Category Archives: Culture

The Grinch…er…Gingrich Who Stole The Party.

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Now that serial liar, adulterer and cheater, Newt Gingrich, seems poised to take the Teapublican nomination for president, it seems fitting that his rise in the polls coincides with the holiday season. After all, he’s the Grinch personified – egomaniacal, arrogant and disparaging of everyone else. He dislikes and resents everyone who disagrees with him, which is to say most of the world. And, if elected, he promises to place a lump of coal in everyone’s Christmas stocking by taking away Social Security and Medicare. He also seems determined to bomb Iran and give all of Palestine to Israel. (And you doubted the Mayan 2012 prophecy!)

Yes, this model of lies, meanness and hypocrisy is now the apparent favorite of Teapublicans far and wide. Newt has taken hypocrisy to new levels, even for Teapublicans. You may remember that he led the impeachment of President Clinton for adultery while having his own affair as his wife was fighting cancer. After marrying his mistress, he later dumped her in favor of a new mistress. Yet he still has the balls to talk about “values.”

Swept into power in 1994 as the result of his Contract on America, he succeeded in throwing single moms off of welfare and throwing more people into prisons. He claims to have balanced the budget as Speaker of the House, giving no credit to other members of Congress (including Democrats) and President Clinton who signed the budget-balancing bills.

But Newt’s greatest accomplishment in the House was to be charged with 84 ethics violations for which he was fined $300,000 by a 395-28 vote. He was forced to resign from the House in disgrace – the first time in history that a Speaker was disciplined for ethical wrongdoing – saying “In my name and over my signature, inaccurate, incomplete and unreliable statements were given to the committee.”

And Newt hasn’t lost his knack for finding questionable ways to make money. In addition to his books and speaking engagements, the Grinch was paid $1.6 million as “historian” for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the very institutions he blames for wasting taxpayer money and causing our current financial mess. (Of course, he doesn’t mention that one of the biggest wastes of taxpayer money was his $1.6 million consulting fee.)

But the best way to summarize Newt is by quoting his former colleagues. Former New Hampshire governor and George H.W. Bush chief of staff John Sununu called Gingrich “inconsistent, erratic, untrustworthy and unprincipled.” Sen. Tom Coburn, called Gingrich’s leadership “lacking,” and reportedly told his Oklahoma constituents that Mr. Gingrich was “the last person I’d vote for for president of the United States.” Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal offers an even better description of the GOP’s leading presidential candidate. She wrote that Newt is “a human hand grenade who walks around with his hand on the pin, saying, ‘Watch this!’”

It’s bad enough when we discover an official’s character flaws after they’ve been elected to office. What does it say about a party if it’s willing to nominate someone like Gingrich despite his many known character issues? What would it say about our country if he’s elected?

Ummm…Actually, It’s A Pagan Tree.

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This week, Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee unintentionally angered Christians by announcing the lighting of a “holiday tree” in the Rhode Island State House. Fueled by Fox News Channel, a group of carolers interrupted the lighting ceremony by singing O Christmas Tree. They were quoted as saying that they felt Chafee was trying to put down Christianity.

Instead of singing, they should have picked up a history book or simply searched the subject on their computers.

Had they taken the time, they would have found that the display of an evergreen tree or an evergreen branch at this time of year actually originated as part of the Pagan celebration for the winter solstice. Indeed, many historians believe that early Christians even changed the celebration of Christ’s birth to coincide with the solstice to make it easier to attract converts to their fledgling religion.

The carolers also might have discovered that, in the Old Testament, there is a passage in which the prophet Jeremiah condemned the ancient Middle Eastern practice of bringing trees into the home as Pagan. Of course, that was centuries before Jesus was born.

In Early America, William Bradford, the Pilgrim’s second governor, tried to stamp out the practice of decorating trees at Christmas-time as “Pagan mockery”. It wasn’t until 1851, that a “Christmas tree” was placed in an American church by Cleveland Pastor Henry Schwan. Even then, he was condemned for resorting to a Pagan practice and threatened with harm.

My point is this: It’s all too easy for people to find offense at some perceived slight or disrespect. It’s much more difficult to seek tolerance and to search for true understanding. If the carolers had made the effort, they might have actually learned something about the history of their own faith. And they might have understood that Chafee was not attacking Christianity.  He was merely trying to include all of his constituents in the season’s festivities as his Republican predecessor had done.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Road Rage, Arizona-Style.

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Road rage incidents have become commonplace in every state. But in Arizona, where guns are viewed as a fashion accessory, such incidents can be particularly deadly.

For example, two years ago, a worker operating a photo radar unit was shot and killed in a drive-by shooting by a driver who simply disliked the method of traffic enforcement. Although the reason for that incident was unique, there have been many other road rage shootings across the state that are just as senseless.

