that would benefit everyone. So, let's see it, already.
Is it here?
Or here?
Or here?
No, wait! Maybe it's over here!
Uhhh ... here?
Never mind ...

Let's Hear It For Nine Inch Nails

2005-05-28T08:15:00.000-07:00

Activism in the name of freedom deserves widespread applause.
So here's a hand to Nine Inch Nails for pulling out of the MTV Movie Awards because the Viacom-owned network would not allow them to perform a protest song in front of an image of the U.S. President.
The image wasn't to be altered or defaced in any way, but evidently the lyrics of the song, "The Hand That Feeds" would not have been flattering to the chimpanzee in chief (sorry, chimps -- it's not fair to you, I know, but I'm feeling more angry than creative at the moment).
Viacom, of course, also owns CBS, which beheaded its own and kowtowed to the election thieves in the Bush/National Guard documents case, rather than maintain focus on the real, important question, which was Bush's record of service.
So, again, here's to Nine Inch Nails. I don't listen to their music, but I've heard them loud and clear this morning, and I'm right in line with them.

Treason?

2005-05-24T06:43:00.000-07:00

Right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin, with her typical anti-patriotic fervor, is all a-twitter this morning about John Kerry taking a step toward releasing his complete military records for public review.
The loony Ms. Malkin evidently has not given up on her campaign to destroy Mr. Kerry's honorable record as a Vietnam war hero, and continues to question the U.S. military's judgment in awarding Mr. Kerry his medals for valorous service.
Here's my question: If Bill Maher's "low-lying fruit" comment on HBO is near-treasonous, as the esteemed Alabama Republican Congressman Spencer Bachus has charged, shouldn't Ms. Malkin do a long term in prison for suggesting that the Navy didn't know what it was doing when it chose to decorate Mr. Kerry?
Seems to me that her remarks are treason, plain and simple. How dare she suggest that the U.S. Navy is staffed by incompetents!!!!!
It's time we judged these people by their own standards.

OK. If The Right Wing-Nuts Are This Mad, It's Got To Be Good

2005-05-23T20:04:00.000-07:00

The crazed reactions of the James Dobson-Michelle Malkin brigade to the filibuster deal have convinced me that the deal must be a good thing. We've evidently struck a nerve. They realize they can't have everything they want, and that drives them even crazier than they already were.

Talk About Your Low-Lying Fruit

2005-05-23T19:45:00.000-07:00

Can these people be real?
The illustrious Republican congressman from Alabama, Mr. Spencer Bachus, thinks that Bill Maher's HBO show should be canceled because he referred to Lynddie England as the sort of "low-lying fruit" that the Army picks up in time of need.
"I don't want him prosecuted," Bachus said. "I want him off the air."
Hey, Spence -- It was a joke. The show is a satirical commentary.
Maher, by the way, was talking about the U.S. military's well-publicized recruiting problems.
Mr. Bachus who, like George W. Bush, chose the National Guard over active duty during the Vietnam War, objected to Mr. Maher's joshing the military. In fact, he said, Mr. Maher's comments "border on treason."
Has this man ever heard of the Bill of Rights -- the one that guarantees freedom of speech? Yes, under that sage provision, he's entitled to his view as well. But I'm entitled to call him an idiot. Which he is.
Did it ever occur to him that it's the people who oppose freedom of speech who are the traitors?

Filibuster

2005-05-23T16:20:00.000-07:00

Historically the rare filibuster provided the Senate's best theater; participants had to be ready for days or weeks of free-wheeling debate, and all other business was blocked until one side conceded or a compromise acceptable to all was found. In the modern era the number of filibusters have increased but drama is rare. Disappointment awaits visitors to the Senate gallery who expect a real-life version of actor Jimmy Stewart's climactic oration in the 1939 classic film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. They are likely to look down on an empty floor and hear only the drone of a clerk reading absent senators' names in a mind-numbing succession of quorum calls. Often the filibusterers do not even have to be on the floor, nor do the bills they are opposing.
-- CQ Encyclopedia of American Government

Many volumes have been written about the Senate filibuster recently.
We've heard the good and the bad; that the filibuster is a hallowed tradition, and that it is an unconstitutional outrage. We know from history that it has been used for purposes high and low, by both political parties, and against both legislation and appointees.
Now, we hear that a compromise has been reached that will preserve the right to filibuster while letting some of George W. Bush's more odious judicial nominees have a vote in the full Senate. I'm not sure I like the terms of the deal.
I do, however, have some thoughts about the filibuster itself and why it is a potentially important tool. At its best, what it provides is time for reflection, time to gather evidence and to rally support. All of those are positive attributes in a deliberative body like the Senate.Both sides in the debate can use the filibuster period to sway opinions and build strength.
However, I also think there is a reasonable argument to be made that a filibuster should have to be "live" -- real people speaking on the topic at hand rather than dull reciting of names and addresses from phone books or, even worse, remarks simply posted in the Congressional Record. The rules I think should be changed are the ones that allow the filibuster to become a mere blocking of debate rather than an extension of debate. The filibuster should be about talking, persuading, arguing the core of one's convictions until one's apponents, whether from fatique or discomfort, pay attention.
And there is probably further value in "live" filibustering as well in that it becomes a battle of wills, a contest to see which side on an issue is more strongly invested.
But the bottom line is that there's nothing wrong with slowing down a controversial vote; time and words are often exactly what is needed to win hearts and minds. And there's nothing wrong with requiring that 3/5 of the members vote to move on. It's certainly preferable to changing the rules just because you can't win under the rules you agreed to follow.
So we appear to have averted the "nuclear" option for now. But it will come up again, probably the very next time Democrats consider a Bush nominee to be too extreme to stomach. So it's worth remembering what would make the filibuster a valuable tool in support of democracy again.

