Opinion-Columns.com

Poor Depends On Where You Live

The United States Census Bureau is a wonderful organization that takes our national pulse, checks our height and weight and makes inferences from that, as smoothly as any family doctor.  Our body-politic is as complicated as our various couch-potato incarnations, the diagnosis as varied, the prescriptions as vulnerable to individual identity. What I’m driving at is we’re not as poor in Caledonia, Mississippi as we are in Highland Park, Illinois.

It’s not a small matter.  According to today’s statistical release, one in every eight Americans lives in poverty.

Definition.  We require that everything be defined in America.  No different for poverty.  You want to know what poor is, we can tell you.  For a family of four, it’s $19,307 and a couple is poor at $12,334.  The interesting thing is (if it’s not too grotesque to talk about poverty as interesting) that you can be every bit as poor earning $19,500 and yet lose various and sundry gift packages worth a whole lot of money.  Such as housing assistance, food stamps, school lunch programs and the like.  $193 bumps you out of that even though you won’t feel one bit richer.

Getting back to Caledonia and Highland Park, the same nineteen grand will buy you quite decent housing in Caledonia, a two bedroom house can be had there for about $7,000 per year.  A two bedroom apartment in Highland Park will set you back $10,500 and don’t even ask about a house.  Thus housing varies by from 36% to 55% of available income, depending upon where you’re poor.

Apropos to just these differentiations within the fixed-numbers of the poverty legislation currently applicable, a bright young newly-elected congressman has proposals.  Rahm Emanuel, Congressman from Chicago says “We’re getting at best an impressionistic sense of what’s going on in the economy.” Poverty levels, personal savings, inflation, health insurance and all kinds of similar data that drives policy-making is increasingly based on census figures that are too broad.  Thus we overstate some problems and understate others. “Major policy decisions are being made based on data that is inadequate to the task,” says Emanuel.

It’s not that the Census Bureau isn’t up to the task of making numbers fit circumstances. But it’s up to the White House budget office to actually change the official measurement and, thus far, both Democrat and Republican administrations have failed to do so.  There are a lot of geese out there to be cooked, so cooking the numbers has been an easier solution.  Rahm has recently introduced legislation to establish an independent commission aimed at overhauling government statistics. 

Yeah, I know . . . another independent commission.  But let’s hope we get this one and begin to straighten out the numbers we live and legislate by.
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More about politics in America at my personal web site.

Will the Last Woman With a Voice, Please Turn Out the Lights

The national fight by anti-abortionists, un-winnable for the time being, is being fought instead in the states, where it makes considerable headway.

As an instance, both Florida and West Virginia passed legislation recognizing an embryo as an independent victim of homicide.  Missouri has a special session coming up in early September, called by the governor to consider three anti-abortion proposals.  A near record number of laws have been passed in various states this year regarding various restrictions on a woman’s access to both abortion and contraception.  The national attention is on Judge John G. Roberts, but the national pressure is building quietly and effectively, state by state.

That pressure and that direction and that oratory is male dominated, by an enormous margin.

Preachers, priests, pastors, evangelists, legislators, lobbyists, fund-raisers, contributors, the conservative core and the wild-eyed fringe are overwhelmingly male.  There was a time in human history when priestesses were in the driver’s seat, but that was a way long time before the men hijacked religion and marched off to this or that inquisition, crusade or witch-burning.

Women’s attitudes seemed to be “Look at the little dears, off to another war” as they bent over the stew-pot, sending their offspring to be slaughtered.  Not a priestess-like role.

Women now have the vote and many of them are senators, representatives, governors, CEOs, astronauts or scientists.  But there’s a left-over tremor in their collective voice, a harkening to past cringings-in-the-shadows, as if they need permission to be heard, as though at any moment some man will come along and vilify them for their opinion, take away their hard-fought victories and cast them back into the kitchen and nursery.

