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A CALL TO ACTION

1/25/2012

State of the Union, 2012

A Call to Action
    The stark contrast between President Obama’s State of the Union message and the petulant rantings of Newt Gingrich and vacuous vaporings of Mitt Romney, make you wonder about their supporters. Evangelicals, breaking out of their closed communities, want to convert the world. Greedy economicals, terrified they may have to pay up, would gladly bankrupt it. And Tea Party traitors, grinding their teeth for four years, would not hesitate to unholster their Glocks and Kalashnikovs to shoot you dead. It’s an angry pack.
    An election campaign is a battle, but going into battle blinded by anger is no way to win. Martial arts masters teach calm with a clear head. Actions primed by rage allow victory to go to the clear-headed fighter.
    I thought of this watching Barack Obama last night, the coolest President since FDR. FDR countered every lie spread about him, calmly calling it a “misstatement of fact,” then nailing the truth. Too cool to use the word, “lie,” his forceful reasonable tone won him four terms in office.
    Some of Obama’s supporters consider him too cool, are agitating for more heat. Yet his clear optimistic reasoning blows away Gingrich’s choleric claptrap, rings past Romny, 20 million dollars a year pathetically pretending to be middle class.
    A poll taken immediately after the State of the Union address gave it an approval rating of 90%, a historic high. It was Obama’s call to action. The months ahead will be historic too.
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NOTE TO READERS: From tomorrow until February 7th, no new posts as I tackle my income tax return. So I invite readers to scroll down to peruse past posts, and welcome all comments. Once my return is calculated, like last year, I’ll add an extra 1% to be sent directly to the U.S. Treasury.

UNANIMOUS SUPREME COURT

1/24/2012

Unanimous Supreme Court
    The U.S. Supreme Court is so ideologically split that a unanimous decision is a jaw dropper. United States vs. Jones is about whether police have a right to attach a GPS device to your car, leave it there for weeks or months, thereby getting a record of your every move. The unanimous decision? They cannot.
    It got to the Court after FBI agents attached one to a car parked on private property, then used it to track its position every ten seconds for a month.
    Ron Paul would agree, although maybe Mitt Romney, who plays his IRS returns as close to the vest as poker hands, would not, or would police, FBI, CIA, and all with prosecutorial mentalities.
    We all want protection from crazies with bombs so what would you expect police to do if they spot a suspicious bomb-sized package carried by a skulking individual with a suspicious look? But they can still mark him for observation with a GPS. All they need is is an order from a judge. Good decision.

DEEP REALITY

1/23/2012

Deep Reality
            "Some hear and see him whom he heareth nor seeth not...
...            ...a cat may look on a king, ye know!"
    Nero, my cat, doesn’t know that I’m not a king. His look says just being me is enough. But kings need to know what a look means, and so does everyone. We are a species who need to probe beneath surfaces to the deeper reality beneath.
    As a child, I walked in a babbling brook over a bed of glistening multi-hued stones, and collected some. I still have one, smooth, almost black, with a band of white. For years it decorated my tropical fish tank. A geologist could tell me much about it, yet not enough. Is there a deeper secret beneath its outer reality? It feels so good in my hand. An Animist, might say that it has a soul. Sometimes I feel certain that it does.
    Some believe that the world was created for the use of humano sapiens, and that our all-powerful Creator put us specifically in charge. Woe betide those who disagree even in details. There was a time when offering a blessing with three fingers instead of two identified an enemy. Ideas about deep reality can be passionately held.
    The ancient Greeks theorized the atom, the smallest possible unit of matter. One day, atoms were scientifically discovered. Later. they were found to be bundles of much smaller particles. Then, M-Theory, tiny vibrating “strings” in 11 dimensions, deemed to be the basic stuff of creation. And now there is digital Quantum Foam. Deep reality is information projected from two dimensions to three, forming all that we can see, hear, taste, smell, and feel,
    One thing about Quantum Foam causes my mind to flip over in a way that the word “boggle” describes well. There’s dense mathematics behind Quantum Foam, and it says that no information can ever be lost, even in a Black Hole. That is astounding because if each of us is a projection of information coming out of digital Quantum Foam, and information can never be lost, isn’t that another way of explaining an immortal soul? Can scientists finally be on the threshold of a mathematical proof of immortality?

