The most fundamental problem with politics today

Some say the trouble with politics is that it has been corrupted by moneyed interests. Others that the other side has gotten too powerful through lies and deception--the right says this about the left, the left about the right.

But there's a deeper problem: society has gotten more complex than at any time in the past, as have the issues facing us--and this complexity is too much for the average human mind. Over half the human race isn't up to the task.

This is nobody's fault. Intelligence is expensive, metabolically speaking. You learn this if you get scuba diver training. Your body pumps an incredible volume of blood through your head in order to feed all those brain cells. Every animal's metabolism represents a compromise between effectiveness and efficiency--that is, we're only as smart as we needed to be 50,000 years ago--otherwise, extra smarts would have added too much need for high protein food.

So...how smart did we need to be? Smarter than other animals. We had that. And in our recent evolution (over the last million years or so) our ancestors got quite a bit smarter. Then we stopped getting smarter, a long time before we developed agriculture and the rest of civilization.

We reached a balance point between what it took to feed our brains and what our brains could do for us.

At that point we were smart enough to become masters of our primitive world--to know what to eat, what to not eat, what the threats were, what the opportunities were...how to make our way through that world.

The problem is that that world doesn't much resemble this one. It wasn't simple, to be sure. Look at what Kalahari Bushmen living traditionally had to know--such as how to find water in a desertlike landscape. But it was an environment someone with an IQ of 100 could master.

Ours isn't.

So there's over half the population, in over their heads. Not so bad when things are going well, as they were in the 50s (if you were white at least). But as things have gotten progressively worse for this group over the last 30 years or more, this group has dimly realized that rising tides didn't lift their boats.

They want hope. They want answers they can understand. They want revenge on whoever did this to them. They want to feel something besides helpless and futureless.

And--especially in times of stress--they want leaders who look like them and talk like them.

This opens the door to demagogues. They make people feel like they do understand the situation, and that they can do something about it.

So what do you say? That they're incapable of understanding the situation, and they're helpless? That dog's not gonna hunt.

So we're stuck. Maybe Slipknot is right..."All hope is gone."

Fort Hood mass murder

I keep thinking about something Osama Bin Ladin said a decade ago: that Christianity is a religion of life, while Islam is a religion of death, and that this fact made us weak and them strong.

So here's an American Major and a psychiatrist--and an Islamist. He was willing to die, to be sure. And to murder as many people as he could before going to his fate.

Nobody wants to deal with the possibility that Islam is more likely to produce Major Hassans than are other world views. This thought doesn't conflict with the likelihood that the average Muslim isn't murderous. I'm just asking whether Islam produces a statistically significantly higher percentage of terrorist/murderers than other world views.

And if so, what can we do about it? Every Islamic terrorist stands on the shoulders of Islamist thought leaders. We have to go after them, and do so in Islamic terms--that's the trick, I suspect. Instead of talking about how Islam is bad, we have to talk about how Islamists are bad Muslims.

We have to attack the underlying beliefs directly. Calling murderers like Hassan cowards or nut cases or solitary actors is both ridiculous and counterproductive. He wasn't a coward--given his beliefs, he was actually quite brave. Studies of terrorist murderers have indicated that they aren't insane in the sense that, say, a paranoid schizophrenic or a manic depressive is insane. And he didn't act alone. He was brought to this state of mind by legions of effective propagandists. I bet if you look at the websites he frequented and possibly the individuals he talked to at his local mosque, you'll find the ideological support for his murders.

Hassan was a Muslim terrorist, trying to achieve social change through murder. I'm sure that's how he saw himself (except for the "terrorist" label of course). Our challenge is to get other Muslims to view him as a bad Muslim.

Population is SO over

To those who believe we can magically feed any number of people, I'll just say

"Hope clouds observation."

The fact that must be faced squarely is that the indigenous populations of the advanced nations are not growing much if at all, while those in the third world are exploding, along with many first generation immigrant populations in America and Europe.

If you look at a chart of population growth over the last few centuries, you'll see that the human population remained stable for centuries, then exploded after around 1900, with the advent of modern medicine; but in the advanced world the advance of women's rights and effective contraception kept the lid on population explosion. Not so in the countries where women have few if no rights--especially those dominated by religions that make women second-class citezens or simply chattel.

