Although Eleanor Holmes Norton is seen chairing a hearing in this file photo, the congresswoman will be barred from offering personal testimony on Thursday.

Just months after Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California prevented a female Georgetown University law student from joining an all-male panel on the issue of contraception, another GOP committee chairman won’t allow Norton to testify against a bill which would ban abortions in the District of Columbia after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), who also is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee subcommittee considering the legislation, denied Norton’s request to speak out against it. The legislation in question is the District of Columbia Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.

Norton, who has no ability to vote on the bill — or any matters in the House – because the District of Columbia is not a state, instead says she will offer written testimony. The lack of a vote in Congress inspired D.C.’s license plates with the slogan “Taxation Without Representation,” because residents are required to pay federal income tax.

However, Christy Zink, a George Washington University professor and District of Columbia resident who  had an abortion 21 weeks and five days into her pregnancy, after doctors found a cyst on the brain of the fetus and a follow-up MRI revealed severe fetal brain abnormalities, will be allowed to testify against the bill during Thursday’s hearing.

“Women in the District of Columbia have been singled out for an unprecedented attack on their constitutional rights,” Norton says. “Christy Zink will speak for us all in the District and for women throughout America, as versions of this bill have passed in several states.”

Although Zink will be allowed to speak out, the fact that Norton herself will not be allowed to address the matter in person has rankled other congressional Democrats, notably Sen. Barbara Mikulski of neighboring Maryland.

“Reps in Congress elected 2 speak on behalf of people, your rep should not b sidelined! Let DC Rep @EleanorNorton speak on DC women’s health!” the senator tweeted on Wednesday. 

Today, the next-to-next-to last progressive Republican president, a fellow with big ears, signed the documents creating the Department of Agriculture:

On May 15, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln established the independent Department of Agriculture to be headed by a Commissioner without Cabinet status. Lincoln called it the “people’s department.” In the 1880s, varied advocacy groups were lobbying for Cabinet representation. Business interests sought a Department of Commerce and Industry, and farmers tried to raise the Department of Agriculture to Cabinet rank. In 1887, the House of Representatives and Senate passed bills giving Cabinet status to the Department of Agriculture and Labor, but the bill was killed in conference committee after farm interests objected to the addition of labor. Finally, on February 9, 1889, President Grover Cleveland signed a bill into law elevating the Department of Agriculture to Cabinet level. [Wikipedia]

Lincoln, minus the Civil War, managed to carry out a pretty progressive policy of “wealth redistribution,” and infrastructure improvements, having promised these in his campaign, the Homestead Act was passed, the Transcontinental Railroad founded and subsidized, land-grant colleges, like, say the University of Iowa (the first). Wikipedia:

The [1860 Republican] party platform clearly stated that slavery would not be allowed to spread any further; this statement was made in the platform’s due process plank. The platform also promised that tariffs protecting industry would be imposed, a Homestead Act granting free farmland in the West to settlers, and the funding of a transcontinental railroad. All of these provisions were highly unpopular in the South.

This is, perhaps, apocryphal and not necessarily long for Wikipedia’s quality control, but, in the same piece:

In 1849, the Patent Office was transferred to the newly created Department of the Interior. In the ensuing years, agitation for a separate bureau of agriculture within the department or a separate department devoted to agriculture kept recurring.

The USDA was created by Abraham Lincoln in order to help out the United States economy

Which, while true, cannot be stated as such by any self-respecting historian or academic. We have achieved a level of rhetorical dissimulation that Lincoln would have appreciated, with the Southern Papers adopting the same tone and ofttimes rhetoric — as the Wingnut Blogosmear™ adopts today.*

[* (See the Richmond Daily Dispatch  "Virginia's wealth, power and influence rest upon her slave system" for tone and argumentation in defense of the indefensible.]

The problem with the Department of the Interior was that it rapidly and near-continually became a hotbed of corruption, influence-peddling and wholesale looting of the people’s natural resources. For instance, circa 2000, the Brothers Koch paid the largest single fine ever levied ($25 million) for corporate malfeasance, having reported only half of the oil they pumped from Federal and Indian lands under a contract to … well, you got it.

A “popular” group in Wisconsin’s Walker recall defense today, as well

At the time, agriculture was the life blood of the nation, and there were virtually no Americans who were not within one degree of separation from the agricultural enterprises of the nation. Without agriculture, there would have been no need for the South to protect their “peculiar institution.”*

[* Today is also the 150th anniversary of General Benjamin Butler -- would later be a "House Manager" in the Andrew Johnson Impeachment -- issuance of his infamous order regarding the women of New Orleans:

"As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults from the woman (calling themselves ladies) of New Orleans in return for the most scrupulous non-interference and courtesy on our part, it is ordered that hereafter when any female shall by word, gesture, or movement insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation." ]

Meantime, the “People’s Department” has expanded perhaps, to something beyond Lincoln’s highest hopes:

Today, many of the programs concerned with the distribution of food and nutrition to people of America and providing nourishment as well as nutrition education to those in need are run and operated under the USDA Food and Nutrition Service. Activities in this program include the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides healthy food to over 40 million low-income and homeless individuals and families each month. USDA is a member of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness where it is committed to working with other agencies to ensure these mainstream benefits are accessed by those experiencing homelessness.

The USDA also is concerned with assisting farmers and food producers with the sale of crops and food on both a domestic and on the world market. It plays a role in overseas aid programs by providing surplus foods to developing countries. This aid can go through USAID, foreign governments, international bodies such as World Food Program, or approved non profit organizations.

American farming

During the Grant Administration (the next-to-last progressive Republican president) in 1876,  nobody wanted to see the assessment of the condition of nation’s vast forests turned over to the care of the Department of the Interior (the logical place in an organizational chart of the US federal government, as we shall see), and was given to “the People’s department,” instead.

In 1876, Congress created the office of Special Agent in the Department of Agriculture to assess the quality and conditions of forests in the United States. Franklin B. Hough was appointed the head of the office. In 1881, the office was expanded into the newly-formed Division of Forestry.

Then, Theodore Roosevelt (the last progressive Republican president)  had to clean up Interior’s mess:

The Forest Reserve Act of 1891 authorized withdrawing land from the public domain as “forest reserves,” managed by the Department of the Interior. In 1901, the Division of Forestry was renamed the Bureau of Forestry. The Transfer Act of 1905 transferred the management of forest reserves from the General Land Office of the Interior Department to the Bureau of Forestry, henceforth known as the United States Forest Service. Gifford Pinchot was the first Chief Forester of the United States Forest Service in the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt.

You might notice that it only took fourteen years (1891 to 1905) for the stench from Interior to become so foul that the forest lands they originally managed were explicitly withdrawn and transferred to the Forest Service.

Now, I have always had a special place in my heart for the Forest Service, since my dad was a Forest Service engineer, with the side duty of fighting fires during his entire career. I was raised with all the USDA Forest Service freebies and paraphernalia, including a Smokey Bear (not Smokey THE Bear) teddy bear (hat lost first day, probably, and never seen since).