Most recently, a 59-year-old attorney in Scottsdale shot and killed a 50-year-old husband and father over an incident that allegedly began when the attorney sped up to make a green light and the victim inadvertantly blocked him.  That may not seem like a life-threatening action in most places. But in Arizona anything that displeases one of our gun-slinging Wyatt Earp wannabes is a shootin’ offense.

What followed the missed green light is unclear. But we do know that the two drivers ended up in a pharmacy parking lot. When the shooting victim approached the attorney’s car, the attorney shot him in the chest, fatally wounding him. 

Now we come to what sets our rootin’, tootin’ state apart.  The attorney was arrested for second-degree murder, but the charge has been dropped “pending further investigation.” You see, a few years ago, the Teapublican-dominated legislature passed a law giving cars the same “domain” status as homes. So anyone who feels that his or her car is in danger of being invaded can shoot without consequences. It’s a matter of “self-defense.”

Never mind that you can simply put the car in gear and drive away when threatened. Never mind that you could avoid the confrontation by not stopping in the first place. Never mind that you can drive to the nearest police station to assure your safety.

What’s the fun in that? After all, Arizonans not only like to carry guns. Many of our Second Amendment-citing citizens like to use them.

Penn State Merely Reflects Our Culture.

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Whatever the legal outcome of the charges against former Penn State defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky, one thing is clear. The reaction of Penn State students to the firing of Joe Paterno reveals seriously twisted values. When the students filled the streets in protest, they were, in effect, saying we don’t care about the victims. Winning is more important.

We’ve seen this bankruptcy of values for many years in sports; particularly football. In places like Auburn, Iowa, Oklahoma, Ohio State, Nebraska, and USC, the institutions are expected to win at any cost. Athletes are allowed to assault, rape and rob with little consequence as long as they perform well on gameday. Boosters are allowed to make illegal payments under the table without fear. Coaches earn millions for finding ways around the NCAA’s rules. If they’re caught, they take the money and leave knowing they will be able to continue their careers at another school with the same values.

Before you think sports are unique in their lack of ethics, consider that the same kind of behavior is rewarded in politics. Politicians can lie and cheat without repercussions. They can pad their bank accounts and earn large pensions just by getting elected.

Business leaders are rewarded with multi-million-dollar salaries, stock options and bonuses for cutting employees and shipping jobs off-shore. The long-term health of their companies, or even our nation, mean little. After all, the executives can make enough in a year to retire comfortably.

This win-at-any-cost, ends-justify-the-means attitude permeates virtually every aspect of our society. For generations, the Catholic Church has swept child abuse under its sacramental rug then acted shocked by the outcry. Evangelical churches believe that it’s acceptable to lie to obtain new converts, to increase donations, or to rally adherents to their political causes. At the same time, they deny their political motivations and cover up their excesses.

Even worse than the excesses, themselves, is the fact that we all have been aware of them for decades. But we have done little to speak out or to try to change them. We not only accept that entertainers, sports stars and CEOs make millions a year while demanding even more. We admire them. We turn them into celebrities. And if they are caught for misbehaving or abusing their power and wealth, we turn on them. We vilify them. And we ask ourselves how we could have been so easily fooled.

If Sandusky actually did what he is accused of doing, he deserves our wrath. At the same time, we all need to look into the mirror and ask ourselves why his actions and similar actions of others are allowed to continue for so long.

7 Billion People. Now What?

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As of Monday, October 31, 2011, the world population officially reached 7 billion.  How appropriate that this milestone was reached on Halloween!

The statistic might not be so alarming if not for the fact that it took several million years for the population to reach one billion. It took just 123 years for the world to add the second billion. We’ve added the most recent billion in 12 years. And despite the fact that the world population rate has declined by half over the past 50 years, the world population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050!

As the population grows, so will extreme poverty, food shortages and income inequality. So what can we do?

Ironically, those who are least able to afford it tend to have the most children. So the primary solution to our fast-growing population is to reduce poverty by investing in health and education. Second, we can promote women’s rights. As women gain knowledge and power, they tend to be less satisfied with being barefoot and pregnant. Obviously, we can promote family planning and the use of condoms. Finally, and perhaps most important, we can reject the idiocy of religions that disdain sex education and proven birth control methods for abstinance-only programs.

It may have made some sense for the Church to promote large families in the Middle Ages when infant death rates were high and large flocks of children were needed to help raise food. But that sort of primitive thinking is nothing less than global suicide in a world that has already over-exploited its natural resources.

Of course, any attempts to address over-population will be disdained by the simpletons who believe in the “rapture” or a heaven filled with virgins.  For them, the end of our planet can’t come soon enough.

