PlumwoodRoad

Texas Governor Rick Perry, Secessionist?

2011-06-19T10:02:00.005-05:00

I am curious about Republican Texas Governor, Rick Perry. Other than very favorable comments written of him and his state's phenomenal economic success in The Wall Street Journal, I really don't know much about him yet.

This morning Bill Burton, a former Obama media adviser, on FoxNews Sunday attempted to dampen interest by mentioning that Governor Perry wants Texas to secede from the US.

Hmm...I have a number of Liberal friends and I have heard this mentioned before when Perry's name came up. Talk of modern-day secession-ism would be a serious matter if the Left did not throw out as a political knock, like some gotcha' torn out of context from something else. As part of the oath of office as Governor of Texas, didn't Rick Perry swear to "defend and protect the Constitution of the United States"? Has he been negligent?

The question might better be, which Constitution did Governor Perry swear to defend? The old Constitution that we worked with for over 200 years, or the New Constitution that mandates everyone to buy Government Health Care or prevents a company like Boeing Aircraft from setting up a manufacturing operation in whichever state it chooses?

Let's go one baby-step further. Right now there is a large and growing "off the books"economy. Cash only. No paperwork. Additionally, nearly half the country does not pay income tax. General Electric and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner are two very different but notable examples. Haven't these Americans already seceded from the rest of the country?

As for other potential secessionists, keep your ears open as election 2012 approaches. We'll all hear this more than once: "My God! If Rick Perry (or Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney, or Michele Bachmann, or Herman Cain, or Fill-In-The-Blank) wins the election I'm moving to Canada!" I actually know people who have said those very words prior to a couple different elections: the same people, ready to move every four years. Haven't they, to a degree, already left the country?

Five Saturdays

2010-09-17T14:01:00.003-05:00

The difference between winning big on November 2nd and winning REALLY BIG could be decided by five Saturdays in October.

It is daily becoming more apparent that Republican candidates will unseat many Democrats. A lot of deadwood will get trimmed and a lot of toothless “Blue Dogs” will get kicked off the front porch of the Capitol Building where they’ve been dozing for the last couple years.

Most pollsters seem comfortable predicting that the Republicans are within range of picking up the 39 seats necessary to regain control of the House of Representatives. A retaking of the Senate is no longer out of the question. If you are a Republican this is a nice place to be in the middle of September.

But having a very good election year is not the same thing as having a Great election year.

A Great Election Victory will not be limited to a monotone of predicted easy wins in communities where voters have been “mad as hell” for months. It will include a lot of other victories that are won on the edges. There will be surprise pickups that weren’t supposed to happen. There will be “squeakers” in districts or states that are currently “leaning Democrat” or too close to call. These tough wins are what will put the frosting on the cake. But, it is going to take more than positive voter trends to win the marginal races.

Through a gift of happy Providence the calendar this October includes five Saturdays. Those five Saturdays can be put to good use by dedicated activists.

In election politics there is absolutely nothing that can match the effectiveness of personal one-on-one campaigning. It is the cornerstone of American politics. A volunteer who walks up the front steps and rings the bell of a perfect stranger, a fellow citizen, and in a few sentences explains his candidate’s cause and – this is important – ends by respectfully “asking for the vote” is much more effective than another TV ad or four-color mailing. Direct personal appeal can win over a surprising number of marginal voters who otherwise may have gone either way.

This kind of campaigning is work. It requires a basic level of physical conditioning. It also requires commitment. But if you can march in a rally, you can go door to door. The candidate who can count on a corps of effective working volunteers has depth and a “ground game” added to his or her campaign.

You’ll find there is no greater joy in campaigning than working for a cause you love and a candidate you believe in and helping them win. Yes, giving up a month of Saturdays is a tough decision to make, but look all of exercise and fresh air you’ll get, and consider all the great new friends you’ll be working with.

Here’s another thing. In much of the nation by mid or late October the weather has turned ugly. It can be rainy and cold. But, with the right frame of mind this can offer another fun aspect to campaigning. Under particularly bad conditions, for those with a certain impishness, there is great sport in going out while you know your opponents will be staying in. Your fingers numb and your feet damp, there is much enjoyment in letting the opposition discover that while they were cozy on the sofa you were out in the weather getting votes. The chill you feel outside is toasty-warm compared to the chill they feel on the inside while learning you are gaining ground on them. They may have millions in donations from some government employee’s union but you have the intensity and the will to win.

It is this intensity and will to win that turns marginal campaigns into winning campaigns. Informed, motivated people going door to door reaching persuadable voters one at a time makes many tough races winnable.

This year there are five Saturdays in October. They were put there for a reason. Make them count.

This essay was originally published in American Thinker
September 17, 2010

What We Don't Want Future Generations to Say

2010-08-09T11:45:00.002-05:00

Future generations will judge us harshly. Let’s hope they don’t judge us for the wrong things.

Even though it looks like all governmental bodies involved have cleared the way for construction of the Cultural Center/Mosque near the site of the 9/11 terror attack a growing segment of the general public is still very much engaged in stopping the project.

According to a Fox News report today, August 9, 2010, resistance to the construction of Mosques is growing nation wide. Right now there are approximately 1,200 Mosques in the United States and plans are under way to increase that number to 1,800 in the near term. The Fox News cameras showed clips of sizable protests all across the country as Americans become increasingly alarmed.

Naturally, critics are characterizing this opposition as “religious intolerance”. And if we can agree that Islam is a religion and not just an extremely large “cult”, there may be a point to be made along those lines. Other people’s religious beliefs along a whole spectrum often seem cult-like to an outside observer. From the burning bush to the Resurrection, from no meat on Friday to no meat at all, from full-dunk baptism to just a splash…Most in this country believe the bill for any theological errors will come due soon enough. In the meantime, why make each other miserable arguing here on earth?

But, tolerance is not something we see in Islam. Pick up a newspaper almost any day; Bali, Mumbai, Lockerbie, Fort Hood. Today it was reported that ten international medical aid workers were lined up and shot in remote Afghanistan. No amount of politically correct happy talk can smooth that over.

Americans share a healthy suspicion of the Islamic community for a host of reasons, not the least is the 9/11 Attack and the video images of the Muslim world celebrating, dancing in the streets following it. Seeing no discernable effort of the Muslim community to rid their own faith of violent fanatics, is it any wonder that the American public’s “radar” is turned on and loaded with fresh batteries? And while none of us would like to be thought of as intolerant there is a prudent need for caution with regards to the spread of a belief system that has both declared and shown itself hostile to other religions and to the West.

So, rather than go round in a circle on the question of tolerance, let’s get to the point. Here is what we want to happen:

One hundred years from now we want the American people to look back and say of us, “The early 21st Century was truly a dark time. Many American citizens were rather silly in those days. They viewed the Muslim religion with skepticism and outright suspicion. They even went so far as to hinder the construction of hundreds of much-needed Mosques and cultural centers. Yet, in the face of all this intolerance, the good Muslim people themselves cleansed their faith of dangerous fanatics, renounced the violence of their traditional justice system, embraced their new culture in the West and became a model of tolerance and understanding.” That’s what we want future generations to say.

What we don’t want future generations to say, especially historians writing centuries from now, is something like this:

“The political leadership in America was every bit as weak and frivolous as their enemies suspected. This leadership was unsure of the value of their own culture. Preferring to avoid controversy at all cost, they were willing to look the other way and distract themselves with trivial matters. Public concerns were swept aside while the country was re-populated by residents who were openly hostile to the basic tenants of their Constitutional government. Once a tipping point was reached, the Old American Republic was no more and mankind sank, as Winston Churchill stated in 1940,

“into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

That is what we don’t want future generations to say.

The Monument at Ground Zero

2010-08-07T16:49:00.004-05:00

In Columbus, Ohio stands a statue dedicated to that city's namesake: the discoverer of America, Christopher Columbus.

Let's not quibble about whether a band of Vikings or an errant Chinese vessel reached the New World centuries earlier. Other than to quote the famous line "Yes, but when Columbus discovered America, it stayed discovered," that's beside the point.

In the late 1980s, I was photographing campaign commercials for Democratic candidates. One bright day, I was riding in a van with that day's candidate, his media consultant, a director, camera assistant, sound man, gaffer, and whoever else squeezed in. We were discussing particulars of our project when we turned a corner. There, in a grassy park, was the statue of Columbus. As we rolled past, gazing at it from the windows, one of our number offered a comment: "Christopher Columbus: a symbol of racism, sexism, genocide and oppression."

No one seemed to need clarification. He might as well have been talking about the weather. If you have spent any time at all around Leftist Democrats, you know that this remark was nothing out of the ordinary. Inside their comfort zone, or after they've had a couple glasses of wine, they are capable of making the most astonishing pronouncements and judgments, delivering them in the most unequivocal terms.

The Christopher Columbus remark lingered in the air for a moment, a couple heads nodded in agreement, and then talk returned to details of the job at hand.

That statement made an impression on me, however, and on occasion over the years, I have remembered it and considered it from various angles. It is certain that readers of this essay will find much to comment on regarding the peculiar mindset this anecdote exposes and the low opinion Democrats frequently express of the nation they seek to lead. It may even prompt readers to wonder whether some Democrats identify with America as a nation at all, wishing instead that the country had been settled by a better class of people. Again, this is not the point.

My point, rather, is this: Those who erected that statue intended the image of Columbus to reflect and honor the noble characteristics of Vision, Courage, and Resolve. They intended it to be viewed as symbol of the power of Right Idea and Inspired Enlightenment as a direct challenge to ignorance and superstition. And for quite a while, the statue of Columbus stood as a representation of those very things. But then we arrived at the era of postmodern Liberalism, and out of the classrooms and intellectual enclaves came political correctness, revisionist history, and the image of The Ugly American. Things changed, or were made to change. Immediately following World War II, there seemed to be a deep need in some to take a little of the shine off the U.S. The United States was no longer depicted as a beacon to mankind but as a plundering bully that needed to be cut down to size. To some in this country -- and every year, hordes of them come out of the woodwork around October 12 -- the image of Christopher Columbus was made to represent the exact opposite of Freedom, Enterprise, and the power of Mind.

Interesting, isn't it, how a monument erected to noble ideals can be remade instead into a symbol of "genocide and oppression"?

Let us now consider another monument, recently approved by state and local leaders to be built in lower Manhattan, a block from the hole in the ground known as "Ground Zero."

Less than nine years after the 9/11 attack -- the "Day America Will Never Forget" -- state and city officials in New York have cleared the way for a proposed fifteen-story mosque, or Islamic "culture center," just paces away from the hole. While nothing has yet been built on the actual site of Ground Zero, the mosque zipped through zoning and landmark hearings untouched by city and state bureaucrats and unscathed by citizen protests. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo were both early supporters of the project. Much of official media sees nothing wrong or disrespectful about it. Words like "insensitive", "tacky," and "in poor taste" have had no place in the conversation, nor have words like "vile" and "obscene." In the minds of our current officialdom, the issue is one of America's lack of religious freedom and tolerance -- and officialdom is all about tolerance of religion, don't you know.

Well, here is what that mosque will truly represent: To the American Left, this mosque represents a gooey dose of feel-good inclusiveness. It provides a platform for them to lecture and talk down to the public on the subject of America's perceived moral shortcomings while at the same time allowing them to act as enablers for a religion that happens to have many adherents who wish for the destruction of America. It's a win/win.

To Islamist fanatics, it will represent a victory over what they perceive as a corrupt and complacent America. To them, America is a "weak horse"; we can be had, and official approval of this mosque only nine years after the slaughter that took place at this location serves as living proof.

But to us regular citizens, living in the burroughs, across the Hudson, or out here in flyover country, driving our seven-year-old cars and happy to have our families together, that mosque represents the dangerous fecklessness of the Left. It is another symptom of timidity when common sense is called for. It is the disease of the Arizona border issue spread to New York City. That mosque will stand as a testament for every modern liberal who never missed a chance to call Ronald Reagan a "warmonger" but finds Islam a "religion of peace." Additionally, if actually built, it will be a testament to shortsighted Islamic overreach. Erected as a chip-on-the-shoulder challenge to the United States, it will sooner or later be knocked flat.

No one contemplating this building as they pass on their way to pay respects at Ground Zero will have to have lost loved ones that day to understand the meaning of that building. We all know that not just New York was attacked, but all of America. And we all will see this building as an insult to the three thousand people who were crushed or burned alive that September 11. This mosque, at fifteen stories tall, will memorialize two hundred souls per floor. And every brick, every stone will represent Progressive Liberalism's astonishing preference to defend everyone else's position, but not ours.

While we marveled at the implications of one Democrat's words on seeing a statue of Christopher Columbus, consider that same re-interpretative phenomenon magnified ten thousand times over as Americans contemplate this proposed monument at Ground Zero.

This essay was originally published in The American Thinker, August 7, 2010

Arizona and the Pottery Barn-rule

2010-08-02T21:56:00.003-05:00

What happened last week to the Arizona illegal immigration law is a clear indication that in these serious times America has an un-serious President… as if we needed more proof.

U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton has acquiesced to the Obama Administration’s pleading and issued an injunction preventing implementation of the Arizona law. What’s likely to happen next? To those who feel that Judge Bolton’s decision is a sure disaster I say, “Yes, it will be a disaster. But, let’s slow down and see if we can find a ‘bright side’ to any of this.” And, you know, there just may be. Barack Obama may have given the people of Arizona an insurance policy.

A few years ago regarding Iraq policy someone warned George W. Bush of the Pottery Barn-Rule; “You break it, you own it.”

By telling the people of Arizona, "Relax. I'll take care of it" the President has taken ownership of the illegal immigration issue and of all the collateral problems that result from it.

Okay, Mr. President, you’re in charge. From here on out, if anything breaks you get the bill. That includes shootings, kidnapping and headless bodies found in the desert.

Moving the official command and control center from Phoenix to Washington, DC, about as far away from Arizona as is possible to get, is not a confidence-builder. Arizona residents will not sleep better knowing that help is only 2,300 miles away and that it moves at the speed of the Federal bureaucracy.

The President does not seem to understand that because of his own Justice Department’s case and Judge Bolton’s ruling he is the one who will be receiving the likely "3:00am phone call". All of the crime and violence, the shootings and kidnapping are his problem now. While he can count on a continued news blackout on the part of the MSM, it is a safe bet that Fox News will continue to report (you decide) on the subject and to air hidden-camera footage of drug smugglers and human traffickers crossing the border at will.

It is not likely to be a pretty picture. It is inevitable that sooner or later the Obama Administration will get tangled up in some unpleasant border incident. When that happens the President will attempt to shift the blame and the people of Arizona and their police force will bear the cost. Our job will be to make sure that Obama is not able to shirk the responsibility he has taken with his District Court victory.

We were looking for a bright side to the story. That’s about as bright as it gets.

Simultaneously, there is a dark cloud that seems to have escaped much notice. The Republican Party also had a hand in Judge Bolton’s decision. All you Tea Party people take note.

In 2000 Judge Susan Bolton was nominated to the District Court by none other than President Bill Clinton. No surprises there. Problem is, US Senator John Kyl, Republican of Arizona, is the one who suggested her. Further, at that time the Republicans held a majority in the US Senate and Trent Lott was Majority Leader.

Fade Out – Fade In: Ten years later…

When Democrats needed a Judge to do them a favor they had one in the right place, and the Republicans put her there. This is what America gets as a result of Republican “collegiality” and going-along-to-get-along.

The purpose here is not to bang on John Kyl. He’s a pretty good Senator. But the Pottery Barn-rule applies to him, too, and to all of our elected officials. They have to know that they are accountable to us, not “Them”. We do not hold elections and send people to Washington to represent someone else’s interest. They are to represent our interests.

Keep the Arizona decision in mind when Elena Kagan’s name comes up for a vote.

To those reading this in Maine, Massachusetts, or South Carolina; now would be a good time to contact your Republican Senator. Remind them that if they break something, they bought it.

This essay was published August 2, 2010 on The American Thinker.

IN CHICAGO, THE AIR GOES OUT OF THE BLAGO TRIAL

2010-07-21T14:45:00.004-05:00

In the fall and early winter of 2008, former Illinois Governor, Rod Blagojevich, was caught on a series of tapes attempting to sell the US Senate seat soon to be vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. It caused quite a sensation when the case broke in early December. The resultant early reports of involvement or complicity by top Obama people put quite a dent in the showroom finish of the new administration

For much of the nation the Blago case was their first lesson in how things are done in Illinois. Stunned voters didn't have to connect too many dots before they got a picture of what we would be seeing more of in the weeks and months to come. So much for “Hope and Change”.

A brief recap of the case offers a Who’s Who of Democratic politics. One of the bidders, allegedly, was Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. who had a platoon of fundraisers out trying to scratch together $6.5 Million. Convicted fixer and fraudster, Tony Rezko, the new President’s old pal and next door-neighbor was implicated. Also playing parts were key members of the Obama team; Rham Emanuel and Valerie Jarrett, as well as Senators Harry Reid and Dick Durbin. A local Union official, Tom Balanoff president of Local 1 of the SEIU, the union associated with ACORN, is alleged to have acted as a “cut-out” between the Obama team and Blago in the Governor’s mansion. There were bugs crawling around under every rock. All that was needed was a court case that would kick a few of them over.

Unfortunately, crack Federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, sprung the trap before money actually changed hands, which means the main crime, actually “selling” a Senate seat, technically was never committed,. Why he did not wait a day or two until he caught all concerned in the act has not been made satisfactorily clear. As a result of Fitzgerald's jumping of the gun, Federal Prosecutors had to base their case entirely on recordings of wire taps and testimony involving other crimes and cases of bribery, which, other than “guilt by association”, did not directly involve members of the Obama Administration

Still, the case against Rod Blagojevich seems not only rock solid, but sensationally so.

To an Illinois public accustomed to existing in a dirty political world, Blago was widely known to be running an exceptionally dirty operation. His administration was something special even by Illinois standards. On one of the tapes, when Children's Memorial Hospital balked at making the suggested $50,000 “donation”, Blago was heard to say “Screw those guys” -- and he held up State funding to the hospital. His brand of politics was not tiddly-winks.

However, Blago’s methods were not so far out of line that he had any problem getting reelected in 2006. Voters in the Land of Lincoln when given the choice between a crook or a Republican, no matter how Rino-like, can always find a reason to go with the Democrat. Look at the current Illinois Senate race between bland establishment Republican, Mark Kirk, and disgraced banker and failed State Treasurer, Alexi Giannoulias, Democrat. It’s neck and neck.

As the corruption trial heated up over the last year Blago was everywhere; making personal appearances, phoning in on talk shows, even at one point hosting his own weekend talker; and all the while professing his innocence and defiantly vowing to take the stand and name names. In fact, he regularly declared his eagerness to take the stand to tell his side of the story. He was only doing what everyone else in Illinois politics does, and he was not going to go to prison without naming names.

Naturally, people in Washington were nervous. Pile the Blago trial on top of the Gulf oil leak, the economy, unemployment, resentment over health care, and etc., all coming just before the mid-term elections, and you can picture the sleepless nights in the White House, in Georgetown, or in other enclaves of power.

It was clear from the start that the official media grasped the serious implications of just how badly it could go if things spun out of control. You see at work their instinct to soft-peddle the trial, which began in June, as a sordid, second-rate “page 3” story. The big reporters were not present at Chicago’ Federal Court Building. The breathless coverage, the interviews, the speculation were largely absent. Lindsay Lohan, LeBron James, even the President's current vacation plans, padded the news and helped squeeze coverage. The trial to proceed next-to unnoticed.

In the media's spin, this was simply the trial of a local big-shot who opened his mouth one time too many and got caught. Nothing to do with Barack Obama or his associations or the polluted political pond that for years he swam in.

But there was always a feeling that the media was holding their breath -- up until news broke that the defense would rest without calling Blago to testify in his own defense.

Not only would the defense rest with no Blago, but it would rest with no Emanuel, no Rezko, no Jarrett, no Durbin, no Jackson, no Reid, no etc… That’s a lot of questions dodged by a lot of people.

Locals may greet the news with a shrug. Around Chicago far worse things get swept under the rug all the time. A few years ago a mysterious fire in the Evidence Room of the Cook County Building killed six county employees. There was some initial hubbub, but after a week or two the story just went away. To this day all we know about the matter is that some evidence was destroyed and six people died. The man ultimately in charge of the investigation, Cook County Board President John Stroger, was a supporter of Barack Obama.

Can anybody reading this guess how the “deal” was made? I can't. Who gets what, and how was the problem made to go away? Previous Illinois Governor, Republican George Ryan, is mid-way through a seven year sentence for corruption. How much time will Blago get? Will he get any time? Will he retire somewhere fat and happy with an off-shore bank account?

It is all part of the infinite puzzle of Chicago Politics.

All The News That's Fit to Print

2010-07-14T12:21:00.004-05:00

All of a sudden, they seem pretty optimistic over at BP. Sounds like they may finally be getting a handle on the Gulf oil spill.

Engineers are installing a new containment cap which is expected be a big improvement over the current cap. That first device, lowered into place on June 3rd, has managed to capture only about one-third of the estimated 60-80,000 barrels of crude gushing from the bottom of the Gulf each day. As we know, the other two-thirds of that oil continued to pollute the shrimp and oyster beds, kill wildlife, wash into marshes and spread onto white sand beaches. It will be about a week before installation is complete and crews can determine if the new cap works. Ideally, it will capture all or most of the oil.

Success will take a big load off President Obama’s mind. Knowing that he can play golf, fiddle with the nation’s economic system, or sue the State of Arizona without feeling like he’s somehow tied down to a crisis that needs attention should put a little of the swagger back in his step.

For Obama the best news is the fact that, if the new cap is successful, the leak will essentially be stopped before the invisible July 28th “deadline”, which would mark Day-100.

Not that an oil spill lasting 100 days would be guaranteed in-depth media coverage. There seems to be an unspoken truce between the President and the media: he’s not saying anything about the spill and the press isn’t asking. It would be nice if they’d ask even a teensy little question; like, how did BP become a finalist for a Major Award on safety and pollution control to be given just days after the initial explosion and disaster?
Wouldn’t any finalist have to undergo an inspection to qualify for such an award in the first place?

There were a few outbursts among talking heads back around Day-50, but they all seemed to quickly get back on the same page. Since then, aside from The Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily and talk radio, there has been a remarkable lack of media intensity in nosing around the story. They’ve been compliant, too, down along the Gulf, in staying back behind the yellow police tape strung along the beaches and wetlands, in not bothering people or otherwise getting in the way. Strange, isn’t it, that Bush and Cheney were often derided as oilmen – the word “oilmen” said with a sneer – then the nation elects a highly qualified community organizer from Chicago and this happens. It only goes to show that even for a man of Barack Obama’s gifts there is a limit to what he could learn from Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”.

Still, there are lingering questions that need to be asked – and answered truthfully – about some of the connections between BP and the current Administration; from the dollars BP donated to the Obama presidential campaign in ’08 and the gobs of money they’ve given to Democrats in general, to the cozy personal relationship between White House chief of staff, Rham Emanuel and BP lobbyists , to the breezy way Obama’s people in the U.S. Minerals and Management Service waved through BP’s list of variances and exemptions to standard drilling requirements.

President Obama’s hand-picked Minerals and Management Service director, Elizabeth Birnbaum, was thrown under the bus soon after the disaster occured and word of several other, shall we say, SNAFUs got out. So far, enterprising reporters have failed to track down Ms Birnbaum and question her.

To be fair, the Main Stream Press has generally had its hands full lately with other important breaking news. Waiving a calendar and pointing to an arbitrary “Day-100” of an environmental disaster is no guarantee such a story would be considered “news”, or that there would be any space available. These are extraordinary times we live in. Recently, displacing Gulf oils spill was coverage of the tragic Lindsay Lohan court case. Simultaneously crucial contract negotiations were under way involving NBA star LeBron James’, who ended up signing with the Miami Heat. Naturally this shocking development called for lots of interviews with angry fans in Cleveland and happy fans in Miami. Of those interviewed I saw, none seemed terribly upset about the oil spill. And then, wouldn’t you know it, in the middle of all of this, Mel Gibson went off the deep end again.

Looking ahead to the end of July, space for stories about out-of-work fishermen, lax governmental oversight, environmental catastrophe, and questionable Washington ethics will be especially limited. Right around that mythical “Day-100” Pro football training camps will be opening and the pre-season will be just around the corner; the major television networks will be pitching their new fall line-up; and with any luck at all Hef will be on his way to repurchasing Playboy, which some feel he never should have sold in the first place. Any one of these things could lead to a potential big story. Besides, by now just about everybody this side of a Tonight Show “Jay Walking” segment knows that there’s been a leak in the Gulf of Mexico since the middle of April. Right? So, what’s the big deal?

Well, seriously folks, there is a Big Deal. A bureaucratic Charley-Foxtrot of this magnitude demands accountability.

The so-called Main Stream Press has simply become too conflicted and too timid to do its part of the job. Remember all the Hurricane Katrina coverage; the weeks and months of follow-up stories; the stream of celebrity charity concerts; the coffee table commemorative books; the documentaries? Remember how the incompetence of state and local elected officials and the massive crime wave that followed the flooding were carefully Photoshopped out of the story and George Bush was Photoshopped in? We know what it looks like when the official eyes and ears of the media are hot on a story. We know how they sound when they want heads to roll. Right now the media is just going through the motions. They are uncomfortable with this story and are ready to move on.

Next up: Congressional hearings. Damage along the Gulf Coast is not going away anytime soon, no matter how much hush-money the Obama Administration wrings out of BP shareholders to throw at the local economy. No one in the current Administration is interested in getting answers about causes of the Gulf oil spill or the tardiness of Federal response to it. Neither the Harry Reid Senate, nor the Nancy Pelosi House is curious. Otherwise they’d already be holding hearings. Assuming a Republican take-over of either chamber in November, the new Republican committee chairmen should be clear: responsible Federal officials will be subpoenaed. Those who caused or compounded this disaster deserve to tell their stories under oath.