I wonder how

• Margaret Whitman (CEO) at eBay
• Anne Mulcahy (CEO) at Xerox
• Hillary Clinton, Senator from New York
• Oprah Winfrey, entertainer
• Melinda Gates, Chairman, Gates Foundation
• Condoleeza Rice, Secretary of State
• Zoe Cruz (President) Morgan Stanley and
• Abby Cohen at Goldman Sachs

feel about these issues.  Senator or CEO, make no mistake, men will control your reproductive life if they can. If you let them, that is.  And if you think this issue is a hot-button topic for someone else, you’ve sold out your sex for a big title. Too controversial for you to take a stand?

If not you, who?  If not now, when?

All of you are rich as well as powerful and I won’t point at your wealth as a primary reason to not become involved, because how could I know?  But it is a fact that abortion rights are the rights of the not-wealthy.  If you have the bucks and your particular state’s laws don’t accommodate, then it’s merely a plane ride and a good hotel to another state.  Before Roe vs. Wade, no rich women were out there at risk because they all had the dough to go elsewhere, even if elsewhere was Europe with a vacation thrown in.  No, it’s the poor and the scared and the powerless who pay.  It’s always been the left-out and the set-aside who pay, who are told in church that their riches are to be found in the next world.

The wealthy want theirs now.

I don't begin to know Margaret or Anne or Hillary’s opinions regarding abortion.  I grabbed their names because they're movers and shakers. They, along with Oprah and Melinda, Condy, Zoe and Abbey, may all be against it as can be, but they should be heard.  Powerful men make men’s issues known.  That’s what kept Augusta National Golf Club all men . . . power.  Powerful women owe it to their less powerful sisters to be heard and to use their power as it’s needed.

Otherwise men will just send them back to the nursery, when and as it suits their purpose.  It stupefies me that in a country where women have more than half the vote, they seem to have less power than the measly four million NRA members.  The NRA has kept us from any sort of gun control with stunning effectiveness. 

Women have been as stunningly ineffective in demanding and getting control over their own reproductive systems.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

Detroit Auto-Makers on the Cutting Edge

Norman Minetta isn’t exactly a household name, but he’s just as Stormin’ a Norman as General Schwarzkopf when it comes to fighting the wars for Detroit.  Minetta’s the Transportation Secretary and, like all good generals, he knows his marching orders,  So, no surprise, the newly announced fuel efficiency standards were largely crafted by the boys at Ford and GM and Chrysler.

Which is sort of like letting a six-year-old set the menu for the family---all candy-coated sugar-bombs for breakfast and no vegetables at dinner.

Like undisciplined kids, Detroit automakers want what gives them a sugar-high and Minetta’s giving it to them.  Who cares if it makes them sick?  It’s a dying industry here in the U.S. anyway and the easy politics is to give the Big (but getting smaller) Three whatever they ask for so they can’t complain on the way to the poorhouse.

“Fleet mileage,” which is an average across all product lines was making Ford more concerned than Moody rating their bonds as junk, because Japanese producers weren’t building the heavy end of the product line.  In Ford’s mind that gave them an additional advantage, added to their already superior automobiles.  GM screamed that they needed just one more fix before being carted off to the rehab clinic.  Chrysler was more quiescent, smugly assuming their Mercedes Benz partner wouldn’t really let them fall off the end of the table.

And so it’s Back-To-The-Future with the American producers building muscle-cars and four to five-ton behemouth SUVs as gasoline edges toward $4.  Minetta’s candy-coated suicide-pill gives them six categories within which they can hide from logical downsizing, the last of which requires no mileage standards at all.  Sneak a peek at Navistar’s ‘pickup’ that marketing executives rave “really towers over what's on the road now in height, standing only a foot below a basketball rim and more than two feet above the Hummer. It's not going to fit into the standard garage," said Mark Oberle, a spokesman for Navistar. "We can see it as a vehicle for business people who want to make a distinct impression. For personal use, it's for people who want to make a statement."

That’s a statement that impresses the hell out of me.  A statement of American excess in full plumage.  Not a single Detroit executive admits that deep discounts and finance deals that postpone the pain have become their norm, while Toyota can’t manufacture enough Prius’ to meet demand (at full price).