Environmentalists considered overpopulation to be a key issue until the 1970s, when they joined with religious conservatives in opposing any limits to population. That's when most environmentalists became enemies of the environment, and of our planet's future, and of future generations, sacrificing them to short-sighted sentimentality.

How these people think the human population can keep expanding infinitely is beyond me. It just shows how little science education the average liberal arts college graduate gets.

Who are district attorneys protecting?

Prosecutorial misconduct is like a mugging that goes on for 10 years. When the Innocence Project was started by a Northwestern U. professor and his student reporters, every district attorney's office fought them tooth and nail to prevent convicts from getting DNA tests--even when the convict was willing to pay for it. And despite the hard-core obstructionism by one out of five of these prosecutors, the Innocence Project has gotten 244 prisoners off death row and long sentences. No one knows how many more have been railroaded by DAs and cops looking for convictions uber alles--the Innocence Project can only work for a few, and those are limited to the ones for whom DNA evidence is available, mostly.

I'm all for the death penalty if a heinous murderer's guilt is unambiguous. But it has to be rock solid--even eye witnesses have proven to be remarkably fallible. And innumerable DAs and cops have proven to be more interested in convictions than in justice.

I bring this up now because the Cook County (Chicago) DA's office has finally done something different about an Innocence Project case.

It's going after the student reporters.

The NYTimes reports it here:

(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/us/25innocence.html?_r=1&hpw=&pagewanted=all)

Making DA and county sheriff offices elective is inherently corrupting, and nonsense like this illustrates how low they can go.

Clash of civilizations?

The American right has been demonizing Islam for years. But there is an element of truth in their rants. The latest came from the New York Times' newish conservative columnist Ross Douthat. Here's my response:

Normally as a centrist Democrat and a devout--so to speak--empiricist, I oppose nearly everything Douthat says.

But I've traveled a fair amount in the world's most populous Muslim-majority country, Indonesia, and I've witnessed the truth of what he says here.

Muslims say "Islam" means submission, and that that means "submission to Allah." And in my wife's and my travels the many Muslims we've encountered personally have lived up to that modest ideal.

But this religion's theological establishment is another matter. Every Mosque in Indonesia--even when it's in majority-Christian or majority-Hindu regions--blares out its calls to prayer and other exhortations hourly from early in the morning to late at night, and does so using PA systems Metallica could use for stadium concerts. The Hindus and Christians subjected to this racket grind their teeth, and they've told us so in no uncertain terms.

An additional irony is that not one Indonesian out of a thousand can understand what's being hollered out through those giant loudspeakers. It's not only in Arabic, a language virtually unrelated to Bahasa Indonesia, but it's an archaic Arabic few Arabs understand either. The interpretation is left up to the local imams, many trained and financed by the rigid fundamentalist Wahhabi sect of Islam, paid for with our petrodollars funneled through Saudi Arabia.

And it's having effect. More and more Indonesian Muslims are being moved rightward, with women taking the veil, so to speak, and even small children being forced to wear stifling, swaddling garments in the hot, humid tropical climate of Indonesia.

We just got back from Bali, and one thing that struck us was a new mosque built on a hillock overlooking a revered Hindu temple set by a lake in Bali's mountains. The symbolism was obvious and inescapable--the mosque was next to the temple grounds and it hung over the Hindu temple complex. The large botanical gardens nearby, where Balinese in love like to go and, if they're daring, even hold hands, is dominated by the calls to prayer blaring out from the adjacent mosque. And Bali is at least 90% Hindu--though Javanase Muslims are pouring across the channel, buying land, building Mosques, and Islamifying more and more of the island. Bali's Hindu majority is complaining to the authorities in Jakarta urgently--to no avail so far.
And this is just a microcosm of the way Islamic officialdom imposes its "new world order" everywhere it can.

Sure, Christians have church bells, and I've heard plenty. But they aren't a fraction of the acoustic dominance the mosques establish wherever they can get away with it.

America hasn't had much problems with Islam within our country because we've gotten the most educated Muslim immigrants, and they're a majority almost nowhere here in communities, except possibly for Detroit--where I hear the Mosque PA systems are doing their very loud thing now.

