Hollywood, CA for OBAMA

Book Report: "Working Class New York," by Joshua Freeman

Stephen Siciliano — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:59:57 EST

The narrative in "Working Class New York," grows less interesting along with the declining labor movement it chronicles.

That's no criticism. After all, Joshua Freeman did not write a novel, rather penned an important nonfiction and academic effort that tells the story of New York through its workers.

"Working Class New York," is wonderfully done and demonstrative, at every turn, with the author's passion for his subject.

But, for labor enthusiasts, the end can't match the beginning for excitement.

In the early chapters, the poesy of labor reigns as the Hatters, Printers, Furriers, Elevator Operators, Milliners, Bakers and Tugboat workers, representing a rainbow of crafts and productive industries, bring the world's mightiest city to a halt through mass strikes driven by the underlining goal of reorganizing society itself.

Freeman's analysis of New York's economic structure, and how it created a textured union movement unequaled in the rest of the country, is fascinating and as much a love letter to the unions as to Gotham itself.

Indeed, the author frequently asserts that the city's best face was the lined countenance of the laborer or craftsperson enlightened by their recognition of a shared destiny, on the shop floor and front stoop, with similarly situated souls.

"Working Class New York," meticulously follows the labor movement's progress and retrenchments, starting with its halcyon days in the post-war 1940s.

It makes no bones about the powerful impetus communist politics played, and the subsequent loss of energy that coincided with the reds being chased out of American labor.

Freeman illustrates how the union movement reflected changes in the city as it lost manufacturing jobs and embraced the financial and service-based industries.

His mapping of municipal unionism's rise has less of a workerist flavor and more of what the departed Allan Bloom called the "Nitzscheanization of the left," as ethnicity and cultural issues consumed unions' internal power struggles and drove their industrial strategies.

And the book details how the decline of labor in New York reflected its nationwide losses as the country grew more individualistic and market-oriented in the 1970s and '80s.

Freeman's chapter on how financial types used The Big Apple's fiscal crisis in the late 1970s to undermine and rollback the unions' hard-earned, and unique urban social democracy, is must-read for anyone interested in those dynamics affecting the American workplace for nigh on a generation now.

Jerry Brown Does Sunset Blvd.

Stephen Siciliano — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 05:14:32 EST

California Attorney General Jerry Brown's Nov. 19 appearance at XIV on Sunset Blvd., was proof there is such a thing as being young at heart.

The former-governor-running-to-be-governor was in good form, voluble, humorous, and purposeful.

By way of confession, highwayscribery attended the event, sponsored by Generation for Change, with little enthusiasm for the budding Brown candidacy.

Covering the attorney general as a real-life reporter at press conferences, the highway scribe's alter-ego and rainmaker was left with an impression that, at 71-years-old, Brown had lost a step and gone mushy in his gray matter.

And besides, maybe it's time for some others to try. Politics these days, at least Democratic Party politics, have a transformational tinge that was reflected in the event itself.

Generation for Change, after all, grew out of Generation Obama Los Angeles following the president's triumph last November.

It is headed-up by two political operatives - Justyn Winner and Haroom "Boom" Saleem, still young enough to actually believe in all the Obama-inspired Hopela and energetic enough to convene a cabal of handsome, well-dressed, young professionals comfortable in venues like XIV (by Michael Mina) who, prior to last year' campaign were hardly worthy of political consideration.

And the kids are learning the hard way. Saleem noted that last year's ardor for change has given way to this years sense of disappointment.

Patience, grasshopper, patience.

For his part, Brown has always been more of a visionary type. His turns as secretary of state, Oakland mayor, and attorney general, while positive contributions, do not bring out the quest-like qualities in him that running for president and governor do.

For Brown wants to lead in big, system-changing ways and Generation for Change, thinks he has the stuff, and has come out early for him.

The ambience of confident cool hardly intimidated Brown who grabbed the microphone, and persuaded the crowd to separate itself so that everyone could see him.

He did not, Brown said, work from prepared speeches, "because they're boring. If you have something to say you should be able to say it without looking at some notes."

Freed from the tyranny of text on paper, Brown rambled on in an organized fashion only someone of his unique cast can.

He pulled the crowd, separated from him by decades of life lived, closer, talking about the nonpolitical part of his personal journey: "I've lived in Mexico and different countries of South America, I took Linda Ronstadt to Africa. I went to Japan and meditated for six months; not on the achievements of my life, but on the essential emptiness of it. And you're not going to find a lot of politicians who will do that."

Working the crowd afterward, Brown may have learned how few knew who Linda Ronstadt is (was?), but he's just getting going at this point, and that gap could link his living legend to a time when California was truly a Golden State.

The day's backdrop was a University of California Regents meeting two miles away at UCLA. There, student demonstrators clashed with police while inside "the board" jacked-up their tuition 32 percent.

The campus was crammed with so many police it begged the question of whether cutting the force's size might improve the tuition picture. The university's shock troops, with the help of California Highways Patrol(ers) handled the students' in a typically over-the-top fashion: rude, violent, disdainful of the fact universities exist for the kids.

It was tense, and unpleasant, and sad for those who remember the state's halcyon days.

Things clearly need fixing and if Brown's audience represented a generation of "change," he suggested they had much in common since he's been accused by political enemies of changing all his life.

"And it's true. But I'm not ashamed of that," he said, "because if you're alive, and your mind is open, than you have to change."

They ate it up without fully understanding how true the claims were. Brown's politics have always invited intense debate. However, the inherent truth of his commitment, his advocacy, and his willingness to go a new way are agreed upon by friend and foe alike.

Perhaps the crowd sensed it.

The quintessentially Irish-looking pol enumerated the many offices he has run for successfully and not so successfully.

"Many of the people I ran against are dead," said Brown, hinting of his hand in their demise, "because I'm a stressful person, and some of these other people in this campaign for governor are going to find out the same thing."

And them's fightin' words of which the impromptu address contained more; perhaps a tip-off to the approach Brown may take in the campaign, running on his experience rather than away from it.

Brown said the country had been, 30 or 40 years ago, a productive one that lost its edge and then continually borrowed to maintain privileges no longer earned the old-fashioned way.

He did not, of course, use the words "old" or "fashioned."

Brown conducted a brief analysis of the financial "leveraging" that brought the state and country to its knees, and referred to the resulting fiscal crisis as "the greatest case of grand larceny in American history."

Applause again.

The country's political system is, Brown observed, "in an advanced state of decay." He lamented the "wall of resistance" President Obama has run into at the hands of Republicans in Washington D.C. and said it was a symptom of that decay.

The attorney general did not run away from Obama, rather suggested the president was a kindred spirit who could use some help with the heavy lifting out on the Left Coast.

He wove is merry way through about a 20-minute discourse, jumping from subject to subject, free-associating, joking, and holding the group's attention through the background chatter of the adjacent restaurant, and clatter of pots in the close-by kitchen.

California's budget deficit, large as it is, amounts to only 1 percent of its annual gross product and is fixable, said Brown.

He is, naturally, the person to do it. "These other people running don't know how tough it is to run the state. I've worked in it my whole life. I do."

For political junkies, the evening on Sunset offered a good sampling of what Brown is testing in the campaign's early phases.

His effort at tapping into the energy of a generation that knows little of him, but offers some of our best prospects, demonstrated the flexibility he claims to possess in real time.

More than anything, it was a tip of the hat to the hoary old notion that youth must be served...

...in very good restaurants.

On Obstruction

Stephen Siciliano — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 03:30:52 EST

Saturday's Senate debate has as much to do with Republican obstruction as it does with health care.

The Republican strategy of arresting any progress on the country's problems, of suppressing the will of voters who elected President Barack Obama and a attendant Democratic congressional majority, has begun to garner attention.

Which is why this post will be written more by other writers than the highway scribe, whose intention is to extend their reach and blow off a little steam at the same time.

Like Social Security, the weekend, paid vacations, and health care reform, the first volley came from the far left of the American spectrum in the form of a Nov. 11 "Washington Post," piece by Harold Meyerson.

In the "Do-nothing Senate" the one-time "L.A. Weekly" essayist referred to that body as "dithering heights."

That's pretty good and demonstrates how you need a sense of humor to make your ideology go down a little easier.

Meyerson noted that a few weeks ago, the Republicans thrice filibustered a measure to extend unemployment insurance. Once they relented, the measure passed 98-0.

"Just flexing their muscles, mind you," he wrote. "Establishing a new normal. If we have anything to do with it, nothing moves."

Indeed.

The filibuster, as we know only too well now, is an endless stream of B.S. meant to bury a bill under the Senate's terms of unlimited debate. It was not always thus. At the beginning, under rules drafted by none other than Thomas Jefferson, a senator was allowed to "move the previous question" and end floor discussion.

But Aaron Burr, the guy who shot Alexander Hamilton and came to personify American infamy (except for Gore Vidal), got that rule stricken and the filibuster was born. Its use was nil at first, but grew over the years.

During the Bush II debacle, Democrats used it with greater frequency, but typically infuriated their radicalized supporters with an urge to cooperate and get things done.

Under Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell (pictured), the thing has taken on a life of its own, since voters so reduced his caucus that filibusters are all he can use for leverage.

And use it McConnell has.

As Meyerson pointed out, "Unless you can get a 60-vote majority to end debate, all major bills (and some minor ones) are dead in the water."

He left out political and judicial choices, but on Nov 16, Michael Savage of the "Los Angeles Times," picked up on the meme, detailing a disparity in the judicial appointments made by his predecessor over the same time-period Obama has been in office.

"So far," Savage wrote, "only six of Obama's nominees to the lower federal courts have won approval. By comparison, President George W. Bush had 28 judges confirmed in his first year in office, even though Democrats held a narrow majority for much of the year."

The point being Democrats recognize the president's prerogatives, even when he garners less votes than his opponent and the Supreme Court shuts down a recount in a state governed by his brother (making him president).

On Nov. 17, one day later, the "New York Times" joined the chorus in an editorial generically entitled, "Obama's Judicial Nominations."

While noting the president has been tentative, the anonymous editorialist observed that Senate Republicans bear the blame on the confirmation side by, "doing their best to drag things out."

On Tuesday, a crack in the armor appeared over Obama's nomination of Judge David Hamilton to the U.S. Seventh District Court of Appeals.

The gentleman, who hails from a paternal line of Methodist ministers and enjoys the support of home-state Republican Senator Richard Lugar, apparently ran afoul of "conservative activists," because he worked for the American Civil Liberties Union before joining the bench.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) demurred in respecting the president's choice, saying "a common DNA" ran through Obama appointees in the form of an "ACLU chromosome."

And they say Republicans are "anti-science."

They tried to filibuster the nomination and, in the words of the "Washington Post's"Dana Milbank, got "Filibusted."

Which is pretty good, too.

His piece does a great job of detailing the suddenly changed views of Republicans who, just a few years ago, likened Democratic filibusters to obstruction.

By November 19, the big boys were taking a wider view of the filibuster phenomenon.

"The Washington Post's" E.J. Dionne came out with the "The GOP's no-exit strategy," which warned that it is "time to start paying attention to how Republicans, with Machievellian brilliance, have hit upon what might be called the Beltway-at-Rush-Hour Strategy, aimed at snarling legislative traffic to a standstill so Democrats have no hope of reaching the next exit."

On November 22, "The Post's" Fred Hiatt got into the act, further fleshing out the ramifications of what the "New York Times'" Charles Blow referred to as "the Republican's surprisingly effective obstructionist strategy."

Hiatt noted that, "more than a year after his electoral triumph, President Obama has filled only 55 percent of Senate-confirmed slots in his government. He has nominated few judges, won confirmation for fewer. The principal item on the agenda of the unions that went all in for him, labor law reform, is on hold. Almost everyone agrees that America's immigration laws are broken, yet no fix is in sight. Long after the collapse of our financial system, new systems of regulation have yet to emerge. There is no discernible trade policy."

Hiatt's point of departure was what all this looks like to friend and foe alike overseas. And what it looks like is that American democracy is in paralysis.

The Republicans, the party of flag-wrapped patriots, care a lot about America's image, but not so much as they do about regaining power. And they show no shame in their effort to do it.

For example, in "Help in Battling the Big Boys," highwayscribery lauded the efforts of Democrats, Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut in particular, for proposed legislation that would prevent credit card companies from imposing the arbitrary interest rates and fee increases they're dumping on customers before the new law capping such things takes effect.

But in "A Gift to Credit Card Companies," the "New York Times" reported that Sen. Thad Cochran of (R-Miss.), blocked a vote on the bill, "in yet another act of obeisance by Senate Republicans to the banking and credit card industries."

Thanks Thad.

"The Times" editorial on the judicial nominations noted that, "In March, every Republican senator signed an outrageous letter to the White House warning that they would filibuster any nominee from their home states if they did not approve the choice in advance."

That the Republican caucus is "outrageous," is not the point here. It's that "every" Republican senator signed the piece of trash.

Democrats have never enjoyed such lock-step discipline and as Meyerson and Dionne pointed out, "Blue Dog" or "centrist" or "spineless" Democrats (whatever you want to call them) are playing an important role in all of this.

Dionne said Republican use of the filibuster is making the majority look "foolish, ineffectual and incompetent." Moderate Democrats, by making their own narrow interests paramount on crucial matters like health care reform and climate change, "will only make themselves complicit in this humiliation."

The balky Democratic senators are not only betraying their own party, Myerson wrote, but simultaneously making a mockery of majority rule.

If they are "comfortable with the idea that elections shouldn't have consequences, they should say so publicly. If not, they should let the debate begin."

The word is out. Spread it around. Let's see what happens.

Now That The Health Care Reform Bill Passed....

Nezer — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:25:50 EST

Now that the Health Care Reform Bill has passed the House; I am looking forward to the Health Care Reform Bill w/ a Strong Public Option passing in the Senate. Then when the Bill gets to President Obama's Desk he will be able to Sign the Bill into Law. That would be, as awesome as, the Noble Peace Prize President Obama received. It's nice to get recognition for the work you're doing when it's something you believe in doing. Have a Grate Day.

Help In Battling the Big Boys

Stephen Siciliano — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:21:29 EST

Life's not easy when it is spent jousting with the Internal Revenue Service, Bank of America, and Anthem/Blue Cross.

As it is for many of you, it is thus for the highway scribe. The American struggle is a lonely one. It is a gauntlet run without the assistance of potent unions, affordable legal help, merciful tax rules, or simple health insurance policies.

For decades, policy has exalted the myth of our rugged individualism to the point where we have been left alone to tilt at behemoths against which we are no match.

Today, via the wonder of Web banking, Bank of America helped itself to $8.95 of the highway scribe's money for services that can only be guessed at. And that's because any time the scribe actually needs something from the bank, he gets nailed with a fee.

The relationship is simple wherein the bank serves as a brief holder and dispenser of the scribe's money while checks are deposited and quickly gobbled up by expenses associated with his humble existence. It's a pretty clean collaboration, which is why the free price originally offered for the account made sense.

One day, without any notice, the price went up to $5.95. highwayscribery called to find out what was up with that and got the stock response that such increases were included in the long, illegible text of a document he signed agreeing to a free checking account.

Which is not news to any of you.

Then, sometime after the Obama administration came into power, banks found themselves in the extremely rare position of having customer gripes funneled back at them through the White House.

In "Change New World," we expressed our initial shock at having the government do our bidding.

In "Credit Card Crookery" and "Credit Card Redux," this unique pleasure was extended, in particular, to the financial industry, which had it coming.

Of course, these companies didn't get richer than the rest of us by being stupider. Soon came their response to new rules reining in the parasitical abuses.

These involved arbitrary increases to most everyone's interest rates and general account fees. The companies also kept their promise on sticking it to credit cardholders who were on the up and up all these years.

That's around the time the aforementioned bump to $8.95 on the scribe's free checking account occurred. Bank of America stretched the terms of our original agreement by $107.40 per annum with nary a "howdy-do!"

Of course, on a sliding scale, a $107 heist is relatively small when compared with what happens when a bank does one the favor of paying a series of five $6 debit charges and then hits you for $35 on each.

Which is to say, the scribe absorbed it figuring nothing in life is truly free. Mired in a 1099 hourly wage reality, the effort in going over to the bank and getting the monthly fee reduced wasn't worth the time... financially speaking.

So it was with great pleasure that highwayscribery, in its ritual perusal of the "New York Times," on Tuesday, Oct. 2, ran into a charming slice of life on page B9 wherein Sen. Chris Dodd (D) of Connecticut was calling for an "interim freeze" on further fee increases of the type just detailed for your reading pleasure.

The author of the piece, Andrew Martin, by the way, does an excellent job on the myriad ways banks and credit card companies screw people. His pieces provide the consolation that you are not alone, and that someone with a decent megaphone is pointing out the abuses of usury to which we numbly submit.

But we digress with much territory to cover.

The article explains that Congress is only too aware of the run-up in fees and rates as banks interpret the interim between when the new law goes into effect, and now, as a window in which it’s okay to loot as many customers as possible.

A bill was recently reported out of the House Financial Services Committee that would close the window more quickly, on Dec. 1, instead of February 22 of next year.

Said Dodd: "At a time when families are struggling to make ends meet, jacked-up rates can quickly create crushing debt. People need to be responsible with their money, but they shouldn't be taken to the cleaners by outrageous fees."

What the Connecticut Yankee wants, in reality, is an old-time, 1970s-style price control. highwayscribery and others of his ilk love a good price control. They had fallen very much out of favor during the free market rage, but since that worked out about as well as it did in 1929, the price control may be making a comeback.

A fellow named Talbot from something called the Financial Service Roundtable said Dodd's desire is fired by the false notion that fees and interest rates are going up because of the new law to hold them down (if you follow).

Talbot added that the increases strem from the economy is so bad and people are having such a tough time paying their credit card bills.

But that's why taxpayers gave the big banks and brokerage houses those big bucks bailouts, so it won't wash. And thank heavens the Democrats are in power because we'd never have gotten this kind of love from the Tea Party Party.

Not to suggest the Dems are somehow holy and sacrosanct when it comes to protecting the naked consumer. They sat around for years bending to the will of marketeers and cultivated a lot of our current-day problems during the disappointing days of President Bill Clinton.

And that's because they're not as good as Republicans when it comes to loving their base.

GOPers can rush into a hotly contested New York congressional race and back the Conservative Party candidate (against their own!) without fear of...well, fear of anything.

National Democratic leaders jumping into a local race to back a socialist candidate, on principle, would result in their being sent straight to hell, or jail or worse. So they tend to take their left-wingers for granted because they have nowhere else to go.

Then they sit around waiting for independents and Olympia Snow (R-Maine) to give them cover.

Even as they have benefited from the change in our political landscape, Democrats have been slow to truly internalize it, which is why the public option was dead a month ago and now it’s not.

We've had 11 months of the Obama administration, but are into about the third year of the Obama era during which conventional wisepersons have seen their predictions upended again and again.

And so it goes with the public option. In his most recent column, David Broder wrote that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) finally decided upon the public option to satisfy the "labor-left" of his party. That's the highway scribe, who will avail himself of the benefit as soon as it becomes available.

But it's also a lot of other people, not necessarily for unions or anything else "left," but affordable health care.

Broder, like many in his field, think the Obama election happened in some weird vacuum that represented no shift in Americans' political thinking.

Reid thought that, too, and so did a lot of other people in Congress until the President did some decent explaining, the debate groaned on, and the public option concept grew clearer to the electorate.

The numbers don't lie. Reid can interpret them and feels safe in putting the idea forward.

But he needs some help, because oft-times, the peoples' will is thwarted.

Here's a petition asking Democratic leaders to strip any Senator supporting Republican filibuster efforts of their chairmanship.

highwayscribery calls it the "Lieberman Petition."

Here's Reid's petition asking you to help him out on the public option.

Here's former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, Robert Reich asking you, via video, to call your representatives on behalf of the public option.

Now, don't you feel better?

The "Times" ran an article on "Senate naysayer," John Cornyn (R-Okla.) who is hell-bent on stopping health care reform, because of the "financial ruin" it represents.

The article says he has a big "No," sign behind his desk in the Hart Senate Building of which he is very proud. The reason why is a secret of Cornyn's own keeping, but highwayscribery is willing to bet his tightwad ways don't extend to arms purchases and war packages.

And we're betting a yahoo like Cornyn, effective as he may be in gumming up the legislative works, won't be able to stop this thing coming down the pike.

Once achieved, health care reform is going to make life with or without Anthem/BlueCross a lot easier for a lot of people.

All of which, dare we way, represents something of a pending victory for President Obama whose Paul Krugman noted, "The seemingly impossible dream of fundamental health care reform is just a few steps away from becoming reality, and each player has to decide whether he or she is going to help it across the finish line or stand in its way."

Wow.

Which brings us to that final phantom, the IRS.

If you follow American politics very closely, you might come away with an impression that President Obama is not faring well. That people like him, but not his policies. That Republicans are poised for a comeback. You might have been caught off guard by news that he'd won the Nobel Peace Prize and swayed by those who say he has accomplished naught to deserve it.

In an Op-ed piece penned by U2's Bono in the "New York Times" a short while back, the singer attempted to explain why Obama is beloved in Europe, where they lack an entire network dedicated to the daily trashing of his reputation.

Among these virtues are Obama’s commitment to the Millennium Development Goals of halving world poverty by 2015. Obama, Bono notes, was not around when the goals were set, “but he’s there now. Indeed he’s gone further -- all the way, in fact. Halve it, he says, then end it.”

Such policies, wrote Bono, “are why I believe Mr. Obama could well be a force for peace and prosperity, if the words signal action.”

This does not mean the specter of the Internal Revenue Service and the crushing penalties it has visited upon the scribe's family will suddenly evaporate. Even Obama can't do that.

But, we hope, it means that WHAT we give to the government will be spent less on institutionalized violence and more on the promotion of peace, human harmony, and the vision of our better angels abroad.

And that's change you can bank on.

Letter to the Honduran Ambassador

Stephen Siciliano — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:33:28 EDT

Roberto Flores Bermudez
Honduran Ambassador to the United States
3007 Tilden St., N.W. #4 M
Washington D.C. 20008

Mr. Ambassador,

I'm absolutely sickened by press notices regarding the treatment, not only of anti-government supporters but of those who just happened to be in the way of government troops.

As I just wrote to your counterpart from Guinea, military coups do not work. Either they further enrage popular sentiment, which is always on the side of democracy, or they smother it. The latter instance entails nothing more than a country being occupied by its own army.

Unleashing these ill-prepared, and unscrupulous soldiers on middle-aged women, academics, and any poor soul trying to get home from the market is speaks volumes as to Micheletti Government's ability to lead. This is not leading, this is repression.

Reports of tanks rolling through the poor parts of the country as a way of intimidating President Zelaya's supporters is unconscionable and hints of oligarchic forces seeking to forestall a true democratic process.

If people didn't want Zelaya to run for a third term, they would have voted down the referendum. "Fixing" things with an army that brutalizes them was probably a distant preference for Hondurans of both the left and right.

Shame on the ruling junta.

Regards,
the highway scribe

Letter to the Guinean Ambassador

Stephen Siciliano — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:32:10 EDT

Guinean Embassy to the United States
2112 Leroy Place N.W.
Washington D.C. 20008

Dear Sir or Madame,

I want to express my outrage at the behavior of soldiers in your country. We do not hear much of Guinea here in the United States and it is most unfortunate that we should become familiar with your country thanks to the savage acts of men whose charge, one would suppose, is to protect a country's citizens.

These stories and images of women being raped by military forces in the streets of Conakry are abhorrent. President Moussa Dadis Camara's protestations that he could not foresee this bloodbath are unacceptable. Either he controls his army or doesn't. They should all be stripped of their commissions. These are not soldiers, but thugs.

Perhaps I am naive, but there must be a difference between the two types of person.

This is why military coups don't work. Nobody can stand in the way of those with guns if there is no system of civil law to provide prior restraint. I don't see how the trauma and tragedy can ever be revoked, but the current government might do the whole world a favor and step down so that voters might have a chance to replace them with more responsible human beings. And I emphasize "human."

Shame on your government.

Regards,
the highway scribe

Free Elliot Madison

Stephen Siciliano — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:10:25 EDT

Before you get upset about all those Iranian protestors being run through the wringer over there, you might turn your attention to those enduring similar treatment over here.

In "Twitter-Patter Revolutions," highwayscribery drew parallels between what governments do in Iran, and everywhere else, by framing examples of the violent way our own government has treated its dissidents.

highwayscribery reached back to the murder of four students at Kent State University in the 1960s and moved onto some overzealous police enforcement at Democratic and Republican national conventions over the past decade.

Now, we've got a fresh example from the recent G-20 summit and corresponding protests in Pittsburgh.

Similar to the way authorities responded to the Twitter-Patter revolution in Tehran, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents invaded a house in Queens, New York on Oct. 1, and rooted around its entrails for 16 hours.

That's not a misprint: 16 hours.

As part of the FBI effort in overkill, agents arrested a 41-year old social worker named Elliot Madison. It is not clear what Mr. Madison has done other than participated in the coordination of demonstrations around the G-20 confab.

Last we checked, which was just a few minutes ago, that's not a crime, rather a protected civil right.

His attorney, Martin Stolar told "The Times, "There's absolutely nothing that he's done that should subject him to any criminal liability."

highwayscribery agrees.

The article is devoid of evidence this fellow did anything other than occupy an improvised e-communications bureau that helped demonstrators divine the movements of the police details bent knocking the snot out of them.

The attorney said he'll know what the charges are when the affidavit empowering the FBI to disembowel his home is unsealed.

That's another anti-democratic feature of our democracy that drives the highway scribe nuts. The sealed court document. In his real-life job as a reporter, the scribe must comb the PACER system for federal court documents and they are often sealed, which is a way of keeping them from public purview without explanation.

Explanation, we posit here, is the essence of democracy. For a government by and for the people to take an action, it must explain the action to those same people.

The point being we have a ways to go here before pointing the figure at other places.

A criminal complaint against Madison, in Pennsylvania, said he directed, "others, specifically protestors of the G-20 summit, in order to avoid apprehension after a lawful order to disperse."

Of course, whenever a government issues an order to disperse, it's lawful, so Pennsylvania authorities are belaboring a weak point.

Emerson reminds us, "A good man obeys the law not too well," as in a case like this where your constitutional right to assemble for political reasons is questioned by a bunch of meat-headed, truncheon-wielding yo-yos.

Meant-headed, truncheon-wielding yo-yos, by the way, hate the Constitution because of the way it makes a crime out of venting their most basic and savage urges.
So what we're saying here is the same thing we said in "Twitter Patter Revolutions" and "President Obama and The Venice Drum Circle": Countries in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

If you want to argue that there is no moral equivalent between the enforcers in Iran and those in the United States, ask those who have to breathe the spew from their teargas canisters first.

If you think highwayscribery is getting all bent out of shape over something isolated, keep in mind that on the next page, same newspaper spread, it is reported that New York City will blow $24 million -- useful in forestalling foreclosures or paying furloughed teachers -- to install an "electronic bulwark" against "terrorists" in midtown Manhattan.

Hey, we're all against terrorism right? What's the problem with that?

The problem is that "terrorists" are not the only people the forces of order will be using their new electronic toys to watch.

How do you think they found Madison and his protesting friends in Pittsburgh?

And why is highwayscribery taking potshots at the police?

Because highwayscribery wouldn't trust a policeman farther than he could throw one, and because this article, also in next page of "The Times," regarding the impunity with which officers in that once free and anarchic city operate.

Screw 'em. We're with Madison and his ilk.

Cantor's Song

Stephen Siciliano — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 03:16:55 EDT

Governing Governing and protesting are markedly different activities.

This from a daily newspaper article dated Sept. 22:

"The same actions to confront the same problems are reaping the same results: voluntary activism, heroic public protest, slogans and posters, militant loyalty and the concentration of hopes in the central figure of a leader who has yet to harness a national crisis into a viable alternative political and social organization through which multiple sectors and interests impacted by poor government can fight for more than sound bites and the next congressional elections."

A summation of the populist uprising fomented by Glenn Beck and FOX News?

No, words from the pen of "La Jornada" columnist, Julio Hernandez Lopez on the state of Mexico 's left-wing opposition.

But it crosses that screwy “virtual” border fence to sum up the Republican status quo pretty easily doesn’t it?

In yesterday's "Washington Post," another columnist, Dana Milbank, wrote a piece that might lead one to believe House Republican Whip Eric Cantor has been delving into some of Lopez's writing.

In "The Health-Care War Gets a Little More Civil," Milbank recounts the staid circumstances of a public meeting convened by Cantor on (what else?) health care.

The meeting was conducted under rather strict rules of conduct, that wouldn't be considered so strict had certain people demonstrated an ability to behave like responsible adults during this summer's nefarious health care town halls.

You can read the piece for yourself, but in summation, Cantor, a snarky, perpetual Young Republican, invited a colleague from the other side of the aisle, and the issue, to join him.

The usual cast of crazies who found the town halls such fertile ground for ranting about the president, the color of his skin and socialistic tendencies, materialized anew.

But Cantor informed them, after some predictable early outbursts, that this was not a town hall, rather a "public square" and that, "We are here today to talk about health care."

That was something of a shocking, if passive, admission that those who disrupted the town halls did everything but talk about health care.

The piece chronicles the disappointment of those who came to rumble over the fact that Cantor was more willing to engage those who came to discuss. They were aghast at the collegial treatment, once a hallmark of The Peoples' House, Cantor afforded his opposite number, Rep. Bobby Scott (D).

"I felt like pulling a Joe Wilson," one defrauded attendee told Milbank.

We know.

You have to wonder what Republican internal polls are telling them about the impact the Tea Party and 9-12 crowd's caterwauling has had on party fortunes.

highwayscribery thought he espied the first shoots of this new Republican tone when Newt Gingrich, the original braying backbencher, decided not to join in bashing the president’s school kids speech.

Let’s revisit the Mexico article and highlight the fragment which reads: "...has yet to harness a national crisis into a viable alternative political and social organization through which multiple sectors and interests impacted by poor government can fight..."

Columnists (and bloggers) can get very wordy, but that swatch of text can be reduced to: “Yelling loud is bringing us no closer to governing.”

And as we said in our opener, whether in Mexico or Richmond, Virginia (Cantor's redoubt), screaming, tearing down, and obstructing is something quite different from governing.