Muscle the market is the banner under which we march, champagne for everyone and don’t stop the music.  Consider the muscle-car Dodge Charger, with its 425 horsepower, 6.1 liter engine that does 0-60 in five seconds.  That's presuming you can actually keep the tires on the road instead of uselessly burning up.  Detroit is once again on the cutting edge.

Cutting its own throat.
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There are lots more things that make me nuts, all of them on my personal web site.

Apple and the Music Industry, Two Flavors of Intransigence

Apple Computer’s thread to survival is no longer a computer, but the iPod and its companion loading mechanism, the iTunes service.  The ‘Music Industry,’ loosely defined as the four major record companies seems bent on severing whatever threads to survival it has left, loosing itself to a final free-fall.

Each component in this modern Shakespearean drama has in common its failure to learn from past experience.  Greed, or an inability to see where the music business is headed is the Industry cause and hubris is a specialty of Steve Jobs at Apple.

Music executives are so muddled by wealth, they don’t see the wall in front of their speeding egos.  The old political adage of it’s the economy, stupid is turned on its ear within the music biz and screams to anyone who listens that it’s the Internet, stupid.

The bean-counters and expense-accounters have so thoroughly picked the pockets of their artists and consumers over the last four decades that they’ve become accustomed to theft and deception, as long as it’s their own.  The technology that allows file-sharing (the swapping of whopping big content in seconds) has shot down the business model that allowed them to sell 9-cent CDs for $14.95.  Like Claude Rains in Casablanca, they’re “Shocked, absolutely shocked.”  Misguided and flailing, they sued every kid they could find and heaped upon themselves the wrath and disgust of their record-buying public.  Sales slid, then threatened to lose their footing entirely. 

And a funny thing happened on the way to the demise of the Music Industry as it was currently structured.  Apple Computer invented the iPod, a marvel the size of a pack of cigarettes that could store and play-on-demand thousands of songs.  Not albums, individual songs, just as listeners wanted them.  Tiny jukebox, free downloads . . . end of the Music Industry, huh?  Not quite.  Apple served up iTunes to load its little miracle and sold the individual songs for 99 cents.  People bought them by the tens of millions. Overpriced, methinks.  But overpriced or not, they proved that the public would rather buy if they weren't taken to the cleaners by greed.

It doesn’t take a financial wizard to see that 99 cents times the twelve or fourteen songs on the average CD comes out to nearly the $14.95 that thwarted all those overpaid record moguls. Jobs had found a way to run the horse the industry couldn’t flog into a trot.  iTunes pays the music deadbeats 70 cents out of every 99.  Everyone breathed a sigh of relief and smiled, right? Went back to their babes and caviar?

Wrong.

Apple, in a move disarmingly like their refusal to share their operating software way back in their early history . . . a mistake that gave us Microsoft . . . is again refusing to make iTunes software compatible with other manufacturers.  Owners can’t load a Napster song on their iPods.  Thus Apple itself is out there up to its knees, standing in the way of the downloaded-music tsunami, expecting to hold back the waters.  Steve Jobs makes another industry breakthrough and follows it with the same old industry blunder.

You gotta wonder.

Meanwhile, back in the rarefied atmosphere of their Malibu beach houses, the industry that was flat-on-its-ass three years ago is getting greedy.  What a surprise. The same guys who misunderstood their market year after year is now poised, at the top of this wave of prosperity, to misunderstand it again.  The CEO of Sony BMG complained that Apple has two income streams; music downloads and iPod sales, while poor Sony has only one. He somehow connects that with a need to squeeze the Apple.

Hello, Sony!  Earth calling!  An income stream is an income stream . . . don’t knock it, particularly when you’re harvesting 70% of it . . . build on it!

Hello, Steve Jobs.  Music (and all other digital entertainments) are the fastest growing businesses on the planet. Earth calling you as well! Don’t get painted into another software corner by someone thirsty and technologically capable and overstuffed with available capital . . .

