The iHandbill

Mississippi: Civil rights for cells?

2011-10-30T19:55:00.010-05:00

November 8th, Mississippi voters will will either support or defeat a proposition that would give a fertilized human egg the same legal rights and protections under the State’s Constitution that apply to living breathing people.

Few voters in Mississippi would bother to turn out to support particulars of defining the legal status of the fusion of two haploid gametes. Most folks might think that was a pair of some new deer species and the vote would regulate its hunting season.

But clarification of those biological terms quickly spread in evangelical conservative code for anti-abortion, suddenly making zygotes, diploid cells and gametes candidates for legal ‘personhood’ among the fervent and zealous.

The Mississippi proposition’s draconian redefinition of abortion and commonly used methods of contraception as murder would do away with a woman’s rights to make her own decisions about childbearing. The so-called ‘personhood’ measure seeks to do away with those rights guaranteed under the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

Such a state constitutional change would not only ban all abortion care but could also outlaw many common forms of birth control, limit medical treatment options for pregnant women and ban reproductive technologies such as in-vitro fertilization.

This was tried in Colorado twice, in 2008 and 2010 and voters overwhelmingly defeated the ballot measures each time.

But that that was Colorado and this is Mississippi, the state that tops the Gallup poll list of America's most frequent churchgoers with 63% of the population attending church weekly or almost every week. Vermont, incidentally, has the least churchgoers with only 23% attending regularly, but then they are a bunch of Yankees.

Mississippi's strong religious voice has long determined what folks can and can't do in the state. Alcohol was made illegal in 1907, and Mississippi was the last state to repeal Prohibition in 1966. When I moved here to the gulf coast in 1980, sale of alcohol was from state controlled “package stores,” whose signs had to be flat against the building and in letters of a specified size. No neon and no hanging signs like other stores.

I stopped in one my first week here for a bottle of sour mash bourbon and after ringing up the purchase, the nice lady leaned over the counter and asked, sweetly and helpfully, if I “wanted a Baptist Bag.” I must have had a totally puzzled look so she pulled a regular large brown grocery bag from under the counter and mentioned that “lots of customers prefer to carry out their bottles in this kind of bag.” At the time, I found this all rather provincially colorful.

Thirty one years later you still cannot buy hard liquor on a Sunday even in the "wet" counties, and Mississippi’s provincialism has a much darker hue today that is potentially much more dangerous. Many evangelical and fundamentalist believers now want to impose their narrow, extreme beliefs down to the human cellular level upon all who live in the State of Mississippi.

And with 63% of the population being steady church goers ... and voters, both the Republican and Democratic candidates for governor are making it clear that legal human rights for a single fertilized human egg is just peachy with them.

Abortion foes piously proclaiming their belief in the sanctity of life seem to look at that sanctity differently regarding Mississippi’s death penalty. Their opposition to family planning, birth control and contraception is loud and clear, but there seem to be no voices raised against the biblical evils of fornication. The libidinous Viagra and Cialis commercials still dominate the nightly news.

November the 8th will show if Mississippi’s reckless religious fundamentalists would, as The New York Times noted, “ … protect zygotes at the expense of all women while creating a legal quagmire - at least until the courts rule it unconstitutional, as they should.”

I have to hope that Mississippi will ultimately not vote to support this attempt by a vocal segment of organized religion to limit the personal and civil rights of the women who live here.

But then again, as far as civil rights are concerned, from the cellular level on up, we have to realize that it was just one year ago that a federal judge ordered the Walthall County School District in Mississippi to halt policies that had allowed some of its district’s schools and classes to become segregated ... again. Segregation was outlawed in 1970.

Graphic by Larry Ray

Tattered Leadership and Toxic Tea

2011-08-01T22:18:00.009-05:00

A fetid brew of public ignorance and indifference flavored with abject partisan stubbornness forms the growth medium in America's political petri dish. A virulent voter virus feeds upon it, spreading a plague of indecision, impotence, Presidential pusillanimity, and contemptible congressional charade.

The voter virus was created by pseudo patriotism and the excesses of a previous decade of lax government whose singular priority was to reward the already wealthy.

Sober regulation of our banking and real estate industries was blithely and irresponsibly sidestepped for more than a decade. Then in late 2008 Wall Street's wild, reckless ride came to a crashing halt. Finally the virus was loosed, infecting the American economy and reducing it to a rattling house of tumbling cards, all jokers.

Since 2009, more time has been spent in assigning political blame by our elected leaders than in launching a vigorous joint effort to cure and strengthen our economically bedridden nation. Confused Americans have not questioned flawed and false narratives from a brash, opportunistic and well funded conservative chorus.

Repeated GOP mantras shamelessly blame the new black

democratic president for the entire mess, for all the nation's out of control spending. But these duplicitous accusers never acknowledge the inherited debt racked up and left by their party.