Remember in November.

This essay was originally published on The American Thinker, under the title; "Suppressing the Political Impact of the Gulf Oil Crisis" July 13, 2010

After November

2010-07-01T07:30:00.003-05:00

Why kid our selves? There is something seriously wrong with our government. Some of us may choose to ignore it, others may wish it would go away, but we all, at least on some subconscious level, know it. We see it in dozens of ways: persistent high unemployment, government spending through the roof, a health care system made worse by “reform”, two thousand miles of southern border left wide open, taxes set to explode next January 1, vote buying at the highest levels of the Administration, terrorist states building nuclear weapons, and an oil leak that has been a Charley-Foxtrot of mismanagement from Day One…on and on…

Behind all of this, down in the pit of our stomachs, is the gnawing feeling that many, even a majority, of those we’ve sent to Washington have no interest in looking out for the country’s best interests. What ever particular star in the east they are following, it isn’t ours.

But, a large segment of the population is not taking this bad situation quietly. An epidemic of November Fever has broken out. Brought back from near death by the infusion of energy from revved up Tea Party activists, Libertarians and political first timers, the Republican Party stands a real chance of getting control of at least some part of the government. We know it and the Left knows it.

There is, however, a catch: Electoral victory will not be enough.

Victory at the ballot box will need to be based upon – and followed up by – a plan for swift, sure action. No pussy footing around. The moment the new Representatives and Senators take the oath of office, they get in gear.

The new Congress and new Senate will need to drive off the vultures that are already circling. They will need to face down the Main Stream Press. They will need to challenge every political appointment that comes out of this White House. They will need to keep the nervous ones from panicking or breaking ranks. They will need to force the Administration’s hand by cutting off Federal funding for everything from implementation of the Health Care Reform to so-called “sanctuary” cities. They will need to immediately begin reassuring both the American people and financial markets that they are dead serious about reversing the damage that has been done. World War II was fought on two major fronts. This struggle will be fought on many fronts; legislative, executive, judicial, economic, educational, political and social. The enemy is a malevolent octopus that is rapidly getting its arms around everything and everyone.

So, what can we, the John and Jane Doe’s out here, do to further help mold Congress into a sharp, focused and effective band of legislators, one that takes seriously its Constitutional duties, one that will put the interests of the nation first?

The answer to that question appeared Monday, June 28th. A web site called American Thinker – a terrific site, you ought to take a look at it some time – published an essay by
Kieran Michael Lalor entitled “Top 10 Reasons GOP Must Rally behind Iraq and Afghanistan Veteran Candidates”

Read Lalor’s article. After listing 10 good reasons, the author does us the further service of listing seventeen Iraq and Afghanistan vets running as Republicans in various parts of the country. In order for them to help us, we must first help them. Obviously, it goes without saying that this year any veteran running as a Democrat is not running as a candidate of change, but rather in support a very toxic status-quo.

The message of Lalor’s essay is very encouraging. Those vets he lists know how to march and not tire. They know how to face an enemy. They know how to simplify things down to what they can carry on their backs. These Iraq and Afghanistan veterans potentially offer the mix of leadership and support it will take to effectively turn things around in Washington.

In November, if the American people elect a new Republican Congress and include a squad of lean and mean military vets, starting in January we stand a good chance of hearing some coconuts knocked together.

The Guy With a Camera

2010-06-18T10:53:00.003-05:00

Just a few days ago this was all over the internet and Fox News...

This morning a similar video surfaced involving campaign aids of Illinois Democratic Senate candidate, Alexi Giannoulias...

Hmm....Seeing them reminded me of an incident last February, about the time Democrats began to worry that Scott Brown just might pull off an upset in Massachusetts...

Its summertime, we're all busy and we've all seen at least one of these clips. But, take a moment to refresh your memory. Click on one of the videos and then ask yourself this question: Have I ever seen a cameraman from, say, CBS or NBC get cuffed around? Has a major news media ever been ejected from an event? To the best of your recollection has a reporter from a major news outlet ever wrestled to the ground?

I'll bet you come up with a blank. Right? And I think I know why:

The reason you don't see reporters and cameramen from CNN get knocked around is because the Main Stream Media does not ask questions of tipsy Democratic Congressmen in the middle of the day, nor do they photograph attendees at Democratic fundraisers, and they don't ambush Democratic candidates coming out of fundraisers with questions they are not prepared to answer.

In fact, things are pretty Hunky-Dorey between the Democrats and the media. That's because the Main Stream cameramen and reporters know their place. They are on an invisible leash.

Any other guesses out there?

When It Rains, It Pours

2010-06-04T07:14:00.004-05:00

As President Obama discovered when he tried to deliver his Memorial Day speech near Chicago last weekend: “when it rains, it pours.”

The mile-deep gusher now polluting Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico is a metaphor for the Pandora’s Box of miseries that seem to be raining on the nation and the world: European financial instability; Third World nukes; South American narco-states; the re-emergence of piracy; America’s unprotected borders, our persistent 10% unemployment rate, exploding government debt; runaway entitlements and public pensions; aging infrastructure; a health care system headed for bureaucratic sclerosis; and on and on…

Standing between us and this onslaught is the leader of the free world himself, Barack H. Obama, who, it is becoming increasingly obvious, is in way over his head. If you were Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would you feel comfortable knowing this White House has got Israel’s back? If you were Governor Jan Brewer would you be confident in the President’s ability, even willingness, to halt the hordes of illegals pouring across the Arizona border? If you were Governor Bobby Jindal would you sleep easy knowing this Administration might eventually, some day, perhaps support your request to build protective sand barriers between the advancing oil slick and valuable Louisiana fishing and wildlife waters? Not on your life. You don’t have to be a governor or a foreign leader to feel nervous. A lot of people are starting to worry.

Joining those of us getting worried is Barack Obama. But he’s got a lot more on his mind than developing an effective American energy plan, or Israel getting blown off the map, or helping the private economy recover. Part of what keeps the President awake nights is the fact that jury selection has begun in the Rod “Blago” Blagojevich trial, and a federal judge just cleared the way for White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel to testify.

Don’t think for a moment that it was a coincidence that President Obama abandoned the BP oil-rig mess to take a family vacation to Chicago last weekend. He didn’t travel back to the Windy City because it is a fair-weather paradise in the springtime, or because he missed the old Hyde Park home and his next-door neighbor Anton “Tony” Rezko. Besides, Rezko hasn’t lived next door for quite a while. He’s in a witness protection program, with Federal bodyguards keeping him safe.

Even in Chicago, where wiring legal outcomes is a political art form, this trial has to be making a lot of people nervous; among them the President of the United States, along with the Mayor, the current Illinois Governor, several US Senators and some members of Congress. Blago has made it clear that he doesn’t plan to go to prison quietly. He wants to be put under oath and tell his side of the story. Without a doubt, his side of the story will boil down to exactly this: Blago only did what everyone else was doing. Handing out jobs and selling Senate seats is what Chicago politicians do all the time.

Given the current flap over the Administration’s offer of a job to Pennsylvania’s Joe Sestak in exchange for his staying out the Senate race, and stories of a similar job offer to a Colorado politician we can understand the concern. Scratch the recently passed Health Care Reform Bill and you’ll find dozens more cases of job offers in exchange for votes. As this trial drags on who knows how many cans of worms will get kicked over.

As it turned out, it was Obama’s “vacation” to Chicago that resulted in the rain-soaked Memorial Day speech. This in turn led to the news footage that provided the picture worth a thousand words. There he was on our television screens; President Obama, grimly clutching his umbrella after the temperature suddenly dropped 15 degrees and the skies opened up in a mid-west gully-washer. It was all he could do to read the teleprompter and make himself heard over the rolling thunder.

The audience, hundreds of loyal Democrats, stood dutifully shivering in the rain. Many of them had, perhaps, seen Obama speak before, in better times, when he was full of dreamy promises about lowering the sea level, healing the earth and fundamentally changing America. We can only assume it began to dawn on some in the crowd, the smarter ones, just what kind of President we are stuck with for most of the next three years.

When it rains, it pours.

This essay was originally published on
June 4th, 2010 in American Thinker

Deep Cover at Organizing for America

2010-05-11T13:37:00.004-05:00

Democrats are already gearing up. They can’t wait for the November elections to arrive.

One of the Chicago blogs I check into, Marathon Pundit, ran an interesting post this weekend. I don’t want to mention the writer’s name and risk blowing his cover, but due to a DNC computer glitch he received an invitation to attend an Organizing for America “training session” in Evanston, Illinois. Well, what have we here?

After checking the box marked Yes! You can count on me! said Blogger returned his RSVP. Then, wearing what he described as a “subtle disguise”, he arrived at the session, signed the guest list and positioned himself in the audience to take copious notes.

The Covert Blogger is to be commended. He got in and got out undetected, and filed an informative and enjoyable report. You can read it here: Marathon Pundit.

In the report are some interesting details and quotes, a few of which may benefit from a little further analysis.

For instance, briefly describing the political landscape in Evanston, we are told that in the 2008 election Evanston – which is home to North Western University – voted 87% for Obama-Biden.

That is an astounding percentage of voters even for an affluent liberal college town. But, it is even more astounding when we turn that number around and consider the fact this left only 13% to vote for the Green Party, Communist Party, or the Socialist Worker’s Party.

According to the report, one of the hosts of the training session was the secretary of the Democratic Party of Evanston, Brian Miller. Miller told attendees that the DP of E has “a history of exporting our influence.” This was the purpose of the meeting. Under the name “Organizing for America”, it is their stated objective to further export Democratic influence. Miller went on to describe the hundreds of Obama volunteers the group sent into Indiana, Wisconsin and Iowa; busloads of them. Evanston, the Blogger shows, is a major distribution hub of Leftist politics. Reading this part of the report I recalled the scene where the Doctor looks out his window on the town square in the b&w version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and witnesses his fellow citizens loading pods onto trucks and into the trunks of their cars.

“We got it locked down” in Evanston, Miller told attendees.

Then, Organizing for America regional field director, Brian Gorman asked attendees to consider the question, “How can I use the tools to take ownership of the community?”

One such “tool’, apparently, will be the continued use of the sexual slur “Tea Bagger”. Democrats seem to take a giggly delight in saying it. It’s like a dirty word in the mouth of a child. President Obama has been quoted using it. I still don’t know exactly what it means, but get the idea that unless you’re into whips and chains it isn’t good.

To drill attendees in proper usage, they used the term to refer to Republican Illinois Gubernatorial Candidate, Bill Brady, never mentioning him by name. He was just the “The Republican ’Tea Bagger’ running for Governor”.

Concerning the Left’s dismissal of Bill Brady, so far the main thing the public knows about him is that he is asking where our tax money has been going for all these years. He’s calling for an independent audit of the State of Illinois’ financial books. Given the $12-17 Billion dollar hole in the State’s annual budget and the estimated $77.8 Billion in unfunded state worker pensions this seems reasonable.

Yet, the only thing Organizing for America had to say about Bill Brady is that he’s a “Tea Bagger” and “a really bad guy.” There was nothing in the report that indicated concerns over the current Illinois Governor, Pat Quinn, a Democrat, who was Rod “Blago” Blagojevich’s running mate just four years ago, back when Blago was cutting deals and shaking down charity hospitals. No worries there.

Notice, too, the use of the phrase, “take ownership of the community.”

Evanston borders Chicago on the north and they speak the same political language. In Democrat-ese “owning the community” means if you got a problem with trash pick up, talk to the Democratic precinct captain. If you have a kid who needs a job, talk to the Democratic precinct captain. If you have trouble with delivery trucks getting ticketed for double-parking in front of your shop, talk to the Democratic precinct captain. If you need a block party permit, a one-day liquor license, or building code violation overlooked, talk to the Democratic precinct captain. Democrats own the community. They don’t own the potholes or the crumbling infrastructure or the failing schools, or the crime in the streets – that part of the community taxpayers own. Democrats just own the parts with the “juice”. Additionally, in Evanston they own the part that gets to decide how everyone else has to live and how much VAT tax they’ll have to pay and whether mass illegal immigration is a good thing or a bad thing. They own the policy part.

As our clandestine Blogger reports, Democratic strategy for the 2010 mid-term elections boils down to this: they are going to quote-unquote “zero in” on those first-time voters who in 2008 went overwhelmingly for Obama. That’s their plan. That’s it. That, and the phrase “Tea Bagger”.

At this point, let me caution against over-confidence. The mid-term election is by no means a sure thing for Conservatives, Libertarians and right-thinking Republicans. We are all going to have to work with a will. But if this is the central strategy of the Democrat’s plan to hold on to power they are in deep water. Obama won in ’08 with 53% of the vote, which, outside of places like Evanston, does not give the Administration much room to play with.

What this tells us is that the official Leftist Democratic agenda has peaked. It has gone as far as it can go at the ballot box and is now contracting. The reality of economic and world events has made it difficult if not impossible for Democrats to expand their voter base. Now they are forced to put their efforts into holding on to their old voters, especially those who were “new” voters two years ago. Most of those new voters in 2008 were inexperienced. And, if they were young voters they were inexperienced, period

Having this knowledge of the Democrat’s strategy presents us an opportunity. When Conservatives, Libertarians and Republicans volunteer to campaign door to door we, too, will take the opportunity to “zero in” on those young voters. Many of them are not so inexperienced now. Many have awakened from the fog that was the Obama-Biden campaign of ’08. Many now realizes our nation and the world face problems that can’t be overcome with feel-good speeches of Hope and Change.

Take it as a guarantee. When you come to the door of those “new” voters of the ’08 campaign you will find many are now open to discussion.

Let us offer thanks to the Covert Blogger for this valuable reconnaissance.

This essay was originally published May 11, 2010 on
American Thinker.

Vote for the Crook -- It's Important

2010-05-08T06:59:00.003-05:00

If anyone ever wonders why politics in the State of Illinois is such a bucket of worms they need look no further than the shot a CBS-Chicago bureau producer fired at Republican US Senate nominee, Mark Kirk the other day.

Said CBS producer, Ed Marshall in front of a live mike;

"Channel 2's made a decision. We're really not going to cover the Senate race if it consistently, only in your terms, is about Broadway Bank. The bank's been taken over by the government, Alexi's been pilloried. Tell me: what is your campaign going forward? What are the issues that you are going to tell the voters why they should vote for you?"

The Feds closed Broadway Bank on April 23rd, after it came up $395 million dollars short in the books. Now, two weeks later, CBS-Chicago is already tired of hearing about it. Producer Ed Marshall’s statement amounts to a CBS Policy Statement: CBS is not interested in digging into the story. Further, CBS considers the subject off-limits as a campaign issue. In other words they told Kirk to button his lip – or else.

Why is this significant? Because the “Alexi” in the above quote is the Democratic nominee for US Senate in Illinois, Alexi Giannoulias. He also happens to be the former VP and Chief Loan Officer of the Broadway Bank. Oops.

In an election year where the word “banker”, as Joe Biden would say, is a “four letter word”, CBS doesn’t want to rock any boats. Nor do they want Kirk to emphasize any clear distinctions between his record of service in Congress and the US Navy, and Giannoulias’ record of service making “juice loans” to Chicago mobsters.

Mark Kirk continually harping about Broadway Bank makes it tough for the media to run soft coverage of the Giannoulias campaign. Financial details get in the way of the warm and fuzzies about Alexi’s recent marriage or his love of Bulls basketball.

CBS would rather Illinois voters not ask themselves “Does a bank failure matter?” After all, in the grand scheme of things, what is another $400 million? Billions and Trillions are tossed around every day. At the federal level there are so many zeros on the end of budget deficits that the numbers runs off the edge of the page.

But, to answer the question – darn right it matters! Somebody has to pay it back. And we know that Democratic-connected insiders are not the ones who will be stuck with the bill.

Another thing the media would rather not concern voters with is the fact that a lot of the missing Broadway Bank money was lent to Chicago crime figures. Reportedly, Giannoulias lent some $20 Million to felons who were already convicted and were awaiting sentencing at the time the loans were made. This is the kind of banking we’d expect to see on The Sopranos. Yet, to CBS News Mob connections are not a disqualifier for public office. Today’s Democratic Party is a big tent.

The fact is, Illinois politics are conducted inside a house of mirrors, and everywhere the media looks they see a crook.

Standing in one spot inside that house of mirrors we see this: Alexi Giannoulias is the Democratic Party nominee for Barack Obama’s old US Senate seat, the same seat that former Illinois Governor Rod “Blago” Blagojevich attempted to sell for $5 Million dollars just a year and a half ago. The “Blago” trial is set to start in June. A key witness is expected to be money-man Anton “Tony” Rezko, who also helped fix things so Barack and Michelle Obama could buy their Hyde Park house at below market price. See how it works? One crooked politician reflects another. And we haven’t even mentioned three recent suspicious suicides (one just yesterday) or Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and the gaggle of Alderman and City officials under investigation.

This is the kind of delicate glassware that the Mainstream Media in Illinois has to tip-toe around every day. There are crooks everywhere and they need to be ignored. And, all the mouthing-off that Mark Kirk is doing is just making CBS’s job of keeping this Senate seat in Democratic control tougher.

To further move the narrative along, in 2006 Giannoulias got himself elected State Treasurer of Illinois. Don’t bother to ask “how’d that happen?” It’s just the way things seem to work in Illinois. On the good side, at age 30, he was the youngest treasurer elected in state history. On the bad side, his record in Springfield is similar to his record at the Broadway Bank. Illinois finances are a mess; per capita taxpayer debt is second only to California. Here’s an example; recently “Illinois Bright Start”, a State program that allowed parents to send money to Springfield to pre-pay for their kid’s college tuition, was found to have lost $85 Million dollars. That’s $85 Million in tuition fees up in smoke.

While we have to admire Giannoulias, he dogged; failing at one thing – at the bank or at the Treasurer’s job – he dusts himself off and attacks his next goal.

But, what about CBS? What makes them think they can tell a candidate which public issues he should ignore? In an era of economic turbulence aren’t a candidate’s financial blunders worthy of public examination, even if that candidate happens to be a Democrat? Has the mainstream media become that useless? Worse than useless?

I never thought I would think of Mark Kirk for more than two seconds. I didn't vote for him in the primary. He's a "moderate" Republican. One thing’s for sure, though; he hasn’t cost taxpayers a dime. But, between Kirk and Giannoulias how tough a choice can it be?

Illinois is one of the battlegrounds in the 2010 elections. But, there are hundreds of other battleground races, on every level, all over the country. Each one is important to the future of America. No matter where you live in the country there are good, clear-thinking candidates that need your help. Go ahead. Make the commitment to work the election this fall. You’ll get lots of exercise, you’ll meet great people, you’ll help the country, and you’ll drive the media nuts.

Here in Chicago CBS news is already working for their guy. For them, the old Democratic Party slogan seems to be the order of the day:

“Vote for the Crook. It’s Important.”

A version of this essay was published May 8, 2010 on
The American Thinker

California Considers a Boycott of Arizona

2010-05-02T06:45:00.005-05:00

Dude, what’s with California?

Leftists in Los Angeles and San Francisco are so hopping mad at Arizona that they are working themselves up into a boycott of that whole State. Democratic officials in California are seeking a way to cancel public contracts with companies based in Arizona. This is in retaliation for that state’s new law calling for the enforcement of federal immigration laws. These threats are concrete evidence that The Left has reached a condition of self-parody. There ought to be somebody in a position of authority who will think this through first.

The City of Los Angeles is on the verge of bankruptcy. They are not just broke; they’re in hock up to their chins. LA faces a nearly One Billion Dollar budget short fall. Scores of businesses have left the city due to high taxes and regulation. A significant part of the workforce has drifted into the “gray economy”, untaxed and working off the books. San Francisco’s condition is only marginally better. The City by the Bay is just Half a Billion Dollars in the red. It is hard to believe that taxpayers in municipalities in this kind of deep water would permit elected officials to waste time figuring how they can cancel contracts with Arizona businesses.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is why I believe the days of the Left are numbered. The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God will not allow a belief system this dangerously silly to survive.

Let’s refer to our studies from City Contracts 101.

Customarily, when a governmental body seeks bids for a public contract, assuming officials are doing their jobs and bribery or insider connections are not a factor, it awards the contract to the lowest bidder. Assuming this is the case – and if it is not the case California taxpayers have more problems than they realize – it therefore follows that the cancelled contracts will have to be re-issued to higher bidders…at additional cost to taxpayers. Take that, Arizona!

This is what passes for thinking among California’s elected leaders. They are going to take economic revenge on Arizona and citizens of the Golden State will tally as collateral damage.

Officials haven’t been clear about exactly what Arizona goods they will be boycotting, hopefully incidentals of little importance. But you never know. I seem to recall reading that due to California’s environmental laws the state purchases much of its electricity from Arizona, from facilities like the Palo Verde Nuke plant near Phoenix.

Is California’s anger with Arizona so great that they are prepared to boycott Arizona electricity? Are increased brown-outs and more frequent rolling black-outs, euphemistically referred to by the state as “load shedding”, a worthy price to pay in order to keep the flow of illegals coming? (And the flow of illegal voters) How much inconvenience will Californians tolerate in support of this crusade? It’s nice to have lights at night. Those giant screen TVs drink up a lot of juice. And, summer is right around the corner and not everyone has airy beachfront property. It gets pretty hot in most of California. Will residents be willing to give up their air conditioners? And, what about Silicon Valley? What kind of impact will power shortages have on tech industries? Before biting the hand that feeds shouldn’t someone think about that?

And, then there is California’s perpetual water problem. With miles of Pacific coastline, California has a lot of salt water – remember the movie Chinatown? “Bad for glass...” – but it has very little fresh water. The state’s major source of water is the Colorado River – which flows through, wouldn’t you know it, Arizona. No matter how outraged California officials are, there is only so much bottled water that can be trucked in. While bottled water has become recognized as ecologically taboo, still, in the interest of punishing Arizona, will Californians be willing to fill their swimming pools with Perrier? That still leaves the problem of how to water their lawns and wash their cars. Again, did anyone consider this? There are no easy answers.

Here is what’s going on: Many Leftists had a great time in college. An all-warts picture of the United States was drilled into their heads. After graduation many of them moved directly into government jobs. Added to their disdain for America, many have little or no experience running things more complicated than ad-hoc student committees. Although some find their way into the Sunlight of Conservative-Libertarian-Capitalist Enlightenment, many are doomed to an existence trapped inside the box of political-activist thinking. Mentally they remain thoughtless teenagers, arguing with their parents one minute and asking for the keys to the car the next. A handy example is Oakland Mayor, the former Governor Moonbeam himself, Jerry Brown. He’s seriously considering getting aboard the boycott bandwagon -- and he wants to run for California governor again. In thirty years he’s learned nothing.

Once upon a time, these people could march on an Administration Building, block the doors in protest and shut an entire campus down. Now they are peppered throughout various levels of government.

California officials need to accept the fact that they have a duty to their citizens. They need to put childish things aside. Leave the protesting to the college kids.

But, if they simply can’t help themselves, here’s an idea: Any California official who wants to protest Arizona in a nice, harmless way that will leave taxpayers unmolested might consider making a guest appearance at a campus demonstration somewhere. There’s sure to be lots of cameras and, unlike the Tea Parties, the news coverage is guaranteed to be glowingly positive.

Out there in the land of “less is more”, my suggestion would be to give a speech denouncing Arizona -- and America, too, just for good measure. More talk is always a good thing. At the conclusion rip down the American flag, take out a pair of scissors and remove the 48th star. Then spray it with lighter fluid and burn it. Unless you accidentally set something else on fire, the flame will be small, so it will not add the air pollution. The message will be “it is better to light one candle than to enforce the law”. Touching, huh?

Guaranteed, you’ll make the news and you can feel good about yourself in the bargain.

This essay was originally published on May 1, 2010 on
The American Thinker.com

Fancy Nancy

2010-04-30T11:26:00.005-05:00

That’s a pretty amazing photograph of Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the cover of the May/June issue of Capitol File magazine. I saw it linked on The Drudge Report and didn’t even recognize that it was her. The change is nothing short of remarkable.

At first I thought one of her “image” handlers had goofed. In an effort to polish her up they had gotten carried away and smoothed off a few too many years. This picture’s effusive puffery goes so far that it nearly amounts to the roll-out of a new product that the public hasn’t seen, like the Apple iPad. But, Nancy Pelosi is not new.

In marketing and advertising certain procedures are followed when the time comes to re-make a person or product’s public image. Media-savvy consultants don’t just spring a major change on the public out of the blue.

Simply explained a re-build is done in phases and measured steps. The hair is allowed to be shown progressively grayer; the words “sugar sweetened” get smaller on the box and the word “Natural” gets larger; the suit gives way to a sport coat, then to a sweater. The tee shirt and sandals come last.

It may actually be, if we could measure it, that the photo’s impact on the general public is not one of positive approval, but of stunned amazement. John and Jane Doe, fed up with taxes, unemployment and Washington double-think, recognize this for what it is -- political spin. We all know Nancy Pelosi has been around the block a few times and has had some "work" done. So, who do they think they are kidding? Another new "do" and some pictures are not going to improve her numbers with the public.

Having been involved in this sort of thing, I look at Speaker Pelosi’s new photo and see the lights, the silks, the scrims, the makeup artist, wardrobe stylist, the security officers shooing tourists away (if, indeed, this was really shot on location). I see the staffers, the 20-somethings on cell phones back to the office, and the personal assistant sent to fetch some Fiji Water – in a glass with ice, not in the bottle. I see the photographer walking on eggs trying to get the Speaker to look this way or that, to smile -- but not too broadly -- and the crew banging off dozens of high res images before heading into a long session of Photo Shop-by-committee. And, all of this fuss was in quest of a vanity portrait that was never destined for the cover of The Rolling Stone, but rather a stuffy inside the beltway version of Cincinnati Magazine.

However, now that I think about it, this picture is more than a vanity portrait. It is a tool intended to send a message to a specific audience.

