Liberal Values

Dehumanization

2012-01-08T22:59:00.000-08:00

Dehumanization occurs primarily as a result of being part of a larger specialized system, with a sense of futility of being able to change the course of that system. A person who cannot face shame, guilt or pain, of what harm the system that he is part of is doing to others, either rationalizes it by perceiving his role as fragmented and refusing to acknowledge responsibility for what the system is doing, and what he is doing as a part of that system, or by viewing those hurt by the system as subhuman and somehow deserving the pain. The major example would be Nazi Germany, where many Germans were "just following orders" (as Adolf Eichmann said) and where the Jews and other minorities, as well as disabled people, were portrayed as less than human and not deserving to live or to be treated with freedom and dignity. Other genocides have also taken place in modern times, usually based on a similar rationale.

A part of dehumanization is blocking out one's emotional feelings of empathy toward others. Sometimes it would seem necessary to do so in order to help others, such as when a doctor performs surgery. In general though, by blocking out such feelings, one not only can become more cruel toward others, but also toward oneself; in that he becomes a more repressed person, less able to share feelings of love or concern for others. Furthermore, in a large world such as ours, it is natural for one to care little about mass tragedies happening elsewhere, yet much more concerned about the trials of one friend, or a pet. The "good German" attitude caused by dehumanization becomes a vicious cycle: as people see their roles as fragmented, they become apathetic and allow those in power to accumulate even more power.

There have been suggestions for minimizing dehumanization. For example, encourage people to exercise more power in the decision-making process. Another example, educate children toward rehumanization and against behavior that might lead to dehumanization. And encourage people to think more in terms of the future, including the long-range future, so they may respond to situations which might lead to dehumanization. In Christian terms, we can each begin with ourselves, acknowledge our guilt and responsibility for our own bad actions, acknowledge our responsibility as part of a larger system, and become less apathetic, with the hope that we can each see ourselves and others as fully human.

Confusing filibusters with majority vote

2012-01-06T11:43:00.001-08:00

In her column today conservative pundit Michelle Malkin denounces the recess appointment of Richard Cordray as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She says:

"The nomination of former Democratic Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to serve as Dodd-Frank regulatory enforcer had been soundly defeated in the Senate before Christmas."

No his nomination was not defeated. A majority of Senators approved his nomination, by a vote of 53 to 45. Constitutionally only a majority approval in the Senate is required for presidential nominations. But there were not enough votes to overcome the filibuster. And Republicans made it clear they do not oppose Richard Cordray himself, they oppose the agency which he now heads. The way to exercise their opposition to an agency set up to protect consumers against financial fraud is to repeal it, which they can do once they gain control of the Senate.

Maybe Democratic members of the Senate should just bring sleeping bags and cots and forget about trying to get a super majority vote for every piece of legislation or presidential nomination opposed by the obstructionist Republicans.

Government must function in a democracy

2012-01-05T01:54:00.000-08:00

Republicans in Washington are expressing thier usual fake moral outrage, in this case because of a recess appointment by President Obama of Richard Cordray, a former Ohio attorney general, as the new director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. As a form of retaliation, it seems the GOP senators may refuse to approve several other nominees for positions involving the regulation of the banking industry.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is a legal agency established by the government. Republicans are still a minority in the Senate so the only way they can prevent it from functioning is through the filibuster. As reported, they don't object to the nominee, they object to the agency itself. Perhaps when Republicans regain control of the Senate and White House, they can abolish the agency, as well as other regulatory agencies that protect the American people from predatory practices of corporations. In the meantime, our government still has to function, and if the only way to do so in some cases is through recess appointments, then so be it.

Catholic politicians vs. the Vatican

2012-01-04T18:16:00.000-08:00

Rick Santorum in his almost victory speech last night, cited his religious faith as applied to his political views. But he fell short. He is a conservative Catholic politician, but unfortunately in his stand on political issues, he places his conservativism, as defined in American terms, above his Catholicism. In this sense he is not that different from liberal Catholic politicians such as Nancy Pelosi or John Kerry. The latter would agree with the Vatican's stand on a wide range of issues, such as protecting the environment, opposition to the death penalty, torture and preemptive wars, opposition in the words of Pope Benedict XVI to the “scandal of glaring inequalities” between rich and poor, and other social injustices. Santorum differs from the Vatican and Catholic bishops on these issues, but shares their stand on abortion and gay marriage. On the other hand, liberal politicians share the view of the Vatican on these issues, while differing with them on abortion and gay marriage.

There does not seem to be any Catholic politician in America, on either side of the political spectrum, who embraces the whole Catholic doctrine, but instead both conservative and liberals Catholics cite those portions of Catholic teachings which support their political positions while ignoring others. The same general principle applies to other Christian politicians. In general, conservative Christians are more faithful in adhering to the original doctrines of Christianity, except when it comes to teachings that address social inequalities and injustices.

Global warming

2011-08-06T15:24:00.000-07:00

I am not a scientist, but I respect those in the profession and would defer to the general consensus among scientists who specialize on a particular topic if I have any questions on the matter. In this case, the question is whether or not global warming, or climate change, is taking place. The consensus among climatalogists and meteorologists is yes it is happening. Not everyone in these fields agree, but that is the general consensus. Yet among the conservatives here in America, it has become almost a point of religious doctrine that not only is global warming not happening, but that it is a hoax. If a Republican politician veers from this attitude to recognize scientific findings he is not likely to go far in the party. The most recent case in this respect would seem to be Jon Huntsman.

Do Muslims have rights in America

2011-08-06T15:17:00.000-07:00

On a major conservative website, Townhall.com, there are often commentaries on Muslims, usually in the form of demanding that their rights be restricted in America. This is more prevalent among the individuals who join in the comments section (and to be fair, anyone can comment, even me), who take the view that Islam is not a genuine religion and therefore should not enjoy the same rights as other religions in America.

Having studied for many years communist Vietnam and its religious policy, where there is no inalienable right to worship, only the privilege to worship granted by the government to certain recognized religions, I can see the danger of this approach. If out of fear of Muslim terrorists we treat all Muslims as enemies, then to some degree we have already lost the wars, that is the wars we are conducting in Muslim countries, but also the continuing war here in America to preserve our constitutional rights.

We need lawyers in Congress

2011-08-06T14:48:00.000-07:00

On Real Time with Bill Maher last night, one of the guests opined that the problem with Congress is that there are too many lawyers. He said that in law school people are taught to argue, and that is all they do in Congress. Truth is, though, that law school is about much more than learning to argue, it teaches students in detail about our laws, and such an understanding is fundamental to those who serve in Congress, since one of the chief functions of Congress is to legislate, i.e. make laws. The problem with our current Congress does not come from lawyers but from ideologues just elected who have little understanding of the law or how our government works, and who, in this case, were willing to bring our country to the brink of defaulting on our national debt in order to make a point. Experience and knowledge are important qualities for those who serve, alongside a strong dose of public service attitude and focusing on what works best for our country and the world.

Will America wake up?

2011-08-06T14:42:00.000-07:00

With the stock market plummeting after the debt deal and Standard & Poor downgrading our credit rating, I wonder if Americans will come to realize that the Tea Party fanatics who control the House of Representatives do not represent our best interests, including those of the business community. When our economy goes down, everyone is hurt. And cutting government spending along the drastic lines demanded by the right not only throws tens of thousands of people out of work, and therefore cuts back on domestic consumption, but also cuts back on crucial services that are fundamental to our economy functioning well, including our transportation infrastructure. Only by increasing tax revenue can we get out of this mess, and it should not just be applied to the very rich. Let the Bush tax cuts end for all, so our economy can get back on track. I personally don't mind paying an extra few hundred dollars a year for fiscal solvency of our government.

Are Muslims not part of America?

2010-08-30T16:22:00.000-07:00

A question for those who oppose the establishment of a Muslim center two blocks from Ground Zero in New York: Do you oppose the construction of *any* mosque or Muslim center at this particular location, or only this one?

What bothers me about this protest is the implication that Muslims in general should be blamed for the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001, even though the actions were those of a handful of terrorists and were condemned by most major Muslim organizations in the U.S. and abroad. Consider the following statement for example, from the American Center for Law and Justice:

"When it comes to an Islamic mosque on the sacred site of Ground Zero, President Obama is out of step with the American people. He has voiced his support for the misguided project — ignoring the views of the majority of the American people and failing to understand the heart of the issue at stake: Building an Islamic mosque at Ground Zero is offensive to thousands of Americans who lost family and loved ones in the 9/11 terrorist attacks."

Notice also the claim that most Americans oppose the mosque. Is not our country based on majority rule and minority rights? A part of minority rights involves the right to freely express one's views and practice one's religion, regardless of how unpopular their beliefs might be. Otherwise, we would become just another dictatorship, where the rulers suppress dissent movements in the name of the people.

Muslims are just as much a part of this country as you or me. Many were among the victims of this terrorist attack, and many have fought in battle for our country. It isn't just a question of their legal rights, but also whether they should be treated with the same dignity and respect as anyone else in this country.

I believe the protest also sends a message to the Islamic world that we as Americans are the enemy of their religious faith. This may well doom any hopes of succeeding in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Finally there is the matter of anti-Muslim violence such as that which took place against the New York cabbie recently, and which seems to have been stirred up by the overheated rhetoric around this issue. Have any of the vocal opponents of the Muslim center spoke out against such anti-Muslim violence?

Glen Beck vs. Jim Wallis

2010-04-02T15:51:00.001-07:00

Last week, I came across Glenn Beck on Fox television denouncing people supposedly intent on overthrowing our government and way of life, i.e. President Obama and his supporters, with a group of photos of supposedly sinister characters displayed behind him as he spoke. To my surprise, one of the individuals displayed was Jim Wallis. I subsequently learned through web surfing that Beck had devoted an entire week to denouncing Wallis, who he described as the spiritual adviser to President Obama.

Beck's attacks on Wallis do not merit a detailed analysis or point-by-point refutation. How can one take him seriously when he says, for example, he had never heard of Dorothy Day before but then goes on to describe her as a Marxist, because she said she once was a Marxist? In fact Day radically changed her views after a religious conversion in the 1920s and became a devout Catholic. With Peter Maurin she founded the Catholic Worker movement. She was a nonviolent and spiritual activist, in some ways, much more threatening to the popularity of the far left than the right-wingers who during her time were trying to suppress even the civil rights movement, as well as basic labor rights which we now take for granted.

The reference to Dorothy Day came in the context of noting a conversation between her and Wallis in which Wallis said he once was a Marxist. I doubt Wallis was ever truly Marxist in his views, but what Beck is missing is the concept of repentance and people growing out of former beliefs. Was not the apostle Paul once the leading persecutor of Christians? In fact, Wallis came of age in the late 1960s as a seminary student, but from a conservative religious background as an evangelical Christian. In the early 1970s he joined with some like minded people to form a community and publish a magazine, first known as Post-American, later Sojourners. By the mid-1970s they had moved to Washington D.C. where they lived in a poor urban community and, like the Catholic Worker movement, agitated for a more equitable society and against U.S. military policies, particularly in Vietnam and Latin America.

At the time I became aware of them in the early 1970s, they gave me some hope, not because I agreed with all their positions, but because they represented an alternative to the tendency within American evangelical Christianity to incorporate a right-wing political ideology within their overall religious worldview.

I had grown up in a liberal Methodist church, and I value many of the things I learned, but I had friends and relatives who described themselves as "born-again" Christians and I could see their faith was very strong and real to them. So at the age of 21, I became a "born-again" Christian too. It was a dramatic change for me and I recall attending a Billy Graham rally where he urged new converts to find a "Bible-believing" church. Over the next several years I attended various churches that were more in tune with my new orientation, and also became involved with a Christian fellowship on campus. But it was frustrating that the churches I attended, as well as the radio broadcasts I heard, seemed to take for granted that to be a good Christian one must essentially be a conservative Republican.

Glen Beck comes on with the style of a charismatic television preacher, although he is himself a convert to Mormonism, after being brought up as a Catholic. In theory, this would make him a heretic, or even an apostate from a conservative Christian perspective, as Mormonism is considered a heresy from this viewpoint. Wallis, on the other hand, does not seem to have questioned any of the basic doctrines of the Christian faith. But in the polarized times we live in, politics seems to trump all, and Beck's style of personal attack -- for example, accusing any Christian who advocates social justice or progressive politics of being on the same level as a Nazi or Communist -- seems to go down well with the conservative "tea party" folks to whom he is appealing.

This is not meant as a whole-hearted defense of Wallis and the Sojourners community he leads. When I read their Sojourners magazine back in the 1970s, there were some things that bothered me, primarily that it came across in a very self-righteous style. Also, I recall the magazine, while calling on the U.S. to provide aid and normalize relations with the post-75 government of Vietnam, seemed to overlook the serious repression that was taking place in the country at the time.

That said, I would not place Wallis in the same category as some of the other radicals or former radicals that have come under scrutiny in recent years. Rather, he would seem more like a typical member of the baby boomer generation, or that portion which protested the Vietnam war and agitated for social justice on economic and civil rights issues.

It was because Wallis called on Christians not to watch or listen to Glen Beck that he came under attack from Beck. In this respect, I disagree with Wallis, people should not close off their minds to the views of others with whom they strongly disagree. But Beck acted worse, displaying himself as a petty and vindictive character by responding with a week of personal attacks against Wallis.

What the prosecutor said

2008-10-10T12:55:00.000-07:00

William C. Ibershof, lead prosecutor of the Weathermen, in a letter to today's New York Times:

As the lead federal prosecutor of the Weathermen in the 1970s (I was then chief of the criminal division in the Eastern District of Michigan and took over the Weathermen prosecution in 1972), I am amazed and outraged that Senator Barack Obama is being linked to William Ayers’s terrorist activities 40 years ago when Mr. Obama was, as he has noted, just a child.
Although I dearly wanted to obtain convictions against all the Weathermen, including Bill Ayers, I am very pleased to learn that he has become a responsible citizen.
Because Senator Obama recently served on a board of a charitable organization with Mr. Ayers cannot possibly link the senator to acts perpetrated by Mr. Ayers so many years ago.
I do take issue with the statement in your news article that the Weathermen indictment was dismissed because of “prosecutorial misconduct.” It was dismissed because of illegal activities, including wiretaps, break-ins and mail interceptions, initiated by John N. Mitchell, attorney general at that time, and W. Mark Felt, an F.B.I. assistant director.

Bill Ayers vs. stock market crash vs. Alaska Independence Party

2008-10-10T11:22:00.001-07:00

And the list goes on. If we play the guilt by association game, while Obama's connections with Bill Ayers seem pretty remote, Sarah Palin's husband belonged to the Alaska Independence Party for seven years, an organization which advocates the secession of Alaska from the United States and has established links with other state secessionist organizations, some of which promote white supremacy. And McCain in the past served on the board of directors of an organization affilited with the radical right wing World Anti-Communist League, described by the Anti-Defamation League as 'a gathering place, a forum, and a point of contact for extremists, racists, and anti-Semites.'

Meanwhile the stock market continues its alarming crash. I would really like to see the candidates spend the remaining weeks addressing this issue, rather than playing the guilt by association game. After all, why would McCain suspend his campaign for a few days to urge Congress to pass the bailout legislation yet ignore the exacerbating economic problems that have taken place since it was passed?

Novelist Elif Shafak to be tried for "Insulting Turkishness"

2006-08-23T14:01:00.000-07:00

Novelist Elif Shafak is to be brought to trial in a Turkish court Sept. 21 for "insulting Turkishness", according to a report of PEN American Center. She is the third prominent Turkish novelist to be tried in just over a year. Shafak, who divides her time between Turkey and teaching at the University of Arizona, wrote her novel in English about two families, one in Instanbul and the other an Armenian family living in San Francisco. The offending passage in her book mentions Turkey's genocide against Armenians in the early 20th century. The Turkish version of her book is a bestseller in Turkey.

Kentucky school board nixes banning book

2006-08-23T13:52:00.001-07:00

The Warren County School Board of Kentucky voted 3-2 against
banning a book the parent of a Greenwood High School student said was
"full of various types of immorality," according to Bowling Green
Daily News (Kentucky), Aug. 15. Here is an excerpt of the article:

Lee Ann Austin first complained last year about "Flowers for Algernon," by
Daniel Keyes, when it was one of the required books in her son's English
class.

The science fiction book, first published in 1966, focuses on Charlie
Gordon, a 32-year-old man with mental retardation who undergoes surgery
that turns him into a genius. Part of the plot involves the character's
sexualexperiences, which include his having sex with a former teacher,
as well as other women.

Austin objected to the school's inclusion of a book that portrays this, as
well as drug use and profanity...

"Flowers for Algernon" was 47th on the American Library Association's list
of the 100 books most challenged between 1990 and 2000...

