March 2010 Archives
I don't know where the ACLU was hatched, but it was probably in LA, or in Haight Ashbury during the 60's. How else could anybody explain some of their lean so far to the left liberal policies that there was no guessing who they endorsed during the last election?
Ever true to their Haight-Ashbury style roots, their latest target is the death penalty and California. In something reminiscent of "This is Ernest's Tooth," they have published a report with the following findings: California has the highest number of violent offenders sentenced to death row, over 30% of them are either black or Hispanic and costs $137 million dollars a year to keep them there.
Taking aim at LA District Attorney, Steve Cooley, they said that all the convictions are a ploy so he can get reelected and that he is really out-of-step with the rest of the country, expect for Texas and Florida who would be more in step with us. The problem is that unlike those places, the death penalty here carries about as much weight as a slap in the face with a linen hankie.
Either way, I didn't know that there should be a quota for death-row inmates like there are quotas for EOE hiring on the outside. And I didn't think that violent offenders like Rodney Acala deserved a life making license plates and painting pictures. If we continue to listen to organizations like the ACLU in cases like these, we will surely go the way of the dinosaur, or is it the dodo bird?
I'm not sure Obama has "suddenly" given up on bipartisanship in the face of "Hell no" opposition from the GOP.
He didn't get his efforts to create a bipartisan tone in Washington off to a good start a year ago, because he was too meek in dealing with Democratic leaders in Congress. Anyone who intends to be bipartisan can't hand the wheel over to your own activists while then expecting the other side's activists to sit quietly in the back.
Obama seemed a bit tough with Republicans in his first few months as president, at times with cause. And he's tough now, at times again with cause. But I don't see this as a triumph as much as a regrettable mess that he helped cause. My hope is that, as he continues to feel his way into his presidency, he'll ultimately find the right balance that allows sensible Republicans (in other words, the branch that repudiates Michelle Bachmann) to align with him in good conscience.
When the "party of no" became, in its own words, the party of "Hell no!" the message to Obama was clear: He will have to act alone and without being subjected the siren song of bi-partisanship--which was really a stalling technique. By confessing (hell, bragging) about their eternal pledge on non-cooperation, the Republicans removed any incentive for Obama to cooperate.
Ah, the law of unintended consequences; it must surely be the most reliable Law of Nature. My fellow liberals and I should be down on our knees giving thanks to Anthem Blue Cross and Mitch McConnell for getting Healthcare Reform passed and giving Obama the courage to be himself and stop lusting after the unreliable goddess of bi-partisanship.
Healthcare reform, which was dead, sprang back to life when Anthem Blue Cross applied the paddles in the form of 39% premium rises. Liberals got it--and many conservatives also realized that our present course could not stand. Democrats came to life and Republicans lost heart. Even after all the name-calling and fear mongering, not to mention the faux outrage over "reconciliation," the reconciliation process was swift and without any parliamentarian produced constitutional crises.
Then when both Mitch McConnell and John McCain pledged their eternal non-cooperation (finally a credible promise!), Obama believed them and immediately made 15 recess appointments. The Republicans made a strategic mistake that lots of parents make. By over-threatening and constantly criticizing, by the use of chronic outrage and the slamming of doors, they convinced Obama that there was no point, no gain to playing nicely. If they are already mad as hell and no gesture of peace is going to be accepted, people, children, political parties and presidents stop listening or frankly caring.
The whole experience of negotiating with Olympia Snowe and Chuck Grassley over Healthcare Reform and not getting a single Republican vote, while including some 200 Republican amendments, is an object lesson in following one's own star.
The Republicans did this to themselves, and now Obama can finally be and become himself. Thanks John, Mitch and Sarah! You gave Obama his mojo and gave me my president back!
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Continue reading President Obama Now Looks and Acts like FDR.
The comparison of then Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the height of the presidential campaign was hyped, overblown and made mostly to sell magazines, puff up TV pundit sound bites, and by a few carried away with themselves Democratic party campaign boosters. Though undoubtedly flattered by it, candidate Obama did not encourage the comparison to FDR.
This writer as countless others the first months after inauguration did more than just hope that President Obama would inch toward looking and acting like FDR. We relentlessly pushed, prodded, and hectored him to lurch in that direction. There were many days of bitter frustration and disappointment, punctuated by loud grumbling of betrayal.
Obama as FDR knew that he was in a political life and death, take no prisoners war with his political enemies-- the GOP, ultra conservative Democrats, Wall Street, the big bankers and big manufacturers. But unlike FDR for months he soft peddled, coddled, and placated his opponents even as they made absolutely no effort to mask their loath of his policies and presidency, and made it abundantly clear they will stop at nothing to hound him from office. FDR, by contrast, hit back hard at his enemies as obstructionists and economic royalists. He never wavered from his commitment that the workers and farmers, the "common man" came first.
Now President Obama has done the same. His in the trenches fight back started when he admitted what everyone knew and that's that making nice with the GOP and making futile appeals to them for bi-partisanship sounds good in White House interviews and Congressional speeches but in the ruthless party eat party world of real politick it's a surefire prescription for an ineffectual, moribund, and hapless presidency, not to mention ridicule as a president sans spine.
In quick succession he's rammed through a drastically retooled consumer friendly health care reform law that looks nothing like the pharmaceutical and private health insurer goody laden bill of six months ago and with the added FDR touch of beating back the furious lobbying by banks and private lenders to keep their profit first fingers in student lending, and making the government the lender of first resort for student loans. He added millions to back it up, with a special nod toward expanding aid to strapped historically black colleges.
A tweak of the financial reform package that takes a strong first step toward reining in the orgy of Wall Street freeboot speculation, trading, swaps, and scams of investors, borrowers and the government that nearly wrecked the economy. Though the much needed independent consumer agency with full power to oversee and regulate lending practices in the financial reform bill didn't happen. The new agency will not be under the direct grip of the Fed which would kill any regulation that was perceived as Wall Street and Big Bank unfriendly. Obama has also endorsed enactment of a modified version of the Glass-Steagall act. That's the tough FDR era bank regulation act.
The watered down and grossly underfunded Senate jobs bill won't do much to dent the near double digit unemployment. But Obama has strongly signaled that he'll plough stimulus dollars directly into government run job training programs, job banks, and public works projects. The other FDR touch is to virtually order the banks to lend more to distressed homeowners cut borrowing rates, and terms, and promise more aggressive government intervention to aid strapped endangered homeowners. These are the programs that will do much to help the working class, and the minority poor. It makes the screech that he push a black agenda seem even more silly, ridiculous and self-serving.
Obama ignored the squeals of the GOP obstructionists with appointments to judgeships. And a slew of recess appointments of top flight sensitive, moderate, first class scholars and professionals to diplomatic, commerce, and labor regulatory board posts.
He drew the ire of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by holding firm on his demand to halt renewed Israeli settler expansion in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
On a personal and humane note, Obama magnificent gesture of donating every penny of his 1.4 million dollar Nobel Peace Prize award to solid charities and community help organizations and causes. The Big Bank and Wall Street greed merchants could learn a lesson from this example: fat chance of that.