Gingrich, who couldn't match Sara Palin in "exciting the base,” had this epiphany and decided to make a run at being a serious, even-tempered alternative, because people don’t like to see their presidents yelling.

Just ask Howard Dean.

Cantor, as potential national leader, apparently came to the same conclusions Gingrich did. And he might have also noted, with his belated town square on the topic, that for all the media clamor about the August troubles, we're still talking health care.

Worse, for he and his party, it’s going to become a law, with all the ensuing ballyhoo and poll bumps one might expect from that miracle. There is a resolve becoming apparent and it has something to do with the guy in the White House.

The lesson here is this: The party with the votes is the party that makes the laws.

Back when highwayscribery was in the opposition he, and those of his political ilk, made a lot of angry charges about George W. Bush. This left us, or the highway scribe at least, watching the town hall ruckus with a sinking sense of (ir)responsibility.

We still feel, naturally, that our caviling about Bush's questionable legitimacy was er, um, more legitimate, because he filed a lawsuit to stop votes from being counted, which made his claims to victory fairly transparent.

And furthermore, Obama won by a landslide, not by electoral votes delivered in a questionable tally by a state his brother (Jeb Obama) governed.

But we rant when we now recognize the corrosive effects of ranting.

For all our efforts to blow holes in the prior administration’s embarrassing run guiding the ship of state, at the end of the day, the Republicans and Bush always beat us because voters had delivered power unto them.

Yes, journalists fanned rumors of moderate Republicans disagreeing with how the (p)resident and Tom Delay were going about crafting some legislative package or other, but the bottom line is that they eventually got in line and passed the bill.

And so will moderate Democrats, because, once Republicans made clear they wanted health care to be Obama’s Waterloo, there was very little value in striking out independent of the president’s wishes.

And, of course, there are conservatives who play politics because they want to legislate and participate in the majestic process by which our system has unfolded over the past 230-odd years.

They, too, were going to have their say. Not at the top of their lungs, but in the hushed tones of the cloakroom and/or country club.

And like Obama, they wisely waited for the blowhards to run out of gas and the value of their shock tactics to wear thin.

Smart Republicans have faced up to the fact that they lost the election and that cooperating with the other guys is the only path to policy input.

The rants are giving way to something like Cantor’s sweet song.

We congratulate the Republican House Whip and welcome him to the real patriots’ debate.

The case for Single Payer over Public option

March4health4All — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 04:29:26 EDT

The case for Single Payer over Public option

If we are going to fight let's go for the real thing.

Enough with the Public Option, it covers, at best 5% of us, when Obama says, if you like what you have you can keep it, the most important statement is lacking: if you hate it, you can leave it. All the PO does is to create another entitlement for people to resent.

Also, if they wanted to control insurance prices, all they need to do is declare them a public utility, a mandate without price control is untenable.

Single payer is all inclusive, thereby creating less resentment and can be explain in two sentences: This is how it works. You pay your premiums through payroll withholdings, just like ssi, Medicare, etc. and you get the care free.

By eliminating the middleman, you pay a lot less and Drs get pay better.

Single payer is actually an easier sale, as it answers that very human question: "What's in it for me?"

http://healthcare4all.org/

What's in it for me? Healthcare

March4health4All — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:05:48 EDT

Must read http://kucinich.us/index.php

Enough with the public option, it covers, at best 5% of us, when Obama says, if you like what you have you can keep it, the most important statement is lacking: if you hate it, you can leave it. All the PO does is create another entitlement for people to resent.
Single payer is actually an easier sale, as it answers that very human question: "What's in it for me?"

Le's fight for the real thing.

Please join me in demanding your Medicare ASAP, regardless of age:
In FB: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=147637363022

In MyBO: http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/gpk4pt

Read Rep. Kucinich analysis below, and let's go after the real thing.
The Private Mandate Sausage Machine

Tuesday, 15 September 2009

Dear Friends,

It is said one should not ask how sausage or laws are made. Are you concerned about a public option? Let me share with you some insight about health care legislation which may not be good for your health.

A lesson in politics. The Kucinich Prediction: Here's what's going to happen ...

House will make a big deal about keeping/putting a public option in HR3200 because it competes with insurance companies and will keep insurance rates low.
The White House will refer to the President's speech last week where he spoke favorably of the public option.
The Senate will kill the competitive public option in favor of non-competitive "co-ops". Senate leaders like Kent Conrad have said the votes to pass a public option were never there in the Senate.
The bill will come to a House-Senate Conference Committee without the public option.
House Democrats will be told to support the conference report on the legislation to support the President.
The bill will pass, not with a "public option" but with a private mandate requiring 30 million uninsured to buy private health insurance (if one doesn't already have it). If you are broke, you may get a subsidy. If you are not broke, you will get a fine if you do not purchase insurance.

This legislative sausage will be celebrated as a new breakthrough and will be packaged as health insurance reform. However, the bill may require a Surgeon General's warning label: Your Money or Your Life!

The bill that Congress passes may pale in comparison to the bill that millions of Americans get every month for having or not having private health insurance.

It will take four years for the new legislation to go into effect. During that time we are going to build a constituency of millions in support of real health care, a constituency which will be recognized and a cause which is right and just: Health Care as a Civil Right.

Book Report: "I Am a Teamster," by Terry Spencer Hesser

Stephen Siciliano — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 18:46:23 EDT

In recognition of Labor Day, highwayscribery presents this review of "I Am a Teamster."
If departed Teamster leader Regina Polk had been a book, a thorough read would have been required before any judgment was rendered.

Terry Spencer Hesser's newly released "I Am a Teamster" details the too-short life of a woman who forged striking personal contradictions into a hybrid hellion of unique force.

The union organizer's story puts the lie to Republican detractors who can't see "real Americans" in the country's progressive ranks.

It is a story with roots in a hardscrabble western existence begun in Prescott, Arizona. Her father was a farmer who roamed from spread to spread in search of that ever-elusive American dream.

The family ultimately settled in the Sierra Nevada town of Paradise, California where the credo was, "Less Government, More Responsibility, and -- with God's help -- a Better World."

But raising a child takes a village and, in the 1960s, the village was undergoing a transformation of the kind that permitted teenaged Regina to access the sexually-charged "Kinsey Report."

At her mother's urging, Polk applied to the rich girls' school of Mills College where she was caught up in the chaos that was nearby, 1960s Berkeley.

She was permanently affected by the crosscurrents of civil rights, feminism and anti-war activism that characterized the time and place.

Freed by cheap gas at the height of automobile era, the searching Polk wound up at University of Chicago where she enrolled in a masters program for labor relations, but it was her real job where she got the true schooling.

To pay bills she found work as a receptionist at the inappropriately named Red Star Inn. Hesser writes that Regina was a "knockout by anybody's standards," and enjoyed the concomitant privileges extended by management.

But the employer's treatment of lesser types -- dishwashers, busboys, waitresses and kitchen help -- stuck in Polk's politicized craw and she contacted Bob Simpson, organizing director of Teamsters Union Local 743.

In the book, Simpson recounts that Polk struck him, "as a hippie. The way she dressed and looked. She was for all kinds of rights. Worker rights. Civil rights. Women's lib."

Simpson, who had little interest in expending precious resources on organizing the Red Star, became one of many who learned that Regina Polk did not take "no" for an answer.

She set out to organize the restaurant's workers and, when management got wind of the effort, was fired. The union filed a grievance, the restaurant paid money to get rid of Polk, and Simpson hired her as a part-time organizer.

The rest, as they say, is herstory.

By 1975, American capital's move out of the manufacturing business was in full swing and the Teamsters' saw their primary source of dues-paying members evaporate. In search of greener pastures, union researchers identified a surging class of white, middle-class, moderately educated workers.

"To organize white-collar women," Hesser writes, "the Teamsters needed a different kind of organizer to lead them out of the mire of scandal and suspicion that surrounded them on a national level."

Enter Regina Polk.

She was a college-educated, floppy-hat-wearing fashion plate with a philosophical crush on Jimmy Hoffa. Polk possessed a cosmopolite's travel lust and a farm girl’s ear for country western. A serial savior of imperiled animals, she carried an ice pick for slashing tires in the old-time Teamster way.

A culinary epicurean, she walked into one of Southside Chicago's roughest neighborhoods so that her maid Johnnie Scott didn't go without a paycheck.

"I lived on Justine on the South Side," Scott remembers in the book. "At the time, it wasn't a suitable neighborhood. It was bad. And I remember lookin' out the window and here comes Regina walking by herself. Bringing me my paycheck. She wasn't afraid of nobody. 'Have a nice vacation,' she told me, 'it's better with pay.' That's the way she phrased it: It's better with pay.'"

The anecdote is indicative of Polk's approach to both organizing and contract enforcement, which focused on individuals. None of whom were too insignificant to benefit from her assistance.

"She defended ferociously her members when managers attempted to abuse them, believing that the union should do more than just guarantee a wage, that it should also see to it that its members were treated respectfully," Gary Mamlin, a University of Chicago shop steward, told the author.

In her under-appreciated "The Other Women's Movement," Dorothy Sue Cobble posited that in between the first wave of suffragette feminists, and the second-wave feminists spawned by the Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan five decades later, thrived a special breed of "labor feminists."

These women took root and cover in their unions during the 1930s when labor syndicates enjoyed a heyday in the United States.

Polk's religious dedication to union values, and fearless confrontations with the old boys in labor and management alike, suggest she was a unique mix of the latter two waves.

As such, she neither demeaned the value of domestic work nor avoided it.

"If she was coming home late or not at all," Scott remembered, "she would cook for Tom [her husband] a beautiful plate of lamb chops and peas and wrap his dishes before she left, leaving me instructions or telling him to eat it cold."

Classified by the famed political scientist C. Wright Mills as "weak insiders," unions typically groan under the weight of servicing the least fortunate with a dearth of resources

And so, the Teamsters promptly put Polk to work helping organize clerical workers at Blue Cross/Blue Shield in Chicago. She later reported to union bosses on the difficulty of getting "status-conscious" and "image conscious" women to join a "truck drivers union."

Nonetheless the Teamsters prevailed. The extent of Polk's contribution to the victory might be read in the 28-year old’s subsequent assignment to organize workers at the University of Chicago.

Faced with a recalcitrant university president who had successfully dislodged the union at Yale, Polk's campaign was conducted largely "underground" or secretively so as to protect those with the courage or need to join the Teamsters' drive.

The campaign prevailed, too.

"The university was stunned," writes Hesser. "It had failed to realize that over the previous twenty years the people who worked on campus were no longer faculty wives but bread-winners who needed the money. They were mothers, many of them single, whose paltry paychecks started looking worse and worse."

"I Am a Teamster," is no syrupy-sweet story about the virtues of organized labor. Hesser makes it clear that Polk had her detractors within the union.

"I think it was because she was so aggressive," said Simpson, "but I can remember specifically one guy saying to me, 'I didn't like her from fuckin' day one!' And that was exactly his words and this guy was a board member."

Regina also grew disillusioned with the union’s lackluster support of its members.

Nor is “I Am a Teamster,” the tale of perpetual triumph, because Polk's campaigns did not always prevail.

After one defeat, she came across her opposite numbers from a union-busting law firm at a local bar. One of the "bastards with briefcases," as she referred to such consultants, approached to share a conciliatory, post-battle drink. Instead, she took the one she was nursing and threw it in his face.

All of Polk’s fire was extinguished in a plane crash at the age of 32. Some years later, when her wrongful death suit was at trial, one of the jurors recognized Regina as the person who had donated the very clothes she was wearing.

Hesser's slim volume, 147-pages long, renders a large life with efficiency. The author commits the biographer’s forgivable sin of falling in love with her subject. She starts off unevenly, accumulating too many posthumous summations, inappropriate for a chapter on childhood, while applying enthusiastic adjectives to someone whose larger-than-life actions speak for themselves.

But as Polk's career takes form, so does the narrative, which is delivered in a no-frills reportorial form that leans properly on numerous interviews of people who were there at the time.

"I Am a Teamster," celebrates the difference one person, empowered and guided by the simple principal of solidarity, can have upon the lives of others through brute effort, consideration, compassion, and even joy.

One of her Teamster mentors, Ray Hamilton, eulogized Polk by saying, "She lived as she believed and felt that it was more important to actually help one person than to talk about saving the world."

Although she inspired fellow Teamsters, the union was never going to make a template of Polk from which a generation of like labor leaders could be modeled.

She was too unique and too individual. A real American if you will.

The Liberal

Stephen Siciliano — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:12:27 EDT

He carried his personal flaws and tragic miscues in the same way he carried the liberal credo: slightly wearied, but unyielding.

His opponents linked them seamlessly.

If the health care debate reveals anything, it is that to believe in a government conceived with the purpose of serving the people places one in the company of someone who drives a young girl off a bridge, runs, and then hides.

Together, Sen. Edward Moore Kennedy and the large liberal constituency that thrives throughout this country, have trudged on, standing by tired platitudes that are no less virtuous for being time-worn and tested.

His loss is a terrible blow to Republican fundraisers, but not so much as it will be to an ungrateful and impatient people who take whatever they can get, while viewing the acts of sharing with or giving to the less-fortunate as foolhardy.

For those of us inspired and instructed by his political example, his like will not be seen for a long time, if ever.

Kennedy never saw a military intervention he liked. He taught, by his example, that such consistency is the stuff of being anti-war and pro-human, never falling for the slick trick of associating support for a missile system with a desire for peace.

Those of us who agreed with him were never disappointed - no matter how low the value of our philosophy sunk - when we awaited his lone and familiar voice to speak out with intelligence against organized and taxpayer-funded mayhem.

We were never disappointed when the corporations that run our lives, pirate our money and health, had come up with yet another new line of propaganda that succeeded by appealing to what was worst, rather than best, in the American spirit.

He was there, like a default setting; turning our helpless rage into articulate argument that we might carry forth onto the streets, into parties, and anywhere else informed public debate still percolates.

For those of us who retired at night, beaten by our own mistakes -- thrown into doubt -- Kennedy demonstrated how one picks-up and carries on.

The marvelous and masterful senator taught us that our questionable pasts and sorry records could be righted by doing one small thing tomorrow and another the day after and so on.

He taught us that our job is to get better at what we do and to not be undone by setbacks.

He did not define what it meant to be liberal because all of that came before his rise to power and fame. But Kennedy taught us what it cost to remain liberal, to endure the insults and continue the work of assisting those who need it.

Unlike his brothers, frozen in youth by martyrdom, his story encompassed the sloppy narrative that becomes all our narratives, which in the end, is the same effort at doing good while swimming against a current of so much evil.

Good bye you good Liberal.

NO MORE HEALTHCARE DISCRIMINATION

March4health4All — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 04:38:18 EDT

Today I had the privilege to interpret for Maxine Waters at the town hall meeting on healthcare.

The good news, the insurance mignons that have been disrupting so many of these meetings with all of their racist and anti-Semitic poison do not have enough cojones to show up in Compton.

The bad news, even in the most liberal of the bills, the public option is no more than a token, it will not cover more than 10 million people and it is not a choice, most people will NOT have an option, much like today, worse yet, by making insurance mandatory, the rest of us will be left even more at the mercy of the insurance companies than we are today.

So even as a matter of strategy this lukewarm reform is no reform. As someone pointed out today, we elected Barack Obama, not Mitt Romney, even under the best light as presented by congresswoman Waters, this is the Romney plan implemented in Massachusetts, it is not working there and it will not work nationally.

The public option is just a misnomer to appease the left, not an option at all, puzzling since last time I check the majority in congress IS THE LEFT, so who are they appeasing?

Healthcare is a right protected and provided by the government to senior citizens, children, veterans and their own employees, as such, equal protection under the law demands that it be provided to all.

Medicare for everyone today, it is a constitutional issue, not a matter of congressional negotiations subject to debate.

A Tale of Two Governments

Stephen Siciliano — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 21:06:28 EDT

Republicans and their wing-nut fellow travelers believe there are two governments in the United States.

One government runs foreign policy and wars and it is a government that never apologizes for America because America never commits a sin overseas.

It is a government never referred to as such.

It is just "America," a bright and shining example of all things good, that runs itself on the strength of its immaculate conception

The other government is the one that should never get involved with America's interior workings, should never monitor its businesses, and should never render any services, because it can't do anything right.

The two governments, of course, are one and the same. Republicans and their ilk consider the first one their particular provenance and shunt the other one off on Democrats whom they then deny the right to adminstrate as often as they can.

FOX News runs montages of President Obama committing the cardinal sin of admitting the first government's humanity and concomitant flaws before foreign audiences to the soundtrack of Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana."

It spends the remaining air-time lamenting Obama's attempt to lead the second government's "takeover of the health care system."

The argument is this: The same American government that should never apologize for actions overseas cannot be trusted to best the wild and woolly wiles of our entrepreneurial class.

That's the religion.

It's a religion, like many religions, with adherents who subscribe to the tenets against their better interests.

But as Michael Hiltzik of the "Los Angeles Times" noted the other day, the entrepreneurs handling of health care sucks.

Writes Hiltzik: "Throughout the heroic struggle in Congress to provide a 'public option' in health insurance, one question never seems to get answered: Why are we so intent on protecting the private option?"

And that's a whopper of an omission, which most of our elected representatives (in a rare demonstration of bipartisan comity), and cable news offerings on both the "left" and right, are all complicit in arranging.

Maybe some of you saw bumbling Bill Kristol's interview on "The Daily Show," not too long ago.

Host Jon Stewart observed how members of our military are the beneficiaries of government-controlled health care and Kristol, in his knee-jerk understanding of patriotism, noted that, because of their sacrifice, the soldiers deserved the best.

Stewart was on it, scribbling in a pad, "So you're saying a government-run plan is better than the sh*#t private insurance coverage the rest of us have?"

Kristol wanted to counter, but the knee had already jerked. He was nailed in the same way the rest of the hysterical right wing should be.

Republicans and conservatives are out to torpedo anything the Democrats might do to improve health care in this country. Not because they love getting reamed monthly by their insurer, but because they don't want the other "side" to have a victory.

This is an extreme example of what candidate Obama was talking about when referencing the corrosive impact of our divisive politics: Some Americans would rather forego better, perhaps life-saving health care, than let their opposite political numbers claim they had done something good for the country.

Full disclosure: highwayscribery hates his insurer Anthem/Blue Cross/Blue Shield etc. He views it as an adversary to whom he ponies-up the second largest chunk of his discretionary budget.

And it's not fair.

Taking his blogger's sense of the responsible citizen into the realm of health care, highwayscribery eats fruit salads every morning (except Sunday when he gets a sausage, egg, and cheese "McGriddle"), and salad (or gazpacho) for lunch.

At dinner, the scribe averages a single piece of meat per week, two fish meals, two pasta feasts, and some other culinary delights chosen for their salubrious balancing of his dietary intake (although he'd prefer more McGriddles).

He surfs three times a week, runs an average of 10 miles over the same period, and plays baseball with a six-year-old who can, and does, run rings around him.

The result is a low-cholesterol, low blood-pressure, clean bill of health for a middle-aged guy (don't ask) who asks little else of his health care providers than to confirm these positive results.

Last year the scribe paid $208 a month for his premium and this year it was raised to $248. No reason. Now the scribe is no Adam Smith, but he figures if the free market system our conservative countrymen are so worried about conserving actually functioned, a cut in premium would have been due.

But that's not what happened. What happened was the unilateral imposition of a considerable increase backed by a threat of financial ruin should the scribe walk away from this "relationship" and then be badly hurt.

What insurance really gets you, of course, is the right to pick a fight with your insurer once illness strikes, and it decides "the procedure is not covered."

Or as Hiltzik puts it: "For if the insurers have proved anything over the last 15 years as the health crisis has gathered speed like an avalanche roaring downhill, it's that they're part of the problem, not the solution."

the scribe wrote the Anthem/Blue Shield plan administrator and let him know exactly what he felt about the increase. He said the company should have paid him for the aforementioned custodianship of his own well-being and added that he hoped President Obama instituted a single-payer, government-run system that responded to public pressure because private insurers certainly don't.

Anthem confirmed the argument by not replying.

The premium stood, much the same way Bank of America's unilateral decision to increase monthly fees by $5 on the scribe's checking account did.

It's all one way. Big boy leans, little guy bends and breaks.

"The firms," Hiltzick writes, "take billions of dollars out of the U.S. healthcare wallet as profits, while imposing enormous administrative costs on doctors, hospitals, employers and patients. They've introduced complexity into the system at every level. Your doctor has to fight them to get approval for the treatment he or she thinks is best for you. Your hospital has to fight them for approval for every day you're laid up. Then they have to fight them to get their bills paid, and you do too."

That's what, no, that's who The Right is defending. These companies.

They are organizing (read: paying) people to attend town hall meetings on health care and disrupt the dialogue, shout down speakers, and insult their elected representatives.

Republican Party leaders at the national level such as Rep. John Boehner and Michael Steele defend these actions as if they were proper and worthy of a healthy civic culture. With the sophomoric smirk that has become their party's trademark responses to earnest policy, they mock Democrats as people who just don't get how badly Americans want to keep the crap arrangement currently in place...in place.

They should be ashamed of themselves.

Instead these purported loyal oppositionists gain succor from what passes for the left in this country, with the onerous Democratic senators Max Baucus (pictured) and Ben Nelson, from Montana and Nebraska respectively, doing everything they can to eviscerate or eliminate altogether the American peoples' desire to have a public option to these corporate crooks.

Hiltzick, in his excellent piece, makes the connection to these "Blue Dog" Democrats thusly:

"You've heard of the Blue Dog Democrats, those mostly rural conservatives who blocked a summertime vote on reform legislation on Capitol Hill? According to the Center for Public Integrity, the biggest backer of the Blue Dogs’ political action committee is the healthcare industry, which is on the path to pumping a total of $1.2 million into the PAC's maw in the current 2009-10 election cycle."

Wow, there's a surprise.

Maybe this time things will backfire. Maybe if the opponents of change yell loud enough and insult enough people, Americans will get past the cant about "socialism," or "bureaucrats" (as if health insurers didn't have them, too), and see that the only thing Republicans propose is doing nothing.

Maybe Americans will see that the President's opponents stand for nothing, but will fall for anything that does harm the largest number of Americans.

But don't wait for an apology. Their America doesn't do that.

President Obama and The Venice Drum Circle

Stephen Siciliano — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:04:39 EDT

For many years, on cool, cool California nights, the Venice Beach Drum Circle has gathered at the rim of the Pacific and rendered rhythmic homage to the sun, to life, and to liberty.

Congas clip, djembes clop, drummers bang and dancing dervishes delight. Incense floats from boardwalk merchant stands and sometimes it is accented with a wisp of marijuana. A crowd of onlookers, always different, enjoys all the spontaneity under the watchful eye of ...

...the Los Angeles Police Department.

highwayscribery can attest to this Sunday night ceremony stretching back to at least 1996, but suspects the tradition dates back to the first hippies.

Frequent attendance over the years also qualify the highway scribe to unequivocally state that these folks are not bothering anybody. Quite the opposite. Carving out a small piece of the public commons for themselves the goal is establishment of a tiny bubble where tolerance and primal beats reign.

It is a charming space to be for those who share the circle's open door philosophy and even for those who don't.

The fly in the ointment is the police presence. They do not serve any protective purpose. Instead the police skulk around observing and intimidating. It has gone on for years and often, they ruin the fun, inexplicably barging in and breaking up the circle before its climactic crescendo just as the sun dips into the ocean drink leaving an orangeade sky behind.

Venice Beach is Los Angeles' Greenwich Village. Despite suffering similar ravages of gentrification, it is holding better than its more famous bohemian cousin. It residents are your usual real estate poison pills of blacks, working-class Mexicans, and dreadlocked indy freaks.

They do not participate in the ambitious race that is American life for reasons varied as their odd raiment. But last year the neighborhood was papered in Shepard Fairey's famed "Hope" poster and local activists, usually aligned with the Green Party or Che Guevara's ghost, came out strong for Obama.

Like the conservative pundits who hurled time-worn labels at Obama such as "leftist" and "socialist," they did not completely buy what the media was claiming the next president to represent.

A "The New York Times," editorial on Mr. Obama and race, noted how he has refused the role of black "exceptionalist" lecturing his people "to stop whining about racism and get on with it."

Regardless of Obama's posture on Guantanamo, detentions, the intelligence capers, and other civil rights issues, the conservatives were correct in their earliest presentiments that he was something "other."

So were the "others."

And last Wednesday. The Venice Beach Drum Circle got their reward for voting Obama in November.

That was when President Obama, a guy who thinks thrice before talking, said that a stupid Cambridge cop "acted stupidly" in its handling of a report that a Harvard professor was burgling his own home.

Of course, the upstanding and obedient who claim all American values to be their own pounced, but out at Venice, around the drum circle at sunset, the congas were getting conked a little harder.

Because the victim of police abuse in the case at hand was African-American, much of the ensuing debate has rested upon the question of race, which is fine.

But for highwayscribery, and those at The Venice Drum Circle on behalf of whom he deigns to write, it was only a "black thing," to the extent African-Americans are subject to the larger "police thing."

In America, we reserve a place for the forces of law and order that are too often, well, above the law. There is and always has been a slavish deference to the whims and desires of those we ostensibly pay to protect us.

The only exception to the habitual bending of this tropism toward all things cop is the National Rifle Association, which can beat a capitol building lined with police officers seeking some sanity in our gun laws, every time.

highwayscribery does not need to go back very far in time in a search for events that make his case. And it is worth pointing out that the only reason we're talking about this now is because the Cambridge Police Force picked on the wrong black guy.

That's because Professor Gates is a black guy with a big brain, a brain with our Constitution's Bill of Rights etched into its recesses, and a strong conviction that democracy is healthier when you question cops rather than lick their shoes.

That, of course, was his privilege. Gates took the cop on because of the firepower (intelligence and connections) he had.

But not everyone is so blessed.

Only a month ago, in San Diego, a jury acquitted a police officer who, while off-duty, got into a road-rage scrape with another driver and wound up shooting both she and her eight-year old boy.

As the current state of affairs would have it, the one who got shot was convicted and sentenced, medical problems associated with being wounded by a cop, notwithstanding.

It turns out that she was an "unsympathetic" victim, someone whom even the prosecutor trying the cop called a "butthead" in court, a person plagued with flaws we'd have never known about had Officer Frank White not taken aim at her.
And fired.

Whatever Rachel Silva's imperfections, it was Mr. White who carried the gun, who was sworn to uphold the law, and who should have gotten spanked for acting in a manner beneath the dignity of his office (or anybody else's).

Also down in San Diego, Encinitas to be exact, a Democratic challenger to Rep. Brian Bilbray's congressional seat had a residential fundraiser "upset" by the local police.

A 60-year old woman, Shari Barman, and a 62-year old activist named Pam Morgan, were both pepper-sprayed, handcuffed, and charged with the usual crimes associated with telling a cop to go and respond to a real crime.

The American Civil Liberties has said the case involves, "what appears to be a significant abuse of power by a peace officer who intruded into a person's home and reacted with unwarranted force to an unsubstantiated complaint alleging a minor infraction."

When Will Carless, an intrepid investigative reporter for the nonprofit "Voice of San Diego," requested documents from the Sheriff's Department on the investigation into Deputy Marshall G. Abbott's
meltdown, he was told to go screw.

See what we mean?

The "San Diego Union-Tribune," which never met a police raid it didn't like, was able, with the help of local "Christian" activist, to dredge up some evidence of Barman's "violent past" involving an altercation with an airport security guard in...1977.

Michael Wilson and Solomon Moore of the "The New York Times" wrote that, "The line of when to put on handcuffs is a personal and blurry one, varying among officers in the same city, the same precinct, even the same patrol car."

Some officers in the article described a degree of tolerance and the need for a thick skin in their particular line of work.

But another officer from Denver had a different take. "We're not going to take abuse," he said. "We have to remain in control. We're running the show."

Well, over at The Venice Drum Circle that they're never abusing anybody when the police come around. They might add that "control" is the provenance of free citizens until they forfeit it and note that civil society is not a "show" so there is no reason for somebody to "run" it.

It is worth noting that, in the San Diego incident, Abbott went haywire when Barman asked him why he needed her date of birth.

Seems Barman and Professor Gates hail from a similar time and generation that did not care much for the dictates of security guards and police officers with a dim view of America's claim to being a free county.

Ms. Barman's "partner," the 55 year-old Jane Stratton was also knocked down by "Wildman" Abbot.

See a pattern here?

NRA wins. Conga players, lesbians, and black people lose.

The NRA did not support or endorse Obama. Its propaganda about the meaning of his election led a guy in Pittsburgh to shoot up the town for fear our president would remove the sacred gun from his cold sweaty hands.

The conga players, the lesbians, and, for certain, the blacks, did vote for Mr. Obama. Thus elevated, he characterized a certain type of police behavior, common and accepted from the cold Northeast to the warm Southwest, in the same way they would have.

The president has not apologized. Obama has said he would have "calibrated" his remarks differently, but the sum total would have been the same.

If his hand was forced in commenting anew, and calling the policeman and the professor to a White House conversation, the victory goes to his supporters, because there Sergeant James Crowley will come face-to-face with his sloppy handiwork.

And that would be a first.

Little Story, Big News

Stephen Siciliano — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 22:32:48 EDT

Your "big" news stories confected for mainstream consumption do not always cover matters of mainstream consumption.

Sotomayor, health care, Guantanamo...a liberal's dream list of concerns blanket our Web pages and daily newspapers thanks to the change in power affected last November.

Sometimes, in the heat of it all, it is not so easy to remember that during the Bush regime Guantanamo was the particular province of media oddities such as, well, highwayscribery.

Yes, there are close votes on health care forthcoming, and frustrated minority senators sniping at a nominee assured confirmation, but the shift in agenda from Bush to Obama is dramatic enough to suggest they were two presidents of two different countries (with the same name).

As to mainstream consumption, it would have been unheard of, a year ago, that our big media outlets must needs bother themselves with such a thing as the Obama administration's efforts to restrict the use of anti-biotics in our food supply.

But lo and behold, there was Gardiner Harris's piece in the July 14 edition of "The New York Times."

Given its page 17 placement, HR 962, sponsored by Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) is not the biggest star in the media constellation.