Ocean acidification threatens marine life

2006-03-19T23:50:00.000-08:00

Increasing acidification of the oceans from carbon dioxide emissions could cause mass extinction of marine life, reports Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology

When carbonic acid input is modest, sediments from the ocean floor can buffer the increases in acidity. But at the current rate of input--nearly 50 times the natural background from volcanoes and other sources--this buffering mechanism is overwhelmed. Previous estimates suggest that in less than 100 years, the pH of the oceans could drop by as much as half a unit from its natural value of 8.2 to about 7.7. (On the pH scale, lower numbers are more acidic and higher numbers are more basic.)

This drop in ocean pH would be especially damaging to marine animals such as corals that use calcium carbonate to make their shells. Under normal conditions the ocean is supersaturated with this mineral, making it easy for such creatures to grow. However, a more acidic ocean would more easily dissolve calcium carbonate, putting these species at particular risk.

Bush uses straw man fallacy

2006-03-19T23:21:00.000-08:00

President Bush has been employing straw man arguments with increasing frequency as his popularity plummets, reports AP correspondent Jennifer Lovan:

When the president starts a sentence with "some say" or offers up what "some in Washington" believe, as he is doing more often these days, a rhetorical retort almost assuredly follows.

The device usually is code for Democrats or other White House opponents. In describing what they advocate, Bush often omits an important nuance or substitutes an extreme stance that bears little resemblance to their actual position.

He typically then says he "strongly disagrees" - conveniently knocking down a straw man of his own making.

Stop big oil giveaways

2006-02-15T11:27:00.000-08:00

Democrats in Congress will present legislation this week to require oil and gas companies to pay royalties to the federal treasury for drilling on public lands. American Chronicle reports: "taxpayers stand to lose at least $7 billion on oil and gas retrieved from federal lands, according to a report in the New York Times published today." Historically, oil and gas companies have had to pay royalties for drilling on federal lands, but since 1995 they have been exempt from such payments, despite their record earnings.

Seven billion dollars is alot of money, as much as the California state deficit. Another case of big business being allowed to profit off the destruction of our natural resources.

I am back

2006-02-14T17:19:00.000-08:00

I apologize for the long delay in posting anything to this blog site. I don't know if anyone still reads it. But I plan to resume posting within the next few days, on issues concerning liberal values.

Remembering my mother

2005-07-16T09:10:00.000-07:00

My mother, Mary Denney, passed away last Sunday. She died peacefully, in her sleep at home.

One of my earliest childhood memories of mother was when she taught me the Lord's Prayer as I lay in bed.

She was not one who wore her religion on her sleeve, she did not come across as overly religious or sanctimonius. Instead, she lived her faith in her involvement with this church and in her relationships with others. I remember in my youth she told me how much she liked a book by the psychiatrist Eric Fromm, The Art of Love. The theme of this book was that love is where we find the meaning of our existence. God is love, my mother told me.

Mother took pride in whatever modest accomplishments I made in life. Even when I would thank her for dinner, she would comment on how thoughtful it was of me to thank her for having prepared the meal.

She also sought to expand her own horizons. When I was in high school, she began attending part-time the College of San Mateo, and then onto San Francisco State from where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts with honors. She was a better college student than me.

After college she painted many pictures, and received some awards at local shows. We have many of them on the walls of my parents' home, along with paintings by her brother Richard, some of them are local landscapes, some of them are of people, including my mother's father.

Mother also began travelling around the world in the later years of her life. She went with travel groups to Europe, the Mid-East, China. I think she wanted to see as much of the world as she could before her life ended.

Mother worked hard on compiling a family history on both her and my dad's side. She did alot of research, visited the Mormon archives in Salt Lake City and various places in the midwest. The family history is a few hundred pages in a looseleaf binder, with many old photographs, and quite alot of fascinating detail. She managed to trace her ancestry all the way back to an emperor of Britain at the time of the Roman empire.

She took good care of herself, and looked young for her age. I recall in the early 90s she was told a few times that she looked like Hillary Clinton. And that was very pleasing to her, because she really liked Hillary, who was also someone from the midwest who grew up with strong values from the Methodist church.

The last years of my mother's life were very difficult for both her and my father who worked hard to take good care of her. She suffered from Alzheimer's and related problems. But even then she focused her mind on what was most important to her, her love for her family. Often, while visiting, I would be talking to dad about something and she would suddenly say, "I love William Julian Denney with all my heart, and I love my sons David and Stephen." Sometimes she would ask me about her grandchildren. Actually there were no grandchildren, but she wanted very much to believe that she had grandchildren. Sometimes she would just hold onto my hand for awhile, like when I would go out to the sofa to sit down and she would sit next to me. When it came time for me to go back to Berkeley, I would shake hands with dad, and by then mother would usually be laying down in bed or on the reclining chair, so I would lean over so she could kiss me on the head to say goodbye.

There are probably more stories I could tell about her, but the main thing I recall as her son is the strong love she had for her family, along with her sweet disposition and her caring and thoughtful attitude for other relatives and friends, and people she knew in church.

What Durbin and the FBI said

2005-06-26T09:38:00.000-07:00

Since he has been denounced so harshly for his statement
on Guantanamo, it might be helpful to read what Illinois
Senator Durbin actually said that provoked the outrage.
The full speech can be found here.

The offending passage:

"..When you read some of the graphic descriptions of
what has occurred here-- I almost hesitate to put them
in the record, and yet they have to be added to this
debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw.
And I quote from his report:

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to
find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position
to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times
they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been
left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the
air conditioning had been turned down so far and the
temperature was so cold in the room, left there for 18-24
hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning
had been turned down so far and the temperature was
so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was
shaking with cold....On another occasion, the
[air conditioner] had been turned off, making the
temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees.
The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile
of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling
his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion,
not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely
loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been
since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot
in the fetal position on the tile floor.

"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was
an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners
in their control, you would most certainly believe this must
have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some
mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for
human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action
of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.."

In response to this, Chris Wallace of FOX news said:

"But what the FBI memo alleges, and it is an allegation,
is, you know, would be considered a day at the beach
in the Soviet gulag or Nazi ... I mean, what was so
horrific in the memo? And I'm not saying, you know, there
aren't legitimate questions there, is that someone is
chained to a floor and forced to defecate on themselves,
and has loud rock music playing. Excuse me? I mean, you know,
Auschwitz? Bergen Belsen? The Soviet gulag? I think
they would have been very happy to be allowed to defecate
on themselves."

I don't know any former prisoners of the Soviet Gulag or of
Nazi concentration camps, but I do know Vietnamese who were
detained in re-education camps that I think can be fairly
compared to the Gulag system, and the treatment described in
the FBI memo is actually a common form of mistreatment of
prisoners in Vietnam -- the shackling of hands and feet in
confined positions and exposure to temperature extremes.

To me this is torture, in that it involves the infliction
of severe mental and physical pain. The defecating and
urinating on themselves, as well as the pulling out of hair
and shaking from extreme cold, is a byproduct of the
fact that these prisoners in Guantanamo were "chained hand
and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair,
food or water." This kind of mistreatment of prisoners in
the U.S. would be illegal, even against those
who committed the most heinous of crimes.

In reading this memo, Senator Durbin was not claiming that
overall treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo is comparable
to the Nazi concentration camps or the Soviet Gulag. He was
saying that the particular treatment of prisoners
described in the FBI memo is what we would associate with
the treatment of prisoners in these more extreme prison
systems. Maybe he was wrong to compare this kind of torture
to Nazi concentration camps. But on the other hand, I don't
think that the kind of torture described in the FBI memo would
be considered a "day at the beach" by many former prisoners,
including those who survived the Soviet Gulag system.

If someone had read the FBI memo to me, without the reference
to rap music or the FBI, I would probably think the memo was
describing a prison in Vietnam.

It seems that those concerned with the human rights have to walk on pins and needles when criticizing U.S. prison abuses in Guantanamo, Iraq or elsewhere. The Bush administration and its supporters will jump on the slightest hyperbole from those who criticize such injustices, but it is only a diversionary tactic. Their moral outrage goes in only one direction: against those who speak out against the inhumane policies they are carrying out.

Wendy's

2005-04-17T23:08:00.000-07:00

I used to eat fairly often at fast food restaurants, and of those Wendy's seemed one of the better, or more healthy one. As I have learned more, I try to avoid fast food restaurants, but still Wendy's received a bad deal with this controversy over the finger in the chili.

Media reports suggest that the finger might have been placed in the chili by the person who claimed to have found it. Of course, I have no idea what is true, but the fact is that this kind of horrible event could happen at almost any restaurant. Wendy's has been badly hurt by the whole news story. I hope they can recover well, alhtough I know I won't be eating any chili there for a long time.

Terri Schiavo

2005-03-28T09:57:00.000-08:00

The sad and tragic case of Terri Schiavo has captured the imagination of our nation. Much of the media portrays this as a religious debate, but there are also factual questions involved here -- namely is she really brain dead, and does she feel no pain as she slowly dies of thirst and starvation? Yesterday, a priest who is the spokesman for her parents said Schiavo smiled, raised her hands and made guttural sounds late Sunday while being visited by her father and a friend. Another report I read, from lifenews.com, said hospice workers have provided Terri morphine to be able to ease the tremendous pain that comes with dying from dehydration.

Are these people lying, or are they engaged in wishful thinking? If the answer to both is no, then why are we letting her die in this manner? It seems to me what we have here is de facto euthanasia, and with that decision made, it would be more humane to give her real euthanasia, so she could die more quickly and painlessly.

The other question that comes to mind is, why are her parents and siblings forced to stand by in protest while the decisions over her life are made by her husband of five years who is now virtually remarried to someone else with whom he has had two children? It seems at the beginning of life, pro-abortion rights advocates support the right of the mother to determine the future of the unborn child, but at the end of life they oppose the right of a Schiavo's parents to decide her future, instead letting that decision rest with her husband who is now sharing his life with another woman.

Whatever charges of hypocrisy may be leveled at the Bush administration, or other conservatives on this issue, I believe the above questions need to be addressed.

The cell phone

2005-03-28T09:31:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, Easter Sunday, while driving on the Bay Bridge toward San Francisco, I noticed a burning smell. I looked at the temperature guage, and saw to my horror that the car was overheated, with the guage pointed at the extreme. With about a mile to go to Treasure Island, and smoke or steam coming out of the engine, I just made it to the turnoff. Fortunately I had a cell phone and Triple A (although I did not realize I had the basic service, meaning I had to pay $10/mile over five miles of towing). It was raining and the tow truck driver had some problems finding me, but finally he arrived and I had the car towed to a Berkeley repair shop. Now I wait today to find out what the damage is, in the meantime relying on foot or the bus for transportation.

This morning there was a news segment about how widespread the use of the cell phone has become. Some people might consider it a nuisance, but the car is one place where it is essential. Because I don't need to use a cell phone frequently, I have a Virgin Mobile phone, which allows me to just buy a card at various values ($20, $30, etc.), as opposed to having a monthly plan. The only precaution is that you have to keep the phone account at a certain level, otherwise you risk it running out of money. That almost happened to me yesterday, as I had only about $1.50 left in the account at the conclusion of several long phone calls. The charge is 25 cents per minute, 10 cents per minute after using the phone for 10 minutes in a day.

The other message from this experience is: do not stop on the Bay Bridge or other bridges and similar highway structures if you can avoid it; drive to the nearest turnoff instead. Better to risk the car's health than your own life.

Going on strike?

2005-03-13T07:31:00.000-08:00

I attended a meeting of my union the other day, the Coalition of University Employees (CUE), which represents clerical workers in the University of California system (I am a library assistant, hence a clerical worker). It seems a strike is possible within a month. The leaders cited a report which said we employees should be paid significantly higher. We had a strike a few years ago, but that had a definite beginning and end, lasting just a few days. This strike, on the other hand, would be open-ended, meaning it could last several months. I don't want to cross the picket line, but on the other hand, I cannot afford to go indefinitely without a paycheck, and with questionable job security, especially after I have worked so many years for the university and am looking forward to retirement. I believe that is the situation of many other UC employees represented by CUE. Our pay is not great, but it is not like we are working at Walmart, which is the current job trend in our country. I wonder sometimes if the CUE leaders are just in that old 60s Berkeley mode, looking for a people's confrontation with the establishment.

Misrepresenting Howard Dean

2005-03-02T08:06:00.000-08:00

In his careless misreading of a Cornell Daily Sun report on Howard Dean's speech at Cornell, columnist Robert Novak on CNN claimed Dean said that if left untended, over the years Social Security will lose about 80 percent of the benefits. The Republican National Committee thought so much of it that it posted Novak's comment on its website, with a link to the CNN video of Novak. However, what Dean said was that if left alone for 30 years SSI benefits would be reduced to 80 percent of what it is now. In other words Novak was off by 60 percent in his misrepresentation of Dean. Let us see how long it takes for the RNC or Novak to correct the error.

Update: The RNC website deleted the reference to Novak citing Dean within a day, but did not mention its error nor apologize. Novak was quoted by CNN's Judy Woodruff several days later as stating he had meant to cite Dean as saying SSI would be reduced to 80 percent of its current benefits, not by 80 percent. Media Matters for America, which commented in some detail on this whole issue, noted that (as of March 7) Rush Limbaugh was still citing Novak's original statement without correction..

Media scandal continues

2005-02-19T10:30:00.000-08:00

Today's New York Times reports new developments in the unravelling scandal of fake news from the White House, as reported by Anne Kornblut:

"The comptroller general has issued a blanket warning that reminds federal agencies they may not produce newscasts promoting administration policies without clearly stating that the government itself is the source.

"Twice in the last two years, agencies of the federal government have been caught distributing prepackaged television programs that used paid spokesmen acting as newscasters and, in violation of federal law, failed to disclose the administration's role in developing and financing them.

"And those were not isolated incidents, David M. Walker, the comptroller general, said in a letter dated Thursday that put all agency heads on notice about the practice.

"In fact, it has become increasingly common for federal agencies to adopt the public relations tactic of producing 'video news releases' that look indistinguishable from authentic newscasts and, as ready-made and cost-free reports, are sometimes picked up by local news programs. It is illegal for the government to produce or distribute such publicity material domestically without disclosing its own role..."

In the same issue, Frank Rich comments that there are now at least six fake journalists who have either been on the payroll of the Bush administration "or a barely arms-length ally like Talon News while simultaneously appearing in print or broadcast forums that purport to be real news." He continues:

"Of these six, two have been syndicated newspaper columnists paid by the Department of Health and Human Services to promote the administration's 'marriage' initiatives. The other four have played real newsmen on TV. Before Mr. Guckert and Armstrong Williams, the talking head paid $240,000 by the Department of Education, there were Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia. Let us not forget these pioneers - the Woodward and Bernstein of fake news. They starred in bogus reports ('In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting,' went the script) pretending to 'sort through the details' of the administration's Medicare prescription-drug plan in 2004. Such 'reports,' some of which found their way into news packages distributed to local stations by CNN, appeared in more than 50 news broadcasts around the country and have now been deemed illegal 'covert propaganda' by the Government Accountability Office.

"The money that paid for both the Ryan-Garcia news packages and the Armstrong Williams contract was siphoned through the same huge public relations firm, Ketchum Communications, which itself filtered the funds through subcontractors. A new report by Congressional Democrats finds that Ketchum has received $97 million of the administration's total $250 million P.R. kitty, of which the Williams and Ryan-Garcia scams would account for only a fraction. We have yet to learn precisely where the rest of it ended up.."

On the other hand, he notes:

"It is a brilliant strategy. When the Bush administration isn't using taxpayers' money to buy its own fake news, it does everything it can to shut out and pillory real reporters who might tell Americans what is happening in what is, at least in theory, their own government. Paul Farhi of The Washington Post discovered that even at an inaugural ball he was assigned 'minders' - attractive women who wouldn't give him their full names - to let the revelers know that Big Brother was watching should they be tempted to say anything remotely off message."

Regrets in life

2005-02-13T13:05:00.000-08:00

There are some people who can look back on their lives and say if they had to do it all over again, they would not do anything differently. I am not one of those.

Among the regrets I have in life, not necessarily in order of importance:

- That I never married and raised a family. My mother, now suffering from dementia, God bless her, is convinced she has grandchildren, and wants to know when she can visit the babies in the hospital. It doesn't matter how many times I tell her otherwise.

- That I did not find a better way of dealing with my disease. For over 30 years I have had ankylosing spondalitis, a form of rheumetoid arthritis where the joints of the vertebrae gradually fuse together. It started probably when I was around 17 or 18, because at that time I experienced occassional back problems, but did not become really noticeable, and properly diagonosed, until I was 27.

- That I did not have a greater sense of purpose in pursuing my education and career choices.