FDR did not substitute rock star photo op, stagey, high profile media posturing for tough leadership. When the GOP and the press wrote the epitaph for him midway through his second term in 1938 he continued to swing away. FDR took to the airwaves and hit the road to blast the economic royalists and the obstructionist judges and those in congress to his reform program.
In the final stages of the healthcare reform fight and its immediate aftermath, Obama snatched a page directly from FDR and mobilized millions of Americans to fight for real reform. As long as he continues to do that he'll continue to look and act like FDR.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His nationally heard talk show is on KTYM-AM 1460 AM Los Angeles, Fridays 9:30 AM and KPFK Pacifica Radio 90.7 Los Angeles, Saturdays Noon PST.
Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan could have saved his breath when he furiously demanded that GOP leaders denounce the blatant racists among them. The loud chorus from other Democrats, civil rights leaders, and even an on line petition from an advocacy group begging the GOP to speak out against its naked bigots is a good preaching to the choir, PR gambit but it won't change anything at the GOP top. The GOP would cut its throat if it denounced its racists and racism, and really meant it. The shouts, taunts, spitting, catcalls, joker posters, N word slurs, Confederate and Texas Lone Star flag waving, by tea baggers is and has been an indispensable political necessity for the GOP.
Despite the GOP's narrow health care defeat, maybe even because of it, the GOP's programmed racist public ugliness is having some success. Obama's approval ratings, always tenuous at best among white males, have plunged into free fall among them. A bare 35 percent of them say they will back Democrats in the fall mid-term elections, and less than half of white women say they will back Democrats.
The spark to reignite the GOP's traditional conservative, lower income white male loyalists, and increasingly white female supporters, has always been there. The final presidential vote gave ample warning of that. While Obama made a major breakthrough in winning a significant percent of votes from white independents and young white voters, contrary to popular perception, McCain (not Obama) won a slim majority of their vote in the final tally. Overall, Obama garnered slightly more than 40 percent of the white male vote. Among Southern and Heartland America white male voters, Obama made almost no impact. Overall McCain garnered nearly 60 percent of the white vote.
The GOP could not have been competitive during campaign 2008 without the bail out from white male voters. Much has been made since then that they are a dwindling percent of the electorate, and that Hispanics, Asian, black, young, and women voters will permanently tip the balance of political power to the Democrats in coming national elections. Blue collar white voters have shrunk from more than half of the nation's voters to less than forty percent. The assumption based solely on this slide and the increased minority population numbers and regional demographic changes is that the GOP's white vote strategy is doomed to fail. This ignores three political facts. Elections are usually won by candidates with a solid and impassioned core of bloc voters. White males, particularly older white males, vote consistently and faithfully. And they voted in a far greater percentage than Hispanics and blacks.
The GOP leaders have long known that blue collar white male voters can be easily aroused to vote and shout loudly on the emotional wedge issues; abortion, family values, anti-gay marriage and rights, and tax cuts. For fourteen months, they whipped up their hysteria and borderline racism against health care reform. This was glaringly apparent in ferocity and bile spouted by the shock troops the GOP leaders in consort with the tea baggers brought out to harangue, harass and bully Democrat legislators on the eve of the health care vote. These are the very voters that GOP presidents and aspiring presidents, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and W. Bush, and McCain and legions of GOP governors, senators and congresspersons banked for victory and to seize and maintain regional and national political dominance.
But the GOP's best efforts to stir and keep them stirred into frenzy wouldn't get to first base if millions didn't genuinely believe that Obama was the anti-Christ (new Gallup poll) and that every Democrat before him had turned government into a Frankenstein monster to tax them out of their gourd to create endless social programs that benefit minorities at the expense of hard-working whites. This is exactly how hate groups, the legion of anti-Obama Web sites and bloggers, and radio talk jocks craft the reason for the anger and alienation that many white males feel toward health care and, by extension, Obama. This translates to even more fear, rage and distrust of big government.
The GOP's win with white vote strategy failed in 2008 only because of the rage and disgust of legions of white voters at Bush's horribly failed and flawed domestic and war policies. This was more a personal and visceral reaction to the bumbles of Bush than a radical and permanent sea change in overall white voter sentiment about Obama, the Democrats, and the GOP. Even if the GOP is, as is widely seen, an insular party of Deep South and narrow Heartland, rural and, non-college educated blue-collar whites this is not a voting demographic to mock, ridicule, sneered at, let alone dismiss, because the numbers are still huge.
The GOP driven by personal instincts, political leanings, history, demographics, and raw political need has masterfully played the race card for a half century to get its way. Asking it to stop now would be asking it to cut its own throat.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His nationally heard talk show is on KTYM-AM 1460 AM Los Angeles, Fridays 9:30 AM and KPFK Pacifica Radio 90.7 Los Angeles, Saturdays Noon PST.
Hmm, I think these folks are oversimplifying my criticism of Bristol Palin, but that's certainly their right.
I am known for being loyal, but even with that personage, I still have my limits. One of them, as a card-carrying Republican, is the out-and-out mayhem that some members of Congress have had to tolerate over how they voted on the health care bill.
Some of my fellow noodnick-like Americans have decided to send death threats or hurl bricks through the windows of some Democratic headquarters. A note attached to one brick thrown through the window of the Democratic Party offices in Rochester, New York read "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice," as if hurling a rock through a window isn't extreme enough.
Adding to the problem for any normal Republicans out there are Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck who have been encouraging their followers to express their views using violence. My message to them is knock it off, fellows. Cut it out. Besides, no one is going to see them acting in ways that could get them sent up the river, even if a camera crew was going to record their every move.
It is fellow Americans like these and the brick throwers and head bashers that make the party look like the one where they rode through town in white robes and burnt crosses on people's lawns. The health care reform is still in its infancy and can still be tweaked before it breaks the back of the economy once and for all. But all that mayhem doesn't make the party look like much of a party at all.
Both sides of the healthcare debate are distorting the information and pretending to certainties that are unwarranted and making predictions that are unsound. I'm not making a moral equivalence between the sides (I'm frankly pro-reform and thing this is a good, if imperfect, first step.) I think the Republican distortions are more egregious, but my side is not without sin.
The anti-reform folks may indeed sincerely believe that this is a terrible bill and will cost us a fortune. They may really want to keep government out of our medical system for philosophical reasons. They are not, however, stupid and know that this is not a government takeover of medicine or communism, or even socialism. It is more than a baby step and far less than a revolution. I do not object to principled opposition. Cynical untruths for political and financial gain is another thing altogether.
Right now Republicans are raising money from the frightened and credulous folks they themselves have frightened. They are raising money promising to repeal this legislation. They are doing this without any realistic hope of being able to repeal it--and they know that. They are depending on the innocence and fear of their base. However many seats they are likely to gain in the Senate and the House, they have no real shot of creating a veto-proof majority in the House or a filibuster proof supermajority in the Senate. In other words, there will be no repeal until after this complicated program is actually working.
It is true that there is much we don't know because almost everything is subject to bureaucratic interpretation. Eventually, however, the public will judge the reality. The Republicans are probably making a mistake with fear mongering and name-calling. Where they do have a shot at blocking reform is with the Supreme Court and the mandate to purchase insurance. Ordinarily I wouldn't give this argument much of a chance, but with this precedent breaking court, anything is possible.