Medicine Bow National Forest, Wyoming, where I was a kid

And I watched, under Reagan, those interests always clutching at the checkbook of the Department of the Interior finally manage to take over the Forest Service (or the “Forest Circus” as a former staffer once told me he called it) and you knew the crap had hit the rotating blades when Forest Service personnel were jumping from the Forest Circus to the Bureau of Land Management under the Department of the Interior.

You know how Texans tell “Aggie” jokes, or New Yorkers tell “New Jersey” jokes? That’s how federal resources people told jokes about the BLM, with BLM being always the punchline.

So you know that things was bad in LassieLand. (In her final TV incarnation, Lassie was the dog of a Forest Service ranger, saving people in the pine forests of the West week in and week out. Rather surreal to watch TV and see Lassie riding in the same old forest green (not the new, day-glow Forest service green) Forest Service motor pool vehicle my dad sometimes drove.

Lassie promo shot, 1961

Mostly, he drove the pickups, always with a box of survey stakes and rolls of red and green fluorescent tape in the back. He preferred the Chevys.

All of this is a story for another day, perhaps. But the Forest Service was the part of the “People’s Department” that I knew personally. It’s too large to fully encompass, but it’s safe to say that no single other department of the Federal government touches more lives in a potentially beneficial and even life-saving manner.

Dad was posted here when I was in high school

So, thank you Mr. President Lincoln.

And thank you Mr. President Grant.

And thank you, Mr. Theodore Roosevelt  for the Forest Service.

Teddy and Teddy poster at Art dot com

The Department of Agriculture is 150 years old today, and it remains the People’s Department.

Government and politicians do things right sometimes. Perhaps more often than is publicized, in fact.

And, while that’s my USDA choice, the vigor of the USDA is still in its prime.

My Smokey today. Nose is MIA. 

Courage.

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

A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog

Matt Negrin / ABCNEWS:
George W. Bush: ‘I’m for Mitt Romney’  —  Mitt Romney has the support of George W. Bush.  —  “I’m for Mitt Romney,” Bush told ABC News this morning as the doors of an elevator closed on him, after he gave a speech on human rights a block from his old home — the White House.

G. Dubya Bush assuring residents of The Big Easy that
nothing bad actually happened in Katrina, and even
if it did, everything would be hunky dory. The square
was lit by emergency generators : virtually the only
electricity IN New Orleans that night…

I wrote this to the Eugene Register-Guard in 2003:

Saddam Hussein was evil, but we had no lawful right to depose him. These are our American values.

Letters in the Editor’s Mailbag

June 19, 2003

A question of war crimes

After 80 days, it’s time Americans confronted a grave question: If no weapons of mass destruction are found, then members of the Bush administration are guilty of war crimes.

The U.S.-sponsored United Nations Charter, Chapter 1, Article 2, states: “The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its members.” And “All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.”

Saddam Hussein was evil, but we had no lawful right to depose him. These are our American values.

In the 1945 Nuremberg Trials, there were four counts, and one, if not two, are applicable here. Count one: conspiracy to wage aggressive war, and count two: waging aggressive war, or “crimes against peace.” When it was argued that the court had no jurisdiction, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, lead prosecutor, rejoined, “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

Remember that in the near year of spin leading up to this war the term “regime change” was never used until 48 hours before the war began: because such a war would have been unlawful.

If war crimes have been committed (thousands are dead), those who screamed about the “rule of law” in 1999 better step up to the plate, else there is no such “rule.”

HART WILLIAMS

Well, at least one court now backs me up. Interestingly, not much comment in the American press. One short page on Google yesterday and one long page and another short overflow story on the next (and that’s when you turn off the redundancy filter):

Bush Convicted of War Crimes in Absentia

by Yvonne Ridley
The Foreign Policy Journal
May 12, 2012

Kuala Lumpur — It’s official; George W Bush is a war criminal.

In what is the first ever conviction of its kind anywhere in the world, the former US President and seven key members of his administration were yesterday (Fri) found guilty of war crimes.

Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo were tried in absentia in Malaysia.

The trial held in Kuala Lumpur heard harrowing witness accounts from victims of torture who suffered at the hands of US soldiers and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They included testimony from British man Moazzam Begg, an ex-Guantanamo detainee and Iraqi woman Jameelah Abbas Hameedi who was tortured in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison….

Interestingly enough, the Nuremberg Trials at the end of WWII (“watch the great movie “Judgment at Nuremberg” with Spencer Tracy and Burt Lancaster for a bit of the flavor) were cited by the court. Thus far, it’s Yvonne Ridley’s story, her having done the best job of early reporting, having seemingly read a good portion of the transcripts.

It is a sad day, my friends, when old Lenin Era Pravda now online in the XXIth century with a new direction and mission does a MUCH more credible reporting job than the US press and most of the blogosphere. Here are links to four parts of the transcript — such as it is — of the findings of the court with a suggestion that the story has been hacked at least once in the notes to one of the interior parts:

Part 1:
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/09-05-2012/121063-accusations_war_crimes-0/

Part II:
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/10-05-2012/121082-united_states_torture-0/

Part III
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/12-05-2012/121089-us_torture-0/

Part IV
http://english.pravda.ru/world/americas/13-05-2012/121099-usa_dock_four-0/

Here is the citation of our own hypocrisy in staining the national character before the whole world (who were watching):

The charge against the accused here is very similar to the charge for which the Nazi war criminals were convicted at the Nuremberg trials: “the charge of conscious participation in a nation-wide governmentally organized system of cruelty and injustice, in violation of the laws of war and humanity, and perpetrated in the name of law by … authority”: Alstotter case.

This is because after 9/11, all the pronouncements from the top made a conscious decision to set aside international rules constraining such treatment. A combination of factors account for this: fear, ideology and almost visceral disdain for international rules and norms. There are others who have also committed war crimes but those that have been charged are the key players. Against them there is overwhelming evidence and they bear direct responsibility for war crimes.

That is how it ends. You owe it to yourself to go and read the English translation put up in full by good ol’ Pravda. Time was, citing Pravda was a guarantee that you was at least a pinko, if not an outright commie. Boy times sure change.

George W. Bush, Agent of Al Q.A.E.D.A. is a post you should read

But what I said then was true. It remains true and as this story gains traction, every force in serpentine media and slithery supplication will attempt to convince you that our good nation did NOT commit War Crimes. These are the same bastards who maintained that no US soldier had ever or would ever do anything bad in our invasion and toppling of the regime of that guy who was responsible for Nine-Lebben.

Oh wait.

You see: we Americans are REALLY GOOD at ignoring important problems we find inconvenient. Slavery. Segregation. Child labor. Sweat shops. Women’s rights — promised them during the Civil War by politicians as part of expanding suffrage. Women’s actual rights, and not just the right to vote. Hispanic rights. Minority rights. Disabled access. The right not to be sexually harassed in the workplace. Gays and gay rights and no rights for “illegal aliens” who force sweatshop owners to fire all their American workers and employ the dirt-poor illegals to work for much lower wages, with zero rights.