Islam has plenty of moderates--probably a large majority of their religious community. But they don't control the mosques, by and large, and many don't dare speak up, since Islamists control the moderates through threats, intimidation, and, across the Arab world...murder. Not to mention places like the Netherlands and Denmark and England and Spain, which have all witnessed these things as well. The Islamists stridently insist--very much like Christian fundamentalists--that only they are true Muslims, and you have to knuckle under to their 7th century worldview if you want to be a good Muslim.

And the intimidation has worked, and not just in the mideast and Indonesia. When the Danish cartoons came out, only one large American newspaper dared publish them (the Philadelphia Inquirer). Every other one, including the New York Times, chickened out. And the cartoons were incredibly mild by Western standards.

I don't want to see us pitting ourselves against Islam per se--but we have to stop submitting to it in ways large and small. Visit Bali--a wonderful place to visit, by the way--and you'll see what I mean.

We have to somehow start supporting Muslim moderates. Of course if and when we do the Islamists will call anyone who agrees with us Western stooges. So it will be a very, very tough propaganda war. And of course Bush did so much during his reign to make this job as difficult as possible.

It will take the most astute statesmanship to change the minds of Muslims, a majority of whom, even the moderates, believe the West is out to get them.

But we can't just sit there, silenced by our own liberal convictions (and even American right wingers are liberals by Islamist stndards). They're playing for keeps, and it's time we acknowledge that.

Water supply issues mask a deeper problem

The NYTimes yesterday published an editorial calling for reform of water supply/ pollution legislation and vigorous enforcement of existing laws. I wrote this response:

Everything the NYTimes editorial board recommends in this article is true, I believe. Yet this editorial has a fundamental problem. It doesn't examine the cause of our overuse of our water supplies.

That cause is overpopulation--the issue the American left abandoned decades ago, for fear of being called racist--and because neither liberals nor conservatives, for the most part, have the integrity to face our real problems, because they'd rather not face the solutions required.

Look at an article in this very issue of the Times, titled \"Experts Worry as Population and Hunger Grow,\" stating that currently world population is slated to grow to 9.1B people in 40 years, which in turn will require increasing \"food production 50% in 2030 and 70% in 2050\"--with a communsurate increase in water supplies. And while the perceived overpopulation growth is in the third world, America uses vastly more natural resources than the equivalent number of third world people and land.

The world population was only 1 billion in 1900. Then it took off. Glassy eyed optimists claim that we can feed more people. OK. How many more? Do you honestly think the Earth has infinite growth possibilities for water and food supplies? We're going to tap out everything, technology notwithstanding, sooner or later. And then what? As that article states, today over a billion people suffer from chronic hunger and malnutrition.

And students of war predict that future wars may be fought over water more than anything else--especially where the water moves across national boundaries. We led the charge by destroying Mexico's once-fertile Colorado delta farmlands when we built Hoover Dam--and now that land has been poisoned by salt water intrusion into the water table.

In this country, overpumping is destroying our porous aquifers, as is happening worldwide. Those are underground rock formations that store water. When we overpump these formations the rock settles and it can't store water any more. Then it just runs off into the ocean, and the wells run dry.

So--want to solve our water problems? Start by not letting anyone else into this country, then expel anyone who isn't here with our permission, then follow Communist China's lead by mandating one-child families, then provide free contraception and abortion to anyone, no questions asked.

Sound too harsh? Wait 'till you see what Mother Nature's preparing to do to us if we don't solve our problems ourselves. They'll make the draconian solutions I've proposed look like pattycake in the garden.

Archive time

My spouse and I are going scuba diving in Indonesia for a couple of weeks. While we're gone, you might want to poke around in my archives. I've focused on enduring issues and tried to provide enduring ways of handling yourself in verbal tussles when those issues are being discussed.

Scuba diving helps with all this, BTW. Divers who panic tend to die, but on the other hand if you don't die you'll get lots of practice in overcoming panic (for some reason there's always a little part of your brain screaming "I can't breathe water! Get out of here!" every second you're diving), so it helps one's mental discipline as long as you remember that it's not a safe thing to do and use a certain amount of caution.

But neither does it have to be wildly dangerous. It's like skiing--you can stick to the marine equivalent of bunny slopes and be pretty darn safe.