Much of this goes back to choices I made in my youth. When I was in high school, I was very shy, afraid even to try to eat lunch with the various cliques on campus, but my participation in sports as a distance runner became my main focus of energy and time. And the few friends I had were fellow distance runners. I put much more of myself into the sport than into trying to develop some kind of social life or mastering the subject matter of my classes. If it were not for my disability, I might still be running today, in fact I would have competed seriously (although I was never that good) probably until I was 30. But now I wonder, if in retrospect, the running might have contributed to my disease, and that if I had not gone out for sports, maybe I would be healthy today. And I also regret, that after my diagnosis, I did not more agressively resist the natural progression of the disease, through proper exercise and maintaining straight posture.

I know we can't relive the past, but still I regret that in high school and college, that I did not have a better sense of connection between what I was studying at the time and what practical benefits my acquired knowledge would serve out there in the real world. I wish I had taken some shop and particularly auto mechanics classes, but those were frowned upon at the time by those who wanted to pursue the college prep route. And I wish I had taken some business classes too. I also wished I had stayed on top of math and kept at it through calculus, and that I had become fluent in some foreign languages like Spanish and French.

In college I majored in history, but in truth I was just taking whatever classes interested me; some classes I still remember well, such as a Writings of C.S. Lewis course and a Black Existence in American Life course. But overall, if I was going to major in history, my course selection should have been more comprehensive. Better yet, would have been to major or at least minor in something more practical like Business Administration.

I went back to grad school to get a teaching certificate and then Masters degree in teaching high school social studies, but the job market for applicants in this area was so bad that I never got past substitute teaching, which I hated. With spare time on my hands, and new friendships with some Vietnamese refugees, I developed an interest in human rights in Vietnam, first publishing a newsletter, and later working at the UC Berkeley Indochina Archive, where I worked from 1983-2002. But during all those years I worked at the archive, I was paid a small clerical salary, and in fact for many of those years was paid only part time, even while working full time.
Now I work at the main library of the university, cataloging books. But I regret that I did not pursue a different route in graduate studies, perhaps to law school, to business school to get an MBA, or to library school to get a Masters degree in library science. The latter probably would have been the most suitable choice.

Of course I could not live through all my years looking at life through the prism of a middle aged man. It might be boring, But if I were to advise young people today, I would tell them to try to understand how valuable education can be for their lives and to develop a plan for the goals they eventually want to achieve. Maybe not to become a famous movie star or politician, but just to find a decent job, to raise a family and live in a nice home. I think it today's society, with all the cutbacks in public education and outsourcing of jobs, it is more difficult than before, but the goal is still attainable if you work for it.

Protecting Halliburton

2005-02-05T01:12:00.000-08:00

In his State of the Union address, President Bush said the U.S. economy has been held back by "irresponsible class actions and frivolous asbestos claims," and urged Congress to pass reforms to limit such lawsuits. It is strange that the President would come to the defense of those who spread a major cause of cancer in this country, in the State of the Union address, no less.

But perhaps it is not so strange when we learn that his vice-president's company Halliburton has just lost a $30 million lawsuit on this very issue. As reported by the Seattle Times:

The Halliburton Co. settled legal claims with about 120 families of asbestos victims in the Pacific Northwest this week, agreeing to pay out $30 million and to create a fund for future victims of the deadly fiber.

The local settlement was part of a $4.3 billion national settlement involving about 250,000 plaintiffs who had sued the company in connection with exposure to asbestos products distributed by Halliburton subsidiaries.

Matthew Bergman, attorney for the local families and one of seven lawyers involved in negotiating the settlement, said Dresser Industries, a Halliburton subsidiary, knew since the 1930s that asbestos was harmful, yet issued no warnings. Locally, asbestos products were widely used in shipyards, pulp mills and power plants.

Many of Bergman's clients worked at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, he said. Some were civilian workers and others were sailors, some of whom remember sleeping in bunks beneath pipes insulated with asbestos, he said.

Our moral values president in action, working to protect companies that destroy the health of the American people.

Bush's meeting with black leaders

2005-01-26T19:19:00.000-08:00

Also in today's New York Times is a report by Elisabeth Bumiller on a one-hour meeting between President Bush and 20 African-American religious and community leaders. In this meeting, he pledged that he would fight for a constitutional ban on gay marriage, and that fighting HIV and AIDS in Africa remained a priority. Perhaps strangest of all, he argued that they should support his plan to partially privatize Social Security, based on the reasoning that such changes could benefit blacks as they have a shorter average life span than whites and end up putting more money into the retirement system than they take out. This is our president in action: rather than addressing the health problems that result in shorter life spans for blacks and other minorities, he tries to sell them on the idea that their shorter life spans mean they would benefit from his plans on Social Security. The article said all the leaders were supporters of Bush.

Budget Deficit Will Rise Again

2005-01-26T19:05:00.000-08:00

Front page story in today's New York Times:
Bush Aides Say Budget Deficit Will Rise Again, by Edmund L. Andrews

White House officials say the budget deficit will rise to $427 billion, according to the NYT report, "which includes part of an additional $80 billion that Mr. Bush requested mostly for Iraq.."

According to the Congressional Budget Office, if Pres. Bush is successful in persuading the Republican Congress to make tax cuts permanent, that will add an additional $2 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years. And the agency predicts the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost our country another $600 billion over the next ten years, *if* they taper off gradually.

Added to that, if the plans to partially privatize Social Security succeed, that will cost between $1 trillion and $2 trillion over the next two decades.

It is incredible that here in California, our former governor could have been removed from office for a deficit of a few billion dollars (only to be replaced by a governor who makes no headway in reducing the deficit), while nationally our Republican administration is running up deficits that will be in the trillions of dollars over the next few decades with little effort to stop this travesty.

The Inauguration as a form of bribery

2005-01-16T16:46:00.000-08:00

"Large corporations, many of which have enormous regulatory and policy interests in Washington, are paying for most of President Bush's inauguration,"reports Matt Stearns of Knight-Ridder. Bush is expected to tie a record he set in 2001 with a $40 million event (the previous record was $33 million set by Clinton in 1993). All of the money comes from private, mostly corporate sources who have an obvious interest in the policies of the Bush administration. Stearns reports the largest contributor so far are the financial service companies, who have so far donated $4 million, and who will benefit from Bush's scheme to establish private investment accounts as a part his Social Security reform, and who also benefit from the tax cuts. There are no legal limits on corporate contributions to this event. These are people who really understand that you get what you pay for (and more), unlike most citizens of this country. Donating to this event is a good investment for these corporate interests, in this legalized system of bribery.

Social Security employees unhappy

2005-01-16T13:52:00.000-08:00

"Over the objections of many of its own employees, the Social Security Administration is gearing up for a major effort to publicize the financial problems of Social Security and to convince the public that private accounts are needed as part of any solution," reports Robert Pear of today's New York Times. He adds: "But agency employees have complained to Social Security officials that they are being conscripted into a political battle over the future of the program. They question the accuracy of recent statements by the agency, and they say that money from the Social Security trust fund should not be used for such advocacy."

Pear also quotes Robert M. Ball, who worked at the Social Security Administration for three decades and was commissioner under Democratic and Republican presidents from 1962 to 1973, who said: "It's fine for the agency to answer factual questions, but it's unusual to use the Civil Service organization to push a political agenda, especially because what they're saying is not true. The program is not going bankrupt."

Interesting that overturning our Social Security system has become such a high priority for the Bush administration after his re-election. I don't recall him saying much about it during the campaign -- maybe he was afraid of losing Florida? Now we see another case of questionable use of a government agency to promote a dubious ideological position.

The plot against America: a novel

2005-01-16T09:10:00.000-08:00

I recently read Philip Roth's novel, The Plot Against America. In this novel, Roth imagines what it would be like if Charles Lindbergh, the famous pilot well known for his isolationist views at that time, had become president in 1940. This is actually the first novel of Roth's I have read, although from some reviews I have read it may well be his best. It is a real page turner, quite engrossing and vividly written. It has an autobiographical quality to it as well, as Roth uses his real name and childhood age at the time, although some of the characers are composites of people he knew growing up. The novel is set in Newark, New Jersey, Roth growing up in a lower middle-class Jewish neighborhood. His father, an insurance agent who did not have the opportunity to receive much education, is the center of integrity in this novel. It is a valuable portrayal of the life of a Jewish-American family at that time, when anti-Semitism was much more open and widespread than now, but not as apparent to the Roth family until after Lindbergh's election. There are elements of satire in it as well, particularly in the euphemistic approach the Lindbergh administration adopts in implementing its anti-Semitic domestic policies and in making alliances with Hitler and Japan. Does it have relevance for today? I think so in some respects, particularly in how our society can be misled by shallow politicians (like Lindbergh), who can gain popularity through superficial campaign techniques while pursuing darker designs that threaten the integrity of our society.

You get what you pay for

2005-01-12T14:34:00.000-08:00

According to a recent Rand study, California's education system ranks among the lowest in the nation. This is quite a transformation for a state once considered to be in the forefront of public education. Unfortunately the system will receive no help from our governor. Schwarzenegger is determined not to raise any kind of taxes in order to deal with the huge deficit facing our state, so instead, like his predecessor Gray Davis, he has been shuffling around funds and borrowing from the future. Now he is adding a new component, cutting funds for the programs that most directly serve the people of this state, while condemning those who protest as "special interest" groups.

As reported by The Los Angeles Times yesterday:

"A boost in money for local schools would be put off — even as national reports suggest California's education system is in trouble. As commuters spend more time than ever sitting in traffic, more than $1 billion worth of payments for road projects would be canceled.

"The plan would cut welfare benefits, the pensions of teachers and other public employees, and the salaries of workers who provide home care to the frail elderly and disabled.

"University students would get hit with fee hikes, and tens of thousands of low-income Californians would have to begin paying premiums to get healthcare. Visits to the dentist for poor people would be limited. Thousands of low-income seniors would lose their renter's tax credit.

"The proposed budget is larger than the current year's spending plan of $105 billion. But that increase is not enough to avoid dramatic cuts in services."

Why can we not recognise that in order for California and our nation to be great, we have to pay for it? We ask young men and women to go over to Iraq and risk life and limb for a war we should have never entered, yet here in America we are led by Republican politicians who believe there should be no fiscal sacrifice -- especially from those who have the most money -- to maintain even the most basic services.

Over 50,000 dead from tidal wave

2004-12-28T08:29:00.000-08:00

Reuters reports that the death toll from Sunday's tsunami in the Indian Ocean has now passed 50,000. This is more than double the number I heard yesterday; and just as I am writing this on the television news they now say it could rise past 80,000:

"The apocalyptic destruction caused by the wave dwarfed the efforts of governments and relief agencies as they turned from rescuing survivors to trying to care for millions of homeless, increasingly threatened by disease amid the rotting corpses....

"...Sri Lanka and Indonesia reported death tolls around 19,000 each and expected them to keep rising.

"India's toll of 11,500 included at least 7,000 on one archipelago, the Andamans and Nicobar. On one island, the surge of water triggered by Sunday's cataclysmic undersea earthquake killed two-thirds of the population.

"At magnitude 9.0, the tremor was the biggest in 40 years. The chasm that it tore in the seabed off the Indonesian island of Sumatra launched a tsunami that raced across the Andaman Sea and struck Sri Lanka, southern India, the Maldives, Malaysia, Myanmar and resorts packed with Christmas tourists in Thailand.

"The surge battered thousands of miles of coastline in a vast arc from Indonesia to Tanzania. Fishing villages, ports and resorts were devastated, power and communications cut and homes destroyed...

The cost of the relief effort will be in the billions of dollars, according to a U.N relief official, while hundreds of thousands of villagers have lost their livelihoods. The death toll may continue to rise as contaminated water and dead bodies spread disease; also in Sri Lanka from landmines that have come loose from the flooding.

Update: The death toll is now estimated at over 158,000.

What is democracy?

2004-12-19T13:09:00.000-08:00

Given the title of this blogspot, Liberal Values, it would seem to make sense that I have devoted most of my criticism toward the right side of our political spectrum, who are in the ascendancy in our country and whose policies, I believe, will have long term destructive effects on our society and the world.

However, I also disagree on some issues with those further to the left on the political spectrum, particularly over the issue of human rights in communist countries such as Vietnam and Cuba. In the case of Cuba, there are a still a few people willing to overlook its gross human rights violations while praising the supposed egalitarian policies of that society. I oppose the embargo on Cuba and other restrictions, as I believe that isolation only serves to harden its leadership and gives Castro and his subordinataes an excuse for their various forms of repression.

Within the American Library Association, to which I have belonged, Cuba has become a hot topic, in particular the right of individuals to establish their own libraries without government interference and harassment. Some activists, based in the ALA-affiliated group, Social Responsibilities Round Table, have denounced those of us who support these individuals and seem to see it all as a U.S.-directed plot to overthrow the regime. In March of 2003, a political crackdown took place in Cuba in which 75 dissidents were given prison sentences ranging up to 28 years after rigged political show trials, in which they were charged with receiving funds and instructions from the U.S., among other things. To the SRRT activists, these rigged trials proved that these dissidents were indeed U.S. agents; but to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders and every other major human rights group, all of these individuals were considered as "prisoners of conscience", unjustly imprisoned, who should be released immediately.

I might discuss this controversy over the Cuba crackdown more in a later entry, but for now, a related topic is a debate on the SRRT Action Council list over what is democracy. Conservative SRRT member Jack Stephens inquired on the list about a posted statement of the Cuban Culture Minister, who said, ""we propose the defense
of the values of social justice and authentic democracy." Should not an authentic democracy include free and fair elections, independent newspapers, opposition political parties, free access to diverse information sources and the right to speak freely without fear of imprisonment, Jack asked. To this, Dana Lubow (one of SRRT's main activists on Cuba) responded that she had checked the Harper Collins Dictionary of American Government and Politics (1992) and the Oxford Companion to Politics and the World (1993) and found in neither of them were elections, political parties or the press mentioned in their definitions of democracy. On the other hand, they did mention Marxist-Leninist model, which I guess to Dana proves that a one-party dictatorship such as Cuba can indeed be considered a democracy.

I checked the Harper Collins dictionary, and it did indeed mention the Marxist-Leninist model, but only in the sense that democracy is a concept which has different meanings to different people, even to the point that Marxist-Leninist totalitarian models can be considered democratic by some people. The book did not endorse Marxism-Leninism as a form of democracy.

Every democracy is flawed, certainly that is true with out society, but it is absurd to say that in a modern society you can have democracy without free elections, an independent press, free speech, or opposition parties. When people are not allowed to speak freely and consider divergent views, nor to peacefully organize independent political alternatives to the political leadership of their society -- in short, when dissent is systematically suppressed -- then that society is not a democratic society, no matter how much the regime or it supporters may claim it to be so.

It is sad that within the American Library Association the most influential activists on Cuba are individuals so willfully ignorant on Cuba's repressive nature and on what consitutes a genuine democracy.

Christian persecution in America?

2004-12-19T13:01:00.000-08:00

The New York Times cultural critic Frank Rich takes on the notion that Christians are persecuted in today's edition:

As Mr. Gibson shrewdly contrived his own crucifixion all the way to the bank, trumping up nonexistent threats to his movie to hype it, so the creation of imagined enemies and exaggerated threats to Christianity by "moral values" mongers of the right has its own secular purpose. The idea is to intimidate and marginalize anyone who objects to their efforts to impose the most conservative of Christian dogma on public policy. If you're against their views, you don't have a differing opinion — you're anti-Christian (even if you are a Christian).

My son, a poem

2004-12-10T13:10:00.000-08:00

My Son
by Jeff Pepper

All of the badges you earned as a Scout
The rod and the reel you took fishing for trout
The fielder’s glove you wore playing ball
Remnants of you, son, we treasure them all.

Your girlfriend still calls us just to say “hi”
She and your mother have a good cry
I sometimes go walking down by the lake
The never-agains make my heart ache.

My son, my son, did you have to go?
Your mother and I, we’ve been missing you so
You went off to war, and there met your end
I’ll never go fishing with my son again.

A woman somewhere prays softly, alone
Her daughter’s en route to the main battle zone
She tries not to worry, but who wouldn’t fear
The flag-draped return of her own darling dear?

May their duty conclude with a loving embrace
No dreaded news, no chaplain’s grave face
No siege of despair when the anguish ebbs low
I wish these on no one, not friend, not foe.

My son, my son, did you have to go?
Your mother and I, we’ve been missing you so
You went off to war, and there met your end
I’ll never play catch with my son again.

Our leaders give reasons why it must be so
Are we to believe them? I really don’t know
If this month it’s one thing and next month it’s not
It gets me to wondering why my son fought.

You can’t undrop a bomb, you can’t unshoot a gun
You can’t unkill a person – once done, it’s done
Leaders, you must be surer than sure
There’s no undoing the damage of war.