Kind of like that slave labor in China that builds our computers and our i-Phones® and all the rest of the Wal-Marted, Four Bank and Four Oil Company America.

We are REAL good at it.

The (graven) Image Makers at work

We Americans have never met a problem so big that we couldn’t all agree that it wasn’t actually there, and, therefore, nothing needs be done, nor talkin’ about that bothersome … thing. WHAT thing?

My point.

But the Bushies have PROVEN that you can be lied to with a straight face and will buy ANY crap they want to shove a feeding tube down your throat and ladle into your poor stomach.

Only next time, the country they topple and install their “approved” government after writing its “pillage and loot” constitution won’t be in the Middle East.

It’ll be in the Middle West.

Remember when I said “Saddam Hussein was evil, but we had no lawful right to depose him. These are our American values”? Well, here’s a piece of news for yas: “American values” are now whatever we SAY they are. So …

What is the blogosphere rambling on about?

Romney v. Obama blah blah blah, and it’s only the Fourteenth of Freaking May. Democracy in America is ill-served by this obfuscatory persiflage masquerading as journalism. It is not journalism: it is sycophantism and infantilism and paroxysm. But it is NOT journalism, which, in its finest flower doesn’t merely report the news (with hefty chunks of gossip and hot air speculation thrown in to pad out the segment), but finds the IMPORTANT news and goes after it like a terrier after a rat.

Sure: One of these days we’re going to have to face up to the crimes of the past thirty years. That is guaranteed.

But not today.

That is guaranteed, as well.

Genuine; not PhotoShopped.

Courage.

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

Kudos to Thom Hartmann for having the cojones to write about this on TruthOut and mention it on his program today(?).

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

A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog

Democratic Rep. John Lewis has joined a lawsuit against the Senate use of the filibuster to obstruct legislation.

After years of complaining — and a failed attempt at reform from within — several Democratic lawmakers and others have taken decisive action against the Senate filibuster in the courts.

Reps. John Lewis ( D-Ga.), Michael Michaud (D-Maine), Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), and Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) joined a lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court in Washington by Common Cause, a government watchdog organization. The suit charges that the rule is unconstitutional and was never contemplated by the nation’s founders.

The lawmakers on the suit say they all have introduced legislation in the House only to have it blocked in the Senate by use of the filibuster, which allows a minority to block further action on nearly any bill.

Once a rarely used procedural tactic, filibusters have become commonplace in recent years — requiring a supermajority of 60 senators to approve almost any legislation.

Since 2006, there have been more filibusters than the total between 1920 and 1980, filibuster critics note. As a result, in the last Congress the Senate was unable to pass a single appropriations or budget bill, left more than 400 bills sent over by the House unconsidered, and left key executive appointments and judicial nominations to languish.

Senate Republicans have routinely used the filibuster to torpedo much of President Obama’s legislative agenda, including most of his American Jobs Act, designed to bolster U.S. employment.

“Most Americans have lost confidence in Congress and its ability to act in the best interest of the American public,” says Bob Edgar, president and CEO of Common Cause.  “They have good reason. Congress is mired in gridlock as partisan factions put political advantage over the national interest. Requiring 60 votes to do anything in the Senate is a big part of the problem. It creates a disincentive to compromise, and allows powerful special interests to call the shots behind closed doors.”

The 52-page complaint argues that the filibuster allows senators representing as little as 11 percent of the population to prevent votes in the Senate; that violates the Constitution, which envisioned majority rule except where specifically stated otherwise, the plaintiffs charge. Once used to ensure open debate and deliberation, the filibuster rule is now used to actually stifle debate and make a mockery of the legislative process, they add.  

The complaint notes that the filibuster has even kept the Senate from reforming its own rules, because any attempt at reform has itself been blocked by a filibuster.

“It’s clear the framers intended that a supermajority be required only in rare and special cases, like impeachment, ratifying a treaty, or overriding a presidential veto,” says Emmet Bondurant, Common Cause’s lead attorney on the lawsuit. “It was not meant to block debate.”

A revised rule that permits extended debate but guarantees a simple majority vote at the end of the day would solve the constitutional problem, Bondurant says.

Also listed as plaintfiffs are three young people whose future in the United States is in doubt because of the filibuster of the DREAM Act, legislation which would provide “conditional” green cards to as many as 2.1 million people who were brought to the United States illegally by their parents when they were under the age of 16. It would allow them to work, attend college and serve in the military. It also would put them on a path to citizenship.

Plaintiffs Erika Andiola, Ceasar Vargas and Celso Mireles were brought as children to the United States from Mexico by their parents, according to Common Cause.  Each earned a college degree with honors and would be on track to become a U.S. citizen under the DREAM Act. Passed in the House of Representatives, and supported by a majority of senators, the DREAM Act was killed when just 41 senators refused to end the filibuster blocking it.

идея за подарък

An apparent conflict of interest by JPMorgan Chase boss Jamie Dimon is drawing more scrutiny on Capitol Hill.

The massive $2 billion loss reported last week by the nation’s largest bank continues to roil Capitol Hill. The loss, by JPMorgan Chase, not only has renewed calls for stricter financial regulation — but now the calls of conflict-of-interest on the part of JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon are growing louder.

At issue is Dimon’s dual role at the Federal Reserve. Democrat Elizabeth Warren, a candidate for Senate from Massachusetts and a former Obama administration financial consumer advocate, first called on Dimon to resign his post at the Fed.

Now the issue has jumped from the campaign trail to the Senate floor, where Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) says he is readying new legislation.

“It is an obvious conflict of interest for Jamie Dimon, the CEO of the largest bank in America, to serve on the New York Fed’s board of directors,” Sanders says. “The New York Fed is in charge of both regulating JPMorgan Chase and deciding whether or not to provide billions of dollars in virtually zero-interest loans to this too-big-to-fail institution if it needs another bailout. This is a clear example of the fox guarding the henhouse.

“I am working on legislation to reform the Federal Reserve that would end this conflict of interest. No one who works for a firm receiving direct financial assistance from the Fed should be allowed to sit on the Fed’s board of directors or be employed by the Fed,” Sanders adds.

Sanders says that Government Accountability Office audits found that:

• Dimon served on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York at the same time that his bank received over $390 billion in total emergency loans from the Fed.
• Dimon convinced the Fed to take risky mortgage-related assets off of Bear Stearns balance sheet before JPMorgan Chase acquired this troubled investment bank.

• JPMorgan Chase was used by the Fed as a clearinghouse for the Fed’s emergency lending programs.
• Dimon was successful in getting the Fed to provide JPMorgan Chase with an 18-month exemption from risk-based leverage and capital requirements.

The state media wasn’t much better, devoting an article or two on a “exposé” and then right back to debating pig effluvium and its pros and cons. The blogosphere picked up the story, and when the voters found out, they overwhelmingly rejected these measures in states in which they were exposed, and passed them in states in which they were not.