And our hobby has taken us to many exotic (for us) destinations, where, as divers, we interact with the locals to a depth (so to speak) not known by the folks under the beach umbrellas at the resorts.

This helps give me perspective when dealing with domestic political issues.

Fun Fact about Afghanistan

It has come out recently that around $200,000,000 of the Taliban's budget comes from American taxpayers. We spend around $1B/year on development projects. The Taliban skims off about 20% of that through protection rackets. The local Afghans who carry out those development projects build in an added 20% to their pricing to make the payoffs.

Nothing like paying people to kill you.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/afghanistan/090902/usaid-taliban-funding

Start immigration arguments with verifiable facts

Whether you favor or oppose illegal immigration, you must admit the truth of the following facts:

1. Mexico's population in 1940 was around 20 million.

2. Mexico's population in 2000 was over 100 million.

3. Mexico's population growth has not come from immigration to Mexico--it has come from Mexicans having many, many babies. Mexico's dominant religion is Roman Catholicism. The Catholic church fiercely opposes the use of any form of birth control device or drug, including condoms. Catholic social policy dominates Mexico.

4. America's Latino population in 1940 was 1/2 of 1%. Which means, among other things, that the American Southwest was not populated by Mexicans when the Americans arrived. It was populated by American Indians, such as Navaho, Hopi, Puelo, Plains Indians etc.--for whom the few Mexicans there were no more or less than foreign invaders.

5. America's Latino population today is over 14%--more than self-identified blacks at this point. Much of that huge increase stems from two previous amnesties, which at the time were presented as the last amnesty ever, because new enforcement provisions would prevent further illegal immigration. In each case what ensued was real amnesty coupled with fake enforcement. The last such amnesty was in 1986.

6. America is in the depths of its worst recession since the Great Depression.

7. Unemployment for American unskilled laborers is over 20%, and promises to remain so for the foreseeable future. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment for Hispanics who are American citizens is 13%; for blacks, 15%; for teenagers, 26%. Most Mexican illegal immigrants are unskilled laborers. Liberal economist Paul Krugman states that large unskilled immigrant populations always drive down wages for unskilled labor--by around 5-25% today, depending on job and location.

8. Over the last decade Californians had a chance to vote on several initiative measures that sought to restrict government benefits to illegal aliens and make English California's official language. California has a substantial majority of Democrats (i.e. relative liberals). Yet these measures passed, and exit polls indicated that they had the support of around a quarter of Hispanic Americans as well as about 40% of Democrats.

Those are the facts, all of which can be verified independently. And they show that many assertions about illegal immigration are canards. Starting with the so-called American "job magnet."

Mexicans want to move to America because there are too many Mexicans. Mexicans weren't sneaking into America in 1950, despite a booming American economy, because there weren't yet too many Mexicans for Mexico's economy to accommodate. Few people want to leave their town, their country, their culture for a foreign one.

Of course now they don't have to. California has become Mexifornia. For example, the most-watched TV station in Los Angeles (American's second-largest city) only broadcasts in Spanish. Nearly all legal materials, signs, commercial customer support phone systems etc. are delivered in Spanish as well as English. Many storefront signs are in Spanish only. You can live your whole life in Mexifornia without having to speak a word of English. And of course, by law, all ballots are delivered in Spanish as well as English. Many radio and TV stations broadcast only in Spanish.
And from being a miniscule minority in California in 1940, Mexicans with American citizenship will be a majority of the state's population by 2050, as long as it continues to increase at the present rate.

Now it's one thing to welcome in thousands or even millions of people from one foreign country/culture. It's another for one of those foreign immigrant groups to become the majority in your state, making everyone else, combined, a minority.

That's the conquering of one country by another--a (mostly) unarmed invasion.

And it makes any American supporting this invasion...well, what do you call someone who works to help a foreign country conquer one's own country?

Is it all about race?

It's not racism pure and simple. It's racism impure and complex. If it were, say, Al Gore pushing the same agenda, there would be protests and anger, just as there are now. And if it were General Powell in the Oval Office pushing, say, the same agenda as John McCain, there would be left wing protests and anger, but only racial to the degree of calling Powell an Uncle Tom, which is different than racism, though it still reflects a kind of bias.