Capitol File magazine’s primary circulation area is Washington, DC. The audience is very select. This cover photo is so outlandish in its visual flattery that it can only be seen as a warning directed to the lobbyists, and vendors, and supplicants who travel to our nation’s capitol. It communicates to them that Nancy Pelosi can command how others should see her; as Our Glorious Speaker, and you better not laugh or you’ll be on the next plane back to Palookaville. Gone are the wild eyes. Gone are the grasping facial expressions. Gone is any hint that she habitually accuses Tea Partiers or others who challenge her of being “violent” and “Nazis”.

For the next two months Capitol File magazine will sit on coffee tables in reception areas throughout Washington. All the people who are not insiders, who have to wait, who are not whisked past the desk directly through to meetings, will sit in lobbies and see Nancy Pelosi’s picture smiling at them from the coffee table as if there’s nothing wrong.

Nancy Pelosi's cover portrait is not designed to fool anyone into believing that she is younger, kinder or gentler than she really is. We all know the truth in that matter.

The picture is intended to let people know who is in charge.

This essay was originally published April 30, 2010 on

The American Thinker

The US is Not "Like Nazi Germany"

2010-04-27T06:11:00.006-05:00

Oh, Brother.

I just heard a radio sound bite of some anti-anti-illegal immigration protester claiming that America is like Nazi Germany: We are putting up a border fence in Arizona and storm troopers are demanding to see people's papers.

The easy explanation would be to point out that in Nazi Germany those things were done to keep people in -- in Arizona they are being done to keep people out. That's a significant difference right there, but also an over-simplification itself.

It is commonly agreed that The United States is a nation of immigrants, legal immigrants. For over two hundred years in all parts of the world -- people have left their homes, their extended families, their possessions and moved to the New World of the United States. Those huddled-masses built this nation. An immigrant today doesn't just join us, but in a real sense joins those earlier immigrants, too.

It should be self-evident that the old legal-way worked well; we're all here, aren't we? We all have grand-parents or great grand-parents many times removed who came here from somewhere. They all were escaping a tyrant, a famine, religious oppression, or a backward culture that would abandon them to an eternity of peasantry. All were looking for a new start and a chance at Life. Very few of the world's wealthy left their estates or their villas to move here. Even the Marquis de Lafayette, after serving with George Washington and helping win our independence, moved back to France -- I'll never figure why. So don't fall for a lecture about "America hates poor people". Poor people by the million came to the United States and made it what it is.

The protest focused on Arizona is really a part of the economic resentment directed at the American people as a whole. It is self-serving and ultimately will prove self-defeating. There is no reason now to discard our measured means of selecting, admitting and absorbing new citizens in favor of a lax open border policy that disadvantages the American people.

The recent Arizona law was forced on the Governor, the Legislature and the People of that State by the inaction and fecklessness of the Federal Government. We've all heard the stories. How much murder and kidnapping does the Administration expect the people of Arizona to put up with? Just a little bit more, and then we'll do something? The fact is, the American public is being ignored by those who would benefit from either cheap labor or cheap votes. As Americans we have a right to expect our government to fulfill its commitment to "provide for the common defense" and to "insure domestic tranquility".

A 3-D Slide Show -- in Breathtaking Kodachrome

2010-04-22T09:31:00.008-05:00

As I have mentioned before, I am a dedicated and long-time stereo photographer. The rugged Stereo Realist is my camera of choice. It was Made In the USA, in Milwaukee to be exact, and is one of those American built-to-last wonders of the post WWII-era. Other companies introduced more sophisticated stereo cameras with more features and simpler operation, but the good-old Stereo Realist just keeps taking the pictures I want it to take.

Shooting with a 60 year-old stereo camera means, obviously, that I use film. Very retro compared to the current mode of photography. This year I am shooting my way through my last supply of Kodachrome 64. Last summer, after 75 years, Kodak announced they are suspending production of that wonderful film. -- One of the earliest posts on Plumwood Road, June 23, 2009, dealt with the subject of Kodachrome's passing.-- I found a cache of this film at PJ's Camera in Glen Ellyn, Illinois and bought a brick of it. My camera has been souped-up in such a manner to enables it to shoot "wider" views, but that means it burns through a 36-exposure roll in only 20 clicks. I am trying to make my supply last through the year, which is also the last year that processing will be available.

As it happens, we have very few Kodachrome slides of any kind from my youth. My Dad was not a slide shooter. He shot black and white print snapshots. Nothing fancy. Although, some of the shots he took in World War II in China and India are pretty dog gone amazing.

My introduction to Kodachrome slide film came in the mid-1970s, when I was a motion picture camera assistant. I was working in the California desert on a car commercial. The still photographer's assistant saw that I was using some commonly available "vacation-type" slide film in my personal camera and gave me a roll of Kodachrome 25 to try.

"This is called 'The Good Stuff'", he said. "Use it once and I guarantee you'll never go back."

And he was right. Kodachrome is/was rich, vivid, crisp, sharp...and permanent. Properly stored some estimates claim it to be stable for 500 years. It is perfect for documenting for viewers in the distant future a record of the images we see around us now.

Most people remember slide shows when they were kids. It was a common form of entertainment in the 50s and 60s; gather in the living room, dim the lights and project last summer's vacation pictures for the neighbors.

The Kodachrome slide shows that I remember seeing were photographed and projected in 3-D.

Long time friends of my parents from our church were Emil and Stella Miller.

Emil Miller was corporate/portrait/wedding photographer in the post-WWII years in Dayton, Ohio. Stella ran the business. Though it may be hard to picture now, Dayton, Ohio was once a booming industrial center, home to NCR, Delco, Frigidaire, Mead Paper, Lau Industries and a host of other manufacturing businesses. It was a very prosperous Mid-Western city that was full of engineers, machine shops, factories, and aerospace firms. All of this provided Em and Stella with work and interesting photographic subject matter. During his assignments Em would often switch out his view camera or 6X6, and mount his Stereo Realist on the tripod and click off a few shots in 3-D for his personal collection. He had nifty views taken on the plant floors, inside offices, at the mill...the lady at the switchboard, the guy in the bow-tie with the clipboard, the sparks flying as the molten metal was poured, the line of bottles rattling along at the local Coca-Cola plant... all preserved in that perfect You Are There effect that only 3-D can capture.

Emil's business was very profitable. It allowed him and his wife to indulge their interests in art and antiques. They restored an old frame house and filled it with paintings. They enjoyed nice vacations, too; road trips in the summer, ski trips in the winter, as well as European or Asian travel. This they covered extensively in 3-D as well.

In the winter they hosted parties where they would project their slides; the kids sitting on the floor up front and the parents comfy on furniture in back and everybody wearing cardboard glasses. These shows were a lot of fun, not only due to the interesting subject matter but for the unusual 3-D effect. As the images clicked by, Stella or Em would narrate and tell us what we were seeing and who was in the picture. If you've never seen well-shot, well-projected 3-D pictures, it's quite an experience. We would look at the pictures and feel like we could step right into the screen and stand in front of the Eiffel Tower, or walk through the gates of the newly opened Disneyland. The pictures made quite an impression.

Years later, I began shooting Stereo pictures myself. This common interest put me in contact with the Millers who would phone from Ohio occasionally with questions like "where can I find supplies", or "who do you recommend to repair my projector?"

Sometime in the early 1990s, my wife and I, visiting family in Dayton, were invited to attend one of Emil and Stella Miller's 3-D shows. They had found a few boxes of old slides and thought we would enjoy seeing them.

That evening's show came as almost a shock: All of the views were shot on Kodachrome and projected as beautifully as the day they were shot. We saw pictures of my brother and me as boys, my parents as a young couple, adults and kids from church, There was a shot of Dave Rothman when he was about 10 years-old, standing next to his dippy sister, Diane, who had cooties. But, what did I know then? For the record, she was a dish the last time I saw her.

There were slides taken inside our old house, at a picnics with people long gone, of Dayton, bustling and decorated up for Christmas. In the mid-50s my brother and I had a pet raccoon and there were a couple pictures of him, still a young pup, sitting on my brother's shoulder or standing up on his hind legs mooching a handout. The pictures were so life-like I felt I could reach out and give the fuzzy little guy a scratch behind the ears. The show went on to highlight some of Emil's commercial work, views of Dayton, Ohio as it used to be, and of some of the travel Em and Stella enjoyed; all of it was interesting. The over-all effect was this: Emil Miller had taken a shovel and scooped up a load of random memories and flashed them on the screen.

The evening concluded with refreshments of soft-drinks, with ham and rye, sweet pickles, veggies with potato chips and dips -- all smells and tastes associated with the era in which most of the pictures had been taken.

In 2002 my wife and I were in Dayton. Stella had passed a few months earlier and we found Em packing boxes in the dining room. He was breaking up their art collection and selling the house in preparation to move into a retirement community.

"While you're here, I have something you may be able to get more use out of than me..." Em opened a closet, shifted a few boxes around and got out his Stereo Realist projector, which to this day is the only genuine "Realist" projector I've ever seen. It was a phenomenal gift and one for which I was very grateful.

Along with the projector he gave me four boxes crammed with stereo slides.

"These are not my best slides" he said. "But I won't have room for them in the new place. Maybe you could look through them and see if there is anything you want to keep."

It took my wife and me several days to get through all the slides. They were all interesting and fun. Yes, I could see that some of them were misfires or out-takes, but there were some gems in the collection as well.

I stayed in touch with Em, over the next few years and on visits would stop by his apartment and say hello. He was a handy fellow with tools and kept busy hanging pictures and making repairs for the widows in the community.

After a while I began thinking about the rest of his stereo slides, the ones he'd shot at church functions, of my parent's 50th wedding anniversary, the views inside factories and old airliners, "the good ones" that he had kept. I wondered if he had any idea what he planned to do with them. I knew they were more personal to him, so I put off any questions. I would have loved to have had them. But, as it turned out, I never got the chance to ask.

In the fall of '07 Em didn't return a couple calls I had made. When we stopped by at Christmas time his apartment was empty. We were told that Em had died several months earlier. An auction had been held for his remaining artwork.

But, sadly, all those slides were tossed into a dumpster.

This article was published earlier by The Kodachrome Project. If you are a photographer you will enjoy going to that site and taking a last look at that wonderful, soon to be gone, film...Kodachrome.

Tea Time in Chicago

2010-04-16T15:41:00.004-05:00

I’ll tell you right now: this Chicago Tea Party report has a very happy ending…and, I’m going to get to it as fast as I can, so just sit tight and be patient.

I haven’t had a chance yet to check in on reports of tax day Tea Parties from around the country, but I don’t suppose Chicago’s made much of a ripple. Other rallies were much bigger, featured speakers of national stature, or had coverage on Fox. But in heavily Democratic Chicago, the capital of Obamanomics, what could happen worth comment?

The Windy City’s Tea Party took place on Daley Plaza in the center of Chicago’s Loop. Daley Plaza is dominated by the five-story high Picasso statue depicting a giant iron bird. Since it’s erection in the 1960s, it has evenly divided locals between those who like it and those who think it is an eyesore. Artistic merit aside, it never the less qualifies as a major Chicago landmark. You can walk by even in the dead of winter and find tourists, under-dressed and shivering, snapping pictures of each other in front of it. Then, to the west of the Plaza, across Clark Street, looms Chicago City Hall. It is the local equivalent of the Tower of London; the source of some local pride, but also the site of many infamous deeds.

The rally kicked off smartly a few minutes after noon, right at the heart of lunch hour. It was a warm day and the Plaza quickly filled. A couple major problems quickly became apparent. First, the speaker’s platform was located too close to the Picasso, so the view of a lot of people was blocked off. And, second, the sound system, which would have been fine for a high school pep rally, was totally inadequate to reach the ears of several thousand of the attendees. For most of the rally I could hear nothing but a low rumbling blur.

What happens when people half-way back in the crowd can’t hear? They stop trying to listen and begin to talk among themselves. It was in large part due to those conversations that the event was such a success. There were people all around introducing themselves, taking pictures, commenting on clever signs, exchanging literature, business cards and email addresses. Yes, there were a few “Party Crashers”, but they amounted to little more nuisance than ants at a picnic. On the plus side, however, was a surprising number of the genuinely curious; those who came to see what the Tea Party was all about. It was a lively, very satisfying social gathering; a cocktail party without the cocktails.

Several of us eventually managed to inch our way into hearing range just as the MC introduced Congressional candidate Joel Pollak, who is running for Congress in the Illinois 9th District, for the seat now held by Democrat Jan Schakowsky. If somebody from the Republican National Committee is reading this, pay attention: Pollak is somebody to keep an eye on.

Pollak's turn at the podium came late in the program. He stepped to the microphone with a toothy grin, gave the crowd a few laughs and then got down to business. He clicked off a short stump speech stressing political accountability, of “More freedom, less government, less taxes”. Then he shouldered an acoustic guitar and led the crowd in a Hootenanny. It was a blast. Joel Pollak was on stage about twelve minutes and created a lot of buzz in the crowd.

A little later, after the rally, I walked into The Berghoff for a pint of dark. Several groups of Tea Partiers had gotten there ahead of me and were in discussion. While I was paying for my beer, a young man standing at the bar carrying a nice Canon professional commented on my Stereo Realist. Camera-talk led to talk of the Tea Party. He’d attended the rally to photograph it. He had seen little that impressed him, “A few nice people, but not what the country needs right now.” He was generally unsympathetic to the views of the Tea Partiers.

As the remaining Tea Party crowd drifted out of the bar and onto the sidewalk, the photographer and I continued talking.

“What do you think of Sarah Palin? What about Glen Beck? How can you let all those people go without health care?” I did my best to advance the ideas of Free Markets, less government, and lower taxes, and to describe the dark waters that lay ahead if we don’t bring government under control.

Then his cell phone rang. It was the photographer’s new girlfriend.

“I’m at The Berghoff talking to some Tea Party-guy.” He said. “Okay, see you in ten minutes.”

We continued our conversation, and ten minutes later the girlfriend walked in. She was in her late 20s, wearing a cotton sun dress, and very attractive. The photographer introduced us, “This is Lisa.”

She ordered a beer and sat quietly while the photographer and I continued our conversation.

When her beer arrived she, with some ceremony, picked it up, took a sip, set the glass back on the bar then looked at us steadily for a moment. “Are you guys just talking politics? ‘Cause, if you are, here’s my politics: I voted for Barack Obama and I wish I hadn’t.”

Maybe it wasn't the sum-total of the Tea Party philosophy, but what happier, more unexpected conclusion to the day’s events could there be? A beer at The Berghoff, and a cute girl who wraps things up in one sentence.

Case closed.

Congressman Paul Ryan Speaks in Oklahoma

2010-04-05T17:24:00.002-05:00

Today while doing yard chores I caught part of Rush’s show on my Walkman, and heard him comment about a recent speech given by Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan. I was trimming some dead branches and trying not to step on spring flowers starting to poke up, so I was only half-listening.

It wasn’t what Limbaugh said that caught my attention, but the way that he said it. A little light flashed in the back of my head. When I finished the job I came in and fired up Old Sparky and looked around the internet.

Representative Ryan spoke last week, on March 31st, to the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. If this sounds like Ryan is tap dancing his way through the Rubber Chicken Circuit, put that thought out of your mind. I found a transcript at Real Clear Politics and it took about 20 minutes to read. It was riveting and you should take a look at it; Click Here for Paul Ryan Speech.

The whole thing is a freight train of ideas barreling along at 80mph; one terrific passage after another. There is nothing half-way about it. He absolutely demolished the Health Care Reform Bill, Cap & Trade, the concept of “ethics” in the current Administration, but one part caught my eye:

“Since America began, the timid have feared the Founding Father’s ideas of individual freedom, so they yearned for Old World class models. Our Progressivists are the latest iteration of that same fear of the people.”

A few weeks ago I happened to run across a quote by Samuel Adams that said the same exact thing more than 200 years ago.

Many people would be surprised to learn that after the Founders won our independence an astonishing number of colonists packed up their belongings and moved back to England. Isn’t that astounding? They sailed here, and then sailed back. They could not comprehend living in a representative democracy without a Monarch. No King, no Duke, no Sultan, no permanent ruling class; just “Mr. President”, some Congressmen and Senators and “We the People”. It’ll never last. Who’ll take care of them?

There was, understandably, some resentment at the time directed toward those who wanted no part of The American Adventure, who couldn’t comprehend any sort of “American Dream” and Sam Adams expressed it beautifully:

"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."

The spirit of that quote lives in Paul Ryan’s Oklahoma speech. As does this sentence, which I take to be Ryan’s Topic Sentence:

“We are at the beginning of an election campaign like you’ve never seen before!”

Read Ryan’s speech, and mark the man well. We will see him again before long.

Submitted For Your Approval...

2010-03-25T22:27:00.007-05:00

If you’ve been wondering if you’d ever see author George Orwell, screen composer Bernard Herrmann and early television writer Rod Serling all mentioned in the same sentence, your wait is over.

I am, and have been for years, an admirer of all three. For purposes of this short piece let me simply state that in their respective fields, each is a giant. If you scroll back through the Plumwood Road archives you’ll see a piece posted December 21, 2009 that concerned one of Serling’s excursions into The Twilight Zone. Let the record therefore show that I’ve at least nibbled around the edges of the subject before.

The three men were not quite contemporaries. Orwell died in 1950, while Serling was writing teleplays for the great WLW in Cincinnati, and Herrmann was near composing the score for The Day the Earth Stood Still. But for the purposes of this article, let me offer this single observation: these three artists, Serling, Herrmann, and Orwell all frequently created works built around a dread of the totalitarian state.

For The Twilight Zone Rod Serling wrote dozens of episodes depicting the nature of dark, futuristic mega-governments, of state control and monitoring. The music of Bernard Herrmann, beautiful and listenable as it is, frequently contrasted warm inner passion with an icy, sterile, emotionless condition. Watch a copy of the 1966 production of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Pay special attention to the musical score and you’ll see what I mean. And, finally, what is there to say about George Orwell, author of 1984, that hasn’t already been said? The word “Orwellian” sums it up nicely.

As it happened, the other evening I was reading Orwell’s essay, The Prevention of Literature. It’s an excellent short piece if you want to gain a little insight into the workings progressives and of the leftist press from an expert.

Usually I read in silence. But I’d received a new CD; a collection of the scores that Herrmann wrote for The Twilight Zone.

After dinner, as Karen and I settled into the living room to do some reading. I unwrapped the double-disc CD set and put it in the player. I had only a hazy memory of the music composed for the episode titled Eye of the Beholder, so I cued it up and pushed play, then settled down to read.

As the music played, this is the passage from Orwell’s The Prevention of Literature that I happened to read:

“The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient… It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary….From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible… This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. The friends of totalitarianism in this country (Great Britain in the post-war 1940s) usually argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or, on the other hand, that modern physics has proved that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one’s senses is simply vulgar philistinism. A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific textbook, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying a historical fact. It is at the point where literature and politics cross that totalitarianism exerts its greatest pressure on the intellectuals.”

Did you get all of that? The above is excerpted from one, single paragraph. It pays to read Orwell slowly, with a pencil for underlining. But he opens a door for you, doesn't he?

About half way through the passage I became aware of the effect that Herrmann’s music was having in enhancing the impact of Orwell’s words and I began to read aloud. I didn’t get far before Karen said,

“Stop, Jed. Stop. It’s scaring me.”

She made my point. Orwell’s text read with Herrmann’s musical accompaniment projects a vivid image. You can feel “the state” at work. The state is everything. You are an ant.

And, now that you have read George Orwell’s text displayed on your computer screen didn’t you, too, even without musical embellishment, see the state as represented by our compliant, unquestioning press, by evidence-destroying global warming scientists, by a power hungry Congress, by seedy, self-serving cradle-to-grave programs?

But what about Mr. Serling; where’s his contribution in this discussion of a potentially all-controlling state?

If you have 23 minutes to spare, click on this You Tube video, broken into three short segments,

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

It is the original November 11, 1960 broadcast of The Eye of the Beholder. See if you don’t get the warnings concerning government medicine, of rationing, of benevolent oppression.

Submitted for your approval...
from Plumwood Road, via The Twilight Zone.

This Is What Change Looks Like

2010-03-22T12:39:00.003-05:00

I should listen to my wife more often.

After Sunday night’s health care vote we turned off the television and took our dog for a walk.

I was pretty grumbly and probably not very good company. I griped and complained and expressed astonishment that a bill that mandates this much federal oversight of private industry, that is stuffed, end to end with pork – literally built on a cornerstone of graft – could ever be written in the capitol of the United States.

And then I said, “I wonder how long it will be before some Democrat sums all of this up as 'just a step in the right direction’.”

“Oh! Good point,” Karen said. “When we get home you should fire up Sparky and blog that.”

As it turns out I would have had to blog it that very instant, because while we were out, President Barack Obama addressed the nation and said the same thing almost word for word.

“This legislation will not fix everything that ails our health care system. But it moves us decisively in the right direction.”

Astounding, isn’t it? It’s like I’m some kind of a mind-reader.

Of course, the President's intent, after all the hype this last year, was to begin lowering expectations and yet still declare that the bill was “close enough for government work.” And, make no mistake; government work is precisely what medicine will become.

Looking at the bright side, Congress and the federal bureaucracy got exactly what they want: a platform they can build on and tinker with ad infinitum. More government jobs, more "process", more opportunities, as they say in Chicago, for a few extra potatoes on the side. At the same time, Democrats believe they’ve put another bullet in their campaign clip, and that for decades to come whenever they get into elective-trouble they can always talk about expanding coverage, adding or cutting benefits, means testing, increasing fees, tighter mandates, etc., etc. For Democrats, what’s not to like? This kind of thing is their bread and butter.

Then, President Obama, in his very next sentence, put a cherry on top of the sundae:

“This is what change looks like.”

He got it exactly right. With those six words spoke more truth than he intended.

Democrats Have Painted Themselves Into a Corner

2010-03-21T21:14:00.002-05:00

Democrats have painted themselves into an ugly corner with their Health Care Reform Bill (HCR).

The Obama administration has managed to take what has been a standard Democratic vote-getting ploy -- promise government largesse to core constituencies and let the rest of the country pay for it -- and screw it up so badly that regardless of whether HCR passes or fails, Democrats will suffer heavy losses in the midterm election.

Problem is, it's not just Democrats in the corner; they've got the whole country held hostage with them.

Everything else in Washington is at a dead stop. Since late last summer, when details of The Bill began to leak, public support has declined and opposition sharply increased.

Consequently, the Obama administration moved all their troops to the Health Care eastern front. All other problems the nation faces have turned to weeds. The "official" unemployment rate hit 10% in November and has remained there. Iran is said to be months away from having a nuclear bomb. Diplomatic blunders have been committed with Great Britain, Israel, and South America. A would-be terrorist tackled by passengers while attempting to detonate an explosive device over Detroit was questioned by intelligence officers for fifty minutes, then whisked into the Miranda-ized world of the civilian court system. "Party crashers," in three separate incidents, got past security and attended White House functions.

The list goes on to include jihad lawyers hired into the Justice Department; the president's time-out to go to Europe to lobby in favor of bringing the 2016 Olympic Games to Chicago; the White House chief of staff twisting arms, naked, in the Congress-only shower; and a credible charge that a White House "bribe" was offered to a politician as inducement to get him to stay out of a U.S. Senate race. Just the other evening, President Obama, being interviewed by Bret Baier on Fox News, told America that we need to spend millions of dollars to clean up after the earthquake in Hawaii. What earthquake in Hawaii? And we're going to spend millions to fix it? Health Care aside, the POTUS clearly does not have his mind on his work.

Let's take a look at the corner Democrats have put us all in.

The president has staked his entire administration on getting his Health Care Reform Bill passed. If it fails, he fails. The United States will then be shown to have a hollow leader, and the whole world -- Vladimir Putin, Hu Jintao, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and every dictator and drug lord from here to Marrakech -- will know it. By postponing his trip to Asia, first for three days, then for three months, in order to twist arms and get HCR chiseled in stone, President Obama put his entire presidency on the line. He has no plan "B."

Meanwhile, the American people have gotten a good look at the administration's Chicago-style legislative techniques -- sausage-making at its ugliest. Wavering Democrats are being offered anything they want -- anything -- in exchange for their votes. But kick-backs and payoffs aside, when the roll is finally called, each congressman will have only a "yes" or "no" choice: this abomination of a health care bill, or leaving America without a president for three years. Some choice: heads, we lose; tails, we lose.

When independent-minded people away from the heat of Washington consider The Bill, the question then becomes "Can America get along without a president?" Will We the People be able to take care of ourselves while an empty suit keeps the seat warm in the Oval Office?

As anyone who has ever looked at a government program knows, if HCR is this junked-up at the start, then it will take no time after passage before it becomes the biggest bureaucratic mess ever inflicted upon a free people. We all -- or or at least most of us -- will rue the day. Never mind the lost jobs, tax increases, medical rationing; that's just the tip of the iceberg that we can see from a distance. This thing will be worse. America's medical system will become riddled with government inefficiencies, politically-correct tinkering, and endless corruption. A two-tiered medical system will emerge, each coexisting as separate worlds: one for well-connected elites, and one for everyone else. Chills will crawl up your neck the first time you hear that someone in this country had to "tip" a hospital staffer in order to make sure a loved one got clean bed sheets. If government-run health care is bad in Europe, it will be a disaster here in America, where that magnificently American concept, E Pluribus Unum, went out of fashion at about the time the Me Generation got its hands on the culture.

Democrats are holding the entire nation hostage while they struggle to pass the Health Care Reform Bill. They've wasted a full year on something that only 38% of the nation favors. Check the numbers. It is a dead thing. The Obama media may trumpet a triumph, but there will be little joy in passing it -- no band playing "Happy Days Are Here Again" in most neighborhoods.

There is only one way out of the corner: Open a window and jump. It is a long way to the bottom, and it will be a rough landing, but it will beat the alternative of leashing the American public to the dead hand of Big Government.

Democrats...vote "No" and jump. Leave the president and his acolytes in the corner. It is their mess; let them clean it up. Passing the Health Care Reform Bill will not get us out of the corner.