This year is the SAME THING. On steroids.

And if we don’t pay attention, and if the media do not pay attention, then we are guilty of electoral treason. Period.

Let me give you a case in point, and then I’ll tell you WHY we need to pay attention to what the REAL election is, and why it’s important.

Foster “Aspirin Knees” Friess.

Koch Dominionists for Santorum 6 January 2012

Slow as it was, the dinosaur media found out that Foster was financing Rick Santorum’s superpac. And, he was standing behind Santorum cheering in Iowa. A couple Wyoming blogs and I found it almost immediately. (I give them full credit for spotting Foster first, but my observation wasn’t influenced by theirs.)

Articles were written. Pundits pontificated. But nobody dug.

It remained obscure in news reports that Foster financed and just ponied up another seven figures for The Daily Caller, run by his Jackson Hole, Wyoming neighbor and Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff Neil Patel. Cheney is another neighbor in Millionaire Gulch, outside of Jackson. The only face noted by media is the media face, Tucker Carlson, and even that isn’t much talked about.

We know, for instance, that Andrew Breitbart and Tucker Carlson staged a stealth maneuver to “interview” Bill Ayers.

[* A "benefit" lunch with Ayers was auctioned off at a fundraiser, not for his past, but for his present involvement in the community and education; an operative purchased the auction, and then Breitbart dot com and The Daily Caller dot com showed up. You can hear Bill Ayers public radio interview "My dinner with Andrew Breitbart and Tucker Carlson," March 15, 2012 HERE.]

The spirit animating Breitbart dot com

Breitbart dot com and The Daily Caller have become prominent for taking down persons, bullying media and getting people fired (e.g. Shirley Sherrod in the former case, and David Weigel in the latter. There are many more instances.)

But, during the entire phony “presidential” primaries race and media circus, amidst torrents, floods and seas of blather, nobody had any spare time to note the bizarre connection between The Daily Caller and Foster Friess as a meaningful avenue of inquiry?

This is the same media that provided their OWN tour bus for the fake “Tea Party Express” tours (CNN) thus giving the imprimateur of imperial media legitimacy, even though it’s the same bus show that started out as the “You Don’t Speak for Me, Cindy” tour, to promote the War and silence Cindy Sheehan’s increasingly effective (at the time) protest against the unlawful war of aggression against the wrong opponent.

The “public’s right to know” 2010

When Foster made his “aspirin between the knees” joke to Andrea Mitchell, he claimed a special “wedding anniversary” getaway and existed the media spotlight to hide out like the drunken younger brother of a legislator up for state re-election in a Motel 6, with plenty of booze, cable TV and a baby-sitter.

The media stopped asking any questions, even though it is known that Foster Friess was one of those singled out for praise by Charles Koch at the Palm Springs get-together last year for having given their zillionaires’ slush fund a million dollars before. I’ve gone into this at length, so I won’t repeat myself here.

The Aspen Koch Get-together. Click pic for details

The point is that when somebody gives the Kochs a million bucks to launder however they may, almost single-handedly underwrites the presidential campaign of the last man standing, who was given absolutely zero chance of surviving past Iowa by those self-same know-it-alls, isn’t that worth cutting a couple slices of BS blather out of the columns and paying some investigative attention?

When he underwrites a prominent new “attack media” Right Wing blog in collusion with the fading Breitbart dot com empire that gave us James “Pimp” O’Keefe, with the instantly recognizable mask of Tucker Carlson in front of the snarling face of the Cheney Veepiness, isn’t that worthy of paying SOME DAMNED ATTENTION TO?!??

No.

Because this election isn’t expected to involve us. This election is for rats. This election will take place at the state and local levels as the Friesses and the Kochs finance a Pavlovian election machine that they tested out in 2010.

Let me show you how pernicious this is. AAMCO Transmissions. (You ought to hear their jingle “Double A, Em Cee Oh. AAAMCO.)

Those jingles, ubiquitous in American life since the early days of radio, have a very specific purpose: they condition you to associate the tune with the name, so that you will think of the name when you think of the product.

Roto-Rooter!

Well and good. But that’s conditioning. That’s not choice. Bill Maher was paneling last night and ranting about fast food, that it was a choice and his split on the issue. But it isn’t a choice. If you’ve watched any TV, you might notice that the food commercials come on just at those points they think you might be hungry. Dinnertime. Breakfast.

Even my favorite recent commercial, where a “phantom bong” is in the middle of a table surrounded by Jack in the Box taco wrappers, always run late at night (with Late Night logo), and showing the reverse angle that no, it’s ACTUALLY a ceramic mug and was a trick of the light. The two stoner dudes are saying how great their surcease of munchies was.  The initial impression is clear: stoned? Jack tacos would be AWESOME right now, and hey! We’re open right now.

Click for the commercial on YouTube

Or the current Applebees commercial, (which you should just listen to, without looking; THEN go back and look): The soundtrack emphasizes the sizzle sound. And they even cop to it. “And what gets your juices flowing.” Anton Pavlov must be chuckling. Now, they ring the bell, and WE drool.

Frank Luntz became the indispensable man in Republican Rhetoric long ago, not for his eloquence, but for his Pavlovian research into WHAT words will imprint, will create the proper emotional response, will cause the dog to drool.

Death Tax.

And now, it’s a simple game of pick your candidate, turn on your secret SuperPac machine, and carpet-bomb with conditioning.

Candidate A? Unicorns and rainbows and butterflies.

Candidate B? Dark Satanic rites, prowling wolves, spiders.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Roto-Rooter.

Associative Conditioning

What happened in 2006 was a national legislative agenda, drafted by unseen hands for shadowy plutocratic masters. And we STILL don’t actually know who financed it. (Although the implications are clear enough that anyone but a journalist or lawyer could see it.)

What happened in 2010 was a shift to playing a national game at a state level. Having a slate of candidates. Taking out unwary incumbents in poorly-covered primaries. Overwhelming the state parties and organizations with CONDITIONING and taking over governorships and legislatures across the land.

The real, untold story of 2010 was how the “Tea Party” meme was created and conditioned, supported and financed, successfully, to grab massive power across the land, and the same machinery is clanking underway this year as well.

The Republican party is being taken over by another force, the pie on whose crust Mitt Romney merely is a top flake upon. Here’s a little factotum: The Republican governor of New Mexico, elected in 2010 was aided by a $300,000 donation from Foster Friess, the largest donation in her campaign.

In Wisconsin, Foster Friess is (or was, as of last month) among the top contributors to Scott Walker’s “Don’t Recall Me, Bro!” campaign, to the tune of six figures. (And the bastard has the gall to whine that he’s not NEARLY as rich as some of the other players. “I may be richer than Croesus, but I’m an underdog, because so many gazillionaires have more than I. I’m not even a lousy BILLIONAIRE.” Awww. We weep.)

When you’re worth several hundred
million dollars, you get to pretend
you’re a cowboy and nobody
will say a word. Money talks. 