However, all that said, there is obviously a racial component in the protests today. Not in all, not in everyone. I know many conservatives personally, and few if any of them are racists. But I don't live in the South or in a culturally backwards area. People who do live in such places report a strong racist component in the opposition to Obama, augmented by his perceived foreignness--last name, father being a foreigner, Islamic middle name, time spent abroad, long attendance in a racialist church, and politics considered by far right wingers to be unAmerican.

So when lefties claim it's pure racism, they're wrong, and in saying so they legitimize conservatives' desire to dismiss complaints about the protests.

And when righties claim there's no race involved whatsoever, it's purely about Obama's policies, and Pelosi and Reid are white anyway...they're also wrong.

I think this Obama-as-snob poster epitomizes what I call the New Racism. To someone who isn't a racist himself, this is just criticizing Obama for being smart--a crime to millions of Americans; hence Bush's Jim-Bob act on the campaign trail. But to a fellow racist, this poster says that Obama is worst kind of knee-grow: an uppity one. And that's probably the most intolerable way to be black for these people.

The Tea Party protestors:

The deluded,
attacking those trying to rescue them,
in defense of those preying on them,
led by the pundits & politicians who work for America's Aristocrats, who,
at their own tea parties,
are laughing at them.

You Lie!

There are several different issues involved in l'affair Joe Wilson:

(1) Is it OK for congressmen to heckle the President of the United States when he's addressing Congress?

(2) Was President Obama lying about whether "Obamacare" gives illegals new health bennies?

(3) Are Liberals the Spawn of Satan & Conservatives the Defenders of America...or vice versa?

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(1)--OK to heckle the prez?

The only possible opinion an actual conservative could have is to oppose violations of decorum in such circumstances, because conservatives believe in decorum, in established order, in respect for the office.

But also--the only possible opinion an actual liberal could have is to support letting the other side have its say. That's the essence of liberality.Not trying to shout him down and silence him, as liberals do to consersative speakers on campus regularly.

So when Republicans heckled Obama and when Democrats heckled Bush earlier in similar circumstances, both were violating their own principles in heckling their president.

And in both cases, what the hecklers actually reveal is that they're tribalists, just as primitive as members of some tribe living in the Amazon jungles. "My tribe good--because it's my tribe. Your tribe bad--because it's your tribe." Truth has nothing to do with it.

Simplest proof of whether you're a primitive tribalist: you excuse your side doing exactly what you condemn the other side doing.

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(2): Was Obama, in fact, lying?

Don't go looking for fact checking on right wing websites. That appears to be where most right wing ranters got their "information." Along with the radio voices, of course.

But I'm not recommending left wing websites either. Whirly eyes--Left and Right--are united in their disregard for objective truth.

Both extremes use faith-based thinking, deriving their view of reality from their ideas, instead of deriving their ideas from reality.

Instead, try looking at nonpartisan, knowledgeable, fact-checking sites like www.factcheck.org and www.politifact.com.

I've been following these sites for a while, and I've found that they criticize both parties' pronouncements and marketing whenever they find lies and spin.

So I looked up Obama's speech. According to these factchecking sites, which use sizable staffs to track down every claim, Obama generally told the truth--though not the whole truth.

Specifically, as regards the source of Wilson's outburst, Obama correctly stated that the current bills exclude illegal aliens from benefits.

However, the factchecking sites also noted that in their current state the bills lack new enforcement mechanisms [update: as of 9/15/9, enforcement mechanisms are being added].

So if the Demos enact healthcare reform with either the House or Senate bills as is, illegals will be no more or less able to purchase health insurance as they are now. They will receive no more benefits than they do now. It will be the status quo. They won't get any new free benefits.

However, enforcement mechanisms are often added to bills after the main outlines have been hashed out. So in this case, many on this forum are talking about a work in progress as if it's the final bill.

So if Wilson had yelled "You aren't telling the whole truth if the bill is passed and signed in its present form, though it wouldn't be any worse than it is now as regards illegal aliens getting benefits," that would have been factually defensible. "You lie!" is not.

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(3): Which side is the Spawn of Satan?

Lefties and righties believe the world would OK if we could just make the other side go away. They're both wrong-o. We need both small "l" liberals & small "c" conservatives.