This essay was originally published March 20,2010 on AmericanThinker.com

The CARROT and the STICK

2010-03-12T10:29:00.013-06:00

The Drudge Report got some laughs recently when it published a collection of news headlines, all virtually identical, going back to July 28th, 2009, each hailing an “endgame” deadline for passing the Health Care Reform Bill. These headlines were bannered just prior to the Senate’s August recess, when passage of the bill seemed certain. They were run again just before Labor Day, when passage again seemed assured...then again in mid-October, then before Halloween, then Thanksgiving… Each proclaimed the Health Care Bill a done-deal. All that remained was to take the final vote to send the bill to the President’s desk for signing.

We are now coming up on the third week of March, 2010. Spring is just days away, and the whole blessed Health Care Bill is still gathering dust on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk; un-voted upon. The reason Speaker Pelosi hasn’t yet called for the final House vote is obvious; there aren’t enough Democrats willing to vote for it. It’s just that simple.

Democratic leaders are said to be working furiously. President Obama has postponed his Asian trip to “work on the bill”…Work on the bill? Who are they trying to kid? They can’t change one word in the bill or it has to go back to the Senate where -- as of January 19th -- they no longer have enough Democrats to pass it. It's this bill, warts and all, or nothing. What the phrase “working on the bill” means is they are working to bribe or coerce the few reluctant Democrats to get on-board the bandwagon.

It is said that every man has his price, and House and Senate leaders have spent the last thirteen months in closed door meetings trying to determine each member's price-point, either personally or on behalf of a particular constituency, and then setting about to make sure they get the juice. Some of this juice has become public knowledge and is seen as outrageously laughable. For as long as the sun continues to rise in the east and there remain politics and politicians on the face of the earth, the “Louisiana Purchase”, the Florida “gator aid”, and the Corn Husker Kick-Back will be the stuff of legend. Back room deals don't get any more clownish than that.

Suffice it to say that by now everybody who needed to be taken care of has been taken care of. It has become clear that Leadership has run out of donkeys that will follow carrots dangled in front of them. In order to move the legislative cart any further nothing remains but to get out the stick.

This is where The Chicago Way of doing things comes into play and things can get ugly, because this is where the Administration sends out the message, “Last call for carrots!”

As an example of what can happen to those who refuse to cooperate, consider Eric Massa, now an Ex-Congressman from New York.

Until ten days ago Representative Massa was unknown to the public. It’s even a safe bet that if Jay Leno had done one of his Jay Walking routines in Upstate New York and asked “Who’s the Vice President of the United States? Who’s your Congressional Representative?” He’d have gotten embarrassed chuckles but few right answers.

However, Representative Massa was well-known in Washington, where he made it clear that believed the Health Care Bill did not go far enough. For that reason he planned to vote against it. Got that?

Unfortunately for Rep. Massa, this is not what party leaders need to hear right now. Equally unfortunate, there are some kinky skeletons in Massa’s closet.

Hints of these skeletons began to leak, bone by bone, out of the Congressional Ethics Committee. Surprise, then shock was expressed. In a matter of days Massa was gone.

But, you notice fellow New York Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel, also the subject of an Ethics Committee investigation on tax and bribery charges, is still there... Rangel is a reliable "yes" vote.

It is impossible to believe that much of this came as news to anyone in the Washington power structure, as was claimed, until Massa made some inappropriate remarks at a wedding party in January. Eric Massa ran successfully as a Democrat for the US House of Representatives. That means he went through the nomination process and the election process. He was interviewed many times by Party leaders. He was assigned a DNC team of handlers; he had his background checked; he garnered endorsements, raised money, and shook thousands of hands in DC and in New York. It is simply impossible to believe that in the 24/7 pressure of a campaign somebody did not trip over one of the kinks in Massa's personality.

As clearly troubled as Massa appears, chances are someone did trip over them; likely several some-ones. And as soon as they said, “Whoops! We’ve got a problem here in the 29th District!” someone else higher up the ladder told them to keep their mouths shut. They pegged Massa as a strange one, word was passed along, discussions were held, information was put into a dossier, and the whole thing was kept locked away... until recently.

News out now is that Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office was officially notified about Massa last October. Although, Speaker Pelosi states she personally didn’t get the word but her that her staff did.

“There are many rumors in Washington.” About whom, she didn’t say.

If it is true that staff didn’t pass word along to the Speaker then they were derelict in their duty. Further, Speaker Nancy Pelosi represents a District in San Francisco. She should be able to pick up on various cues.

Here is a suspicion of what happened. Eric Massa wouldn’t budge on his “no” vote. Remember there were quite a lot of Liberal Democrats who said they would vote no unless the bill was made stronger. But, one by one they all fell in line. Not Massa. So, they got out the stick and let him have it.

In Chicago there are two kinds of mob hits: the quiet-kind where the victim just disappears; the body dumped in a landfill or sent to the bottom of Lake Michigan never to be seen again. Then there's The Big Noise, where the victim is whacked in some public place like a restaurant, splattered against a wall in front of a lot of witnesses. The later method is used to send a message; “Don’t let this happen to you.”

Would the Washington power structure do anything this dark, this devious? That's an unpleasant question to contemplate. There is a lot of money and power at stake. They've invested over a year in putting this deal across. If it goes down they've got nothing. So, would they? Speaker Pelosi referenced other "rumors". Certainly what happened to Eric Massa weighs on the other dozen or so Health Care hold-outs. Doubtless they quickly assessed their own pasts. Could there be anything they wouldn't want their families to see splashed across the evening news?

The Eric Massa story, "whether he fell or whether he was pushed" carries the clear inherent message; "The Health Care Bill has been stalled long enough. No more carrots. From now on there's nothing but stick."

JIM BUNNING; None In, None Left On

2010-03-04T18:47:00.003-06:00

Late last week the word on retiring Kentucky Senator, Jim Bunning, and his one man bust-up with the Democratic majority was grim. “Looks like some dour Republican has opened his yap and picked a fight he can’t win.”

By Sunday, a few details had penetrated the media firewall and it looked like Bunning might have a valid point: Democrats were proposing to borrow ten billion dollars to save non-essential workers their jobs in the Transportation Department and to install satellite TV in rural areas – this was bundled together with another extension of unemployment benefits. Bunning argued there is no need to go deeper into debt to the Chinese government when hundreds of billions remain unspent in last year’s “Stimulus” fund.

Then, by Tuesday word was out that colleagues were meeting with the Senator trying to get him to give up his cause. His issue had turned into a gift to the Democrats. The mainstream press was having a party; yocking it up, cracking wise on poor old Jim Bunning, portraying the matter as a Republican Party effort to deny unemployment benefits to millions who are out of work.

For Democrats it couldn’t get any better than this. Right in the middle of Congressman Charlie Rangel’s corruption problems, Speaker Pelosi gaffes, the Governor Patterson mess, and the terrorist’s lawyers in the Justice Department – out of the blue came a cranky old Republican who, as a matter of principle, wanted to starve widows and orphans. Champaign corks were popping all over DC.

But the problem for Democrats is that Bunning was able to hold out for five long days. One, lone US Senator was able to stop the gravy-train long enough to attract attention, and for the real message to leak out. In ’06 and ’08 Democrats campaigned specifically on what they call “Pay-Go”, whereby the government must match spending with revenue. The matter was hatched back when Democrats were trying to gum-up the War on Terror. Pay-Go was an attempt to tie George Bush’s hands. You see, voting for military cuts while troops were engaged in combat would have looked bad to voters, but Pay-Go, once passed, was to be a device whereby Democrats could cut military funding indirectly. “Hey, it isn’t us. We’re just following the law…”

But, government moves slowly and just a couple weeks ago, on February 10th, the Pay-Go bill finally became law. We didn’t hear much about a signing ceremony. George W. Bush is long gone and Barack H. Obama now owns The War.

Never the less, when President Obama signed the bill, the message was supposed to be clear: From now on, there’ll be no more spending unless we can pay for it, and that’s that.

This is exactly what the Senator Jim Bunning fuss was all about. A little over two weeks after they outlawed unsecured spending, in their first piece of major financial legislation, the Democratic majority ignored half-a-trillion dollars still sitting in Stimulus funds, and went ahead and borrowed other billions without indicating how they’d pay it back.

Of course, the suspicion is the Stimulus money is not meant for things like unemployment or highway funding, not now at least. Those funds are scheduled to be released later this summer and into the fall in order to give a sugar-boost to the economy just before the mid-term elections. Barack Obama may be a Harvard-educated lawyer, but as a politician he’s pure Chicago. Stashing away a slush fund of public money to dole out at election time is exactly the kind of ethical jiggling they do every day of the week back in the Windy City. The plan is, leave the economy in the tank until we need people to vote.

So, now the Bunning crisis is over. How did the Republicans do? That’s hard to tell just yet. This whole matter came out of the blue and clearly caught GOP leaders by surprise. The more important question is, did Republicans learn anything and do they recognize what Senator Bunning may have done for them?

In his earlier career, Jim Bunning pitched his way into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Back in the 1960s he was among the very best. He made seven All-Star appearances, pitched a perfect game in ‘64 – one of only 18 in official baseball history – and built a lifetime ERA of 3.27. For seventeen seasons Jim Bunning kept his team in the game. And, that may be exactly what he did in his one-man duel with the Senate Democratic majority; he kept Republicans in the game.

In order to get Senator Bunning to sit down Democrats made a couple seemingly minor concessions. They don’t plan to touch those left-over stimulus dollars just yet, but they allowed Bunning to attempt to pay for the bill by closing tax-benefits to the paper industry. That measure only got 43 votes, but that’s two more than the 41 Republicans…Interesting. They also made the re-hire of non-essential Federal employees and the unemployment benefits extension a temporary matter. It will have to be reauthorized in 30 days. That’s even more interesting.

Those 30-days should give Senate Republicans time to prepare. What might happen when this thing comes up for renewal again in April – right around Income Tax time – if a fight were to erupt over Government spending? What would happen if Democrats were forced to pay for jobless benefits and satellite TV and non-essential government employees from the Stimulus fund which taxpayers are already paying for? And by the way, how much longer can we expect Democrat economic policy to keep people unemployed?

In baseball when a team is on defense the pitcher takes the mound. He stands alone in the center of the infield. He faces each of the opposing batters. One-on-one, it’s him them. It takes a certain kind of guy to do that successfully. Last week Senator Jim Bunning did what a great pitcher does; he gutted it up and kept his team in the game.

Now Republicans need to go on offense and score some runs.

This essay was first published 3/4/10 on American Thinker http://www.americanthinker.com/

Coffee Party, anyone?

2010-03-01T16:57:00.005-06:00

In the one-year that The Tea Partiers have been around they have been ignored, insulted, denigrated, and dismissed by mainstream media and official Washington. They have been shut out of public meetings, compared to Nazis, labeled wing-nuts, and denounced as dangerous kooks and populist radicals.

In the face of these calumnies we are reminded that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”. Yes, that’s right; the political Left has decided to get in on the act.

Drum roll, please. Enter, stage left; “The Coffee Party”.

Over the last couple weeks I have noticed a couple squibs on the internet about a brand-new political advocacy group dedicated to countering the Tea Party movement. At first I thought it was a joke. I wondered if this an organization made up of people who are not Taxed Enough Already, who think government is too small, that there’s not enough intrusion, who think that when it comes to Washington spending there is still plenty of room left on the National Credit Card. The question is, will they take that famous revolutionary flag seen at Tea Parties, the one with the coiled rattlesnake, and update its message to read “Tread On Me Some More”?

The Left is good at looking down on the common-folk, at telling others what to do, but they are not good a copying conservative phenomena. Remember what happened when they tried to get in on the talk radio business? Air America, now defunct, was a nation-wide Left wing broadcasting network that spent gobs of money – some of it tax money – yet was able to attract an audience from among only the most loyal of their fringe. Just to give an idea of how big that fringe is, their “hit” program was The Al Franken Show; at its peak it drew 1.5 million listeners per week, not listeners per day or listeners per 15-minute rating segments. That’s listeners per week to their top-rated program. In broadcasting numbers that low are presumed to include a significant percentage of those who tuned in accidentally and were unable to change the dial. The few times I got curious enough to tune in I almost asked for Novocain. That was back before Al Franken got himself elected the Senator from ACORN.

So now, the Left is going to take a stab at populist organizing. Of course, their idea of “populist” is a little high-falutin’ if the Washington Post article of February 26th is an indication. One organizer was quoted saying; “let's start a coffee party . . . smoothie party. red bull party. anything but tea. Geez. Ooh how about cappuccino party? that would really piss 'em off because it sounds elitist . . . let's get together and drink cappuccino and have real political dialogue with substance and compassion.”

Yes, and then we’ll all hold hands and feel good about ourselves.

First, we can see the Left's grasp of populist reality is limited. They don’t understand that regular Joes don’t spend too much time worrying about what beverages to serve at their meetings.

Second – and I think this is an important distinction – Tea Party people do not seek to “piss off” others. Rather, Tea Partiers seek to inform and persuade – which is what makes them effective and such a problem for the Left.

So let’s get out our crystal ball and have a look. As we gaze into the future here is what’s likely to happen: The Coffee Party will perk into existence under the leadership of the customary Democratic Party enablers. They’ll hold a couple media-approved rallies. They’ll stress that they are in favor of co-operation between the public and the government. They will say they want this 2,400 page health care bill to pass, but think it should be expanded to cover everybody on the planet. They'll want to screw The Rich to the wall with taxes, they think Rush Limbaugh should be forced off the air, and are saddened by the fact that Dick Cheney has not had the big one. The mainstream media message will be, “Isn’t it nice that such reasonable people care about our future?”

But it’ll be no time at all before some guy in a “Che” t-shirt says something dumb in front of a FOX NEWS camera. Or one of their leaders is identified as a 9/11 Truther, or a spokesman is found to have an arrest record for drug and firearm violations, or somebody was busted 20-years ago for mailing a pipe-bomb but their Democratic Congressman got the charges dropped. The possibilities are endless.

Tea, anyone?

Democrats Check In...but they can't check out

2010-02-27T16:00:00.002-06:00

Now that the Health Care Summit is over it’s safe to say that Barack Obama, even if he serves but a single term, is one president who’ll not soon be forgotten.

Depending on which side you're on, either for or against Obama’s stated goals, it is clear that for years to come we’ll all be marveling over either the monumental smallness of this man’s accomplishments or the grandness of his missed opportunities. It is now apparent to anyone half-paying attention that Barack Obama and his entire administration are in way over their heads. They come across as callow opinionated student protesters who have barricaded themselves into the Dean’s office and shut down the campus…Now what?

There was a moment following the Scott Brown Senate victory back in January, that it looked like the President had gotten the message; he indicated he would go to work on the economy, on lowering unemployment, on getting business moving and keeping the country safe. This was a sad but entirely reasonable fall-back position; write off the first year of his administration as a wild goose chase and go to work on the problems that face the nation.

That new focus lasted about a day and a half…then, just like nothing ever happened, it was back to work trying to cram that over-stuffed the 2,400+page Senate Health Care Bill into law. Reports began to leak of Democratic strategy sessions, of possible legislative tricks and legal maneuvering. The Health Care Bill would be declared a piece of “financial” legislation so that Budget Reconciliation could be used to pass it with 50 votes plus the Vice President’s. Holy Criminetly! Now another six weeks has slipped by.

If there is a good side to this, and there’s only one that I can see, it is this: The whole dream of nationalized health care has turned into a giant Democratic Party “Roach Motel” -- you know, one of those household pest removers that advertise “bugs check in but they don’t check out”. The Health Care Bill is like that. In order to grease this abomination through all the committees and all the test votes Democratic Party leadership loaded the bill with goodies of every description; with ear marks, pork, kick-backs and pay-offs galore. The operative question in private discussions was not "how do we make this bill better for the American people", but “What do you need to get on board?”

Here's the situation for Democrats, and it is only going to get worse: As public resistance to the Health Care Bill grows, now at 60% and growing, Democrats are finding they can't back out of the deal. They are caught in a trap of their own devising. First, if they try to get out their own party base, the hard-core Left, would go berserk. Second, if the bill goes down in flames it will take all the "Gator Aid" and "Corn Husker Kick-Backs" with it. Those guys will not get a piece of the action if there is no action. Third, whether they pass it or don't pass it, they'll gain little political advantage with the voters. Large sections of the public have already written them off as dolts.

Well, by now it is dawning on them that they have checked into The Democratic Party Roach Motel. In fact, they booked themselves into the honeymoon suite. Somebody should send up a bottle of champagne.

THE TRIANGLE OF DEATH, film review

2010-02-13T12:11:00.010-06:00

It’s happened to all of us. We receive a recommendation from a friend: “You’ve got to see this documentary movie. It's important.”

Right away our suspicions are aroused. While the film in question may deal with an issue that cries out for public outrage, it is also likely to be a pretentious dry-ball exercise that will make an evening’s movie-going feel like sitting at the dinner table when you were eight years old and being told by your Mother to “eat your peas and carrots”. Experience has taught us to graciously accept the recommendation, and put said film on our “must see” list – at the bottom – where it stays.

The Triangle of Death is not that movie. It belongs at the top of your list.

The Triangle of Death is a fast paced picture that documents the day to day combat experiences of the 3rd Platoon of the 2/24th of the United States Marine Corps while deployed in the Sunni Triangle in 2004-2005. For 94 pounding minutes the film puts the viewer right at the tip of the spear. You are there; traveling in the convoys, going house to house, battling from the rooftops. The bullets whizzing by are as thick as deerflies at a Wisconsin fish fry in July, and they are real bullets. Same for the mortar rounds, the IEDs, and the blood…they’re all real, too.

And speaking of blood; this film is not for the kiddies. Body parts go flying, wild dogs feed on rotting corpses, and Al Qaeda reprisals against anyone aiding the Marines are brutal. The pictures are unvarnished. The language is unbleeped. It is all right there on the screen.

The film itself is something of an improbability. Get this: all of the combat footage was filmed by one man, Corporal Follah S. Tamba, a rifleman in Echo Company, who in addition to his other gear carried a small high-quality video camera. And what pictures he captured. Tightly edited together, The Triangle of Death it is like an extended fireworks display. The viewer is bashed by one astonishing image after another. Tamba was wounded midway through his deployment and had his first camera blown to bits by an IED. He got patched up, found a back-up camera and went right back into action.

Going further, and even more into the improbable, consider these facts: Corporal Follah S. Tamba is an immigrant from Nigeria. He has a degree in film from Chicago’s Columbia College. Upon graduation he didn’t go to Hollywood, he joined the Marines.

In the course of filming his deployment, and through follow up interviews back home, Tamba draws a clear picture of combat and the men who serve. Writer George Orwell’s statement “We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm” is spot on, but it also omits several important characteristics of these American Marines. The first is dedication. They are charged up and ready to go. The young Marines who are wounded can’t wait to get back into action. They clearly want victory and they want to accomplish their mission.

The second characteristic is professionalism. These guys are the most efficient, businesslike warriors the world has yet to see. No muss. No fuss. They train, they practice and they show up ready for action.

Third, and most unexpectedly, we see how funny these Marines are. Through all they experienced – heat, filth, fatigue, and the threat of miserable death, they maintain an almost chipper sense of humor. Off-hand comments heard in the background while something serious was going on led to some unexpected laughs. Their effort to establish good relations with the Iraqi locals was interesting, too.

While the Americans made it a priority to work within the framework of local mores and customs, sometimes this was a pretty tall order. An incident that occurred during a training exercise with Iraqi militia recruits was especially telling and amusing. At one point an Iraqi trainee, through negligence, accidentally discharged his weapon. As punishment the offender was ordered to carry around a 63 pound rock, in the heat of day through whatever they were doing. Throughout the rest of the filmed sequence, lurking on the fringes we see a gangly Iraqi with a slab of stone perched on his shoulder. This incident underlined the off-center humor sprinkled throughout the film.

The film's producers, Juan Montelongo and Thomas Hartmann, along with Corporal Tamba, are also Columbia College graduates. They formed Wolf Dog Films in the western suburbs of Chicago. The final cut of their picture finished, their task now is to get the film into as many festivals as possible and secure some form of general release.

As well photographed as the film is a key participant in the final presentation was the editor, Eugene Gordon. He kept things tight and moving forward. There is not one slow second of screen time. The sound designer, Tom Balazs, deserves mention, too. “The sound” of the FX tracks was first rate and enhanced the reality of the finished film far beyond the limitations of its modest budget.

As a piece of filmmaking, The Triangle of Death is a unique rare gem, a little jewel. Seeing it today you can easily imagine the film’s increased documentary value five hundred years from now. In future times someone viewing it will have a clear window into the American military of today, its character and capability, unfiltered and untarnished by current mainstream media bias. The Triangle of Death is fast paced, exciting, violent, funny and it makes a serious point: Some first-rate young men are working hard and taking risks so that the rest of America can sleep well again tonight.

Here's a preview.

And, to purchase a copy of the film click here.

Illinois Elections Worthy of National Attention

2010-02-04T23:16:00.006-06:00

Don’t lose interest in the Illinois elections just because conservative Adam Andrezejewski came up short of the Republican Gubernatorial nomination last Tuesday.

There are two reasons for this: first, a little-known but very solid State Senator from downstate Illinois, Bill Brady, appears to have won instead. One door may have closed and another opened. Brady is currently holding a 400+ vote lead over old-boy Republican–backed Kirk Dillard with all precincts now in.

If Bill Brady wins, it will be because he ran a sharp rebel insurgency campaign. He avoided a head to head clash in the expensive Chicago media market, concentrating instead on small towns and rural areas where discontent and resentment with The Chicago Way of doing things runs high. There was a very clever, almost military thinking at work there.

So far, the media has shown little curiosity about him. No “underdog comes from behind and wins” stories, no “David and Goliath” angle. Not a word, so far.

The Republican establishment doesn’t seem too happy with his win, either. Some big people were behind several of the other candidates. They can be expected to throw Brady under the bus at the first opportunity. However, Brady seems to have strong appeal with the sick-of-Windy-City-politicians voters. But, to win against Democratic Governor, Pat Quinn, in November Brady will need to raise money and a corps of volunteers. Keep an eye on him. He may be able to do it.

The second reason to pay attention to Illinois this year is this: from top to bottom, the Democratic slate is riddled with incompetence and corruption. It will be a slow motion train wreck all the way to November.

Already, the first car has jumped the rails. This morning, February 4th, local talk radio hosts were guffawing over news that Democratic candidate for the state Lieutenant Governor, Scott Lee Cohen, was arrested in 2005 and charged with holding a knife to his prostitute-girlfriend’s throat. Yes, you read that right – and he just won the primary two days ago. Cohen also has tax troubles. For the sordid details read the Chicago Sun-Times report.

Another case in point – and I have no idea what Democratic primary voters put in their coffee Tuesday morning – Chicago banker Alexi Giannoulias, a close friend of Barack Obama, won the Democratic nomination to the US Senate…this just two weeks after President Obama told a crowd in Massachusetts that “Bankers don’t need another vote in the Senate.”

But, Giannoulias is not just any banker. Google “Broadway Bank Chicago” or click on this link to Crain's Chicago Business and simply read the collection of headlines. We’re sure to learn more as the weeks and months go by.

And, don't forget to mark you calendars for June 3rd; that's the day the Blago Trial is scheduled to start. When that happens, discounting a plea bargain or unexpected deaths, a centipede will start dropping shoes.

As for the Republican Senate candidate there is not too much to be excited about. Congressman Mark Kirk won the nomination. Although Kirk describes himself as a social moderate and fiscal conservative, his fiscally conservative credentials are not particularly solid: he lost a lot of credibility when he became one of the eight house Republicans who voted with the Democrats in favor of Cap and Trade last year. Mark Kirk will campaign as a conservative, but is he?

All together, the 2010 Illinois elections will be fun to watch and could help frame the National debate. Things are just starting to get interesting.

Taxes, Taxes, and More Taxes

2010-02-02T15:31:00.007-06:00

Yesterday Chicago news carried reports that 29th Ward Alderman, Isaac “Ike” Carothers, an influential Democrat and chairman of the City’s Police & Fire Committee, plead guilty to Federal corruption charges involving his accepting sports tickets and $40,000 worth of home remodeling in exchange for greasing the skids on behalf a developer who had a $3 million project in the works.

Yes, another one bites the dust, and it was my intention to yock it up at the Alderman’s expense. There’s pathetic humor inherent in the situation – A powerful Chicago politician, after all he’s gotten away with, is caught picking up a “tip” in the amount of 1.03% of the project’s total price tag.

While not much money was involved, it is an indication of how things work. If a City official can string together enough such deals to get a cash-flow going it can add up to a nice chunk of change. And there are no taxes. A child could do it.

But, my jolly humor went out the window this morning when I read THIS STORY linked from the Drudge Report.

All of a sudden there’s not much to laugh about.

In a few paragraphs we get a very unfunny picture: Right now, as you read this, billions upon billions of dollars are circling the drain, and the rest of the economy is floating in the same direction. This is what we get for all those bail-outs and Louisiana Re-Purchases, and Corn Husker Kick-Backs. The same goes for all the carve-outs and "donuts" and pork projects and the millions earmarked for phantom zip-codes and non-existing congressional districts. That's the way things are done.

This we know: The Chicago Way of doing things is expensive enough in the Windy City, but on a national scale Alderman Carothers’ $40,000 won’t buy a cup of coffee.

Report: Adam Andrezejewski rally in Chicago

2010-01-30T15:59:00.010-06:00

The Tea Party network got the word out that there would be a rally Friday, January 29th on Federal Plaza in Chicago in support of Republican Gubernatorial candidate Adam Andrezejewski.

Andrezejewski is gaining steam in the upcoming primary here in Illinois. He has a shot at taking the nomination away from a crowded field of mostly establishment-backed go-along Rinos. The issue in Illinois, besides a pestilence of corruption, is the State’s lousy financial situation. A “combine” of Dems and Repubs, has left the treasury looted and the state with an $14 billion budget hole. Unfunded pension liability for State workers is $89 billion and counting. Click here. Only California has a worse Moody's credit rating.