But if the Michael Jackson circus taught us anything, it is that the chieftains at our networks and bureaus have no monopoly on the country's sober priorities and are as apt to lose their heads as a teenage girl at a concert of the now departed pop star.

Gardiner ledes with the administration seeking, "to ban many routine uses antibiotics in farm animals in hopes of reducing the spread of dangerous bacteria in humans."

One of the unsung heroes of our time, or any time, Principal Deputy Commissioner of Food and Drug Joshua Sharfstein, told the House Rules Committee on Monday that, "feeding antibiotics to healthy chickens, pigs, and cattle -- done to encourage rapid growth -- should cease."

And that's a start. From there highwayscribery would like to see the cessation of all additions to farm livestock that are not necessarily...actual food.

Slaughter's legislation would ban seven classes of antibiotics from being given and restrict the application of others to therapeutic and preventive uses.

One would have thought that's what such things were intended for in the first place.

Sharfstein, and those who hired him in the Obama administration, believe the antibiotics lead to the development of bacteria in humans for which our immune systems have no response.

The American Medical Association agrees with them.

The bad and somewhat dispiriting news is that the farm lobby is against the measure and therefore, Gardiner reports, "makes its passage unlikely."

Well, you know, that's awful.

After all, we're aware something makes us sick -- and sounds funny as an idea to begin with -- the doctors' council essentially agrees, and because the National Pork Producers Council has paid for the loyalty of enough Congress members, we've got to eat...

But all hope is not lost. There's a plan to sidestep Congressional fans of polluted food and slip the "Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2007" into the health care reform bill.

That should make the President's job even easier!

Dave Warner, a spokesman for the porkmen, admits there seem to be more cases of anti-biotic resistance diseases from food consumption. But he added that there are "no good studies" tying them to the use of these substances in the production of that food.

Which may or may not be true, but wouldn't it be nice if they stopped using these things until some degree of certainty is achieved on the question?

The Pew Environment Group, the article goes on to note, is paying for some advertisements supporting the measure.

Robert Martin, a senior officer at Pew said, "Just the fact that Congresswoman Slaughter is having a hearing today is a huge step forward."

Which is somewhat the point of this post.

(You can call Slaughter at (202) 225-3615 to encourage her efforts in this area).

Obama: The First 106 Days

Stephen Siciliano — Wed, 06 May 2009 04:13:37 EDT

It's a good thing that, as a blogging outfit, highwayscribery decided to stay clear of the "first 100 days" traffic and waited patiently for the no less important FIRST 106 DAYS milepost.

On top of highwayscribery's little peep being overwhelmed by the roar of outlets both mega and minor, President Obama's ensuing stand against offshore tax havens and unequivocal nod to industrial syndicalism might have gone unremarked.

Offshore tax havens are the things that people who don't get 10-99 or 1040 forms at the end of year use to avoid paying taxes the people who get 10-99 or 1040 forms can't use to avoid the annual tithe.

Like, say, Warren Buffet.

When the Oracle of Omaha was asked by "New York Times," business columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, why his empire was structured as a conglomerate when he advised other investors to "keep it simple," Buffet responded, "We've got this ability in terms of moving money around into various opportunities without tax consequences."

Get it. WITHOUT TAX CONSEQUENCES.

Jackie Calmes and Edmund Andrews at the "New York Times," (NYT) reported that Obama's is a move which, "appeals to growing populist anger among taxpayers but that is likely to open an epic battle with some major powers in American commerce."

To quote a very unpopular former president, "Bring it on."

The new President, you see, is fulfilling a campaign promise to end tax breaks for American companies that send American jobs overseas.

John Castellani of the Business Roundtable gave the reporters a canned reaction: "This plan will reduce the ability of U.S. companies to compete in foreign markets, which will also cripple economic growth here in the U.S."

The obvious question is what is it that makes these countries "American"? You also have to wonder if other companies in other countries pay taxes and, if they do, how they compete.

Finally, while blessed with all these neat tools for avoiding taxes, why has economic growth been crippled anyway?

If the NYT reporters are to be taken at their word, Obama merely wants to fix provisions that no longer serve the original purpose of protecting multinational corporations from being taxed twice: once overseas and once by the Internal Revenue Service.

But according to the same article, in 2004, the last year for which there are figures, corporations deferred reporting earnings and wracked up tax credits that led to a paltry 2.3 percent contribution on what is supposed to be a 35 percent tax rate.

In short, they didn't come even close to paying their fair share.

the highway scribe, by the way, is still being forced to pay his.

The Obama plan has left open one big, fat loophole, according to Lynnley Browning, also of the "New York Times" (which should give you an idea of what political blogging's future will look like when all these "real" newspapers go under).

The Obama plan, apparently, doesn't do away with "transfer pricing," a concept we feel no need to explain since most of you aren't going to need it and because the outcome is essentially the same, where multinationals and taxes are concerned.

There's a pattern developing with the president, who seems to throw big punches, but them dance off into a corner when battling the big boys.

Robert Reich at Salon.com thinks the president throws a lot of stuff out there, and keeps some close to his chest, because he's trying to affect great changes in American society. More often than not, Reich believes, he will run into the same people at the negotiating table and all of these plans and provisions will serve as so many bargaining chips on its coffee-stained surface.

For example, when the American car industry started going belly-up, there were complaints from people the scribe has coffee with that the bankers were bailed out, while unions were being required to eat their contracts in most usual and inequitable fashion.

But lo-and-behold, at Chrysler Obama practically went syndicalist, which is a philosophy that believes unions, workers councils, and others cooperative labor groups are best-suited to running industrial entities.

On May Day itself, "NYT" subscribers awoke to a headline that claimed "Chrysler Files for Bankruptcy, UAW and Fiat Take Control."

True, it's not the revolutionary syndicalism preached by Pierre Prodhoun, but it's still United Auto Workers control with $8 billion in government grease for the wheels.

Or as Jim Rutenberg and Bill Vlasic, again, of "The Times" noted, "It was a stark moment, and one unseen in modern times..."

Micheline Maynard, of (yes) "The Times," penned "In Chrysler Deal, Union Takes Rare Front Seat," and observed that Chrysler's Chapter 11 could end up being the "Cadillac" of bankruptcies for the United Auto Workers.

Apparently Chrysler didn't have a luxury model that could make the analogy workable.

Quoted in the piece was an expert in bankruptcy restructuring of Washington-based Arent Fox saying, "This is extraordinary, truly extraordinary. I never would have thought a year ago that this would occur. These are truly unusual times."

Change indeed.

Maynard noted that the United Auto Workers is not just any union thanks to its heavy political contributions, but that's a narrow conclusion that lacks a back story.

Which is why you come to highwayscribery.

The UAW is the holy grail of democratic trade unionism in this country with a not inconsiderable reputation around the world as well. The union's dramatic history is woven into labor lore. The auto workers have cut a noble and progressive profile in countless fights since their formation by the Reuther brothers in the 1930s.

In 1986, when the highway scribe was a cub reporter, he was assigned to cover the union's national convention in Anaheim, Calif.

Now reporters are a pretty jaded lot. We've got to sift through a lot of buffalo chips to get at the truth and many events we cover are shows concocted especially for our delectation and/or distraction.

But the sight of 5,000 UAW delegates, sitting at long tables across the sprawling convention floor, rising to their feet and singing "Solidarity Forever" stamped a memory in the scribe's mind that 23 years have barely dimmed.

And that's part of what is behind this move. A progressive president standing by a blue chip labor union and assuring its members get a fighting chance rather, rather than sacrificing them to the cold and heartless logic of the marketplace.

The Message, Not the Messenger

Stephen Siciliano — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:06:01 EDT

The messenger is beloved when the message is peace, freedom, equality, rights, and other byproducts of the American and French revolutions.

A lot, but not everything, that President Barack Obama does passes muster with the highwayscribery editorial board.

Take, for example, the Obama Department of Justice brief in Jewel v. National Security Agency.

For nitty gritties we suggest you visit Glenn Greenwald's blog at Salon, where he applies an unrelenting commitment to civil rights with a constitutional lawyer's training.

In broad strokes, the lawsuit represents a legal challenge to the Bush administration's illegal wiretapping policy.

By way of recap, last year Obama and other Democrats joined Republicans in passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). This nefarious piece of legislation granted immunity to telecommunications companies that had complied with Bush administration requests to spy on their customers.

This provoked a howl of protest from civil libertarians. Congressional Democrats responded that the government, in spite of the FISA bill, could still be sued for its transgressions upon our rights.

Jewel put that promise to the test.

An unfortunate byproduct of our country's majestic process for transferring power is that new administrations get saddled with their predecessor's sins, and the Obama administration necessarily became the defendant in Jewel.

But rather than fold the government's defense and bless the claims of citizens legitimately asserting their constitutional right to privacy, Attorney General Eric Holder has done just the opposite...if not worse.

In requesting the lawsuit's dismissal, Holder asserts the state's "secret privilege" doctrine and attempts to repress evidence that might add meat to the plaintiff's boney claims.

It is identical to the Bush administration's posture which said: "We can't play ball in this court, because its rules require the exposure of information that threatens our national security...

..."trust us."

Holder then argues the doctrine of "sovereign immunity," which leans upon the loathsome Patriot Act and says you can't sue the government on illegal spying unless the pilfered information is made public.

Or, you can't sue the government for spying on you, unless it lets everyone know it has been spying on you.

Worse, it serves the double purpose of letting all Bush administration officials off-the-hook on these crucial constitutional questions.

Howard Fineman of "Newsweek" told Keith Olberman of "Countdown" that the Obama administration was engaged in a political calculus pitting its earliest and core supporters against the "intelligence community" in Washington.

Obama is an "outsider," Fineman explained, who needs the support of the intelligence community in waging the war on terror.

Being commander-in-chief is, apparently, not enough to get them to do their jobs.

highwayscribery does not know much about intelligence types since they sit on the other side of a deep cultural, political, and philosophical divide.

And highwayscribery can say it has about as much use for this particular "community" as it has for highwayscribery's civil rights.

That President Obama would expect anything from them by acquiescing to age-old tropisms evident in our political fabric suggests he may be as naive as some right-wingers insist.

The government could lose. The last administration did not fair well even in a federal judiciary system largely appointed by presidents named Bush, so that losing the case would also mean losing face, with Obama having sold-out his principals for no good reason.

As for the "earliest and core supporters," the scribe can claim initial membership and long-time relations in and with that particular army.

And this qualifies him to observe how people who never gave a hoot about politics came out of their ghettoes, border shacks, and coffee shops to rap, sing, write musical anthems, and put their street cred on the line for the president.

They did not prevail in the administration's formula on this issue, and they can hardly be expected to view this kind of expediency as some new politics fashioned by a unique leader for their own benefit.

Losing their energy and belief would be a real tragedy to the Obama narrative.

Of course, it was always going to be difficult conducting a "new" politics. Obama has been a doctrinaire liberal in many of his first steps and this has pleased the doctrinaire liberals among us, although it is new only to the extent such politics have been out of fashion for so long.

To date his politics have been to the left of President Bill Clinton's, but that is a product of the present political climate.

President Obama has been no more willing than Clinton to engage the right wing in a full-throated battle over a nominee or a law that is important to his supporters, always fearful of losing just one Republican Senate vote he rarely possesses in the first place.

Barack Obama seems a very successful politician, but his triumphs are in the old-style politics.

We see it in his financial plans, which not only leave the old order in place, but reward them with our money for the misery they've inflicted upon us.

We see it in the signing statement he made reserving the right to silence government whistleblowers not explicit in the legislation sent to him.

Of course, when he wins as an orthodox liberal we are glad, but the horse-trading and calculation represent a dark side to his old-school tics and the high price we pay for his doctrinaire leftism.

Perhaps this was inevitable, but the President was hired to do a special job on behalf of wronged, but hopeful, people the world over who look to him in a way they have looked to no other U.S. leader.

And this cannot be what they had in mind.

A Letter to the Iranian Ambassador

Stephen Siciliano — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 16:27:17 EDT

March 26, 2009
Los Angeles, California

The Iranian Ambassador to the United States of America
2209 Wisconsin Ave. N.W.
Washington D.C. 20007

Dear Sir,

I’m writing after reading a brief news report on the uncertain fate of the journalist Roxana Saberi in the March 25 edition of the“New York Times.”

The piece reports that your government, after promising to release the woman, now may keep her in custody for months “or even years.”

I’m ignorant of the tenets governing Islamic law, but less so when it comes to the rights of human beings, and especially journalists, confronting the overwhelming power of the state.

I urge you to release Ms. Saberi. Journalism is a crucial function in the Western democracies. It permits a fully informed populace to make educated decisions about their own government and those of others with whom their countries interact in an interdependent world.

I understand that whatever medieval code you’ve decided to run your own country by probably does not extend the same courtesy to information-seekers, but it is incumbent upon me to inform you of your presence amidst other states and other peoples who conduct themselves more openly and fairly.

Who are you, in the end, to curtail the movements and box in the body and spirit of another human being? Is this something Allah desires? I should think not. What your detention of this journalist demonstrates, dear sir, is that you are running a dictatorship fearful that its own citizens, and those beyond your borders, would be repulsed if fully informed as to its actions.

The only government worth preserving is one that lives in truth. Not one that would jail it.

Regards,
the highway scribe

The Most Oppressive Debt- The Banking Scam You Never Hear About

silversunstop — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:57:00 EDT

The Most Oppressive Debt- The Banking Scam You Never Hear About

As a former student organizer and staff of the US Student Association, I always have an eye out for stories about access to higher education, and the affordability crisis. Not only are there few stories, but they usually focus on the impact of rising tuition. The analysis (if there is any) is it is caused by more cut backs in state funding. There's little to no analysis of the declining value of the Pell Grant.

This segment on Democracy Now is astonishing. Like I said, I know more than the average person about student loans, the impact on students, and on access to higher education for communities of color; and I am amazed at the analysis and the evidence here of a student loan racket and wholesale ripoff. You have to watch it for yourself starts 13 minutes in (scroll down for audio or the written transcript).

They show clips of Defualt: The Student Loan Documentary, from the website,

"While the media has focused on the disaster that sub-prime mortgages have turned out to be, only superficial attention has been given to financial giants which have been profiting by approving loans to low-income students with variable interest rates up to 25%."

Another guest, Alan Michael Collinge, author of The Student Loan Scam: the Most Oppressive Debt in US History--and How We Can Fight Back, talks about his personal experience with the student loan industry and reveals how private banks have created a perfect monopoly and racket in student loans that even the mob would envy. His website www.StudentLoanJustice.org is fantastic- it names names.

In addition to extraordinary and arbitrary fees, student loans have been stripped of consumer protections, not just bankruptcy protection, but truth in lending laws. Under the banking protection laws, it is in their financial interest for students to default- you owe them WAY more, AND they still collect. This graph will help illustrate that profit motive.

A Sexy Mondale

Stephen Siciliano — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 02:12:30 EST

Stefan Heym

It started with a Facebook profile picture and an Obama t-shirt.

the highway scribe was in his usual, perpetual search for work and wondering if he should remove the photo with Shepard Fairey's artwork and replace it with one starring a suit and tie.

Ever has it been, the modest cutting of sails, the cautious coiffing of locks, the camouflaging of ideas to from an unforgiving mainstream in which the scribe did not swim.

Then it hit. "Wait! This guy on the t-shirt is the President! highwayscribery supports the President!"

It took some getting used to, which a while ago might have said something about highwayscribery, but now says more about what has passed for presidential timbre lo these many years.

Much the same is happening to the young conservatives profiled by the "Washington Post" in "Right, and Left Out," except in reverse.

It's a heartwarming yarn of Ian Shapira's about young conservatives spurned by the majority of their own generation, their own country, even.

Savor if you will:

"Those 18 to 29, part of the 'millennial generation,' voted overwhelmingly for Obama in the presidential election, according to polling data. Some at this happy hour [in the D.C. bar where this profile went down] won't name their employers in social settings with contemporaries because they fear it will create awkwardness."

Oh you little lambs, the highway scribe feels your pain. Has felt it, in fact, since 1980 when that whole Reagan Revolution went down.

Flush with the fever of youth and altruism, the scribe was left feeling, at the time, like some cigar-chomping, Hawaiian bowling shirt-wearing union guy from the fat '50s.

The very programs that had paid for his schools and provided a warm and secure middling malaise were suddenly being referred to as "sacred cows," ready for slaughter to feed and fuel the go-go '80s.

the scribe's concern for the poor and working stiffs was openly jeered at by his conservative contemporaries. Born into the same comfort so long after it had been built they had forgotten somebody had to build it and pay for it.

"Wimp," "limp-wristed," "weak," "naive," and other characteristics typically associated with the greatest mistake America ever made, Jimmy Carter, were callously applied to the scribe's sways between old lady liberalism and anarcho-syndicalism.

Not that one should change their politics to fit the times. highwayscribery continued to march so that Reagan would get out of Central America, chronicled as a reporter the drastic decline of American labor, and worked for Democrats who lost to nitwits in landslides.

the scribe was a kind of sexy Mondale...and that ain't easy.

The "Post" article notes that the young conservatives "worry they might not have jobs in Washington for long," that the gravy associated with hitching their car to the train in power has dried up.

the scribe understands, but still needs a good pinch now and again to believe this is all happening.

It's political Bizzaro world where bankers are dead meat and people who think in terms of community truly are Sacred Cows; like the kind in India.

President Obama can't do much about the scribe's decrepitude, but Barack has elevated the value of his social and cultural endeavors, which are locked in at around 24 years old anyway.

Sexy Mondale anyone?

Years of railing against power, writerly independence, and a joy at working to obstruct rather than build have highwayscribery aching to jump off the Obama express and get on to more typical endeavors, but the ride just keeps getting better.

Attorney General Eric Holder just announced that the federal government will stop raiding medical marijuana outlets permitted under state laws like the one we have here in California.

See, that's how Bill Clinton started rubbing people the wrong way. He let the raids happen to show how tough he was, but nobody right about now is doubting how tough Obama is.

highwayscribery has always hated the raids happening right up the street from him, here in West Hollywood, for the ugly face of government they present to the locals.

It’s the only face anti-government Republican types can stomach: The Gestapo stomping, sunglass-wearing, mustachioed suburbanites occupying our urban centers, bullying citizens and screwing up the lives of people who need weed to ease their terrible pain...or who just need their weed.

As highwaysribery noted in "A Different Approach to Life" (2006), the raids were always an outlier in those blasted culture wars:

The whole thing smacks of an attack on one class of Americans by another over a difference in approach to life.

There is no sense, on the law enforcement-and-tradition side, that one person should live one way, and a second another way, and that what defines them as Americans is their ability to exist side-by-side on those varying terms.

There is only one good kind of American. And it’s their kind.

But now there’s another kind of good American.

The President said so.

It's a policy attuned to reality where marijuana and the American public is concerned... it is not out there and up where decisions don't have anything to do with facts on the ground.

And it is at least a partial granting of writer Stefan Heym's wish for "a kind society where the human mind and the human heart are the most important elements, not the elbow."

Book Report, "A Man Without a Country" by Kurt Vonnegut

Stephen Siciliano — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:04:11 EST

Had Kurt Vonnegut died last month his literary goodbye, "A Man Without a Country," might have been brighter.

Maybe the sea change in American politics was already affecting Vonnegut when he passed on April 11, 2007, but this book, his last sigh, had been published in 2005.

That means it would have been written the year before, an annus horribilis, marked by the American peoples' unfortunate validation of George W. Bush's presidency.

So Vonnegut, an avowed socialist, was pretty soured on the United States. And that resulted in his swan song being a mixture of a trademark whimsy and heavy doses of dead seriousness.

For the book-loving, Vonnegut unpacked this chestnut:

Do you realize that all great literature -- "Moby Dick," "Huckleberry Finn," "A Farewell to Arms," "The Scarlet Letter," "The Red Badge of Courage," "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," "The Bible," and "The Charge of the Light Brigade," -- are all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? (Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?)

Maybe it's a relief if you've lived well and are on the way out, but if a good stretch of road is still in front of you, not so much.

In "Man Without..." the famed writer riffed often on the oil problem, our national addiction, and the increasingly desperate decisions being made by the country's leaders to placate that addiction.

Evolution can go to hell as far as I'm concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet -- and the only one in the whole Milky Way -- with a century of transportation whoopee.

But, as can be seen from this quote's opening beats, oil addiction is but a symptom. It's the human race that rots.

Why was Vonnegut a man without a country? Here's a decent stretch, long in inches, but short in bandwidth, wherein he lays out his case in the writerly way:

Loaded pistols are good for everyone except inmates in prisons or lunatic asylums.
That's correct.
Millions spent on public health are inflationary.
That's correct.
Billions spent on weapons will bring inflation down.
That's correct.
Dictatorships to the right are much closer to American ideals than dictatorships to the left.
That's correct.
The more hydrogen bomb warheads we have, all set to go off at a moment's notice, the safer humanity is and the better of the world will be that our grandchildren inherit.
That's correct.
Industrial wastes, and especially those that radioactive, hardly ever hurt anybody, so everybody should shut up about them.
That's correct.
Industries should be allowed to do whatever they want to do: Bribe, wreck the environment just a little, fix prices, screw dumb customers, put a stop to competition, and raid the Treasury when they go broke.
That's correct.
That's free enterprise.
And that's correct.
The poor have done something very wrong or they wouldn't be poor, so their children should pay the consequences.
That's correct.
The United States of America cannot be expected to look after its own people.
That's correct.
The free market will do that.
That's correct.
The free market is an automatic system of justice.
That's correct.
I'm kidding.

Which reminds us of how good writers communicate deep concepts with simplicity and economy.

Vonnegut was dead-set against the war in Iraq. His chief grievance was the unprovoked nature of the military action and he drafted a historical parallel with the U.S. invasion of Mexico in the 19th Century.

More than a decade before his Gettysburg Address, back in 1848, when Lincoln was only a Congressman, he was heartbroken and humiliated by our war on Mexico, which had never attacked us. James Polk was the person Representative Lincoln had in mind when he said what he said. Abraham Lincoln said of Polk, his president, his armed forces' commander-in-chief:

Trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory - that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood - that serpent's eyes, that charms to destroy - he plunged into war.

Holy shit! And I thought I was a writer!

We told you there was whimsy melded into book's gloomy view.

One chapter revisits an old Vonnegut favorite about the simplicity of successful story structure, but then goes a step further wherein he demonstrates why "Shakespeare was as poor a storyteller as any Arapaho," whose true virtue was that he told the truth in a world where the truth is in short supply.

A lifetime of literary creation and consumption led our subject to crown poet Carl Sanburg a personal favorite, and Ambrose Bierce's "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," as a "flawless example of American genius like, 'Sophisticated Lady' by Duke Ellington or the Franklin stove."

He warns writers off using semi-colons, "transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing." And then, after using one, remarks, "The point is: Rules only take us so far, even good rules."

"Man Without a Country" plugs Eugene Debs and plies the sad story of Ignaz Semmelweis.

This gentleman convinced his unbelieving fellow doctors that leaving the morgue after doing autopsies to perform surgery on live patients, without washing their hands first, was causing a lot of death.

It is a story of truth spurned and suicide and one of the reasons, along with Vonnegut's presence at the firebombing of Dresden, he lost hope in the human race.

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people, too. I am a veteran of the Second World War and I have to say this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse."

Perhaps it was the responsibility of Vonnegut's editor to loyally assist in the assaying of a downer document. We expect these things from older people. Their pessimism completes the arc of our devolutionary intellectual development.

But we also expect wisdom from a life lived well and fully. So highwayscribery is going to step in and close this report with something that appeared at the beginning of the book and, for that reason, may have been lost to those who closed "A Man Without a Country,' in gloom.

It is advice with which highwayscribery agrees, often propounds to novice writers, and finds worthy of such a fine man and artist:

If you want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created to something.

What Lefties Like

Stephen Siciliano — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 03:54:52 EST

Rep. Vito Marcantonio, "The Goodfather."

The old revolutionary yearning having passed with the Sandinistas, what The Left wants these days is an end to war and taxes on the very rich - the top one percent rich.

Simple as that.

You can talk new politics till the cows come home, but either you're taxing people at the top of the income pyramid or the unwashed down at the bottom.

What can be "new" is the direction in which spending that tax revenue leads a nation, but left/right battles typically come down to who pays.

The unwashed, who started this whole economic cycle somewhere in the middle, have paid for so long now they're closer to the bottom, and so, according to the "New York Times," President Obama plans to slash the deficit all these bailouts, stimuli, and relief efforts are creating by changing the existing calculus.

The articles observes that, "The reduction would come in large part through Iraq troop withdrawals and higher taxes on the wealthy."

Presto! Some $9 billion a month saved and tons of international goodwill earned by ending the bloodiest boondoggle on the national credit card.

Yes, credit card, because the Bush administration never levied a tithe to pay for its violent crusade. It merely passed the price onto those too young to vote or yet unborn.

Which was easy except the bill came due much sooner than expected.

And that may be because of certain "accounting gimmicks" instituted by the Bush crowd that the Obama gang has decided to scotch.

What were those gimmicks?

That's a good question.

The answer: Leaving the costs for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, along with Medicare reimbursements to physicians, out of the formula.

Jackie Calmes' "New York Times" article on this subject does not contain a single dissenting voice to balance the account because there are none.

Not even the Limbaugh/Coulter axis has the chestnuts to claim leaving your largest expenditures off the balance sheet is some article of faith to the conservative shock troops.

But without the gimmicks, their supply side, relieve-the-rich-of-taxes mantra will be harder than ever to peddle.

That's because it was pap, and cant, and crap, and now it's okay for writers to come out from the shadows and talk about taxing the rich as an option to giving them a perpetual free ride.

Michael Thomas of the "New York Observer," puts it in the context of making private capital pay something for the exploitation of public capital.

"What's public capital?"

Another good question and fair indicator of where we've traveled as a country on such questions.

As primer, highwayscribery recommends you read great turn of the (19th) century muckrackers such as John L. Mathews, whose "Mr. Ballinger and the National Grab Bag," describes how the all the waters in water-rich Oregon ended up lining the purses of a few self-interested operators.

It is no longer recognized that this country's natural resources were once considered a public trust, meaning they belonged to the people and the benefits they rendered should necessarily accrue to the people.

Just before leaving office, Bush leased a bunch of wild Utah land to oil and natural gas companies for exploration.

There was a great outcry, but the claims were largely environmental. Opponents expressed anger the leases would despoil the landscape near treasured national parks and taint virgin land.

Nobody questioned the executive branch's right to sell the peoples' land to profit-seekers, when that same executive branch was ideologically opposed to taxing profit-seekers so that the people might see a proper return.

If you follow.

As late as 1935, highwayscribery favorite Rep. Vito Marcantonio spoke in favor of a bill to eliminate public utility holding companies from operating and selling securities to profit from the exploitation of public property.

Here's what he said:

"If it be radicalism to believe that when God said, 'Let there be light,' that that light should be used for the benefit of a few exploiters; if it be radicalism to believe that our national resources should be used for the benefit of all of the American people and not for the purpose of enriching just a few; if it be radicalism to smash, to abolish, and to surgically eradicate these companies which have been throttling the life of America and siphoning out the lifeblood of American consumers, then, ladies and gentlemen of this House, I accept the charge. I plead guilty to the charge; I am a radical."

And so is highwayscribery.

In this Winning of Our Discontent

Stephen Siciliano — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 02:14:36 EST

Why is the winter of our winning becoming the winter of our discontent?

The media narrative has President Obama denied bipartisan support and schooled in the harsh realities of Washington politics, failing his core constituencies and settling for a plan that is not "stimulative" enough (which "spellcheck" agrees is not a word).

"New York Times" columnist Paul Krugman says "Mr. Obama's victory feels more than a bit like defeat."

Except that it's a victory.

Joan Walsh at "Salon" says Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) "humiliated" the President by accepting and then rejecting his offer to head the Department of Commerce.

Except that he'll go back to being one of a minority in the Senate and the President will still be the President with large majorities in both houses.

"The compromise stimulus is probably better than nothing," she writes. "With its expansion of food stamps and unemployment benefits, its tax rebates for low-income workers, aid to states and cities and billions for infrastructure projects."

Sounds good right?

"BUT," Walsh continues, "it won't be as effective as a bigger spending bill would have been, and let's hope Obama doesn't come to regret how much he gave Republicans to get so little."

and later:

"He better have learned that Washington bipartisanship is dead."

It has been dead and not fixing it on the first go-round is hardly a failure. Lacking a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, Obama got the support of three senators who do not occupy red meat conservative seats. And they delivered him a stimulus package.

Glenn Greenwald, also of "Salon," accuses liberal groups of precipitating this non-debacle by, "subordinating their concern about issues to their support for the party and its leading politician."

That leading politician, of course, being the guy we all broke our asses and wallets to get elected: Barack Obama, the man who renovated the Democratic Party and won states south and west long-treasured by rank-and-filers.

"During the 2008 election," he noted, "Obama co-opted huge portions of the Left and its infrastructure so that their allegiance became devoted to him and not to any ideas."

That's because his Ideas where their/our ideas.

Krugman is a brilliant, Nobel Prize laureate in economics, Walsh a darling and charming soldier of progressive forces, and Greenwald a hard-boiled walking left-litmus test who keeps his eye on the issue rather than the personality.

But they are not helping things.

Each, as a loyal member of the anointed commentariat, is allowing the mass media's narrative focus on stimulus to block out their own sun and bum the rest of us out.

Day in day out, the Obama administration is doing what progressives, liberals, leftists, or whatever flag you fly under, had prayed for, but feared never would happen.

Every place in government, in ways big and small, whether it's admitting the Earth is getting warmer, cancelling energy industry fire sales offshore and on treasured Western lands, undoing a conservative Supreme Court's ruling by signing the Lilly Ledbetter Law, forestalling foreclosures, or appointing a pro-union Latina to the Labor Department, we see change we dared not dream of in the darkest days of the Bush era.

But romps in the House of Representatives are tainted by the fact Obama "failed to garner a single vote," from the GOP, when the failure, of course, is their own.

Victories in the Senate are deemed "razor-thin" when 61-37 is something of a trouncing. Or should the scribe remind you of how votes went, say, three years ago under guys with names like Delay, Frist, and Bush?

It's razor-thin because the Republican filibuster is an unchallenged daily blessing to a struggling minority, when it should be subject to national derision.