My son, my son, did you have to go?
Your mother and I, we’ve been missing you so
You went off to war, and there met your end
I’ll never embrace my son again.

copyright Jeff Pepper 2004

Book banning in Alabama

2004-12-02T13:06:00.000-08:00

An Alabama legislator is seeking to ban from all public and university libraries in his state any books or other materials that include any kind of gay orientation. Even plays such as "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" would be banned under this legislation. A public librarian in the state estimates that half the books from libraries could be removed, depending on how one interprets the law. Hard to believe this legislation could get very far, even in Alabama, but in the present state of affairs, who can know for sure? See Kim Chandler's article in the Birmingham News.

Pee-yew!

2004-12-01T14:12:00.000-08:00

Pee-yew!

By Jeff Pepper

The election of Bush fills me with wonder…
How could the voters make such a blunder?
I’ve lived many years as a citizen/resident
And I’ve never seen such a bad President.

Accomplished incumbents can run on their laurels.
Bush, on the other hand, ran on his morals.
Dub, I’ve got morals, too, I might note
And God knows there’s no way I’d give you my vote.

Brother, please tell me, in which gospel is it
Jesus favors the rich during His earthly visit?
Sister, I’m stumped, was it in Galilee,
That He preached the pre-emptive war policy?

The Prez moves me to pray, environmentally
I pray no one discovers oil in Yosemite.
If he sleeps through the global warming threat
We may not need to repay the national debt.

Did you like Columbine? Then Bush is your man.
He got rid of that pesky assault weapons ban.
But by non-mainstream lovers, he’s so offended
He wants our great Constitution amended.

We lost our big chance to tell him to stick it.
Now this prickly Bush will turn into a thicket.
The flower of this Bush doesn’t smell like a rose –
Pee-yew! Four more years of holding my nose.

copyright Jeff Pepper 2004
(Reprinted here with Jeff's permission).

Recruiting in high schools

2004-11-30T16:38:00.000-08:00

Last night, a local news show broadcast a segment on the Marines' recruiting effort at a San Jose high school. It was an upbeat segment, showing the popular Marine recruiter, with a bar besides him, urging eager students to show how many pull-ups they could do. He knew many of the students by name. One of the students, a Vietnamese-American, said that although he had a 4.0 GPA, he wanted to join the Marines and go to Iraq to pay back the debt he felt his family owed to our country.

These are very noble sentiments, and in the post-election era we live in, where much emphasis was placed on one's military service during the Vietnam war, who can object to this recruiting effort? But it bothers me, maybe because I feel these kids are too young to make an informed decision, or maybe because the war itself seems like a big mistake. How many of our young are we to sacrifice for this mistaken adventure? I am not one to urge an immediate pull-out, but I still wonder how many lives will be lost and destroyed for this cause -- Americans, Iraqis and others of various nationalities.

Jerry Falwell vs. PETA

2004-11-24T11:51:00.000-08:00

It has been said, often, that President Bush won this election largely because of the "moral values" issue, which refers mainly to his willlingness to amend our Constitution in order to prevent gay people, even Dick Cheney's daughter, from getting married. It was the conservative Christian vote which made the difference on this issue, and who else but Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority and chairman of the Faith and Values Coalition, better represents that viewpoint?

As reported by Media Matters for America, Falwell has made some recent statements which migh offend a few of us liberal types: he described NOW (National Organization for Women) as the "National Organization of Witches"; he referred to Americans United for Separation of Church and State, headed by Rev. Barry Lynn, as "an anti-Christ" group; and, in a November 21 televised service, broadcast from his Thomas Road Baptist Church, he said of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) : "And we're going to invite PETA [to 'Wild Game Night'] as our special guest, P-E-T-A -- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. We want you to come, we're going to give you a top seat there, so you can sit there and suffer."

Presumably he is joking at some level, but even so I find his reference to PETA particularly offensive and even sick. PETA may go further than I would in some respects (I am neither a vegan or vegetarian), but their basic purpose is good, to prevent animal cruelty. Recently a PETA member was arrested outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Vietnam, protesting how the company boils chickens alive, and makes them so fat their legs break if they stand up. This seems like something worth protesting. Here in Berkeley on my local access channel, animal rights documentaries are sometimes aired about the cruelty toward animals in slaughterhouses. I find these too hard to watch.

What is evil about protesting this kind of animal cruelty? Or is it evil to defend this kind of behavior? It has been said that children who commit cruel acts against animals often grow up to become sociopaths. It is too bad that Jerry Falwell and his followers do not seem to understand this but instead believe it is their Christian duty to oppose those fighting animal cruelty.

International jailed journalists support day

2004-11-24T11:47:00.000-08:00

Reporters without Borders has announced today (Nov. 24) as "International Jailed Journalists Support Day," in honor of the 128 journalists and 70 cyber-dissidents imprisoned around the world. Of these 80% are detained in six countries: China (26 journalists and 62 cyber-dissidents), Cuba (26 journalists), Iran (15), Eritrea (14), Nepal (12) and Burma (11).

Shooting the messenger

2004-11-23T13:38:00.000-08:00

The recent Marine shooting of a wounded Iraqi combatant in a Fallujah mosque has stirred some outrage. Caught on videotape, the Marine is seen shooting the wounded, barely alive man, after stating he believed the man was pretending to be dead. In the Mideast, the outrage is directed against the U.S., but here in America, much of the outrage is being directed against Kevin Sites, the NBC freelance journalist who videotaped the event. Sites presents an eloquent reply at his own blog site. Concluding his open letter to the Marine unit, he says: "So here, ultimately, is how it all plays out: when the Iraqi man in the mosque posed a threat, he was your enemy; when he was subdued he was your responsibility; when he was killed in front of my eyes and my camera -- the story of his death became my responsibility."

We live in a strange political climate when those who chronicle atrocities committed by U.S. troops then become themselves the object of attack from the pro-Bush wing of the media. I have added Sites to my blogroll.

Regressive Ethics in the House

2004-11-19T10:09:00.000-08:00

It is said the President Bush was elected because of his moral values, yet Republican members of the House of Representatives have voted to renew suspected felon Tom DeLay as House majority leader and revoke a rule that said House leaders under criminal indictment would have to step down from their posts. The party is also making it more difficult for House members to file ethic complaints, and according to today's New York Times editorial: "Rumors also abound that come January, when the next Congress is seated, all five Republican members of the ethics committee, including its current chairman, Representative Joel Hefley, may be replaced."

Bush's echo chamber

2004-11-19T10:03:00.000-08:00

Commenting on Colin Powell's departure Bob Herbert of the New York Times writes:

"History will show that the Bush crowd of incompetents brought tremendous amounts of suffering to enormous numbers of people. The amount of blood being shed is sickening, and there is no end to the grief in sight...

"...As I watch the disastrous consequences of the Bush policies unfold - not just in Iraq, but here at home as well - I am struck by the immaturity of this administration, whatever the ages of the officials involved. It's as if the children have taken over and sent the adults packing. The counsel of wiser heads, like George H. W. Bush, or Brent Scowcroft, or Colin Powell, is not needed and not wanted.

"Some of the world's most important decisions - often, decisions of life and death - have been left to those who are less competent and less experienced, to men and women who are deficient in such qualities as risk perception and comprehension of future consequences, who are reckless and dangerously susceptible to magical thinking and the ideological pressure of their peers.

"I look at the catastrophe in Iraq, the fiscal debacle here at home, the extent to which loyalty trumps competence at the highest levels of government, the absence of a coherent vision of the future for the U.S. and the world, and I wonder, with a sense of deep sadness, where the adults have gone."

Blogging and digital knowledge

2004-11-16T17:19:00.000-08:00

C-Span aired a Library of Congress sponsored conference on "Digital Future: Blogs and Knowledge". For those unable to view it on cable, it can also be seen via livestream at its web site.

The scandal of global warming

2004-11-14T16:05:00.000-08:00

Two scientific reports released last week highlight the danger and current reality of global warming. As summarized by Matt Crenson of the Associated Press:

Overall, the reports say, Earth's climate has warmed by about 1 degree Fahrenheit since 1900. In the Arctic, where a number of processes amplify the warming effects of carbon dioxide, most regions have experienced a temperature rise of 4 to 7 degrees in the last 50 years.

That warmth has reduced the amount of snow that falls every winter, melted away mountain glaciers and shrunk the Arctic Ocean's summer sea ice cover to its smallest extent in millennia, according to satellite measurements. Swaths of Alaskan permafrost are thawing into soggy bogs, and trees are moving northward at the expense of the tundra that rings the Arctic Ocean.

These changes seriously threaten animals such as polar bears, which live and hunt on the sea ice. The bears have already suffered a 15 percent decrease in their number of offspring and a similar decline in weight over the past 25 years. If the Arctic sea ice disappears altogether during the summer months, as some researchers expect it will by the end of the century, polar bears have little chance of survival.

One of the reports, said Crenson, "was commissioned by the Arctic Council, an international commission of eight countries, including the United States, and six indigenous groups. It was written by a team of 300 scientists."

Nevertheless, the Bush administration was at best noncommital in its response, as Crenson reports:

"The report will be a valuable contribution to the literature on potential regional impacts of climate change, and the United States government will take its findings into account as it continues to review the science," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said in a statement released Tuesday.

The United States faces a potential showdown with other members of the Arctic Council on Nov. 24, when representatives of the organization's members are scheduled to meet in Iceland to consider climate change policy recommendations.

The other report was released by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change:

"Responses to climate change are being seen across the U.S.A," said Camille Parmesan, a biologist at the University of Texas in Austin. She is the co-author, with Hector Galbraith of the University of Colorado in Boulder, of "Observed Impacts of Global Climate Change in the U.S." The report was released Tuesday by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, a non-partisan but not disinterested research organization dedicated to providing sound scientific information about global warming.

Parmesan and Galbraith acknowledge that nothing in the report would strike the average person as particularly alarming. They also allow that some of the past century's warming might have happened even if humans hadn't been pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But they argue that the changes they describe should be taken as a "very clear signal" that climate change will have significant effects in coming decades.

And what has been the response of the Bush administration? Over the last four years, it has pursued a policy of increased destruction of our resources, rolling back hundreds of environmental regulations. And there is no sign that these two reports will in any way deter our government from speeding our planet toward the brink of environmental catastrophe. As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer concluded in an editorial today:

The United States must be at least a part of the solution to the problem it does more than any other country to create. Fresh from an election victory, the administration may well think it can engage in four more years of calls for better science and voluntary "action." When a Scripps Howard News Service reporter asked White House science adviser John Marburger about the possibility of regulating greenhouse emissions, he said, "Not in this administration."

The swagger in the White House walk will face the persistence of Sen. John McCain. Last week, the Arizona Republican and Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., responded to the release of another report, on dramatic warming in the Arctic, with more calls for passage of their bill for reducing global-warming gases.

Most other economic powers have decided to join the Kyoto agreement on climate change. With each major scientific study, the need to limit global warming becomes more obvious. Domestically and internationally, pressure should force action by Congress and a president who came into office promising to regulate carbon dioxide emissions.

Confessing Christ in a world of violence

2004-11-11T15:53:00.000-08:00

A group of 200 Christian theologians, many of them affiliated with evangelical seminaries and organizations, have signed a petition urging American Christians to follow the teachings of Jesus, particularly to love our enemies, at a time when our culture is wrapped up in an atmosphere of militarism and nationalism. It begins:

Our world is wracked with violence and war. But Jesus said: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God" (Matt. 5:9). Innocent people, at home and abroad, are increasingly threatened by terrorist attacks. But Jesus said: "Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you" (Matt. 5:44). These words, which have never been easy, seem all the more difficult today.

Nevertheless, a time comes when silence is betrayal. How many churches have heard sermons on these texts since the terrorist atrocities of September 11? Where is the serious debate about what it means to confess Christ in a world of violence? Does Christian "realism" mean resigning ourselves to an endless future of "pre-emptive wars"? Does it mean turning a blind eye to torture and massive civilian casualties? Does it mean acting out of fear and resentment rather than intelligence and restraint?

Faithfully confessing Christ is the church's task, and never more so than when its confession is co-opted by militarism and nationalism...

The evangelical factor, my perspective

2004-11-09T18:13:00.000-08:00

It has been said that 75% of "born-again" Christians voted for Bush in this presidential election, as opposed to 25% for Kerry. Bush also managed to double his support among African-Americans in Ohio from 8% to 16% (still not very impressive) apparently because of his stance on the "moral" issues, namely outlawing gay marriage.

I am among those who has had the born-again experience, so I guess that would count me among this population. Although raised in a liberal Methodist church, I reached a point in my life where I felt estranged from God and my closest friends were devout fundamentalist Christians for whom their faith was very real -- not just a religion, but a relationship, as they told me. So on a summer day in 1971 I prayed the "sinner's prayer", asking God to forgive me for my sins and to come into my heart to be my Lord and Savior.

It was a turning point in my life, but maybe not in the same way as for others who have been through this experience. I remember getting into arguments with my parents over my newfound faith, and visiting various churches. Later that summer, I attended a Billy Graham rally, which helped solidify my decision. That fall I started at a new college, Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, to finish my liberal arts education. There I visited various churches, pentecostal and baptist, but it was the student Christian group, the Willamette Christian Body, in which I felt most comfortable. It involved Christians from a wide variety of backgrounds, so there was more of a ecumenical spirit there, even while we shared our basic faith in Christ.

Over the next few years I attended a variety of churches but I could never really find a church in which to settle, and eventually my church attendance dropped almost to zero. Meanwhile, with the end of the Vietnam war I came to know many Vietnamese friends, mostly Buddhist, Confucianist or Catholic, and worked with them for the cause of human rights in Vietnam and the Vietnamese boat people. So that became the center of my life, as opposed to my religious faith. Eventually, however, I came back.

I am still a Christian, but am no longer fundamentalist, as that term is commonly understood. That is, I do not believe that only born-again Christians will go to heaven, or that Darwin's theory of evolution is untrue. It took me some years to find the right church, one where I could grow in my faith in fellowship with others while not sacriificing my intellectual integrity. In visiting a local Catholic church, I learned that the weekly Catholic mass is basically the same as what occurs when one becomes a "born-again" Christian -- to confess one's sins, accept God's saving grace, and to dedicate one's life to following Christ. I almost became a Roman Catholic, but in the end decided to join the Episcopal Church instead, its liturgy being virtually the same as the Catholic mass but with less doctrinal baggage.

In doing a Google search for "Willamette Christian body" I came across the name of Joe Fuiten. I knew Joe, but not very well, at Willamette. The son of two Assembly of God ministers, Joe became student body president at Willamette and also helped to start the Willamette Christian body. Today, he is pastor of an Assembly of God megachurch ministering to 5,000 people in Bothell, Washington and active in political affairs. In fact he launched a successful effort to register 60,000 evangelical voters in his state this year, to the obvious benefit of the Republican party. Lest there be any doubt, Joe heads the Social Conservatives for Bush campaign. But, since IRS regulations forbid churches from engaging in partisan politics, he cannot actually tell the congregation how to vote, the church ushers would just hand out voter registration forms during the service. Joe is also president of Washington Evangelicals for Responsible Government, a political lobbying organization and the convener of Positive Christian Agenda, a collection of 35 Christian organizations that coordinate political action in Washington State.

In Joe's view, the war in Iraq is part of a holy war between Christians and Muslims, a war instigated by Muslim extremists, who were in turn instigated by Hollywood portraying our country as a degenerate society.

It was through his opposition to gay marriage that Joe and oher evangelical leaders managed to inspire so many evangelicals to register this year to vote. That was the big issue this election year, but Joe's opposition to gay rights goes deeper: he believes the Supreme Court was wrong to overturn the Texas anti-sodomy law. As he stated in a sermon:

I am sure that many ministers will criticize the Supreme Court’s recent deplorable decision to overturn the laws of Texas with regard to Sodomy. It was a terrible decision partly because it gives governmental approval to sinful behavior. On an even larger scale, it is the wholesale destruction of representative government in America. The people of Texas passed that law. Only by inventing a “right to privacy” in Amendment 14 of the US Constitution were they able to overturn previous Supreme Court decisions and impose their own social views on us all. Nine judges rode into Texas, captured the Legislature, disarmed the police, and made two men sovereign over all others.

Subsequently, he said he did not believe homosexuality should be outlawed, but what is the difference between that and allowing states to outlaw homosexual activity between consenting adults?

In his July 4th sermon this year, Joe featured a picture of Bush and his cabinet solemnly praying together before a meeting, even Karl Rove. It was presented in the context of defending the idea of America as a Christian nation, yet another clear message that came through is that Bush is a man of God, that he has God on his side and we should support him. Although he cannot openly allow his church to campaign for a political candidate, Joe seems to cross that line here. Commenting on the upcoming election, he said:

I have never seen this level of motivation among the church people. They perceive a genuine threat to the American way of life, to the Christian way of life as they've known it in this country now for over 200 years. They see a genuine threat, and so they want to get involved. They're registering to vote in larger numbers than we've ever seen before.