THAT is this year’s election. The shadowy masters, and those trying to make us drool, utterly without any but the slightest nod to the higher cognitive faculties, like … choice.

All they are trying to do is to get the rats to press the proper lever, using conditioning and reinforcement techniques.

And if that doesn’t scare the piss out of you, there’s no point in going on.

This is a NATIONAL campaign being waged on a state level.

Used to be that it was a contest of self-limiting size. It used to be here in Eugene, Oregon, a state senator’s campaign rarely went above five figures spent (and a low five figures at that)  and often less than five figures. Now, it is a six-figure race. Each election ramps up the costs of running for statewide offices geometrically.  Money becomes the determinant.

And, increasingly, as in Wisconsin, the money has nothing whatsoever to do with the state. Somewhere in Valhalla, over a marble chessboard, played with bejeweled pieces made of precious metals and lovingly hand-crafted by Norns, the Great Bears and Bulls play a money game this year, picking and choosing the candidates that they have no moral entitlement to support or deny, since they do not live on the ground with we, poor ants, nor share our toils and travails.

Political parties used to be different, state by state. The “national party” was a creature of the state parties. Today, the GOP is a franchise operation, and the local and state parties merely retail outlets, where, mostly, “involved” citizens are allowed to play kabuki politics that have no effect on the candidates, the issues or the legislation that ensues. They are valuable more for their bodies in getting the rats out to press the proper lever than they are for their modest contributions. Their money is meaningless, as is your money.

Sorry lady. You’re off the board and out of the game.

But we pretend that it is still like Idaho was in 2006. When you look through the patiently chronicled contributions it is easy to spot the out of state “Club for Growth” bundles. The average donation that year was five and ten, and sometimes fifty dollars. Those were the in-state donations. The out-of-state donations ran to four and even five figures.  How is granny going to compete, politically, with her widow’s mite against the plutocrats’ might?

Local fundraising and local donations (and support) have become mere window-dressing. The real action is in the money that can now sluice in, smoking and steaming,  from every piggy bank in hell.

THAT is the real election. THAT would actually employ reporters covering a presidential contest more notable for its gaffes than for its substance. One candidate actually HAS no substance.

But he DOES have a massive “independent” conditioning machine behind him, as Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum and all other pretenders found out to their chagrin. No candidate ever approached 1:1 parity. Usually they were outspent twenty and forty to one.

teeny facebook ad
running presently for
Americans For Prosperity
(Koch front group) page

We are enslaved by our conditioning. Multiple generations of Americans will instantly hear a jingle when the magic words are spoken.

I wish I was an Oscar Mayer wiener.

The Faux Nooz crowd are so conditioned that they truly believe that President Obama was born in Kenya, is a Muslim, is a “socialist” (whatever THAT means, but it’s BAD, right?), is a Marxist (see previous parenthetical), a radical, the “most divisive president in modern American history” (as I actually heard spoken with a straight face this week, thinking, true, if by “modern” you mean the past three years) and is a “celebrity.”

Jack = yum

Which is hilarious, since being a celebrity has become the lingua franca of American discourse AND the chiefest thing to be ardently hoped and dreamed for its magical acquisition. cf. “Kardassian.” cf. every author in America, who must now become a “celebrity” interview to sell books. cf. everyone on TeeVee. cf. every journalist, who requires the cachet of BEING on TV to lend “celebrity” status to his/her journalism. “I been on TeeVee. I’s a REAL journalist.”

Or in the words of Faux Nooz (local edition):

The Fauxmobile screeches to a halt (You can tell, because it’s got the logo emblazoned on its otherwise white exterior). Reporter, sound/boom guy and cameraman emerge, along with another couple of guys holding portable lights, which they aim at an unshaven, fedora’d fellow leading a pack mule out of the Sonoran desert.

HEAD JOURNO: We are reporters. You know, journalistos.

F.C. DOBBS: If you’re journalistos, where are your facts?

HEAD JOURNO: Facts? FACTS?? We don’ got to show you no steenking facts!

(With apologies to John Huston.)

The “reporting” isn’t as important as the conditioning.

Bong: Jack in the Box.

Phantom bong reinforcement

(The later message that it was a trick of the light, even though J.P. Morgan’s ‘phantom dagger’ is literally in the center of the frame doesn’t undo the conditioning. FIRST impressions are almost always the only impressions that matter. How else do you explain the still prevalent idiocy that AIDS has something to do with homosexuality? It’s a disease that shows up according to the chain of transmitters, not the method of transmission. In Haiti and Africa, it’s a disease of heterosexuals. But the INITIAL conditioning was that it’s “God’s Vengeance on Homos” and that conditioning remains stuck fast in the glottis of American small-mindedness to this very day.)

Famous Edward Steichen portrait of 
J.P. Morgan with “phantom dagger” 

Let me give you an example (from “Truth Is Whatever I Say It Is” ):

[Karl Rove] “writes” this in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal today:

As for the killing of Osama bin Laden, Mr. Obama did what virtually any commander in chief [sic] would have done in the same situation. Even President Bill Clinton says in the film “that’s the call I would have made.” For this to be portrayed as the epic achievement of the first term tells you how bare the White House cupboards are…

Setting aside for a moment Mr. Rove’s qualifications as a film critic (they are slightly fewer than his qualifications as a creature with a soul or a conscience), one asks one’s self: When was the last time that you ever heard ANY Republican admit that Bill Clinton could possibly be right about ANYthing? And yet, here, Karl Rove is marking up the merchandise right in front of our eyes.

[...]

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal has “corrected” the lie that Karl Rove told:

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this column included an incomplete quote from Bill Clinton in the last paragraph.

Now, it reads: Even President Bill Clinton says in the film ”I hope that’s the call I would have made.“

Which completely changes the meaning of Rove’s oily assertion.

The correction doesn’t matter. The first impression has produced the desired imprinting, GIGO as they used to say in the punch card days of computing, “Garbage In: Garbage Out.”

YouTube “click to turn off” Romney ad that appears on videos right now

Here is some conditioniong today from John Hinderaker, new Koch appointee to the CATO Institute board, former vice-taker-downer of Dan Rather:

John Hinderaker / Power Line:

Is Romney Pulling Away?  —  It is, of course, way too early to get cocky.  But Republicans have to be happy with the way current polling is going.  In this morning’s tracking poll at Rasmussen Reports, Mitt Romney leads Barack Obama by a stunning 50%-42%.  Rasmussen’s matchup is a rolling three …

Discussion:

Gregg Re / The Daily Caller:   Obama ignores gay marriage issue on Saturday as Romney surges ahead

Scared Monkeys:   Rasmussen: Mitt Romney 50% – Barack Obama 42% … Hardly Good Polling Numbers for an Incumbent President

McPartland / nation.foxnews.com:   Rasmussen Poll: Romney 50%, Obama 42%

Weasel Zippers:   Rasmussen: Romney 50%, Obama 42%

You see the talking points, which are about conditioning. And it has been successful. You can see how much if you follow threads in discussion groups. A made up example:

Someone is making a point about campaign cash, and uses an analogy about tacos.