POLITICS OF DEMONIZATION

1/22/2012

Politics of Demonization
    Newt Gingrich
    Voice of the purple
    New York elites, drop dead
    The politics of demonization got a tryout in Newt Gingrich’s short victory speech on Saturday after his South Carolina primary victory. Some quotes:
• “...the elites in Washington and New York.”
• “...elites trying to force us to quit being American.”
• “...you have a chance no matter what the elites in Washington and New York say.
• “...I will take this straight to the elites...”
• “...the growing anti-religious bigotry of the elites...”
• “...this makes the elite media nervous..”
    It was a foretaste of a campaign that would be aimed at xenophobes and all those frightened by the “outside” world. Sarah Palin, who publicly endorsed Gingrich, did the same thing by dividing the country into “real” Americans, and all the rest.
    Grandiosity was in ample supply. Gingrich challenged Obama to debates while modestly attributing his powers as a debater to his ability to “articulate the deepest values of the American people.” He termed support offered by an ex-army general, “a moment of patriotism.”
    “I helped create four balanced budgets,” he crowed, heaping credit on himself for the growth in jobs and balanced budgets achieved by President Bill Clinton.
    With Gingrich in charge, “...no American president will ever again bow to a Saudi king,” referring, one must conclude , to George W. Bush, the only President to entertain Saudi royalty on his own (instead of U.S. government) property.
    “We fought and beat Germany and Japan in 3 years 8 months,” he said. He was two years old when WWII ended, and at 19, married his high school geometry teacher, quickly had kids, and thus dodged the draft that sent so many young Americans to Vietnam. (The details of their bitter divorce will be revealing.)
    His victory speech was a dismal sample of what we can expect if the Republican Party loses its mind entirely and sends this bloated pandering, morally challenged hypocrite into the race for the U.S. Presidency. Democrats, however, would celebrate.

YA BETTER WATCH OUT, MITT R. MONEY IS COMIN' TO TOWN

1/20/2012

Ya better Watch Out, Mitt. R. Money is Comin’ to Town
            Mitt Romney
            Mitt R. Money
            Dogs and peasants, on the roof!
    It’s not about not rich or rich. Abe Lincoln and Harry Truman were not rich. Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy were rich. All were great U.S. Presidents. It’s about being in or out of touch.
    Mitt Romney is not as rich as the casino billionaire who’s stuffing millions into a pro-Gingrich super PAC. He’s not even a billionaire. But his estimated net worth—250 million or 750 million, he won’t say—is not chump change. He was born rich, but give him credit; he earned most of his wealth by the sweat of his brain. Straight A’s at Harvard, and one smart cookie. But is he in touch?
    He looks like a regular guy in his jeans at stump speeches. Asked on TV what poor people feel about rich ones, he said with a smirk, “Envy.”
    Most of his present income, he said, comes from investments, except for speaking fees which he calls, “not very much.” Then he laughed. The laugh is on us; Romney’s “not very much” was $ 374,000 in 2010.
    He made people cringe when he stuck out his hand and offered to bet Rick Perry $10,000.
    At one of his campaign town meetings, a woman told Romney she’d lost her job. He smiled his wolfish smile, said, “I’m out of work too.” How out of touch can you get?
    He’s got money tucked away in off shore tax shelters like the Cayman Islands, and still won’t release his income tax. He did reveal that his tax rate is “close to” 15%. But that's because he’s a job creator. Claims Bain Capital created 120,00 jobs, but does not subtract jobs lost when Bain sucked the bone marrow out of companies like KB Toys. The cute trick with KB was to leverage up the stock price, pay themselves a fat dividend, then yank the rug out. KB tanked, its employees were fired, but by then Bain was gone and kept the dividend. Romney was gone too, but got his cut. According to one investigator, 52% of Bain Capital’s companies went bankrupt.
    It’s just business and it’s all legal, except that this guy is asking to be made CEO of the whole U.S.A. Michele Bachmann said that Herman Cain’s “999,” was an inversion of “666,” the Mark of the Beast. What would she think of the anagram for Mitt Romney: Mitt R. Money. Coincidence?