Enthusiastic supporterss of this reform package--with or without the full panoply of fixes--also have their pants on fire. Calling this revenue neutral is both silly and untrue. It will certainly cost more than it will bring in from the traditional vapor income gained from reigning in "waste, fraud and abuse." The income from taxing "Cadillac" insurance benefits has been postponed long enough not to be countable. And the other new taxes are put off to another day (or decade) and another Congress--no likelier to be braver or more honest than this one. The so-called "Doc fix," where doctors' Medicare and Medicaid payments are cut, will not happen. Doctors are already dropping out of these two programs, and Congress has postponed the cuts on at least three separate occasions.
This program may be a giant step forward for medical care or it may crash. Anyone who claims to know is not to be trusted. Most likely it will deliver a mixed bag--just as Social Security and Medicare have--two other governmental programs that Republicans passionately opposed and predicted would lead us to Soviet style socialism. As Dr. Phil asks rhetorically, "How's that working for your guys?"
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Pakistan has receded from most Americans' minds, not that it was ever much on their minds anyway. This is because the cable networks aren't obsessing on events there. But more quietly, important "stuff" keeps happening, and this piece offers some excellent perspective.
I know, I know, it's only liberals who are uncouth. Still, this shows something about the temper(s) of our times.
Here's a HuffPo interview I did with Greg Boyd, who has a strikingly difficult mission: Helping evangelicals to actually subscribe to the worldview that they seek to share with others.
UPDATE: I fixed the link. Sorry about that!
If anyone ever wondered what's wrong with today's kids, I've got a clue. It's somehow related to the fact that they and their parents could barely identify each other in a police line up.
No wonder someone like 15 year-old Wayne Treacy tried stomping a former classmate to death. It started when his girlfriend borrowed 15 year-old Josie Lou Ratley's cell phone to send him text messages because she didn't have a phone of her own. Although she disapproved of the relationship, she loaned the girl the phone but eventually started sending text messages to Treacy voicing her opinion. An exchange ensued, and she sent a final message commenting about his brother's recent suicide. Threatening to break her neck, the boy went home, put on some steel-toed boots and rode his bike to the school that Ratley and his girlfriend attended.
Knowing what he intended to do, his girlfriend, pointed Ratley out to him, and he started pummeling her, slamming her head against the ground and kicking her in the head with his boots before a teacher pulled him off. She is in critical condition, and should she survive, will more than likely have brain damage. Prosecutors are planning on using Treacy's brother's suicide as his defense. Hopefully, the judge and jury won't buy it because if they did, they could set up a precedent for all sorts of mayhem.
Children like this don't come out of nowhere. Neither did the boys who doused 15 year-old Michael Brewer with rubbing alcohol before setting him on fire five months ago or the 16 year-old Delray Beach girl who pretended to be her mother in a text message and arranged to meet with her mother's married boyfriend before stabbing him to death and then going to school with his blood on her clothes. They are preened and culled from years of zombie-style parenting and neglect. They come from parents who defend their children when the teachers call home, when the neighbors complain and when the police show up at their house.
Psychologists say that part of the problem is that a child's brain is not developed enough to recognize the impact of his actions. This may be true. When I was fifteen, a boy at school taught me how to flip someone. No sooner had I come home from school that day when my sister and I got into a fight. Our parents weren't home, so I tried flipping her, but she wouldn't budge no matter how hard I pulled and tugged, though we did wind up knocking a rolling closet door off its hinges. At fifteen, I never even thought about what could have happened had it worked or how she could have been injured.
But that doesn't mean I graduated to other things like trying to poison a teacher, setting a house on fire or engaging in petty theft. And it was because I knew that if my parents ever found out, then that thankfully would have been worse than any visit down to the precinct.
We have since 9-11 avoided a large-scale attack on our homeland. Some of this is from good intelligence, good police work and increased sharing of information between intelligence service--both domestic and foreign. Some of our relative tranquility has come from Al Qaeda's custom and practice of staging ever larger scale attacks. They go for drama, and large scale usually involves more planning, more people and more time. This has worked in our favor--so far.
Unfortunately this is now changing. In the past two years we have interrupted three or four times the number of plots than in the previous six years combined. There is a clear pattern of an increasing effort to hurt us. We have been both lucky and good, but that could change at any moment. As intelligence professionals the world over say, "The terrorists only have to get it right once; we have to get it right every time."
The most disturbing part of the new pattern is not the number of plots alone, but the sources. Increasingly we are seeing Americans involved or accused of terrorist ties. "Jihad Jane" is only the most recent example. The first telltale was the significant number of Somalian Muslims from Minneapolis and Detroit going to join jihad in Somalia. This showed an effort to recruit American citizens and some responsiveness from the Americans. We are also seeing mixes of African immigrants, Pakistani immigrants and American converts to radical Islam--both black and white. Radical Islam is also winning converts in Europe among whites. Al Qaeda is running a significant conversion program in Latin America and in the Mexican state of Chiapas. With the growth of radicalism in Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines, our ethnic profiling will soon become useless.
What we have to understand takes some subtlety and nuance--two things that are difficult to employ when we are frightened and the threat is real. We are in a war but it is not with Islam per se. There is nothing uniquely violent in the religious DNA of Islam or the physical DNA of Muslims. A radical, malignant version of Islam has become the face of Islam. But they represent Muslims in general no more than the Inquisition was the permanent face of Christianity or that the twisted cross of the swastika replaced the True Cross of Christianity.
What is happening today is that this warped view of Islam is becoming thee organizing principle of discontent and grievance the world over. This small minority in Islam has become both the communism and the fascism of the 21st century, attracting cynics hungry for power, deluded idealists and the alienated. The religion itself is not the cause but the uniform that attracts the unhappy middle class youth of the world with a grand struggle and holy task. Its call is widespread and no nation, ethnicity or religion is immune from the seductive power of jihad. From peasants in Bosnia to alienated kids in our suburbs, from the over educated and underemployed of the Third World to our prisons, there is a powerful tide moving against us.
The mantra that "we are fighting them in Iraq and Afghanistan so we don't have to fight them here" is obsolete. They are here. Some came as adults, some as kids and some were born here--not simply in Muslim families but to Christians, Buddhists and Jews. The Jihad Janes of the world are the wave of our troubling future.
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Of course we profile. We look for commonalities and differences. But these factors change and are not intrinsic or immutable.
When someone comes to date one of my granddaughters. Will I profile? Of course. Will I look at dress, at grammar, at social skills? You bet. How about race or ethnicity? I don't think so. I didn't when the kids were dating. Religion? Yeah, I'll note it. Political persuasion? Definitely. Tattoos? Yes, but it may depend on how many, how large and the themes. All of this also applies to my grandsons
Do I profile at airports? Of course. I was flying on 9-11 a couple of years ago, and the airport was nearly empty. But I did spot a woman in a burqa walking towards a gate. I prayed it wasn't my gate. I wished her a good day in Arabic and sighed with relief when she got on a different plane. I am human, not perfect and look for patterns. But whatever my issues are, there was and would be no call for rudeness of lack of respect.
The question is not if we see differences or sort by music, culture or ethnicity. The issue is how we treat people whom we have judged by surface criteria.