And what is the way of life that is threatened? At the website of Joe's Washington Evangelicals for Responsible Government is a list of position papers, almost all of them concerning homosexuality, abortion, pornography, etc. One paper also opposed a state bill to outlaw school bullying. There are genuine differences between Bush and Kerry on these issues, also between Bush and his vice president (on a federal amendment to outlaw gay marriage). But what is sadly lacking in these various position papers is any reference to other moral issues that threaten our way of life. For example, the destruction of our environment for the benefit of corporate interests, the huge and increasing federal deficit largely because of tax cuts that mostly benefit the very wealthy, and many aspects of our war on terrorism and the war in Iraq, with the killing of civilians and the torture of prisoners, many of whom -- according to the International Red Cross -- were innocent of crimes. What happened to the Sermon on the Mount?

I remember Joe as a very intelligent and good person, and I am sure the same is true today. But it seems to me that he represents one end of the spectrum between those who believe our nation should indeed be one nation under a Christian God, and those who believe we live in a pluralistic society and recognize and appreciate a diversity of views. And I wonder how far he or other evangelical Christians want to go in opposing gay rights. Is it just gay marriage, or as the above passage indicates, does he want to outlaw homosexual practices altogether, or at least allow states such as Texas to do so? And about Iraq being part of a holy war, if that is the case it is of our own making. However brutal Saddam Hussein may have been, he was more secular than his neighoring rulers, and kept the Muslim extremists in check.

Recently, I saw a documentary on a local educational station on the rise of the religious right. Three scenes from the early 1970s struck me. One showed Bill Bright, and a song troupe of his organization Campus Crusade for Christ led by Pat Boone. The singers were dressed in a kind of 60s day-glow ersatz hip uniforms. They were trying to appeal to youth caught up in the hippie movement but they seemed kind of like robots. Then came on Bill Bright, with his pencil-thin mustache telling us how this new Jesus movement would supplant the anarchy of the counter-cultural movements with a real message of hope. I remember Campus Crusade for Christ, and was briefly involved with them, once sharing a leaflet titled "The Four Spiritual Laws" with strangers in a shopping mall.

Another scene in the documentary had quite a different flavor. This was of a 1974 protest movement started in a West Virginia school district over school textbooks that seemed too liberal. There may have been some legitimate grievances at the beginning, but the preacher-led protest quickly got out of hand, with violence (no one was killed), and a wildcat strike organized by miners. A wide range of books were considered unacceptable to these people. Many today still feel scarred by the conflict.

The third scene was of Billy Graham with then President Richard Nixon at Graham's Christian rally. That was a time when Graham was known for being close to U.S. presidents, particularly Republicans. After Watergate, Graham became shocked and disillusioned with Nixon, and in the late 1970s after visting Eastern Europe he came to urge a less confrontational approach in our relations with the Soviet bloc. To his credit, Graham's primary interest all his life has been in saving souls, not promoting a political agenda.

When I knew Joe back in 1971-72, the "Jesus people" movement in which we were both involved was a movement among young people, many of them burned out on the hippie movement, who felt an emptiness in their lives and sought to bring God into their lives and fellowship with others who had the same aspirations. At least on the surface, it was non-political. But even then the seeds were being planted for this movement to become integrated within a larger hardline politically conservative movement.

There are evangelical Christians such as Jimmy Carter or Sojourners community who still promote a more comprehensive and tolerant view of the role of the Christian in our society. It is unfortunate, though, that for most evangelical Christians, supporting a hard-right political agenda is considered God's way.

Voting without the facts

2004-11-08T11:30:00.000-08:00

Also in today's New York Times is an op-ed piece by Bob Herbert, in which he speculates that ignorance is a major reason why Bush won, and suggests we should have teach-ins in order to make the American public better informed. He cites particularly a Univ. of Maryland study which found that "70 percent of President Bush's supporters believe the U.S. has come up with 'clear evidence' that Saddam Hussein was working closely with Al Qaeda."

Herbert also cites the comments of a Christian radio talk show host on the dangers of liberalism:

If you don't think this values thing has gotten out of control, consider the lead paragraph of an op-ed article that ran in The LA. Times on Friday. It was written by Frank Pastore, a former major league pitcher who is now a host on the Christian talk-radio station KKLA.
"Christians, in politics as in evangelism," said Mr. Pastore, "are not against people or the world. But we are against false ideas that hold good people captive. On Tuesday, this nation rejected liberalism, primarily because liberalism has been taken captive by the left. Since 1968, the left has taken millions captive, and we must help those Democrats who truly want to be free to actually break free of this evil ideology."
Mr. Pastore goes on to exhort Christian conservatives to reject any and all voices that might urge them "to compromise with the vanquished." How's that for values?

When the personal shouldn't be political

2004-11-08T11:17:00.000-08:00

Gary Hart, the former presidential candidate, wrote a very thoughtful op-ed piece in today's New York Times on the dangers of mixing faith with politics in political campaigns. Raised in the Church of the Nazarene, Hart also points out that the Christian faith includes social justice and helping the poor, and it does not give the U.S. a mandate to invade Iraq or other countries.

Iraq and the state of the evidence

2004-11-07T16:02:00.000-08:00

Human Rights Watch has released a detailed report, Iraq: State of the Evidence, commenting on the materials to be used in the upcoming trials of Saddam Hussein and other Iraqi officials accused of crimes against humanity. According to the report, much of the evidence was destroyed with the U.S. invasion because we did not take proper safeguards to secure the material.

In the chaos that ensued with the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003, U.S.-led coalition forces, Iraqi opposition groups, and individuals seized hundreds of thousands of Iraqi state documents from government buildings, Ba`th Party headquarters, offices of the former intelligence and security apparatuses, military garrisons and other premises across Baghdad. Sensitive documents were later found in public buildings such as schools, as well as in private homes, apparently having been removed by officials of the former government, ostensibly for safe keeping, and then abandoned as military defeat became imminent. Similar scenes were witnessed in other cities and towns across the country. Former Iraqi government officials shredded, burned, or otherwise destroyed many documents during the preceding weeks, while countless others were destroyed as a result of the wartime aerial bombing campaign. The widespread looting and wanton destruction of government property by Iraqis in the days and weeks after the war led to further destruction of documents that had survived the war itself...

Despite the potential value of Iraqi state documents in yielding information that could assist in bringing to justice perpetrators of serious past crimes, U.S. and coalition authorities apparently put no effective plan in place to secure them in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Hussein government. While U.S.-led coalition forces claimed to have since seized very large numbers of documents, many others were pilfered, looted, or otherwise destroyed needlessly, resulting in the loss of potentially vital information. Some of this destruction took place in the context of the widespread general looting in Baghdad and elsewhere. In many cases, the looting was carried out within sight of coalition military forces, which had apparently received no instructions about securing government documents or protecting the premises in which they were found. Additionally, other documents that survived or were not subjected to looting in a number of locations lay strewn about for days and sometimes weeks without being taken into coalition custody.

Secrecy in the Bush administration

2004-11-04T14:00:00.000-08:00

The House Committee on Government Reform - Minority Office, headed by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA), released a report last September on secrecy in the Bush administration. The report finds that there has been "a consistent pattern in the Administration's actions: laws that are designed to promote public access to information have been undermined, while laws that authorize the government to withhold information or to operate in secret have repeatedly been expanded."

In the New York Times, Nov. 1, editorial observer Dorothy Samuels commented on the report:

The report lists many other troubling examples as well. Mr. Bush and his appointees have routinely impeded Congress's constitutionally prescribed oversight role by denying reasonable requests from senior members of Congressional committees for basic information. They forced a court fight over access to the Commerce Department's corrected census counts, for instance, withheld material relating to the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib and stonewalled attempts to collect information on meetings and phone conversations between Karl Rove, the presidential adviser, and executives of firms in which he owned stock. The administration has also taken to treating as top secret documents previously available under the Freedom of Information Act - going so far as to reverse the landmark act's presumption in favor of disclosure and to encourage agencies to withhold a broad, hazily defined universe of "sensitive but unclassified" information.

Under a phony banner of national security, Mr. Bush has reversed reasonable steps by the Clinton administration to narrow the government's capacity to classify documents. Aside from being extremely expensive, the predictably steep recent increase in decisions to classify information runs starkly counter to recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission geared to strengthening oversight of the intelligence agencies.

Not one for self-criticism - or any kind of criticism, for that matter - President Bush says he's content to leave it to historians to assess his presidential legacy. What he fails to mention is that he has seriously impeded that historical review by issuing a 2001 executive order repealing the presumption of public access to presidential papers embedded in the 1978 Presidential Records Act.

Post Election Blues

2004-11-03T22:33:00.000-08:00

Continuing from yesterday, I went to the local Democratic offices, called some people in Florida, reading from a script, and left after about two hours. Not much, but I felt I had to do something, especially with all the emails I had been receiving over the last few months from various offices asking for my support.

As I was listening to Air America radio in the afternoon, the hosts and their guests seemed quite giddy from the exit polls. It appeared that Kerry was going to win decisively. But of course, things changed, and it was Bush who won.

So what went wrong, who is to blame, who should lead our party in the future? Some conservatives say there will be a civil war within the Republican party between old line conservatives and the neo-conservatives, the former feeling that their party has been hijacked. But turmoil will probably be stronger within the Democratic party. In fact, the party seems to be in a state of disarray. We lost big time.

Part of the problem is that "liberal" has become a dirty word in our national political scene. I chose the term "liberal values" for this blog, because it seems to me that really is the heart of the problem. The Republicans were seen by most voters as the party of values, the Democratic party the party of economic and foreign policy reform. The job ahead involves more than just finding the right candidate, or building up better organizations, it involves reaching out to the masses of people in the "red" states and convincing them of the moral values behind our positions, not just that it is in their self-interest to support us. We need to convince people that "liberal" has value as it did during the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement.

We also need to reach out to Republicans and conservatives who are becoming disaffected with various aspects of Bush's policies, and find ways to work with them. And there are a growing number of such people, likely to become ever larger if Bush pursues a hard right agenda.

In any case, the Republican party now has control over Congress, the Supreme Court, and the White House. We are almost a one-party government at the federal level. So whatever goes wrong in our economy, our environment, or our foreign relations, Bush will have no one to blame but himself and his party. I am thinking particularly of Iraq.

Some predictions:

- Bush will cut back on government spending in order to bring the budget under control, and most of the slashing will be aimed at public and social welfare programs. But given the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Homeland Security, and permanent tax cuts, the main effect will be to hurt poor people, with little actual budget balancing.

- Iraq will further descend into anarchy, to be quelled only if Bush decides to bomb the smithereens out of the country or reinstitute the draft and send in more troops.

- Republicans will continue to minimize the role of Democrats in Congress and exclude them from various meetings that minority party members normally attend.

- Environmental destruction will increase as more land and sea is opened up to corporate interests. Less controls over pollution will lead to more public health problems.

- Bush will pick several Supreme Court justices and appoint a new Chief Justice.

Anyone want to add predictions?

Election Day II

2004-11-02T10:39:00.000-08:00

I just voted. At my polling place in Berkeley, the line was not that long, but it took about 45 minutes before I could vote. Fortunately I had an election guide with me so I could read up more on the local measures and candidates. We had touchscreen voting. Unfortunately, my screen was green print on a turquoise background, so it was difficult to make out the smaller print. Since I had already checked off the names and measures on my sample ballot, I was able to get through it. But I complained to the volunteer there. She said my touch screen was the only one with this problem, the others were purple and black on a white background. But they were keeping it in use because there were so many voters. I wonder if there are other touchscreens around the country with this problem.

In any case, after a quick snack I will head off to the local Democratic offices to call some people in Ohio and Florida.

Election Day

2004-11-01T23:55:00.000-08:00

I went to the local Democratic headquarters this evening to do some phone bank work. I did not do much, but hope to do more tomorrow. This is the kind of election where for many of us simply voting is not enough. Strong feelings exist on both sides.

The Kerry/Democrat side believes that President Bush has been a disaster as president and extremely short-sighted in policies such as the war in Iraq, the economy, environment and civil liberties, that these policies are extremely harmful to us and to our children and grandchildren.

The Republican/Bush side believes that Kerry is a traitor and that it would be a mortal sin to vote for him. I am exagerrating a little bit, but not by much. In fact, we have this highly organized and effective campaign by a group of Vietnam veterans and their non-veteran supporters to tear down Kerry on everything he did during the Vietnam war and in the antiwar movement. The latest charge is that he took his orders from Hanoi in advancing a peace proposal, that he is the Manchurian Candidate.

Then there are the few conservative Catholic bishops who have declared that it would be a mortal sin to vote for Kerry or anyone who does not accept the position of the Vatican on abortion. (And maybe gay marriage too.)

I canot recall in my lifetime ever witnessing a presidential candidate, or any candidate being attacked in this manner.
Whoever wins the election tomorrow will find it difficult to govern this nation while conducing a war in Iraq and trying to bring the deficit under control. If Kerry is elected, he will likely face a Republican congress; certainly the House will stay Republican, and probably the Senate too. That means, like Clinton, his biggest challenge will be to overcome the partisan hostility. He will be unlikely to achieve his more ambitious goals, such as health insurance, but he can turn our country away from the radical direction in which it is headed.

If Bush is elected, we can expect his policies to become stronger and more forceful, but in the wrong direction -- polluting our land, giving to the rich, perhaps more foreign wars, and greater threats to our civil liberties.

That is one of the main reasons to vote for Kerry -- not so much for what he will do but what he won't do. He will have to move more slowly than Bush; in a sense Kerry will prove himself to be more conservative than Bush if he is elected -- conservative in the genuine sense, not as the term has been abused by the Republican right.

Use pesticides, get a free camcorder

2004-10-31T22:57:00.000-08:00

Dissension has arisen within the Environmental Protection Agency over a proposed research project partially funded by the chemical industry, to study young children's exposure to pesticides. According to Washington Post reporter Julie Eilperin, sixty children in Florida will be investigated for how they absorb pesticides and other household chemicals. EPA officials have expressed concern over possible bias in this study and the exploitation of the children and their families. In an article published in the Oct. 31 San Francisco Chronicle, she writes :

... In exchange for participating for two years in the Children's Environmental Exposure Research Study, which involves infants and children up to age 3, the EPA will give each family using pesticides in their home $970, some children's clothing and a camcorder that parents can keep.

EPA officials in states such as Georgia and Colorado sent e-mail messages to each other last week suggesting the study lacked safeguards to ensure that low-income families would not be swayed into exposing their children to hazardous chemicals in exchange for money and high-tech gadgetry. Pesticide exposure has been linked to neurological problems, lung damage and birth defects.

Suzanne Wuerthele, the EPA's regional toxicologist in Denver, wrote to her colleagues on Wednesday that after reviewing the project's design, she feared poor families would not understand the dangers associated with pesticide exposure.

"It is important that EPA behaves ethically, consistently, and in a way that engenders public health. Unless these issues are resolved, it is likely that all three goals will be compromised, and the agency's reputation will suffer," she wrote in an e-mail obtained by the Washington Post. "EPA researchers will not tell participants that using pesticides always entails some risk, and not using pesticides will reduce that risk to zero."

Troy Pierce, a life scientist in the EPA's Atlanta-based pesticides section, wrote in a separate e-mail: "This does sound like it goes against everything we recommend at EPA concerning use of (pesticides) related to children. Paying families in Florida to have their homes routinely treated with pesticides is very sad when we at EPA know that (pesticide management) should always be used to protect children." ...

----------

So while our President has refused to enforce hundreds of environmental regulations, the main agency in charge of protecting our environment is bribing poor families to expose their young children to pesticides in a study partially funded by the chemical industry. Another example of how far down the wrong road we have traveled in environmental policies over the last four years.

100,000 civilians dead in Iraq

2004-10-30T21:47:00.000-07:00

The British medical journal, The Lancet, published a study Friday which estimated that over the last year and a half, 100,000 civilians have been killed in the Iraq war. It says many of the victims were women and children who died as a result of air strikes, and that the risk of death in Iraq today is far higher than before the U.S. went into Iraq. As summarized by the New York Times, Oct. 29:

Although the authors acknowledge that data collection was difficult in what is effectively still a war zone, the data they managed to collect is extensive. Using what they described as the best sampling methods that could be applied under the circumstances, they found that Iraqis were 2.5 times more likely to die in the 17 months following the invasion than in the 14 months before it.

Before the invasion, the most common causes of death in Iraq were heart attacks, strokes and chronic diseases. Afterward, violent death was far ahead of all other causes.

"We were shocked at the magnitude but we're quite sure that the estimate of 100,000 is a conservative estimate," said Dr. Gilbert Burnham of the Johns Hopkins team. Dr. Burnham said the team excluded data about deaths in Falluja in making their estimate, because that city was the site of unusually intense violence.