. . . someone like Google.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

Taking Time to Take Time Off

John Roberts was quoted the other day that "While some of the tales of woe emanating from the Court are enough to bring tears to the eyes, it is true that only Supreme Court Justices and school children are expected to and do take the entire summer off."   But, he added, there was an upside to that break: "We know that the Constitution is safe for the summer."

Nice quote and shows the humorist side of Judge Roberts, but it got me to thinking about our increasingly frenetic lives.  I have memories of my grandparents in tiny Tipton, Iowa.  GrandDad had a business downtown as well as a farm twenty miles out, but he walked the four blocks home every day for lunch, took a brief nap and walked back ‘downtown.’ Evenings we sat on the porch, talked to one another, invited a neighbor up if one happened to pass and complained about noisy starlings roosting in the two huge old maples in the yard.  It wasn’t terribly intellectually stimulating, but that may have been more because my grandparents were not intellectual than any other reason.  They were certainly not bumpkins.  When his five daughters (including my mother) were young, they played all 48 states and Alaska on the Chautauqua Circuit as the Craven Family Orchestra, my grandfather the leader and cornetist. My grandfather had that greatest of luxuries, the now quickly disappearing lavishness, not of money or finer things, but of time.

So, John Roberts’ quote sent me off on this little flight of fancy and it seems to me that there is wisdom to be found in taking the entire summer off.  We regularly re-charge our cell-phones and digital cameras, but seldom ourselves.  Reachable instantaneously by our labor-saving devices, we can no longer afford the time or hide long enough from the constant pressure of need to take even a metaphoric walk home for lunch and a nap. Instead of re-charging ourselves we misappropriate our lives to the service of busyness in the guise of business.

Few of us, like those lucky children and Supreme Court Justices, can take the summer off.  But we could have our cake and eat it too, if we and our employers worked at it.

Consider that there are 260 working days in a year and from that we are usually allowed to deduct 5 for personal time, another 10 sick leave, a minimal 10 for vacation, added to a usual 12 accepted as national holidays of one kind or another.  All of this based on an eight-hour day.  Okay . . . 223 times we actually get up to the morning alarm in a year.

I suggest we work a ten instead of eight hour day and thereby gain a day a week.  52 extra days off drops the total to 171 ten-hour days.  223 times 8 yields 1,784 and 171 times 10 yields 1710, so we’ve shorted our employers by 74 hours and that won’t do . . . patch on another seven ten-hour days and agree to work 178 days a year. 

Now comes the fun.

We’ve got 187 days off.  More days off than days on.  Three-day weekends the year around and still thirty-one days for holiday.  What we’ve given up is the extraneous stuff, the personal time and sick leave and national holidays, but what we’ve gained is some rational control over our lives and the ability to create a sense of family down-time. 

What we do with it is an entirely different question.  I recall that computers were going to create a paperless society and that hasn’t happened.  Four-day, forty-hour weeks might not put us on the porch in Tipton, Iowa either. 

But somewhere in the equation, we need desperately to reclaim our humanity and the next generation of technological devices isn’t likely to provide the answer.
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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

Let the Great Sacrifice Begin

"Like previous wars we have waged to protect our freedom,
the war on terror requires great sacrifice from Americans."
George W. Bush

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to sacrifice when my President and my nation asks me.  So far, I haven’t been asked  In fact, no one has been asked except the military and even that requirement has fallen disproportionately on the Reserves.