The way the Senate operates now, all you have to do is inform the leadership of your plan to filibuster and the altered, more difficult, voting math kicks-in.

highwayscribery's suggestion is that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) drop the courtesy and force Republicans to sustain their filibuster for real.

Reid should obligate them to wear catheters so they can pee while reading from newspapers, and do midnight relays to fresh senators making a spectacle of themselves while delaying the nation's business.

(Just a thought).

If the Republicans' desire is that they should glue themselves to one another while walking over a cliff, than liberals should be glad of it.

They are not insulting Obama or the Democrats. Rather they are flipping a middle-finger at the American people, who are suffering and currently of a unified mind regarding the man and party they want running things.

Those senators and representatives of the GOP, in herding together like hunted buffaloes (which they are), will have a hard time separating themselves out should the public render a negative verdict on their obstinate groupthink, which is very likely.

Paul Krugman is much smarter than the highway scribe, who agrees with him and would like to see more money spent on good things for a beleaguered people.

But there are doubts and they are legitimate.

The package is enormous and backed by the questionable force of an already overheated U.S. Mint. As most Americans are now painfully aware, spending with one hand while borrowing with the other usually triggers a law of diminishing returns.

There needs to be a balance and to the extent the opposition party used a scalpel to trim things and orient some of the package toward their own constituents, the system is working the way it was designed to.

The stimulus bill represents the largest nonmilitary expenditure since the Great Depression and deals a telling blow to Republican dreams of burying forever the New Deal and the idea of government activism.

No wonder they are of one mind. What's perplexing, and the reason for this post, is that our joy doesn't match their despair.

The president compromised and got nothing for it.

But he remembers -- where Walsh, Krugman, and Greenwald don't -- that the idea is to look beyond the other party to the people they represent...and govern for the entire country.

We just got through with a guy who governed for one half of the populace simply because he had the votes.

His gang's gone. Obama would like a more enduring coalition like the one that lasted for some 40 years after Franklin Delano Roosevelt assembled it.

You win big by being big, not petty.

This stimulus debate, which has consumed our media's narrow bandwith of attention, at the expense of many other issues, is naught but an opening night performance.

As the day-in-day-out business of legislating the country's future unfolds, a filibuster will not serve at every turn nor will its giddy impact on a dwindling Republican base resonate quite so strongly as in the first round.

Because the reality will set in on both sides of this national debate.

Obama-nation Day 16

Stephen Siciliano — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:11:24 EST

Our Change New World continues apace with the Obama administration moving promptly and correctly on a number of fronts.

The President announced limits on executive pay for companies receiving taxpayer-subsidized bailouts of their self-induced declines.

Such an act under the Bush administration would have been unthinkable.

"This is America," the President said. "We don't disparage wealth. We don't begrudge anybody for achieving success. And we believe that success should be rewarded. But what gets people upset -- and rightfully so -- are executives being rewarded for failure. Especially when those rewards are subsidized by U.S. taxpayers."

highwayscribery, for the record, gets upset at the outsized bonuses and golden parachutes earned by executives even when companies thrive. It is looting what belongs to all the workers and contributes to the dismaying drift of national wealth upward to the richest one percent..

Elsewhere, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar silenced certain environmental critics by dashing the Bush administration's fourth quarter effort at leasing some 77 parcels of land to oil and natural gas companies in Utah.

The "Washington Post" reports that, "Salazar's decision, which reverses the Bush administration's move to allow drilling on about 130,000 acres near pristine areas such as Nine Mile Canyon, Arches National Park and Dinosaur National Monument -- is one of a series of steps that the new administration and congressional Democrats are planning to reshape federal regulation of drilling, mining, lumbering and other resource-tapping activities both on U.S. soil and offshore."

That doesn't have mean an end to energy exploration. It just means the eight-year fire sale Bush threw for his industrial cronies is over and we'll start doing these things, er, um intelligently again.

It was part of a move the Bush crowd made to govern after they were out of government, which has failed remarkably. When you leave, you leave, and whatever you made "law" can be unmade...eventually.

The president, either before or after he capped the pay of greedy executives, then signed a measure appropriating $32.8 billion for the State Children's Health Insurance Program. It's a move that will extend coverage to 4 million kids the former president didn't think the country could afford.

"I refuse to accept that millions of our children fail to reach their full potential because we fail to meet their basic needs," said Obama. "In a decent society, there are certain obligations that are not subject to trade-offs or negotiations, and health care for our children is going to be one of those obligations.."

To which we have nothing to add.

Meantime, Energy Secretary Steven Chu was reversing eight years of government denial on global warming in an interview with the "Capitol Weekly."

"I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen," he soberly informed. "We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California. And I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going either."

Maybe that's some kind of Republican wet dream since their presence and influence in the state is nil. If California dries up, there's going to be a big migration back into all those empty red states.

But that would make them Blue.

And speaking of heat, the "Los Angeles Times" reports how the President is now turning it up on Republicans.

The piece by Peter Nicholas observed that Obama went a long way toward appealing to the GOP and upsetting his own party in crafting a stimulus plan, "that relied heavily on tax cuts rooted in Republican economic doctrine."

For Democrats such capitulation has always been what "bipartisan" truly means, and it seems Republicans have grown so used to it, they forgot to pat the president on the back.

In fact, as Michael Hiltzik, also of the "Los Angeles Times," noted, the GOP has engaged in a deceptive and hypocritical campaign to discredit the stimulus plan by isolating specific measures and distorting their reach and purpose to the American people.

Having extended a hand in cooperation, Obama was met with the familiar fist of GOP obstinacy. And he didn't like it.

The Writer President, in an Op-ed penned for the "Washington Post," had this to say:

"In the past few days, I've heard criticisms of this plan that frankly echo the very same failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis in the first place -- the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems, that we can address this enormous crisis with half steps and piecemeal measures and tinkering around the edges, that we can ignore fundamental challenges, like the high cost of healthcare, and still expect our economy and our country to thrive. I reject these theories and, by the way, so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change."

Now we're getting somewhere!

But there is more to go.

Yesterday, in Los Angeles, the Drug Enforcement Agency applied its usual Gestapo tactics in shutting down some medical marijuana dispensaries.

California, for those of you who don't know, approved by way of ballot initiative the establishment of such outlets 13 years ago.

We hope that, as Attorney General Eric Holder's influence permeates the Department of Justice, this choice made by California voters is respected and the harassment stopped.

California is entitled to some deference while the federal government deserves a more humane face.

Labor's Days

Stephen Siciliano — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 11:38:20 EST

Rep. Vito Marcantonio of the American Labor Party during a dockworker strike in New York.

While political life unfolds in media both mass and minor, real life unfolds in the workplace.

Unfortunately for all of humanity there are two teams in the shop, labor and management.

Yes, they work toward the same goals, but management have keys to both the bathroom and cashbox.

For eight years or more -- sorry Clintonites -- the government has been on the side of management, investment, and capital, all different position-players on the same team.

But these are Labor's days and you can see it in the fact President Obama's favorability has already dropped 19 points to 63 percent, which confirms critics who said the promise of a new politics came from a liberal senator.

And it is hard to argue that after 30 years of conservative reign, a new politics isn't exactly what "liberal" signifies. Remember, everything that is old is new again.

Yes we'd all like Republicans and Democrats, lions and lambs, to one day join hands and sing Peter, Paul and Mary songs, but in the meantime, those of us who labor without the benefit of a loaned limousine could use a little help.

Obama to the rescue.

"I do not view the labor movement as part of the problem," he said while signing three executive orders relating to federal workers last week. "To me, it's part of the solution. You cannot have a strong middle class without a strong labor movement."

And right you are sir. Just look at our country. We have a weak labor movement and we have a disappearing middle class.

These executive orders, of course, will not bring back the middle class. But they will undo some rather atrocious Bush era errors, which the Obama crowd is going to waste half a term addressing.

One requires that federal contractors offer jobs to the people they've been paying all along when a contract changes. Republicans don't like this because they think a company that just got a fat contract from Uncle Sam needs "flexibility."

Obama thinks employees involved need their jobs more and doesn't want to cart money over in wheelbarrows to a government contractor that dumps its workers in turn.

Another order overturned a Bush era requirement that federal contractors inform workers that not all their dues can be used by unions for political purposes, which basically placed intricate bookkeeping burdens on labor syndicates that ought to otherwise be serving their members.

Another Bush order used your tax money to reimburse companies who tried to sway their workers from joining unions.

That can be very expensive. Companies fork over lots of money to "consultants" who have combed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) for ways of blocking workers' government-given right to organize unions.

Now, if they want to intimidate their workers, you won't have to pay what it costs them to do so.

As former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich noted in this "Los Angeles Times" Op-ed, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put a willing worker's chance of forming a union at one in five.

That's not so good.

"Most of the time," noted Reich, "employees who want to form a union are threatened and intimidated by their employers. And all too often, if they don't heed the warnings, they're fired, even though that's illegal."

As Labor Secretary under Clinton, Reich learned that penalizing scofflaws is fruitless because the fines are so small that, "Too many employers consider them a cost of doing business."

That's why unions backed the Democrats and now expect them to pass the Employee Free Choice Act for Obama to sign.

That measure would allow unionization after 50 percent of a workforce signed union cards. It would also increase the fines employers would have to pay for screwing around with the right to organize.

Opponents assert the measure robs workers of the secret ballot process, but that's not necessarily true.

The unions would prefer an open process because it would strengthen their hand by permitting a certain degree of peer pressure, which is how they function.

But the measure configured by the House and Senate does not have to be exactly what the unions want. It could be card check and still be anonymous while doing away with the baroque process that has grown up around NLRA with its expensive campaigns, open ended challenges, and (again) puny penalties charged employers for obstruction.

That's what unions really want, a new scheme that isn't stacked against them.

As anyone who follows this stuff knows, even winning an election under current labor law does not obligate an employer to sit down and talk contract.

Opponents of the "card check" law point to news last week that union membership actually grew in 2008, by 428,000 members, which must naturally mean that labor law drafted in the 1930s and 1950s need not be updated.

Sure, it's good news and suggests many more might now be in unions if furnished with a balanced approach to workplace justice. But it is certainly not enough and tainted by the fact most were government employees who rarely face challenges to organizing efforts.

The facts are these: In 1983, 20 percent of the workforce was organized and today that is down to 12.1 percent. More telling, just 7.6 percent of workers in the private sector are union members.

"Los Angeles Times" writer Steven Greenhouse attributes that precipitous fall to a corresponding "drop in manufacturing jobs as a result of plant closings and pressures from imports."

Leaving aside the fact such impacts might have been softened by government policy in the first place, Greenhouse's conclusion excludes the reality of employer resistance to unionization as the workforce shifted to other sectors.

Which is why Obama chose Rep. Hilda Solis (D-Calif.) to revive the moribund Department of Labor from the deadening influence of Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's (Ky.) wife, Elaine Chao, the last secretary.

And it also why these Republicans:

Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn) - (202) 224-4944
Sen. Richard Burr (N.C.) - (202) 224-3154
Sen. Johnny Isakson (Georgia) (202) 224-3634
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) (202) 224-6665
Sen. Orrin Hatch (Utah) (202) 224-5251
Sen. Pat Roberts (Kan.) (202) 224-4774
Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.) (202) 224--5754
Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) (202) 224-2235

are holding up Solis' confirmation.

They found her to be "noncommittal" at a Jan. 9 Senate Committee on Labor, Health, Education and Pensions confirmation hearing.

Specifically, GOPers didn't think she answered their questions about the "card check" law and so they provided her with written questions to which she could respond.

Here's what Solis said:

"Not all workers, of course, want or feel they need a union. But where a majority of the workers in a given workplace have decided they want a union, it is a matter of basic fairness that they should be allowed to have one. That's why I support the Employee Free Choice Act."

Now that sounds pretty specific so what's the hold up? Maybe the Republicans knew what her answer would be ahead of time and knew they wouldn't like it.

Change New World

Stephen Siciliano — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 02:36:55 EST

It's one thing to vote for change, it's another to wake up in a change new world where the constants of many years no longer apply.

Which is to say highwayscribery is feeling very stimulated.

A front page "New York Times," article says House Democrats were crafting a bill "allowing workers getting unemployment checks to qualify for Medicaid."

And not only that, but their family members would be covered as well.

What the... Hey! that's the highway scribe's family they're talking about covering.

You see, Mrs. Scribe lost her job a week after the market crashed in October and the stores which buy her designs promptly cancelled their orders. And once she was out of the shopping force the economy was bound to tank.

Now we're trying to keep our health insurance alive to the tune of $600 a month on markedly reduced income.

And wait a minute, that's a government measure that applies directly to us! the highway scribe has always been enamored with the idea of government helping him, but other than the Pell Grants of his college days - and not counting roads and stuff - he's never actually been the recipient of government assistance.

During the conservative era, our family just simply got used to the idea that the ones who got help from the government were rich people, because they invest and our role was to writhe in the Internal Revenue Service's maws.

This new reality is very bracing.

A second, front page article from the Gray Lady addresses what the stimulus bill would do for education.

Hey wait. That's a winner for us, too!

You see, presently the scribe's kid goes to a public school which was considered new and state-of-the-art when he was a kid himself back in...never mind.

Meantime, the parent "booster" club is always asking for money and not in small sums, either. Other fees pop up all the time and there are no guards at the entry points to the campus because of funding shortfalls.

It's not your father's America.

"The Times" says the stimulus bill would "shower" the nation's schools with money.

It took all the scribe's willpower to resist having a 9 a.m. martini in genuine celebration. All of it.

And that was before news later in the day that the package had actually passed.

Our lives might really improve.

Jesus, we thought the whole "Change," "Hope," "Yes We Can," thing was just great campaign marketing.

The Republican Party, which always runs a tight caucus, got their goose-stepping orders from Rush Limbaugh, who is on record as hoping the Obama presidency fails, and voted unanimously against the measure.

highwayscribery understands. It is shocking when somebody else not only takes power, but then starts acting on their promises and reordering the living room you'd grown so comfortable in.

Some think the stimulus plan is insufficient. They say a trillion dollar economy can't be fixed with a billions-of-dollars package. They don't think it will create jobs.

Of course it won't. The package is meant mostly as relief for those whom Republican policies have buffeted so harshly all these years.

To quote "The Times," the measure is "a tool for rewriting the social contract with the poor, the uninsured and the unemployed, in ways they have long yearned to do."

And it is about time.

Republicans are the first to tell you that government cannot make commerce succeed. That means the private sector will have to man-up, free market style.

This money is for public projects and affairs, which is the proper provenance of government.

Lest we forget, which it seems we have.

Patience. Even for Americans, spending $800 billion takes some time.

Life does not all happen at a McDonald's drive-thru. There will be other measures required, but we'll have to go a little further down the road as a country to see what they should be.

As the president said, we did not create this mess in a day. And we won't get out of it in a day either.

Obama, Machiavelli, and "Fortuna"

Stephen Siciliano — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 13:52:00 EST

Maybe turning the country around won't be quite so hard for President Obama as many people think.

This Prince has assumed power with Virtu, political skill, and which was considered indispensable to successful governance by the Italian thinker Niccolo Machiavelli.

In his seminal work, "The Prince," Machiavelli wrote; "And because this act of transition from private citizen to prince supposes either ingenuity or Fortune, it appears that either the one or the other of these two things should, in part, mitigate many of the problems; nevertheless, he who has relied upon Fortune less has maintained his position best."

The very decision to run, the ability to communicate, the spit-shine and triumph of his campaign, and the celerity with which he has put together a governing team are each testament to the new president's skill and ingenuity.

But what of his Fortuna, that necessary second element? What of the burdens placed upon his shoulders by the outgoing gang of inept and corrupt leaders? Do they signify that Obama is bereft of this special gift in taking office at such a dire time?

As part of his stimulus package, Obama is promoting a "Make Work Pay" tax credit that would also accrue to workers so poor they are not subject to the government's tithe.

Republicans, who don't like taxes, like the poor even less and don't care much for the provision addressing the concerns of those same poor. Rep. Eric Cantor (D-Virg.), House Republican Whip, told the new President as much when invited to an two-party conference at the White House.

"You're correct, there's a philosophical difference, but I won, so we're going to prevail on that," Obama informed Cantor in a way that made those gathered chuckle.

House Republicans, of course, are in the minority, so Obama was absolutely right in his prognosis.

On the Senate side, things can be a little different. There the Republican caucus is led by Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky whom, in the last Congress, launched the most filibusters in America's history.

But even McConnell can read the handwriting on the wall. He recently responded to conservative critics of any compromise with the popular new White House occupant in the following manner: "Anyone who belittles cooperation resigns him or herself to a state of permanent legislative gridlock and that is simply no longer acceptable to the American people."

Which brings us to the overarching point of this meandering post: Obama did not come to power in a vacuum and his ascendance has nothing to do with any popular passion for "centrism" as the commentariat would have us believe.

Instead, it has to do with the ground having shifted dramatically.

So let's talk climate change?

Nobody needs highwayscribery to explain how the "up" is now "down" when the "New York Times," runs a front-page piece on the virtue of nationalizing the country's banks, which is more than a little shocking.

Bill Kristol, not coincidentally, has penned his last column entitled "Will Obama Saved Liberalism?" which is something of a switch given that, for many years now, he and men of similar ilk had gloated over Liberalism's death.

In recent days, Obama has ordered the closing of Guantanamo Bay, subjected all U.S. forces to the existing Army manual on interrogation, frozen the prior administration's last-minute efforts to befoul the environment, and made it okay for states such as California to require cleaner-burning cars from Detroit.

"And one should bear in mind," wrote Machiavelli, "that there is nothing more difficult to execute, nor more dubious of success, nor more dangerous to administer than to introduce a new system of things: for he who introduces it has all those who profit from the old system as his enemies, and he has only lukewarm allies in all those who might profit from the new system."

But those who profited from the old system are either gone or mightily weakened.

The vaunted Titans of Wall Street are being pulled from their podiums of public popularity or, worse, indicted (with more coming).

The auto industry wanted help and got that help in exchange for vigilance from Democratic lawmakers. So they'd better build clean cars and shut-up if they want to stay in business.

Bankers? They still need money and they need it from that source of all things evil over the past 30 years...Big Government.

The horizon, in other words, is free of institutional obstacles. The president looks out over a vast and empty plain pleading for new farms, factories, and foundries.

In the nation's misfortune has Obama found his Fortuna lest we forget the great lament of the Clinton administration was that the reigning prosperity required so little of the president.

There is no shortage of political chat show commentators observing the perils associated with Obama trying to do everything at once, especially when some of what the new government needs to do, and as the president himself has pointed out, will be painful.

Here too, Machiavelli must needs give Obama the benefit of his doubt.

"Injuries," he wrote, "therefore, should be inflicted all at the same time, for the less they are tasted, the less they offend; and benefits should be distributed a bit at a time in order that they may be savored fully."

And for the old boys in particular... it's dinner time.

Getting Organized

P.G. Rose — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 03:33:01 EST

Judging from the messages I’m seeing it seems we have lots of anxious people that want to be able to start making a difference right away. Don’t expect instant results. You must be patient and persistent. This is a fight for our Freedom!

The first thing to do is realize what we are up against. Our entire Congress and State Legislatures, and Local Governments have allowed abuses to our people by corporate interests while enriching themselves, and they are oblivious to our suffering. Overseas people are watching documentaries about the rampant corruption in Washington. You should educate yourselves about what is really going on.

We can’t expect President Obama to set up the organizing of citizens and deal with Congress and the Economic Crisis at the same time. Nor are we going to win our Freedom from the influences of the Lobbyists overnight. We are going to have a long and hard fight.

For now, we can use the model our ancestors used to help us form more modern citizen committees. We need the ability to get the word out quickly to help people form up demonstrations. We have our cell phones and the internet to keep in a constant wait for instructions from City and State citizen Leaders. We must wait for the National organizers to set up a system but, we can start getting ours together locally.

For now we need to focus on our own communities and set up networks between neighboring Cities. Do we have any appointed Community Leaders right now? We need foot soldiers to get to those who are not yet involved. We need people to be able to get signatures from the homeless and the elderly too.

There is much work to do before we get organized. We will need a secure way of obtaining signatures on petitions that can be verified so we don’t get accused of Republican tricks.

If you are really anxious to start making a difference before we get settled into functioning citizen committees, here is what we can do.

Different groups can start sending letters to members of Congress who are still playing the obstructionist games that led is into this Economic Crisis. Demand Change! Ask them openly, is their prosperity and our suffering what America’s children are dying for and fighting to defend?!!

Each group can get people to send stacks of written letters through the post office and coordinate with other groups to send the form letters or letters they write themselves. (Keep the form letters short and to the point.)

We will be helping the Post Office with our letters folks, so send as many as you can. Maybe if we start flooding the corrupt leaders in Washington and the States with letters, we won’t need to march on Washington. (But don’t count that out.)

Ok my fellow citizens, shall we take our Country back?

P.G. Rose

Gitmo: Going, going...

Stephen Siciliano — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:21:52 EST

"Elections have consequences."

That's what California Sen. Barbara Boxer (D) told her Republican counterpart Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) after wresting the Committee on Environment and Public Works gavel from him in 2006.

The consequences from 2006, when Democrats took control of the Senate and House of Representatives, were borne mostly by former President (sounds good!) George W. Bush who saw the people take his toy (their government) away from him.

But it led to stalemate as Bush vetoed Democratic initiatives and did what he could to push a truncated, but hardly less damaging, agenda through executive orders.

Yesterday, Bush left town and President Barack Obama began his term of governance by freezing those same executive orders.

He also pleased "net roots" lefty outlets and interests like highwayscribery by asking the Guantanamo Bay "war crimes court" to suspend proceedings for 120 days while the new kids on the block get a gander at what's been going on down in that pet project of the prior administration.

"Gitmo" as the camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is called by military types, has always stuck in highwayscribery's craw, given its commitment to democratic processes.

Back in the dark ages of 2005, we did a piece on intellectuals like Nobel Prize recipient Rigoberta Menchu, and language anarchist Noam Chomsky petitioning the United States to close the base, which it has "rented" from Cuba since the end of the Spanish-American War for $2000 a year.

In March of 2006 we presented "Gitmo Girl or Lady Lawyer in Yemen," which amplified the tales garnered by attorney Heather Rogers from her job defending what appeared to be some innocent schlumps rounded up for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and sent to Guantanamo.

Unlike Harold and Kumar, her clients had no luck escaping.

One year later, we provided an accounting of Heather's presentation at a San Diego law school, which was heavy on constitution concerns and no less fascinating then the story of her trip to Yemen as a federal defender.

So the highway scribe is thrilled at Obama's move. Sometimes, a lot of times really, Democrats can disappoint you with their easy swivel from progressive campaign promises to conservative cave-ins once the game clock is on.

Specifically, the suspension applies to four cases involving Sept. 11 conspirators and a Canadian charged with killing an American soldier in Afghanistan.

The military guys melted like butter before Obama's request, which is not surprising given reports few were comfortable with the Kafkavian nightmare the Bush crowd had configured off the Florida coast.

At the same time, the Obama administration (sounds good, too!) circulated a draft plan for closing the dump down and reviewing the cases of 245 people stuck there.

We haven't seen that draft, but one gets the impression President Obama has no problem running their cases and the corresponding evidence through the court system we already use for determining everybody else's innocence or guilt.

There's been a lot of talk about the difficulties facing Obama which he emphasized in his inaugural speech. And while saving a corrupted banking system from its own mistakes may be problematic, returning to the comportment of civilized nations can often be done with the mere stroke of a pen.

So far, so good.

And the opiate of the people is...

March4health4All — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 22:28:03 EST

There is a big difference between rival opinions and bigotry. Sharing a stage with those with opposing views is tolerance, sharing it with bigots is complicity.

I am not gay, but according to Rick Warren, as a secular Jew, I am going to hell anyway. According to Warren so would Obama’s own mother. The tone is gentel, the words are pure hate mongering.One quarter of Evangelicals voted for Obama, Jews, atheist, agnostics, gays and other liberal heretic voted for him in the 90% range. We are all insulted. We already had a president for the Christian Nation, Obama was supposed to be the president of the whole nation; Warren’s voice is insulting, embarrassing, his gentle manner belies the white cloak of his beliefs.

On an even more basic and fundamental point, lets start with the irony of swearing on a bible to protect and defend the Constitution, separation of State and church excepted. Religion, not spirituality, but fundamentalist organize religion playing a staring roll in the inauguration is an abominable distortion of the fundamental principles of the constitution and democracy itself.

The Chicago Factory Sit-In: Final Take

Stephen Siciliano — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 14:35:24 EST

As "victories" go, severance pay and vacation coupled with two months of health insurance (get sick quick!), it isn't much.

Michael Luo and Karen Ann Cullotta of the "New York Times" finished up what Monica Davey started with her coverage of a sit-in at a Chicago window factory conducted by Local 1110 of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of American (UE).

As we noted in "A Resurgence of Things Past," the labor coverage, especially of a factory takeover by an infamous and radical union, is a rarity from our mainstream media and perhaps symbolic of a change in the tenor of the times.

Defrauded by Wall Street's payback for years of fawning coverage, media types seem most fascinated with this new toy of industrial relations the current national troubles have thrust under their noses.

Luo and Cullotta's coverage makes clear that, in the real world, our own goals are usually at odds with those who employ us, because we want more pay for the service we're rendering and they want to hold the remuneration down.

The coverage depicts the ways in which union representation brings a certain degree of clout and specific know-how where waging this venerable battle is concerned.

In the case of Republic Windows and Doors, the company's sly moves toward disinvesting itself of a nearly 50-year old factory and the 250 people who manned it, did not go unnoticed to the untrained eye, according to the piece:

"But a few of the factory's union leaders had been anticipating this moment. Several weeks before, they had noticed equipment disappearing from the plant, and began tracing it to a nearby rail yard."

Luo and Culotta then note that reps from an old industrial gladiator like the UE have specific remedies for just such situations:

"And so in secret, they had been discussing a bold but potentially dangerous plan: occupying the factory if it closed."

And then further application of industrial knowledge expressed by "groove cutter" Melvin Maclin.

"We knew keeping the windows in the warehouse was a bargaining chip."

UE also knew how the workers' peremptory dismissal reduced their options by eliminating any chance to formulate personal survival plans, which played into their hands. To wit:

"I ain't got no other choice," Alexis McCoy, 32, a driver's assistant, said later. "I have a newborn. I have to take care of my family."

Hailed as symbols of something larger afoot in the land, the workers said all they wanted was what they had coming to them under the law: 60 days severance pay and earned vacation time.

So they took over the factory and the negotiations began.

The company's Chief Executive Officer, Richard Gillman, "demanded that any new bank loan to help the employees also cover the lease of several of his cars -- a 2007 BMS 350xi and a 2002 Mercedes S500 are among those registered to company addresses -- as well as eighth weeks of his salary, at $225,000 a year."

To quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me..."

The UE people did not know that the factory's owners had set up a new company and purchased a window and manufacturing plant from Red Oak, Iowa, where it planned to employ 102 nonunion employees.

The news about the cars and the new plant were not common and widely available knowledge, but the result of good investigative reporting.

highwayscribery would like to point out that this kind of thing -- justice, in a name -- happens when two endangered civic institutions, unions and the American newspaper, thrive.

So the whole sit-in/takeover thing resulted in something of sorely needed triumph for organized labor and a updated primer for many beleaguered Americans on the virtue and uses of trade unionism.

The "Times" asked Bob Bruno, director, labor studies, University of Illinois at Chicago, to put it all into perspective:

"If you combine some palpable street anger with organizational resources in a changing political mood, you can begin to see more of these sort of riskier, militant adventures, and they're more likely to succeed."

That remains to be seen.

Mr. Bruno's perspective is a somewhat, shall we say, Ivory Tower one. the highway scribe can say so because he lives and works in the Tower, too.

Here's a crucial paragraph explaining why things went the way they did instead of the way they usually go:

"Local politicians discouraged the police from arresting the workers [the usual] Exasperated company officials decided not to press the matter as the news media began arriving in droves" [the unusual].

the highway scribe thinks the mass media is less likely to hop around from factory sit-in to plant takeover if this sort of thing becomes epidemic.

He would also note that, as we were recently reminded, Chicago politicians are somewhat a breed apart and replication of their response to the sit-in should not be expected elsewhere in the country.

"The Times" never did get into the UE's more radical-than-thou-history and communist pedigree, but maybe that's a good thing. Maybe had they done so the scribe and other laborites would be questioning the relevance of a union's politics from 60 years ago while accusing the reporters of red-baiting an honest-to-goodness effort.

In all, the coverage was certainly welcome and even over-generous to the workers, whom are pictured above, in declaring them "victorious."
For theirs was the kind of victory we treasure in our mediatic culture: victory in the arena of public relations, because of the way we reduce all things to products for consumption whether they be a blender, a book, or a strike.

The strikers' "story" sold better than the malicious management team's and so they gain the trophy.

But true victory would have involved a company commitment to close the new plant it purchased and which we can only assume still represents its near future.

A true victory would have involved Bank of America ponying-up some of the money it had received in the federal bank bailout to relieve existing management's crushing financial problems.

Or better still, it might have financed a new worker-owned (gasp!) and run entity at the same location.

Those workers clearly know what they're doing.

A Resurgence of Things Past

Stephen Siciliano — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 18:38:07 EST

The winds of political fashion are not so whimsical as those that blow the hemlines of the apparel industry up and down, but they are more enduring and significant.

About two months ago, an online personality at the writers community This Is By Us, who goes by the handle of Xigent, took the time to watch a video presentation of "Vedette Does La Danza."

Among other interesting and kind things Xigent had to say about this musical/spoken word collaboration with Omar Torrez, was "Attendance to performances like these will really pick-up considerably during the coming Depression, you'll see."

What seemed a light-hearted quip about our nation's dire economic circumstances turned out to be prescient. Daily plays at the "Vedette Does La Danza" My Space page have jumped considerably of late.

"Vedette," the novel from which all this musical material is drawn, is essentially the tale of young flamenco singer's engagement with anarchists (of the kind pictured) who assume control of the town in which she lives at the Spanish Civil War's outset.

It is full of direct action politics including an attempted takeover of a rich bullfighter's ranch, the declaration of free love in an Andalusian village, collectivist experiments, and atheistic tropes, all of which left the highway scribe sitting, in literary terms, where he sat for years regarding things political...