THE PIED PIPER OF HOUSTON

1/19/2012

The Pied Piper of Houston
    For 24 hours, Wikipedia blacked itself out, and a few other Internet presences made symbolic gestures to warn people about a world without them. I grew up without anything like the Internet, and yet find it impossible to imagine it gone.
    Eastman Kodak, not long ago one of the soundest companies in the world, fell behind in camera technology. Not to worry, making great money selling film, when they invented digital photography decades ago, they buried it because it threatened their film business. Now they’ve declared bankruptcy. Would-be cripplers of the Internet, take notice!
    Some Hollywood and other “content providers” still stuck in the past, are trying to get laws to make deep changes in the Internet, hoping to stop piracy of their products. Can’t blame them for that, but they’re doing it wrong.. They should be seeking new ways to sell their products, to “monetize” the Internet, not cripple it. This genie cannot be squeezed back into the bottle.
    Ron Paul, the most truthful and clear speaking of the final four Republican candidates, is trying to do that too. Who can help liking the guy, especially compared to the sneaky, carping, pandering, other three?. And who doesn’t dream of a vanished era when the U.S. produced everything it needed, and could ignore the outside world? His cause is valiant because it is so innocent, and hopeless. And the young, who have never known that world, give it a romantic glow, responding to Paul’s sweet song like the bewitched children of Hamlin who followed the legendary Pied Piper into a mountain abyss never to be seen again.

THE POWER TO DESTROY

1/18/2012

The Power to Destroy
        “The power to tax is the power to destroy.” Daniel Webster said it and so did Supreme Court justice, John Marshall. It is a power free citizens give to their democratic governments, and a power stolen by thieves and despots. But it is not the only deadly power. Another belongs to anyone willing to use it--the power to define.
    President Obama now seeks to shrink government, save tax payer money, and ease the burden on small businesses by consolidating six business bureaucracies: the Small Business Administration, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the Export-Import Bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and the U.S. Trade and Development Agency. Shrinking government is what Republicans constantly demand, so you’d expect them to crow victory. But if Barack Obama does it, it will reflect credit upon him, so they redefine it as a “power grab” and so hope to destroy it.
    What they have done is redefine themselves. Pretending to be advocates of small government and low taxes, they have exposed themselves as the actual power grabbers. Giving credit where it is due, some admit it openly. House Speaker, Mi\tch McConnell, for one, says over and over that his first priority is to make Barack Obama a one-term president. And that defines this year’s crop of Republican presidential wannabes. Ask any one of them why they run. The answer is always, “Because I wish to serve my country.”
        Sure, like Wall Street traders wish to serve the stock market.

A STONE AXE UPSIDE THE HEAD, AND OTHER SOLUTIONS

1/17/2012

A Stone Axe Upside the Head, and Other Solutions
    You can get a PhD in Policy Studies (I have an MS) yet most people never heard of the subject. It’s about rules, regulations, and laws by groups—families, corporations, governments—to solve problems.
    If there is no problem, there is no need for a policy, i.e., a solution. But there are always problems. In cave days, problems were solved by a stone axe to the head. Today it is laws, although punishments can be just as severe. Policy Studies 101 begins by thinking about Assumptions.
    Imagine a broad swath of flat farmland with two roads running through it, east-west and north-south. A few horse-drawn wagons a day, no problem. At 50 automobiles a day, two might collide–a problem–so you put up four signs that read, “4-Way Stop.”
    Assumptions: Drivers will notice the signs. Drivers can read English. Drivers will read the sign and stop.
    If corn grows high, blocking the view, you add an overhead blinker. As the area is built up, stop lights, a traffic circle, an overpass. Each measure is a policy decision that rests upon an Assumption (or hope) that it will solve the problem.
    All this is playing out right now as Republicans bellow for fewer regulations, ignoring the problems they were meant to solve, like banks in 2008, recklessly trading for their own accounts, and bringing down the American economy. Bankers, bailed out by U.S. taxpayers, made obscene profits and gave out obscene bonuses while the rest of the U.S. lost jobs and homes. Now these vultures are using their obscene profits to buy off politicians and dupe naive citizens into calling for the scrapping of all the rules, regulations, and laws that protect them, so the vultures can play their nasty tricky game all over again.

NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION: WATCH THE RIGHT!

1/16/2012

New Year’s Resolution: Watch the Right!
    This year the holiday season began earlier than ever, Hallow’een, to New Year’s Day, a nonstop commercial debauch followed by a few days of inane babble about New Year’s Resolutions. I usually tune that out too, but was suddenly struck with a necessary resolution: I resolve to listen to talking heads I do not agree with.
    Like most people I know, I listen only to talk shows I agree with. This is insular and weak-kneed. How can I be critical of others who do that, differing only on who we agree with? In addition, I treasure readers who disagree with me.
    I’ve always assumed differences in style: on the Left, mockery, travesty, satire, on the Right: condemnation, fear-mongering, and rage. But a quick look at Lou Dobbs Tonight reveals that to be wrong, or anyway, incomplete. Dobbs is relaxed and avuncular while calling illegal immigration from Mexico a “security crisis,” and Obama’s recent proposal to consolidate five government bureaus for small business, “a grab for power.” It’s fear-mongering, yes, but warm and fuzzy, sort of. Mr. Dobbs bears watching.
    I expect to be annoyed, offended, even outraged, but my cognate resolution is to correctly state their arguments and refute them reasonably and rationally. If I lose my cool or collapse into idiocy, I beg readers to let me know.

BAD DECISIONS, FALSE IDEAS

1/15/2012

Bad Decisions, False Ideas
    Bad decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court spring from false social concepts that have taken root in the minds of justices. A reader, sent me a quote explaining the basis for the calamitous 1857 Dred Scott decision which held that slaves and their descendents were not protected by the U.S. Constitution. Chief Justice, Roger Taney, strongly pro-slavery, backed by seven justices, wrote that black people were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far unfit that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Two justices dissented, one so strongly, he resigned from the court.
    The false concept that led to the Citizens United decision of 2010 allowing unlimited political money via Super Pacs, is that “corporations are people,” which Mitt Romney argued in a stump speech in Iowa: (click for link to video clip)
    “Corporations are people, my friend...” followed by, “Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people.”
    Even the reasoning is flawed. If corporations are people because everything they earn goes to people, then supermarkets are people too because everything on their shelves goes to people. Romney knows better, but for him, intelligence and honesty never overrides political expediency.
    Corporations by law have the same economic rights as people; they can buy, sell, lend, save, borrow, sue, be sued, contract, and enforce contracts, etc. But economic rights are far less than full human rights. A person who thinks of corporations as people, sees real people as cogs, to be used and discarded. Romney talks about corporations he invaded that flourished, nothing about those that went bankrupt, or that he made fat profits on both. And why won’t he release his income tax?
    A personal story is always part of a politician’s qualifications for public office. Mitt Romney earned straight A’s at Harvard, getting degrees in both business and law. But a high IQs and business acumen, do not always come with honesty, scruples, and conscience, and he’s shown himself to be a human weather vane pointing in whatever direction the wind blows.
    Would a man whose business life was spent gutting corporations in order to swell his own bank account, likely care a hoot for living breathing Americans were he to find himself holding the reins of power?

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Author (Yuma, AZ, 1944)

Being 90 years in this world, with great kids, great grandkids, great wives (two, one at a time) and great memories, I wonder why some people seem to have stopped loving the U.S.A.? I will wonder in print right here. If you wonder too, or can provide some answers, please comment.
Stuart Hodes

       With my friend, Nero.
             April, 2012.
    Photo by Ray Madrigal