It is not if the police did wrong in looking in the window of the car or, if unable to see the age of the passenger, stopped the car. The real profiling failure came next. When they did not see the age (60 versus 30s) and height (tall versus short), the dress and the demeanor of the Reverend Mr. Taylor, but only saw a "generic black guy driving," they crossed the line of decency and reason. When they hauled him out of the car and treated him rudely, they presumed on his guilt--guilt by association, the association of being black.
These cops flunked profiling 101.
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
There's a headline story today about some Afghan entrepreneurs who are hijacking public water, loading it on trucks and selling it to the poor. These crooks, with the help and blessings of corrupt officials, are called "The Water Mafia." There's another headline story today about Mayor Villaraigosa and David Freeman, of the DWP, trying to raise our water and power bills from 8% to 28%. This is to help us go green. It's working, I'm turning green.
Democracy depends on the consent of the governed to work. We have to believe in the efficacy and honesty of those who make and apply the rules. We have to submit willingly, and not simply out of fear, for democracy to exist and persist.
When the stealing and corruption become too great, when the mendacity becomes too egregious, when our sense of justice is eroded--we rebel. The good folks of California revolted years ago and passed Prop. 13, the Jarvis Initiative, because they were being taxed on the appraisals of their homes and not realized profits. They (we) may revolt again, and I suspect that the results again will not be pretty.
This time in Los Angeles the presenting issue will be water & power. Too many people are already feeling hosed and powerless and are mad as hell. This rate increase will be resisted for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that this pairs in our minds so naturally with the rate increases for health insurance. It feels ill timed and extortionate.
It also comes when the DWP is involved in a scheme to change out our water meters for "smart meters," a hundreds of millions of dollars boondoggle that will only give them more information in order to do more bad things to us--and won't actually save a gallon or kilowatt.
We have today a system so complicated that most of us who try to study and understand our DWP bills are left puzzled. Taxes, special fees and assessments for things having nothing to do with water and power clutter our bills. A tiered system of charges brings tears to our eyes, pain to our heads and an ache to our wallets. We have invented a system that institutionalizes unfairness and punishes those who were responsible too soon.
Let me give you an example. My tiers of charges, what I'm "allowed" at the lowest price is based on my past usage. Naturally my second tier comes into play when I exceed the DWPs allowance, which is less than my previous average because they want to encourage me to save. Thus, if I have been careful and responsible in the past, if I put in low-flow showerheads too soon, if I switched to drought resistant plants too early, if I installed a solar pool heater as well as solar hot water tank, I am still required to cut back further or be punished by second tier pricing or even the punishing third tier charges. My next door neighbor, who may have been profligate in his use of water and power, who watered his expansive lawn every day and night, who didn't cover his pool and let evaporation run its course, who has never had a solar heater, gets a bigger allowance in his first tier than I. Now again, based on my allowances, I'm going to be raised from 8% to 28%?
Some of us have been checking the box for green energy for years--and we will be rewarded by demands for further cuts and higher rates?! Mr. Mayor, Mr. Freeman you are in danger of losing our consent--as we see our selves not as the governed but as the exploited.
If I were to stop paying my bill, you could cut me off with impunity. If hundred of thousands withdrew our consent and went on a ratepayer strike, then what? If a petition to recall the mayor went around, I'd sign it. This is tone deaf and abusive. And, by the way, has anyone done an environmental impact study on the trade off of under-watered hills and fall fires, as well as bare dry hillsides denuded of plants and winter mud slides?
I really sohuldn't be sharing any of this. There is, after all, the water mafia.
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Gail, Jonathan and Earl, I'll hereby join the profiling fray. I'll take a typically independent position -- from both liberals who decry what they see as racism within efforts to keep our streets and our shores secure, and from hard-bitten conservatives who believe liberals need to lighten up.
On the one hand, I may tip slightly closer to the conservative position. And I'll begin with an observation about dust specks in the eye and logs in the eye: Racism and xenophobia strike me as universal quirks of human nature. Downtrodden minorities are as susceptible to them as The Man is. The evolution of the tribal man and woman has wired us to, um, profile carefully anyone who may represent a rival tribe, and our best intentions don't often overcome this tendency.
Let he who is without bigotry cast the first condemnation of bigotry. Hmm, I hear crickets, but I also hear some quiet grumbling and muttering in the background. Still, I think that it's best to handle the insults of life with some grace, rather than to picket every real and perceived insult against a member of our so-called group. I wish that the members of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, for instance, would be as committed to helping victims of the jihadist distortions of their faith as they are to condemning any profiling that may come as an inevitable consequence of the actions of these jihadists.
Now let me offer the "on the other hand": After I once wrote that Pakistani-Americans like me should steel ourselves for some profiling as a political necessity, and that we should handle it with good humor, I got put through the profiling wood-chipper on a trip to Israel. Five hours of tension, isolation and interrogation in the Ben-Gurion airport. It rattled me and made me feel like an unwelcome cockroach. Local police later asked me to forgive what they said was a necessary investigation. I could forgive it, but I also felt there are other places I'll spend my vacation dollar in the future. My views of profiling turned out to be easier to preach than to practice. I don't want to be in a place where they don't believe I belong.
In the end, I think stuff happens and profiling happens. I'd love to see the liberals complain less about other people's bigotry, and I'd like to see the conservatives be less audacious about minimizing the effect profiling has on the recipient.
Okay, I'm out of hands.
Earl and Jonathan, my ignoramuses, do you honestly believe that the goodly reverend was stopped and searched by the Torrance police solely because he was black? If so, then I must differ.
First, let me get something off my chest here. While I've only been stopped whenever I've done something that violates the rules of the road like failing to yield to traffic, driving on the shoulder of the road when I've been in a hurry or over some inanimate object like a kid's skateboard, I therefore have no idea what it's like to drive around in a decidedly ethnic skin, so I blend in with most of them the way peanut butter blends with jelly, the way the way chocolate blends with mousse or a burger and fries. So, mea culpa, I am a novitiate in the profiling department.
Yet the police weren't the bad guys here. Had they hit the goodly reverend with a baton or thrown his Bible onto the freeway for having the King James rather than the other version, then that would be one thing. But the car fit the description from a violent kidnapping; the man did not, but for all they knew, maybe the felon had changed places with his kindly uncle from Phoenix who happened to be the good reverend himself. Maybe. Was it racial profiling? Maybe or maybe not. Saying that all Torrance traffic officers who stop blacks and Latinos are rogue cops is also a form of cop profiling where their every look, motive and eyeball is placed in a giant negative hopper of bad cop motives. Considering how far the pendulum has swung in the other direction after the Rodney King beating, I wouldn't be surprised if some of our boys in blue sat in precinct offices having the following conversations.
McNamara: Have you met your black and white quota for the week, O'Toole?
O'Toole: You can see for yerself, McNamara. Almost. The scorecard's on the wall right behind you. Five blacks, three whites, a pregnant Hispanic lady and an Asian family pulling into a church parking lot.