This absurdity was parlayed into political propaganda gold by tax free groups, notably the "American Legislative Exchange Council" formed in 1973 by conservative activists. Finally, their time had come after the bruising they took in the 2008 Democratic election sweep. Millions of dollars from the ultra conservative billionaire Koch brothers slid into these "Councils" as fast as they could qualify for non-profit status.

The word "debt" is understood by everyone, and when the GOP heralded "an out of control national debt that must be stopped at all costs," the warning was accepted as readily as an FDA ordered ground turkey alert after a multi-state Salmonella outbreak.

Raising the U.S. debt ceiling, was routinely done eight times under the Bush administration and countless other times all the way back to 1917 with no serious opposition whatsoever. But now "Debt Ceiling" was suddenly spotlighted and used as the hostage in a mad extortion plot.

Freshmen congressmen wearing tea bags as blinders had signed pledges to "change government in Washington" and their zealous naivete and self righteousness quickly clogged the old boy congressional sewer pipe leaving rookie Speaker of the House, John Boehner unable to control his GOP vote.

The new conservative clog, after first finding their offices, quickly found the C-Span TV cameras and began to immediately promise their admiring ideologues back home that they would let America go into default unless a sweeping but ill defined debt reduction bill was passed and signed by the president.

Most of these freshmen had no idea of how or why the debt ceiling has operated since 1917 or what the ruinous consequences of default would be. And they wore their ignorance as a badge of courage.

But back in November, 2010, Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell made the GOP goals and strategy crystal clear, setting the stage for the debt ceiling drama to come some seven months later. McConnell loftily proclaimed on national TV that if President Barack Obama wouldn't go along with his key GOP goals, "the only way to do all these things is to put someone in the White House who won't veto any of these things."

After 27 years in the isolated, nurturing environment of the U.S. Senate McConnell, who is worth an estimated $35 million dollars, has become the dour poster boy for America's out of touch professional politicians. There are no poor people in elected office up in Washington.

Blinded by wealth and power, McConnell angrily told the nation that his forces would make the president bend to their will or they would have him removed ... chilling echos from the 15th Century and the pronouncements from the House of Medici. And from that point forward with a new House majority all GOP votes were NO, hobbling the president and actively designed to make his life as difficult as possible.

Now, just moments ago, like the ending to a cookie-cutter Hollywood movie, Speaker John Boehner finally unclogged the congressional sewer main, and repacked the House sausage machine producing a 269-161 vote approving a budget agreement, thus certainly ending the threat of a U.S. Treasury debt default, and setting the stage for a heroic rally on the US and foreign stock markets.

Boehner sent the winning sausage recipe on to the Senate tonight where it is expected to be approved tomorrow, and sent to President Obama for signature, leaving a full twelve hours before the Treasury Department would have gone into default for the first time in the nation's history.

Both chambers on The Hill think they have swallowed bitter pills but they weren't strong enough medicine to wipe out the voter virus. As America's woes worsen, the voter virus will thrive on increasing universal voter disgust with the endlessly sorry and unacceptable performance of their House and Senate leaders.

The voter virus is predicted to attack the CDC (Completely Dysfunctional Congress) and erupt into a nationwide epidemic on November 6th, 2012. Mark your calenders.

Graphic by Larry Ray

US Debt Ceiling: A Quick Refresher Course

2011-07-22T09:53:00.004-05:00

I posted this article in June, 2009. The spending and debt figures were taken from the Congressional Budget Office. It occurs to me that this article, even more valid two years after it was written, should be required reading for voters as well as the ignorant, deluded, greedy fabulists in Washington who are flirting with fiscal disaster for our Nation. Mitch McConnell, Mr. Cantor, Mr. Boehner and their ilk all voted without even a murmur of concern not once, but eight times during the Bush administration to raise the debt ceiling. Other seemingly forgotten hard facts are even more galling.

So, hit the Cliffs notes below. There will be a test August second, 2011.

As soon as Barack Obama's hand left the Lincoln bible after taking his oath of office as President of the United States of America, the race was on within the tattered ranks of the Republican party to see who could scream "tax and spend" the loudest.

The same conservatives who uttered not a dissenting word during the past eight years of Republican "spend and spend" now sputter forth about their perceived perilous excesses of President Obama.

It is time for a review of some hard facts and numbers.

Mr. Obama has calmly and deliberately taken charge, faced with inherited wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the threat of a global financial meltdown, and a laundry list of national and international challenges. And all the while he is pressing ahead and funding promised new programs and change. His Republican detractors, ranting about the national debt, seem to have forgotten George W. Bush's early months as president.

Mr. Bush inherited a federal budget that had been balanced for three consecutive years with a surplus of $236 billion, the largest surplus in American history. Even sweeter, we were running an on-budget surplus no longer diverting surplus from the Social Security Trust Fund to fund other government programs. This conservative largess, of course, came from the previous Democratic administration.