In 15 of the 33 communities visited, residents reported violent deaths in their families since the conflict started. They attributed many of those deaths to attacks by American-led forces, mostly airstrikes, and most of those killed were women and children. The risk of violent death was 58 times higher than before the war, the researchers reported.

The team included researchers from the Johns Hopkins Center for International Emergency, Disaster and Refugee Studies and included doctors from Al Mustansiriya University Medical School in Baghdad.

There is bound to be skepticism about the estimate of 100,000 excess deaths, since that translates into an average of 166 deaths a day since the invasion. But some people were not surprised. "I am emotionally shocked but I have no trouble in believing that this many people have been killed," said Scott Lipscomb, an associate professor at Northwestern University, who works on the www.iraqbodycount.net project.

That project, which collates only deaths reported in the news media, currently put the maximum civilian death toll at just under 17,000. "We've always maintained that the actual count must be much higher," Mr. Lipscomb said.

-------

There have been many reports in the media about this study, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to rise to the level of public concern in America that it deserves. If this study is correct, then it is really astounding that so many civilians in Iraq could be killed in less than two years of occupation. No one questions that Saddam was a brutal dictator, but we cannot ignore our own role in suffering and death in Iraq. Certainly the rest of the world is paying attention.

NAACP Questions IRS Examination

2004-10-30T13:20:00.000-07:00

The Internal Revenue Service is examining the non-profit status of the highly respected civil rights organization, the NAACP, because of a speech made by its chairman, Julian Bond, at the NAACP national convention last July, in which Bond criticized the policies of President George Bush. The Washington Post of Oct. 29 reports:

An IRS document dated Oct. 8 said that at the group's annual convention in Philadelphia in July, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People may have violated the restriction on political activity because it "distributed statements in opposition of George W. Bush for the presidency."

"Specifically in a speech made by Chairman Julian Bond, Mr. Bond condemned the administration policies of George W. Bush on education, the economy and the war in Iraq," said an IRS "information document request" sent with the letter.

The IRS asked for the cost of the convention, including a "listing of all expense" and the "names and addresses of each board member and indicate how each voted."

An NAACP press release protested this action, noting that it has criticized both Republican and Democrat presidents. Julian Bond commented:

The NAACP has always been non-partisan, but that doesn’t mean we’re non-critical. Only in an Orwellian world would honest disagreement be considered partisan, or honest differences called election interference.

Indeed. If organizations can no longer criticize the policies of the president without their non-profit status being endangered, then where does that leave us? Environmental groups cannot criticize Bush's Clear Skies initiative, educational associations cannot criticize the poor funding of the "No Child Left Behind" act, and civil rights groups cannot comment on Bush's policies toward minority groups? On the other hand are the conservative think tanks who freely behave as surrogates for the Republican party, yet no IRS investigation of their non-profit status is forthcoming.

This IRS action is an abuse of its power in order to suppress criticism of President Bush.

Bush website for domestic use only

2004-10-28T18:35:00.000-07:00

The official Bush-Cheney website has blocked access to anyone living outside the U.S. or Canada. The Washington Post reports this follows an electronic attack that took down the campaign's Internet address for six hours last week. This seems like a serious case of overkill, according to the Washington Post:

It is not unusual for Web sites to block e-mail and browser traffic from individual Internet addresses and from certain countries notorious for churning out online fraud scams and junk e-mail, but security experts said the Bush-Cheney campaign's move is probably unprecedented.

"I've never heard of a site wholesale blocking access from the rest of the world," said Johannes Ullrich, chief technology officer for the SANS Internet Storm Center, which monitors hacker trends. "I guess they decided it just wasn't worth the trouble to leave it open to foreign visitors."

The action has launched a flurry of reports, mostly from the foreign press and computer publications, questioning the logic and repressive nature of this action.

Book banning in America

2004-10-28T15:26:00.000-07:00

Pen American Center has issued a joint press release supporting a suit filed by Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights activist awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, against the U.S. Treasury Department in federal court in New York. Her suit is against regulations of the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) which prohibit the publication of a book she wants to write about her life and her work for readers in the United States. Some excerpts:

Ms. Ebadi's predicament provides a perfect illustration of the harm the OFAC regulations cause. Ms. Ebadi has been imprisoned for her human rights work in Iran. She could not publish the book she wants to write in Iran, but the OFAC regulations also prevent anyone from publishing it in the United States. As long as the regulations stand, the book will not come into being.

The regulations were first challenged in a lawsuit filed on September 27, 2004, by the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing division (AAP/PSP), the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), PEN American Center (PEN), and Arcade Publishing.

The publishing and authors' groups point to Ms. Ebadi as exactly the kind of author whose work should be published in the United States....

...The OFAC regulations specifically forbid the publication of works by authors in Iran, Cuba and Sudan unless the works in question have already been completed before any American is involved. Americans may not co-author books or articles with authors in the embargoed countries and may not enter into "transactions" involving any works that are not yet fully completed—even though authors, publishers an agents generally must work with one another well before a new work is fully created—and Americans may not provide "substantive or artistic alterations or enhancements" or promote or market either new or previously existing works from the affected countries, unless they obtain a specific license from OFAC. Violators are subject to prison sentences of up to 10 years or fines of up to $1,000,000 per violation.

Both Ms. Ebadi and the groups that initiated the challenge agree that Ms. Ebadi is only the most prominent example of a valuable voice that has been silenced. "There are untold numbers of less prominent authors whose stories have no chance of reaching us. The embargoes are cutting Americans off from scholars, dissidents, scientists and others in regions that are of enormous public concern," said Peter Givler, Executive Director of AAUP. He cited books on history, music and archaeology that university presses have been unable to publish, and even an article that had to be withdrawn from the scholarly journal Mathematical Geology. "Ms. Ebadi's inability to publish her memoirs provides another example of the chilling effect the regulations are having on publishing in America." ...

New Template.. and links

2004-10-27T17:56:00.000-07:00

Well, I don't know who might be reading this, but I am still learning the basics of blogging. I changed the template almost by accident as I was trying to find a way to add links on the sidebar. I have a few links now, and will add some more. I also figured out how to embed a link within the text of the posts.

Cleveland Plain Dealer: no endorsement

2004-10-27T17:40:00.000-07:00

The Cleveland Plain Dealer is another publication that could not come to an editorial consensus on endorsing a presidential candidate. In its editorial of Oct. 26, it states:

The decision not to endorse in this race was not easily taken. A majority of the editorial board favored Kerry, but after long and difficult deliberations, it was decided that the better path would be to sit this one out.

The editorial itself is far more critical of Bush than Kerry. In fact, according to clevescene.com, the editorial board was overruled by its publisher, Alex Machaskee:

Last week, the daily's editorial board overwhelmingly voted to endorse John Kerry. But Machaskee overruled them, ordering lackeys to prop up George W. Bush instead.
This isn't the first time Machaskee has pulled a power play; he also forced the editorial board to endorse Governor Bob Taft. That turned out well.
Machaskee's Bush decree apparently set off a minor mutiny in the newsroom, where ink-stained wretches scrambled to rat out their boss to other media.
In the face of the controversy, the paper postponed its Bush kiss-up, which was supposed to run last Sunday. Meanwhile, the editorial board -- normally a staunch advocate for transparency -- struggled to keep the paper's inner workings decidedly opaque. Neither Machaskee nor editorial page editor Brent Larkin returned Punch's calls. Editor Doug Clifton offered only a terse e-mail: "I have nothing to say that would be illuminating."

The paper endorsed George Bush in 2000.

No endorsement from The American Conservative

2004-10-27T16:51:00.000-07:00

The editors of The American Conservative magazine could not come to a consensus on who to endorse for president. This is rather surprising, considering the Republican party is supposed to be the repository of conservativism in America. Instead the "special endorsement issue" features competing editorials for Bush, Kerry and even Nader from the editors. Endorsing Bush is Pat Buchanan, who while critical of Bush for getting us into Iraq, the fiscal deficit, and so on, will vote for him. "Why? Because, while Bush and Kerry are both wrong on Iraq, Sharon, NAFTA, the WTO, open borders, affirmative action, amnesty, free trade, foreign aid, and Big Government, Bush is right on taxes, judges, sovereignty, and values. Kerry is right on nothing."

On the other hand, Scott McConnell makes the case for Kerry: "Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations. The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and concessions to politically favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation’s children, the ceaseless drive to cut taxes for those outside the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing cliché about predatory imperialism and turn it into administration policy."

New Yorker endorses Kerry

2004-10-26T08:38:00.000-07:00

For the first time in its history, The New Yorker has endorsed a presidential candidate, John Kerry, in the Nov. 1 issue. Toward the conclusion of its long and thoughtful editorial, it states:

The damage visited upon America, and upon America’s standing in the world, by the Bush Administration’s reckless mishandling of the public trust will not easily be undone. And for many voters the desire to see the damage arrested is reason enough to vote for John Kerry. But the challenger has more to offer than the fact that he is not George W. Bush. In every crucial area of concern to Americans (the economy, health care, the environment, Social Security, the judiciary, national security, foreign policy, the war in Iraq, the fight against terrorism), Kerry offers a clear, corrective alternative to Bush’s curious blend of smugness, radicalism, and demagoguery.

See http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?041101ta_talk_editors for the entire editorial.

A Republican for Kerry

2004-10-25T21:13:00.000-07:00

Republicans have the hothead senator from Georgia, Zell Miller. Now Democrats have Marlow Cook, a former Republican senator from Kentucky who has announced her support for Kerry. In an article written for the Louisville Courier-Journal, she wrote:

I am not enamored with John Kerry, but I am frightened to death of George Bush. I fear a secret government. I abhor a government that refuses to supply the Congress with requested information. I am against a government that refuses to tell the country with whom the leaders of our country sat down and determined our energy policy, and to prove how much they want to keep that secret, they took it all the way to the Supreme Court.

For the entire op-ed piece, see: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1021-30.htm

Bad news for Bush

2004-10-24T21:47:00.000-07:00

Writing in the New York Times, Bob Herbert noted that more bad news about Iraq and our economy is starting to hurt Bush's chance of wining the election. GOP strategists are concerned. One manner in which this concern is manifested:

At the same time, the Republican Party is doing what it can in key states to block as many Democratic votes as possible. Party officials have mounted a huge organized effort to challenge - some would say intimidate - voters in states like Ohio and Florida, in a bid to offset the effects of huge voter registration drives and a potentially heavy turnout of voters opposed to Mr. Bush and his policies.

Election officials in Ohio said they'd never seen such a large drive mounted to challenge voters on Election Day.

It reminds me of the South before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, using literacy tests and other means to disenfranchise black people. For the entire op-ed piece, see:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/25/opinion/25herbert.html?oref=login&hp

Update: The New York Times editorial of Oct. 26 comments on this effort in Ohio, which it believe is chiefly aimed at obstructing and disrupting new Democrats from voting:

In the name of fraud prevention, the Republicans plan to use 3,600 challengers in Ohio, a pivotal state where the race is dead even and there has been a big surge in first-time registrations for Democratic voters. There is no telling how many partisan challengers there will be nationwide next week because many states do not require them to be identified in advance. If challengers behave properly, they can help make elections better. But partisan challengers acting in bad faith can do considerable damage. Aggressive challengers have been known to bully poll workers, many of whom are elderly and have only limited knowledge of election law.

It is likely that some voters will be challenged next week not because they appear to be ineligible, but because partisan challengers think that they will vote for the other side. There is a long history of challengers' targeting minority precincts and minority voters. It is troubling that in Ohio this year, the Republicans appear to be focusing much of their effort on Cleveland, Dayton and other cities with large African-American and Latino populations.

One of the gravest dangers is that partisan teams will challenge many, if not all, voters in selected precincts, with the goal of slowing voting to a standstill. In Ohio, every challenge will require a deliberation over whether the person in question should be allowed to vote. In presidential elections, lines in urban polling places are often hours long under normal conditions. If the challengers can add 10 minutes per voter, waiting times may become so long that thousands of voters will simply give up.

See http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/26/opinion/26edt1.html for the entire editorial.

The Cheneys and gay rights

2004-10-21T22:13:00.000-07:00

The presidential campaign we have witnessed this year is not only the most vicious, it is also the most bizarre. From the time he wrapped up the nomination, Kerry's opponents have sought to "define" him by attacking his character -- that he is a man without principles, a flip-flopper, the most liberal member of the senate, even a traitor, that he did not deserve the awards he received while in Vietnam, and so on.

It was with the three debates that Kerry was able to end his slide downwards and pull even, because here the two men were face to face and had to discuss the substantive issues that our country faces, as opposed to what either of them were doing during the Vietnam war, for example. Most Americans believe Kerry won all three debates.

Now that the debates are over it is back to the mudslinging. And one of the attacks against Kerry is that he mentioned that Dick Cheney's daughter, Mary Cheney, is gay in the context of answering a question, as to whether or not homosexuals are born that way or do they become gay by choice. He mentioned her and her family in a very complimentary way, but apparently Republicans saw an opportunity to attack Kerry on this matter. Dick Cheney announced he was an angry father; Lynne Cheney said she knows now that Kerry is not a good man.

But what are the ethics here? Dick Cheney had publicly mentioned his daughter's sexuality very recently in answering a similar question. That Mary Cheney is a lesbian is well known, and she has not been shy to express herself on the matter publicly, even serving in a well paid position as the Coors liason to the gay community. Cheney thanked John Edwards, when Edwards made essentially the same statement as Kerry in their debate. How does it suddenly become wrong for Kerry to mention it? Furthermore, what about Alan Keyes, Republican candidate for senator in Illinois, and Jerry Falwell, both of whom have denounced Cheney's daughter (in contrast to Kerry who complemented her) for being gay? Neither of the Cheneys protested those denunciations. The answer, it seems, is that it is okay for Cheney to mention his daughter being gay because he is the father; and it is not so bad for Falwell or Keyes because they are not running for president, or maybe because they are not liberal Democrats. It is difficult to fathom any clear sense of ethical principles in this attack on Kerry.

What is stranger, though, is that Bush and the Republicans have made the anti-Gay Marriage Constitutional Amendment into a campaign issue -- Tom DeLay even demanded a roll call vote on the matter even though he knew it would be defeated -- yet, here Cheney's daughter is a lesbian and Cheney has himself said he believes the matter should be left to the states. It smacks of rank hypocrisy for people who support restrictions on the rights of gay people to so passionately denounce Kerry simply because he mentioned Mary Cheney's sexual orientation in the debate.

The hypocrisy gets deeper. Andrew Sullivan commented on it four years ago in an article for The New Republic:

On gay matters, Cheney's congressional record is not just bad. It's shocking. Cheney was one of only 13 representatives to vote against the landmark 1988 bill that initiated federal funding for AIDS testing and counseling — putting him to the right of even Tom DeLay and Dick Armey, both of whom voted for it. He was one of only 29 House members to vote against the 1988 Hate Crimes Statistics Act, which merely allowed the federal government to collect data on violent crimes based on race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, and he voted for an amendment that added gratuitously anti-gay language to the bill. He supported measures to cut federal AIDS research and to allow health-insurance discrimination against people with HIV in the District of Columbia. As defense secretary, despite once describing the ban on gays in the military as an "old chestnut," Cheney solidly backed the old policy of harassment of gay soldiers and their ejection, however distinguished their records, from the Armed Forces.

... There is, however, a second possibility — that the Cheneys don't disapprove of their daughter's lesbianism at all but, for political reasons, must pretend to. After all, Jerry Falwell, one of Bush's key allies on the Christian right, has already described Cheney's daughter as "errant." The Republican platform expresses its opposition to special "rights" for homosexuals. Cheney comes from Wyoming, the state where Matthew Shepard was murdered, and had to represent his constituents in the 1980s. Perhaps he feels obliged not to break publicly with the homophobes who still dominate his party. One small piece of evidence to support this theory is the absence from both Dick Cheney's and Lynne Cheney's records of any known anti-gay slurs, despite their being surrounded by people who bait homosexuals on a regular basis. By all accounts, Cheney has treated his gay staffers decently and was deeply supportive of his Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams during his "outing" ordeal. There is no reason to doubt his affection for his gay daughter.
But, in some respects, this scenario is the more damning one. For, if Cheney personally respects gay people but supports policies that segregate and ostracize them for his own personal advancement, then he truly is contemptible. It's surely worse to oppose homosexual equality for opportunistic rather than for principled reasons...

In this article, Sullivan also asked:

If Dick Cheney loves and is proud of his openly lesbian daughter, why is he supporting a man who wants her to live under the threat of criminal sanction? It's no secret that Governor George W. Bush has publicly supported Texas's still-extant gays-only sodomy law, which makes private, consensual sex between gay adults a crime. Does Cheney agree with his running mate's position?

see http://www.indegayforum.org/authors/sullivan/sullivan5.html for the entire article.