Let's Hear It For The Protesters

2005-05-22T12:45:00.000-07:00

Three cheers for the protesters who surrounded Laura Bush and made sure her visit to the Dome of the Rock got the reception it deserved.
The protesters did not harm Mrs. Bush, they waited until she came onto holy Muslim ground, and they used the visit to ensure that the Bush administration could not use Mrs. Bush to put a kinder, gentler face on the regime's disdain for all things Islamic.
I wouldn't cheer on the protesters were Laura's trip not an attempt to win support for her husband's harmful policies. But she should no better than to think she can make him look better in this part of the world to which he has done so much damage.
Oh, and by the way, three cheers to the nation of Israel for making sure that the Bush administration could not orchestrate the first lady's public appearances to the same degree that they can within our borders. It's nice that at least one of our allies actually takes seriously the rights to free speech and freedom of assembly. I have many disagreements with Israeli policy on many issues, but on this one I salute the nation and its people.

The Real Threats

2005-05-22T07:04:00.000-07:00

The greatest threat to democracy is that we lose our understanding of the importance of the right to dissent.
The greatest threat to humanity is that we lose our understanding of humanity itself.
Those thoughts went through my head this morning as I read the second part of The New York Times investigation into the deaths of two Afghan prisoners killed at the hands of U.S. troops at Bagram prison.
The defense in this case is that the soldiers were poorly trained. Poorly trained in what? As a letter-writer pointed out in yesterday's Times, how much training do you need to understand that beating a prisoner to death is wrong? Can we really say that "poor training" is responsible for the chaining up and beating of prisoners, sexual humiliation, threats of attacks by snarling dogs, desecration of a holy book?
It's a tough argument to accept in my book. These are simple, clear cases of right and wrong. Any 5-year-old child, described the horrific details of the treatment of these prisoners, would know that what was done was wrong.
So what does the right to dissent have to do with this? Oh, probably just an expression of my own priorities. The Bagram report in the Times ran alongside a piece on the filibuster battle in the Senate, which, in my mind, is an extremely important debate over the rights of the minority.
The filibuster has protected the views of the minority many times over the years. Sometimes that minority has been odious, as it was during the Civil Rights battles, when old-fashioned Southern Democrats (who later realized that the party that would support their racism was across the aisle) used the filibuster against anti-segregation measures. This time, the Democratic minority is trying to protect the moderate majority against the possibility of hard-line conservative judges who would ignore constitutional rights and protections to impose their version of Christianity on us.
Whichever side has used the filibuster, the results have been the same: Frustration of the majority's urge to act quickly, extension of discussion, voicing of the opinions of the minority and movement towards moderation. That is what the filibuster is for, that is why it is important to the Senate, and that is why it should be preserved.
Maybe both these stories are at their core about the efforts of the Bush administration and the Republican right to trample on the rights of the rest of the world and forcibly mold it into their vision of utopia -- which, I gather, is something like an old 1950s black-and-white sitcom.
The problem is that the Republicans' policies and world view would give us something a little too much like that sitcom world. Anything smacking of human frailty would be hidden from view. An all-white, all middle-class, asexual view of American society would be shown to the world while behind the scenes those suffering from poverty, prejudice, discrimination, fear would struggle to make themselves heard.
In a frighteningly real sense, the Bush administration wants to stifle dissent in much the same way that Josef Stalin recommended: "No man, no problem."
I'm not being very poetic this morning -- and maybe not even particularly coherent -- but you get the point, right? We need opennness, we need dissent, we need above all respect for others if the spirit of this country is to survive. There was a time -- not all that long ago -- when the United States actually did stand for a set of goals and ideals that could be emulated around the world.
I truly think -- and this is not just hyperbole -- that the administration of George W. Bush has destroyed all of that. They have made a mockery of the U.S. They have made us global villains, hellbent on destroying anyone outside or inside our borders who dares to ascribe to goals different from theirs.
As a graduate student, I spent some time studying the works of literary critics and philosophers known as "deconstructionists." Mostly French, highly controversial because they feel it is not only their right but their duty to question everything. In particular, the critical method of deconstruction involves looking for internal inconsistencies in texts, which may be anything from traditional narratives to works of architecture.
One of the key concepts of deconstruction is to examine the efforts of mainstream "authors" to set themselves up in contrast to an "other," which is made to seem frightening and perhaps threatening.
I have long found it interesting that George W. Bush is a product of Yale in the late 1960s, which is one of the few places and times in the United States where deconstruction found a beachhead. I think W may have learned more from the French than he ever would be willing to admit. What he appears to have learned is to make use of the majoritarian techniques the deconstructions are committed to examining. He and his team are expert at setting up "others" as dangerous forces to be crushed. Democrats, scientists, Muslims, the French -- you name it.
The only glimmer of hope I see is that Bush is increasingly seen as a failure and a right-wing radical at home. His poll numbers are way down, and I can only hope that is due to the scales falling from some people's eyes.
I hope he continues to overstep, to push programs and ideas that clearly violate our sense of fair play, democracy, humanity. His excesses may end up being the only thing that saves us.