When Mr. Bush took office, the national debt was $5.727 trillion. By September 2008, the national debt had soared to more than $9.849 trillion, an almost 72 percent increase during Mr. Bush’s two terms. And those are the debt figures before the basically unregulated, free-for-all banking and financial system received Mr. Bush's $700 billion Wall Street bailout money.

Hastening things along, Mssrs Bush and Cheney, with the approval of their GOP leadership, doled out billions from the inherited surplus in the form of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

Any extra surplus cushion in the budget was quickly depleted as Mr. Bush rushed to invade Iraq which had no participation in the 9-11 attack on the USA, and no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. The costs of Iraq and Afghanistan were also kept on a different set of books or the US debt figures at the end of eight years of the GOP under Bush would have been even more shocking.

And as President Obama walked into the Oval office, Mr. and Mrs. George W. Bush were closing the deal on their mansion in a Dallas, Texas gated community, leaving the biggest increase in the national debt under any president in U.S history as a going away present to the American people.

Mr. Bush must have erased the collective memory of his record national debt from the minds of the Republican party. With stern faces they attempt daily to paint the accumulated national debt as President Obama's dangerous "socialist" agenda to send America to the poorhouse. Well, we have already been sent there, and Barack Obama did not do the sending.

Here's a quick review:

Shortly after taking office, President Bush spoke to the the Republican Congressional Retreat in Williamsburg and blithely declared that his budget would “pay down the national debt."

President Bush raised the national debt limit eight times during his administration with no uproar or opposition from the GOP.

On July 30, 2008 President Bush signed the Housing and Economic Recovery Act, which contained a quiet little provision raising the debt ceiling to $10.615 trillion.

One week before leaving office, Bush asked Congress for the remaining $350 billion of the GOP $700 billion Wall Street Troubled Assets Relief Program or TARP bailout package.

That same last week, Bush signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 raising the national debt ceiling for the eighth time to $12.104 trillion to accommodate the $11.3 trillion all time record debt he left the incoming administration.

George W. Bush's $11.3 trillion record debt comes to more than $37,000 each for every man, woman and child in the United States. And it will get worse because of what it is costing to clean up after him while still moving ahead on badly needed changes like national health care to rein in its current out of control cost.

I find it both bewildering and angering when Republican conservatives lambaste President Obama for the present state of indebtedness on America's balance sheet as if it was all his fault, not Bush and Party spending like drunken sailors. As if the previous eight years never happened.

Mr. Boehner, Mr. Steele, Mr. Cantor and the rest of the GOP spokespersons du Jour should all be given special pocket calculators with a built in factor of $11.3 trillion that is automatically deducted from any figures they use to attack the Obama administration.

The factor could have a new four letter mathematical name, the DEBT factor, a word that also works perfectly to describe the Bush presidential legacy.

Graphic with apologies to Cliffs Notes

Donald Trump: See the Two-Headed Cow!

2011-04-11T14:36:00.004-05:00


The Great American Sideshow !

America has always had a fringe element of nuttiness but most everyone knew it was nuttiness and not to be taken seriously. Before today's instant mass communication, conspiracy claims, wild headlines, mean gossip and outright lies was mostly the stuff of checkout aisle tabloid newspapers. Today many people can't, or refuse to tell the difference.

Nightly prime time TV programs take the lowest road, from the intellectually light weight "Biggest Losers," where morbidly obese people vie weekly to see who has lost the most weight, to "Reality Shows" documenting unreal races, contests and nail-biting competitor eliminations.

The reality is that these carefully scripted competitions are shot with huge film crews hovering all around, documenting supposed intimate spontaneous adventures that have nothing whatsoever to do with reality.

But millions of people never miss these nightly shows. And, sadly, many of these viewers make little distinction between reality and total hogwash both while watching TV, as well as surfing the internet and emailing wild electronic missives back and forth to one another. These minimally discerning and vocal folks have become a new and easily manipulated political bloc.

So when Donald Trump, New York real estate developer, marketing mogul and reality show producer popped up all over Television recently, saying he should be our next president, lots of folks thought that was a great idea. The next day's polls ranked him number two behind favored Republican nominee, Mitt Romney.

Never mind that Trump's eccentric, egomaniacal ranting, including questioning President Obama American legal citizenship, was not a serious testing of the political waters at all. It was an age-old carnival barker ballyhoo designed to "turn the tip."

"Turning the tip" is old carny lingo meaning to attract the gawking townsfolk meandering on the carnival midway to a specific attraction . . . almost always the sideshow. The barker, usually wearing a straw pork pie hat, would taunt, tease and invite,

"Have you seen Bossie! The world's only living two-headed cow? It's all on the inside! Step right up. Be among the few who will ever see a living, breathing two-headed cow! Only ten cents, a thin dime, limited viewing, so step right up!"