McNamara: You're slipping, O'Toole. You're slipping. You've got to get that quota up in terms of the Hispanics and whites. Tell you what, the next time you see a black run a red light even if it looks like he's on a drug run, let him go and concentrate on the Koreans driving around Koreatown. Otherwise, the sarge's not gonna look too good at the next news conference. I'm winning. Go fish. "
The thirty protestors who showed up at Reverend Taylor's rally ought to adopt the words of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at least when judging others behind the wheel. "Judge people not by the color of their skin by the content of their (driving) character." Amen to that.
I filled out my census form today because I'm a good citizen and law requires it. And no, I'm not one of those right-wing nuts who deeply distrusts the government and their use of the information. I'm a left-wing nut who deeply resents the use of racial questions.
Yes, yes, I know that they want these racial classifications so that they can "better serve us." How? What is the utility of racial classifications? Why are we recognizing these unscientific categories invented in the 19th century and used historically to persecute, segregate and divide us legally, physically and psychically? What do we even mean by race? We do not have legal definitions of our various races. Are we going to go back to mulatto, quadroon and octoroon?
The irony of all of this is that just as we are, in fact, blurring the definitions in real life as "races" intermarry (or at least reproduce), we are making these artificial categories official. At the same time, because some groups sense that there may be some future advantage in becoming a race, we are adding more made up categories so that we no longer have the 19th century's Negroid, Mongoloid and Caucasoid. Now we get Asian Pacific, Pacific Islander and Native American. Where shall we put Ethiopians who are dark but not Negroid? And how about Southern India? Hispanic is not a race but Indian is. So how about Mestizo--which is what we all are?
I can understand the need for socio-economic information but not race. Yes, I know that color still counts and people are treated differently because of how we perceive their race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. So how does it advance ending discrimination by using the historical instruments of persecution and division? Once upon a time, I refused to fill out race. This is when the question was used to oppress black people. Why should we believe that this well-intentioned policy today would not be turned once again into evil?
In the 60s we used to joke that killing for peace was like fornicating for virginity. (Our actual words were slightly coarser). So we are classifying by race today so we won't tomorrow?
The law being the law, I complied, but I colored outside the box and wrote: Semite.
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
The throng of angry whites jeered, catcalled, and spat out borderline racial insults at the small group of mostly black protestors. This wasn't a march against Jim Crow in Montgomery, Birmingham, Jackson, Mississippi, or Cicero, The year wasn't 1963. The charged racial confrontation happened on March 14, 2010 in the self-billed All-American, mostly white Los Angeles suburban bedroom city of Torrance, California. The march was called to protest the unwarranted stop, search and harassment of Robert Taylor, a prominent Los Angeles African-American minister and civic leader by two white Torrance police officers on March 4. Following the stop, there were hundreds of outraged letters many filled with vile, crude, and profane racist pot shots at blacks, in local newspapers blasting Taylor and civil rights supporters.
The Taylor stop fit the all too familiar pattern of many unwarranted stops of black and Latino motorists. Torrance police officials claimed that he and the car he drove allegedly fit the description of a suspect and car involved in a robbery and assault a day earlier. The problem is Taylor is not even remotely close in appearance to the description of the suspect. The picture circulated was of a short, stocky dark complexioned 30ish black male. Taylor is tall, in his 60s, and light complexioned.
Predictably, as in most racial profiling allegations, Torrance police and city officials hotly denied the profiling charge. They justified it with the stock story that crime is on the rise in the city, but offered no compelling stats to back up that claim. Taylor's stop would have likely ignited the usual finger pointing, charge swapping, and then faded fast except for one thing. Torrance has been slapped with a Justice Department lawsuit, civil rights lawsuits, court settlements, and hundreds of verbal complaints over the years by black and Latino motorists, shoppers, African-American mail carriers some in full uniform that work at postal stations in Torrance, and residents such as Taylor who allege they were racially profiled.
Torrance is hardly unique. The past decade, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Miami and other big and small cities have repeatedly been called on the carpet for alleged racial profiling. In an address to a joint session of Congress in 2001, then President Bush blasted racial profiling, "It's wrong and we will end it in America." It hasn't
The refusal to admit that racial profiling exists by many public officials and many in law enforcement has done much to torpedo nearly every effort by local and national civil rights and civil liberties groups to get law enforcement and federal agencies not only to admit that racial profiling happens but to do something about it. The throng of white protestors that harangued the blacks and other supporters who protested the Taylor stop in Torrance was ample proof of that.
A perennial federal bill served up by House Democrat John Conyers to get federal agencies to collect stats and do reports on racial profiling hasn't gotten to first base. A similar racial profiling bill met a similar fate in California in 1999. The bill passed by the state legislature mandated that law enforcement agencies compile racial stats on traffic stops. It was promptly vetoed by then Democratic governor Gray Davis.
Despite Davis's veto, nearly 60 California city and county police departments, the California Highway Patrol, and University of California police agencies either through mandatory federal consent decrees or voluntarily collect date on unwarranted traffic stops of motorist and contacts civilian to determine if there is a racial bent to the stops. Torrance is not one of those cities.
Nationally, 46 states collect data either voluntarily or compelled by state law on unwarranted pedestrian contacts and traffic stops. Most police officials, as in Torrance, loudly contend that good police work is about the business of catching criminals and reducing crime, not about profiling blacks and Latinos. If more black and Latino men are stopped it's not because they're black or Latino but because they commit more crimes. The other even more problematic tact used to debunk racial profiling is the few statistics that have been compiled on unwarranted stops. In this case not by police agencies but based on citizen responses. In two surveys, the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics took a hard, long quantified look at racial profiling using information that it got from citizens. Both times, the agency found that while whites are stopped, searched and arrested far less than blacks or Latinos, there was no hard proof that the stops had anything to do with race.
This has done even more to damp down a public outcry to get police agencies and legislators to admit that racial profiling is a fact on many city streets and highways and then to take firm action to eliminate it.
The arrest last July of Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gate's touched off a brief furor over racial profiling. Taylor's stop and search has done the same in a bedroom Southern California city. It has again cast the ugly glare on the always troubling problem of racial profiling.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His nationally heard public issues talk show is on KTYM-AM 1460 AM Los Angeles Friday 9:30 AM and KPFK Pacifica Radio 90.7 Los Angeles Saturday Noon PST.
Yes, this is someone I work with closely at USC, and yes, he is an unimaginably wonderful successor to Steven B. Sample as president of USC. He "gets" every aspect of USC, inspires passion and enthusiasm in those around him, and will extend the rapid growth in all areas of USC's mission, from the libraries to the labs to the athletic fields.
So the Obama Administration courtesy of VP Joe Biden admonished the Israeli government for building more settlements in East Jerusalem on his recent visit to the country.
Shocking indeed that the Obama Administration's stand on the whole idea is ix-nay, a no-go, a don't put your toe over the line thing. Like Jonathan opined, Bibi's announcement that Israel will build 1,600 houses in supposedly occupied East Jerusalem may have been ill timed, but would any other time have been good? Let's look at some dates. Bastille Day? No, too French. Groundhog's Day? No, too animalistic. Fourth of July? Too noisy. An Obama kid's birthday? Too busy and too many balloons.
Like a visit from the IRS, there really is no good time because that day doesn't exist, at least not in this lifetime. The Palestinians and Arabs don't want to see one lousy settlement there let alone 1,600 because they don't want the Israelis or any Jews there, or anywhere else for that matter. If the Jews had settled in Uganda, which once had been considered, then they'd come after us there.