As is typical in January, downtown Chicago was no place for the lightly dressed. The wind-chill factor made for a single-digit, ear flaps-down temperature. No reason to wonder why The Machine scheduled the primary election for the first Tuesday in February.

The real draw for the rally was former President of Poland, and founder of Solidarity, Lech Walesa, who was in Illinois to announce his support for Andrezejewski – by the way, the pronunciation is simpler than it looks: Just say N-G-F and put a Ski on the end. N-G-F-Ski. Repeat it three times and you’ll sound like a real Chicagoan.

Here is a video link to the whole of Walesa’s remarks, and some of Andrezejewski’s, both of whom were brief – they were frozen, too. Click here.

I brought along my wife’s digital camera but didn’t use it. Instead, fingers numb, I shot a few 3-D views with my trusty Stereo Realist (which I mention in my “revisionist” Plumwood Road review of the movie Avatar, posted January 28th).

What was my impression of the rally? Honestly, just between us? Hmmm…I know a lot of Tea Party people who are very impressed with Andrezejewski, and it was easy to see why: He speaks well on the stump, he was sharp and crisp in front of the media, he is gaining experience, but clearly a work in progress. By next fall he could be fantastic. Most importantly, he has a simple, compelling campaign message: “Open the Books”. When I heard those three words, I knew he was in possession of the political equivalent of The Bomb. And, I could see it in his eyes; he’ll use it.

The first thing Governor Andrezejewski will do is circumvent the Democrat and old-boy Republicans and issue an executive order calling for a complete audit of the State of Illinois; where have all those billions of dollars gone? Let’s “Open the Books” and find out whose pockets are getting stuffed. A hint of where that question may lead was given by another speaker, John Bambeneck, who is involved professionally in investigating internet crime. “And, when you are talking about internet crime in Illinois,” Bambeneck said, “You are talking about Organized Crime.” Message received.

Did I see any problems with Andrezejewski? Yes, and a pretty big one: campaign organization. He is young and he needs an experienced hand guiding him and training a rebel band of organizers. And he needs somebody to take charge of the schedule.

The event was set to kick off at 2:30. Andrezejewski and Walesa arrived 40 minutes late. That left a lot of filling to do at the podium as well as 150 supporters standing in the cold. Luckily for the candidate, the people in the cold were dedicated activists. They are the kind of people who are ready to rock. The first of the “filler” speakers was a flag-carrying retired 20-year Marine. This man knew a crowd of volunteers could get little restless. With just a few words, he had us standing straight and focused. “Let me hear an Ooh-Rah!” And he heard one.

But Andrezejewski can’t let this happen again, not when he has a crowd of curious or undecided voters. Write that down, somebody, and get it to him.

Will I vote for Andrezejewski on Tuesday? Most likely. I had previously been leaning toward Dan Proft, another fire-ball conservative, but N-G-F-Ski’s “Open the Books” theme is brilliant. If he gets the nomination, there are going to be a lot of nervous politicians in Illinois.

AVATAR - a story behind the story

2010-01-28T22:21:00.006-06:00

Avatar, in little more than a month after its release, has become the number one box-office money maker of all time. That's a lot of tickets sold. The film is a visually arresting piece, having been photographed in a breakthrough stereographic 3-D process that literally opens the screen and delivers the audience to the planet Pandora, light years away.

It was the buzz that Avatar was like no other 3-D film ever made that got me into the theater. For more than two decades I’ve shot virtually all of my personal photographs with a 1952 Stereo Realist camera. It’s not exactly a cutting edge piece of equipment but solidly reliable and designed to capture terrific stereo images.

The 3-D medium is challenging and endlessly fascinating, dealing as it does with compositional elements in all three visual dimensions. The rules of conventional photography apply, and then some. In contrast to a conventional photograph, instead of looking “at” the picture, you look “through” a stereograph into a perfectly frozen instant of time. The eye is invited to roam around within the frame, or, “window” as it is called, picking out stray bits of detail an ordinary camera would gloss over. I have taken thousands of stereos over the years in which I attempt to capture a person or place with the “you are there” quality that only 3-D can deliver. When successful, the results are magnetic. Further, unlike conventional photographs which tend to sit in a drawer, stereos are looked at and shared. Not a week goes by that I do not pull a few stereos out to enjoy.

However, and stereo photography enthusiasts freely admit this, aside from a couple interesting 3-D films made back in the 50s, Hollywood’s use of the medium has rarely gotten past the cheesiness of rubber sharks, or the eyestrain of occasional bad projection. The movies always seem to treat 3-D as a side-show attraction.

The astounding impact of Avatar is due entirely to its breakthrough stereographic photography. Filmed conventionally, it would be a nothing more than another over-produced action flick. Until now, the 3-D equipment available to film makers was heavy and cumbersome; too limiting to be of general production use. But, computer graphics, digital imaging, and modern optics now enable a level of 3-D cinematography that was impossible using the refrigerator-size camera that Alfred Hitchcock used to film Dial M for Murder in 1954. In Avatar, when the ship from earth lands on Pandora and the doors open, the audience finds itself on another world.

However, when it comes to story, Avatar is “all meat and no potatoes”. It's little more than a ramped up remake of Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars. Well, that’s not quite accurate. Flash Gordon would be fun updated and in 3-D. No, this is Flash Gordon after he's spent a little time in a re-education camp.

Within the first ten minutes, about the length of time it takes to forget you’re wearing 3-D glasses, savvy movie-goers can see what’s about to come down the pike: a nice, gooey Leftist lecture. How do you figure this out? Easy: counter to Hollywood convention, the majority of the earthmen in the film’s cast look like they’re from Suburban-America. How long has it been since a crew of movie space travelers has been portrayed as anything other than a rainbow of diversity? Thirty or forty years? The dramatic reasoning for this is obvious: these are B-A-D Earth People, and they’ve traveled to Pandora to do bad things.

There is no need here to count the ways Avatar neglects presenting a plausible and imaginative picture of mankind and society in the year 2154, and instead relies on recycled Viet Nam imagery and sets out to grate on the sensibilities of present day conservatives, libertarians, and military veterans.

There is a purposeful dismissive insult built into the story from the start: a greedy Earth Corporation, backed by the US Marines – the scum of the universe – conspires to elbow the indigenous residents of Pandora, the Na’vi, out of the way in order to strip mine the planet of its valuable mineral resources. It’s no more subtle than that.

Even the scientists and techies aboard the ship are portrayed as weaseley sell-outs, the kind of hacks who would fake Global Warming evidence if there was a paycheck in it. Imagine what it must be like to be shut up in hyper-space for a few light years with these guys.

The message behind Avatar is simple: America Bad, Capitalism Worse. Yes, I loved the 3-D photography, but it was irritating to have to put up with a bunch of Leftist sing-song in order to partake of the visual marvels.

But – and here is the neat part – about half way into the movie I realized I was rooting for the Na’vi against the Earth Vermin.

At one point the Marine Colonel in charge of operations complains that he’s tried everything to get these yokels to cooperate. He offered to build schools, roads and hospitals in exchange for the mineral rights, but the Na’vi turned him down. They said they wanted to be left alone and in peace.

As tensions rose and the Suburban-Americans plotted what to do next, I turned to my wife and whispered “They should offer ‘universal health care for all’ – and then promise to raise taxes on the creatures over on the next planet to pay for it.”

And that was all it took. The Leftist spell was broken. I had discovered the “key” to understanding and enjoying Avatar.

Seen properly, Avatar is not just a prattle-headed space opera, rather it is a clever retelling of contemporary events back here on earth. It brings to mind the US Supreme Court 5-4 “Kelo Decision” a few years ago which allowed a cabal of business and government officials in New London, Connecticut, to muscle Susette Kelo out of her house in order to squeeze more tax revenue from the property. Remember that? Not long ago Fox News ran a five years-later follow-up report that showed everything about Kelo has turned into a disaster: Mrs. Kelo’s home was demolished, the real estate market tanked, the developer split town, New London is stuck with a vacant lot, and local taxpayers are holding the bag. In Avatar audiences watch a similar game on Pandora being played against the Na’vi.

When you look at them, the Suburban-Americans portrayed in Avatar are the same kind of officials who rushed through the TARP deal, the auto bail-out and the bank take-over; who designed the $780 billion dollar Stimulus Bill and loaded it up with earmarks and pork; who stuff pending Health Care legislation with Corn Husker Kick-Backs and Louisiana Re-purchases then call it "reform".

As for Eywa, Pandora’s mystical Tree of Life, which the Suburban-Americans were willing to destroy in their quest…that is clearly a symbolic representation of the fruitful tree of our own economy, Capitalism – famously called “the invisible hand”. We are daily watching it being hacked and chopped and bombed in a quest for what? Votes? Power and influence over citizens?

In a nutshell, here’s the problem with Avatar: James Cameron set out to portray the plundering of Pandora through the lens of Progressive Liberalism. In Hollywood it's as easy as 1-2-3; pull an old script off the studio shelf, fill in the blanks with Leftist assumptions and be sure your tuxedo is back from the cleaners in time for Oscar night. What could be easier? But this kind of paint-by-numbers film making rendered a flat, cardboard cut-out picture, a weak portrayal of Capitalism as something small and greedy and remote from the needs of real people. In effect, what James Cameron did was give us a view of Pandora through the wrong end of the telescope. When we turn the lens around and look through the other end we see a clearer picture.

When we watch Avatar through the correct end of the lens we begin to see that the problems of the Na’vi are very much like our own. Like the Na’vi, we are being offered a bag of worthless goodies we don’t want from a government that has not earned our trust. We watch in stunned horror as people from Planet Washington plot behind closed doors to pass a massive Health Care Plan that we know will damage the Tree of our economy. Like the Na’vi, we have listened as representatives at first promised, pleaded and cajoled…then insulted, lied and finally threatened (Rahm Emanuel, “Don’t think we’re not keeping score”)in order to force a deal on us. And, like the Na’vi, we’re not buying into the sell.

It’s all there in the movie. There is even a stirring scene where thousands of Pandora’s residents rally together in what can only be seen as an intergalactic Tea Party; a “Tea Party from Outer Space”. And, finally, there’s the climactic battle – Election Day – where the bad guys are tossed out of office and off the planet.

Viewed through the right end of the telescope Avatar is a pretty good movie. And, for the price of admission you can see it all, in Glorious 3-D.

You've Just Crossed Over Into ... THE TWILIGHT ZONE

2009-12-21T12:07:00.015-06:00

It is an occasional custom of mine: I often get home from work late at night, around eleven or twelve o’clock. Karen is usually fast asleep. The house is quiet. And from time to time, after greeting the dog and one of the cats who always comes to the door, I fix a bowl of pretzels, open a beer, pop a disk into the DVD player and relax with an episode from the old TV series The Twilight Zone. It is a nice way to unwind.

The Twilight Zone first hit the air October 2, 1959. I was in grade school at the time and became fan right from the start. The series was the invention of Rod Serling, one of the great writers of television drama back in the days of “live” programming in the 1950s. Serling wrote most of the Twilight Zone episodes himself along with Richard Matheson, Earl Hamner, Charles Beaumont and the inimitable Ray Bradbury.

It is a continual marvel and a testament to the quality of the writing and production that so many of the episodes, especially from the first two or three seasons, are still so satisfying. Much of the enduring impact of this fifty year-old television series is due to the fact that no matter how fanciful or far-fetched the series was, many of its best episodes managed to accurately -- and eerily -- reflect human life down here on Terra Firma.

This morning I recalled a particular episode. Perhaps you have seen it: A space craft lands with visitors from another world. Aliens are seemingly friendly and charming creatures who, despite their otherworldly appearance present themselves as benevolent beings who love the human race. They just want to help. In fact, they are found to be carrying a book titled To Serve Man. How lovely. Their stated mission is to seek recruits to take along on their ship back to their own planet.

Serling’s opening comments set the stage:

“Respectfully submitted for your perusal --- a Kanamit. Height: a little over nine feet. Weight: in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty pounds. Origin: unknown. Motives? Therein hangs the tale…This is the Twilight Zone.”

Yes indeed, fans; a nice, crisp presentation of the crux of the story: "therein hangs the tale."

The program moves smartly along as thousands of awed and, as it turns out, gullible earthlings flock to secure passage to a promised-land of intergalactic paradise. Meanwhile a doubtful skeptic feverishly works to translate the mysterious text contained in the pages of To Serve Man.

The story concludes as the mass of humanity crowds aboard. As the hatch it closed the translation arrives with a patented Twilight Zone twist.

How does this relate to anything in today’s universe? At one o’clock Sunday morning the United States Senate pulled the 2,000 page healthcare bill everyone has been fighting over, and replaced it with a different, new, 2,000 page bill no one has seen or read…and in that hour voted 60-40 to end debate.

As the space craft sails off, bound for a dinner table in another galaxy, Serling’s concluding commentary is apropos.

“…simply stated, the evolution of man…the metamorphosis from being the ruler of a planet to an ingredient in someone’s soup. It’ tonight’s bill of fare on The Twilight Zone.”

HEALTH CARE; FIX IT ONCE, FIX IT RIGHT

2009-12-16T12:54:00.004-06:00

Last September I was asked to write a piece for a local Democratic Party publication.

The parameters were simple:"No Republican propaganda, No Rush Limbaugh rants...just what you think."

I wrote it and submitted it, but in the end, the editorial review board rejected the essay.

Well, it's their loss. Here it is for PlumwoodRoad readers who may find it offers a useful perspective that they haven't heard elsewhere:

IF IT’S WORTH DOING, IT’S WORTH DOING RIGHT

By Jed Skillman

Many post-WWII Boomers can remember falling out of a tree, getting cut by a garden tool, or coming down with a bad case of flu, then getting hauled off to see the doctor. Later, while on the way out of the doctor’s office, Mom or Dad would stop at the nurse’s desk and write a check. In those days the American health care system was a relatively simple and low cost proposition.

It was common, well into the ‘60s for doctors to work out of a room in back of their homes, or in an office across the hall from an insurance agent. A doctor set broken bones, stitched bad cuts, gave tetanus or small-pox shots, and frequently advised “take two aspirin and call me in the morning”. Americans went to the hospital if they were injured in an accident, or to have an appendix removed, get a hernia repaired, or deliver a baby. Following invasive surgery, patients were often laid up in bed for days. There was little in the way of out patient surgery. People who went into the hospital for more serious illnesses, like cancer, likely didn’t come out at all.

Americans of that era had different expectations of their health care system. “Modern medicine” had brought clean drinking water, advances in hygiene as well as an end to the use of mustard plasters, cod liver oil and Epsom salts. Penicillin had been around for a while. Treatment for tuberculosis was new, as was vaccination against polio.

In 1965 the US male/female life expectancy had risen to a very impressive 69 years. This still left a lot of room for improvement. I can remember attending a cook-out where a doctor friend of my Dad’s, old Doc Ritz, stood behind the grill smoking a cigarette while serving hotdogs to us kids. Ah, the good old days.

But that was then; this is now.

Over the past few decades the advancements in the science and art of medicine have been phenomenal. In the year 2009 Americans have access to a fast, efficient medical system. It is important for us to keep in mind all the good that our current system provides. There are problems, yes, but every one of us personally knows someone who was diagnosed with a serious medical problem and began receiving treatment within hours. The lump was discovered on Tuesday; the operation was on Thursday.

The American people benefit from thousands of new tools and techniques that were unimagined a few decades ago. This is nothing to be taken for granted. There are MRIs, CTs, artificial replacements, stints, angioplasties, colonoscopies, mammograms, radiation seeds, arthroscopic surgical techniques and vastly improved pharmaceuticals in use every day. These things didn’t just invent themselves. Highly educated, highly creative people conceived, refined and marketed those new medicines and tools.

The results are obvious. The US life expectancy today stands at just under 79 years, almost 10 years more than in 1965. And, not only are Americans living longer we’re living better, with more pain-free, more active, and more productive lives. How many times have we heard the phrase “80 is the new 60, and 50 is the new 40”?

Medical progress is not a problem. The debate over Health Care Reform should focus on the one single sore point: cost. As we have all seen, medical related expenses have blown through the roof. In recent decades they have increased 300-400%. Some years have seen insurance rates increase 20%, one year to the next. What has gone wrong with pricing?

That is the question. If we answer it correctly we’re on our way to curing the problem. Get it wrong and we will make things even worse.

So far, the only answer coming our of Official Washington is buried somewhere in the tattered pages of that 1000+ page health care bill that the House of Representatives was ready to vote on earlier in the summer. They were ready to vote on it, largely unread.

Note: Since I wrote this essay in September, the House bill has grown to over 1,700 pages and the Senate bill has drifted out beyond 2,100 page reef. This thing has grown to such colossal proportions that it sounds like something out of a cheesy sci/fi movie; Attack of the 50-Foot Health Care Bill

Recently, in news stories and at town hall meetings, The Public started asking questions: does the bill allow for portability? Will the nation’s 1,300 health insurance companies be able to compete across state lines same as auto and home insurance companies? Will individuals be allowed to take a tax deduction for privately purchased coverage, like businesses do? Will there be meaningful tort reform and the elimination of “junk” malpractice suits?

Those questions, which have gone largely unanswered or ignored, are key to any successful reform of health care. And those are the easy questions.

The tough questions cut closer to the bone when it comes to personal beliefs and values: Will tax money be used to pay for abortions? Will tax money pay for the 12 to 20 million illegal residents? And, what’s the difference between a Health Care Resource Allocation Review Committee and a “Death Panel”? Those questions have not been ignored, they have been reviled.

This much is clear; mixing Medicine and politics is dangerous. This bill does not represent a search for practical solutions. What we are witnessing is a Congress tinkering around with Life. We see Washington sawing and chopping and patching together some Frankenstein of a bill that they hope will rise off the slab and grab enough votes by the throat to pass. But with every passing day Administration leaders telegraph the fact that they don’t have a clue what they are doing. There is a reason that of the 525 members of the House and Senate, only three got through medical school.

Since the days of the Ancient Greeks the primary rule for physicians has been “First, do no harm”. Before Congress prescribes – and imposes – a cure for our ills, they owe us a fair and unbiased examination. They have a responsibility to offer the public an honest consultation with no hidden agendas and no CYAs. And we have the right to seek a second opinion. Anything less is pure quackery.

My Mamma Done Tol' Me

2009-11-05T13:36:00.008-06:00

If you’re like me sometimes you think the political world is a pretty grim place; as in “no fun”, “a complete drag”.

Watching this Administration paddle the country toward an economic waterfall is very tiring, especially when you see how persistent they are. It gets a fellow plum tuckered out. There’s only so much you can take.

Last evening, for instance, I was home. While fixing a sandwich I turned on the television, but instead of tuning in to O'Reilly or Hannity I clicked on TCM and found Clint Eastwood’s documentary about songwriter Johnny Mercer. In a few seconds I was hooked. I stood there in the kitchen for an hour and a half and watched the whole thing, start to finish, "from Natchez to Mobile, from Memphis to St. Joe".

It was a very good film, not as good as Johnny Mercer’s songs or Mercer’s own delivery of those songs on the occasions when he sang them himself instead of letting people like Bing Crosby, or Frank Sinatra, or Cab Calloway sing them. Still, it was a very good film. I enjoyed it immensely.

Mercer’s lyrics are so rich, so pleasant and sophisticated in construction that they feel like a warm summer day; like a natural pleasure that we take for granted until its gone and we find ourselves in the cold looking back wondering where it went. They are full of crisp, original observations, of saucy romance and wistful regret, all told with easy Southern humor.

Listening, Mercer’s tunes erased all the concerns in my mind about how those corrupt fixers in Washington are working to rig the American health care system so that it’s a duplicate of any other public facility, be it public education or the DMV. But isn't that sense of sunny transportation part of what made those old songs and shows work so well, that sense of leaving your cares behind and stopping in on another world?

Here’s just a small sample of the hundreds of songs Johnny Mercer wrote: Blues In the Night, Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive, Fools Rush In, I’m Old Fashioned, Moon River, One For My Baby (and One More for the Road), Jeepers Creepers, That Old Black Magic, I Want To Be Around To Pick Up the Pieces, By the River Sainte Marie, Lazy Bones…..and on and on….

I went to bed happy and rested.

When I got up this morning it was back to the real world. I fixed a cup of coffee, scanned a few internet news sites and found this gem of a story.

They never stop, do they, that curious bunch of people running the government. It must be in their blood; for night and day, around the clock somebody in a Federal office building is trying to figure how to spend large sums of money. The article in question is a shopping list of goodies tucked into the so-called “Stimulus Plan”, the plan our tax dollars are paying for. Reading the piece I cruised down the page but didn’t notice any golf courses or merry-go-round museums this time, never the less there are some interesting items to be spending money on, regardless of current economic conditions. Here are a couple:

$300 Thousand for a helicopter to track radio active rabbit droppings near a nuke plant. How did we ever get along without that?

$6 Million earmarked for a snow-making machine in Duluth, Minnesota, which needs snow the way Florida needs sunshine or Seattle needs rain.

And, there's $11 Million to build a bridge over a freeway between two Microsoft corporate buildings. How did Microsoft end up with corporate buildings on either side of a freeway? Were they too busy running down the bugs in Windows “Vista” to notice? As a business, Microsoft is famous for “creating more millionaires than any other company in the world.” Okay. Why not get eleven of them to chip in for the bridge and leave taxpayers alone?

But my favorite – gather ‘round fellas – is this one: The Stimulus Bill actually provides the University of Syracuse with $219 Thousand to study “the sex lives of freshman women”. Who do they think they’re kidding? They’ll hang a few sign-up sheets around campus and get a bunch of interested volunteers who will do the research for free. Then, the $219 Thousand will get funneled through to ACORN workers to teach hookers how to cheat on their taxes.

Reading all this at quarter after seven in the morning reminded me of another Mercer song; The Country’s In the Very Best of Hands.

Gone over thirty years but in that homely Southern drawl Johnny Mercer still sings to us from the Great Beyond. Makes me wonder what he could do with material like he'd find today.

Yes, indeedee, "My Mama Done Tol' Me", alright.

"YOUR INDEPENDENT VOICE IN WASHINGTON"

2009-10-19T23:40:00.005-05:00

Let's assume you are a conservative or libertarian-leaning voter, a Constitutionalist if you will. And further, let's assume you live in a Congressional district usually represented by Republicans, but you found conditions last year, or during the ’06 election, to be such that you were open to considering casting your vote elsewhere, rather than for your usual tired choice. I'm not asking for a show of hands, but just between us, does that sound a little familiar? If so, it’s Okay. A lot of us can identify.

On one hand, you wanted a change from the ineffective K Street-compromised Republican Party. But, on the other hand voting for a candidate steeped in the post-modern, big-government Democratic belief system didn’t have much appeal either.

You faced a tough choice. You watched, aghast, while the Republican controlled House ran the deficit up, but you knew that putting Democrats in charge would likely make fiscal problems worse. Similarly, while you were losing patience with the war in Iraq, you were disturbed by the fact that the official Democratic Party was talking openly about packing up and moving the war into Afghanistan. Democrats haven’t run a war-to-win since the days of Give ‘em Hell Harry.

You were appalled by Republican scandals involving everything from sexual impropriety to outright bribery. But in the back of your mind a little voice kept reminding you that Democrats wrote the book when it came to sleaze, whether it was banging interns or stashing envelopes of cash in the freezer. Some of it, back in places like Chicago, was worse than that.

No, the fact was no matter how upset voters had become, many weren’t quite willing to “Vote Democratic.”

Enter, the Blue Dogs.

Democrats, while they may not share in them, at least understand what the nation’s beliefs are. They are constantly polling, market testing and focus-grouping. They understand that this is essentially a conservative-leaning country. They know it but they don't like it. Every time you hear one of them derisively complain about the “hicks” and “rednecks” that run the country, they are, in effect, acknowledging that fact.

Knowing how weary voters were becoming with Republicans, yet realizing the limited appeal the Democratic message has in much of America, Party leaders lead by current White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, went on a talent search. They combed the wobbly toss-up districts looking for nice, straight, church-going, flag-waving Democrats who would not scare-off conservative voters, and who would be willing to run for office. They sought squeaky-clean candidates who might offer a comfortable alternative to simmering Republican discontent on one hand and a plunge into economic radicalism on the other.

One thing I can attest, having worked both sides of the political street over the years, Democrats are a visceral, two-fisted party. No matter what set of beliefs they have followed in any given era of our Nation’s history, be it Jim Crow, the New Deal, Vietnam – at first pro, then anti – or nationalized health care, they are a sharp, hard-case party and have been since the days of Andrew Jackson. I have known Democrats at their best; warm, humorous and steely at the same time. My Dad was a Democrat in his heart until the day he died, although he officially switched with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

The plan Rahm Emanuel presented was simple: The Party supplied cash and campaign expertise, and the candidates, if elected, would be allowed to vote their conscience. All Emanuel claimed to want was a Democratic Majority running things. Thus, beginning with the 2006 election, there were Democrats running for Congress who were pro-life, who were members of the NRA, who knew what running a small business was all about.

This strategy extended the Democratic Party reach beyond Union-dominated wards and dying rust belt cities, beyond Hollywood and the arts-community, beyond the campus ivory towers and up-scale “latte towns”. The independent message of the Blue Dogs carried the Democratic Party right into the heart of the country. These were Democrats who were not at all like the screaming protesters camped out in front of W’s Texas ranch, or the radicals throwing concrete blocks through storefront windows in riots across the nation, or the ones scrawling assassination threats on washroom stalls.

No, these Democrats were presented as a safe, reasonable alternative to the bla-bla-bla of the Republicans. These were Blue Dog Democrats.

And across the nation, in district after district, these candidates looked straight into the television cameras and told voters:

“I will be your independent voice in Washington.”

And it worked, at least as far as getting elected was concerned.

Voters in those Uber-Liberal parts of the country where family-values, so called, are viewed as a quaint memory from America's socially repressive past continued to vote for the usual flock of standard-issue Democrats. No surprises there.