And people dug into their pockets for that dime, crowding the barker's ticket stand while another carny quickly opened then closed a corner of the canvas entrance flap offering surreptitious peeks at the bizarre wonders inside.

Once jammed in the tent, people were led quickly past a dimly lit rude stall with a straw floor where a badly stuffed small cow sporting a bit of creative taxidermy stood motionless. The "professor" inside the tent repeated Bossie's astounding medical history all the while urging folks to move along, offering, for only a nickle more, the rare chance to see Jargo the dog-faced boy.

Next day at school the two-headed cow was all anyone could talk about. Everyone knew someone who had seen this mutant marvel the night before. Various accounts had the cow being milked while one head slept and the other ate. I imagine that had anyone brought it up at our 50th class reunion, many would have still remembered seeing that two-headed cow ... or someone who had.

Trump doesn't want to be president, not for a minute. But he does want to "turn the tip" of voters wandering the American political carnival midway into his own private tent to gorge his own insatiable ego and sense of power ... Trump's own personal real-time reality show.

In an America where, for a disturbingly high percentage of our population, the misrepresenred, trite and false has become reality, it was a no-brainer for Trump. The ridiculously coiffed megalomaniac is already part of today's media side show and well knows all the divisive bally to spout.

When daytime radio and cable TV's stock-in-trade is now largely a corral full of two-headed cows of varying intellect like Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Bachman, and wildly dressed Tea Party people ranting about "taking back" America, they become the norm and it is harder to find a really unusual two-headed cow.

So, instead of summarily dismissing Trump as a wealthy blowhard, America's mainstream media instead day after day touts this new, particularly outrageous, bellowing two-headed cow ... because two-headed cows still always attract viewers, especially if they have bad hair.

Graphic by Larry Ray thanks to Australia's Mutant Barnyard freak show.

The Coming American OK Corral?

2011-03-16T23:13:00.006-05:00


"Politicians shooting off more than their mouths?"

Got an email this evening from a old friend who keeps a pretty good daily watch on the news, especially the really bizarre and extreme news stories about America in 2011. The article he forwarded had this headline . . .

California politicians demand right to carry arms
Sacramento state assembly members have introduced a bill that would entitle them to carry concealed weapons

The whole idea of elected representatives wanting to make a law to let them pack a gun because they felt threatened by negative e-mails and mean phone calls triggered a top of the head response to my friend, Harry, who sent me the news article ...

Harry, old friend, it occurs that by arming every person capable of loading a gun and letting them carry it in their belts, holsters or wherever, we actually would create a non-nuclear version of MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction . . . sort of. It would be more mutual for some folks than others.

Problem is, that a couple of hours on a shooting range and a pat on the back is not going to really make a scared politician packing heat any safer from an enraged, focused person intent upon blowing him away.

Harper's Magazine had a cover article last year on how this all really shakes out when someone decides to have a gun on him, or her, at all times. One's thinking changes completely and the really remote chance that someone is going to do you harm becomes an obsession.

So, a simple advance, for a completely innocent reason, by someone toward this legally ready-to-shoot-gun-toting person's "territorial imperative" space around him, could result in murderous gunfire.

Like the guy wearing a hood, or the turban-wearing tourist, or whoever you do not recognize and feel threatened by. So some poor soul fumbling for a piece of paper with an address on it in his pocket, who was just trying ask you where the city museum is located goes to boot hill. But you had a permit!

The whole mindset that life today is like a cowboy movie reduces humanity and common sense to a perceived primal battle where everyone goes around with a semi automatic bludgeon at the ready. Kill or be killed. What happy folks.

Had the federal judge in Arizona, Congresswoman Giffords, and her aides all been armed, what would have been the purpose of a sincere meeting with constituents in a supermarket parking lot?
The nutcase young shooter would have still had the drop on all of them because he did not come there to talk about good government with Ms. Giffords. He came there to shoot her in the head, and all the folks around her for good measure.

Maybe someone in the crowd armed with their concealed weapon would have shot back at him, and maybe that scared shitless shooter blasting away wildly at the nutcase shooter would have killed lots of other folks as well.

What the hell happened to the American dream, Harry, and folks getting together to take part in it? Do we all want to be potential killers if we think someone is lurking out there with a shootin' iron to kill us? Are we all walking out of that 1950's Saturday double feature Western where the white hats always shoot and kill the black hats … has that become a movie in an endless loop in our scared collective psyche?

Ain't like the craziness of the early 60's at UT in Austin is it, Harry? What is really scary is that voters actually elected these whacko folks to represent them . . . and this is out in California, not Texas where the pride of Austin, Governor Goodhair, already legally packs a gun and shoots coyotes who get too close!