The unofficial mantra to the Palestinians and the Arabs has become "Jump," so we can reply "Thank you, sir and how high?" because our agreement to their every whim and desire relates to the fact that they have the oil and we don't, that and long festering anti-Semitism. So they could play "Old McDonald Had a Farm," on a juice harp there'd be a delegation marveling at their virtuosity and clapping at their very performances.
Israel announcing the construction of 1,600 new homes in Eastern Jerusalem during Vice President Biden's visit is a sucker-punch meant to send a message. It is, in my view, the wrong message and this diplomatic breach is a true blunder.
However, before examining what went wrong, it is important to disentangle two issues that the media are likely to conflate and confuse. The first question is the substance of the controversy. This involves whether it is right, legal or smart to build 1,600 more units in the "disputed territory" of Eastern Jerusalem. The second is the wisdom of insulting your most reliable ally in public.
Most of the world uses the term "disputed territory" for the eastern part of Jerusalem that was recaptured by Israel in the 1967 War. Israel does not accept the premise. Jerusalem is one city to most Israelis and cannot be given back. It is Israel's to build on, develop and live in, and they do not need the hostile world's permission. Having been vilified for virtually every policy, they no longer court the world's approval.
When rockets rain down on Israeli towns Israel is called wrong to fight back. If they bomb the block from where the rockets were launched it is "collective punishment" and a war crime. If they target the bomb makers narrowly it is a political assassination and also a war crime. If Israel occupies Gaza, it is a terrible and brutal situation that must change, and when Israel leaves Gaza (and leaves farms, homes, apartment blocks and greenhouses--all destroyed by Palestinians after Israel's withdrawal) it is abandonment. Gazans then celebrated their newfound freedom by firing many more rockets into Israel civilian populations.
Israelis realize that their problem with the Palestinians is not geographic. It is not about a settlement on the West Bank or apartments in Jerusalem. Israelis recognize that the problem is existential. It is not about a town or block; it is not about Eastern Jerusalem eventually becoming the capital of a Palestinian state. It is about any indication that Israel's existence is recognized by the Palestinians or that any deal could make Israel legitimate to Palestinians--whatever the borders.
When our good friend Hosni Mubarak, president of Egypt, said a few months ago that he wanted a two state solution--a free Palestine and a secure Israel, this sounded hopeful. But then he added that of course Israel could not be a Jewish State. That would be racist and wrong. Israelis right and left wondered what we had all been talking about for the last couple of decades. Until there is some slight indication that a Jewish Israel could be tolerated, there are no incentives for Israel to try to please the world or to believe that any gesture of good will, or withholding of something provocative, would make the slightest difference in the eventual outcome.
Israel has not been very confident in the support of the Obama administration. They were bothered that Obama went to Egypt and addressed Muslim issues but has not come to Israel. They were offended that Obama was more directive and public in his disapproval of further settlement on the West Bank than previous administrations. So, VP Joe Biden was sent to assure Israel of our constant love and try to make them believe that coercive diplomacy towards Iran was better than launching a military strike.
Biden pledges his love at the airport and says that he is there to show the world that there is "no space between Israel and the United States in matters of security." Policy differences are, however, manifold. We want a freeze on settlements. Netanyahu doesn't. We want no more building in Eastern Jerusalem and Israel says that is not discussible. So while Biden prepares to dine with Netanyahu, the Interior Minister, Eli Yishai, announces plans to build in Eastern Jerusalem. He later explains that this has been in the works for years and no building will start for years and it is just an accident, a coincidence. Rightly, no one believes him.
This is a clear assertion of ownership of all of Jerusalem and a push back against what the Israeli right sees as American interference. They will tolerate discussions concerning the West Bank, but not Jerusalem. Whether, as policy, this is right or wrong, politically, in terms of how you treat your major ally, this is disaster. It is a breach of etiquette understood around the world--and particularly in the Middle East.
There are laws of hospitality. There are things you don't do to your enemies, never mind your friends, when they visit in your tent. The real insult is, well, the insult not the issue. You never embarrass, humiliate or harm a guest. The timing of this announcement did all three. It was a slap at the United States as well as a hard hit on Netanyahu from his right telling him that they would not behave. This also weakens Netanyahu by showing that he cannot control his right wing. In a fairly complicated and perverse way it may advance American interests. Israelis are correct that there is no great love between the Obama administration and Netanyahu. Biden came to Israel to give some aid and comfort to the Kadima Party of Tzipi Livni. Now with Netanyahu hurt and a no confidence vote scheduled for the Knesset, the far right may have provoked some movement to the center.
But who knows? This is, after all, the Middle East.
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
The worst thing about the CEO of the Tennessee Hospitality Association Walt Baker's silly, sick, demeaning depiction of First Lady Michelle Obama as a chimp ironically is not the depiction. It's Baker's clueless defense. The instant the storm broke, and Nashville's mayor, the state's GOP leaders denounced him, and the contract was summarily yanked from his marketing firm, Mercatus Communications, to help promote the city's new convention center, Baker predictably wailed that he's not a bigot, racially insensitive, and the cartoon was nothing but political humor.
He fervently believes that. He just as fervently believes that lampooning Michelle Obama, and President Obama as a monkey, ape, gorilla is just can't you take a joke fun and games. He and the pack of race baiting websites, chat rooms, and of late, college frat parties, and student websites that ridicule the Obama's (and African-Americans) in assorted off beat, crude, vile cartoons and always with the vile depiction as monkeys or apes is by now standard fare. It's no accident that it is.
The long, sordid and savage history of racist stereotyping of African-Americans has been the stock in trade of race baiting and racial ridicule and for more than century. A few grotesque book titles from a century ago, such as The Negro a Beast, The Negro, a Menace to American Civilization, and the Clansman depicted blacks as apes, monkeys, bestial, and animal like. The image stuck in books, magazines, journals, and deeply colored the thinking of many Americans of that day; that day?
In the movie version of Rudyard Kipling children's classic, The Jungle Book, the Disney Studios in 1967 graduated from the other standard animal depiction of African-Americans as black crows to depicting African-Americans as the Monkey like jive, gibberish blathering King Louie. The film was remade in 1994.
Fifteen years later, New York Post Cartoonist Sean Delonas ignited a firestorm with his casual depiction of President Obama as a monkey. He did it precisely because that image didn't die a century, half century, a decade, or even a year ago. In 2007 Penn State researchers conducted six separate studies and found that many Americans still link blacks with apes and monkeys. Many of them were young, and had absolutely no knowledge of the vicious stereotyping of blacks of years past. Their findings with the provocative title "Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization and Contemporary Consequences," in the February 2008 issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, was published by the American Psychological Association.
The overwhelming majority of the participants in the studies bristled at the faintest hint that they had any racial bias. But the animal savagery image and blacks was very much on their minds. The researchers found that participants, and that included even those with no stated prejudices or knowledge of the historical images, were quicker to associate blacks with apes than they were to associate whites with apes.