... way outside.

Back in February we posted "highwayscribery on Super Tuesday" a full-throated endorsement of then-Sen. Barack Obama.

There was nothing novel in this. Since he was old enough to vote the scribe has backed the leftish guy in the Democratic Party primaries (Ted Kennedy '80, Jesse Jackson '84 and '88, Jerry Brown '92) only to suck it up, hold his nose and pull the lever for the likes of Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and yes, Bill Clinton, in the general elections.

Then a weird thing happened. the scribe's first choice won the nomination and then, to his complete and enduring shock, the general election.

Clearly something had changed in the American psyche, which is very closely linked to its wallet. So much so that sales of "Vedette" actually began to pick up. They are not mass sales, but they are much better than zero and unlike anything enjoyed before.

Which brings us to the sit-in by union factory workers in that city du jour, Chicago.

Monica Davey of the "New York Times" reports that some 250 workers at Republic Windows and Doors have begun to stage a sit-in of the type favored by Vedette's comrades, after learning their jobs were being terminated... with three days notice.

There are class rumblings in all this that are related to the ever-growing distance between rich and poor in this country.

For some 30 years now it has been fashionable to declare the antagonism between classes an historical oddity substituted by dreamy soft-sells like the Bush administration's short-lived "ownership society" or the popular "team concept" of industrial relations hatched in Japan and imported to American projects like General Motor's "Saturn."

Not that class warfare is a good thing or its termination undesirable, but the unrelenting greed of international capitalist class did everything it could to fan the dying embers and now we've got the desperate poor resenting the extremely well-heeled across a divide once occupied by the conflict-absorbing middle-class.

The result is events like the Chicago sit-down, which is a plant takeover by any other name, where the workers, according Davey's piece, are not buying claims the decade's-old company is in financial straights, "and they suggested that it would reopen elsewhere with cheaper costs and lower pay."

There's ample precedent for this thinking, of course.

Which brings us back to the President-elect. There has been some hand-wringing of late in progressive circles as Obama casts about for people with experience in the business of government and settles upon a number of Clinton holdovers.

But asked about the plant takeover in his hometown, rather than dredge-up tired bromides about the rule of law and imply police action in private property's defense, here's what Obama said:

"The workers are asking for the benefits and payments they have earned. I think they're absolutely right and understand that what's happening to them is reflective of what's happening across the economy."

As a long-time and professional observer of labor relations in the United States, the scribe can assure you that Obama's position represents change of the most dramatic kind.

How important are his pronouncements?

President Bush made it clear that whatever you have at the top, such as disdain for democratic traditions, you have throughout the government, and ruling cliques the nation over.

And so, picking up on the President-elect's position, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (D) said the state would do no more business with Bank of America until it restores credit to Republic Windows and Doors.

Davey is doing a nice job of covering the sit-in, but she may lack experience covering American labor.

the highways scribe, who does not, can tell you that the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America - "UE" to those in the know - are an old and radical left-wing union thrown out of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1950s for its alleged communist ties.

the scribe covered their convention some 20 years ago, a time of yellow-dog contracts and picket-line retreat everywhere, and was quite taken aback at one UE leader's threat that, "We can and will do economic harm to any employer who thinks the Bill of Rights ceases to apply once one of our members passes through the factory gates."

Later, the delegates at that same convention enjoyed an address from a leader of the International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union , which shared a like pedigree, and whom spoke on "The Meaning of Left-Wing Unionism," fondly recalling the rate of syndical affiliation during the "New Deal."

"It was a thing to behold," he waxed nostalgiac.

The resurfacing of such groups and sentiments are the kinds of things that happen when the powerful lord too much over those who have not, pry away hard-earned things, and back them into corners.

This Is By Us, by the way, is closing February due to lack of advertising revenue.

Paulson's bailout: A different approach

March4health4All — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 02:22:29 EST

Paulson's bailout: A different approach
I suggest this alternative to the bailout: instead of giving a President we do not trust a blank check to use and misuse at will, lets pass H.R. 676, the Universal Health Care, aka Single payer bill, introduced by Representative John Conyers.
Supporting facts:
1.       A large percentage of bankruptcies and foreclosures are caused by medical debts.
2.       Medical bills and insurance premiums consume a disproportionate amount of middle class American incomes.
3.       By eliminating medical expenses for both business and individuals, liquidity would instantly flow back into the consumer market.
4.       The savings incurred by businesses will result in higher wages, and once again infusing liquidity and facilitating good old American consumerism and economic growth.
5.       Foreclosures will be dramatically reduced.
6.       The risk of handing over our money to the same people who got us into this mess and the national state of rage over this would be eliminated.
7.       Universal health care is a moral and economic imperative under any circumstance. Implementing it now would also solve our economic disaster from the bottom up.
8.       Representative John Conyers' bill would be a lot cheaper than Paulsen's parachute.
It is the right thing to do and right now is the only morally and intellectually sound way of resolving the crisis at hand.
Everybody is clamoring that something has to be done now; giving more money to the same people who got us here is beyond absurd - this would achieve the same results economically and it would be a lot better for our health.
It is time to stop rubber-stamping a failed administration and show leadership by thinking outside the box.

Congratulations World

Stephen Siciliano — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 14:46:27 EST

The purpose of this blog has always been to write what the big boys would not write.

It was a task born of media obsequiousness during the deepest darkest days of the Bush administration when no one dared point out the emperor's nakedness.

highwayscribery was a way for one angry leftist scribe to find catharsis while using the leveling and democratic graces of the Internet to disseminate a counter-message.

So with the whole world spewing ink about Barack Obama, we abandon our mission by doing the same.

Forgive us.

highwayscribery's particular stake in the Obama candidacy is obvious and the few regular readers we have accumulated during three-plus years of blogging will come looking for the particular flavor we sell here.

Obama has been a favorite since "Dreams of My Father," was reviewed circa June 2006, wherein we expressed our pleasure at the excellence of the writing and subtle thought that curious book proffers.

We correctly foresaw new American realities that would reveal themselves throughout the election year in "Considering Barack Obama."

We wrote with urgency about the need for the change then-Sen. Obama represented in "highwayscribery on Super Tuesday."

Blogging's promise was fulfilled with "Kristol's Ball," which involved a single-handed, successful campaign to get a crucial "correction," announced in the conservative columnist's "New York Times" piece, applied in other newspapers where it had been syndicated.

In the campaign's most perilous moment, the overblown "Jeremiah Wright controversy," the scribe wrote with passion, desperation even, against the concerted effort to bring down this uncommon man in "Damning Ourselves."

One hundred dollars were given in dribs and drabs thanks to the campaign's unique technology that took any size contribution, through the Internet, especially when the news seemed bleak and the cause needed a bucking-up.

Eyes on the prize of real change, we criticized the Illinois senator's vote to expand domestic spying as a form of counterterrorism, in "Obama: Wrong of FISA," as no change at all.

But in the end, it seemed the country was lucky enough, for once - all cultural considerations aside - to have the smartest guy in the room offering his unique services.

And we think that is what swayed the election.

But the economy, or Iraq, large as they are, seem mundane before the size of our nation's accomplishment.

It is an accomplishment rooted in self-correction. A demonstration to the rest of the world that we agree with them; that we recognize how our country has been a rogue idiot and how they have paid the higher price.

It is an accomplishment as demonstration; demonstration of the ways in which we have changed, matured, and evolved as a nation.

We do not wave the flag often here, but we do so today. There is hardly a country on this planet that has force-fed itself the consideration of ugly issues associated with native racism and come out smelling quite so good as the United States of America.

Yes world, our president is your president, and for once we have synchronized your interests with our own. We have imprinted a new American icon.

Relate to us through him.

Most touching of all is the immeasurable effect upon the black community, which has been, unwillingly at first, a part of the American story for over 400 years.

"Immeasurable" because there was no black citizen, asked following Obama's victory, who did not begin their remarks with, "It's hard to find the words..." "Words escape me..." "It's hard for me to explain what I'm feeling..."

Words, of course, were not necessary where faces glowed, eyes shimmered with tears, and shoulders slumped as if relaxing from a centuries-long struggle.

Finally, and back down on the cold, hard ground, there is the satisfaction of having been right.

Twenty-eight years ago, in a college dorm room at Old Dominion University, this budding scribe watched America make a philosophical decision that had its apotheosis in George W. Bush's unfortunate 2004 reelection.

The ensuing era saw the likes of worthwhile public servants with names like Mondale, Dukakis, Kerry, and two future Nobel Prize winners Gore and Carter, skewered upon the altar of anti-intellectualism and a politics that stopped at the border between the individual and everybody else surrounding.

It was an era in which government pulled out of a handshake first offered to the common man by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

It was an era that redistributed income upward as if it were morally correct. An era which decimated unionization and that crucial element to industrial democracy - the most relevant kind of democracy - collective bargaining.

It was an era that tore the country apart with its support of individual preference for war over talk in every instance, in its elevation of the rural over the urban, in its consecration of base emotion against reasoned logic.

An era that is over.

Congratulations America, congratulations world.

How is a 39% top marginal tax rate socialistic but a 36% rate is not socialistic?

Joe Markowitz — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:38:57 EDT

Obama wants to return the top marginal tax rate to what it was during the Clinton era. McCain wants to keep it at 36% after the Bush tax cuts. McCain supporters are accusing Obama of being a socialist because he said that returning to the 39% top tax rate would help spread the wealth around.

What I am wondering is, at what point does the top tax rate become socialistic? Is 36% still a capitalistic tax rate but as soon as you get to 37% that constitutes socialism? Or are they simply saying that moving the tax rate up just moves us down the slippery slope to socialism?

We need to recognize that any progressive tax system involves some redistribution of wealth. Even a flat tax rate asks rich people to contribute more than poor people simply because their incomes are higher. Only a head tax would avoid wealth redistribution entirely. So Republicans are involved in socialism just as much as Democrats as soon as they admit that they would not abolish the income tax entirely. And since just about everyone seems to be on board with the idea of partially nationalizing our banking system, I guess we are all socialists now.

Admonishment

Stephen Siciliano — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 14:51:26 EDT

Colin Powell does not have a lot of friends left, but last Sunday he spoke to those who remained.

The value to Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) of the former Secretary of State's endorsement has been much debated the past few days.

highwayscribery submits that those debates miss the rather totemic importance of what Powell did.

Endorsements are probably overstated in terms of their impact. Powell's served mostly as another nail in a coffin that will never be quite closed until all the votes are really counted, because the corpse it carries is Republican.

The Secretary's Sunday morning talk show intervention had a value richer than any resulting impact on the electoral ebb and flow.

Mr. Powell's speech was directed at the only people left who believe in him, because they still believe the Iraq war was the right thing to do, and because they still believe that George W. Bush's presidency was an excellent one sabotaged by a revolt of the egg-heads.

Mostly discredited, first by a turn as lackey in the sell-job the administration tried and failed to dump on the United Nations, and second, by his ensuing impotence before the craven drive of Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld, Powell still has a red state constituency.

And what he did on Sunday morning was take that constituency to task for ignorance demonstrated throughout the presidential campaign (and before).

We reach this conclusion by paraphrasing, which is nothing more than saying what somebody has already said...a different way. More interpretation than science it is yours to agree or not.

Powell told his party pals that they were traipsing the borders of stupidity by conflating an association between William Ayers and Barack Obama to some alchemical point where the latter became a terrorist sympathizer (if not one himself).

He reminded them that you are not untrustworthy by virtue of the fact you are an Arab and that those like the lady who stood up at a McCain rally to announce her distrust of Obama because he's "an Arab" are not thinking very inclusively, democratically, or, well, intelligently.

Pretty basic stuff, yes, but losing elections, lust for power, or the refusal to admit errors can make people say some pretty dim things.

Powell reminded the country-firsters that they are not the only Americans by virtue of their Christianity, white skins, or small-town addresses, nor do they top any list of purity because of these traits.

A Muslim who lies in Arlington National Cemetery, he seemed to say, has a greater claim to the title "American" than the jingo-jangle crowd rattling at the tail of McCain's campaign.

He used the language of reason and logic, something to which his last followers appear inured. And Powell used it to highlight the absurdity of a certain Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachmann's (R) remarks about "anti-American" legislators in the United States Congress.

Powell put an end to his own collaboration, by party association, with Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh, and FOX News, and everybody else who thinks there is only one kind of American - the American they understand themselves to be.

It was an admonishment.

It was a cry that enough is enough. That no matter how much they reject Obama's challenge to join in a national healing, the challenge remains, and that real Americans will heed it, not for Obama's benefit, but for their own.

One can only hope they listened.

Letter from a mother in NYC to Obama

VoicesOfObama.com — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 11:29:23 EDT

This letter posted to our Obama board this weekend. I had to share it - it touched us all deeply....

Oct. 15th - New York City

To Barack Obama: I can not express all of the feelings and emotions I feel about this election... but there is so much more. I admire you as a human being more than I have ever admired anyone. You embody everything I could ever hope to be - yet you are REAL... just like me and my husband, just like my mother and father - though you are like us - at our best --- if ever we get there in this life time. God Himself - sent you here for an extrordinary purpose and I know you are to change not only this country but this world. I am moved to tears when you speak ... In these last 8 years I have changed so completely as a person. I have lost all of my vigor, all of my positivity - I was there on 9.11 - 10 days away from giving birth - I watched those 3,000 Americans get murdered - I watch so many of them decided to jump out of the windows of the WTC buildings that were very personal to me as I grew up in Tribeca. I watched those towers crumbled as I held the baby in my belly. And I have watched Mr. Bush do everything BUT push that button. Please know you have restored the idea that there is TRUTH out there in my heart. You have made me believe that there is a future and that there is something to look forward to. I believe you, Barack. I believe politicians may actually really care about this country we call home of the free and I'm thinking if God is near and you become our next President my parents could possibly live to see world peace become a reality. I think you could achieve that. Thank you for being. For your efforts, for your family - for your example - for your bravery - I will be praying until November 4th. I know you can change this world because you have filled me with HOPE!

Two Visions of America

Joe Markowitz — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 01:44:27 EDT

Colin Powell's story on Meet the Press this morning about the grave of a fallen American soldier, who happened to be a Muslim, summed up a vision of an America which practices tolerance, which welcomes people of all ethnic backgrounds, and which tells anyone that they can achieve anything they want in this country. It seems the final straw for Powell in moving him to endorse Obama was the McCain campaign's tactics of sowing suspicion of foreign-sounding names, engaging in guilt by association, and suggesting that only white Christian small-town voters are real Americans. Ask Colin Powell: which campaign is truly pro-American? Which campaign embraces everyone and excludes no one? Which campaign has the chance of uniting us instead of dividing us?

Conservative commentators are already trying to discount the value of the Powell endorsement by attempting to explain it away as one African-American supporting another. While such affinity must count for something--Powell himself said more than six months ago that he was excited to see an African-American running for president, and Condaleeza Rice has said the same thing--it would not have led to an endorsement had John McCain not run the type of campaign that he has. Indeed, trying to explain everything on the basis of racial affinity only reflects the kind of divisive mindset that is leading the McCain campaign to defeat. If your vision of America is narrow-minded, bigoted, xenophobic, and distrustful, then you are bound to judge everyone's actions with that same us vs. them mindset. On the other hand, if your campaign is open, inclusive, and tolerant, then you are going to be able to see the bigger picture. Recent statements by the McCain-Palin ticket reveal that they only have the capacity to play to a narrow subset of Americans. And they can call their supporters the real Americans, or the pro-Americans, or whatever they want, but it is becoming increasingly clear that by alienating everyone else, they are destroying their chance to win the election, or to govern effectively, even if they could win.

Colin Powell may have been torn because he is a Republican and because he has long admired John McCain, but after listening to his vision of the meaning of this country, and how it has been distorted by his party, the choice for him must have been clear-cut.

New VoicesOfObama.com VIDEOS premiere on YouTube!!!

VoicesOfObama.com — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 05:11:31 EDT

VoicesOfObama.com WRITE YOUR LETTER OR POEM to Obama today - let him know how you feel about his campaign, and why he inspires you to BE THE CHANGE!!!

The VoicesOfObama.com video messages to Barack just premiered on YouTube!!!

Here is a link to one of our favorites!!!

VoicesOfObama.com on YouTube!

www.VoicesOfObama.com

It is all over for John McCain

Joe Markowitz — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:19:33 EDT

If John McCain could not improve his standing even after appearing in his favorite Town Hall format, he does not have many realistic chances of winning the election. The electoral map looks absolutely disastrous for him right now. People don't even seem to be listening to John McCain any more. He presented a plan for re-structuring people's mortgages, and nobody even seems to be discussing it. I would almost feel sorry for the guy except that I feel his election would be an unqualified disaster for the country. The first rule of politics is that people vote their pocketbooks, and when the economy is down the way it is, they are going to vote the party in power out of office. Hopefully by landslide margins.

I don't think going negative is going to work. I think the only way the Republicans can win is if something really unexpected happens, or if they manage to steal the election despite the Obama campaign's best efforts. So I think the challenges remaining for the Obama campaign are to get out the vote, keep the enthusiasm level high among Obama supporters, don't take anything for granted, focus on Senate and House races, and watch out for dirty tricks. The media will try to maintain interest in the presidential horse race, and maybe that is a good thing because it will keep us energized, but the election is essentially over.

McKeating: The Creation of Trust and Its Betrayal

Stephen Siciliano — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:39:37 EDT

The Obama campaign has pulled a slickly produced video out from its bag of tricks, which takes us back to the great savings & loan failure of the late 1980s.

It is a simple production that wraps Senate Ethics Committee hearing clips - featuring a younger John McCain - around an interview with William Black.

Black was a regulator with the Federal Home Loan Bank Board from 1984 to 1994; an appointee of Republican President Ronald Reagan.

He does a fairly straightforward job in laying out the process by which over 700 financial institutions failed. The taxpayers, of course, picked up the tab.

Sound familiar?

The central figure was, in the words of Black, a "very nasty and fraudulent man" by the name of Charles Keating.

Keating took exception to a new federal rule prohibiting the direct investment by savings & loans in property, because it limited his ability to play with the money regular citizens had entrusted to his Lincoln Savings & Loan.

Keating was on the hook for "control fraud" - looting his savings & loan - to the tune of over $615 million.

Fraud is defined by Black as, "the creation of trust and its betrayal."

It's not a labyrinthine, complicated story. Keating gave a lot of money to five legislators, including McCain, and then asked them in a private meeting not to enforce the direct investment rule against him.

Black describes the two men as "confidants and mutual political supporters." McCain received $112,000 over a few years from Keating along with paid vacations for his family in the Bahamas.

You could probably fill in the rest, but anyway, the senators at the meeting caved to Keating, the problem spread, and the crisis went nationwide. The government, or you (depending upon your politics), applied a $3.4 billion band-aid.

Said Black: "Sen. McCain knew the facts because we briefed him. He knew this was a criminal enterprise. He knew that what was being done was improper. He knew how much undo pressure his words brought to bear. He was uniquely in a position where he could have protested this. Stopped it. Stopped this loss. But he did nothing."

Now, this is certainly a backward reach for a campaign of "Hope" and "Change." It is certainly the "old" brand of politics Sen. Obama rails against.

But with the unfortunate Sarah Palin (R-Alaska) squeaking about the "unrepentant domestic terrorist" William Ayers in a desperate effort to distract the electorate from its own economic woes, the Obama campaign was not interested in doing the John Kerry noble loser thing.

It's tit-for-tat and it's working. For every dutiful parroting of Palin's charge by the media, which was predictable, there is an equally slavish mention of the Keating Five, which on the whole, is a more severe indictment of McCain's judgment than the Ayers flap is to the Illinois senator's.

That certainly was the conclusion of the Senate Ethics Committee's report. which said, and we quote, McCain had demonstrated "bad judgment."

McCain is saying this was all a long time ago.

Not as long ago as Bill Ayers' turn with The Weathermen.

Volunteer for "Yes You Can" Music Video

Heather from Santa Monica, CA — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 18:48:58 EDT

We are making a music video to Get Out the Vote for Obama and give the people of Los Angeles an opportunity to have their voices heard.

The theme of the music video is that with Individual Voices coming together we can inspire people to overcome fear and take action for a better tomorrow. The music video will feature citizens of LA holding homemade signs saying what HOPE, PEACE or CHANGE means to them.

We have an amazing song that has been produced by a grammy-winning producer and an experienced team of film makers.

We need VOLUNTEERS who would like to participate in this community effort.

Please email us at yesyoucanvideo@yahoo.com if you:

Want to make a sign and appear in the music video
You can coordinate people in your community
You know of a great location in LA for people to gather
You can gather 10 or more people

With the election coming up, we need to move on this fast. So please get back to us by Sunday, Oct 5th at 8pm. YesYouCanVideo@yahoo.com

THANK YOU!

LGBT VP Debate Watch Party

Pam Cooke — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:49:08 EDT

VP Debate
Sen. Obama rocked the first debate showing America why the Democrats have the best candidate to lead our country back to glory. Now it is time to watch Sen. Biden take on McSame's so-called running mate. Come watch Sen. Biden show the Governor what it means to be a Vice Presidential Candidate. Join us at the United Democratic Headquarters of West Hollywood, Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Join Stonewall Democratic Club, Stonewall Young Democrats, West Hollywood Democratic Club and Beverly Hills Democrats for a Debate Watch Party. Where & When

Thursday October 2, 2008 - 6pm

8106 Santa Monica Blvd
West Hollywood, California 90046
310-594-DEMSwehohq@gmail.com

Palin's Perils: A Literary Analysis

Stephen Siciliano — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:21:11 EDT

"Has the country sunk so low that the likes of Sarah Palin would come within a heart's beat of the presidency?"

You've heard this talk in recent weeks, even if you're on the conservative side of the aisle.

the scribe's mother is mortified "this woman" has risen to the undeserved station she has in the blink of an eye.

And to be sure, there has been no shortage of articles in recent days laying out the depth of Palin's Perils, the Republicans' great Palin panic, and other devastating judgments as to Lady Alaska's suitability to govern at the highest level of the nation, indeed, the planet.

Has the talent pool sunk so low, the American public so numbed by political advertisements, the Republic so frayed that only intellectual maladroits of the Bushian ilk can deign to lead us?

If "Democracy," a classic from Henry Adams, is any indication, we're rising to our natural level and being true to our bluest nature in election season.

highwayscribery picked up "Democracy" after George Will mentioned it in a great tete a tete with Stephen Colbert about six weeks ago.

Will's plug was not the first to which the scribe has been exposed, but he was late in getting around to it thanks to a vague confusion regarding the James and Adams clans: the very same Adams(es) that brought you a great HBO miniseries and John Quincy.

But you don't care about that. What you care about is the way in which this depiction of post-Civil War Washington D.C. informs our present-day reality.

So here's the set-up: A prairie statesman, a senator from Illinois by the name of Ratcliffe, is robbed of his rightful place at the top of the party ticket by some convention machinations that elevate an unknown from Indiana in his stead.

Ratcliffe's enemies, Adams writes, "had laid aside their principles and set up for their candidate a plain Indiana farmer, whose political experience was limited to stump-speaking in his native state, and to one term as governor. They had pitched upon him, not because they thought him competent, but because they hoped by doing so to detach Indiana from Ratcliffe's following, and they were so successful that within fifteen minutes Ratcliffe's friends were routed, and the presidency had fallen upon this new political Buddha."

Sound familiar?

Today, of course, conventions are done-deals so that, McCain, upon arriving in Minnesota, was already playing for the general election. He pulled the Palin card in an effort to "detach" Hillary Clinton's female supporters from a surging Obama, while reaping the added benefit of "changing the conversation" and denying this contemporary Illinois senator his moment in the news cycle sun.

The move seems to have garnered short-term benefits at the expense of McCain's long-term chances at the presidency.

But Back to "Democracy."

The Indiana governor, prior to engaging politics, had worked as a stone-cutter in a quarry. And this fact is trumpeted as virtue; a vocation separate and distinct from the lowly crafts practiced in the nation's capital, much in the way Palin's commitment to moose murder was sold as a mark of distinction between herself and your run-of-the-mill vote-chasing lawmaker.

Among the press-ready monikers lavished upon the newcomer were "The Stone-cutter of Wabash," "the Hoosier Quarryman," and "Old Granite."

The other party, and what passed in those days for the "liberal media elite," attacked Old Granite's resume as insufficient to the high-stakes game of national politics, "But these violations of decency and good sense were universally reproved by the virtuous; and it was remarked with satisfaction that the purest and most highly cultivated newspaper editors on his side, without excepting those of Boston itself, agreed with one voice that the Stone-cutter was a noble type of man, perhaps the very noblest that appeared to adorn this country since the incomparable Washington."

That's nineteenth century straight talk for the coded marketing-speak associated with Palin's ability to "connect" with the regular, good, and"hard-working" people of our morally infallible country.

And like Palin, the Hoosier Quarryman was willing to buy the campaign swill put forth on his behalf.

"Owing nothing, as he conceived, to politicians, but sympathizing through every fiber of his unselfish nature with impulses and aspiration of the people, he affirmed it to be his first duty to protect the people from those vultures, as he called them, those wolves in sheep's clothing, those harpies, those hyenas the politicians; epithets which, as generally interpreted, meant Ratcliffe and Ratcliffe's friends."

But what happens next is that the Stone-cutter of Wabash finds himself in over his head.

"No maid-of-all-work in a cheap boardinghouse was ever more harassed. Everyone conspired against him. His enemies gave him no peace. All Washington was laughing at his blunders, and ribald sheets, published on a Sunday, took delight in printing the new Chief Magistrate's sayings and doings, chronicled with outrageous humor, and placed by malicious hands where the President could not see them."

Overwhelmed with public business he turns to...

...Ratcliffe and "breathed more freely than for a past week."

The prairie statesman relieves his burden to an extent that surprises the erstwhile reformer who had come, ostensibly, to shake-up Washington:

"[Ratcliffe] knew everybody and everything. He took most of the President's visitors at once into his own hands and dismissed them with great rapidity. He knew what they wanted; he knew what recommendations were strong and what were weak; who was to be treated with deference and who was to be sent away abruptly; where a blunt refusal was safe, and where a pledge was allowable."

Sound familiar? If not, here's a hint: (Dick Cheney).

In 10 days Ratcliffe has taken control of a government, with the title of Treasury Secretary, that was elected to tame him.

highwayscribery has yet to finish "Democracy" and would not normally issue one of its famed "Book Reports" prior to completing a self-appointed duty. But tonight is the debate between vice presidential candidates and the piece seemed timely.

And while Henry Adams may yet have a surprise in store, the scribe felt the tale told in "Democracy," seemed exceedingly, well, familiar.

It's not easy to get "experience" at leading companies, newspapers, and countries. But as "Democracy" makes clear, the stories of our world and the things we think so new in it, are to be found in the great books, and perusing them is the next best thing to a hands-on schooling.

That's why making a blessing of Dame Palin's intellectual shortcomings represents something of a double-whammy, because she is doubly inexperienced in the ways of the world: first of action, and then of contemplation.

The Barack Obama Comedy Night & Voter Drive IV is this Friday! We need ya there!

BIG MIKE, COMEDIAN — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:03:08 EDT

Thanks for all your support in the past but now I need your help to make our last voter drive the best yet. We have awesome comedy and a musical act as well. Please confirm your R.S.V.P. and try your best to tell your friends top join you for a great show and a great cause. The admission is $15.00 ($10.00 w/ college I.D) and 30% of the proceeds will be donated to the campaign. The amount will be announced when the show ends. You really do not want to miss this! Thanks, Mike Mitchell..Community Organizer!

Thanks for making The Barack Obama Comedy Night & Voter Drive III great. I need your help one last time!

BIG MIKE, COMEDIAN — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:00:00 EDT

Without 'Marc' We'd Have No Barack

Stephen Siciliano — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:57:26 EDT

There is a kind of joyous amnesia to our measuring Sen. Barack Obama's (D-Ill) expansion of the electoral map for his usually hapless party, to the daily, cool dissection of his potential for governance.

Not long ago, only months ago perhaps, such considerations seemed most unlikely.

Still longer ago, 1902 to be exact, a kid was born in New York City who became infected with the idea that African-Americans were entitled to the same rights as everybody else. The odd thing is that the kid was Italian-American.

Vito Marcantonio grew up in the crowded slums of East Harlem and, at the age of 18, stunned a guy named Fiorello LaGuardia with a speech in defense of government protection for the aged.

LaGuardia, “the Little Flower” would eventually become mayor of New York. “Marc” would graduate from NYU Law School and eventually assume LaGuardia’s congressional seat, representing that same East Harlem district, earning his own sobriquet, “the Bread of the Poor.”

Penning a pamphlet for Marcantonio’s 1946 reelection campaign, writer Howard Fast urged voters to, “love him for the enemies he has made. For there is no better assessment of Marc than to catalogue his enemies.”

Chief among them was a Mississippi Republican, Rep. John Rankin, who in 1943 accused Marcantonio of, “harassing the white people of the Southern States,” with his “rump organization,” the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC).

And it was true.

Aiming to root out discrimination in hiring and industrial relations, Marc first introduced FEPC in 1942 and continued to do so, year in, year out.

The FEPC, Marcantonio said on the House floor in 1950, began with the establishment of slavery in America, a struggle evidenced in the Declaration of Independence and the claim that all men were created equal.

It was a claim, he said, that had been “whittled away” by newfound profitability in sugar and cotton, and finally the Dred Scott decision which, “stated that no Negro had any rights that any white man must respect. Today this doctrine is the real basis of white supremacy, utilized again for the exploitation of the Negro people.”

FEPC, he said, “is the emancipation proclamation in the industrial life of the nation.”

Although his constituency was largely Italian and Puerto Rican, Marc’s greatest efforts were in the area of civil rights.

He introduced the first anti-poll tax bill in 1942 and did so every year he served. He proposed legislation barring discrimination against blacks in the military, offered amendments prohibiting race-based discrimination on projects funded with federal monies, and supported Adam Clayton Powell’s legislation calling for desegregation of public facilities in the nation’s capital.

In 1945, he sponsored a resolution directing the Secretary of Commerce to investigate the employment practices of major league baseball and determine whether it was discriminating against African-Americans; paving the way for Jackie Robinson’s ultimate triumph.