The NRA Effect.

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Beginning in 1980, the National Rifle Association first inserted itself into politics by endorsing Ronald Reagan. Since then, the NRA has increasingly exerted its power and influence over both national and state politics. Nearly every year, the NRA writes proposed legislation then shops it around to state legislatures in hopes of finding sponsors.

Often the legislators who put their names on the bills never even read them!

An example is the Concealed Carry Law. In 1986, there were only 8 states that had legislation dictating that anyone who meets minimum requirements shall be issued a permit to carry concealed weapons. But thanks to the NRA, there are now 37 states that have “shall issue” permit laws and 4 states with no restrictions at all. Next month (November 2011), Illinois will be the only state left that does not allow concealed carry in any circumstances.

These laws were not demanded by the states’ citizens. Nor were they addressing real problems. They were written by the NRA merely to push its own narrow political agenda.

Of course, other special interest groups followed the NRA’s lead. For example, the Arizona anti-immigrant law was initially written by Kris Kobach, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. It was embraced by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) which is headquartered in Washington, DC. FAIR (or, more precisely, UNFAIR) then shopped the bill around to the states until Arizona State Senator-In-Recall, Russell Pearce agreed to sponsor it as the infamous SB1070. It has since been brought before state legislatures in Alabama, Georgia, and South Dakota.

Now Kenneth Blackwell, an Ohio citizen and Senior Fellow for Family Empowerment at the Family Research Council in Washington, DC, is pushing an anti-abortion bill for the state of Mississippi. The bill, if the voters of Mississippi pass it, will ban all abortions in the state by extending First Amendment rights to fetuses. And this isn’t the first hayride for the bill. It was previously promoted, and defeated, in Colorado.

Now, I believe US citizens should be able to create and pass legislation to solve problems in their own states as long as they meet the standards of our US Constitution. But it is one thing for a state legislature to identify issues, and quite another for special interest groups to write and promote legislative solutions in search of a problem.

It’s time for this nonsense to stop.

Teapublican Lie #23.

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“President Obama is not an American Citizen.”

The fact that any of us feel compelled to address this idiocy after more than 3 years of intense investigation is sad.  Yet this nonsense continues to pervade the ethernet. 

Never mind that the Federal Election Commission accepted President Obama’s birth certificate as evidence of his citizenship.  Never mind that the Hawaii governor, Hawaii secretary of state and virtually every other Hawaiian leader have certified his citizenship and proudly proclaim that he was born in Hawaii.  Never mind that there are archival birth notices in Hawaii newspapers announcing the birth of Barack Hussein Obama in a Honolulu hospital.  Never mind that the Republican Party, Tea Party leaders, media reporters, and right wing lunatics have spent millions in attempts to investigate claims that he was born elsewhere.

There is not one shred of proof that President Obama is not an American citizen.  Not one!  Yet Teapublicans continue to raise the question.

One has to ask why.

I believe the answer is simple.  If Teapublicans can delude themselves into thinking President Obama is not a citizen, then he is not really our president.  Therefore, they don’t have to respect him or anything he says.  They can tell themselves that he was elected only as the result of imaginary voter fraud by Acorn and inner city “thugs.”  They can tell themselves that all of our nation’s problems are the result of the policies of this “foreign born” interloper.

If this is how they react following Obama’s election by an overwhelming majority, imagine what they’ll do when he’s re-elected.

How Did We Get Here?

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Once upon a time, the most distinguishing characteristic between Republicans and Democrats was a difference in opinion on how to solve social problems and improve our nation.

For example, Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and presidential candidate Robert Dole all agreed to the need for universal healthcare. They simply offered different means of accomplishing it. Indeed, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed into law by President Obama was actually based upon ideas by Nixon, Dole and Mitt Romney – all Republicans.

Contrary to current party ideologies, it was a Republican senator who authored the first anti-trust act. It was a Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, who most aggressively enforced it to break up large corporate monopolies such as Standard Oil. And contrary to the Republican Party’s conservative heritage, it was Republican presidents, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who created most of our national debt.

Similarly, it was a “liberal” Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who most aggressively controlled revenue and spending resulting in annual budget surpluses.

Unfortunately, the subtle gap between the ideologies has turned into an ever-expanding gulf.

Even as the Democratic Party has moved to the center right, the Republican Party has lept to the way-off-the-map extreme right. Republicans no longer talk about merely limiting government. They now talk about “starving the beast” and declare the government as the enemy. Indeed, they have set their sights on eliminating entire departments and agencies.

They demand an end to the intrusion of government into their lives. At the same time, they want to tell women what they can and cannot do to their own bodies.