What you and I have been asked to give includes:

• Giving (and receiving, if we’re wealthy enough) a trillion dollar tax break in place of the tax increases that usually attend a declaration of war
• Giving no-bid war contracts to Vice-President Cheney’s old alma mater, Haliburton, under which they are repeatedly found to have their hands in the till
• Giving a blind-eye to unconscionable mistreatments of war prisoners in a scandal the likes of which this country has never had to choke down
• Giving unquestioning approvals to an almost endless string of false premises, lies, cover-ups and blunderings by the President, Vice-President and Secretary of Defense
• Giving the appearance of approval to the military chain-of-command as it accepts illegal direction from its civilian leadership
• Giving false hope and insufficient support to the citizenry of two nations we selected to punish for the presumed crimes of their leaders (whom we supported militarily and politically in recent times)

Last week George Bush said, "The veterans of World War II defended America when ruthless foes threatened our freedom and our very way of life. And after winning a great victory, they helped former enemies rebuild and form free and peaceful societies that would become strong allies of America. The World War II generation endured great suffering and sacrifice because they understood that defeating tyranny in Europe and Asia was essential to the security and freedom of America.” And he’s absolutely correct in that statement.

That was of course a war of nations, a conflict with lines clearly drawn, a war we came to late and unwillingly after the naval attack on naval facilities in Pearl Harbor.  Navy against Navy, not world-power against terrorists.

What President Bush neglected to add, is that the generation he reveres

• Sent its women into war plants
• Planted ‘victory gardens’
• Saved scrap metals and even the grease from cooking
• Bought ‘War Bonds’ in unprecedented numbers
• Rationed meat, sugar, cooking oil and gasoline
• Stopped domestic production of automobiles and most consumer goods in favor of airplanes, tanks, ships and guns
• Honored its soldiers when they came home and rewarded them with the ‘G.I. Bill of Rights’
• Stayed in Europe and Japan while the Marshall Plan was administered

In stark contrast to those commitments, this administration embarrasses itself by the reference.  Our killed young men come home in secret, without so much as a camera to meet them.  SUVs are the big sellers in automobiles, corporate greed and scandal are at all-time highs, consumer spending is unequalled, the press has been put to bed with milk and cookies.  Our politicians can’t wait to run from the consequences of their blunders. There will be no Marshall Plan because there is no leader of anywhere near the moral stature of George Marshall.  It’s a mockery to compare this lack of sacrifice with what the most senior of our senior citizens willingly gave.  I wonder how Bush’s father feels about that?

But I’m ready to sacrifice when my President and my nation asks me.  I have the seed-packets.  The radishes go over there, next to the sweet-corn.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

Pat Robertson Needs a Reality Check

Of course Pat ran for President, but you can’t hold that against him.  A lot of men as foolish as he is have run and some of them have been elected.

But this thing about assassinating Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, is just off the wall.  Time to throw a rope around old Pat Robertson and lead him off to a more remote pasture than The 700 Club.  Certainly the Christian Broadcast Network that sponsors his diatribes ought to be ashamed of itself, but we’ve gotten to the place where the so-called religious right is equally off its nut. Pat Robertson is the best argument I know against intelligent design.

Whatever happened to the age-old religious beliefs in loving one another, helping each other over the rough patches and being a good neighbor?  When did it turn so hard to the right that we have national religious and political figures (Robertson, embarrassingly rates as both) suggesting they “don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he (Chavez) thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.”

I guess he doesn’t know much about this ‘doctrine,’ but it ought to be explained to him, since the reason we have it is because we lost a president named Kennedy by making it open season on heads of state. “We have the ability to take him out and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability.” This ill-informed ignoramus went on to call Chavez, the democratically elected president of his country, a ‘strong-arm dictator’ that our covert operatives ought to do the job on and get it over with.

Get what over with?

Chavez’s friendship with Fidel Castro?  Does that affiliation between South and Central American presidents so disgust Robertson that he would kill one (or both) of them?  What a paragon of peace and faith in God this ignorant buffoon claims to be.

Is it Venezuelan oil that needs to be ‘gotten over with?’  Pat better adjust his glasses and notice that America, each and every day, consumes nearly 60% of Venezuelan production.  That mob Pat calls his flock, those 700 Clubbers, might get a tad bent out of shape if Chavez yanked that production.  I wonder how long it would be before Robertson’s followers begged the old man to recant as gasoline shot up towards four bucks? 