But Blue Dogs helped the Democrats win a bare House majority in '06. Then, when the dust finally settled after the '08 election many more conservative districts elected Blue Dogs. There are now 56 of them in Congress. In fact, they provide entirely the comfortable majority that the Democratic Party now enjoys.

The roots of the original Blue Dog Democrats go back to the mid-1990s when the size and cost of government was an issue that cut across party lines. Their website states:

“The fiscally conservative Democratic Blue Dog Coalition was formed in 1995 with the goal of representing the center of the House of Representatives and appealing to the mainstream values of the American public. The Blue Dogs are dedicated to a core set of beliefs that transcend partisan politics, including a deep commitment to the financial stability and national security of the United States.”

While the Blue Dogs were effective fifteen years ago in helping get spending under control, balance the budget and trim down government, the fact is that they, like many Republicans (which is another story), have compromised their beliefs. When it comes to challenging modern era core-Democratic doctrine they have lost their bite, and they don’t have much bark left either.

That promise to “vote their conscience”, well, the minute they were sworn in that went away. Twenty-two of the Blue Dogs voted for the job-killing “Cap and Trade” Bill which was supposedly designed to halt Global Warming. And, fifty of them voted “yes” on the pork-packed, ear mark-laden $800 Billion Dollar stimulus bill. The Blue Dogs ran out of gas about the time Independents and restive Republicans voted for them.

Over the last few months health care reform, this Administration's keystone issue, has devolved into a Washington Melodrama. A confusing mess. On one side we see a driven, grimly determined Administration. They are bent on winning at any cost, but they are not explaining "Winning what?" On the other side are a growing list of “enemies”; the “mobs”, the “tea-partiers”, talk radio, Fox News commentators, the greedy doctors and insurance people, along with an increasing majority of the American Population.

“Any nation that can’t maintain clean public restrooms shouldn't try to run a socialized healthcare system,” P. J. O’Rourke said. Many people think he’s on to something. How will this turn out? Hard to say.

Right now as you read this, those Blue Dogs are getting plenty of advice on how to vote when the plan comes up. They are being told that “This bill is too big to let personal opinions about fiscal responsibility or concerns about the proper role of government get in the way. You don’t have to read it, you don’t have to understand it, you don’t have to like it. You just have to vote ‘yes’.” Your “independent voice in Washington” is barely a whisper.

Knowing, as we do, the nature of power politics, especially Chicago power politics which is what we now have in Washington, it is safe to say that these private conversations are especially pointed. It is being intimated to the Blue Dogs that their future personal fortunes and happiness depends on how they vote.

“We know that certain segments of the population do not favor this plan and will work hard to defeat you in next year’s election. If you vote “yes”, you will have our full support. In the event you lose re-election you will be looked after. It is a tough economy out there, you’ll need friends. Your wife and family will need friends. We can see to it that doors are held open for you. We’ll help you find employment; in a federal agency, in a State House, a University, in banking, the auto industry, advertising, some tax-free foundation.

“If you cast any other than a “yes” vote, you will be finished. You will be cut from the herd and shunned.”

In short, the Blue Dogs are not facing a choice on how they wish to vote on health care. They are being offered a choice on what kind of personal future they wish to have.

“Your Independent voice in Washington” is up against it right now. The Blue Dogs didn’t bargain for any of this in the sunnier days of last year’s election or in the warm glow of victory, but that’s what they have got.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. For years books will be written about it.

HAIRCUT

2009-10-14T10:22:00.005-05:00

“Never trust a barber who says you need a haircut", Anonymous

The wisdom offered in that quote seems pretty obvious. The referenced barber isn’t thinking about what you need. He’s thinking about what he needs.

I recalled this recently while watching a couple government officials on television tell each other how much America needs that nebulously defined Health Care Reform bill or what-ever-it-is that’s in those 1,114 pages. Notice, by the way, they keep telling us how much we need it, but they don’t tell us what’s in it. We have to depend on other sources for that.

A little hint came just the other day. An insurance industry group hired one of the Big-Four accounting firms, Price Waterhouse - Coopers, to work up some numbers on how much the plan will potentially cost individuals in additional annual health care expense – that is, money on top of what people already pay. On Monday morning, October 12th, they released their report: $1,700 – $4,000 per year was the range of numbers I heard. By 10:00am, the White House was firing back. Without refuting the claim, spokesperson Linda Douglas called the report “self-serving”.

“It comes on the eve of a vote that will reduce the industry’s profits,” she said.

The Administration was eager to shoot the messenger, but it didn’t sound like anyone had read the report and double-checked the figures, just to be sure.

Consequently, while the insurance business got bashed around some more, their numbers, $1,700 - $4,000 remained standing. If the problem with health care is the expense, why is fixing the problem going to result in even more expense? Again, no answer.

In Washington, in the back rooms where the deals are made, the word “haircut” is a euphemism. A fly on the wall during recent Senate Finance Committee meetings might have heard the word used in a sentence like “In order to pay for all of this we’re going to have to give Joe Public a ‘haircut’” or, “We need to carve out a 'doughnut' for Nevada because the Senate Majority leader will not allow the people of his state to take a ‘haircut’”.

No, “haircut” is not a happy word. Nor does it imply that Joe Public will have any say in the matter. That’s the distressing part.

Examples of the “haircut” can take various forms and are found at all levels of government. Basically, it is the legal deal elected officials concoct that trims, even scalps, one individual or group in order to pay for some program or project that benefits some other. Invariably, that “other” is connected to the politicians doing the barbering.

While the scale of operation changes to suit the level of government involved, the step-by-step procedure involved is generally the same.

So, to illustrate in a way that puts the meaning of the word in our own backyards, let us suppose that within recent memory you’ve received a “haircut” from your local municipal government.

If you were paying close attention to the play-by-play, perhaps events transpired something like this: The majority on your Town Council got cozy with a developer. They let a choice piece of property slip away to become part of the developer’s proposed strip mall or apartment complex. People in your community got wind of what was in store and began attending Council meetings and asking questions, much like those who attended the “Town Hall” meetings and Tea Parties of recent months. You joined neighbors and wrote letters, signed petitions, and hosted meetings of your own, all to no avail. In effect, you spoke, but were not heard. You found yourselves on the receiving end of some bad publicly in your local Gazette. You were vilified as a mob of selfish, no-growth NIMBYs who want local schools to crumble. Council clearly had their minds made up from the start. It was a done- deal. When the official vote was taken you and your community were on the losing end.

“It was a tough vote,” you were all told in consolation. “But there were just too many benefits to turn down.”

Then, a year or so later, after things had progressed, you learned that it was worse than you imagined: Yes, trees were cut down, and there was increased noise and congestion, and the promised tax benefits never quite materialized – just as you and other residents had predicted. But you had no idea how much worse it was going to be. It turned out State Law mandates that you and other taxpayers are going to have to pony up for new fire engine in order to service that new development. Not only will traffic lights will have to be added to accommodate the increased traffic, but the main street through town will have to be widened. And, now, due to all the construction, every time it rains back yards flood.

Yes, this is a small-scale hypothetical case, but events exactly like this happen in communities every day. This is an illustration of the classic “haircut”. Somebody with connections gets the gold mine, and the general public gets the shaft.

But, when we talk about health care reform we are not talking about some ill-conceived comb-over that leads to traffic snarls and a bump in property taxes. We are talking about a big-government imposed “fix” that, once enacted, will pretty much be set in bureaucratic stone. The “haircut” we need to be concerned with is the Big Haircut that is barreling through both houses of Congress, headed for a rubber-stamp vote by Thanksgiving and a nice signing ceremony by Christmas.

It is impossible for anything as massive as comprehensive health care reform to be properly planned in this kind of hurry. If we’re going to fix America’s health care problems, we need to do it right. Congress needs to post all information and answer all the questions. This is one haircut where the old physician’s rule should apply: First, do no harm.

Congress Goes from 0-60 in One Day

2009-09-18T13:36:00.004-05:00

On Wednesday, September 16th, House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, D. San Francisco, claimed to know nothing of the ACORN/prostitution/housing scandal as well as efforts by opponents in the Senate to de-fund the organization. “I don’t even know what they passed. What did they do?” she said.

On Thursday, 24 hours later, her House of Representatives voted, 345-75 to totally de-fund ACORN. Granted, this was not a stand-alone bill, but an amendment to another bill.

Still, that’s quite a rate of acceleration. Considering the snail’s pace at which government usually works and the fact that they’ve given ACORN $7 Billion Dollars in public stimulus money this year alone it's enough to give them whiplash.

They cut them off like that -snap- with no public hearings, no special prosecutor, no witnesses, no sworn testimony, no windy speeches from the floor; what happened?

Simple. Congress, the Senate, and the White House – click HERE for an interesting tid-bit – have known about ACORN all along.

Leaders know full well the calibre of people they’ve been dealing with in ACORN. The media knows, too. They had a cozy relationship. One hand was washing the other. As long as Congress could suppress those pesky calls for an ACORN investigation everything was fine. But then the O’Keefe – Giles tapes were shown on Glen Beck’s middle-of-the-afternoon FOX News show and the lid blew off.

But, there is one fact that Congressional leaders truly don’t know: what else is out there on other tapes? Holding public hearings would be like shoveling manure into a fan. The smell of corruption in Washington is thick enough already.

The vote to de-fund ACORN is an attempt to make the issue go away, so that Congress can get back to passing government health care reform and calling Tea Partiers “Nazis”.

TV NEWS and the ACORN Scandal

2009-09-16T15:36:00.010-05:00

"What we have here...is a failure to communicate." actor Strother Martin in the movie Cool Hand Luke.

If events of the last couple weeks have shown anything, it is that the mainstream media is not up to the job of keeping the American public informed. Neither is it capable of digging into a story to get the facts. The traditional media leaves the profound impression that they will first seek permission or await instructions concerning which stories to cover and what to say about them.

In quick fashion we’ve seen the Van Jones story missed, the Tea Party march on Washington ignored, and now we’ve had a week of silence on the ACORN sex-sting tapes. What are we to make of this?

As someone who used to work in media I’ll give you my conclusion right up front:

TV news is to news, what a TV dinner is to dinner.

Both are conveniently packaged, pre-digested, bland, and shot-full of additives. They are an insult to both the stomach and the brain.

About a week ago Fox News covered a story, broken earlier in the morning by a web site, Big Government. I happened to catch 30 seconds of the initial Fox coverage on my way out the door to work.

A hidden camera-sting inside the Baltimore office of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) showed a young woman talking across a desk with a couple other women who were representatives of ACORN. The young woman was dressed like the hookers who used to work the streets near my old neighborhood in Venice, California.

Closed-captioning clarified what was being said on camera while the Fox newscasters commented on the footage. As I bagged up my lunch for work I formed the impression that the prostitute had been caught on hidden camera, along with her slime-ball pimp-lawyer-boyfriend, negotiating with ACORN representatives. The plan was to use tax money to buy a house to use as a brothel. The brothel would feature a dozen young girls, age 13-15, which the pimp had already arranged to be shipped in from El Salvador. Banks won’t lend money for this kind of enterprise. No problem with ACORN. They are open for business and they have lots of money.

That’s all I saw or heard of that first report. It was grim and it reminded me of the movie Taxi Driver, of the social rot that movie depicted, and the feeling that everything is for sale, and at not too high a price, either.

My immediate reaction was a wave of melancholy. I felt sorry for the girl and for any family members she might have who would surely see this footage, if not now, in all the re-runs. The ACORN people were seen on camera conferring with other staffers on how to fudge the nature of the business on the paperwork, how to hide the profits, even offering suggestions how to get a couple of those underage El Salvador working girls listed as “dependents” on the tax rolls. ACORN clearly offered One-Stop Shopping. I bought the ruse just like the ACORN people did.

When I got in my car I found that talk radio was blazing with the story. Details that I had misunderstood were clarified. The prostitute, it turned out, is really a college journalism student, Hannah Giles. The guy posing as the young pimp/lawyer is a 25 year-old filmmaker named James O’Keefe. The whole thing was a sting designed to document the rampant corruption within ACORN. It was a 100% gutsy move and it succeeded brilliantly.

The Wall Street Journal, the go-to paper I read, has been covering ACORN’s shady activities for years. In fact you can go to WSJ.com today and read John Fund’s article “Acorn Runs Off the Rails” if you want to get a brief overview of some of the group’s activities. For example, ACORN is currently under investigation for voter fraud California, Missouri, Nevada, Arizona and in a number of other states. It worked hard on behalf of Al Franken in his narrow, 200 hundred vote “win” in the Minnesota US Senate race last fall, registering non-existent voters by the thousands. And, the man who made “community organizer” a household word, President Obama himself, used to work for ACORN and has surrounded his administration with ACORN staffers and sympathizers. Up until a few days ago ACORN was going to be a key contractor in taking the 2010 US Census.

So there they are on camera, tax-funded ACORN employees, telling a hooker how to deal with the issue of the underage girls transported across the border to be sexually abused for money. They do not discuss how to educate the girls or give them a good home or get them started in happy productive lives, but, rather, how to exploit them and keep the profits away from the taxman.

Given the very recent news-context of the eleven year-old girl in California who was kidnapped and held as a sex slave for 15 years you’d think this story would be news --- Big News. You have sex, money, and corruption all under an oily cloud of sleazy politics. What’s there for any newsman not to like? You’d think reporters would be wrestling each other for dibs on being the first to ask the President what he thinks about all of this.

But, alas, nothing but silence. And such a silent silence it is. You can hear a pin drop.

After that first report, last week, other tapes were released every couple days. Now, along with the ACORN office in Baltimore there is footage from inside offices in New York, Washington, DC and Los Angeles. Are there more?

The tape from LA is a doozy. An ACORN worker literally brags on-camera how she killed a man and got away with it. Here. Like some low-life bottom feeder you'd see in Pulp Fiction, she casually discusses with the pimp how he can make a lot more money if he goes for the rough-trade. This ACORN representative then reveals that she “talks to Congressmen, Senators and Assembly people everyday”. She even names a few -- Oops -- in case investigators need a road map, or California voters want to know who not to vote for. This is bad stuff.

Still... not even a whisper in the establishment press.

This brings us up to September 15th, a week into the ACORN/prostitutes story, when ABC News anchor, Charlie Gibson opened his mouth in front of a microphone and out came an amazing statement.

Gibson is a weekly call-in guest on the “Mornings with Don Wade and Roma Show” on WLS-890 in Chicago. He engages in light weight chit-chat and plugs his quote-unquote evening “news” show. Only this time I’m sure he spilled his coffee when host, Don Wade, veered away from “happy talk” and asked Gibson this question:

Don: “We got the embarrassing video of ACORN staff giving tax advice on how to set up a brothel with 13 year old hookers. It has everything you could want; corruption and sleazy action at tax funded organizations that’s got government ties. But nobody’s covering that story. Why?

Charlie Gibson: (laugh) I don’t even know about it. Uh, so you got me at a loss, I don’t know.”

Think about that statement for just a moment…A story concerning underage hookers and political corruption is all over competing news media and the main anchor at ABC doesn’t “even know about it”?

That’s not just hard to believe, it's impossible to believe. It is Charlie Gibson’s job “to know”. He has staff who's job it is to know. I’ve worked in a few TV stations over the years and every one of them had banks of monitors tuned to the other channels in order to keep an eye on their competitors. How could he not know?

How could he not report a week’s worth of breaking-news regarding a
major cog in the Washington wheel? Unless he didn't want to know...Unless this is a rigged game staring back at us from our TV screens. (Refer to my PlumwoodRoad essay, The Confidence Men, from August 26th)

You can rest assured that not only does the establishment media know about this story, but it knows other things as well. It is all their jobs to know. They know who in Congress benefits from relations with ACORN. They know that just this past April Democrats in the US Senate over-powered opposition objections and inserted a $7 Billion Dollar "ear mark" for ACORN into that $847 Billion Dollar Stimulus Bill. And, they know that miles of video footage exists of the President speaking glowingly of ACORN and other marginally savory organizations.

The mainstream media also knows that in order to push through the President's bloated, intrusive Health Care plan, they have to tamp down public concerns about governmental competency, corruption, and fiscal irresponsibility. Then along came a couple of self-appointed journalists who kicked over a rotten log and then took pictures of all the taxpayer-supported cockroaches they found crawling around. It couldn't have happened at a worse time.

Here is the media's Plan-B:

Right now the networks are trying to remain silent. That's proving hard to do; Charlie Gibson's comment, for example, or Jimmy Carter's even worse comment last night. The longer this thing drags on, the more likely someone else will say something stupid. Networks are scrambling behind the scenes to write the “spin” they need to contain the damage. That’s a tall order. Aiding the sexual abuse of young girls is going to be hard to mitigate, even in today's anything-goes culture.

And though they may not know it yet, James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles are under a microscope. Right now State bureaucrats are fingering through their files and school records, somebody is busy hacking into their computers, investigators are tracking down every date they ever kissed, and their parents are being checked for embarrassing information, too. Remember "Joe the Plumber" last year?

By remaining silent the media hopes to get past the shock-value of the story and prevent it from resonating into the broader public consciousness. But, they must maintain the black out until all the the tapes are released and all the information is out. Like a slick legal defense attorney, once they have all the information they will know exactly how to tailor their message. The mainstream press can then step forward and take control of the story. They can then launch a cleaned up version with a plausible exculpatory angle. But they have to wait until they're certain the shoes have stopped dropping. No surprises.

This is what press agents and publicists do all the time. Books have been written on the subject. It's called "managing the news". But it is not what a healthy, free press does. It is what propagandists and apparatchiks in The Ministry of Information do. And, that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the most disturbing element of the ACORN story.

Report from the Washington, DC Patriot's Rally

2009-09-14T11:37:00.005-05:00

Hi Everyone:

If you don't have cable and get Fox News or if your AM radio is broken you may not know about the HUGE rally in Washington that took place on Saturday, Sept. 12th. The whole thing was a massive event that grew out of all the Tea Parties and town hall meetings that have been occurring this summer.

"Why bother protesting?" some wonder. "We're doomed," others say. Yes, things do look bleak: The "Cash for Clunkers" program cost taxpayers $3 Billion and the auto dealers were left waiting for their money. ACORN is doing business with pimps and prostitutes using our money. Zillions in TARP dollars have disappeared. "Cap and Trade" is a shellgame that is going to bleed more money out of the economy, And Obama is rallying the Democrat base to ram through a 1,000 page health care bill that few in Congress have bothered to read. Shouldn't we all just give up and shove the country down the driveway and leave it for curbside pickup?

I don't know about you, but I feel revved up.

And, here is an on-the-spot report from the Rally, by Plumwood Road reader and correspondent, Jane Sheridan.
http://plumwoodroad.blogspot.com/

Jane and her husband Flip, who live not far from the real Plumwood Road, have their kids married or in college. Ma and Pa Sheridan dusted off their protest marcher shoes and went to Washington for the Patriot's Rally on Saturday, September 12th. Here, Jane gives her perspective from inside the crowd, where all you can see is up. And that's not a bad perspective.

Jed

Here is Jane's report.

On Friday Flip and I flew to Washington to be part of the march on Saturday the 12th.

Washington is always a thrill and it was great to be back there no matter who is in the White House!

We checked into our hotel and then did some wandering. Had dinner and got up the next morning to overcast skies but no rain!

We took off in our sensible shoes,patriotic t shirts, while holding our handmade signs and schlepping our chairs and backpack... we were ready for anything! (Our children would NOT have been proud of the way we looked) We originally were going to meet at the Freedom Plaza at 11 but when we made it to Pennsylvania Ave. the march had already started and there were THRONGS of people parading down the street! They were cheering and chanting and carrying some great signs. We watched for a few minutes and then decided just to dive in and join the crowd!

WOW! what a rush to be in a throng of like minded, happy people ! Some had bull horns to start chants or encourage the crowd, others were in period costume or in some very creative outfits. There were babies and children marching with their parents, there were dogs and people on canes or in wheelchairs. Veterans proudly carried flags.... beside bikers who were said to have ridden from California to be part of this! One man walked along with a trash bag to pick up every little bit of paper so that we did not leave a trace.
The route was lined with others holding signs and calling out encouragement! We were contacted by cell phone by our friends who had taken the train in from Maryland... since they were just behind us in the parade we stood on the side awhile to wait for them to pass by and we were able to get lots of great photos and take our TURN cheering for the "Angry Mob" We were soon joined by our friends and we marched together to the Capitol.

On arrival at the Capitol we were then separated by yellow police line tape and sent in different directions. Many police officers were there and this "funneling' of the group into a small passage and then dividing up had a very negative feeling and immediately impacted the groups overall mood. Several of us wondered if we were going to be going through a metal detector, We were all then dispersed around the pond at the Capitol.... some grassy areas were actually roped off leaving not nearly enough room for people to stand or sit and hear.... the effect of putting the water between us and the steps and speakers was not a positive one.

I called our Son Jeff in Ohio and Daughter Stacy in GA. and asked them to e-mail Fox news to find out what was going on if possible. People continued to mill around trying to find a way to get closer . Later I walked back the way we had come and found that someone had pushed down a section of the cordoned off fencing and now the grassy areas were covered wall to wall with people while back as far as I could see marchers were still coming down Penn. Ave!

A person in a designated" Volunteer" shirt informed us that our group had applied for a permit to assemble on the mall but that it was denied. However a permit was granted to ACORN and at the far end of the mall by the Washington Monuement there were tents and loud music for a group with a sign that said "Black Family Reunion" This was understood to be the Collective Black Family not a family named Black.
We were also told that we were not welcomed on the mall because "THEY" (the administration) did not want anyone to be able to compare the crowd with the group size that assembled for Obamas inauguration ! And that if anyone went there we would not be allowed to have signs.

As you can imagine this did not go over very well with Flip and I ... so I immediately started telling the people who were just arriving and being herded into the crowded spaces that they should go to the MALL! Stacy reported by phone that there WERE protesters on the mall and they had signs! Flip and I then got our chairs and headed for the mall! We could actually hear better from this area.... and people continued to move around and parade along the walk that surrounded the grass in the center. Here we also found that many areas to the sides had been fenced off and again people had "adjusted" a section for access.
There was room for blankets and picnics, a juggler, some football, and a few people took naps. Most of us people watched!
We later broke camp again and moved up past the Conservatory until we wormed our way to the front just below the steps where the speakers were. We saw more costumes, a parade of workers in hard hats and many more creative signs.
There were numerous moments of loud cheering, some spontaneous "USA" chants , very little booing and we did not witness any negative confrontations. Actually only saw one group that opposed us and that was about 6 or 8 young adults in Formal attire....standing at the Navy Memorial. Very well mannered and respectful but stating their view through satire.

Litter was non existent. But trash cans were overflowing. When asked about this the security people explained that no trash cans were allowed within a certain distance of the Capital or other major building due to the possibility of bombs/explosives being concealed in them. Much later as the speeches were ending we made our way back to our hotel in a Sea of Patriots who all felt that the day had been worthwhile and vowed to each other to keep up the fight back home.

After a late night stroll around the historic monuments the Whitehouse we had to agree that there is much in Washington AND the United States that is worth fighting for. JS

The Confidence Men

2009-08-26T00:56:00.003-05:00

"A proposed victim is known as a "sucker," to the confidence men."
-- H. L. Mencken

I came across that quote a couple weeks ago and I think about it every time I watch the current Administration try to slick that Health Care plan of theirs past us; that grandiose, ill-defined, 1,000+ pages of wonderfulness that just cries out to be called “too good to be true”. Only I don’t hear any one calling it “too good to be true”. Do you?

Take just a moment to stand back and watch them; the President, Congressional leaders, the majority of our elected representatives, news commentators, whomever… Do you get the idea that any of them are on the level as they try to push this thing through? Not quite as on the level as one of those nimble carnival sharpsters moving a pea around under the shells. The hand is always quicker than the eye.

Both the carnival operator and the big time con-man are generally charming, jovial fast-talkers. The suckers can sense they are dealing with a rogue, but he seems so likeable. They know he’s playing fast and loose, too. But, whether he is enticing suckers to put up dollar bills in hopes of finding the pea, or invest millions in the hope of getting rich, he makes them all feel that he’s their pal; that he’s only stealing from the other guy.

The bunch in Washington hasn’t quite pulled that off. The President and his staff are on television all the time. We see them; we size them up. There is something about them. Their charm is a little too surface, a little too phony. With all those tax-cheats in the Administration we know one thing for certain; they’re not just stealing from the other guy. By definition they’re stealing from the rest of us. Why would we think otherwise?

In fact, the Administration is starting to look grim and just a little bit angry at us for not buying the line they are selling. We keep asking too many questions. Before long, they are going to resort to low-end used car salesman tricks.

It is not that their Plan, so-called, just needs a little work here and there, but rather there are so many holes in it that need to be filled, so many internal contradictions that can’t be explained in plain English that the whole thing looks like a disaster ready to happen. Even the pie-in-the-sky promise of “look at all the money you’ll save” was swept away when the Congressional Budget Office published a report showing that instead of savings, we’ll end up with another Trillion dollars tacked onto the deficit in the next few years, maybe more. What the Administration is trying to sell is the is the medical version of the “free lunch”.

Worse, the plan fails to address the real problems. There’s no simplification, no tax relief for the self-insured, no market-oriented thinking at all: just the promise of cost cutting and Government efficiency, which means – let’s face it – “rationing”. In these economic times, if you work for a company that scrimps on pencils and booklets of Post-It notes, that defers fixing a toilet or changing light bulbs, you know what I mean.

As politicians and media acolytes yammer on about the plan’s promised benefits, more people see a health care-future of long lines in government-green waiting rooms with Federal Employees offering a choice between “the red pill and the blue pill”.

Doctors are already trying to get ahead of this thing by advising patients not to get sick.

About the only thing in the plan carved in stone is Government control. That part is for sure. Whatever shape your health care takes in the future, whatever the wording of the final bill the President signs – Washington will control it. Every thing else is up for grabs.