This was not simply a dry academic exercise. The animal association and blacks has had devastating real life consequences. In hundreds of news stories from 1979 to 1999 the Philadelphia Inquirer was much more likely to describe African Americans than Whites convicted of capital crimes with ape-relevant language, such as "barbaric," "beast," "brute," "savage" and "wild." And jurors in criminal cases were far more likely to judge blacks more harshly than whites, and regard them and their crimes as savage, bestial, and heinous, and slap them with tougher sentences than whites.
First Lady Michelle Obama is a woman, a black woman, and a soft target for the frustrations and even scorn of the Obama loathers. During the campaign Obama opponents eagerly latched onto out-of-context statement she made at a campaign rally in which she allegedly questioned her faith in America, and made a supposedly less than reverential reference to the flag. They brutally tarred her as a closet anti-American, race-obsessed, black radical. That made her an instant campaign liability. For weeks she virtually disappeared from the campaign trail.
She has played a relatively low key role in the White House, and has succeeded in pretty much staying out of harm's way from the hits of hubby Obama's avowed enemies. That is all except when it comes to the image assault from the eternal animal mockery of blacks, an image that Baker and legions of other see nothing wrong with. It's an image that the First Lady and the President haven't seen the last of it. It's just too juicy, vile and hurtful to die. It's been that way for a century.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His nationally heard talk show is on KTYM-AM 1460 AM Los Angeles Friday 9:30 AM and KPFK Pacifica Radio 90.7 Los Angeles Saturday Noon PST.
There is a reason why traditions become traditions. They provide comfort in peaceful and turbulent times. They are the life preserver on the high seas of life.
Take Haiti and the Monday morning tradition in Port au Prince where young smoke some marijuana and down some brewskis. They can't really afford it because they aren't working so they rely on money from their parents or from well-meaning relatives living abroad. Some men believe that beer is a food group because it contains corn and barley. They say that the tradition makes them feel better because it helps relieve their stress. Heaven knows, if there is one place where the stress-o-meter has been on full tilt, it is modern-day Haiti, though the pre-earthquake Haiti was not exactly rolling in the dough, either.
My father had a Monday morning tradition too where he got up and went to work after eating a breakfast of eggs (sunny side up) toasted rye bread with butter and Lipton tea with lemon. Then he drove to work at the used car lot he owned.
In the end, that must be how Haiti became Haiti because their able-bodied nimrods keep following this tradition as a way to relieve stress rather than rolling up their sleeves and going to work. Maybe the elders, who look on and shake their heads, could stop looking on and shaking their heads long enough to say something to them before the whole place goes up in a giant puff of smoke.
Surprise of all surprises: The Obama Administration via super-diplomat, VP Joe Biden, admonished the Israeli government for building more settlements in East Jerusalem on his recent visit to the country. Outside of Pres. Obooma, Biden is the highest ranking American official to visit the country since the last historic election.
The left-wing administration's stand is up there with some other shockers of all shockers like the sun rising in the east each day and setting in the west, the rivers flowing into the seas and drinking orange juice with milk is not the most stellar idea because one is an acid and the other is a base (a chef sitting next to me on an airplane told me that.)
The idea that is whizzing past this administration's head faster than a rock thrown at a rally is the fact that anything the Israelis do will annoy the Palestinians, so here is a list of things the Israelis should avoid if they want to keep peace in the region.
1.) Build new settlements on land annexed in a war
2.) Breathe
3.) Brush and floss
4.) Gargle
5.) Bake bread
6.) Light any candles
7.) Cough, sneeze or go dancing
8.) Go folk dancing
9.) Be fruitful and multiply
Things they can do:
Give back the entire place before rolling over and dieing.
Tilikum, the Killer Whale, lived up to his name and killed a human being. Dawn Brancheau, his trainer, was his third kill. There is a heated controversy about programs that use our intellectually closest mammals as players in a captive minstrel show--making them jump through hoops, do tail stands and generally cavort for the pleasure of the human race.
The argument for the use of captive, and bred in captivity, dolphins and killer whales (also technically a kind of dolphin and not whale) is that they make us feel closer to them and care about their plight. This is an argument that had merit. I have no doubt that Flipper awakened a sense of empathy in generations of human children. Flipper lived, like a kind of biblical "Suffering Servant" and thousands, if not hundred of thousands, of dolphins were spared. Dolphin-free tuna programs came directly from our appreciation of the intelligence of dolphins.
Entertainment companies such as Sea World and Marineland brought millions of children into contact with these wonderful cetaceans. We were educated. We were entertained. We became empathetic. This was good. The OSCAR winning documentary, The Cove, comes in a nearly unbroken line from Flipper. We are now rightfully outraged by the herding and wanton killing of dolphins.
We should also understand that we no longer need to capture, breed and keep in servitude these wonderful creatures. We have film. We have Imax programs. We can disseminate information and create moving depictions of them as they are and not as performing captives, whose dignity is demeaned by dancing for their suppers in small tanks, when in the wild they roam our vast seas.
For those animals who have been in prison for decades, such as Tilikum, and those bred in captivity, freedom might mean death, but we don't really know. We need to release and track some of them so that we actually know what we are talking about. And we need to release populations that have been together in captivity in order to form their own pods. The argument that they will be lonely and vulnerable only applies if you break up the captive populations and release them one at a time. If release does, in fact, mean quick death, the rest should be allowed to live out their lives. But no more breeding programs. No more minstrel shows for the amusement of the superior species.
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Roger Ebert turned out to be a lucky man, although it may not have first seemed that way. In 2002, the famed film critic was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and had his thyroid removed. Then the cancer struck again and he had to have his lower jaw and the lower floor of his mouth removed. With it went his ability to eat or swallow, and he now has to take his meals through a drip bag. Later on, an artery burst as he was getting ready to leave the hospital, and he almost hemorrhaged to death.
But it turned out to be the old pearl inside the oyster, the idea where we lose one thing only to gain something else more precious, and that is the unending and unrelenting love of his wife, Chaz.
She's been the one to pick up the pieces when he's down, who doesn't want to eat in front of him, not because she doesn't want to eat alone, but because she doesn't want to taunt him with something he can no longer do. She was the one who cried when he spoke to her for the first time in four years through a computer in a voice spliced together from clips and sound bytes before he took ill. And she will be the one standing in the rain cheering him on long after everyone else has gone home. If there were ever a definition of love, this is it.
His other senses have taken over to compensate for what he has lost. He remembers things he thought were buried and forgotten and has dreamt of the day he and his father spent drinking root beer when he was a child and awoke with the taste of the frothy drink in his mouth. And he is still at work doing some of the most poignant writing of his life and has given the most four stars, and he is happy. Life seldom throws out a curve ball without also providing a back up.
Years ago, I interviewed for a position for a magazine for the blind. Before going, I did some research into blindness and learned that the other senses take over to compensate for what was lost so that a blind person will have a keener sense of hearing or a keener sense of smell. I was amazed as the editor, who was blind, recited the minute details of my resume back to me. When you lose one thing, you gain something else.
No one wants to get sick, but to exchange it for something better, or in this case for something beyond 'till death do us part, to have someone to cheer you on and pick up the pieces when you are certain you are at an end and there is no way out and who loves you not for externals but for the goodness and light they see in you, those are the things that somehow make it look like a fair trade indeed.