“I know a lot of people are annoyed and disgusted that Marcantonio should be repeatedly offering these civil rights amendments,” he said in 1950, “but I am going to keep on offering them as long as I am here and until we win this fight; because I conscientiously believe, and it has been my guiding political philosophy, that no white man is free in America as long as the Negro is subjected to discrimination and Jim Crow and segregation.”

Jazz great Sonny Rollins recalled, “Coming from the neighborhood, there was also a Communist person who was a big hero in our house, Vito Marcantonio. He was a Communist, and he came from that part of Harlem, Italian Harlem. Vito Marcantonio was a very liberal person. See, these lines are blurred, because to be in favor of treating a black person as an equal, some people would say, ‘Oh well, he’s a Communist,’ automatically. This is the thinking that prevailed, as you know, in many parts of the country. Vito Marcantonio was great, and he was from where we went to school, that area.”

Others were rarely so kind. In its Oct. 25, 1948 issue, Time lamented the fact Marcantonio, “the sardonic, sallow little man who has long been the Communists most zealous congressional spokesman,” would likely be re-elected, thanks to the diligence with which he served his constituents: “Sitting in his grimy First Avenue headquarters, assisted by a battery of secretaries, he put in long hours defending everything from eviction cases to felony raps for the Negroes, Italians and Puerto Ricans who make up almost half the district’s voting lists.”

The question of whether Marcantonio was a communist provided much grist for his enemies. It is worth pointing out that he won both Republican and Democratic primaries alike when necessary; and often, both at the same time.

But he was a member and, for a time, leader of the American Labor Party (ALP), which had been formed by New York’s needle trades unions.

Joshua Freeman, author of “Working Class New York,” observed that the ALP was a “key vehicle” of the 1930s “Popular Front” strategy which saw communists helping liberal democratic parties in an effort to stave off creeping Fascism.

Marcantonio traveled with the communists when they were of use to him, left the ALP when they became a burden, and never allowed himself to be red-baited. The charge, he said, “was the red herring to conceal the lack of pork chops.”

In fact, he leaned heavily upon the words of the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson in particular. Where progressives today see “dead white Europeans” in the American revolutionary leaders, he saw democratic radicals fighting the very same forces he was.

Battling the House Committee on Un-American Activities persecution of radicals in 1947, Marcantonio turned his gaze to the Alien and Sedition Acts’ passage. “Jefferson and the followers of Jefferson were subjected to the appellations of Jacobin and Republican. They were...called foreign agents, because they maintained at the time that the future of liberty in the world depended upon collaboration between the Republic of the United States and the New Republic of France.”

He provided the sole House vote in opposition to the war resolution plunging U.S. armed forces into the Korean Conflict. “You only live once,” he said in the debate, “and it is best to live one’s life with one’s conscience rather than to temporize or accept with silence those things one believes to be against the interests of one’s people and one’s nation.”

In that moment, his lonely struggle was symbolic, but his single-handed efforts, applied with the knowledge and skill of a master parliamentarian, could yield real results.

An April 2006 piece by John J. Simon in The Monthly Review, noted that, “Today, with the city’s highest concentration of public housing, due almost entirely to Marcantonio’s legislative skill, the [East Harlem’s] population remains almost entirely Hispanic and people of color.”

In this instance a lone radical did craft a counterculture of public urban development in the very belly of a larger privately-driven economic system.

In the end, it took a coalition of the Liberal, Democratic, and Republican parties in New York to pry him from office. He did not stop or retreat. As a lawyer for civil liberties he represented W.E.B DuBois and other members of the Peace Information Center charged with failing to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. He fought for union leaders and leftists under siege in the red-baiting hysteria of the times.

Planning to run for Congress anew, Marc dropped dead of a heart attack on lower Broadway. The date was Aug. 9, 1954 and he was just fifty-one-years-old. Cardinal Francis Spellman denied him a Catholic funeral, but thousands packed the streets of East Harlem to say goodbye.

In eulogy, Dubois said Marcantonio “believed in America when it would no longer believe in itself.”

His agenda of integration would become the respectable politics of a future era and the legislation of equality he furiously advocated bore fruit, too.

In our own time, when threats from without and within, actual and otherwise, motivate some to limit the ability of Americans to think and speak independently, his words still provide remedy: “In a period as trying as this, the test of democracy lies in the ability of that democracy to maintain its liberties and to have more freedom rather than less freedom.”

Bailout Blues

Stephen Siciliano — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 01:45:21 EDT

It's not every day highwayscribery finds itself cheering Rep. Darrell Issa (D-Calif) on some cable news program.

Issa was telling someone from MSNBC why he didn't vote for yesterday's $700 billion sop to Wall Street.

He was responding to a claim, generally disseminated in the wake of the House of Representatives' stunning vote, that "the government is broken," "the people have given up on their political leadership," and similar dross.

Issa, a fairly right-wing conservative from San Diego, was occupying the same page the highway scribe was with his insistence the public had lost faith in Wall Street, not the government.

The government, by contrast, actually worked - barely - and thanks to the design of our miraculous Founding Fathers.

For the 10 days we watched Democrats, who've spent the past eight years rolling over for the Bush Administration do everything they could to deliver it, and the lamentable Sen. John McCain (D-Ariz), another legislative victory.

The way Democrats will join the administration when its own party has gone AWOL is incomprehensible. And there they were, yet again, sweating pills in an effort at rounding up votes to buttress Bush's plan and buck-up a financial sector that treats them as some Trotskyite legacy.

Folks, it's not socialism when the money goes to the wealthy. It's fascism.

Again, the familiar bipartisan "consensus" seemed to be forming in the usual inexorable way those of us on the outside find inscrutable.

Calls to Congressional offices were running 10-1 against the bailout, but our noble legislators were ready to save the likes of Lehman Bros., while further empowering Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a gentleman who helped concoct this noxious dish.

The markets melted. Credit is going to be hard to get. A lot of guys in wing-tipped shoes will be out of work.

Good.

That's how grown-ups deal with things; excepting the consequences of their actions. And while highwayscribery is no fan of unfettered markets, it certainly favors a correction that is richly deserved by a people that wants cake and to eat it too, a people that approves wars while passing the associated expense onto the young and unborn.

For reasons that aren't worth going into, some Democrats and some Republicans on the fringe of things listened to their constituents and opted to can this thing, or "Punish the country," as Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass).

Indeed many Americans, including the goofs who accepted wacky loans on houses they couldn't afford, the lowly agents who duped them for commissions they knew were not commensurate with the service rendered, and the Wall Strett fancy pants who concocted financial instruments for generating nonexistent wealth...are getting their deserts.

Screw Wall Street. The companies that sink will be replaced by those with a more sober and responsible approach to finance. Let them fail the way the highway scribe would have to fail for mismanaging his finances and his business.

If the country has to suffer short-term, that's better than suffering long-term.

People didn't like this bill because they see the healthy and wealth getting a break their government has been philosophically against giving to them for 28 years now.

Hats off to those representatives who had the courage who saw this thing for what it is and may they hold strong as the economic news gets worse.

Broken politics

Joe Markowitz — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 17:43:09 EDT

If anything illustrates the point that Barack Obama has been trying to make about our broken political system, the spectacle of today's vote in the House of Representatives defeating the bail-out plan does that. When Nancy Pelosi needed to strike a note of conciliation to get more Republican votes for the bill, instead she starts blaming President Bush for the problem, allowing Republicans to see the vote as an anti-Bush measure. That might have helped a few of those running for re-election this year, but probably gave more comfort to those Republicans voting against it. Then instead of taking some responsibility for defeating this bill, the Republicans get up and blame Nancy Pelosi for persuading them to vote against it. Barney Frank did a good job of pointing out what a bunch of cry-babies these Republicans are. But if the point is to pass the bill instead of giving politicians of both parties opportunities to blame one another, then the entire House of Representatives failed to function properly. And the first responsibility for that has to rest with the Democratic leadership of the House. If they wanted to get the bill passed, they could have put enough pressure on the Democratic members to get enough Democratic votes to pass it. But instead they chose to put partisan interests first.

Here we have a piece of legislation that all responsible parties--the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the relevant Congressional committess, BOTH candidates for President, and the current President, have all decided is necessary to avoid a financial melt-down. And everyone recognizes that it needs bi-partisan support in order to get the American people on board. But enough congressman now seem to want to make some kind of ideological point, or use this bill as a tool for scoring political points in the middle of a financial crises, that the bill did not pass.

John McCain made a joke of coming to Washington to save the day last week. But maybe there is an opportunity for Barack Obama to help persuade the American people and their congressmen that enough of them better get together to get something done this week, or else we are all in big trouble. This may be extremely difficult for him to do, since House Republicans certainly don't want Barack Obama to get the credit for getting this bill passed. Moreover, at this point passing the bill may require either making some additional concessions to the Republicans, or making it look more like this is a Democratic bill, or continuing the stand-off until enough additional congressmen from either party feel the heat. The House leadership is supposed to be doing what is necessary to accomplish that. But if they aren't up to the task, Barack Obama has every right at least to criticize both Democrats and Republicans for playing politics with our financial future, instead of working together constructively to get something done.

LGBT Watrch Party in West Holywood

Pam Cooke — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 12:43:22 EDT

Obama vs McCain Round 1 Presidential Election 2008 Debate Number 1
McSame wanted to postpone it so he could have a photo op at the capital, but Barack Obama said no way Sen. McSame we are going to debate and we are going to debate good. Come watch Sen. Obama open a can of change on Sen. McSame and talk some issues at the United Democratic Headquarters of West Hollywood, Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Join Stonewall Democratic Club, Stonewall Young Democrats, West Hollywood Democratic Club and Beverly Hills Democrats for a Debate Watch Party. Where & When

Friday Sept 26, 2008 - 6pm

8106 Santa Monica Blvd
West Hollywood, California 90046
310-594-DEMSwehohq@gmail.com

It's still the economy, stupid.

Joe Markowitz — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:56:39 EDT

The only silver lining of the continued crisis on Wall Street is that it is good news for the Obama campaign. With the focus back on serious issues, instead of silliness, the Obama campaign is in a good position to demonstrate that it has real answers to economic questions, while the McCain campaign seems to be doing a good job of demonstrating its continued cluelessness. The challenge is for Obama to be able to communicate these complicated issues clearly, in a way that resonates for people, while at the same time avoiding over-simplification, and without getting too downbeat. We cannot have six more weeks of people worrying whether or not the sky is falling. What we need is a continued message of hope, coupled with some serious talk about some difficult issues.

Moose Murder

Stephen Siciliano — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:40:43 EDT

The only investigation worth heeding is one conducted by your friends.

That has been the Bush administration's modus operandi for eight years now. Not even a congressional subpoena can bring its wayward and lawless elements to heel.

They literally ignore Congress.

Of course, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) has been tapped by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to end all this stuff. A reformer, she's coming to Washington and when she leaves it will be free of corruption and responsive to the rule of law.

Just as in Alaska where she is under investigation for something to do with her brother-in-law. the scribe doesn't care what, just the mention of "brother-in-law" speaks volumes about her governing capacity and the great stuff she's occupied with up there.

Palin agreed to an investigation back in July, but now that she's on the GOP A-Team, and charged with making a moribund candidate president, there's a whole new air blowing out of her...campaign.

According to the Associated Press, she'll no longer be cooperating with the bipartisan entity set up to sniff her brother-in-law problem out.

Which begs the question: When you "field-dress" a moose, do you flip it on one side before you flop it to the other?

Her husband Todd, who turns out to be quite the unelected official, according to "Salon," will likely challenge a subpoena issued Friday "to compel his cooperation."

Comes news today that Sassy Sarah's allies in the snowy state have filed a lawsuit to stop the investigation, or at least put it off until her run at the vice presidency is completed, which would sort of defeat the point, don't ya think?

Parroting Bush toady U.S. Attorney General Robert Mukasey, the Alaska Attorney General (name irrelevant), a Republican, has said state employees will not honor any summons, issued by investigators, related to "Troopergate."

the highway scribe sees a potential change of faces in Washington under McCain-Palin, but little variation in the way governance is practiced.

highwayscribery thought it wrong for MomsRising, and NARAL, and MoveOn, and all the usual suspects to conduct a Palin pile-on before much was known about her. It is fair and good that important nominees be given a chance to tell their story.

And highwayscribery thinks the liberal, knee-jerk reaction played into Republican hands, and that's because they know their enemy well.

But the scribe has heard and read enough. Yes the liberal folk, Bob Hebert, Frank Rich,Tom Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Eugene Robinson have all weighed in with intelligence and verve.

It has not been pretty for the pretty lady, but in a climate wherein we all act upon are own set of facts, it is more noteworthy that Conservative pundit David Brooks also sounded the alarm.

The "New York Times" columnist does a fine job of detailing the way in which, "destroy the establishment" was born on the political left only to move ever rightward until Sarah Palin became possible.

"Palin is the ultimate small-town renegade rising from the frontier to do battle with the corrupt establishment," he writes. "Her followers take pride in the way she has aroused fear, hatred and panic in the minds of the liberal elite. The feminists declare that she's not a real woman because she doesn't hew to their rigid categories. People who've never been to Wal-Mart think she is parochial because she never summered in Tuscany."

Brooks continues that he'd have more sympathy for governance by "rough and rooted people like Palin," if he hadn't sat through the disaster of the outgoing regime she and Rex Harrison claim they want to change.

Governance, he observes, requires prudence, which he defines as an "ability to grasp the unique pattern of a specific situation. It is the ability to absorb the vast flow of information and still discern the essential current of events - the things that go together and the things that will never go together. It is the ability to engage in complex deliberations and feel which arguments have the most weight."

Palin, Brooks concludes, has many virtues, but prudence is not one of those virtues.

Among those in her possession are Palin's staunch defense of Second Amendment rights, which Republicans feel really turns the worm on American feminists by showing that "real" women are just like "real" men.

"Dissident feminist" Camille Paglia wrote that Palin, "represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day [of the GOP convention] she was combining male and female qualities in ways I have never seen before."

the scribe would contest the point. Women's success in the masculine sphere has often come at the expense of traditional female qualities, which left-feminism has always asserted were byproducts of male domination; behavior rooted in subjugation and submission.

the scribe's not saying what's desirable or not, just noting that modern feminism has gauged success as the achievement of male status and jettisoned a prior and long-standing concept of the feminine.

Liberal feminists pretend to still brandish a few of the "gentler" qualities, those of the Republican stripe, we now know, are pleased to be represented by a moose murderer.

In a charming piece done for the "Los Angeles Times," novelist Paul Theroux notes that, "Moose hunting is now seen as a possible Republican vote getter, especially as the moose hunter in question is a slightly built and bespectacled mother of five."

The author of "Mosquito Coast" and "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star" contrasts the blood-curdling yodels of the Republican campaign under Palin's rising star with passages from Henry David Thoreau's "The Maine Woods."

When he hears cheers of delight at former Tennessee Sen. Thompson's celebration of Palin's ability to field dress a moose, Theroux quotes Thoreau's detailed observation of the same:

"Joe [his Penobscot guide] now proceeded to skin the moose with a pocket knife, while I looked on, and a tragical business it was; to see that still warm and palpitating body pierced with a knife, to see the warm milk stream from the rent udder, and the ghastly naked red carcass appearing from within its seemly robe."

The other great virtue Palin possesses, and which blinds normally keen political observers of conservative ilk, is that she is "pro-life."

Theroux only sees Thoreau and the great web of life which we are part of, rather than stand apart from:

"A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is man. Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he understands it aright will rather preserve life than destroy it."

We are two Americas. Rather than war across a cultural divide, one prefers to nervously await the second's evolution toward kindness and love.

Time to move on

Joe Markowitz — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 02:13:14 EDT

The more I read about Sarah Palin, the more I am starting to think it is a waste of energy to focus attention on her. People are not going to turn against her because the campaign is able to prove that she is inexperienced or that she doesn't know what she is talking about. Millions of voters are instead attracted to her precisely because she is a new face. They already know she is inexperienced but they are rooting for the new kid to succeed. And the more she is attacked, the more her sympathizers will take her side. Any sort of attack will be portrayed as mean and unfair. Even Obama's comment about lipstick on a pig that had nothing whatsoever to do with Sarah Palin was portrayed as an unfair attack on Sarah Palin. So perhaps it is best to just ignore her as much as possible.

Anybody remember Dan Quayle? The man couldn't spell "potato." Lloyd Bentsen absolutely devastated him during the vice presidential debate in 1988, with perhaps the greatest rejoinder of any debate ever ("You're no Jack Kennedy"), but it didn't matter. George Bush the first won anyway, even though very few people had much confidence in his choice for VP.

The election is between Obama and McCain. Obama needs to stick to his themes, and talk about the emptiness of McCain's promises. Sarah Palin is a boon to him in that she makes it harder for McCain to attack Obama as inexperienced. But I'm not sure the campaign gains any ground by pointing out Sarah Palin's obvious weaknesses.

The GOP's Dwindling Base

Stephen Siciliano — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:24:49 EDT

Growing older gets a little better when you've hung around long enough to see a political trend culminate in your team's favor.

If you noticed the white, regional entity the Republican Party has become during its convention, the "bounce" McCain-Palin have enjoyed in weekend-based polls shouldn't upset you much.

David Frum, noted in a recent "New York Times" article, "As America becomes more unequal, it also becomes less Republican. The trends we have dismissed are ending by devouring us."

"The Vanishing Republican Voter," was a tough article for Frum to write. He's basically saying that the disparity of wealth in America is the result of successful GOP policies.

To wit: There is now more inequality within nations, because there's less among them.

"Today," he notes, "the lifestyles of middle-class Chinese increasingly approximate those of middle-class Americans, while the lifestyle of upper and lower Americans increasingly diverge."

With all their flag-waving it was hard to tell the Republicans were working for the Chinese middle-class (unless you were really paying attention) all these years.

Frum takes a strange turn when he generates numbers showing that the wealthiest Americans actually vote Democrat and observes how good that's been for the Bill O'Reillys of the world who portray themselves (and the GOP) to middle class Americans as bulwarks against "liberal elites."

Now incomes are "flat-lining" and the mood of middle-class Americans has "soured," he says.

His pieces depicts the state of affairs in once solid and Republican Fairfax, Virg., which thanks to growth fueled by Republican policies, is now plagued with increasingly urban problems and going Democrat in response.

The analysis inverts the Democratic quandary of the 1980s where decades of New Deal policies had lifted the unionized, manufacturing working class into the solid middle and, in doing so, made them Republicans.

The Democrats, it was argued at the time, had been so successful in improving peoples lives that they'd shrunk their own base.

Reduced to a rump party, prospective candidates were forced to reckon with an influential left wing that could not be ignored but, conversely, alienated the great mainstream of American political thought (such as it is) come general election time.

Frum's article tells us that Republican success in putting space between rich and poor, while shrinking the middle, has left the party with a conservative core out of touch with that same and great mainstream America.

"In short, the trend to inequality is reality, it is large and it is transforming American society and the electoral map," he writes. "Yet the conservative response to this trend verges somewhere between the obsolete and irrelevant."

Thomas Frank sees much the same reality in a Sept. 10 piece by the "Wall Street Journal."

Revisiting Sarah Palin's treacle-laced convention speech about "our hardworking small-town people," he sees naught but cynicism:

"Leave the fantasy land of convention rhetoric and you will find that small-town America, this legendary place of honesty and sincerity and dignity, is not doing very well. If you drive west from Kansas City, Mo., you will find towns whose main street is largely boarded up. You will see closed schools and hospitals. You will hear about depleted groundwater and massive depopulation.

"And eventually you will ask yourself, how did this happen? Did Hollywood do this? Was it those 'reporters and commentators' with their fancy college degrees who wrecked Main Street, U.S.A.?

"No. For decades now we have been electing people like Sarah Palin who claim to love and respect the folksy conservativism of small towns, and yet who have unfailingly enacted laws to aid the small town's market enemies."

He goes on to say Republicans, in some form of power or other for the last 28 years, have never raised "an anti-trust finger" to help the family farmer in his battle with "the big food processors."

The "Wall Street Journal" columnist spoke with the president of the Kansas Farmers Union to give his piece a little spine. The guy gave Obama a 100 percent rating on farm issues.

McCain got a zero.

"If any farmer in the Plains States looks at McCain's voting record on ag issues he would not vote for him," the Farmers Union president said.

Frum, for his part, reasons that the Republican policies at issue led to wage growth of almost 25 percent, "Yet almost all of that money was absorbed by the costs of health insurance, which doubled over the Bush years."

A simple cause to a rather complex problem.

Undeterred, he asserts that Republicans who look at health care as "not our issue" are courting electoral disaster: "Conservatives need to stop denying reality."

Indeed.

Frum's struggle to reconcile Republican "success" with the country's current state of affairs matches the confusion of a McCain candidacy that promises change from a guy who has worked in the Dirksen Senate Office Building for more than two decades.

Frank concludes that McCain, "seems to think that small-town people can be easily played. Just choose a running mate who knows how to skin a moose and all will be forgiven. Drive them off their land, toss their life chances into the grinder of big agriculture and praise their values. The TV eminences will coo in appreciation of your in-touch authenticity and the carnival will move on."

The question is whether or not the American people - that mysterious franchise which brought you eight years of George W. Bush - will follow those TV eminences into another thicket of character assassination and faux issues.

So far, the GOP is crowing loudly, so good.

A Writer in Trouble

Stephen Siciliano — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:18:58 EDT

The highway scribe is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, which maintains a special Writers Emergency Assistance Fund for those who find themselves under economic duress.

We all chip in, usually with a $15 addition to our annual dues, and imperiled freelancers make requests for a few thousand dollars that tide them over until better times.

The Fund blasted a special request a few days ago. It involves the case of Lori Steele.

Lori, to quote from the missive, "is a single mom battling ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) and chronic Lyme disease, who faces the loss of her home to foreclosure within days because she's too sick to work. She has medical bills totaling more than $50,000, which may ultimately reach $120,000. She has a seven-year old son, and prior to the devastating neurological disease that has left her paralyzed and on a breathing machine, wrote over 3,000 published articles. She is 44, and determined to fight this disease with all her strength."

The ASJA is not permitted to give Lori any more than it already has and requests small contributions be sent to her at:

Lori Hall Steele
223 W. 7th Street
Traverse City, MI 49684

CHERISH ALEXANDER IS PERFORMING READY TO BELIEVE FRIDAY SEPT. 12th IN HOLLYWOOD

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Carrying a Palin of Water

Stephen Siciliano — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:59:11 EDT

Sometimes you'd like to see the convention for yourself rather than the "experts" assembled by your favorite media outlet telling you what you just saw.

the highway scribe is entering his 25th season playing for the media team and he's here to tell you those network commentator jobs are the best... if you can get them.

The actual life of the "ink-stained wretch" (true even in the era of computers) is spent contacting protagonists on issues or narratives of note, and taking their accounts for the record.

Al Franken does it in his books to demonstrate how rare the practice of fact- or source-checking has become.

Sometimes, we'll call an academic, or some emeritus on the topic at hand, to lend a little perspective where narratives are dueling, since our own paragraph of "opinion" is sure to be cut by a sneering editor.

Were they to follow this this journalistically respected pattern of coverage, NBC, MSNBC, FOX, CNN and the rest would necessarily aim cameras at speakers occupying the convention dais and party delegates on the floor, and let the action flow mostly without interruption.

Late into the night, after you'd had a chance to savor the actual players' debates and opinions, somebody like a Joe Gergen - who worked in White Houses both Democratic and Republican - might be called upon to provide a little of the aforementioned "perspective."

But we suffer the inverse from those whom "New York Times," columnist Frank Rich calls the "bloviators."

These titans of verbal diarrhea make up a third force that does not mediate goings-on, rather tells us what we will see, what needs to happen, and finally, whether it happened or not.

The great thrill to this campaign season, Rich noted in his Sunday piece, is that the pundits have been getting it wrong since, oh, about January when Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) punctured Sen. Hillary Clinton's (D-N.Y.) "inevitable" march to the Democratic nomination for president.

To watch the Democratic convention last week was to endure the "bloviators" hour-after-hour while real speakers ranted in the background and real delegates met in conference rooms where real business was done.

None of which you saw.

You got speeches for which the table was set in terms of what the speaker "needed" to do in order to placate some journalistically divined demographic (supposedly) crucial to their party's chances in November

Immediately after the speech, you were told by people, "selected" from across the political spectrum, whether these normative, a priori benchmarks had been met or not.

Olberman: "Pat Buchannan, did Hillary do enough to unite the Democratic Party we ourselves divided in search of ratings and as a way of making sense out of something we're not actually covering?"

Buchannan: "Absolutely not Kieth. This party's never going to be united and I found a lack of sincerity in her remarks that viewers might never have picked-up on where it not for my years of expert opinionating cultivated in Georgetown restaurants."

Olberman: "Jim Carville? What's your take?"

Carville: "Oh she absolutely hit it out of the park as I knew she would. This job is so easy it's hard for me to believe they pay me to do it."

Neither can we Jim, which is somewhat the point of this post: You're not a reporter and never were.

Of course, there's a potential chicken-and-egg argument for the hatching here (sorry).

Why should the outlets strive for real news coverage if, when the few actual reporters on the convention floor are patched-in, you get the same talking points answers from the Texas guy as the gal from Maine serves up?

"Oh we're united and nothing has or ever could divide us when you consider the hell-fire and shit-rain to befall us should the other guys get in."

Now it's the Republicans' turn and they're all about a Man who puts "Country First," as if that were an extraordinary trait from a guy who wants to lead the country.

The GOPers have put up a woman for vice president and it is a real riot to hear them cry "sexism," the existence of which they normally deny, because Gov. Sarah Palin (D-Alaska) is being run through the same gauntlet anyone with the chestnuts to stand for national office is subjected to.

You know Republicans are in trouble when they start playing the victim card. That's our bit!

highwayscribery will not discuss the merits of McCain's choice of this particular governess for his running mate since, like everyone else, we know very little about her and have cringed at the way our guardians of truth in the media have handled the Obama introduction.

How can we say we truly know the candidates with all of this posturing and spinning? Even the "No Spin Zone" gives you motion sickness.

It goes on, not only during conventions, but throughout the year on political shows and news hours where, in the name of balance, we get trained spokes-dogs from both sides attacking each other without surrendering a shred of truth.

The reporter in these events serves less as a referee than a circus animal trainer cracking a whip, driving things to a frantic and fevered pitch.

Everybody is fibbing in the hopes the best fib wins when, really, the convention, or the Congress, or the hearing is usually conducted for public consumption, compliments of our Founding Fathers.

How many following events in Minnesota know about local police raids on demonstrators' lairs and the incarceration of "Democracy Now" producer Amy Goodman?

How many know who Amy Goodman is?

Rather than "tell us what it all means," our media stars might encourage us to go out and watch, listen, or learn a thing or two on our own.

Or, barring such civic involvement, they might provide a little more variety across channels instead of devoting every last man, woman, and opinionator to the same discourse (at the same damn time).

Why this imperial privilege over what's information, what's not, and how it should be cooked up for serving?

By now you may have heard the off-screen but on-mic comments of two Republican pundits bemoaning the Palin pick.

A former McCain operative, Mike Murphy, says "it's over," and he doesn't mean with a victory lap.

The other, a very tenacious and brighter-than-the-norm conservative commentator named Peggy Noonan, calls the choice "political bullshit."

Given her immortal utterances, the same qualification might be made of Noonan's column in the "Wall Street Journal" on the same day.

In that column, she declared Palin, "a clear and present danger to the American left, and to the Obama candidacy."

We're all looking for a niche in the great free marketplace of ideas and services. Some people clean toilets, others do pedicures, and Peggy Noonan, as one of the lucky ones, earns a buck making war, not love, with the "American left."

Far be it from her to deviate publicly from this particular task; even if it's what the lady truly believes, because IT'S NOT WHAT SHE'S PAID TO DO.

For those of us on the American left, Noonan's remarks are something of a revelation, because the right wing always seems so goose-steppy in its uniform discipline of message.

Turns out that Republicans talk about their party just the way we talk about "ours," such as it is.

She says, "I think they went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives. Every time Republicans do that, because it's not where they live and it's not what they're good at, they blow it."

Democrats have the same kinds of conversations (although we don't say "excuse me" before swearing among intimates) when "convention organizers" turn what is a decidedly secular party into a perpetual prayer meeting.

It's not where we live, and it's not what we're good at, but Like Noonan, Democrats suck it up and assume that the bloviators are correct; that somewhere out there exists a decisive mass of voting Americans who pray before and after everything they do, even though we've never met them and find the behavior personally off-putting.

With matchmakesr like these, how do we know who we're every really "marrying"?

Rush Limbaugh calls it "carrying water," and is honest about the fact he's the biggest waterboy in Republican circles.

But they exist on both sides and, thanks to Noonan, we're reminded of how refreshing a splashy spill can be.

The Angry Left

Joe Markowitz — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 11:47:52 EDT

I was struck by the line in George Bush's speech last night that John McCain's time in the Hanoi Hilton had prepared him to deal with anything that might come from the "angry left." To equate a large segment of American voters with our one-time enemies in North Vietnam reveals a certain mindset on the right. It is the same mindset that characterized the Nixon White House, where they viewed anyone who opposed their policies as an enemy. It is the same mindset that characterized the Republicans' anti-democratic efforts to win the 2000 election at all costs. It is the same mindset that characterizes the Karl Rove approach to demonizing your political opponents. Maybe I'm naive, but I just don't think most people on the left view their poor deluded fellow citizens on the right as the enemy, and we don't seek to exclude them from the political process.

I think this mindset ties in with the religious fervor of many on the right. If you believe that God supports a particular political position, then you may not be so interested in allowing all voices to participate in the political process. Heretical voices must be ignored or suppressed. Yes, the left wants to win also, and wants its positions on the issues enacted, but I think the left has more faith in democracy, while the right believes its mission has been directed from a higher authority.

What is the point of demonstrating outside the GOP convention?

Joe Markowitz — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 12:06:57 EDT

It's not like you are going to convince any of the delegates of anything. So your audience must be the people watching on TV. But who is going to be sympathetic to the demonstrators' position? I think only those who are already sympathetic. Those on the fence are more likely to side with the police. Let's remember that the riots outside the Democratic convention in 1968 only helped Richard Nixon win the election, even though the police tactics in dealing with the demonstrators were horrific. Most people watching on tv are turned off by disorder, and sympathize with the forces of law and order.