Peace and love, etc.

Larry

Boehner: A Crocodilian Crock?

2010-12-27T08:30:00.000-06:00

John Boehner - A Portrait of Courage?

This, my last post of the year, dear readers, is a short few quatrains; prickly poetry that would probe the mind of the incoming GOP Speaker of the House, the emotionally delicate John Andrew Boehner.

                          Does Boehner's orange face denote a great tan
                          or is it dermatologically the mark of a man
                          with dour countenance and low self esteem
                          who weeps and sobs as if reliving a dream?

                          A sad dream invoked so he may wear his past
                          as a badge of passage he fears cannot last
                          while his political career has arrived at a peak
                          emotionally odd weeping will not let him speak.

                          Fabled crocodile tears are not truly felt
                          but perhaps John's weeping is darkly indwelt
                          from tormented pangs of past poverty, looming
                          his lachrymal breakdowns are now all consuming.

                          As Congress convenes, with new Speaker and gavel
                          will the negative spotlight make Boehner unravel
                          as his overblown ego casts a dull orange glow
                          will his bawling and weeping continue to grow?

                          Will Speaker John Boehner now tread that thin border
                          between sanity and madness, a narcissistic disorder?
                          Indeed, Jesus wept over the city of Jerusalem
                          I fear Boehner's tears are just there to bamboozle 'em!

Happy New Year,

Larry Ray
Texas poet lariat

Obama: Stumping to the stumped?

2010-12-15T19:37:00.011-06:00

I have long enjoyed intellectually spirited email exchanges with a friend in New York who is a frenetic and frequent objector. Joel is a jazz pianist, university professor, fine art photographer and far left activist Democrat. I am a more centrist Democrat yet our exchanges of late seek a common end . . . however we seem to define a path through the political thicket much differently.

Regarding the present Bush tax cut extension hairball that President Obama wants Democrats to choke down, and Obama's percieved failure to communicate to a wide swath of Americans, Joel writes:

If Obama had a clearer public profile and ranted against the moneyed interests (à la TR, and FDR), there would be fewer like the elderly lady I met today in the dentist's office who believe he has a sinister agenda for the country. He doesn't say enough, appear enough to reveal this to be an absurdity!

Joel,
Folks like your little old lady are to be found in large numbers across the land. I have found, repeatedly, that beneath their dark, irrational suspicions is always the fact that many are only seeing a "Negro" president whose middle name is Hussein.

Grant Park on election eve was not full of little old ladies, it was a much more youthful and diverse crowd of many colors and hues. I agree that Obama has been perhaps too calmly cerebral while he has continued to tackle tough, meaningful challenges during the past two years. Important diplomatic and economic progress has been made in spite of inheriting eight years of the George Bush fiasco abetted by a GOP moral insolvency.

Obama has calmly undertaken complex challenges like preventing a deep national economic depression and restoring America's image around the globe. But right now the general public is unable to appreciate or understand any of that. Simply put, history shows that a huge number of Americans are dumb as chickens.*

Perhaps a bit of populist Obama theater is in order. But with Fox being the "news" channel that so many of these very folks watch, Obama runs a risk of being easily pilloried for what would be characterized as pandering through the use of clever editing, out of context "quotes" and other typical Murdoch machinations.

Teddy and Franklin D. did not have today's frenetic, instant informational circus to deal with. "Bloggers" are now being interviewed as if they were journalists or somehow respected experts. The average Web Log, or "Blog" is a digital stump from which ordinary folks exhort and bellow forth opinions. There is little objectivity or academic credential in the average blog. There is an abundance of opinion.

Next consider the fear and struggling from continuing unemployment, foreclosures and other calamitous results of two terms of the GOP's sorry leadership, and people are just not rational. A dumbed-down presentation of how the calculating GOP got them into this mess would not, and has not, registered with the angry centrist majority.

The GOP, which has no shame, will continue to calculatingly lure these very folks right back so they can give them another screwing. And many will eagerly go back, hearing only platitudes, invocations of God's blessings and outrageous promises.

Finally, mix Ron and Rand Paul into this gumbo, add the other green so-called Tea Party populist winners, and then watch as they experience the harsh realities of Washington politics for freshmen members and back-benchers in both houses. We are in for a fascinating couple of years.

Throwing down extremist gauntlets on either side of the pendulum swing will provide brief moments of irritation, certainly. But if Obama and the nation are to break the paralyzing effects of today's political polarization, which is a pointless, greedy skunk pissing contest, the restive radical centrists must somehow be brought into the streets, whether literally or conceptually.