To be fair, this article was written in 2000, and Cheney does not support the anti-Gay Marriage amendment. On the other hand, he has stood by in virtual silence while his Republican colleagues in Congress and elsewhere have routinely trashed gay people while promoting this amendment.

Why I will vote for Kerry

2004-10-20T21:05:00.000-07:00

I have been away from this blog site for awhile. To tell the truth I doubt many people read this so I did not feel much incentive. But I see a response today. Thanks, Robert.

Why I will vote for Kerry: this is from my heart, or off the top of my head. In any case here are the major reasons:

* President Bush has transformed a record budget surplus into a record deficit, and there is no indication he will do anything serious to reduce it over the next four years. On the contrary it is likely to grow ever larger, exponentially perhaps. Why? Because he wants to make tax cuts permanent, while at the same time he has said he will pay whatever it takes to win the war in Iraq. Added to Iraq is Afghanistan and Homeland Security. The tax cuts have benefitted mostly the very wealthy. For the average American the refund might have amounted to a few hundred dollars. Unless we decide to withdraw and allow Iraq to collapse into anarchy, which is close to where it is now, this war is likely to take several years before the country is stable enough that we can pull out. And we will have to finance the war while reducing taxes for the wealthy. That makes no sense. The conservative economist Milton Friedman once said that a tax cut now is not a real tax cut unless it is accompanied by corresponding cuts in government spending. We are just passing on the fiscal burden to the future.

If this trend continues, it may be that our country will reach a breaking point where drastic cuts have to be made in most domestic programs in order to bring the deficit under control, perhaps even elimination of entire programs.

* Bush and Cheney have conducted a criminal policy against our environment, destroying our natural resources and endangering public health in order to benefit their wealthy cronies. Bush is, as Robert Kennedy said, the worst environmental president in the history of this country. And that is quite an accomplishment. Every major environmental organization has strongly criticized Bush's environmental record. Even Russell Train, one of the first EPA administrators, under Richard Nixon, has expressed his strong protests on this matter. Bush has refused to enforce hundreds of environmental regulations and has appointed to environmental regulatory agencies former CEOs and lobbyists for energy industries that exploit our resources. This is an obvious conflict of interest, appointing foxes to guard the henhouse.

It is unfortunate that the environment has not become a more serious issue in this campaign. It was not even mentioned in the three debates. But in fact our natural resources are like money in the bank. And when we use them up now that means they are not available in the future. Furthermore, environmental pollution is closely linked to public health problems. For example it is unsafe to eat fish from most freshwater sources because of the mercury contamination. Bush does nothing to stop this problem because he does not want to hurt the interests of the corporations that are plundering our land.

* When Bush ran for office, he claimed to be a "uniter not a divider". Many believed his promise, but now four years later our country has never been more divided. In Congress, Republicans have excluded Democrats from much of the normal conference hearings. In public discourse, particularly this campaign, we see highly divisive, hateful rhetoric; and while the left is not blameless by any means, it is really the Bush-Cheney-Rove team that have been the most guilty. I have never witnessed a more vicious presidential campaign in my lifetime.

* Unlike his father, Bush demonstrates a woeful ignorance, in fact a willful ignorance, of the complexity of foreign affairs. He has a new doctrine of preventive war, that is invade other countries that might be a threat in the future, even if they are not a direct threat to us now. In the case of Iraq, he sent our troops in there with wild misconceptions about how we would be welcomed and no plan for winning the peace. Now we are bogged down in a much less safe situation than our troops were in Vietnam, for example. And the Muslim extremists are acting far more forcefully in Iraq than they ever did under Saddam Hussein. The latest tragic news is the highly respected director of Care International in Iraq has been kidnapped. Will she be beheaded too? We will probably have to stay in Iraq for over a decade, or withdraw and see the country descend into anarchy and terrorism. This will be very costly for us.

Furthermore, his general attitude toward the United Nations and what Rumsfeld called "Old Europe" is also pretty self-defeating and only serves to isolate us further from the rest of the world. In fact, while Bush may win the election here, if the rest of the world could vote he would lose by a landslide.

I could go on, but those are the major reasons for my opposition to Bush. In all these aspects, Bush and Cheney have demonostrated an arrogant and myopic shortsighteness that will be mostly costly not to us but to our children and grandchildren.

What then are my reasons for supporting Kerry? First of all, he is not Bush. He could not possibly be as disastrous in office. But beyond that, I believe he will behave far more responsibly toward the environment and toward our gaping budget deficit. His health plan while very commendable, is not likely to pass without significant modification unless the Democrats somehow take over both the House and Senate. But it is more important what he won't do than what he will do on the domestic front. Futhermore, Kerry has a strong environmental record, and I believe there would be significant progress in this area under him, certainly major reversals from the present trend.

As to foreign policy, particularly Iraq, I would not wish that on anyone. I do not know how Kerry might handle the Iraq war differently, but I do believe he would seek to repair our damaged relations with other countries over this war. Unfortunately, we could well see a return of the draft, whether under Kerry or Bush.

I do not agree with Kerry on all issues, but I believe he is more genuinely motivated by public service than is Bush. At this point I am not entirely optimistic he will win, but I would be so happy to see a more thoughtful, intelligent, and yes, ethical president than the clown who currently occupies the Oval Office.

More hostages in Iraq

2004-09-19T18:14:00.000-07:00

I have been having a stomach ache all day, so when I turned on the national news and saw the new group of hostages in Iraq talking to the camera, I just had to turn it off. It is literally sickening. Most likely these unfortunate men will be brutally murdered. Whomever is elected, I hope we can find some way to extricate ourselves from this mess.

Kerry and Bush on nuclear war

2004-09-19T15:27:00.000-07:00

From today's New York Times, editorial, excerpt, so much for our war on terrorism:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/opinion/dunukeissues915.html

The cold war generation grew up worrying about the bomb, the Russians and World War III. Today's nuclear nightmares are more varied, but no less scary. The list of nuclear-armed states is lengthening alarmingly, and each new entry increases the chances that some nasty regional war could turn nuclear. Nuclear terrorism has emerged as a terrifying new threat. Russia has huge, poorly guarded stockpiles of nuclear bomb fuel and there is a small but increasing possibility that its decaying early warning system could trigger an accidental launch.

President Bush often says he means to halt the nuclear arms programs of North Korea and Iran, although he has yet to produce any workable plans for doing so. In February, he rightly called for tighter controls over nuclear fuel processing, used by several countries to produce bomb ingredients.

As a senator and a candidate, John Kerry has offered constructive proposals addressing almost every aspect of current nuclear dangers. While Mr. Bush has tended to focus narrowly on rogue states like North Korea and Iran, Mr. Kerry wisely favors a more comprehensive approach that would combine crisis diplomacy on these two priority cases with accelerated efforts to protect Russian stockpiles. The North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs are at the top of the nation's agenda. But it is disingenuous to ignore the fact that 95 percent of the nuclear bombs and most of the nuclear weapons fuel are in the hands of Russia and the United States.

Mr. Kerry would also break with Bush policies that unintentionally encourage nuclear proliferation, like the Strangelovian plans for research on unneeded new nuclear weapons....

.... Mr. Bush once lumped Iraq, Iran and North Korea together as an "axis of evil." But his decision to invade Iraq limited the diplomatic and military tools left available to influence North Korea and Iran - which were undoubtedly taught by the Iraq experience that the best protection against a pre-emptive strike is a nuclear arsenal.

In both cases, precious time has been lost while the administration has followed largely unproductive diplomatic strategies. Mr. Bush now wants to ask the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran. But many Council members, including major European allies, are not ready to do so. On North Korea, the administration has insisted on discussions including Russia, China, Japan and South Korea as well as North Korea and the United States. These have made no discernible progress, in part because Washington waited until this summer to put its first serious negotiating proposal on the table. With the talks stalled, North Korea has all the time it needs to reprocess its plutonium into several nuclear bombs. ...

No Stars, just cuffs

2004-09-19T15:24:00.000-07:00

From today's New York Times, excerpt:
===============
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/opinion/19dowd.html

No Stars, Just Cuffs
September 19, 2004
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON - In World Wars I and II, gold star mothers were
the queens of their neighborhoods, the stars in their
windows ensuring that they would be treated with great
respect for their sacrifice in sending sons overseas to
fight and die against the Germans and Japanese.
Instead of a gold star, Sue Niederer, 55, of Hopewell,
N.J., got handcuffed, arrested and charged with a crime for
daring to challenge the Bush policy in Iraq, where her son,
Army First Lt. Seth Dvorin, 24, died in February while
attempting to disarm a bomb.

She came to a Laura Bush rally last week at a firehouse in
Hamilton, N.J., wearing a T-shirt that blazed with her
agony and anger: "President Bush You Killed My Son."
Mrs. Niederer tried to shout while the first lady was
delivering her standard ode to her husband's efforts to
fight terrorism. She wanted to know why the Bush twins
weren't serving in Iraq "if it's such a justified war," as
she put it afterward. The Record of Hackensack, N.J.,
reported that the mother of the dead soldier was boxed in
by Bush supporters yelling "Four more years!" and wielding
"Bush/Cheney" signs. Though she eventually left
voluntarily, she was charged with trespassing while talking
to reporters.

The moment was emblematic of how far the Bushies will go to
squelch any voice that presents a view of Iraq that's
different from the sunny party line, which they continue to
dish out despite a torrent of alarming evidence to the
contrary...

=================

Rather v. Bush

2004-09-19T14:52:00.000-07:00

I have to confess I was looking forward to the CBS 60 Minutes show that discussed George W. Bush's Air National Guard service. Not that I believe what he or Kerry did during the Vietnam war is a reason to vote for or against them. I am just so fed up with all the spurious attacks on Kerry for his military service, that it seems like payback time for Bush.

But the show turned out to be a disaster, as virtually everyone knows now. Apparently Dan Rather and his staff did not do adequate research in authenticating the four memos that formed a basis for their allegation that Bush's commanding officer Killian was unhappy with his slacking off during the last two years of his service. When it first came up I thought perhaps the memos had been typed on an IBM Executive model typerwriter, originally developed in the 1950s, because I once had one of those typewriters and it did have proportional spacing. But from what I have read since then it seems more likely that the documents were forged, and the person who most often is hinted at being the source of these documents is an ex National Guard officer living near Abeliene, Texas.

I got into an argument with someone over at a conservative blog site over the whole matter. He felt I could not be reasoned with because I found Killian's secretary to be credible when she said that, while she believes the documents are fake, she did type similar memos for him and they reflect what he felt at the time. Furthermore, I was accused of being dishonest because I did not share the opinion that Dan Rather and CBS network were engaged in a "bald-faced" attempt to influence the outcome of the election through "throwing mud" at Bush with this report.

The idea that I must agree with a certain position on this controversy or otherwise I am dishonest and unreasonable seems pretty intolerant to me. The authoritarian mentality at work, especially so in demanding that I share his assessment of Dan Rather's or CBS's motives on this matter. It has always been my view that one should be careful in assesing the motives of others.

Certainly it was sloppy journalism, but what about the substance of the charges against Bush? There are three basic accusations here:

1. That Bush got into the Air National Guard through intervention on his behalf because of his privileged standing. There seems very little dispute on this point..

2. That over the last two years of his service, he slacked off noticeably in his fulfillment of duty, to the point where some have accused him of going AWOL. This doesn't seem to be that disputed either.

3. That Bush's commanding officer(s) were unhappy about this development. The memos aside, there is some testimony to support this view, but in any case it isn't as important as points 1 and 2.

The conservative news magazine U.S. News and World Report also investigated this issue and concluded that Bush did indeed slack off noticeably in his last two years:

"Bush's records show that he did his duty for much of the first four years of his commitment. But as the Vietnam War wound down, his performance slumped, and his attendance at required drills fell off markedly. He did no drills for one five-month period in 1972. He also missed his flight physical. By May 2, 1973, his superiors said they could not evaluate his performance because he 'has not been observed.'"

It also said: "Some experts say they remain mystified as to how Bush obtained an honorable discharge. Lawrence Korb, a former top Defense Department official in the Reagan administration, says the military records clearly show that Bush 'had not fulfilled his obligation' and 'should have been called to active duty.'"

For the entire article, see:

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/040920/usnews/20guard.htm

Seymour Hersh on Iraq

2004-09-12T01:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening CSPAN broadcast a speech given by Seymour Hersh to a college in Virginia. He was speaking about Iraq. Earlier this year, Hersh wrote an article for the New Yorker on the torture of Iraqi prisoners atAbu Ghraib. See:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fact

He was discussing the war in more general terms. Basically he does not think we went in there for oil, but rather because the neo-conservatives in the Bush adminisration were convinced that invading Iraq would be a cakewalk and would lead to the collapse of other authoritarian regimes throughout the Mideast, based on the assumption that the region was like Eastern Europe and the people lovers of democracy. Of course that did not happen and now we are bogged down in a war with no foreseeable end or even improvement. He says Bush or Kerry must develop an exit strategy, but neither have in his view.

The Bush administration seems to suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder in its approach toward Iraq and Afghanistan, poorly prepared for what would develop after we went into these countries. We the people will have to pay the price for generations to come.

Will music save us?

2004-09-12T01:27:00.000-07:00

The other day as I was driving to work, quite depressed over the failure of most Americans to perceive the dangerous direction in which Bush is leading this country, I wondered if it might have something to do with the music. There was a time when the music of youth was closely identified with an emerging new counter culture. It began with rock and roll of the fifties and its sense of rebelliousness, but it was really the folk music and then the folk rock music of the sixties that delivered a new message of hope and idealism, of fighting for social justice and peace.

The music evolved to disco, then punk rock and its variants, which is mostly where it is now. And the problem with this music is that it doesn't seem to present that same spirit, the impetus for young people to become involved in various movements to change society in a positive way. Most of the performers touring in support of John Kerry, for example, are people like Bruce Springsteen or John Mellenkamp whose music belongs to the baby boomer generation.

On the other side is country western music. Every form of music can be beautiful to listen to, and that is certainly true of country and western music. But the heartland "red state" culture it conveys shows little tolerance for people of different values, religions, cultures or nations. And this is the music that has become the driving force in our society with our cowboy president. Unfortunately it is a music and culture that now underlies the ignorant direction in which we are heading under President Bush -- building up record deficits in order to give tax cuts to the wealthiest people in our society, openingup the environment to be exploited without restrictions by lumber, mining and other interests, inventing a new policy of preemptive foreign invasion, and so on. The costs to future generations of such misguided and thoughtless policies will be heavy indeed.

Later in the day, as I was walking through Sproul Plaze of UC Berkeley where I work, there was a Dixieland band playing away cheerfully. About six old men, in their 70s and 80s I would guess, but the music was quite good and uplifting. They call themselves the "Spirit of 29", which I guess is where our country is now. Something about this group of old men playing to the students though.

Al Gore, in the New Yorker

2004-09-09T23:51:00.000-07:00

The current issue of New Yorker has a lengthy and rather poignant article by David Remnick on Al Gore, based on spending time with him around the time of the Democrat convention. It can be viewed online at:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040913fa_fact

Crimes against Nature

2004-09-09T23:44:00.000-07:00

I have been reading Crimes against Nature, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is an attorney with the National Resources Defense Council. It is quite systematic and therefore quite depressing in detailing how the Bush administration has given over the future of our natural resources to the companies that plunder them.

The behavior of the Bush administration on this matter is nothing less than criminal. It dwarfs Watergate and Whitewater combined. But unfortunately it is barely noticed by our corporate media.

An article Kennedy wrote for Rolling Stone last December summarizes the main points of this book:

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1120-01.htm

Here is the opening paragraph of the article:

George W. Bush will go down in history as America's worst environmental president. In a ferocious three-year attack, the Bush administration has initiated more than 200 major rollbacks of America's environmental laws, weakening the protection of our country's air, water, public lands and wildlife. Cloaked in meticulously crafted language designed to deceive the public, the administration intends to eliminate the nation's most important environmental laws by the end of the year. Under the guidance of Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the Bush White House has actively hidden its anti-environmental program behind deceptive rhetoric, telegenic spokespeople, secrecy and the intimidation of scientists and bureaucrats. The Bush attack was not entirely unexpected. George W. Bush had the grimmest environmental record of any governor during his tenure in Texas. Texas became number one in air and water pollution and in the release of toxic chemicals. In his six years in Austin, he championed a short-term pollution-based prosperity, which enriched his political contributors and corporate cronies by lowering the quality of life for everyone else. Now President Bush is set to do the same to America. After three years, his policies are already bearing fruit, diminishing standards of living for millions of Americans.