I am getting tired of paying taxes to keep kooks, lowlifes and thugs afloat. I don't mind paying for things like museums, operas and such. I mind having to pay to house kooks whose actions rival only that of a rabid squirrel. As they have about as much sense, I am proposing that they be given measure for measure of their own actions.
First, let's deal with the rapists. I know we all have our urges and biology, but we can also control them when we want to. So I am proposing we cut out jailhouse art, music and dancing classes, line these guys up and bring out the old penknife or a small nail clippers, depending, and give the body bit the old heave-ho. They may qualify for the Vienna Boys Choir afterwards, but if that is the price to pay for public peace of mind and finer music, then so be it.
The thugs on death row should be next. I know that we all have our childhoods. I know we all have our burdens to bear but they should be etherized and put down at the vet's office in fairness to their victims.
Let's not forget other criminals, too like about Rianne Theriault-Odom who doused Roberta Dos Santos Busby with gasoline and set her on fire. Theriault-Odom was sentenced to life in prison where she may get her freedom taken away but she will still have her body and face. A better punishment would be to dole out what she just gave. I know it sounds cruel, I know it may sound insane, but maybe if ne'er do-wells like her knew what was in store, then they might find other ways to occupy themselves.
A conference at Georgetown University looked this week at what the role of proselytizing should be in our interconnected, global era. I penned this piece for the Washington Post's "On Faith" blog for the occasion.
Key point: People of all faiths need a Golden Rule for proselytizing, but there are reasons they resist abiding by such a rule.
It's funny how, just 18 months ago, it was largely Democrats who railed about the growing deficit. Republican loyalists had a variety of explanations and rationalizations for it. Today the roles are reversed.
Is this hypocrisy on both sides? Of course it is. And it's irrational in the way that loyalists on each side complain that the other side is a tad more hypocritical. Tea Partiers may have legitimate grievances, but they seem to be all friction and heat and no light. Some want lower taxes, some want a lower deficit, some want Medicare untouched, some want less government, and so on.
Obama and progressives have set themselves up for this because they haven't shown any seriousness about the deficit, even while offering legitimate and necessary short-term fiscal stimuli.
And polarization, "with us or agin' us" politics has overwhelmed the system, seen again when the media attempted to reduce the recent health-care summit down to which party "won" more political points. Must the media be so foolish, so hellbent on crushing helpful discourse? Of course they must. They, like the politicians of both parties, seek only short-term gain.
Far be it from us to have a genuine discussion about what to do with Medicare, preexisting conditions and deficit reduction. Instead, let conservatives pretend that lower taxes will balance the budget and liberals pretend that spending more will keep us from going bankrupt.
A democracy indeed gets the government it deserves. But it's a helluva thing to stop and realize we deserve so little at this point in our history.
I've never been that hepped up on using drugs or medicine. Even taking children's aspirin when I have a fever is a no-no for me. Instead, I can be found in the kitchen rummaging through my cheap pots and pans to make chicken soup. It's about the only thing I know how to make aside from fried zucchini whose recipe is below. But when the soup does not work within one week, which it usually doesn't, then I can found suffering away at the doctor's office.
And aside from medical purposes, this is one reason why I am against marijuana because it is all so unnatural. How can people zone out and space out when the same stressors in life will be on the other side waiting to smack them upside the head?
Now the Mexican mafia has brought their marijuana trade to the Sequoia National Forest and other public lands where they have set up operations like workers on an ant farm or a bee colony. There are workers who tend to and water the crops and those who stand guard and shoot anyone who tries wreaking havoc on their million-dollar business.
If Mexico's economy improves, then the dope grown here will be one reason why. But there aren't any moral reasons to keep them afloat, so I am proposing that we start by taking to the skies and dusting the crops and the gunmen with sleeping powder and non-polluting pesticides that won't run off into our waterways and streams. When we are done we can set the plants afire then plant zucchini, onions and tomatoes before shipping the jerks in crates to their own volcano-laden island.
As promised, here is a recipe for fried zucchini
Wash and rinse the zucchini and cut into slices
Pour some olive oil into a saucepan
Put the zucchini into the pan
Cook until brown or until you get tired of cooking it
Drain and cover with kosher salt (There is a difference between that and regular salt)
Eat and enjoy
And now, back by popular demand... Tzipporah's Altered Chicken Soup Recipe
Take one nice chicken. Say a brucha (or a blessing) over it as you drop it in a pot of water. The chicken should be like a child swimming in a community pool; you neither want too much water nor too little, but just the right amount. I don't know what that is, so you will have to play around and figure it out for yourself.
Add a pinch of pepper and some kosher salt, too. It's not that I am a chauvinist about kosher salt. (Okay, maybe I am a little bit) but it's just that it tastes better and has more tang.
Always simmer your chicken soup and never boil because it is against the religion and you may wind up bringing a plague against your house and kitchen.
Next, add some sliced onions and two garlic cloves. Throw the cloves over your shoulder and into the pot just to add some panache and flair like those chefs on cooking shows.
After a few hours, add carrots (important for the eyes), celery (important for the teeth. I don't know, but I just made that up) and green beans (important for your love life. I really made that up) and in a few hours pull it off the stove or unplug the crock pot or whatever.
Put the concoction in the refrigerator because now is the marination time where you let it sit overnight. Skim the surface off after a day or two and voila, you have your soup.
And I will put a plague on anyone who copies either recipe without permission.
The fastest growing political movement in the United States consists of the unaffiliated independents. Republicans and Democrats are hemorrhaging membership right, left and center. People, in growing numbers, have lost faith that our system is working for either the greater good of the nation or for us as individual citizens.
We see partisanship and gridlock, anger and name-calling, cynicism and mendacity. We hear words of patriotism but see little evidence. Politicians run for office and their election is their only principal. From left to right, across the political spectrum, there is one point of agreement: This is not working.
Enter the Tea Party--a bunch of not unreasonably alienated people who are mad as hell and frightened by what they see as our dim future. I agree with Earl that the Tea Party folks are not automatically racist. Yes, certainly some are racists--as some Republicans and Democrats are also racist. The Tea Party people are both more and less than a racial/ethnic identity.
What the Tea Party is not is a party. There is no unifying principle or vision. While Democrats like to think of themselves as being for the common man, and Republicans like to be associated with conservative values, the Tea Party is united only in its wall-to-wall grievance. It has no platform only a myriad of complaints. This will make it hard for them to become a true political party or even a coherent force.
In this season we see the anger on the right and with the Libertarian distrust of government or any institution. We associate this anger with the Tea Party, but there is the same kind of feeling, mistrust of government and anger on the left. When you look and listen to the rhetoric from Tea Party events, you could easily translate it into left-leaning political issues. The fear that the fat cats and moneyed elites get everything and we, whoever "we" are, get nothing is pretty universal.
Our institutions are losing our trust and goodwill--with reason. Some day a third party will challenge our two moribund coalitions of corruption, but they will need a positive plan and not simply inchoate rage. Leaders of the Tea Party movement are making a big mistake and missing a real opportunity by allowing the racists and xenophobes, whom the cameras find, to become their icons. By denouncing the fear-mongers, they could become significant players in our system and not simply angry naysayers.
©2010 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
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