Imagine their anger shifted to the real villains, the wealthy, conservative Right who plays the ignorance of the average working stiff like a cheap guitar. You are the historian, Joel. How to organize a truly representative and overwhelming movement from the great centrist majority seems to be the question. Forget screaming leftists or right wing Doom Sayers. Where are the farmers or workers spontaneously organizing and demonstrating in huge numbers? Where are the outraged veterans and students who should be protesting in massive demonstrations over the seemingly endless occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan?

My cynical yet studied observation is that they are all blithely uninvolved. Younger Americans are Twittering and Facebooking inanities to one another in the distracting echoes of the social networking vortex.

How do you see this on your wide angle lens? Will a new orange tinted, weepy Speaker of the House make anyone wonder what the hell this country has allowed to happen?

* ...or very purposefully misinformed. See: U of Maryland poll of midterm voters

Graphic -"Stump Speaker" Courier litho card, 1890's

Judge Who Ruled Health Care Reform Unconstitutional Owns Piece of GOP Consulting Firm

2010-12-13T21:16:00.020-06:00

A bit of background from the news wires on today's Federal Judicial news-maker, a Fed. judge who also owns part of a GOP "consulting firm" and is a Bush appointee to the Federal Bench. Conflict of interest? Recusal? Nah. Since The Grand Old Party has elbowed its way back into power, the Jack Abramoff rules are in play once more. Things will just get more tawdry when The Supremes, Roberts, Scalia et al eventually get this. Put that in your Tea Pot.

"Henry E. Hudson, the federal judge in Virginia who just ruled health care reform unconstitutional, owns between $15,000 and $50,000 in a GOP political consulting firm that worked against health care reform. You don't say!

As the Huffington Post and others first noted last July, Hudson's annual financial disclosures show that he owns a sizable chunk of Campaign Solutions, Inc., a Republican consulting firm that worked this election cycle for John Boehner, Michele Bachmann, John McCain, and a whole host of other GOP candidates who've placed the purported unconstitutionality of health care reform at the center of their political platforms. Since 2003, according to the disclosures, Hudson has earned between $32,000 and $108,000 in dividends from his shares in the firm (federal rules only require judges to report ranges of income).

Campaign Solutions was instrumental in the launching of Sarah Palin's PAC (though Palin has since split with the firm), and Ken Cuccinelli, the Virginia attorney general who filed the lawsuit that Hudson ruled in favor of today, paid Campaign Solutions $9,000 for services rendered in 2009 and 2010.

Anyway, if you're curious why Hudson, who was appointed to the bench by George W. Bush, ruled that health care reform's individual coverage mandate violates the constitution, it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he as a major shareholder in a political messaging firm that gets paid to argue that health care reform's individual mandate is unconstitutional. It's really just that he's a Republican."

http://gawker.com/5713041/judge-who-ruled-health-care-reform-unconstitutional-owns-piece-of-gop-consulting-firm

Monarchs have a tough lesson for flighty Democrats

2010-11-11T18:07:00.010-06:00

Battered Monarch Butterfly resting in Texas on trip home

These photos were taken in Texas recently. They show a battered migrating Monarch butterfly feeding on milkweed nectar and resting after clearly flying in very windy conditions.

Someone suggested that the beaten up butterfly, merely resting on its 5,000 mile migration flight from Canada back to Central Mexico, literally "on a wing and a prayer," could be symbolic of "The Democratic Party after their recent election mauling."

Nice idea, wonderful photos, suggesting strength and determination. But given the Democratic party's recent implosion, if they were scheduled to all move in one direction, like a mass migration, they would argue, delay, fight and piddle around and those who actually got airborne would fly an erratic path probably at the wrong time of year to procreate. Which is why the Monarchs do it.

And speaking of procreation, when today's Democrats aren't getting screwed by Republicans they wind up screwing themselves. Even Monarch butterflies are smarter than that.

Letters to Charlie-Our Schools, Their Madrassas

2010-09-28T16:30:00.013-05:00

Letters to Charlie is a collection of emails to a long time friend. He worked hard and did very well. To many of his wealthy conservative friends, Charlie is an anomalous dreaded liberal. He forwards many of their hateful and distorted right-wing emails to me and I frequently send Charlie my free-flow take on them. Education was the topic for a recent series . . . Islamic Madrassas V/S American schools.

Imagine if all the glistening red white and blue was stripped from the history of America that is, or was, taught in our public schools. Americans just do not want to talk about or remember the darker history of this great country. But a mere 46 years ago black Americans were denied basic rights and could not drink from the same water fountains designated for use by white people. The same went for transportation, eating in restaurants, staying in hotels or motels, or voting without intimidation or paying a "poll tax."

1964 is not that long ago, Charlie. There was even great doubt that JFK could be elected as president because he was, gasp, a Catholic! Senator Joe McCarthy's Commie blacklist hearings and the actual existence of an "un-American activities committee" are well within your memory and mine.