At age 75, Robertson is clearly senile.

His past idiocies include a suggestion that the State Department should be nuked and that feminism encourages women to ‘kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.’ 

Get serious, Pat.  Those are just the women in your social circles.
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There are lots more things that make me nuts, all of them on my personal web site.

It’s Cut-and-Run Time

There’s two ways to look at the rush-to-judgment the Bush administration is forcing on Iraqis as they struggle toward a constitution. 

• A certain truth is that without a gun at their heads, Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites would be at the bargaining table for years to come. 
• Just as certain, is the fact that the timetable argued as inviolable is a political necessity and the politics at risk are American rather than Iraqi.

George Bush has a greased rope to climb so far as Iraq and his mismanaged war is concerned and even he has to finally recognize a legacy-at-stake when he sees one. So, it’s cut-and-run time in a war where he’s consistently claimed America will ‘stay the course.’ The timekeeper for the cut before the run is American Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, who’s just cut-and-run himself from duties as Ambassador to Afghanistan, his native country.

Khalilzad is a guy who knows the ropes of this part of the world and, over a career in American politics, he’s been as successful a negotiator with terrorists as he has with matters of state. (As an aside to the issue at hand, he might have been a brilliant choice as propaganda-master to the Muslim world instead of the shaky option to give the job to Karen Hughes)  Khalilzad is the guy holding the gun as the Iraqi constitution gets steamrollered into Parliament, where it lies at this moment, like a turd in a punchbowl.

GB first decreed a war, then a victory, now a constitution, soon a plebiscite to confirm that constitution, then a national election, followed as quickly as possible by the withdrawal of American troops, followed shortly thereafter by chaos, disintegration and civil war. 

By speeding this process, perhaps necessarily but certainly unwisely, he may even have forced the dissolution of Parliament and that would be a setback far more destabilizing than an additional several weeks of debate. Because that’s the choice.  According to current law, Parliament will either receive the draft of the new charter or vote on setting a new deadline. If it doesn't agree on either, the legislature will have to dissolve.  Abdul-Khaleq Zangana, a Kurdish member of the drafting committee said there were problems with ''the role of religion and women's rights.'' He predicted ''either an extension -- and this is not good -- or parliament dissolves -- and this is difficult.''

Understatement of the week. Difficult doesn’t half say it.

Other problems touch upon the creation of Iraq as a federation, which would give much-desired autonomy to Kurd, Sunni and Shiite areas of Iraq but brings with it an incentive to become independent.  Then there’s the matter of who gets how much of the national oil revenue.  And the writing of laws. The various negotiating blocs agreed that no laws would be adopted that contradict the principles of Islam.  Fair enough, but they agreed that in addition, no law shall be adopted that contradicts human rights and democratic principles.  That's a far tougher call.  Sharia, human rights and democratic principles, each countermanding the other are sure to make it impossibly complicated to write new law for this new country, a secular nation in its recent past.

So, there’s no doubt a certain amount of finger-crossing down on the ranch as this all spins its way into reality. But this president, who has been accused of many things, is determined not to be accused of allowing the schedule to fail.

The nation may fail and the original intent may fail (although it’s become murky enough over the past year to resist) and the military may be asked to rack up yet another failure.

But the schedule will prevail.
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Read more of my musings on the war in Iraq at my personal web site.

If You Can’t Change the Judgment, Change the Judge

No, this is not about Judge Roberts.  It’s yet another example of a so-called Justice Department that’s confused about what constitutes justice.

After nine years of obfuscation and delay and outright lies, Justice is asking for the replacement of the long-suffering judge who’s had to listen to all this clap-trap on the part of the Interior Department’s handling (or failing to handle) 260,000 Indian trust accounts.  The failures aren’t recent, by the way, they go back over a hundred years.

A hundred years?

Yep. A hundred years of non-management, followed by nine years in court, failing to change their ways and Interior thinks they’re being unfairly abused.  Scalping, it seems to me at this point, would be more than fair.  Or maybe tied down over an ant hill.  But fairness, like beauty, is always in the eyes of the beholder and Interior is miffed about Judge Lamberth’s July ruling, which it characterizes as “unlike any other judicial opinion that we have ever seen.”