We always need to have some people urging caution and standing up for tradition, just as we always need some people eager to try new things, to experiment.

And we also need a third, pragmatic group to weigh what these two sides say.

All this should be obvious to anyone who doesn't treat politics as some kind of religion.

-----------------------
And to my fellow Democrats:

Don't get mad at stampeding cattle. Look for who's stampeding them.

And that would be the medical industrial complex, which has spent to date at least $370,000,000 to convince rank and file Republicans and Independents that Obama is an illegal alien teamed with a European Socialst Democrat Congress to steal our healthcare benefits and give them to bums and foreigners, then kill us off as soon as we get old.

The Republican Party leadership isn't conservative at all. It's just fronting for a small group of very, very wealthy people who plan to stay that way by hook or by crook.

They do it by stampeding the electorate, many if not most of whom lack the education and objectivity to see through all the fake conspiracies to the real one.

Oh, & part of their plan is to make sure Liberals and Conservatives hate each other. It keeps both sides' attention diverted from the ones who are exploiting us both.

--------------------------------
And to my Republican friends:

The stampeding cattle I'm talking about don't include thoughtful Republicans, of whom there are many. They've just been shut out of the public debate by the...well, stampeding cattle. Just the way Colin Powell was shut out of the Bush inner circle (along with George Bush Sr., interestingly). Just the way President Eisenhower--a former brilliant general--is never mentioned, while President Reagan--a former B movie actor--is lionized.

To you I say--just because a political leader dresses like you and acts like you when the cameras are on him (or her) doesn't mean they're actually like you. Plenty of Democratic leaders have been caught with their pants down and/or their hands in the cookie jar. But plenty of Republican leader have, too, and if you think the hypocrite scale of personal conduct tilts Democratward, you're dreaming.

That's why I try to see what leaders actually do, not what they claim to believe. How many former Republican congressmen are now very highly-paid lobbyists for industries they favored while in Congress? How many have exhibited personal conduct that you wouldn't find acceptable in a business associate or brother in law?

Now I know what you're thinking right now. "Democrats do it." Yes they do. So? That makes it OK? You don't think so in your own life. Congressmen should be held to an even higher standard than you'd accept in a relative or business associate.

Instead, when the Republicans took command of the whole shooting match in 2000, they replaced Tax and Spend with Borrow and Spend. That's better how? And they did nothing to fix our healthcare system. Instead they said, and still say, that it's great, and 85% of Americans love it. Speaking of lies, that a whopper with whipped cream and a cherry on top.

Americans are satisfied with their current healthcare system in direct proportion to how little they've had to use it, and in direct proportion to how unaware they are of how it's appropriated most of the raises they would have otherwise gotten in the past twenty years.

American satisfaction is also tied to how little they know about other wealthy democracies manage theirs. That's the only way the Republican leadership can have the gall to stand there and say, straightfaced, that ours is the best on Earth.

Not by standards like amount of administrative overhead and citizen life expectancy. And those are pretty important standards.

They also lie about rationing. Rationing is what we have now. Rationing is when your health insurance company cuts off payment just before you're due to have a kidney transplant because you didn't tell them you had gallstones you didn't know about before signing on. Rationing is when you lose your job and can't get insurance because you have a pre-existing condition, or when you can but at such a high price and with such a huge deductible that you can't afford it.
The Democrats' plans also involve rationing. But it's less rationing, and it's fairer than what we have now.

The healthcare crisis hasn't brought out the best in my former party.

There's a proper role for real conservatives to play with healthcare reform. But first you have to admit that it needs reform before healthcare comes to consume 40% of the economy, as it will in a few years if we don't reform it. Then you have to hold the Demos' feet to the fire on cost control and regulatory mechanisms to reduce waste and fraud. But you also have to face the fact that we can't reform it without moving the whole system from paying for procedures to paying for health care. That means putting doctors on salary, as they are at well-run private systems like Kaiser Permanente. And it means figuring out how to make general practice more attractive to med students. We have a shortage of them amidst plenty of specialists.

All the nonsense about granny dying and so-shul-ism and acting like we can't learn from any other country just makes Republicans sound like loons--and wastes time that could be spent on the real issues. Which are there.