They protect the incomes of millionaires and billionaires while rewarding corporations for sending middle class jobs overseas. They rail against class warfare as they continue to redistribute wealth upward. They approve of billionaires paying a lower percentage of their incomes than working people.

They praise the Founding Fathers while denying the very principles they fought for. Though the Founding Fathers declared that “all men are created equal,” Republicans deny equality to gays, blacks, latinos and anyone else who is different. Thanks to Republican appointments to the Supreme Court, corporations now have the rights of people. And since the same Republican-appointed members of the Court ruled that money equals free speech, large corporations have more rights than people.

The differences between the parties are abundantly clear. The question is how on Earth did we ever get here?

Teapublicans Are A Disgrace To The Term “Redneck.”

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Many Teapublicans, especially those in the South, are fond of referring to themselves as Rednecks. They interpret that to mean that they are common sense, down-to-earth people. They take pride in the fact that they’re relatively uneducated in contrast to the “pointy-headed liberals.”

Not surprisingly, it’s a false pride.

In fact, most of these people are diametricly opposed to the priniciples of the original Rednecks. You see, the term Redneck actually stems from the organized labor movement. In the early 1900s, West Virginia coal miners were fighting for better pay and better working conditions. The mine owners convinced the local law enforcement authorities to fight their battle for them. In late August and early September 1921, 10,000-15,000 coal miners confronted an army of police and strikebreakers. They met on Blair Mountain where they battled for days. More than a million rounds of ammunition were fired. The fighting only stopped when the US Army intervened following a presidential order.

What does that have to do with Rednecks?

Since those fighting did not have uniforms to identify friend from foe, the miners wrapped red kerchiefs around their necks. The term, Redneck, stuck.

Today, not only are the rights to collective bargaining once again under attack by corporate interests. The battlefield on top of Blair Mountain is also under assault by big coal. A coal company wants to remove the entire mountaintop to get at the coal below. To add insult to injury, the coal company owners are supported by modern day “Rednecks.”

Origins Of The Right’s Misplaced Hate Of Obama.

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I confess that I’ve long been confused about the intense (and, I believe irrational) hatred of President Obama, when it appears to me that he has been guilty of nothing more than trying to correct the problems created by the previous administration.

Upon reflection, I believe it stems from the Right’s unfailing belief in the so-called “free” market.

When the economy, led by the housing market and a lack of common-sense regulations, careened off a cliff in late 2008, the Bush administration recommended a bill to Congress that called for the US to spend billions in order to prop up the failing banks. Lacking the support of Republican leaders in Congress, the measure initially failed. But when the stock markets crashed as a result, enough Congressmen were persuaded to change their votes and the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) went into effect.

The program ultimately stabilized the markets and the economy enough to prevent the Great Recession from turning into a second Great Depresssion. Yet many Republicans were furious. They believed TARP to be a government intrusion into the infallibility of free market principles. When President Obama subsequently offered government-backed loans to General Motors and Chrysler in order to stave off the collapse of the American automobile industry, the free market Republicans and Libertarians went ballistic.

Capitalizing on an idea by a Republican strategist, groups such as the Koch-funded American FreedomWorks spent millions to rally free market believers to protest. They labeled the movement a modern day Tea Party. It turned out to be the perfect way to inspire the Republican base which was dispirited following the 2008 elections.

Teapublicans deluded themselves into believing that the Great Recession was not the fault of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act or the Bush administration’s lax oversight of the financial industry.

They focused, instead, on President Obama’s attempts to fend off an economic Armegeddon. In addition, they convinced themselves that the national debt, which had doubled under President Bush, was now the fault of President Obama. They believed the auto bail-outs and economic stimulus were evidence that the administration was moving toward socialism. The President’s eventual signing of a bill to reform the out-of-control healthcare system added even more fuel to the torches being carried by the Tea Party.

When viewed in context, the Teapublican fears seem irrational. But when viewed through a partisan lens and slavish devotion to free market principles, regardless of their consequences, the fears are understandable, if not logical.

Moreover, this helps to explain why so many lower and middle class Americans vote against their self-interest by supporting Republican candidates determined to transfer wealth upward through tax breaks for the wealthy.

Over many years of listening to Fox News pundits and Rush-to-the-table Limbaugh, these people have become convinced that all of their problems will be solved if only we rid ourselves of government intrusion and allow Teapublican leaders to work their free market magic. Indeed, these voters are likely convinced that the only thing standing between them and unimagined riches are evil Democrats, who in their Teapublican minds, are trying to replace capitalism with socialism, or worse yet, communism or fascism.

Never mind that many of these people don’t have a clue of what any of these “isms” actually mean. Hence the Tea Party signs that read “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.”