Someone else says: “Tacos! Tacos? I LOVES me some tacos!’

And someone else says ‘But not those tacos at Hyper-Taco. They’re using evil chemical additives!’

And then someone else says, yes, it’s all a conspiracy of the FritoBandito Supremacy, who have taken control of every bubble-gum manufacturing facility on the planet!”

And someone else says “Bubble-gum! Bubble-gum? I LOVES me some bubble-gum!”

And so forth.

Jack tacos yum – from same commercial

The logical train of thought is not rational, it is associative: it is dream logic, the logic of the subconscious (or the soul-in-drag) of teddy bears remind you of childhood and that reminds you of your childhood and that reminds you of your bed where the teddy bear used to sit and that hole in the mattress that your brother burned in it playing with matches and how much you used to like matches and free matchbooks that said “Can you draw the Pirate?” and how much you liked Pirates of the Caribbean, and so on.

Can YOU draw the pirate?

The links are by association, but not logical. The constant and unending conditioning that we’ve undergone has programmed an unending and endlessly annoying series of conditionings that have trapped us as surely as the Lilliputians trapped Gulliver with gossamer threads.

So: secret gazillionaires are paying Frank Luntzes and filmmakers to condition you via carpet-bombing all the way down to the local level. And you’ve been neatly finessed right off the game board.

Because your thoughtful vote only counts as one against a sea of rats trained to press the proper lever.

Woof

All the way down to your hometown.

That’s this election and that’s the national story that we need to be talking about, no matter whose face ultimately graces the marquee.

All that matters is that the conditioning proceeds, bypassing rational thought and producing the proper results for our chess masters.

But that’s not newsworthy.

Roto-rooter!

Courage.

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

A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog

by WALTER BRASCH

Last year, not one of the 491,687 new minivans sold in the United States was made in America by unionized workers.

Some were manufactured overseas by companies owned by non-American manufacturers. The Kia Sedona, with 24,047 sales, was built in South Korea, Russia, and the Philippines. The MAZDA5, with 19,155 sales, was built in China, Japan, and Taiwan.

Some minivans from Japanese companies were built in the U.S., but by non-unionized workers. Honda sold 107,068 Odysseys built in Alabama. Toyota Siennas, built in Indiana, went to 111,429 persons. The Nissan Quest, built in Ohio, had 12,199 sales.

Only three minivans were built by unionized workers, but they were made in Canada by members of the Canadian Auto Workers. The Dodge Grand Caravan, with 110,996 sales; Chrysler Town & Country, with 94,320 sales; and the VW Routan, with 12,473 sales, all share the same basic body; most differences are cosmetic. GM and Ford no longer produce minivans.

The United Auto Workers (UAW) suggests that members who wish to buy minivans buy one of the three Chrysler products because much of the parts are manufactured in the United States by UAW members.

All cars, trucks, and vans from GM, Ford, and Chrysler are produced by union workers in the U.S. or Canada. The Japanese-owned Mitsubishi Eclipse, Spyder, and Galant, and the Mazda6 are produced in the U.S. under UAW contracts; neither company makes minivans. All vehicles produced in the U.S. have the first Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) as a 1, 4, or 5; vehicles produced in Canada have a 2 as the first VIN number.

Founded in 1935, the UAW quickly established a reputation for creating the first cost-of-living allowances (COLAs) and employer-paid health care programs. It helped pioneer pensions, supplementary unemployment benefits, and paid vacations.

It has been at the forefront of social and economic justice issues; Walter Reuther, its legendary president between 1946 and his death in 1970, marched side-by-side with Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez, and helped assure that the UAW was one of the first unions to allow minorities into membership and to integrate the workforce. Bob King, its current president, a lawyer, was arrested for civil disobedience, carrying on the tradition of the social conscience that has identified the union and its leadership.

The UAW doesn’t mind that corporations make profits; it does care when some of the profit is at the expense of the worker, for without a competent and secure work force, there would be no profit. When the economy failed under the Bush–Cheney administration, and the auto manufacturers were struggling, the UAW recognized it was necessary for the workers to take pay cuts and make other concessions for the companies to survive.

But not all corporations have the social conscience that the UAW and the “Big 3” auto manufacturers developed. For decades, American corporations have learned that to “maximize profits,” “improve the bottom line,” and “give strength to shareholder stakes” they could downsize their workforce and ship manufacturing throughout the world. Our companies have outsourced almost every form of tech support, as well as credit card assistance, to vendors whose employees speak varying degrees of English, but tell us their names are George, Barry, or Miriam. Clothing, toys, and just about anything bought by Americans could be made overseas by children working in abject conditions; their parents might make a few cents more, and in certain countries would be thrilled to earn less than half the U.S. minimum wage.

Americans go along with this because they think they are getting their products cheaper. What they don’t want to see is the working conditions of those who are employed by companies that are sub-contractors to the mega-conglomerates of American enterprise. These would be the same companies whose executives earn seven and eight-figure salaries and benefits, while millions are unemployed.

But, Americans don’t care. After all, we’re getting less expensive products, even if what we buy is cheaply made because overseas managers, encouraged by American corporate executives, lower the quality of materials and demand even more work from their employees.

Walk into almost every department store and Big Box store, and it’s a struggle to find clothes, house supplies, and entertainment media made in America. If you do find American-made products, they are probably produced in “right-to-work” states that think unionized labor is a Communist-conspiracy to destroy the free enterprise system of the right to make obscene profits at the expense of the working class.

We can wave flags and tell everyone how much more patriotic we are than them, but we still can’t buy a minivan made in America by unionized workers—even when the price is lower than that of the non-unionized competition.

[Sales figures of minivans is from Edmunds.com. Also assisting was Rosemary Brasch. Walter Brasch’s latest book is the critically-acclaimed novel Before the First Snow, which looks at the mass media, social justice, and the labor movement. The book is available from amazon, local bookstores, and http://www.greeleyandstone.com in both hard copy or an ebook.]

School Choice

We know that the Right Wing dislikes actual rational thought: evolution, global warming, science, higher education. OK: ALL edumacation.

This week brings to light a series of ugly “What do them experts know? Any boob knows more than any so-called ‘expert’!” arguments.

We begin with Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi, who has somehow slipped into an attitude of utter “expertise” on governance and policy that is in no wise borne out by the evidence. He’s BORED with the election. Awww: 

… Obama and Romney feels like a contest between two calculating centrists, fighting for the right to serve as figurehead atop a bloated state apparatus that will operate according to the same demented imperial logic irrespective of who wins the White House. George Bush’s reign highlighted the enormous power of the individual president to drive policy, which made the elections involving him compelling contests; Obama’s first term has highlighted the timeless power of the intractable bureaucracy underneath the president, which is kind of a bummer, when you think about it.