Well, not quite everything. Meaningful medical malpractice lawsuit reform is not on the table. Lawyers have an important lobby. But, the Public option? One day it’s in, the next it’s out, and then it’s back in again. Euthanasia, the so-called “Death Panels”? Absolutely not, except in special cases. Funding for abortion? Abortion was guaranteed by our Founding Fathers, sort of, so Federal Courts will no doubt insist. The same reasoning will require paying for the insurance of the 12-20 million Illegals already in the country. Once this plan is law these details will be out of our hands.

To fix the problems with health care, Congress needs to approach the problem like a Doctor. Faced with a problem here’s what a real Doctor would do, before even getting out his stethoscope: First, listen to the patient, then, Second, project confidence. The Administration has done neither. They have handled the health care debate like a third-rate confidence man trying to sell mining stock to a widow.

How badly have they handled things? For about a month, now, You Tube has been filled with clips from Town Hall meetings showing politicians being questioned about the Health Care bill by voters. At first some pols openly stated they hadn’t read the bill, had no idea what was in it but were prepared to vote in favor of it. The fewer questions the politicians could answer the angrier the voters got. Before long, things understandably turned confrontational. The video clips, while fine as entertainment, are actually pretty redundant. How many clueless politicians do we have to see? The public has already got the picture: Our elected officials are a bunch of quacks. And what is a quack? He is a confidence man who practices medicine without a license.

The politicians eventually realized they were not coming off well, so what did they do? First, they engaged in name-calling. They called citizens – their own voters – obstructionists, un-American, Nazis, stooges of Big Pharma. Next they tried bullying. They brought in members of public employee unions to “counter” the citizens, to shove them around a little.

When that didn’t work politicians went into hiding. They moved meetings to secret locations, inviting only favored constituents by special invitation. They held “electronic Town Halls” via video or by conference call. Or, they cancelled them altogether; anything to avoid contact with voters.

Recently they’ve begun “astro turfing”, bussing in crowds of the party faithful in order to show support for the plan. Hey, we don't want Republicans or independents to "win" on this issue, do we?

So, now that public support has fallen below 50% should we chalk up the score as American Citizens – 1, Government Bureaucrats – 0? Not on your life. Don’t open any champagne.

Government controlled health care has been a goal of Big Government types since the 1920s. There is a lot of money and a lot of power at stake and right now they believe it is all in the wrong hands. They will not give up just because of a few rowdy protests or bad polling results. They started this fight and they can’t just walk away. So, what will they do next?

Well, there’s another quote that we might want to keep in mind.

“Never give a sucker an even chance.” -- W. C. Fields

If those words are any indication, we can expect them to sharpen their game and come at us again. To them, we’re still “suckers,” and we still have money in our pockets.

A Review of a Book I Haven't Read

2009-08-11T14:26:00.005-05:00

Did you happen to notice last year, while plane loads of reporters were roaming over the tundra in Alaska trying to dig up a scandal they could connect to Sarah Palin, there didn’t seem to be any interest in sniffing around Barack Obama’s home town? Unless you're interested in moose hunting, seems like Chicago is where the action is.

Well, it looks like somebody has finally done some sniffing.

Michelle Malkin’s book, Culture of Corruption maps the murky waters of Chicago politics in which President Barack Obama swam during his formative years as local organizer and politician. Evidently, there exists a lot of curiosity among many in the reading public, because within days of its release Culture of Corruption became #1 on the non-fiction best seller lists.

I’d like to read the book myself. I work in a book store but have been so busy lately that I haven’t even had time to pick the thing up and flip through it to see if my favorite Chicago Stories made it into print. My wife and I have lived in the area for 21 years and from the day of our arrival we have been amazed at the political messes that the natives step around – and pay for – without even seeming to noticing.

"An apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”. From that standpoint alone it is easy to understand the book’s appeal to those who live in other parts of the country. We have a new president and a lot of people are curious about his Political Family Tree. A lot of people are watching the new administration's conduct in the current Health Care debate. Without reading the book, I can divulge the secret: his method of operating is Pure Chicago: avoid substance, pit constituencies against each other and take names.

On a lighter level, Chicago politics has a novel cachet in the rest of the country. People out there in Kansas or Texas or Georgia or where-ever voters feel is a safe distance from which to watch, wonder: “How do those people in Illinois put up with all of that?” It's like watching a three-ring circus complete with freak show, only in this circus it’s the monkeys who are throwing the peanuts at the people, and the people don’t seem to mind all that much.

Like I said, we’ve lived here for over twenty years and we still can’t figure it out. Every few weeks another miscellaneous official, from building code Safety Inspector all the way up to Governor – you name it – gets caught in some low intrigue or other. Not long ago we heard on the radio that "Fast Eddie" admitted to taking over a Million Dollars of public money. Admitted. He got off with a wrist-slap. No mention of whether he had to return the money.

Some of these shenanigans are laughable in their audacity. I hope Michelle Malkin included a couple of the goofier scams, just for laughs. A few weeks ago Alderman Issac “Ike” Carothers got popped for accepting $40, 000 worth of home remodeling in exchange for greasing through a $3 Million Dollar land deal. I know. I wondered the same thing: the developer gets 3 Mil and Ike gets a measly 40K? Never the less, that’s the case.

Other goings-on are less funny: In ’03 there was an early morning panic stampede in an illegal after hours joint, the E2 Nightclub, in which 21 people were trampled to death and another 50 were injured. The fact that the story disappeared from the news so fast – you’d have thought it was a fender-bender involving a yellow cab and a garbage truck – lends credence to the rumor that a big political family had a financial interest in the club. Twenty people dead and the story just went away? What about lawsuits? Was everything really cleared up quietly out of court?

A couple months later there was another disaster in which six County employees were killed in an arson fire that started in the Cook County Office Building evidence room. Another Keystone Cops investigation went nowhere. In 2006, US Senator Barack Obama endorsed the man in charge of the investigation, John Stroger for re-election as County Board President.

So here is what I suspect the net effect of Culture of Corruption will be: people will read the book from cover to cover. They will put the book on the coffee table, or pass it along to a friend, and they will sit back and reflect on The Chicago Way of doing things.

As it sinks in, they’ll begin to reflect on what the country can expect now that this same bunch has “gone national”. People from this soup, trained in these ethics are now filling Federal posts, tweaking the budget, fiddling with healthcare, and otherwise not looking out for the common good – just like they were back home in Chicago.

And, I have a point here…

Take for instance this story from last Friday’s Chicago Tribune(8/7/09), headlined “Daley Insider Corners Olympic Spots”. This may be illustrative of where we are headed.

The Tribune report is markedly "passive" in it's tone. So, allow me to put it into a nutshell for you:

Michael Scott is a member of Mayor Daley’s Chicago Olympic Committee, and he's a real operator. At the same time he's been working to bring the Olympics here he has been busy buying up land where the Games would be held should Chicago be named Host City. If that happens, Scott will be in a position to resell the land to the IOC.

$$$$$$$$

Before you say “that’s just smart business”, consider that the City of Chicago controls many of the lots and is selling them at distressed prices of $1.00 apiece. I know, that doesn't sound right to me either. Chicago, like most other cities, is in sad financial condition. Why does not the City of Chicago sell the lots to the IOC themselves and let the profits give taxpayers a break? Why take what could be valuable land and treat it as the real estate equivalent of the Cash For Clunkers program, letting someone with political connections pocket the money?

And there’s more. Michael Scott is also President of the Chicago Public School Board. The previous CPS President is now Secretary of Education in the Obama Administration, in case you were wondering.

Pop Quiz -- What do you think of when you think of Chicago Public Schools? Yeah. You bet you do: Bullets, drugs, gangs, and chaos, along with low achievement and high drop-out rate.

But, in Chicago there are, effectively, two school systems; the so-called Magnet School Program for the City's best-and-brightest and the regular public system for everyone else.

If you are hip to the way government tends to operate, the minute you learn that there are two systems set up for anything you know that one system is for “us" and the other for “them”. "Them" being people with political clout, people who need to be attended to. Got it? Now hold that thought.

Students are required to test into the better schools. However, true to Chicago form, a phone call and a little curried favor will improve admission chances. There seems to be plenty of opportunity to sneak politically connected kids into elite public schools. Yet, for every under achieving student who gets in on Dad's clout, there is another, truly deserving student, who is denied.

This kind of thing goes on all the time. In fact, right now, there is a similar scandal going on at the Illinois State University level.

The easy question would be to ask, Is this fair? Of course it is not fair.

But there is a more important question we need to consider: What will happen when these people, these oily politicians and malleable bureaucrats, control our health care? I suspect, although I haven't read it, that that is the question left by Culture of Corruption.

What’s going to happen when you have to apply to a governmental body to get a knee replacement or a valve job or an MRI? While everyone knows there are problems with our current delivery system, I have never heard of anyone offering to “tip” the nurse in order to get the sheets changed, or donate to Congressman X’s campaign in order to get moved to the front of the line for a hernia repair. But that is how things are done in Chicago. And we should be considering the likelihood that this is how things will be done once the health care system is taken over by politicians and bureaucrats.

Budd Schulberg dies

2009-08-06T16:19:00.003-05:00

On my way home from work last night I heard on the news that writer Budd Schulberg had died at age 95.

Budd Schulberg was the son of silent movie-era chief of Paramount Pictures, B.P. Schulberg. He was raised on studio back lots around the rich and famous of the day. It is said that his Dad, in order to show him what life is really like, made him sell newspapers on a corner. On the other hand, young Schulberg received an Ivy League educated.

For a while he was a member of the Communist Party but became peeved when the Party tried to tell him how to write his book, What Makes Sammy Run? He left the movement and banged heads with party activists the rest of his life.

I read What Makes Sammy Run? a few years ago with that little tid-bit of information in mind. I enjoyed it. As a Hollywood expose it works similarly to Billy Wilder’s movie, Sunset Boulevard, only it’s not nearly as operatic; there’s no dead monkey, no writer floating face down in the swimming pool, but, yes, there is a girl who wants to be a writer. Schulberg’s book is a darkly humorous story of the rise of an ambitious no-talent, Sammy Glick, and the people he tramples over on his way to the top. It serves as a Heads-Up to the rest of us: no matter where we live there are Sammy Glicks out there, in Hollywood, in Washington, or where you work and they will run right over you if you happen to be standing between them and what they want. It’s worth a read.

Budd Schulberg is most famous, of course, for writing On the Waterfront, which won him the Oscar in 1954. TCM ran the movie a few weeks ago when Karl Malden died. I stood right there in the kitchen and watched most of it on our little 11”. It is a beautiful work. Most film fans view the picture as an explanation of Schulberg’s decision (and director Elia Kazan’s as well) to testify about Communist influence in the film industry. Okay. But, beyond that, Waterfront is the story one brother who sells out another to the mob; a depiction of the betrayal by someone in a position of trust. He talks him into taking the short-end money and throwing a prize fight.

That scene in the back of the taxi between Rod Steiger and Marlon Brando is one of the single greatest scenes in movies. You can watch it on You Tube. You don’t even have to see it in context with the rest of the film to get the punch: “You’re my brother, Charlie. You should have looked out for me a little bit.”

But we all know what to really expect when we make a bargain like that: “A one-way ticket to Palookaville".

Read the Bill

2009-07-29T11:23:00.003-05:00

Want a quick peek at how things are being run in Washington these days? Make sure you’re sitting down and in a calm, relaxed state. Ready?

Check this :30 second clip from the Drudge Report, here.

Amazing, isn't it? Did you have to watch it twice just to make sure you heard what you thought you heard?

US Representative John Conyers, D. Michigan, basically came out and said he hasn’t read the Health Care Bill. Further, he left the clear impression -- and he was a trifle prickly about it -- that he has no intention of ever reading the bill. This guy is a party leader and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, too.

Makes you wonder, doesn't it?

But, what’s even more interesting is the fact that Rep. Conyers was speaking to a roomful of reporters at a National Press Club luncheon when he made this comment and, outside of talk radio and Fox News, no one reported it. Seems like this would be be kind of a big deal. The headline would write itself.

A follow-up question is hanging out there, waiting to be asked: “If you don’t read the Bill, how do you know which way to vote?” I’d like hear his answer to that one.

Lost Horizon

2009-07-19T23:09:00.009-05:00

I had a customer at the bookstore where I work ask me, “Aren’t you the guy that told me to get the DVD of Lost Horizon?”

I remembered him. “How’d you like it?”

“It was awesome. I’ve watched it twice, the second time with my girlfriend and she liked it, too.” Ahh, another satisfied customer.

The word “awesome” is a strong recommendation but not particularly descriptive as a review, so let me start at the top and recommend for your next movie-night the 1937 production of Lost Horizon.

The picture was produced and directed by Frank Capra, who specialized in romantic comedies and contemporary Americana. For the record, he also directed Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, It Happened One Night, Arsenic and Old Lace, and Meet John Doe. He made a slew of others that are, if not “great”, certainly interesting.

I like Frank Capra’s work a lot. He’s one of the greats and for years movie fans have enjoyed watching some of his films over and over again. Although he won Best Director Oscars three times, today he is known chiefly for the Christmas classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, for which he did not win and, which in fact was not a box office success when originally released. But the way things have turned out over time it’s been a better-than-even trade off. When we consider the many Oscar winners of the past, many very well deserved, that are completely forgotten today it is reasonable to state that It’s a Wonderful Life, which is watched by millions every year, is monument enough for any filmmaker.

Capra’s best films hold up remarkably well today. Maybe this is due to the way that he reflected the Depression-era spirit. He was optimistic and positive and he loved America. Today we might even consider him an ambassador to us from that era. You can look at his movies and hear him telling us “This is how you do it: When you face tough times you need to work harder, stay true to your ideals, and stick together”.

Capra also loved innocent boy-meets-girl love stories. Part of Capra’s secret may be this: before he’d let his stories drift too far into sentimentality he’d knock the sweetness flat by throwing in a little raw brutality just to remind audiences that there was a real world outside the theater and they’d better stay awake for it. Think of young George Bailey getting slapped around in back of the drugstore. “You lazy loafer, you should have delivered those pills an hour ago.” Most people know there is a dark side lurking behind the warmth and love. Frank Capra could put it on the screen beautifully.

If you are an admirer of Its a Wonderful Life you will be especially intrigued by Lost Horizon. Though entirely different films, they share a similar theme: both are about a man who have something beautiful and yet decide to throw it away.

In Lost Horizon, we are given a hint of what is thrown away from the first frame of the movie. The moment the Columbia Pictures logo fades from the screen the credits begin to roll over a night aerial view flying up into icy moonlit mountains. As each successive peak is crossed, another higher, more distant peak is revealed in the altitude. With no limit we fly into a vast infinity.

Lost Horizon is based on James Hilton’s short novel of the same title. On the surface it is an imaginative adventure tale that concerns a small group of westerners thrown together escaping a bloody revolution in China. We meet a stuffy paleontologist; an ailing prostitute; a loud American businessman. All are flawed in some way. On the last plane out of Baskul they find that instead of traveling to safety in Shanghai, they have been hi-jacked and taken hostage and are being flown deeper into the interior of the country, then high into the Himalayan Mountains.

Principle among the group, and perhaps the real prize among the hostages, is a British diplomat, Robert Conway, portrayed by the great screen actor Ronald Colman. Conway is a disappointed idealist, a melancholy seeker who fears the world of the 1930s is sliding into another war.

An early bit of dialog as Conway despairs of the slaughter going on down below may have led to the film’s miss-interpretation as a pacifist message-picture. For a few moments he talks dreamily of dismantling the world’s armies and sinking the navies. It is a sophomore year speech, brought on by liquor and high altitude, after which Conway drifts into sleep. The real theme of the picture is left to be discovered somewhere high in the mountains.

Far into the journey the passengers are awakened by the sound of engine trouble just before the plane banks and crashes onto a snowy crag. The captives survive, but soon the severity of their situation sinks in. Hundreds of miles from any village, with inadequate clothing and no food they realize that they face death by exposure and starvation. They are discovered, however, by a group traveling from a remote lamasery. Instead of dying, the westerners are led on an arduous mountain journey that ends when they climb through a narrow pass and cross a gateway.

On the other side, separated from the cold and storms of the outside world, they find warm sunlight and lush greenery. They have arrived at the Valley of the Blue Moon and the welcoming monastery of Shangri-La. A paradise of peace, harmony and contentment stretches before them.

Out of curiosity, I recently read the book just to see how closely the movie follows it. It is a faithful adaptation. Capra and screen writer Robert Riskin tweaked the story here and there, supplying detail that the novel skimmed over, adding a character or two, but it is the same story improved for the screen.

The heart of Hilton's story is central in Capra's film; that of a man, Robert Conway, who finds his state of perfection and, yet, standing in it and experiencing it he cannot believe it is real. "Is it you fail to recognize one of your own dreams when you see it?" a monk asks Conway.

Among the others accompanying Conway is his brother, George, a shallow materialist. George is key to the impact of the story. Every bit of wonderment that Conway finds, his brother recasts as phony spiritual hokum. At every turn George sows dissension, or rails against the teachings of the monks or whispers in Conway’s ear. Even as the others in the group slowly adapt and then embrace Shangri-La, the brother plots a return to civilization.

There is a particularly striking piece of movie making near the end of the film, in the scene where the arguments of the brother finally break Conway down. “I wouldn’t believe this in an English monastery," the brother says. "Why should I believe it in Tibet?”

This scene is a minor masterpiece in itself. It builds to a lingering shot, nearly 45 seconds in length, of Conway as doubt creeps over him. The scene was made in one take with no dialogue. Ronald Colman plays it so clearly, in his eyes and through his body language, that you can read each of his thoughts as they drift across his face: What could I have been thinking? They seem so sincere. I could be content here forever. Those crazy stories of living for hundreds of years. They lied to me.
I was a complete fool to believe any of this….

Slowly, Conway ceases to accept what he has seen with his own eyes and agrees to accompany his brother out of Shangri-La. Consumed by doubt, Conway becomes George Bailey on the bridge.

And this is what makes Lost Horizon a great motion picture and one that is relevant to us today. If we were to step out onto the sidewalk in front of our homes and look up and down the street, or if we were to reflect on all that we possess and take for granted, all that we have experienced and regularly benefited from, how much of this could we be convinced was an illusion? A fraud? A lie? More importantly, how likely is it that we could be convinced that our existence is seriously flawed enough to warrant us throwing it away?

The magnificent Capra-ending I’ll not reveal but will leave to you and your DVD player.

The movie has a terrific cast. Opposite Ronald Colman, the quote-unquote love-interest in the story is played by Jane Wyatt. Never a major star in Hollywood, not glamorous in the usual sense, she is perfect in this part; intelligent, mature, appealing. Also included in the cast are the great Hollywood character actors Edward Everett Horton, Sam Jaffe, and Isabel Jewell, as well as Capra movie-regulars Thomas Mitchell and H.B. Warner who are seen in the featured rolls of Uncle Billy and Mr. Gower, respectively, in Its a Wonderful Life. And, it is important to note that John Howard, who played brother George, became a highly decorated soldier in WWII.

The knock-out photography is by Joseph Walker,ASC. There are lots of candlelight and torch-lit scenes and Walker made the most of them. The scenes surrounding the plane crash and the climb through the Himalayas seem bone-chilling cold. In addition the musical score, by Dimitri Tiomkin, is so good you’ll want to run the movie through your stereo sound system with the volume turned up loud.

Suffice it to say, Lost Horizon is a must-see for every movie fan.

A Little Perspective on Sarah Palin

2009-07-09T13:41:00.007-05:00

Depending on where you get your news you may not have heard this.

On Tuesday, July 7th, Barack Obama had to do some serious diplomatic patchwork as a result of statements made by his Vice President, Joe Biden, which set off alarm bells; statements which appeared to give the Administration’s go-ahead for an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuke facilities.

“Absolutely not,” Obama said.

Biden had been speaking on ABC-TV with George Stephanopoulos. Obama was speaking in Moscow with Vladimir Putin.

That Joe Biden could make such a misstatement at that level should come as no surprise. We’ve had plenty of warning. Biden had been in the US Senate since the early 1970s and he’s left a trail of BS going all the way back to his college days when he had to repeat a law class after he was caught cheating. Over the years the press has watched the man cheerfully brag, boast, bloviate, lecture, shoot off his mouth, and get busted for plagiarism without exerting much editorial pressure on him to clean up his act. To them, it’s just Joe. Guys like him come with the furniture in Washington. Everybody’s supposed to know that.

Remember during the election last fall, Joe Biden at that rally telling the wheelchair guy to stand up and take a bow? Remember his cure for the economy was “a three letter word: J-O-B-S, jobs.”? Remember him talking about his favorite eating spot back in Delaware, Katie’s Diner, which and when somebody tried to locate the place turned out to have gone out of business years ago? Biden himself recently referenced last fall’s campaign when he admitted that they had “guessed wrong” about the economy. Guessed? By now even the casually informed have gotten the picture: One heartbeat away from President Barack Obama, a smoker, sits Joe Biden, a nincompoop.

Since Biden’s elevation to the Vice Presidency he’s been painting his gaffes across a larger and more consequential canvas, making intemperate remarks about the economy, joshing in public about the President’s dependence on a Teleprompter, telling people to stay away from public transportation during the flu scare, giving away secure locations, approving the aforementioned Israeli attack….

I mention this as preface for a couple of remarks about Sarah Palin, who was painted as the dangerous dim-bulb during last year’s election.

A lot of editorialists and commentators are wondering what led her to resign the Alaskan Governorship. Sure, there could be some grand reason behind it; a run for the Presidency, or a scandal about to hatch. Maybe, but I doubt it. Rather, I think her reason at least in part could be small and personal. It could be something that might look insignificant to an outsider but to her family, up close, looms big.

Nobody in the press has yet made an attempt to get acquainted with Sarah Palin. Every major interview with her was conducted with an eye to banging her around. No… I take that back. Greta Van Susteren from Fox News covered her pretty closely during the election, spent time with her and her family, and presented a rounded picture, or at least as rounded as you can get on a Sunday night TV show. But nobody else has fairly examined her that I can recall.

From the moment Sarah Palin was introduced as John McCain’s running mate on a podium in Dayton, Ohio the mainstream press jumped on her with both feet. TV talking heads openly derided everything about her, from her Alaskan accent to her hair style. A whisper campaign was revved up on the internet spreading stories of sexual infidelity, abuse of power, book-banning, even witchcraft. Plane loads of reporters went to Alaska to dig up dirt. Her trash was sifted through, not with an idea of fairly evaluating Sarah Palin as a human being or discovering who she is, but in an effort to destroy her, obliterate her, to wipe her and her entire family off the planet. Nobody seemed the least bit curious about her. Outside the Red States and what remains of the Wild West she was openly reviled. It was a public stoning.

Strangely, even a lot of Republican insiders held her in low regard. Why? What did Palin ever do to the GOP besides kick a bunch of Republican grafters away from the public trough in Alaska?

The election is over and we’re well into the Obama Administration. From a perspective of mid-summer of ’09 we can now look around and get an idea of how all that “Hope and Change” is likely to work out. As for the Vice President, I don’t think Joe Biden would be an improvement over Clem Kadiddlehopper. Clem Kadiddlehopper would at least know when to keep his mouth shut.

So what was it about Sarah Palin that generated all that ire and raw hatred?

Some time ago I read an article in a business publication talking about the sorry state of so many advertising agencies. The key point that I recall lay in the fact that most agencies, flat out, don’t know what they are doing. Think about that. They don’t know what creative advertising is, but they have a pre-conceived notion of what creative advertising is supposed to look like, and they always go with the looks.

We’re kind of like that, “we” the voting public. We have preconceived notions of what a politician is supposed to look like. We know that many politicians are BS artists or worse, but we go along with them. We are accustomed to pretense. Image is everything: John Kerry in a duck blind with a 12 guage resting in the crook of his arm. Bill Clinton coming out of a church carrying a Bible, with his finger tucked between pages marking a favorite passage. George Ryan escorting a bus load of orphans around the Governor’s Mansion in Springfield. Come on. Who are they kidding? Well, they’re kidding us. And, for the most part, we know it.

And then, out of the blue, there’s a chance that the genuine article may have come along. Then what do we do?

I am not willing to do more than speculate that Sarah Palin is the “genuine article”, but I allow that she could be. None of us know. We didn’t take time to look.

Human beings like the familiar. We like traditional imagery. Most of us in post-agrarian America are unfamiliar with anyone like Sarah Palin. She is from another century, the kind of woman who helped win the West, hunting, fishing, cooking, raising kids and looking good doing it. She is a reflection of the old hymn “It’s a gift to be simple, It’s a gift to be free, It’s a gift to come down where you ought to be.”

Sarah Palin is so old she is completely new. And while she instantly connected on a basic level with a lot of voters, others were stopped dead in their tracks. To them, she was the “other”; an un-cool graduate of some third-tier, no-name university. While some looked at her as an American original, others saw her as a hayseed who killed and cooked innocent animals and couldn’t name a decent pinot noir if her life depended on it. And her pro-life beliefs are so déclassé.

But, I’m just going to go out on a limb and suppose that at least part of Sarah Palin’s reason for giving up the Governorship is her husband, Todd Palin.

Think about national politics from his point of view. Todd Palin is 45 years old and in perfect condition. He is a licensed pilot and runs his own commercial fishing business, which is dangerous, hard work. In the off-season he works in the oil fields, also not for the faint of heart. Along with this, his sport of choice is Iron Dog racing of which he is a recent champion. He spends much of his life in a wild, unforgiving environment where a simple mistake at the wrong time can finish you; drowned, frozen, augured. As importantly, he comes from a world where your word and your handshake mean something.