The history of the American development of oil production in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East is a sorry tale of arrogance and complete disrespect for customs and religion in that area. Ancient tribal areas had been carved up into countries with boundaries drawn by colonial imperialists . . .

Great Britain and the USA have a shameful history of using our Christian badge of correctness to disregard any other religions as misguided and wrong. We still do that. Imagine Islamic missionaries roaming the cities and towns in rural America seeking to convert Christians.

Our public schools were wisely and purposefully made to be secular and apart from religious control or curriculum. There is no mention of setting up schools in the Constitution. We are constitutionally bound to respect and practice freedom of religion in America. That, however, mostly translates to freedom to be Christian of some stripe or another. Jews continue to fight antisemitism and did not easily build their Synagogues and other places of gathering without lots of ugliness. Islam is having an even tougher time of it here being accepted as American citizens.

We invaded Iraq and blew up its already minimal, but functioning, infrastructure. People who suddenly lose their electricity, water and sewer service and who have family members rounded up and even killed get pretty mad and disgusted. Americans would react the same way if some massive power invaded us for no apparent reason and crippled our basic infrastructure.

Our massively superior military took over large parts of Iraq, kicked in doors of the homes of ordinary people, wildly looking for a relatively small number of Islamic extremists. Young American soldiers by and large speak and understand only American English, so just like in Vietnam, the Iraqis became the "foreigners." Our ignorance of historic Sunni - Shiia religious sectarian hatreds just added to needless stirring up of an old hornet's nest.

Cumulative ancient local hatreds easily shifted to the Americans invaders. What had been a few extremist individuals, dedicated Islamic jihadists, easily turned into an easily organized resistance against the American invaders, and attracted extremists from other countries. Martyred suicide attacks by one sect against another expanded to larger and larger suicide attacks against the American invaders.

Now, a trillion dollars later with 4,500 dead American kids, and tens of thousands wounded, and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis dead, we are still applauding our gift of bringing the first real Democracy to the Middle East. Except that has not happened.

"Freely Elected" candidates in Iraq are in a 50-50 standoff, each hewing to their tribal and sectarian power bases to get all they can for their side. Screw democracy. Screw America. Sharing is not part of the vocabulary in the ancient, tribal Middle East.

How much hatred does it take to pull off something as horrible and seemingly impossible as the 9-11 attacks? This relative handful of religious zealots not only triggered a fierce response by the American military, they also made it easy for this infuriated Christian nation to throw all Muslims into one big bad category.

So, what does a 234 year old America teach in our secular schools? What do they teach in their ancient Islamic Madrassas? Should there be a threatning gulf between the two ways of educating our young?

You and I have traveled widely, lived in other countries and have a sense of global diversity and inequity, Charlie. Most Americans never go abroad in their lifetimes, and for the past 40 years American students have not been taught much world or American history in public schools. A huge percentage of Americans have no sense at all of history, geography or civics. We have been irresponsible in our materialism and now are pitifully lagging behind other developed nations in so many basic areas of education, health care, social responsibility, and even happiness.

And as if this was not enough, America, the land of the free, is now imprisoning itself with polarization, laziness, obesity, greed, denial and indifference. Our roads, dams and bridges are old and in disrepair, but there is a loud cry for no new taxes. And a loud conservative minority would do away with a strong, centralized federal government.

In past national times of crisis in America the young have taken up the banner of change and helped move this country forward. I don't see America's under-educated, over indulged and seeming directionless young people being able to or even wanting to step up and face the challenge.

graphic by Larry Ray

Political Party Hats and the Great American Snake

2010-08-29T17:45:00.014-05:00

Photo by Oliver Douliery - Abaca Press

I talk with friends in Italy almost daily and this past year it has been challenging to try to answer their questions about political images beamed to them from America. They are mystified by the clots of angry, mostly white and mostly “mature” Americans who wear strange clown-like hats sometimes with “tanti bustini di tè” (lots of teabags) dangling from them.

Friends in Naples ask, “Who are these people and why do they dress up like that? Is it some sort of folk tradition? Do they still not like dark-skinned people? Why are they so angry?” All are valid questions, especially with the steady stream of news, photos and video being fed constantly to Italy. The loud and bizarre gets lots of play there just like it does here.

Protests have their extremes in Europe, to be sure. French farmers dumped tons of manure in front of McDonald’s outlets protesting U.S. sanctions. And in Brussels it was not blood running in the streets last year, it was milk. Part of a continuing Pan-European farm fury included the scene below, protesting government controlled milk prices. Frustrated farmers presented a clear message that was milked for all it was worth with not one funny hat, misspelled poster or misplaced metaphor.

So, how to explain why those frustrated, not too well informed and very noisy Americans gather to “take their country back” while all decked out in giant Red White and Blue top hats and other strange attire? I was recently asked by my friend, Guido, "Larry, why is the woman with the yellow flag with the coiled snake on it telling everyone not to step on the snake? Is she a snake worshiper?"