I think a more effective type of demonstration would be to pretend you are a Republican and carry signs that take their positions to a logical extreme, a la Steven Colbert. For example, Shoot all illegal immigrants; or Death penalty for all abortion providers; or Bomb Iran. The news might pick up signs like that, and that would perhaps help advance the cause of showing that Republicans are nut jobs.

The Dangers of Identity Politics

Joe Markowitz — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:05:05 EDT

When we pay too much attention to the superficial characteristics of political candidates, such as gender or skin color, we end up with a Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, and a Sarah Palin as vice-presidential candidate. Sure it is about time we had a female president, but the choice of Sarah Palin shows that it is very dangerous to make the argument that Hillary Clinton sometimes made, that people should vote for her because it is about time we had a female president. Once you make that argument, you are encouraging the Republicans to run a Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin is dangerous not only because she might actually help McCain win, but also because she encourages people to think that issues don't matter, and knowledge doesn't matter. Not to mention that her views on the issues are as right wing as they come. The funny thing is that the Republicans are now falling over themselves arguing that she is knowledgeable and experienced enough to be president, after they have spent months saying that a President of the Harvard Law Review, community organizer, lawyer, constitutional law professor, state legislator and US Senator was not qualifed to be president. So the experience argument is out the window, but now the Republicans will be seeking to make the campaign solely about personalities, and the likeable qualities of their candidates. And who doesn't adore the grandfatherly McCain, beside the cute and fresh young energetic new face?

Note that Barack Obama never suggests that people should vote for him because of his skin color, even though in light of the central issues in American history of 250 years of slavery and 100 years of legalized discrimination against black people, it will be at least as historically significant to elect a black person president as a woman. He has to continue to focus on substance, and hope that people will make a decision based on substance and not superficiality.

Yes We Can, not Yes He Can

Joe Markowitz — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 02:30:47 EDT

Obama's acceptance speech was masterful as always. Every part of it struck important notes, and answered necessary questions. But to my ears the part of the speech that detailed his policy proposals represented an unwelcome shift in emphasis. I heard a little more of "Iwill . . ." and less "We will . . ." than I would have liked. It think this part of the speech was necessary to answer critics who said that Obama has not been specific enough about his policy proposals, or that he has not adequately explained what the change he is talking about will represent. These kinds of policy proposals are always taken with a grain of salt by the voters, however, as they know that politicians always promise more than they deliver, and these lists of policy proposals therefore breed cynicism about the process.

I have always understood the main change that Obama has been talking about is that the government will be less beholden to special interests, and more responsive to the needs of the people, instead of us depending on the president to take care of us. The reason people have gotten excited by the Obama campaign is that it represents the idea that we the people are going to take back our government. I know that many people have never grasped or gotten excited by this idea, including many Hillary Clinton supporters, so perhaps Obama needs to reassure these people that he is going to be a strong and effective leader who is going to handle crises for us, and run the government effectively. I would prefer, however, that he try to persuade these people that what we really need to do is remodel the government so that we the people exercise power.

Near the end of the speech, Obama did return to the central themes of his campaign, reminding his critics that this campaign is not about him, it is about us. It is perhaps necessary that Obama sometimes act like a conventional candidate, making the kinds of promises that politicians always make to get elected. But he must keep returning to this central message of hope and change, even if its supposed vagueness puzzles many voters, because the idea of putting the people back in charge of the government, and changing the way power is exercised in this country is so important, and this is the idea that has drawn many of us out of our cynicism, and drawn many new participants into the political process.

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so proud

Carolyn — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 01:53:57 EDT

i needed to get this out all day,but wasn't quite sure how. then i remembered--here!

i am a 35 year old white woman from the south. my first memory (true story, swear) is of driving through georgia w/ my folks and brothers to visit my grandparents and asking my mom why the people in the parade wewere passing were all wearing white hoods.

i watched today and gathered co-workers to watch as senator obama officially became the nominee. i was weepy but tried not to lose it. unsuccesfuly endeavor? check. watching clyburn and john lewis watch on in an almost dazed amazment as senator obama became the first african american nominated to lead this country. hearing mr. clyburn talk about flashing back to a moment in a jail cell after taking part in a sit down and wondering if it all meant anything, if their efforts would result in anything. then i watched the news coverage and was pretty outraged over the lack of coverage on this seminal moment in US history.

then i realized--wait a second. they aren't devoting time to it because they don't consider it a big deal. imagine that--a black American finally, finally getting to this point, poised to be the leader of our country, and it isn't a big deal. I realized that was probably a bigger and better statement to where we are as a country than anything else.

i've never understood the patriot argument. what does that even mean? but today, i did. today i was proud of my country. today i got that it was a big deal, that just 45 short years from segregation and separate drinking fountains and dogs and hoses and lynchings, Senator Obama is poised to be my country's leader. i am so humbled and honored to be one of his supporters.

i can't wait for tomorrow night. i don't now who will introduce the senator but i know this: gore will deliver a barn burner, the intro will be outstanding, and Senator Obama will make me proud to be an American. I cannot wait!

How Cuba will determine the 2008 Election.

! A LUIS "Cuba!" MORO. . . . . — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 01:37:33 EDT

How Cuba will determine the 2008 Election.

Whether you are pro-Cuba or anti-Cuba, the debate may continue for centuries. One thing is certain. The nearly fifty year old, U.S. Embargo on Cuba has not worked, does not work and will not work. In stating so, we are not acknowledging, supporting or condoning Cuba’s current government.

We are saying it’s time for some of America’s voters, politicians and media to evolve with Cuba, perhaps more than any other issue. It could be said; how politicians act and vote towards the five decade old failed U.S. policies with Cuba is a clear reflection on their character.

We are saying that continuing the anti Cuba embargo policies is a clear reflection of a persons character. Whether running for President of the United States, Senate, Congress or any government leadership position; a person should demonstrated the ability to change course, try new directions and see different points of view. Especially if the policy they supported has failed for fifty years.

The anti-Cuba politicians, lobby and community is a small percentage of all populations, including the Cuban population itself. Yet the anti-Cuba movement has controlled the presidency of the United States and both political houses; including this elections Republican candidate John McCain for nearly fifty years. John McCain is anti-Cuba, while Barack Obama is pro-Cuba.

Why would any politician, business person and human continue enforcing on themselves, and worse others; a failed Cuba policy that the majority of people in America, the world and mostly the island of Cuba itself do not want? See the Election 08 FREE CUBA FILM SERIES and you will find out.

Then it’s up to you to decide when you cast your vote on “Election Moment”, if you are voting for character.

Election moment is the truest moment in any election when you, the voter stand there in the privacy of your own mind right before you vote. Only you will know if you cast a vote for character, and only you can determine the issues that reflect a person’s character. Cuba is one of those clear character issues.

Election 08 FREE CUBA FILM SERIES, is committed to bring the real Cuba to America. We’ve selected three diverse films that provide audiences with a modern day love story set in Havana, Cuba. A film that gives you a glimpse into the future with the childhood version of The Buena Vista Club, and lastly, an impacting documentary that brings to life, the hidden true history of Cuban terrorism, the U.S. Politicians directly related to Fidel Castro who continued to master mind the anti Cuba movement in the U.S. and the political families who continue to enforce their historically failed policies against Cuba on the world through violence, economics and political warfare.

Will you vote for a person who is pro-Cuba and promises to create a powerful future for America uniting the world.

Or will you vote for a person who is anti-Cuba and promises to bend history to make sure America stays the current course isolating the world.

Only you will know on your “Election Moment.”

Luis Moro

www.EveryThingCuba.com

Voters Have Heard Enough About The Presidential Candidates And Religion, Says Americans United

Paul B — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:00:54 EDT

I donate less everytime I see this crap.....

Friday, August 15, 2008

Watchdog Group Criticizes Saturday Forum On Faith At Saddleback Church

Voters have heard quite enough about the religious views of Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama and don’t need another forum on the presidential candidates and faith, says Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Bud decides the election

Joe Markowitz — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:48:51 EDT

I saw Swing Vote last week, where the election is decided by one uneducated and apathetic loser who only cares about where his next beer is coming from, and is barely aware of the issues. Of course the scenario is far-fetched, but the truth is that these are exactly the kind of people who do decide the election. And that is why we get the kinds of political campaigns we get, and we have to endure ads that are so misleading and beside the point.

Barack Obama goes to Europe and scores a home run with the leaders of very important countries, as well as with the people. The Prime Minister of Iraq basically endorses his Iraq plan. The leaders of Israel are impressed. He is a hit in Berlin, Paris, and London. If there were even a hint that he was not up to the job, we would be hearing about it from people who came in contact with him on his trip, but there are basically no dissenting voices. This should be very important to people. We should care about whether America is respected in the rest of the world, and whether we are going to be effective in carrying out our foreign policy goals.

So what does the McCain camp respond with? Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. And people seem to react favorably to McCain's ludicrous message, instead of the substance of the Obama campaign. As if it were a bad thing for European leaders to respect this country. And Obama slips a bit in the polls. Truly if this country elects John McCain, the boobs will have won.

The challenge is to figure out how to attract the Buds of this world to the Obama campaign without sinking to the level of the McCain campaign. I think one way is to focus on Bud's saving grace, his daughter. If you can get people to think about the future, maybe they will realize that the election is about things like universal health care, a fair tax policy, jobs, and a government that cares about the people instead of serving the special interests. It is not about personalities. And to the extent it is about personalities, let's focus a little more on the personality of John McCain, instead of constantly having to respond to the drumbeat of doubts and fears that have been stirred up about Barack Obama.

Travel to Vegas 8-22 to 8-24 and help register voters

DJ — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:58:17 EDT

Even though we may be ahead in the polls in California, we still need to be sure we register new voters and get them all to the polls November 4th.

In addition, we can reach out and help our brothers and sisters in Nevada. The polls say Nevada is close and some of us can travel there to help register voters and canvass.

The Nevada team would appreciate our help. We are coordinating with supporters in Nevada.

It's the Obama Wild West Weekend in Las Vegas!

Join our SoCal posse as we stampede into Clark County and round up all the unregistered voters for Obama!

It's August 22-24. We're organizing caravans and carpools to Las Vegas.
Limited supporter housing is available. Cheap hotel rooms are plentiful. Let's make Nevada Obama country.

Yippee!!!

Interested? Contact Dave Crocker, Out-of-State Travel Coordinator for Obamawood/North CD33, at DJCroc@yahoo.com.

Provide your name, email address and phone number. You'll be notified of all the details of when and where to meet.

(prior to Friday night 8-22-08). The event signup is also located at: http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/gpgkjr

PLEASE, forward this information to any people or groups who can help. Let's get well over 100 people to Vegas.

Thanks.

LET'S WIN THIS ELECTION!

Dave Crocker (DJcroc@yahoo.com)

Barack Evening Buzz - 8-3-08

Barack Daily Buzz - Victory2008.net — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 23:25:50 EDT

Barack Evening Buzz - 8-3-08
On to Victory in November

(1) Obama Makes Bid in Seven Longtime Republican States
Liz Sidoti-Associated Press
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080804/ap_on_el_pr/campaign_new_battlegrounds_4

(2) Obama Urges Full Voting Rights for Florida and Michigan Delegates
Kathleen Gray-Detroit Free Press
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080803/NEWS15/80803025/&imw=Y

(3) Obama Asks Panel to Restore Votes
Katharine Q. Seelye-New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/us/politics/04delegates.html

(4) Democratic Platform Embraces Obama's Change Theme
Thomas J. Sheeran-Associated Press
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jCJokRL-4bIUMbN5goV0WMHUsJJAD92B0ER80

(5) Obama and McCain Vow to Step Up Fight Against HIV & AIDS
Agence France Presse-AFP
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080804/hl_afp/usvotehealthaids_080804024339

(6) Obama is the Star of McCain's Campaign
Craig Gilbert-Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
http://www.kansascity.com/445/story/732402.html

(7) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Backs Dark Horse for Obama Veep-Texas Representative Chet Edwards
Associated Press
http://news.aol.com/elections/article/pelosi-backs-dark-horse-for-obama-veep/33978?icid=100214839x1206978358x1200368818

(8) Dark Horses Emerge in Obama-McCain VP Stakes
Agence France-Presse-AFP
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5ijTahOIzyfhV4w2D8BQtzv3NPNNA

(9) If Obama's a Celebrity, What's McCain?
Carrie Budoff-Politico
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/08/03/politics/politico/main4317810.shtml

(10) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Says No Vote on Offshore Drilling
Susan Page-USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/2008-08-03-offshore_N.htm

(11) Obama's Offshore Conversion Helps But Battles Loom
Russell Blinch-Reuters
http://uk.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idUKN0340213420080803

(12) McCain's Celebrity Ad-Frivolous, A Waste of Money & Time
Kathy Hilton-Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathy-hilton/mccains-celebrity-ad-friv_b_116593.html

(13) Deep Secrecy in the Obama Campaign
Anne E. Kornblut-CBS News
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/08/03/politics/washingtonpost/main4317674.shtml

(14) Rove Protege Unleashing Obama Attack
Geoff Elliott-The Australian-Washington Correspondent
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24122281-26397,00.html

(15) McCain's Attack Strategy Paying Dividends
Steven R. Hurst-Associated Press
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iX2arGasws02Vc4yiVCrGG8AHP0gD92B2N400

Quoted out of context again

Joe Markowitz — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 19:54:10 EDT

For some reason, the media, as well as a lot of people, including many of Obama's own supporters, still do not seem to "get" the central idea of this campaign. Perhaps that is because we are so used to thinking about political campaigns either in terms of issues or personalities. But this campaign is about more than that. The Obama campaign is not just about a laundry list of policy changes that his supporters would like to see implemented. If we view the campaign in that way, we are destined to be disappointed to the extent that Obama does not push every item on that list. (See all the hand-wringing about FISA, etc.) Viewing the candidate as simply a reflection of a liberal agenda also places too much importance on the power of the presidency, and ignores the fact that almost all important policy changes must come from Congress. But more importantly, viewing the campaign as a list of policy prescriptions ignores the most important and the most radical idea of the Obama campaign, which is that it is intended to restore democracy to America, in the sense of remembering how important it is to see if the experiment of government of the people, by the people and for the people w ill continue to endure.

As the candidate tried to say today, this campaign is not really about him. He is only a symbol for the hopes and dreams of millions, who hope and dream most of all that the government will start reflecting the concerns of the people, not the special interests. If we want particular legislative changes to happen, it is really up to us to make them happen. We need to elect Barack Obama because he will lead a movement for change, not because he happens to agree with us on the issues. And the change is really a change from top-down government to bottom-up government. In other words, we are the change. We need to elect Barack Obama because he understands that he is the instrument of our will; he is not some kind of enlightened ruler who is going to make universal health care happen, or reform our tax policies, or whatever other policy changes we would like to see happen. To make those kinds of changes, we are going to have to keep working for them, meaning we need to elect a progressive Congress, we need to let all of our elected leaders see where the people want to take the government, and we need to take action ourselves to put these policy changes into effect.

One of the changes that we should be trying to make is to bring the presidency a little closer to its proper constitutional role. That means we have to make sure not to elevate Barack Obama to such a high pedestal. It is dangerous for the president to have too much power, as we should have learned from the Bush presidency. So that even if we get a president whose ideas are more to our liking, we still need to cut the presidency down to size. I think Barack Obama understands that.

McCain

Carolyn — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 21:08:18 EDT

I posted this on ABC news tonight after their ridiculous stories and McCains attack on Obama and troop visits. Since I'm sure George Stephanapolous will go easy on him on Sundays show and let him get away with it, I wanted to vent it here too:

Two Points: First, this is just a despicable untrue attack--and to use injured soldiers to do it makes it that much worse.

Second, I'm so tired of McCains whining about his media coverage (aren't they his "base"?) Last week, every single network aired an interview with him on the newscast they aired an Obama interview, even though he didn't at all merit making the news. He makes an issue of Obama's travels then whines about it, all while doing an about face and taking Obama's positions. But does the media call him on it? Of course not! They're too busy asking Senator Obama over and over again if he wants to win a campaign more than the war. What's that you say? Those are the RNC's talking points? Color me shocked.

I've gone from admiring a politican that I could never vote for to seeing what his colleagues have seen for years--a meanspirited angry old man with no vision of the future, who wants the power of the presidency just to have it. I hope the Obama campaign quits softpedaling him and starts hitting him on his horrible voting record on veterans issues. Where's the media been on this? And let's remind a country of people losing their homes about Keating 5.

Free Obama Button

Stephen Siciliano — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:07:04 EDT

MoveOn is giving away free Obama buttons. Click here if you like Obama, or buttons, or both.

I'm not canceling my New Yorker subscription

Joe Markowitz — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:22:12 EDT

We can't get upset about cartoons, no matter how they might be misconstrued. To me, it was obvious that the cover of this week's New Yorker merely satirizes the way that the right wing has been trying, subliminally or overtly, to paint Barack Obama. He's a Muslim, he's unpatriotic, he won't salute the flag, he's a socialist, he hates America, etc., etc. So why not bring all that out in the open and hopefully make it look ridiculous? Sure, some people won't get it, and some might even see this cartoon as making these kinds of smears acceptable. But most people are going to get it.

We can't stop satirists from taking unfair jabs at the campaign, or from crystalizing what many people unfairly think. Every campaign, and every political office-holder has to deal with this sort of thing, or brush it off. Bush supporters probably weren't very happy when this same cartoonist portrayed Bush as Cheney's maid, or when he drew Bush and some of his cabinet in the Oval Office up to their necks in water. But they have to live with it. So do we.

Anyway, inside the latest New Yorker, there is a lengthy article about Obama's rise in Chicago politics. The article brings up some criticisms of Obama, but it also shows him to be a smart politician able to play the game in the rough and tumble world of Chicago, and it shows how people identified him early on as a future president.

It is probably good that the Obama campaign tries to portray itself as practicing a new kind of politics and staying above the fray, but you can't stay above the fray all the time. Politics is sometimes a contact sport, and sometimes you have to have sharp elbows and be willing to get your hands a little dirty, in order to win. If you read the article in the New Yorker, you will see that Barack Obama knows this as well as anyone.

GIVE BARACK A BREAK! LET HIM FLIP-FLOP JUST A LITTLE

BIG MIKE, COMEDIAN — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:12:29 EDT

I WATCH ABOUT FOUR HOURS OF NEWS EVERY DAY AND I SEE WAY TOO MUCH FOCUS ON EVERY SMALL ISSUE THAT COMES UP.GUN CONTROL, ABORTION AND EVEN FISA WERE ISSUES WHERE SENATOR OBAMA'S JUDGMENT WAS VERY MODERATE AND IN MY OPINION, SINCERE! HE MUST BE A CANDIDATE OF COMPROMISE NOT OF STEDFAST, BULLHEADED BELIEVES LIKE PRESIDENT BUSH. I KNOW IN MY HEART THAT SENATOR OBAMA IS A GOOD MAN THAT IS DEALING WITH THE LONGEST & TOUGHEST JOB INTERVIEW IN HISTORY...SO GIVE HIM A BREAK, SUPPORT HIM AND HELP HIM BRING THIS WAR TO AN END!

Sold out AGAIN by our LAME CONGRESS AND BARACK!!!

Kalla B — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:13:11 EDT

THE FISA BILL!!!!

I am hugely disappointed in Obama for voting for this appalling piece of legislation that is ANOTHER blow to our civil liberties, an affront to democracy, an insult to the Constitution and EXTREMELY dangerous to EVERY American citizen. Why? Because Obama has been VERY vocal about PROTECTING our civil liberties and upholding the constitution, then with this vote he sold us down the river to appear not to be weak on national security?!?!?!

Where's the CHANGE in that?

Our weakling Congress has been doing that with this administration from the very beginning, including the Democrats! People have been telling me that it's just politics. Well, POLITICS SUCK! Politics just protected the ILLEGAL/UNCONSTITUTIONAL practice of widespread eves dropping by our government on any of and all of us. In fact it just EXPANDED the level at which our government can do it. We just made another giant leap in our steady march towards Fascism in America. Obama is a party to it, and I'm pissed.

I'm not voting for Obama so that he can turn his back on PROTECTING us from legislation such as this, to protect us from egregious power grabs by a presidency turned dictatorship, to protect our freaking civil liberties. I'm supporting him, campaigning for him, and voting for him so he can step up to the plate and DO THE RIGHT THING!!!!

So DO THE RIGHT THING, Barack!

Fight for us!
Fight for our civil liberties!
Fight to uphold the Constitution!
Fight for the average American whose vote you need so badly!

EARN my vote, my respect, my time, my energy!

Don't roll over and play dead when we need you the most! No, your dissenting vote would not have made a difference in this Bill's passage, but it would have lent credence to your claim to be an agent of CHANGE! Hell, even Hillary got it right on this one, whereas McCain didn't even show up to vote.

I will be voting for you Barack, because McCain is not an option, but you'd better step up to the plate and do right by the American people, BY ME, or I will not be campaigning for you, and from the looks of it, I'm not the only one.

Only 12 red states

Joe Markowitz — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:24:50 EDT

While the media is trying to portray the presidential race as very close, the electoral map is showing a different story. According to the most recent polls, there are only twelve solid red states, amounting to only 80 electoral votes. The largest state in John McCain's solid Republican column is Tennessee!

http://www.electoral-vote.com/

Add in the "pink" states and McCain gets only another 112 electoral votes.

Meanwhile Obama starts with a solid 194 electoral votes, and also is now shown as narrowly carrying states like Montana, which the Democrats last carried in 1992, and North Dakota has just moved into the undecided column. States like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana will still decide the election, but Obama has a real chance also to convert some Southern states as well as a few plains states to Democratic territory.

For a Valiant and Principled Opposition

Stephen Siciliano — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 23:56:08 EDT

If the Senate's passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) had gone otherwise thanks to Sen. Barack Obama's (D-Ill) valiant and principled opposition, we would not be moving on quite so quickly as we are now.

Obama would be hunkering down taking on fire from FOX, and everything to the left of it (which is everything), for his softness on terror and latest manifestation as the "National Journal's" MOST LIBERAL SENATOR.

Although just one vote in 97 total, Obama's support of (p)resident Geo.w.bsh's snooping wish list rightly earned him special mention in the "New York Times," account of the tally:

"The issue put Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the presumptive Democratic nominee, in a particularly precarious spot," the piece observed. "After long opposing the idea of immunity for the phone companies in the wiretapping operation, he voted for the plan on Wednesday. His reversal last month angered many of his most ardent supporters, who organized an unsuccessful drive to get him to reverse his position once again. And it came to symbolize what civil liberties saw as a 'capitulation' by Democratic leaders to pressure from the White House in an election year."

Hillary Clinton, whose political antennae are nothing if not wacky, voted against the bill.

Of course, Obama knew he could easily survive criticism on his left flank and gain from it politically.

And sure enough, he was out on the road yesterday, asserting his "progressive" credentials, while painting himself as a post-ideological guy willing to reach out, or occupy the center, on certain issues crucial to the country.

Bully for him, bad for America.

Rather than attacks from the right, what we're getting is a lot explaining from Democrats who should know better. It is easy comprehend. They have a great candidate running against a rather hapless one and nobody wants to rock the boat.

In a wonderful article, "Barack by the Books," Laura Miller of "Salon" says we could have seen this Obama in his choice of literature.

We say "wonderful" article since its subject matter fits well within highwayscribery's tagline of "Politics, Poetry, and Prose," and because it gives the candidate's cynical vote some intellectual underpinning.

That's important for a party of thinking elitists.

"If Obama is elected, he'll be one of the most literary presidents in recent memory," Miller writes, and that takes some of the sting out of his FISA vote, although it won't work forever.

She details the Illinois Democrat's heavy reading during two years at Occidental College in Los Angeles, two more at Columbia University, and, even later as a Chicago community organizer, where he lived in spartan fashion, devouring philosophy and literature.

Those readings included Toni Morrison, Herman Melville, and one of highwayscribery's favorites, E.L. Doctorow, whom the article says was also an Obama favorite until being dethroned by Shakespeare.

A big influence was Chicagoan Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals," which we are not familiar with. Miller spends some time on Alinsky whose rules were all about practicality, an acceptance of the toilet bowl politics can be, and the value of a good compromise.

She notes that groups formed on the Alinsky model, such as ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) "get things done," which is to say they give something up to get something else and sometimes get called on their backsliding or shortsightedness in the process.

"In the 1980s," Miller writes, "when Obama was organizing on Chicago's South Side, the pieties of the '60s-era leftism -- from identity politics to the idea that, provided with the right social environment, people can be rendered peaceful, industrious and altruistic -- had become kind of dogma. Alinsky's ruthless demolishing of these and other utopian illusions would have been even more bracing then than it was when "Rules for Radicals" was first published, at the height of the counterculture's idealism."

Silly counterculture.

Reinhold Niebur's "Moral Man and Immoral Society," is another book Obama likes that highwayscribery hasn't read, but we can boil down Miller's paragraphs on this philosopher to the fact he was leftist, but realist, with a theo-political point of view that empowered Bushian neocons in the lead-up to "Iraq II: The Endless Occupation."

Still another tome popular with Obama is Doris Kearn Goodwin's "Team of Rivals," which depicts Abraham Lincoln as a savvy politician who kept his enemies close, made them part of his political project.

Miller suggests that Honest Abe's approach is akin to the Obama campaign's "primary selling point," and the prism through which his disappointing reversals on FISA, Iraq withdrawal, and gun control can be viewed.

"American conservatives are not fools," she falsely intones, "and while a sympathetic ear and a considered reception of their ideas may turn down the temperature in the debates between left and right, sooner or later they will require something more substantial."

And, of course, there is an election to be won.

The blogger at "This Week with Barack Obama," has this to say about liberal disenchantment with the FISA stance:

"We now have a moment in time to move full force to the White House, down to the local races and get the 'D' in those slots. Sorry, I don't like Obama's stance on FISA, but I will be DAMNED if I am going to sit on my laurels over a bill that most of America not only don't know about but could give a damn about. Should it be this way? No, but I have learned that you can not win this war, but you must pick the battles that you can win. This was not one of them, in my view."

And Miller concludes that, "bipartisanship means that sometimes the other side -- those people you've come to regard as the devil incarnate over the past 30 years -- will get what they want and you won't."

Which is all well, good, and rather predictable.

highwayscribery has this to say:

If the "Yes We Can," speech will amount to more than fodder for a cool music video, if together with our candidate we really can "heal this nation" and "repair this world," then folks need to know that a bill like FISA is the wrong way to go about it.

They need to know that if compromising means giving an administration that would appear, on the merits, to be criminal in its defiance of the laws protecting us, then it is not worth it. That if bipartisanship means losing now and again, it should not have been on this issue.

highwayscribery sees no reciprocity in this compromise. The windfall profit tax on oil companies failed, the war drones on, the administration refuses to respect congressional subpoenas, and the Republican Party has broken the record for filibusters in the Senate.

Being centrist is easy as giving the other guy what he wants and Democrats don't need the White House to continue that practice. They need someone who uses his unique position to move the center and to reassert what's truly precious about our country.

After eight years of having things stuffed down our throats, the same policies are no easier to swallow coming from the new guy because he's for universal health care, is younger, or African-American.

It's still spying and its still right-wing, police-state stuff.

We will vote for and help fund Senator Obama. It's not about that. It's about seeing where the "change" is going to be and it's about divining what he's made of.

It would be change if our guy were open to hearing the opinions of those who helped get him where he is, and change his political calculation on their behalf.

It would be change were Obama to promote progressives rather than count them as a lock and less important than those who "don't care" about a bill that makes spying on them legal, if never correct.

And it would be change if people who support a candidate made demands of him based on policy rather than sitting by with the simplistic goal of beating the other team.

We've watched Republicans, who knew better, sell-off their every principle to ensure w.'s repeated victories over the hated and "un-American" liberals. Getting into the White House to behave with the same slavish passivity would be to buy a pig in poke.

John Powers of the "L.A. Weekly," who followed the Obama campaign throughout the mano-a-mano with Hillary, said in February, "I'd feel a lot better about him if he'd ever cast a courageous vote."

So would we.

Online Activists Keep the Pressure on Obama

Paul B — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:08:46 EDT

By Ari Melber, TheNation.com. Posted July 9, 2008.

He responded. While most Americans settled into a relaxed Independence Day weekend, Barack Obama tried to quiet mounting criticism from supporters over his decision to back a new White House spying bill. In an unprecedented letter released on the afternoon of July 3, Obama addressed the thousands of supporters who organized a large protest on his social networking portal.

Noting that he expected to take his "lumps" and "be held accountable," Obama respectfully defended his surveillance reversal. While maintaining that immunizing companies accused of illegal spying undermines deterrence and "accountability for past abuses," Obama said he now backs legislation granting the right to give immunity (and other executive powers) because it provides a "real mechanism for accountability" via future investigations. The explanation ran 852 words--more than double the length of his original statement announcing support for the spying bill on June 20--and then campaign policy aides continued the discussion for over an hour with visitors on Obama's site (pictured at right). The unusual exchange sparked an intense debate over the weekend, as activists and bloggers questioned whether it heralded a more interactive political era, or a reminder that double talk can spread on any medium.

Art and Politics

Joe Markowitz — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 15:04:36 EDT

Frank Rich's column today points out that a G-rated cartoon called "Wall-E" contains a lot more interesting ideas than either of the political campaigns have produced in the last couple of weeks. I saw the movie last night, and I would have to agree with him. Maybe all this means is that art is usually more profound than politics, or maybe it is a reflection of the disappointment a lot of us are feeling that our candidate sometimes sounds like just another political candidate. I hope that the campaign eventually returns to raising some of the big questions of our time, including some of the big questions that are dealt with so creatively in Wall-E, such as whether our materialistic culture is in fact making our planet uninhabitable, or whether we are turning into a race of fat, helpless, self-absorbed idiots. It's interesting that you can raise those kinds of questions in a cartoon for children, but adults who are competing for the highest office in the country are probably afraid to touch such subjects.

Maybe the best idea would be for the political campaigns to take a summer vacation for about a month, because otherwise they risk increasing voter fatigue with the whole process.

CHECK OUT THIS VIDEO OF THE OBAMA '08 COMEDY NITE & VOTER REG. DRIVE @ THE M BAR!