His wife, already Governor of the State, is put on the National Ticket. Todd is a supportive husband and a good Dad. The family that campaigns together stays together, so he and the kids got on the plane and whistle-stop their way across America. Before long he discovered that he was looking at The Dark Side of American politics; the handlers, the dealmakers, the press people. Lots of smiles, lots of back patting, lots of hurry up. John McCain may have been aces in his book, but few of the rest of them were Todd Palin’s kind of people. Then, it comes to his attention that stories are being floated that Trig, their youngest, the one with Down’s syndrome was the result of incest. He sees internet sites gain attention by speculating whether Sarah had ever had affairs with co-workers. There were stories of wild spending sprees, attacks on the family’s religion, even on the number of kids they had. Late night hosts told jokes about her. Tina Fey becomes a television star for portraying his wife as a ditz, week after week on Saturday Night Live. He notes there were no jokes about Joe Biden, though, much less about Barack Obama. Television commentators like Keith Olbermann and Jack Cafferty looked like they had to go wash their mouths out after even mentioning the Palin name. And then the press hits pay-dirt; one of their daughters is pregnant. And there it was, the family laundry all over the news.

And as for Feminists “women looking out for women”, and supporting the sisterhood, how about that bumper sticker: “She’s not a woman. She’s a Republican.”

Through all of this Todd Palin stayed with the program, a dutiful husband, on stage, in the motor home, in the background, watching. I thought about Todd Palin a few times last fall, wondering what he thought of the Eastern educated, soft-handed people holding microphones and writing copy. Did he respect them in even a grudging way? I thought about him again a few weeks ago when David Letterman yucked it up about one of the Palin daughters getting boffed by a baseball player during seventh inning stretch. It was probably a good thing David Letterman was in New York and Todd Palin was in Wasilla or David Letterman would be wearing his face backwards.

So, what do you suppose the likelihood is that at some point Todd Palin turned to his wife and said, “Honey, do we really need this?”

Most politicians I’m not saying are heartless bastards who care nothing for their families, but they have at their disposal a support system built to suit the peculiarities of their lives. They have nannies, and tutors, and private schools. They live in family “compounds”. And, after Teddy Kennedy drove Mary Jo off the bridge 40 years ago, they don’t drive their own cars. Right now, for example, here in the State of Illinois a mess is brewing over the ease at which children of the political class are admitted to universities, bumping the more deserving children of others. A phone call or a note is all it takes.

Most politicians live inside a protective “bubble”. What goes on inside the bubble is for the most part invisible to us on the outside. Once in a while there is a gap in the defensive layer and we get a glimpse of someone with their hand in the cookie jar, or going into rehab, or caught with their pants down having affairs with staffers or lobbyists, and once in a while, as in the cases of John Edwards or Elliot Spitzer they peg the Scandal-Meter right off the scale. But for the most part unpleasant occurrences are softened. The press may report, but in a sympathetic, passive-sort of way. Those inside the bubble live and move in a world apart from the rest of us.

Sarah and Todd Palin and their kids live outside the bubble, out here with the rest of us, which is part of her appeal. The bumps and bruises that come with life in the real world are not softened for them. No one is watching their backs, no one with any clout that is. To make things worse the attacks upon Palin were hatched by political and media people from inside the bubble’s protective barrier. It is difficult to shoot back.

Sarah and Todd Palin are family people and all of this must have taken a toll on all of them. So, on 4th of July weekend, 2009, Sarah Palin announced her resignation as Governor. It’s too bad. I’d hate to think that the hacks and the pundits and the late night comedians got to her, but I’d understand it if they did.

It is worth bearing in mind that just a month earlier the Governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford, disappeared for a week. It turned out he was not hiking along the Appalachian Trail, as he’d told his staff. He was in Argentina for the fifth or sixth time in a year visiting his girlfriend. Mark Sanford is still Governor. Sarah Palin is the one headed for the door.

Filtered By Time...a book worth reading

2009-06-24T21:03:00.022-05:00

My cousin, Robert Faulkender, served two tours in Vietnam.

One evening in the mid-1990s I was sitting in his living room, near Atlanta, and happened to mention a television project I had worked on that aired on the CBS network.

The letters “CBS” was the last thing Bob heard me say before his gaze drifted off into space and he disconnected from the conversation.

As I continued my comments to his wife, Luanne, Bob sat next to her on the sofa, distracted and glowering. A moment later he muttered something, “Those sons of bitches.”

Luanne nodded toward her husband and said, “Bob won’t watch CBS. Don’t even mention it or you’ll get him started.”

“You got that right,” he said. “Those little piss-ants came down to our district to do some filming. I led them around the Village and showed them what was going on. I answered their questions and filled them in on what we were trying to accomplish…And then they went back to New York and lied.”

Luanne put her hand on Bob’s knee. “Calm down. There’s no reason to let yourself get worked up about it now.”

“There were five of us assigned to that district. We had a bottle with a little brandy in it and a few cigars that we saved for occasions. They smoked our cigars and drank up our liquor and then lied about us.”

That was the evening that Bob Faulkender told me that “someday” he was going to write a book that told the real story of Vietnam.

Well, “someday” has arrived.

His book, Filtered By Time, just came out. And while Bob Faulkender is neither the first guy to be lied about in the news, nor the last, he is one of the few who have attempted to set the record straight. And, doggone, he did a fine job of it. I work in a bookstore. I read more than most people, and I got into this and couldn’t put it down.

Filtered By Time is the true account of Robert Faulkender’s first tour of duty in 1964, when he went over as part of the Kennedy “adviser” program. This was about a year before all hell broke loose. He doesn’t attempt to write the complete word on the Vietnam War. But, in terms of a focused, narrow look at a specific slice of that war, it succeeds fully. It is the record of five American soldiers sent to Vung Liem, Vietnam, to organize the locals and in the midst of a guerrilla war. I had a blast reading it only partly because I’m related to the guy who wrote it and there is some pride involved.

In real life Robert Faulkender, Lt. Colonel, retired, has done more things than ten other people put together; hitch hiking around the country in the early 1950s, The US Military Academy class of ‘57, hiking in the Rockies, Ranger School, Vietnam, assignments with foreign governments, tossed into an Afghan jail, world figures, beautiful women, exotic locales… You name it. Put your finger on any spot of the globe. If he hasn’t been there, he’s been close by. I remember my Mother trying to get me to study harder in Spanish class by telling me, “Bobby Faulkender can speak six other languages. You ought to be able to handle just one.”

On top of everything else, Bob is a terrific story teller. Raconteur, I believe, is the 50 cent word. Reading Filtered By Time is like sitting across a table listening to him spin yarns over after dinner drinks. The book is by turns, exciting, funny, informative, and personally revealing.

In writing the book, Bob was advised not to use real names. Thus, Bob renamed himself in the book “Ed Skillman” in honor of our grandfather, Spanish-American War vet and real-life Texas cowboy. Other than that the author’s notes clearly state “The Vietnam events in this book actually occurred.”

While some sequences have the feel of a detached reporting of events, others are very suspenseful or wryly humorous, told with a practiced story-teller's charm. The sketches of people were truly impressive, by far my favorite aspect of the book. They form a warmly human parade of beautifully drawn faces. We meet the province “chief”, an old man who at first seems no match for the Viet Cong, but as the story continues we begin to see from his perspective and he emerges as a crafty old fox. We meet an Indiana farm girl, working for the Department of Agriculture. She’s a handsome, confident young woman who has learned, maybe the hard way, to guard her heart. We meet a trained VC assassin, cut down to size, captured by the local militia and now scared to death. We meet a middle aged German-born US soldier who is using his leave to journey to a small village to look for the young Vietnamese girl he has fallen in love with. We meet American diplomats and bureaucrats, some serious and dedicated, some just putting in their time. And everywhere there are flocks of children. All are memorable people well portrayed.

Strangely, the descriptions of most of the other guys in the unit seem a little too surface by comparison. We get to know them, "K.C." in particular, but not too closely. I got the feeling that Captain Skillman was operating on a different awareness level than the others. I don’t know whether this was intentional or not.

The picture of how the War was being fought at that period of time is interesting. For instance, following a shoot out, we learn that a near-by three-man South Vietnamese guard tower is equipped with only one rifle. One of the other guards carried a sword in case he needed it, but that’s it. I will not spoil Bob’s story by telling you the job of the third guard. He definitely had a job, but you’ll have to read the book to find out what it was, and it was a doozy.

Then there is the dark side, the Big Questions that after a while begins to nag in the back of his mind: Is the US government truly committed to winning? Are the American citizens supportive? What he sees and what he hears from official channels does not make him comfortable.

Filtered By Time is not an action-hero book. There are fire fights and tense scenes regarding an assassin or guerilla attacks, but there are no Hollywood action scenes. At one point Captain Skillman hits a landmine that puts him in a military hospital in the Philippines for a month. I remember when that incident happened and the concerns of my parents for Bob. This book is about real men in a real place getting shot at with real bullets. They are doing a job that ultimately turns out to be thankless. This is not “Rambo”. To the contrary, there is a surprising amount of “nation building” involved; new schools, new market place, improved roads, functioning medical facility, and the like. Bob displays a surprising amount of zeal in guiding this. And, he offers an interesting commentary on that, too, later in the book. Along the way he ponders “productivity”, “capitalism” and “self-help”, and “street-gang politics”.

Something else, too: the book has a strong sub-text. In its pages we see notes from a lab-test on social structure and human nature in the raw. What happens in a community when people no longer can count on their own government to protect them from violence? In what ways do bribery and corruption at the national level affect things locally? How can young men be induced to join a force that is fighting against their own families and their own people? Is individual freedom necessary in order for the common people to achieve prosperity?

Filtered By Time is a good read and offers a lot to ponder.

One more thing: the CBS News team that started this whole project? That incident is given throw-away treatment, less than a page. After the build-up I was sure Bob would bang on those guys with a vengeance, but he didn’t. He didn't even mention the brandy.

To order a copy of Filtered By Time, you'll find it available directly from iUniverse at 1-800-Authors. Use ISBN #978-0-595-52888-2 or at Amazon.com by clicking here: http://www.amazon.com/Filtered-Time-Story-Success-Vietnam/dp/0595528880/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245956726&sr=1-1

Goodbye, Kodachrome

2009-06-23T15:13:00.005-05:00

It has happened more times than any of us can count: An artist, a writer, an inventor or some individual who has made significant contributions to a particular field lives beyond his creative prime and dies in obscurity.

It’s a familiar story: After a particular Creative Genius has given what he had to give, the world moves on without him. After a while his original achievements are taken for granted, maybe even denigrated as “passé”. Forgotten, his passing is little noticed and less mourned.

But then…with enough time and under the right conditions the true worth of the former Creative Genius is rediscovered. There is collective delight among the public. Wonderment is followed by curiosity: “Look at what fresh, enduring work that was, and so long ago.” “Why was this Creative Genius ignored and forgotten when his work displays such obvious merit?”

This phenomenon is happening again, only this time not in regard to a particular artist, but a specific technical medium.

On June 22nd, 2009 Eastman Kodak Co. announced it was ending production of its Kodachrome film.

Casual photographers and even most professionals will take little notice. According to The Wall Street Journal, for the last few years Kodachrome has accounted for less than 1% of Kodak's diminishing film sales. Photography has gone digital to a greater degree and faster than many thought likely. Eastman Kodak executives themselves believed digital photography was a toy and failed to get involved with it until it was almost too late.

Most people are delighted with digital pictures. Recent developments in the medium have been truly impressive. But before we wave goodbye to Kodachrome we need to consider not what made it a great film in the past, but rather why it will be relevant in the future.

Kodachrome was introduced in 1935 as the first practical color film. Before that, all was black & white – or costly and complicated color that required a special camera.

Kodachrome not only solved the color problem, it did so spectacularly. Even the earliest versions of the film are renowned for vibrant color and image sharpness. It was incredibly precise and accurate. In fact, the film was limited only by the shooting equipment and the talents of the photographer. Improve your skills and use better lenses, was the only way to improve results. In terms of what you put in your camera, Kodachrome delivered the goods.

Through most of the 20th century Kodachrome was the color film of choice partly because there wasn’t much choice. There were early versions of Ektachrome. Agfa, Fuji, Dufay and some others came out with different color films. But the results, though less expensive, were clearly inferior.

No matter what kind of color film is used, Kodachrome offers a single unique characteristic that is only now being appreciated, and will be valued even more with the passing of time: It produces images that are nearly permanent. As long as the film itself is not destroyed the picture will remain.

A box of Kodachrome slides kept in the bottom of a drawer or the back of a closet will be as crisp and vibrant one hundred years from now as the day it was shot. Kept under archival conditions of controlled temperature and humidity it is said to be stable for 500 years. Maybe more.

Our visual impression of the world before the invention of photography is based solely on paintings, drawings, stone carvings and written descriptions. But with Kodachrome, there it is; the world in full color, going back to 1935.

Think of it. One hundred, two hundred, or five hundred years from now someone can open a box of Kodachrome slides and hold them up to a light and see a perfect image of Pop and Uncle Harold standing around the backyard grill; a ‘53 Pontiac is parked in the driveway. They can see Winston Churchill and General Eisenhower, rumpled, meeting after D-Day. Or they can look down a neighborhood street in St. Paul, Minnesota and see exactly what it looked like in the mid-20th century. These pictures are largely snapshots of people, places and things, not spiffed up for a photograph, but presented informally as they truly were. They are detailed documentary proof of a civilization as it once existed.

My point here is to suggest that this is an occasion of reflection. If you have a few Kodachrome slides somewhere, they’re likely in fine shape. Go ahead and take a peek just to refresh your memory.

For the next five centuries the world will retain this bright 75 year-wide window into the 20th and very early 21st century. People centuries from now will be able to look back through it and see us as we really were.

We are now in an era when the record of what goes on around us is entirely electronic. This is good in terms of instant communications, as the pictures coming out of Iran attest. But what the digital age offers in terms of speed and convenience, it takes away in the form of permanence and durability. Within a generation most of what is digitally shot today will be gone, either erased or irretrievable. This is a tragic bargain.

Sure, photographic records will exist in the Ivory Tower, at some level of officialdom. But “We the people” will have lost the means of preserving the image of who we really are. No more views will be preserved of every day lives, of the changing backyards, of families, living rooms or streetscapes of America. They may be here today, but they’ll be gone soon enough.

Happily, Kodak has made major improvements in their newer Ektachrome films. In terms of visual quality they rival, and in some ways surpass Kodachrome, but in terms of permanence there is still work to be done. I have heard that new Ektachrome stocks are now much less prone to fading as they once were. Supposedly they can last for nearly a century. That’s better than nothing. But, I believe that somewhere down the road, well before the year 2500, we will miss the long timeline of Kodachrome.

Some day in a future archive someone will look up from a light table full of slides and marvel, “Wasn’t that a terrific medium of record they had back then? I wonder why they threw it away.”

Questions in Silicon Valley?

2009-06-12T10:30:00.006-05:00

Following links through Instapundit this morning I found an essay by
Michael S. Malone. It describes how Silicon Valley was an early, effective and cash-rich supporter of Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

Malone's essay shows what can happen when the relationship between business and government gets too cozy. Around Chicago and in the State of Illinois it's called "friends helping friends".

It's also called "paying for protection".

Go ahead and take a few minutes to read the article.

It isn't until about halfway down into the article that we learn what Silicon Valley Execs wanted in return for all this cash and support: Help from Washington in keeping a thumb on pesky competitors and start ups. They want some hassle for those young guys working out of their garages. Concerned, as I am, about the Chicagoification of national politics, that's the part that caught my attention.

Amazing things have come out of garages or basements -- the backrooms of bicycle shops, too. As it happens, just last week I made reference to the Wright Brothers.

Legislating In a Hurry

2009-06-09T15:12:00.002-05:00

Remember those mechanical sandbox toys kids used to play with? Fill the container with sand and turn the crank. The sand is fed into little buckets on a conveyor belt which carries it up a track and dumps it into hopper, which in turn fills up and tips over to refill the container at the bottom where it is scooped again into the little buckets and the process begins again. This can go on and on and on until nap time. Nothing gets accomplished but there is kind of a perpetual motion feel to it, and probably a subtle life-lesson, too. ‘Round and around and around.

I get a similar feeling when I watch the political circus in the Chicago area. In our twenty-one years of living here I don’t think there was ever a time when there was not a major investigation going on, a trial under way, and some grafter awaiting sentencing. It just goes on and on and on like that sandbox toy. Get rid of one, here comes another.

Well, we have a new scandal in Chicago. It's not big as these things go, but it will serve to illustrate issues on a larger scale.

Here’s the deal: On December 2, 2008 Mayor Daley proposed granting a 75 year lease on all 36,000 Chicago City parking meters to a private firm, Chicago Parking Meters LLC, for $1.2 billion dollars. Chicago, like cities everywhere, is broke and this deal seemed like a quick fix. The parking meter company would pay the City in one lump sum, essentially cash, $1.2 billion smackeroos right there on the Treasurer’s desk. The Mayor was anxious to conclude the deal quickly.

City Council studied the matter for a whole two days, skipping over most of the confusing fine print, and on December 4th, by a vote of 40-5 approved the sale. The money showed up like a nice Christmas present. This year’s budget hole was covered and there was plenty left over for other pet-projects. Everybody was happy.

A late US Senator from Illinois, the economically conservative Everett Dirksen, once took a poke at government spending by famously saying “A billion here, and a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”

Senator Dirksen, how right you were.

Within weeks the new owners raised rates on their parking meters; $5-6 an hour in some locations. Complaints started pouring into City Hall. Before long bureaucrats and Aldermen started counting on their fingers and making pencil calculations on the back of envelopes. How much money could 36,000 parking meters generate, anyway? You can picture the beads of sweat on their foreheads when they started coming up with the answer: Lots.

Think of those parking meters as 36,000 sand-box toys that crank out cash, day after day. It turns out the $1.2 billion the City received was the short end of the deal. The “real money” is going elsewhere. Over the life of the lease those meters are worth an estimated 4-5 billion dollars. Likely more. And, it's easy money.

Chicago Parking Meters LLC is owned by Morgan Stanley in New York. Recently it was learned one of Mayor Daley’s nephews works there.

There have been calls to cancel the deal. Problem is the City of Chicago has already spent a lot of the money and can’t pay it back.

The Moral of the Story: This is what happens when legislators get in a hurry.

John H. Patterson, Industrial Genius - with a Flaw

2009-06-05T07:35:00.006-05:00

Several responses to my first post on PlumwoodRoad came to my personal email. To those who sent them, Thank you. It was great to get the positive feedback.

Among the responses was one from Jack B. I copied and pasted it into the response box below.

Jack's note provoked a further thought on the subject of NCR and John H. Patterson. If someone could write a book about Patterson it seems like I ought to be able to write a couple posts about him.

Jack B. theorized that NCR did not adapt to the touch screen. He was amazingly close to the mark.

John H. Patterson was a great man and was so spot-on in much of his thinking. We all, living in Dayton, Ohio at that time, lived with the benefits of his vision. I believe I accurately portrayed that city as a little jewel of a place to live; prosperous, tidy, and populated with intelligent citizens who made new things happening all the time.

However, being human,John H. Patterson had personal foibles. Mostly this expressed itself in beneficial and interesting ways.

For example, Patterson believed in personal cleanliness and had showers with state-of-the-art plumbing installed in the factory. Every employee was required to shower weekly on company time. This was the late 19th / early 20th century, remember, so the old punch-line "whether he needed it or not" might really fit the situation. Patterson also was an early health-food advocate; is said that no bread and butter was served in the executive dining room. He was also an early advocate of exercise, and built the giant employees-only Old River Park.

He viewed management and labor as a team and he was the captain. He openly solicited opinions on how to improve product or operations from every employee via the innovation of the Suggestion Box.

However, Patterson had an ego that could get out of controll. It was a single outburst of this ego that hurt the team, many years later.

For a period of time his vice-president was a man named Thomas Watson. Watson was fascinated by the possibilities presented by electrifying the cash register. The old machines had a hand crank on the side to advance the register tape. Watson pushed the company to build a model that had an electric motor.

I got this story from my Father, who at one time sold for NCR and was fascinated by the lore of the company. Patterson and Watson clashed over the direction to take the company and at some point this turned into personal animosity and Patterson fired him, and the way he fired him made news. Watson showed up for work one day and found his desk and belongings on the sidewalk in front executive building.

As a kid living in the neighborhood we walked by the building many times and Pop would tell the story and point to a spot in front of the main entrance and say "Right there". It made an impression on this little kid's mind. I could see a wooden desk, a chair and a waste basket sitting there on the broad sidewalk next to the curb.

John H. Patterson may have thought he settled the matter but he didn't. For quite a while, his vision of the company prevailed. Long term he made a mistake. It didn't hurt him, or his company right away. But the mistake eventually returned to bite NCR.

A good man will eventually find work somewhere, and Thomas Watson found work with a small time competitor of NCR, International Business Machine, IBM. Watson led his new company full-tilt into research into electrical machines. In the old Machine-Age, IBM was a minor player, but eventually IBM developed the punch card system. Then, during World War II they built the first working computer for the Navy. This computer was so massive it filled an entire room. Everybody knows how things turned out after that.

Long after Patterson and Watson were both gone, it was the direction that Watson led IBM that prevailed and knocked NCR off its perch.

NCR to Leave Dayton, Ohio

2009-06-02T20:43:00.002-05:00

I was raised in Dayton, Ohio. I left when I went to college years ago and haven't lived there since. But, everybody’s got a home and Dayton is mine.

Factory closings are in the news again, with another wave of suspended operations washing over the country. But, that's not news in Dayton. The lights have been going out there, one by one, for years. But today is special. It is one for the history books.

Several emails came in this morning from fellow former Daytonians giving me the news that The National Cash Register Co., NCR, long the jewel in Dayton's industrial crown, will be moving what's left of it's operation to a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. At least they're staying in the United States.

When I say the words "Dayton, Ohio", even now, I see leaf-shaded streets with brick or frame homes, parks with kids running in them, churches with the sound of the pipe organ and singing drifting out the open windows. I see a clean, prosperous small industrial city filled with humming factories and busy enterprises. It is a pleasant summer day with the cicadas singing away in the treetops and there's nothing but blue skies clear out to the horizon.

For four years, in the early 1950s, our family lived on Plumwood Road, the first residential street south of the NCR main factory. Common opinion would tell you that having a large factory a only block away would be unpleasant. Not in the least. It was a wonderful neighborhood and NCR was a great neighbor.

The man responsible for building The National Cash Register Co. was John H. Patterson. He built it and shaped it according to his vision until his death in 1922.

No, he didn't invent the cash register. The inventor was a Dayton saloon keeper named James Ritty. Ritty's device was little more than an accounting device. It didn't even have a cash drawer in it. But Patterson recognized that the machine had applications far beyond keeping tally of the number of beers sold. He saw a potential to expand the way Americans do business. And he was right. Patterson took over the company in the mid 1880s and began improving the machines. He built NCR into a massive enterprise. Through most of the last century, even when paying for a pack of gum or cup of coffee, the customer heard a cash register bell at the end of every purchase. The cash register and the simplifications in accounting and book keeping it introduced, allowed for the development of the entire retail business system. It was the hammer and saw of the trade.

John H. Patterson was both a tough-as-nails businessman and something of an capitalist visionary. His concept of Utopia was the polar opposite of that of Karl Marx. Instead of all good coming from The State, in Patterson's view all earthly good comes from commerce and industry.

"A man ought not be employed at a task that a machine can perform," he said. Industrial Capitalism was the way out of the mud. Living in Dayton, even long after his death, we still heard Patterson quoted frequently.

Patterson spoke on behalf of and worked hard to make Dayton a "model city", a city of the future. At least for a few decades he succeeded. I don't think I'm putting too much of a rosy-glow on my memory to say that when I was a kid it was a pretty swell place to be.

The NCR factory was a direct expression of Patterson's thinking.

The buildings, and there are still a couple standing if you happen to be passing through and want to take a look, were architecturally striking in appearance. Until the late 1970s there were acres of them. They were of yellow brick and had giant pained windows that let in lots of natural light and in hot weather they could be opened to let the breezes in. The place had the feel of a college campus; planted with neat lawns, and mature ginkgo trees. Ivy grew on some of the walls. Everything was spotless.

And, if you happen to stop by, take a look at the neigborhood, too. Imagine Plumwood Road filled with kids, the post-War baby boom going full blast. It looks like a nice place to live, doesn't it.

In those years NCR employed over 20,000 people working three shifts. That is a lot of business. Multiply that by the half-dozen other major factories around the city, as well as many mid-size or smaller industrial shops, and you get a measure of Dayton's prosperity at that time.

A book could be written about the Dayton, Ohio of my boyhood and of the years prior, and a serious case could be made that despite it's relative small size Dayton represented a pinnacle of American industry and innovation.

The cash register was not the only thing designed and built in Dayton. Literally hundreds of other creative works came out of that city, things that shaped the world and gave form to the 20th century: the refrigerator and early air-conditioning, the automotive ignition system, the LCD, the pull top can -- and the single greatest invention of the 20th century, the airplane. It took the Wright Brothers five years from scratch, working evenings and weekends in the back of their bicycle shop, to solve the problem of flight. Now, answer this: How does a city, or a nation, grow people who do things like this?

From the mid 19th century and through most of the 20th the business and creative climate in Dayton must have been ideal, so much of what we Americans took for granted was produced there. The place was full of educated, clever, hard-working people. If they weren't born there they moved there. It drew them like a magnet. These were people who could dream up new things to build and then staff the factories and make sure the job got done right.

But times have changed. The business climate in Dayton has packed up and gone elsewhere, likely driven out of town by a combination of forces. And along with it went a lot of those clever, hard-working people.

And now one of Dayton's premier businesses, a shell of it's former self, is leaving town, too.

A corporation is a legally created "body"; a work drawn up by lawyers and given life on paper. A corporation can earn a profit, pay taxes, grow fat in good times, suffer in lean times, and like a human employee, it can pack up it's bags and move to greener pastures.

A couple months ago, while visiting in Dayton, I ran across a quote of Patterson's that I thought applicable to our national situation and I wrote it down. It works in this situation, too, in a way:

"An executive is a person who decides. Sometimes he decides correctly, but he always decides."

Somehow, I don't think the old fellow would be rolling over in his grave if he knew the corporation he built had decided to move. He'd probably be wondering what took so long.

Jed