For years Italians have seen documentaries about Christian sects in rural America who dance wildly inside their churches while holding and even kissing live poisonous snakes. So, coiled rattlesnakes on flags at heated political gatherings suggest to Italians a reasonable association with the American snake handlers they have seen. But snakes as a national symbol of American patriotism is neither quickly nor easily explained.

You can imagine the challenge in trying to talk about the why and who and what of raucous Tea Party gatherings. I have been unable to connect revolutionary Boston's dumping of crates of tea into their harbor over unfair taxation with today's small tea bags hanging off gaudy sequined hats. Not for my Italian friends or for myself.

The simplistic appeal of Glen Beck’s dreck, to the people in funny hats is particularly difficult for my friends to understand. Italians who have seen him think Beck is a game show host. I just agreed with them and continued on telling about the Great American Snake.

Explaining the yellow “Gadsden flag” to my Italian friends involved starting with a satirical article written by Ben Franklin around 1754 which included a cartoon showing a timber rattlesnake chopped up into 8 pieces. Each piece represented one of the eight colonies. Franklin, tongue in cheek, suggested that since the British had sent convicted criminals to America, we should send rattlesnakes to England by way of thanks.

Four years later Continental Congress Colonel Christopher Gadsden reportedly used the image of a coiled rattlesnake that had been painted on marching band snare drums of US Marines interdicting British naval supply ships arriving in the new colonies to create his “Don’t Tread On Me” flag.

Col. Gadsden presented the first feisty banner to his home constituency in South Carolina. It became one of several early American flags. The flag's image is still all over the place today, even on Nike's 2010 World Cup soccer ball images, at Boy Scouts of America camp sites and as the Tea Party's official flag.

Benjamin Franklin's woodcut cartoon from May 9, 1754. Image from Library of Congress / Wikimedia Commons.

So somehow it makes perfect sense to lots of the disgruntled and fearful here at home to see a 62 year old American woman in an out sized floppy Uncle Sam hat waving the rattlesnake flag warning you not to step on her patriotism . . . however she may define that. Why she can't be just as patriotic in regular street clothes puzzles a large majority of Americans as well as my Italian friends.

I will hazard a guess that she and most of the other snake flag wavers have no more idea of the flag's history than Guido. But to her she is a tightly coiled patriot fighting fascism, communism, socialism and all the other isms that the new black American president and rabid liberals have in store for her. No real need to define or understand all those isms because "everyone knows what they are."

Guido, on the other hand, can give you a clear, quick definition of Fascism and communism. His parents lived under Mussolini's Fascist rule. Italy has a Communist party which is represented in its endless postwar coalition governments, and Italy is by and large a social democracy just like a most of Europe today.

Guido asks, still trying to understand the ladies pictured at the top of the page, “That lady in the hat with the colored horns on it, is that for good luck?” In Italy, an animal horn amulet made of real gold or even red plastic wards off evil. I deftly try to say that she is wearing a standard issue Statue of Liberty party hat that has nothing to do with the evil eye or with France who gave the statue to the USA. “So the USA never sent rattlesnakes to France?” I allowed as how I just wasn't sure about that.

Sarah Palin is easier for Italians to understand since they have had their own national nutcase, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who dominates the news with his benighted bumbling and endless internationally embarrassing pronouncements.

Berlusconi is a billionaire media mogul. Sarah Louise is hard at work Twittering her way to becoming a multi-millionaire from speaking fees for her illogical, vacuous God and Country utterances. Sarah Louise has a nice figure, nice looks and has great legs. If she married Berlusconi, whose wife divorced him for his diversions with underage girls, it could be a marriage made in heaven. And Sarah speaks in tongues. But I digress.

Trying to sum up the discontent, anger and bizarre headgear issues, I offered a list of suggested questions Guido could toss around with his friends over a cup of tea before we have our next political chit chat. The ladies at the top of the page might take a glance at these as well.

What happens when big government gets out of your life, starts spending less and each individual American State bears the responsibility for its citizens' welfare?

Will all the Tea Party folks turn in their Federally subsidized socialized Medicare cards and expect the state and their own private insurance to take care of their health?

When the already collapsing bridges, dams, highways and other infrastructure finally totally crumbles away while no one has been paying any higher taxes, will the states somehow take care of all those problems within their boundaries? You think Wall Street and your local banker might step in and help you while staying out of your life as well?

And when "the government" has been purged from your lives and "returned to The People," except for, "when Federal Government assistance is needed" what will the rules be that define when and how much assistance?

Finally, who will make those rules? Mad folks in funny hats who created their own brand of social democracy State by State?

I look forward to my next chat with Guido. He wants to talk about this great nation of America and how it is made up of immigrants. His great uncle Tonino lived in Brooklyn.