Richard Clarke: Country Still Vulnerable to Terror

2004-09-09T23:40:00.000-07:00

Richard Clarke: Country Still Vulnerable to Terror
Former Presidential Advisor Points to U.S. Intelligence Flaws
By JESSIE BRUNNER AND ELYSHA TENENBAUM
Contributing Writers
Wednesday, September 8, 2004
Daily Californian

For full text of article, see:
http://www.dailycal.org/article.php?id=16025

At a time when Dick Cheney is warning that if we don't reelect him we will have another 9/11, this article on Clarke's speech here at UC Berkeley presents an alternative view on Bush/Cheney and how they have dealt with the threat of terrorism.

The flat tax proposal

2004-09-09T23:27:00.000-07:00

A recent editorial from the Contra Costa Times, a relatively conservative paper, discussed a flat tax proposal and national sales tax, both of which Bush is reported to be considering. According to the editorial, these measures would shift the tax burden signficantly from the wealthy to the middle-class in our society. Bush accuses Kerry of wanting to raise our taxes because he wants to roll back the tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of our country; on the other hand a flat tax or replacing income tax with sales tax as Bush is considering would significantly shift the tax burden from the very rich to the middle class and working poor. A welfare society for the rich.

Excerpts:

The twin attractions of a flat-tax are simplicity and apparent fairness. Unfortunately, under virtually every flat-tax proposal, the price of simplicity is higher taxes for most middle-income families and individuals, while upper-income taxpayers pay less, sometimes a lot less.

Now the top few percent of income-earners pay the lion's share of the tax burden. With the current graduated income tax those in higher incomes pay considerably higher tax rates that generally far offset any tax deductions or 'loopholes' they take advantage of.

Under flat-tax proposals, the tax burden would be shifted to middle-income taxpayers.

To compound the fallacy of a simpler and fairer flat tax, a senior Bush officials also said the president would consider replacing the income tax with a national sales tax. If there is a worse idea than the flat tax, it is a national sales tax.

To replace income tax revenues, a national sales tax would have to be exorbitant, perhaps in the 35 percent-plus range.

It also would place a heavier burden on middle-income families who spend a larger proportion of their incomes on taxable goods than do wealthy wage earners...

Watching the Olympics

2004-08-29T23:56:00.001-07:00

I always enjoy watching distance races, as I once was a runner myself, so these races were the highlights of the Olympics for me. It was particularly enjoyable to see the American win a silver in the marathon, and the Morrocan win the 1500 and 5000 meter races. Of course it was too bad that a crazy man attacked the Brazilian runner, perhaps even causing him to lose the gold or silver. Overall, NBC did a pretty good job this time covering the Olympics, with less of the fluffy bios, more concentration on the actual contests.

We are killing our heritage to make some money

2004-08-29T18:34:00.000-07:00

I caught the tail end of a documentary on one of my local PBS channels:

Net Loss: The Storm Over Salmon Farming, Melissa Young and Mark Dworkin, directors, Moving Images , 2003, 52 minutes. Order from Bullfrog Films, (800) 543-3764 or video@bullfrogfilms.com.

One comment stood out to me: "They are killing our heritage in order to make some money." Unfortunately it is this principle that is behind environmental degradation around the world: use up our natural resources, endanger public health with environmental pollution, all for the short term profit. Our world, and particularly our own nation, is like a spendthrift playboy spending off his parents' fortune. Soon we will be bankrupt and future generations will have to pay the price for our folly.

This documentary was about the impact of salmon farming in British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest. For a review see:
http://www.alternativesjournal.ca/issues/302/review_belton_skladany.asp

"By and large, though, the film serves as an illustration of mainstream aquaculture’s relentless march towards profit at any cost, as evidenced by its arrogant assumption that it can better nature through the genetic engineering of salmon."

A shooting at the laundromat

2004-08-16T19:53:00.000-07:00

Today, being off from work, I took my clothes to a laundromat at the Berkeley-Oakland border. While sitting there reading a book, I heard a series of explosions that sounded either like firecrackers or gunfire. Unfortunately it turned out to be the latter. Several gunshots were fired at a black teenage kid, from what I understand, and although police and ambulance arrived soon afterwards, his chances of survival are very slim. The police cordoned off the area and I took my wet clothes to another laundromat.

I had just been thinking of another shooting that occurred last week. An 18-year-old black student from De La Salle, considered the most valuable football player of the best high school football team in the nation, had a full scholarship to the University of Oregon and was preparing to leave for the school in a few days. Instead he was shot and killed while sitting in a car in his Richmond neighborhood. Another teenager who had been a fellow athlete of his has been arrested, and now the suspect's 15-year-old brother is being sought.

Later in the day I went to the veterinary clinic to pick up some medicine for my cat and got into a conversation with a young black woman who works there. She is attending a Bible college and preparing for the ministry by working with inner school kids, trying to help break the cycle of drugs, gangs and violence. I said to her it must be very hard for someone growing up in that environment to resist peer pressure to join gangs and become trapped into this extremely self-destructive lifestyle.

What are the causes for this situation and how can the vicious cycle be broken? There are no easy answers, but I believe part of the problem is that many black youth don't see that much hope for them in the present system. It isn't easy to rise from the ghetto and overcome substandard schools to reach the American dream of a stable job and a home of one's own. We live in a society where jobs are becoming harder to find and the gap between rich and poor ever widens.

But another part of the problem is cultural. Bill Cosby and others have addressed this problem, that some aspects of the black youth culture seem to encourage gangster behavior. Not to single out black culture, it is a problem among other ethnic groups too. In any case, the change cannot just come from outside aid, ultimately it must come from within the culture itself, within the neighborhood, and within the heart of each individual.

My friend at the veterinary clinic who is working to help inner city kids is a real hero for our society, as much a hero as the soldiers who go to Iraq. Maybe if we could revitalize programs such as the Vista corps, and provide more funds for educational program, that might help overcome this tragic situation today of senseless killings, where young people with their whole lives ahead of them instead die in a hail of gunfire on a neighborhood street corner.

Our Man Chalabi is looking more like a con man

2004-08-12T23:11:00.000-07:00

Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times commented on the closeness of the Bush administration to Ahmad Chalabi prior to his fall:

"In January, when President Bush delivered his State of the Union speechto Congress celebrating the success of the ]preemptive' war against Iraq,a controversial Iraqi exile named Ahmad Chalabi sat in a place of honorbehind First Lady Laura Bush.

"The symbolism was no accident: Despite being a fugitive from Jordan for aconviction in absentia on bank-fraud charges, this darling ofneoconservative hard-liners was the Pentagon's and White House's favored and well-paid adviser on all things Iraq -- including weapons of massdestruction, ties with Al-Qaida and the odds for a postinvasioninsurgency. As is now apparent, he and his cronies seemed to have liedspectacularly about it all."
Scheer observes Chalabi's close ties to the Iran political leadership and asks: "Was Our Man Chalabi a double agent working for the theocraticayatollahs when he helped lobby and lie the United States intooverthrowing Saddam, Iran's despotic but secular enemy?"

Scheer concludes the article by stating: "How ironic that a close alliancebetween Iraq and the fanatical ayatollahs of Iran is the most likely accomplishment of the U.S. invasion. That would lend credence to the claim in a revealing Newsweek cover story on Ahmad Chalabi's checkered past that'the Bushies were bamboozled by a Machiavellian con man for the ages.'"

For the full text of the article, see:http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/4923134.html

Leading neoconservative abandons Bush

2004-08-12T22:51:00.000-07:00

Francis Fukuyama, considered a leading neo-conservative intellectual, has stated he will not vote Republican in the upcoming election. Fukuyama gained fame for his book, The End of History, published shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in which he argued capitalist liberal democracy had prevailed over world socialism. He was also a leading light of the Project for a New American Century, an organization of neo-conservative intellectuals which in 1998 urged President Clinton to invade Iraq. In an interview with the Australian newspaper, The Age, he said his decision was based on Bush's failed policy in Iraq, and he particularly blamed Donald Rumsfeld, whom he said should resign:

"There seems to be this cultural thing that Americans don't resign, no matter what. But I think that people who are responsible for policy that hasn't gone well owe it to give a chance to somebody else. I just think they (the Bush Administration) ought to be held accountable for policy failure."

For the full text of the article, see:
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/08/06/1091732079531.html?oneclick=true#

- Steve Denney

Our next Herbert Hoover

2004-08-12T00:32:00.000-07:00

As with its anti-environmental policies, the economic policies of the Bush administration are also short-sighted, its tax cuts benefitting mostly the very rich, while its effects on the rest of the economy are disastrous. A New York Times editorial today (Dec. 12) comments on the $700 billion swing from a federal surplus to deficit under Bush: "The president's fiscal policies, mainly high-end tax cuts, have resulted in a record federal budget deficit without spurring hiring or income growth. If Mr. Bush continues on the tax-cut path, continuing high deficits will further threaten job creation and living standards." It also points out:

"The main reason for the crippling discrepancy is that the tax cuts were mostly handed out where they did the least good - that is, lavished on the people least likely to spend the largess. The reduction in the tax rates, the largest of Mr. Bush's tax boons, provided only 59 cents of economic stimulus for every dollar of lost tax revenue. The tax cut for dividends and capital gains produced 9 cents of stimulus for every forgone dollar. "

For the text of the editorial, see: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/12/opinion/12thu1.html

Protect the environment, vote for Kerry

2004-08-08T15:37:00.000-07:00

The other day I heard Russell Train interviewed by Al Franken on Air America radio. Train is a Republican and former EPA administrator under Nixon and Ford, heading the EPA from Sept. 1973 to Jan. 1977. He also in 1988 co-chaired Conservationists for Bush, supporting Bush's father. Now Train is supporting Kerry because of Bush's anti-environmental record. Here is an article he wrote about Bush and the environnment:

http://www.gristmagazine.com/soapbox/train092203.asp

see also:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/07/20/bush.environment.ap/

Train describes the Bush environmental record as "polluter protection."

See also:
www.rep.org

This is the website of Republicans for Environmental Protection America. Although not explicitly anti-Bush, it is clear they do not support the various anti-environmental policies of the Bush administration and are trying to offer an alternative voice within the GOP for those who still believe in conservation.

It seems to me the Democrats should make more use of the environmental issue in this presidential campaign. We debate jobs and the economy, but in the long run, it is really the destruction of our natural resources which most seriously threaten our economy and society. The Democrats have a far from perfect record, but it is dramatically better than the record under Bush.

Sandy Berger and the National Archive

2004-08-02T22:00:00.000-07:00

The July 30th issue of The Wall Street Journal reports that Sandy Berger, who had been advising the Kerry campaign (but resigned), has been cleared of taking original documents out of the National Archive in Washington D.C. See:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/080104A.shtml

Below is an excerpt from the article:

====

Officials looking into the removal of classified documents from the National Archives by former Clinton National Security Adviser Samuel Berger say no original materials are missing and nothing Mr. Berger reviewed was withheld from the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Several prominent Republicans, including House Speaker Dennis Hastert and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, have voiced suspicion that when Mr. Berger was preparing materials for the 9/11 Commission on the Clinton administration's antiterror actions, he may have removed documents that were potentially damaging to the former president's record.
The conclusion by archives officials and others would seem to lay to rest the issue of whether any information was permanently destroyed or withheld from the commission.
Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper said officials there "are confident that there aren't any original documents missing in relation to this case." She said in most cases, Mr. Berger was given photocopies to review, and that in any event officials have accounted for all originals to which he had access.
===========

Consider the timing of these accusations: as the 9/11 report was about to come out, as well as the Democrat convention, Republicans were screaming charges as if Berger had already been proved guilty. Now that the convention is over, it turns out the main accusation against Berger was false, but don't expect to hear much about from his accusers.

New Restrictions on Cuban Americans

2004-08-02T00:41:00.000-07:00

NBC Dateline this evening had an interesting segment on Elian Gonzalez and U.S.-Cuba relations. The transcript can be found at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5540113/

The new U.S. restrictions on traveling to Cuba, particularly by Cuban Americans, is highlighted. Reporter Keith Morrison travels with a Cuban American lawyer, Pedro Irigonegaray, to visit the man's aging relatives,whom Irigonegaray may never meet again:

"The U.S. thinking goes something like this: Each time a Cuban-American brings or sends money to relatives, that money, almost $1 billion lastyear, boosts the island's economy and helps Castro continue his dictatorship. So beginning July 2004, Cuban-Americans may only visit direct family members, and then only once every three years. If their relatives are uncles or cousins or, say, aunts, as in Pedro's case, those Cuban-Americans will never be allowed to return or send money ever."

These new restrictions seem inhumane and stupid to me. Castro has been in power for over four decades despite U.S. embargos. Isolating Cuba, particularly Cubans from their loved ones in America, will not bring democracy to the island.

Time to put the Vietnam War behind us

2004-05-16T09:55:00.000-07:00

I read an article not too long ago which said many Americans of the younger generation would prefer that the presidential race focus on politics today as opposed to what the two presidential candidates were doing during the Vietnam War.

Unfortunately, it has become a great dividing line in our society, one which is presently being exploited by both the Bush and Kerry campaigns.

In fact, most young American men of draft age did not serve in Vietnam at that time. As the New York Times reported on May 1, in an article on Dick Cheney's avoidance of service:

"Of the 26.8 million men who were eligible for the draft between 1964 and 1973, only 2.2 million were drafted while 8.7 million joined voluntarily, according to 'Chance and Circumstance: the Draft, the War, and the Vietnam Generation,' a 1978 book by Lawrence M. Baskir and William A. Strauss. Mr. Cheney was among the vast majority of 16 million men -- about 60 percent of those eligible -- who avoided the draft by legal means."

Of those who were drafted or joined voluntarily, a minority served in Vietnam. Joining the National Guard, serving in the armed forces reserves, attending college, getting medical deferments, or marriage deferments, were among ways young men found to avoid Vietnam service.

In this respect, John Kerry was unusual. As a Yale graduate, it probably would not have been difficult for him to avoid going to Vietnam or even the armed services if he had used connections like many of his colleagues. Instead, he went, was there for four months, and received some medals for his service. But he became famous after his return, as a leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, testifying before Congress in 1971.

Kerry's presidential campaign took off after a Vietnam veteran came to a Iowa primary rally of his, and testified that Kerry had saved his life. Even though he was a Republican, he said he would vote for Kerry if he was the Democrat nominee. Subsequently, Kerry has placed much more attention on his Vietnam war experience, with the "band of brothers", fellow Vietnam veterans, joining him on the stage. Since he wrapped up the nomination, he and other Democrats have stepped up attacks on Bush, Cheney and some other Republicans because they did not serve in Vietnam. For example, after Cheney attacked Kerry for his voting record on national security issues, Kerry responded by attacking not only Cheney but also Karl Rove for not having served in Vietnam or the military.

The other side of this is that Kerry's antiwar statements back in 1971 have come to haunt him. Some naval veterans who, like Kerry, commanded swift boats in Vietnam, have formed a group called "Swift Boat Veterans Against Kerry", claiming he is unfit to be Commander-in-Chief. There was not much they could find to attack him over his actual service, other than he was a bit of a hotdog, but they focused their attacks on what Kerry said about the war and his fellow veterans after his return. Essentially, they charge him with giving the war criminal image to Vietnam veterans because he testifed about atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam.

Karen Hughes also has jumped into the act, accusing Kerry of being dishonest about whether he threw medals or ribbons over the White House fence during a 1971 veterans demonstration. Is he a liar or a traitor? That seems to be the question Bush supporters would like to place in Americans' minds.

So Democrats are accusing Bush-Cheney, et al., of being "chickenhawks", while Republicans accuse Kerry of betraying his country. In fact if the Vietnam War background of Bush and Kerry were reversed, but everything else about them remained the same, we would probably be hearing exactly the same arguments, just from the opposite sides.

Personally, I am more concerned about where the candidates stand now than what they did over three decades ago in their youth. I don't hold it against Kerry that he became an antiwar activist after he returned, nor do I hold it against Bush or Cheney that they did not serve in Vietnam. There is more to measuring the quality of one's life and the character of these individuals.

The Vietnam war sharply divided our society when it took place. Now, even as the Iraq war goes on, it is Vietnam which is once again being used to divide our society, to provide an opportunity for each side to accuse the other of being led by traitors, or cowards. Let us put the Vietnam war behind us and focus on the serious problems that loom before us today.

Introduction

2004-05-14T17:07:00.000-07:00

This is my first post to this new blog site. I have never done this before. I chose the name for this site as "Liberal Values". What I would like to promote with this site is a society of tolerance and compassion for the less fortunate, a sense of justice for all. At this time it seems our society is too polarized between right and left. I am concerned with our current administration, that we are destroying the future, with the rapid destruction of the environment, the heavy deficit spending and an increasingly alarming war in Iraq. On the other hand, I cannot fully join with people on the left either. Because I believe abortion involves the taking of a human life, I tend more toward the "conservative" side of this issue, particularly on late term abortions, although I do not believe it should be outlawed. I also disagree with those further to the left who defend repressive Marxist regimes, such as Cuba. This has become quite a controversy within the American Library Association of all places. More on that later.