On the other hand, there aren’t many instances in the judicial career of a sitting judge that they are called upon to opinionate over a stew so long in the stewing.  It has obviously tried Judge Lamberth’s patience.  He had hoped not to retire while still hearing yet another set of excuses as to why Interior can’t find its ass with both hands. 

The Justice Department, rather than being stung by the rebuke, complained that Lamberth described the Interior Department as a “dinosaur . . . the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago, the last pathetic outpost of the indifference and anglocentrism we thought we had left behind.”

Sounds eloquently accurate.

And they want a change in judges for that?  On the prosecution-side of the argument, Dennis Gingold (lead Indian attorney) responds that the governments problem is not the judge, but being called to account for “100 plus years of bad facts, it’s pattern of unethical behavior and its persistent strategy of diversion, delay and obstruction.”

A newly assigned judge would certainly be a diversion.  Hard to contemplate bringing the new guy up to speed on nine years of hearings, but its not hard to see where Justice is headed with this appeal . . . a little delay and obstruction is preferable to a lot of accounting and admittability and they have a hundred-year reputation to uphold.  This country has traditions and the Justice Department is more committed to upholding those traditions than it is upholding justice, even if those traditions are cast in the old John-Wayne mold of redskins against the white folks.  In fact, maybe particularly under those circumstances.

Again, as I mentioned when we first visited this subject, John McCain sits as chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee in the Senate.

C’mon, John.  This particular affair has gone on long enough.
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There are lots more things that make me nuts, all of them on my personal web site.

Swoon and Wilt Take On a Whole New Meaning

I guess it depends upon how badly you want to flog the lack of actual news.  But it occasionally becomes comic and one can only wonder who edits AP.

An Associated Press article about today’s action in the stock markets is titled “Stocks Make Some Gains as Oil Prices Swoon.” A few paragraphs down they opt on “oil prices wilted from last week's record highs, falling more than $1 a barrel in mid-afternoon trading.”

That’s pretty strong stuff for a measly single-buck drop on $66.  When was the last time you described a six-tenths of one percent movement in the price of a commodity as a swoon or a wilt?

But it’s interesting, this oil-price thing, as a barometer of what might have been under slightly altered circumstances.  I remember $2 a barrel oil, but then I remember 22 cent Lucky Strikes as well.  If you live long enough almost anything in memory has changed significantly, most of them for the better.  Here in Europe where I live, it’s nothing new to plunk fifty bucks into the tank of my modest little Subaru.  That’s been the way it is over here since long before Iraq and everyone gets along just fine.  And although I hear some bitching, America seems to have borne up under the strain of $2.60 gasoline that we pay $4.50 to get.

That extra two bucks we pay (and have paid) over here is all taxes of course. 

But had we significantly taxed gasoline in the states, we’d be way closer to balancing our unbalanced balance of payments (intriguing sentence structure there), much less of a debtor nation and perhaps much more importantly, we’d have a differing view of what’s important and what’s not.  Such as four-bedroom homes with three-car garages for couples.  Such as pickup trucks and SUV’s for soccer-moms.  Such as other ways to power our cars and electric generating plants, our industry and homes.

It’s coming to that, you know. That's the inexorable direction of the world.  And, if you live long enough, you’ll tell your grandkids you are the last of the relics left over from the industrial dark-ages.  That’s what history is going to call the two hundred year period from about 1850 to 2050, the Industrial Dark Ages.  Those will be known as unenlightened times when ignorant humans took most of the buried fossil fuels of this earth and threw them into the atmosphere, a time akin in ignorance to the days of the Inquisition. Your grandkids will hardly believe anyone could have been so stupid, with a veritable cornucopia of available clean sources of energy at their disposal. 

But they’ll love you anyway, because you’re their granddad.
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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.