Then there’s one more thing – Obama versus Romney is the worst reality show on TV since the Tila Tequila days. The characters are terrible, there’s no suspense, and the biggest thing is, it lacks both spontaneity and a gross-out factor. In Reality TV, if you don’t have really sexy half-naked young people scheming against each other over campfires in the Cook Islands, you need to have grown men eating millipedes or chicks in bikinis drinking donkey semen. And if you don’t have that, you really need Sarah Palin.

This race has none of that. Biden is the best character in the series, but for exactly that reason the Obama administration would be wise to bury crazy Joe in a salt mine until the election is over.

And so on and so forth. Taibbi has a right to feel disillusioned, but the old “I’m better than all this” snark is as specious as it is tired. We don’t live in a perfect world, but we are required to DEAL with the world we’re in. And Taibbi increasingly seems to feel that not only IS there a perfect world, but that he alone inhabits it. Frankly, his Olympian preenings and pronouncements sound more and more out of touch as evidenced here. But that’s not the real meat of this intellectual abattoir. (Even though, increasingly, Taibbi’s got the knacker.)

Worse, this is the most consequential election of my lifetime, and the Dred Pirate Roberts Court has handed the keys to the safe to those who looted the treasury (remember, nearly all that Iraq cash came back to US war contractors or soldiers’ pay sent home) and, having only audacity, the MUST win this election, else face REAL regulations and even criminal charges.

The latest political headlines powered by NBC News and msnbc.com  —  NBC News projects Lugar defeated in Indiana primary  —  NBC News has declared Richard Mourdock as the projected winner in the Indiana Senate primary.  Mourdock defeated six-term Republican foreign policy elder statesman Sen. Richard Lugar…

As today’s Indiana outcome shows, the Koch/AFP/Tea Party Axis of Evil can take down an insufficiently obeisant GOP Senator, as Dick Lugar was involuntarily retired in today’s primary. And, unlike Holy Joe Lieberman in Connecticut, or Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, Indiana has a “sore loser” law doesn’t allow any run or write-in in the general election.

You lose, you lose: Like March Madness on the basketball court, and not the endless appeals that make the modern law court such a joke.

This is a consequential election, and Mr. Taibbi’s “boredom” with it only stresses Mr. Taibbi’s intellectual limitations.

Which is a perfect segue into what’s really going on today, “intellectual limitations” …

Anti-gay amendment passed in N. Carolina today

Pirate Rupert Murdoch’s The New York Post SCREAMS:

Academics’ response to criticism? Fire that racist!
9:55 AM, May 7, 2012 by Abby W. Schachter

As a blogger for the Chronicle of Higher Education Naomi Schaefer Riley is paid to write about what is going on in academia from her perspective. She was doing her job when Riley wrote about the failure of black studies at American universities, citing PhD dissertations as evidence of the weakness of the discipline.

The response to her post can be summed up as follows: She’s a racist and she should be fired….

Of course. Every dumbass in America can attest to how hideously prejudiced those eggheads are.

Little Billy Kristol’s The Weakly Standardud picks up on THE HORROR, THE HORROR of the Right’s newest Martyr to the Language Police. Mistah Kurtz, he write:

Not the Weakly Standardud, but might as well be

Mob on the Quad 
2:22 PM, MAY 8, 2012 • BY JONATHAN V. LAST

Late last night, in a shameful example of editorial cowardice, the Chronicle of Higher Education fired Naomi Schaefer Riley. Naomi is a good friend of mine, a sometimes contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, and a fine writer. And the story of what happened to her is highly instructive.

Naomi joined the Chronicle’s “Brainstorm Blog” a little over a year ago. It was a good hire—she’s written two insightful books on academia, God on the Quad and The Faculty Lounges, along with dozens of articles on the subject. Her postings were smart and entertaining. (For a couple of samples, click over to “If this is art, your middle-school daughter is Picasso” and “No sex for you.”)

Last week she wrote about the world of “Black Studies” in a post titled “The most persuasive case for getting rid of Black Studies? Read the dissertations.” You should read the whole thing, because it’s only 520 words, but here’s the gist of Naomi’s argument:

I just got around to reading The Chronicle’s recent piece on the young guns of black studies. If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.

That’s what I would say about Ruth Hayes’ dissertation, “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth.” It began because she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.” How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in “natural birth literature,” whatever the heck that is? It’s scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia. [...]

The Gadsdumb Flag

TWS is no longer owned by Rupert Murdoch (who was losing $2 million a year underwriting it) but the connections are still there. As is the use of media to counter-smear those who read Ms. Riley’s somewhat less than lily-white screed, albeit in the completely Black and White world of Murdochiana/GOPville, she IS white and IS talking about Black, ergo, White makes Right.

And, of course, by cherry-picking dissertations, her Limbaughesque screed is “justified”? All Black Studies dissertations are written by morons is the implicit assumption. You see, if anything either stupid, or, taken out of context, a stupid quote appears, ALL Black studies ought to be disbanded?

That’s intellectual. Fer sure, fer sure.

We loves us some Rupert

Here’s what the editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education said to her readers:

A Note to Readers
May 7, 2012, 7:21 pm

By Liz McMillen
When we published Naomi Schaefer Riley’s blog posting on Brainstorm last week (“The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations”), several thousand of you spoke out in outrage and disappointment that The Chronicle had published an article that did not conform to the journalistic standards and civil tone that you expect from us.

We’ve heard you, and we have taken to heart what you said.

We now agree that Ms. Riley’s blog posting did not meet The Chronicle’s basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles. As a result, we have asked Ms. Riley to leave the Brainstorm blog.

Since Brainstorm was created five years ago, we have sought out bloggers representing a range of intellectual and political views, and we have allowed them broad freedom in topics and approach. As part of that freedom, Brainstorm writers were able to post independently; Ms. Riley’s post was not reviewed until after it was posted.

I realize we have made mistakes. We will thoroughly review our editorial practices on Brainstorm and other blogs and strengthen our guidelines for bloggers.

In addition, my Editor’s Note last week inviting you to debate the posting also seemed to elevate it to the level of informed opinion, which it was not. I also realize that, as the controversy unfolded last week, our response on Twitter did not accurately convey The Chronicle’s message.

I sincerely apologize for the distress these incidents have caused our readers and appreciate that so many of you have made your sentiments known to us.

One theme many of you have sounded is that you felt betrayed by what we published; that you welcome healthy informed debate, but that in this case, we did not live up to the expectations of the community of readers we serve.

You told us we can do better, and we agree.

—Liz McMillen, Editor

Oh. Well, they’re just stoopid racists. Next question?

A more rational tea party

NO! We’s smarteez! This iz censoring and stuff! And Nick Gillespie at the Koch-funded Reason foundation just chipped in his two buffalo chips’ worth:

I do find the Chronicle’s response absolutely breath-taking and craven in its censoriousness. If the questions raised by Schaefer Riley’s posts are outside the bounds of discussion at a blog about higher education, then why bother having even the semblance of a discussion? And it strikes me as disingenuous to sack someone for a single blog post that did not meet the Chronicle’s “basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles.” There’s no question of ethics or professionalism raised by Schaefer Riley’s posts than those that are raised by an ongoing series of articles about what a waste of time and money and resources it is to get a degree in English, or art history, or sociology, or whatever.