BIG MIKE, COMEDIAN — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:01:55 EDT

<a href="http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=37576799">Learning some editing software</a><br/><object width="425px" height="360px" ><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/><param name="movie" value="http://mediaservices.myspace.com/services/media/embed.aspx/m=37576799,t=1,mt=video"/><embed src="http://mediaservices.myspace.com/services/media/embed.aspx/m=37576799,t=1,mt=video" width="425" height="360" allowFullScreen="true" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" /></object>

When did candidates get so thin-skinned?

Joe Markowitz — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:59:22 EDT

I read what Wesley Clark said, and it seemed fair to me. How exactly does being a pilot qualify you to become commander in chief? But John McCain is trying to set up ground rules such that it is off limits even to question whether his war hero status has anything to do with the qualifications for president. (Too bad those ground rules weren't in effect when Kerry ran for President!) The more dignified reaction would be for McCain to admit that being shot down and held captive really doesn't amount to much in the way of executive experience. He should be more self-deprecating, as John F. Kennedy was when people cited his war hero experience on PT-109. Kennedy used to say that it was nothing really, the Japanese just sank his boat.

THE VAST RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY..REALLY

BIG MIKE, COMEDIAN — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:40:55 EDT

SINCE I HAVE BEEN ACTIVE IN SPREADING THE WORD AND DOING MY PART TO BRING PEOPLE TO THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN, I HAVE BEEN HARASSED BY ANTI-OBAMA EMAILS. THESE BORED WEIRDOS LIKE TO FEEL IMPORTANT AND DISTORT SENATOR OBAMA'S POSITIONS ON EVERYTHING IN THE BOOK..I CAN TELL YOU NOW THAT I AM TOTALLY DEDICATED TO MAKING BARACK OBAMA THE NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! THE PEOPLE THAT CAN BE SWAYED ARE UNDECIDED VOTERS LIKE MY WIFE WHO HAVE NEVER VOTED IN THEIR LIFE OR FOLKS THAT HAVE NEVER WATCHED HARDBALL WITH CHRIS MATHEWS. PLEASE TELL ANYONE THAT WILL PUT UP WITH YOU THE GREAT QUALITIES OF MR. OBAMA AND THE REASONS WHY HE IS A BETTER CHOICE FOR PRESIDENT THAT SEN. JOHN McCAIN. THANKS, MR. MICHAEL GLEN MITCHELL,JUNIOR.

THE BARACK OBAMA '08 COMEDY NIGHT & VOTER REGISTRATION DRIVE II

BIG MIKE, COMEDIAN — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:47:21 EDT

CNN dignifying smears

Joe Markowitz — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:34:42 EDT

Why would a respectable news organization run a piece on all the anti-Obama websites cropping up on the Internet? First of all, shouldn't they spend just as much time talking about all of the pro-Obama web sites? Second of all, if they are talking about these negative sites, shouldn't they be digging a little more deeply into the level of rumor and innuendo that is so prevalent on these sites, instead of giving them what amounts to a plug?

To me it sounds a bit like a restaurant telling you to eat out of the garbage dump!

THANKS FOR SUPPORTING THE OBAMA '08 COMEDY NIGHT

BIG MIKE, COMEDIAN — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:41:01 EDT

I WANT TO THANK ALL THAT ATTENDED THE SHOW LAST NIGHT.I AM DOING MY BEST TO MAKE THE NEXT SHOW EVEN BETTER,FUNNIER AND MORE OBAMA! ALSO, A SPECIAL THANKS TO OBAMAWOOD FOR ALL OF THEIR HELP!

More on FISA

Stephen Siciliano — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:43:33 EDT

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Ct.), most responsible for delaying tactics that have prevented passage of the FISA "compromise" skewered in the post below, has given a comprehensive and important speech on this miserable measure.

Bonus Barack Evening Buzz - 6-25-08

Barack Daily Buzz - Victory2008.net — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 22:38:38 EDT

Bonus Barack Evening Buzz - 6-25-08
On to Victory in November

(1) Obama Road Map to White House is a Nationwide Tour
Greg Giroux-CQPolitics
http://news.yahoo.com/s/cq/20080626/pl_cq_politics/politics2906096_1

(2) Obama and McCain Reaching Out Aggressively to Latinos
Carla Marinucci-San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/25/MN2R11EUAU.DTL

(3) Many Hurdles for Two Democrats on Path to Unity
Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny-New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/us/politics/26unity.html?ref=politics

(4) Is Obama-Clinton Unity Just a Town in New Hampshire?
Jake Tapper and Avery Miller-ABC News-Vote '08
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/story?id=5248620&page=1

(5) Obama to Announce Foreign Trip Soon Including Iraq
Agence France Presse-AFP
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080625/pl_afp/usvoteobamairaqdiplomacy_080625204436

(6) Obama Says He Wants a VP Who Offers Sound Counsel
Caren Bohan-Reuters
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080626/pl_nm/usa_politics_obama_dc_1

(7) Ability Not Politics is Obama's Factor in VP Choice
Agence France Presse-AFP
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080625/ts_alt_afp/usvoteobamavp_080625220638

(8) Obama-McCain So Far-Positively Negative
Dan Balz-Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/25/AR2008062502847.html

(9) Too Large a Democratic Advantage in New Poll?
Don Frederick-Los Angeles Times-Top of the Ticket
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/06/too-large-of-a.html

(10) Netroots Feel Jilted by Obama's FISA Stand
Carrie Budoff Brown-Politico
http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20080625/pl_politico/11349_2

(11) Obama Says World Not Doing Enough on Zimbabwe
Caren Bohan-Reuters
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080625/pl_nm/obama_zimbabwe_dc_1

(12) Will Obama's Name Help a Republican Senator?
Alexander Mooney-CNNPolitics
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/06/25/gordon.smith/index.html?section=cnn_latest

(13) Other Democrats Could Use Obama Money Too
Emily Cadei-CQPolitics
http://news.yahoo.com/s/cq/20080625/pl_cq_politics/politics2905813_2

(14) 8 Political Watchdog Groups Ask for Greater Disclosure from Obama and McCain
Associated Press
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080625/ap_on_el_pr/candidates_disclosure_1

Obama: Wrong on FISA

Stephen Siciliano — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:56:32 EDT

Maybe it's a question of his being so close he can taste it.

Maybe a recent Bloomberg poll showing Illinois Sen. Barack Obama with a double-digit lead over the hapless Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz), has Team Obama assuming the defensive posture of Team Italia (inside soccer joke).

In any case, and no matter what bland excuses Obama comes up with about "the threats we face," his decision to support the bipartisan "compromise" on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is unacceptable at best and disappointing at worse.

More so is Obama's backsliding on an earlier promise to filibuster any measure providing immunity for the telephone companies that caved before the Bush administration's warrant-less requests to access peoples' private stuff.

highwayscribery called Obama's headquarters yesterday to detail the financial support, numerous blog posts, and insults endured by this otherwise cynical enterprise in the HOPE there would be PROGRESS through him.

The lady who answered was articulate and on top of the issue. She informed that the senator was a constitutional law professor and that, given how the measure had not cleared the Senate, he would be "looking for legislative solutions to some of the problems with the bill," or some other mealy-mouthed hoo-ha.

the scribe responded that Obama was no longer a constitutional law professor nor a legislative plumber, but the STANDARD BEARER OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY and that we (Democrats) don't go in for government spying without warrants; nor are we crazy about spying with the warrants, since the judges in these cases usually golf with the overzealous prosecutors who see a terrorist under the seat of anybody who opposes government policies.

We don't care what Rep. Steny Hoyer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi say, the compromise is a sop to a (p)resident with nothing to do and no political power other than the veto pen.

The American people don't have to take this crap anymore. These guys are done. Bush can't steamroll the Democrats the way he could in 2003 and for Obama to try and play the, "we're just as tough on national security" card by not standing up for a core party principle makes one wonder...

...are civil rights really at the core of the Democratic Party's principles?

As Jeff Greenwald at "Salon" has noted in a series of excellent posts on this sellout, the FISA compromise gives a lame-duck administration everything it wants, while the Democratic leadership runs around claiming some kind of victory, because now there's a law that permits the executive to do what it had been doing illegally over the past few years.

The bill sucks, but don't take highwayscribery's word for it. Read this assessment by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

They list a number of flaws in this boner (H.R. 6304), but we'll highlight two favorites (for lack of a better word):

1. According to the ACLU, the legislation, "trivializes court review by explicitly permitting the government to continue surveillance programs even if the application is denied by the court;"

For those of you who aren't political bloggers, here's a translation: After a court tells the government they can't sift through your cybersurfing destinations, they can go ahead and do it anyway.

2. The bill permits "mass, untargeted surveillance of all communications" coming in and going out of the country "without any finding of wrongdoing."

It's that last phrase that really gets the scribe's goat: "without any finding of wrongdoing."

On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington ruled that a Chinese Muslim guy held in Guantanamo Bay for SIX YEARS without being charged had a right to appeal his detention.

The defendant, Huzaifa Parhat, is of the Uighur Muslim minority who was caught in Afghanistan while fleeing persecution from our biggest business partner and loan shark.

Parhat is still designated an "enemy combatant," although the U.S. military no longer considers him a "significant threat," or the possessor of any valuable intelligence (a department in which they are sorely lacking).

David Cole, constitutional law professor at Georgetown University, said, "And here is somebody that the military has been holding onto for six years and the federal court now says he shouldn't have been held in the first place. Absent this independent judicial review, he might have been sitting in there for another 10 to 15 years."

Maybe the constitutional law professor from University of Chicago needs to have a chat with the constitutional law professor from Georgetown, because fighting terrorists is all well and good, as long as you know they're terrorists and not using the label to silence people you don't care for.

Barack Obama didn't become presumptive Democratic nominee by being a poor politician and he's not about to start being one now.

That's a tired old Democratic trick.

The girl manning the campaign's phones pointed out that "the senator is still opposed to the immunity for telecom companies contained in the bill."

But as the blogger at "Balkinization" noted, a President Obama (tasting it!) won't mind having all those sweeping powers.

On the other hand, he could give a hoot about the telecom company part, which is getting all the play and drives his base crazy, because of their weariness with the corporation's privileged position in American life.

So he's against it without breaking a sweat.

We're still crazy about Barack Obama at highwayscribery. We don't expect the senator as president to forward our anarcho-syndicalist views in sweeping legislation, but we'd like to advance them without being snooped on and labeled terrorists.

We don't expect to always agree with him, because we're ready for a president who governs for both halves of the country and unites us.

But like MoveOn.org, which has supported him wholeheartedly, we expect the change he is promising us, and now is as good a time as any to signal the reigning-in of an overzealous security state that treats dissent as a crime.

MORE CRAZY PREACHERS..REV. DOBSON

BIG MIKE, COMEDIAN — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:57:07 EDT

I SAW THE VIDEO THAT UPSET MR.DOBSON SO MUCH AND I THINK HE IS NUTS. TO GO AND FIND A TWO YEAR OLD TAPE OF A GREAT SPEECH BY SENATOR OBAMA AND CRITICIZE IT JUST TO SCORE COOL POINTS FOR JOHN McCAIN IS SAD AND SILLY! THE SMEARS ARE GOING TO KEEP COMING AND WE MUST BE DILIGENT IN OUR COMMITTMENT TO SENATOR BARACK OBAMA! HE IS AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN THE BEST CHOICE FOR PRESIDENT!

If you'll indulge me!

Carolyn — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 22:20:41 EDT

I'd like to suggest a couple of great articles in this months Texas Monthly magazine, both of which can be found at texasmonthly.com

The first is an article by Bill Broyles called "Mission Impossible". Bill is a family friend, and his article is the single best argument for bringing the troops home I've ever seen. It will get you seriously fired up! He gave a portion of it as a speech at the Wyoming Dem Convention a few weeks ago and it received an enormous response.

The second is an article called "Soldier" by Matt Cook. Yep, that's right, full disclosure necessary. Matt is my little bro, the one I've mentioned was stop-lossed and sent back to Iraq. The one who is no longer a republican but a huge supporter of Senator Obama. And while you're there, take a gander at his video--he and his friends have made a documentary called "Swim" that chronicles their attempts to raise money for injured vets. (The website for the film can be found at hazardpayproductions.com).

That's all I've got--have a great weekend!

Public Financing...SO WHAT

BIG MIKE, COMEDIAN — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:59:50 EDT

BARACK "FLIP-FLOPPED"..SO WHAT! IF HE WOULD HAVE TOOK THE 84.1 MILLION THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN FOOLISH. THE RNC HAS RAISED 30 MILLION ALREADY AND JOHN McCAIN IS HAVING PRIVATE FUNDRAIERS AND FLYING AROUND IN HIS RICH WIFE'S PLANE! GIVE ME A BREAK. HE IS BENDING THE RULES AT EVERY TURN AND THE REPUBLICANS WILL USE AND HAVE USED EVERY DIRTY TRICK IN THE BOOK,INCLUDING ATTACKING MICHELLE OBAMA! BARACK NEEDS EVERY DOLLAR HE CAN GET TO FIGHT THE REPUBLICAN MACHINE AND THE RACIST OUT THERE THAT ARE SCARED TO DEATH OF SEEING THE WESTERN WORLD'S FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT! SO, BARACK, KEEP KEEPING ON AND DO WHAT YOU MUST TO BEAT JOHN McCAIN, INCLUDING NOT TAKING TAXPAYER'S MONEY TO RUN FOR OFFICE! TAKE OUR MONEY INSTEAD! THERE'S NO STRINGS WITH US. WE JUST WANT YOU TO KEEP YOUR HONOR! GOD BLESS BARACK OBAMA!

OBAMA '08 COMEDY NITE

BIG MIKE, COMEDIAN — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:10:16 EDT

I AM SO EXCITED TO BE PRODUCING AND PERFORMING @ THE M BAR JUNE 26th. ALL OF THE COMEDIANS ARE SO FUNNY AND THEY ARE MY FRIENDS. IT FEELS GOOD TO BE BRINGING AWARENESS TO SENATOR OBAMA'S CAMPAIGN. NOT LIKE HE NEEDS MUCH HELP BUT IT FEELS GOOD TO BE MAKING A DIFFERENCE!

Barack Evening Buzz - 6-16-08

Barack Daily Buzz - Victory2008.net — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:55:42 EDT

Barack Evening Buzz - 6-16-08
On to Victory in November

(1) Al Gore Endorses Obama and Promises to Help Him
Nedra Pickler-Associated Press
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080617/ap_on_el_pr/obama_gore_11

(2) Obama Says Gore Advised Him During Primary Run
Jeff Zeleny-New York Times-Monday Pool Reporter
http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2008/06/obama_said_gore_advised_him_du.html

(3) Obama Hits at McCain's Appeal to Women-"He's Been on the Wrong Side" of Women's Issues
Jake Tapper-ABC News
http://www.abcnews.go.com/WN/Vote2008/story?id=5177410&page=1

(4) Obama Will Spend to Revitalize Economy
CNNMoney
http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/16/news/economy/obama_economy/index.htm?section=money_latest

(5) Obama Plans Pre-Election Trip to Iraq and Afghanistan
Jitendra Joshi-Agence France Presse-AFP
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080616/ts_alt_afp/usvote_080616202652

(6) Obama to Visit Iraq and Afghanistan
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-06-16-obama-iraq-afghanistan_N.htm?csp=34

(7) Obama Campaign Names New Senior Advisors Including Ex-Clinton Campaign Manager
Associated Press
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080616/ap_on_el_pr/obama_new_staff_2

(8) Obama's Path to Presidency Goes Through Michigan
Paul Steinhauser and Peter Hamby-CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/06/16/obama.michigan/index.html?section=cnn_latest

(9) Obama and the Latino Vote
Joel Connelly-Seattle Post Intelligencer
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/seattlepolitics/archives/141282.asp

(10) For Blacks in France, Obama's Rise is Reason to Rejoice and to Hope
Michael Kimmelman-New York Times-Arts
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/arts/17abroad.html

GOD BLESS AND PROTECT BARACK OBAMA!

BIG MIKE, COMEDIAN — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 23:09:16 EDT

MY FATHER WAS ALSO ABSENT AND NOW PASSE AWAY.HE GOT INVOLVED WITH DRUGS,WOMEN AND PRISON.IN MY EARLIER YEARS I TOO BECAME OBSESSED WITH JAIL AND WOMEN BUT I AM HAPPILY MARRIED FOR SEVEN YEARS WITH TWO DAUGHTERS.THEY ARE BI-RACIAL AND SOMETIMES FIND IT HARD TO ADJUST TO SOCIETY AS SEN. OBAMA ONCE DID.I WANT TO THANK SENATOR OBAMA FOR MAKING ME BELIEVE IN HOPE,AMERICA AND PERSEVERENCE! THANK YOU BARACK FOR BEING A PROUD MAN WHO IS DEFINATELY AN INSPIRATION TO ALL OF AMERICA,ESPECIALLY BLACK AMERICA! GOD BLESS AND PROTECT BARACK OBAMA.HE IS MY HOPE!

Back to Bush

Stephen Siciliano — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 00:47:25 EDT

With all that Democratic primary business eating up our space highwayscribery almost forgot George W. Bush was still (p)resident.

But today the Supreme Court - five of them anyway - came to the aid of those who can't forget Bush's undemocratic reign: the internees at Guantanamo.

Once again, the sacred nine, most of whom are in Bush's pocket, slapped his silly, unconstitutional face red, by ruling that those held in Gulag Gitmo have a right to contest their detention in federal court.

Now there's a revelation.

Justice Anthony Kennedy served once again as pivot man between right and left, siding with the latter in defense of those guarantees that make our country unique (most of the time).

Here's the scribe's favorite quote by Kennedy: "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law (emphasis added). The Framers decided that habeas corpus, a right of first importance, must be a part of that framework, a part of that law."

Hoorah!

The "Washington Post" noted that Justice Antonin Scalia highlighted his dissent by taking the rare step of summarizing it from the bench like some lowly House member, rather than a sage of the highest tribune.

Scalia called the ruling a "self-invited...incursion into military affairs," which suggests that the military is not subject to any of the country's laws.

He then went on to suggest that the ruling, "will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed," which seems to us like an, er, um, "self invited incursion into military affairs" on Scalia's part.

He should be ashamed of himself, uttering this passive inversion of w.'s "Bring it on."

highwayscribery, many of you know, hates the prison at Guantanamo. In "Gitmo Girl," and "Gitmo Girl Gone Wild," we leaned upon no less a connection than the scribe's cousin Heather Rogers who was given the thankless task of legally representing some of the Allah-forsaken schlubs caught in the CIA's bounty-primed dragnet.

The Bush administration's idea was that holding prisoners in an offshore hellhole would deny them protections onshore detainees enjoy (for lack of a better word).

the scribe has always thought there was something adolescent about that reasoning; like a teenager forbidden to have parties at the house arguing that all the drinking and dancing was out in the backyard.

It is a cheap and technical evasion that sums up the administration's approach to our Constitution and the Democratic principles contained therein.

Bush said he "strongly disagreed" with the court's ruling, but promised to abide by it; as if there were another option open to him.

He said "legislation might be necessary" to deal with the invalidation of the reasons for even having a prison at Guantanamo, but Tom Delay's gone and this is 2007 so Bush shouldn't hold his breath.

Meanwhile - and you didn't read about it anywhere in the mainstream media - the House of Representative mustered up 251 votes (to 166) to send 35 articles of impeachment (House Resolution 1258), introduced by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, to the Judiciary Committee.

Certainly an embarrassment for a sitting president conducting diplomacy overseas and a move highwayscribery wholeheartedly supports.

It's not enough that these crooks surrender power. They need to go to jail and highwayscribery plans to comb the articles of impeachment for interesting things and report back if worthwhile items turns up.

Here's a little flyer from the crowd at ImpeachBush.org you can print out and send around if you're interested in helping this thing along.

highwayscribery does not know how the measure got to the floor for a vote, what with the Dems' desire to keep it clean and smooth the way for an Obama administration. the scribe does not know what the Judiciary Committee's posture is on the matter.

But it's worth noting that, unlike a lot of things that happen in the House, this one is not subject to reconciliation with Senate prerogatives or subject to presidential veto.

The business of bringing charges against a sitting president lies with the House alone.

And it's not out-of-orbit to wonder if lower chamber leaders are steamed enough at the administration's Bronx cheer in response to the service of subpoenas on Harriet Miers, Karl Rove, etc., to follow through on criminal charges.

There is more than one way to skin a cat.

Consolidating Power

Stephen Siciliano — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 15:55:42 EDT

"Genius: You either have it or you don't," wrote Salvador Dali.

Since claiming the mantle of Democratic presidential nominee on Tuesday night, Sen. Barack Obama has begun a consolidation of his power in a way that seems to exceed what many consider his thin resume; strutting Washington D.C. as if it were his roost.

Which it may be if John McCain's speech Tuesday night is any indication of where we're heading.

Hillary Clinton's claims from the same evening seemed strong the next day, but by now amount to nothing more than a close second, which is still second as became clear with the New York senator muffling her earlier claims to the number two spot while taking her place on the Obama train before it left the station.

The Illinois senator promised changed and if sporting a yarmulke on Wednesday morning suggested hints of another power hungry candidate playing the game, his announcement later in the day that the Democratic National Committee would no longer take money from lobbyists represented a first down payment on the promise.

That's not putting money where your mouth is so much as taking money out of your mouth, but there will be no change until lobbyist influence is pulled from party coffers.

This is not new for Obama, but woefully underreported. In Pennsylvania and West Virginia the campaign's decision not to pay ward heelers for the delivery of votes hurt him and helped pad Sen. Clinton's heroic tallies in those places.

Obama can bite a bullet.

The same article noted that in consolidating his leadership over the party, Obama decided to keep Howard Dean as DNC chairman, which should tell you a lot, in spite of the chat channels' failure to discuss "what it means."

As a presidential candidate, Dean harnessed the passion of the Democratic grassroots only to have his campaign's head chopped off by the party establishment in Washington.

An apparently selfless person, the former Vermont governor decided to change the way things worked, got the committee chairmanship and spent the last three years empowering state organizations, emphasizing the local over the national, and grooming a new generation of Democrats for a revolution we are now poised to witness.

This year, Obama was able to translate grassroots support into real power and if you don't think Dean's efforts had something to do with it, then you don't understand why Obama kept him in that rather choice position.

Elsewhere in the media constellation, at the same moment, came a news account about how Medicare drug benefit costs had gone up 16 percent this year, where outpatient care had only gone up 3 percent.

That's because the Bush administration rammed a drug benefit program through Congress that essentially funneled public health care patients to pharmaceutical companies with an added caveat that the government could not negotiate for better prices.

You can bet your bottom dollar that is what lobbyists wanted out of the largest benefit expansion in a generation and their money was the way this legislative stinker found its way through the House and Senate.

And though it will be hard for some career pols in the party to forego the easy green, with all winds blowing Democratic, now is about as good a time as any to pledge the golden rule and make it stick.

"We will not take a dime from Washington lobbyists or special interest PACS," Obama announced. "They will not fund our campaign, they will not run our party, they will not drown out the voices of the American people."

The "Washington Post's" David Broder wrote a piece highlighting Obama's weak closing to the Democratic nominating race, but highwayscribery thinks he missed the point; even if Broder was the first pundit back in February to predict a McCain/Obama faceoff.

Obama's was an insurgent candidacy that studied the rules of the game (read: delegates) and did what it had to win that game. The braintrust never planned to beat Hillary Clinton everywhere, all the time; rather do just what it needed (and probably all that it could).

And so Obama ran out the clock at the end, knowing full well the delegates were in the bag. But the general election is a completely different game, played on different field with a different clock than the primary/caucus roulette and Broder's parallels probably don't apply.

Morton Kondracke has a different take that says it will be very difficult for McCain to defeat Obama this year.

His piece makes a scientific attempt to monitor a series of indicators that decide watershed elections and those indicators are all breaking Obama's way. You can read them for yourself.

"Voters clearly want 'change'," he writes. "McCain has a long way to go to convince them that his kind is better than Obama's even though - on the merits - it may well be. At the rate things are going, history will repeat itself with a Democratic victory in 2008 and liberal domination of the government until voters change their minds again."

Meanwhile, "Salon" reports that Obama had a little chat with Sen. Joe Lieberman who was once a Democrat and has now decided to form something called "Citizens for McCain."

Quoting ABC News' Jake Tapper, Salon noted (that Tapper noted), "The conversation was a stern rebuke to Lieberman for his criticism of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee on a conference call, as well as a discussion about how far Lieberman is willing to go in his advocacy of McCain, and the tone of his campaign."

"Salon" ran the above picture of Lyndon Baines Johnson leaning in on some forgotten U.S. Senator to dramatize what transpired between Obama and Lieberman.

Obama's only 47 and yet he's cracking the whip at older more experienced politicians, getting the capital city in hand.

Genius: You either have it or you don't.

Remembering Bobby

Stephen Siciliano — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:21:41 EDT

(Reprinted from last year)

Tonight the scribe takes special pleasure in updating this Web log, for the subject is the memory of the late Bobby Kennedy. June 5th was the 37th anniversary of his assassination in Los Angeles.

the scribe thought it was today, and it is a reflection of our rightward drift and division that so little, if anything, was written on Sunday about this man whom, whatever his political inclinations, gave his life to the country.

In any case, we’ll do this a few days late; the sentiment is no less deep or profound.

Once a guy is dead and not around to defend his own name the enemy tends to do a dance all over their reputation. The Kennedys, Jack and Bobby, were by virtue of their murders raised to the level of saints. In reality they were politicians with all that implies and which left them open for some pretty vicious hits post mortem.

And furthermore, the scribe doesn’t go in much for family dynasties, which by their very nature are anti-democratic. You only need to look at what’s going on now to get an idea.

Nonetheless, the scribe lives his life in the belief that Senator Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign represented the high point of the American experience and that his murder marked the beginning of our decline as a special and enlightened nation which, through its ideas and not its armies, led a democratic revolution around the world.

To go back and listen to Bobby’s speeches from that terrible and tremendous time is to wonder what country they might have been delivered in, because it’s not the America any of us are experiencing. He and his brother the President were the closest thing to social democrats the post-war United States ever produced and both were shot like dogs for their efforts.

His own presidential candidacy featured a discussion about inequality and poverty never, ever repeated in American politics. He took the anti-war movement mainstream and gave it a head of steam and respectability it did not lose until they had killed him.

If you ever get frustrated at Democratic presidential candidates and wonder why it is so goddamn hard for them to just come out against a war they know is wrong, remember what happened to the last guy who tried it.

As they say in Spain, “Haz bien, trae mal” or “Do good, bring bad.”

That he was shot by Sirhan Sirhan is a certainty. That more bullets than the eight Sirhan’s gun could hold were found is also a certainty. That the doorway beam from which two bullets were pried was inexplicably burned by the Los Angeles Police Department is also a known fact. The rest can be left to those with the time to sort out conspiracies; for us it serves as a stark reminder of how the American right wing plays for keeps.

They talk a lot about the bankruptcy of American liberalism, the loss of direction and lack of ideas. They never wonder what the murders of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr., meant in that regard. They were young men, standard-bearers of the left with many years of fight, maturity and leadership still ahead when they were struck down. And they could not be replaced.

We should remember that.

The recently departed Hunter S. Thompson wrote about Kennedy in his classic “Fear and Loathing on Campaign Trail ‘72”. He was addressing the McGovern campaign’s idea of using Bobby’s voice on commercial spots:

“In purely pragmatic terms, the Kennedy voice tapes will probably be effective in this dreary campaign; and in the end we might all agree that it was Right and Wise to use them...but in the meantime there will be a few bad losers here and there, like me, who feel a very powerful sense of loss and depression every time we hear that voice – that speedy, nasal Irish twang that mailed the ear like a shot of ‘Let It Bleed’ suddenly cutting through the doldrums of a dull Sunday morning on a plastic FM station.

There is a strange psychic connection between Bobby Kennedy’s voice and the sound of the Rolling Stones. They were part of the same trip, that wild sense of breakthrough in the late Sixties when almost anything seemed possible.

The whole era peaked on March 31, 1968 when LBJ went on national TV to announce that he wouldn’t run for re-election – that everything he stood for was fucked, and by quitting he made himself the symbolic ex-champ of the Old Order.

It was like driving an evil King off the throne. Nobody knew exactly what would come next, but we all understood that whatever happened would somehow be the product of the ‘New Consciousness.’ By May it was clear that the next President would be either Gene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy and that the War would be over by Christmas...”

the scribe lived that connection before ever reading the passage. The Stones marked the boundaries of his lifestyle as a young rake, Bobby his political activism as a reformed one.

As a reporter with the “Los Angeles Business Journal” the scribe had to do a story about the Ambassador Hotel where Kennedy was slain. He asked to be taken into the infamous “pantry” where the nefarious act went down. He didn’t stay long.

In 1966, Kennedy gave perhaps his most famous speech to an arena filled with young people in Cape Town, South Africa.

We close tonight with an excerpt from the same:

“[T]he belief there is nothing one man or woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills – against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence...Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

“It is from the numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

Let it bleed indeed.

I'm sick of talking about Hillary.

Joe Markowitz — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:14:52 EDT

Last night, however, she forced everyone to keep talking about her. It's not so much that she wouldn't concede that bothered me; it's that she kept up a divisive message. Why bring up the tired argument that she has won the popular vote? All that can do is make her supporters continue to question the legitimacy of Obama's victory. Why keep talking about how her supporters think she would be the strongest candidate in November? All that can do is attempt to create a prophecy as to Obama's chances, and encourage her supporters to make it come true. What Hillary Clinton said she was going to do was work to help the Democratic nominee. How is she doing that?

I understand that what might really be going on is that she needs to keep her campaign alive so that she can encourage her supporters to help her reduce her campaign debt. But she needs to think about the damage she is doing to the party's chances by focusing on her problems. The theory is also going around that she wants leverage, either to become the vice-presidential candidate, or to play a large role at the convention. But her ungracious speech last night does not seem calculated to make the Obama campaign want to do her any favors.

It seems impossible to ask Hillary Clinton to look past her own interests and think about the larger issues. So we need to reach out to her supporters in every way possible. Obama did that brilliantly in his magnanimous speech last night, by praising Clinton and focusing on the contest with McCain.