This is plainly a politically correct response to a thug’s veto and should be owned up to as such.

Unknown, Howard Rich, Nick Gillespie, Andrea Rich

Never one to let a snark get caught in his obligatory Black Leather Jacket (else he would have no identity, seemingly), Gillespie can’t help but end with this:

Ironically, the post at Brainstorm (possibly the worst name for a blog since The New Republic introduced “The Plank” and “The Spine”) …

Ahh. Them racist intellek’chuals. We’s all real much smarter than them, because dumb = real smart, where smart = dumb.

Two plus two really DOES equal five?

Or, perhaps the “Martyr” abused her freedom to say whatever she wanted, without regard to the Editorial policies or readership, whose hard-earned bucks trickle down into Ms. Multi-name Riley’s exchequer. Naw. Like Limbaugh, we MUST patronize the businesses that pay to have us insulted. Free speech, in this case, trumping the Almighty Dollar, in one of those rare instances of the GOPpers being against the “Free Market.” Right.

Fake cowboy bringing aspirin to the women of the world

Here’s Foster “Aspirin Knees” Friess’ paid-blogger on President Obama’s twenties (from the new rooting-through-garbage book):

Obama’s Writings Clearly Display His Everyman Status
by T. J. Haley
May 4, 2012

Letters to girlfriends will always come back to bite you

[quoted letter from book ...]

Quite a read, huh? It sounds like Barack Obama was an absolute riot to hang out with back in the day. Why would anyone ever call this man an elitist?

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: No one understands everyday Americans like people who were analyzing the nuances of T.S. Eliot in their early 20s.

If I could choose five famous people I would most want to sit down with and discuss Eliot’s love for metaphysical poetry, Barack Obama would be at the top of the list.

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

A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog

In the midst of his battle for re-election, Obama announced in an interview with ABC News: “I think same sex couples should be able to get married.”

Previously, Obama had said only that his views on the issue had been “evolving.”

But with his declaration Wednesday, Democrats and other progressives quickly rallied to the president’s side.

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, chairwoman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), fired off an email titled “BREAKING: Historic announcement.”

“Today is an historic day in America. This afternoon, President Obama announced his support for marriage equality for all Americans,” Murray says. “I am standing with the President and I hope you will, too. As a result of taking this stand, President Obama will face attacks from every corner of the Republican Party. Everyone from Mitt Romney to the tea partiers will unite behind this issue to try to end his presidency.”

Murray’s email includes a link to an online petition in support of same-sex marriage which the senator encourages recipients to sign.

Democracy For America (DFA), a prominent progressive organization associated with former Vermont governor and 2004 presidential candidate Howard Dean, portrayed Obama’s announcement in similar terms.

“This is a huge moment for DFA members who’ve been working towards full marriage equality across the country — in California, in New York, in North Carolina, in Vermont, in Washington and everywhere in between,” says Jim Dean, chairman of DFA and Howard Dean’s brother. “Our work’s not done yet, but this is a huge victory in that fight.”

DFA’s email includes a link to allow Twitter users to tweet their thanks to the president.

Meanwhile, the president himself emailed supporters to explain his sudden outpouring of support.

In the email sent from his 2012 re-election campaign website, Obama described how his thinking had changed.

“I’ve always believed that gay and lesbian Americans should be treated fairly and equally. I was reluctant to use the term marriage because of the very powerful traditions it evokes. And I thought civil union laws that conferred legal rights upon gay and lesbian couples were a solution,” the president says. “But over the course of several years I’ve talked to friends and family about this. I’ve thought about members of my staff in long-term, committed, same-sex relationships who are raising kids together. Through our efforts to end the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy, I’ve gotten to know some of the gay and lesbian troops who are serving our country with honor and distinction.

“What I’ve come to realize is that for loving, same-sex couples, the denial of marriage equality means that, in their eyes and the eyes of their children, they are still considered less than full citizens,” Obama says.

I am about half way through my review copy and have to say it’s one of the best and most inspiring political books I have read in sometime. The following is an excerpt from We Can All Do Better:

In the 21st century, the intelligence of people will determine the future. Our free society can be the magnet for some of the world’s brightest minds if we deliberately, carefully, and intelligently open ourselves up. Lee Kuan Yew, the former Prime Minister of Singapore, has said that while China has a talent pool of 1.3 billion people, the U.S., given its history openess, can draw talent from all 7 billion people in the world. We should welcome the arrival of doctors, scientists, writers, mathematicians, computer specialists, language teachers, and other such talented professionals from abroad. Anytime a foreign student gets an advanced degree from an American university, he or she should automatically get a green card. We should also be open to those with entrepreneurial spirit who have the resources and want to start a business. Finally we should welcome not just the brightest or those with resources but also, as we always have done, those in limited numbers who just want a better life and show the ambition to seek it here. Surely, in a land as large as ours, we can make room for the energy, drive, and optimism that immigrants bring to our shores.

Ever since the Great Depression, the economic prospect that has most terrified policymakers has been a labor surplus — unemployment. Even now, when unemployment remains at an unacceptably high level, it’s difficult to imagine that within fifteen years we will have a labor scarcity. The magic number needed to maintain a stable population is 2.1 children per woman. In 2010 we were at 1.93. As baby boomers retire over the next decade, we will need new workers to make the economy grow, pay the Social Security and Medicare taxes necessary to fulfill our promises to the elderly, and produce the goods that they will demand. We either increase our birth rate, or accept more immigrants, or settle for slower economic growth. Look at Japan or Russia, which are both losing population because of low birth rates and hardly any immigration. They are committing slow-motion national suicide. Demographics don’t lie.

Since passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, which abolished the national origins quota system, the face of immigration has changed; there are fewer Europeans and more Central Americans, Asians, and Africans. We have absorbed these immigrants into our larger culture with a minimum of negative repercussions. When I heard a recent radio interview with Linda Sarsour, an Arab-American woman preparing to run for the New York City Council from a Brooklyn district that is heavily Moroccan, Algerian, and Palestinian, I was moved by her obvious devotion to the sense of possibility that is the birthright of all Americans. Newcomers have always added value to America. Look at New York or Jersey City or San Jose or Houston or Miami or Chicago in the last thirty years; each has been revitalized by immigrant communities who have come to America to build lives they couldn’t lead in their homelands. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur I know, a Pakistani Muslim married to a Hindu woman from India, once remarked to me, “Where else in the world but America could we be happy and accepted?”

Our history shows that each wave of immigrants added definition to what it meant to be an American. America is not static but constantly changing. Having overcome the deep racism of its history and integrated successive waves of immigrants, the United States, more than any other country, should welcome the pluralism that is growing in the age of the Internet and whose successful management could inspire admiration around the world.

Adapted excerpt from We Can All Do Better by Bill Bradley. Published in May 2012 by Vanguard Press. Copyright © 2012 by Bill Bradley.