Just ask yourself "What would Eisenhower do?"

Obamacare = Mexicare?

The GOP claims that the Democratic healthcare reform bill in the works give a free medical ride to illegal aliens. One GOP congressman shouted "You lie!" during President Obama's address to Congress when he said nothing in the healthcare reform bills permitted illegals getting in on the gravy train.

Thank heavens for factfinding nonpartisan organizations like www.Politifact.com, which read the whole bill in its present form in both the House and the Senate.

They said the President was correct, and it was the GOP that's lying about this.

But.

In its current form nothing in the bills includes any regulatory mechanism to prevent illegals from purchasing health insurance--private or, potentially, public--exactly the same as the status quo.

I note that the GOP did nothing to remedy this while they were in power. So while I want a regulatory mechanism in healthcare reform to exclude illegals (even when they have anchor babies), I see no reason to believe the GOP minds--except as a partisan ploy.

So we should disdain the lies the GOP is promoting--while at the same time urging our congressmen to add a regulatory mechanism to all social service legislation to exclude citizens of other countries who are here illegally.

The Republicans may have lost Congress in 2006 and the Presidency in 2008--but the shade-seeking billionaires they work for didn't lose then, and they aren't losing now.

We'll have a corporatist Supreme Court for decades, no matter how many aging Court moderates Obama and future Democrat presidents maybe replace.

And the billionaires' club is pouring a fortune into ensuring that even a Democratic Congress gives them the healthcare reform they want: nothing--or, better yet, a paper-thin patina of "something" stretched around the same old nothing.

Their class war against 95% of America continues unabated, staunchly supported by the many millions of Americans who have been duped into believing that they have anything whatsoever in common with their oppressors--Stockholm Syndrome, anyone?--and the political party that they imagine represents them.

Of course most of these are the same people who believe Obama is an illegal alien, the Earth is 5,000 years old, and Saddam Hussein planned 9/11 in conjunction with Mossad.

Best of all, these people totally distrust the only entity with the slightest chance of protecting ordinary Americans from these shadowy oligarchs: our government.

Their ablest mouthpiece, Ronald Reagan, kicked off this brilliant campaign with an implication that I'd only heard from Communists before him: that the American government is our enemy.

And now, after 40 years of announcing, every day of the week, every hour of every day, that you can't trust government, the oligarchs reap the benefits every time Congress tries to constrain the oligarchs' greed with any kind of reform of any kind of business they run.

And their man in the White House put the last two men in the Supreme Court needed to get the five votes they needed to protect the oligarchs' interests from Democratic lawmakers until the GOP (Greed Over Principles party) gets Congress back.

And so America comes to resemble the demographic composition of Russia and Mexico, making us unique among the world's richest, most advanced nations.

You have to admire the perfection of their efforts, just as you have to admire the supreme efficiency of the AIDS virus, which mutates constantly to defeat our body's immune system, even as its goal never wavers.

Kudos to the oligarchs and their eager servants in our courts and Congress.

Frankly, they honestly mean the opposite

How about a new word, "hypedar," to describe being able to tell when someone's trying to pull a fast one on you, using propaganda, demagoguery...you know the drill.

For example, take "honestly" and "frankly." In normal conversation these words mean you're going to follow them by saying something that differs from or even contradicts your position on something--politics, your dignity...some sort of reversal.

But when politicians say "honestly" or "frankly," 99% of the time they follow up with a statement that's anything but honest or frank. It's almost always a direct attack on the other side.

They're entitled to attack the other side, of course. But in putting these words in front of an attack--it's bogus. They're pretending to hand you a personal--perhaps embarrassing--revelation. Not an embarrasing revelation about the other side.

Republicans and Democrats both do this, and they do it all the time.

And the next time you hear these words, see if I'm not right about what always follows.

And then you can show off your hypedar to your friends.

I only have one request: Don't spare your side. We want honest political debate, not tribal warfare.

Don't we?

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Hypedar lesson #2:

"In fact," "in reality," "the truth is."

These aren't the sure signs of hype that "honestly" and "frankly" are. Sometimes a politician will follow up with an actual fact. But it's equally likely that they'll then make an assertion that they don't substantiate. This means what they've actually done is ask you to trust them, without saying so. When you say "in fact," state a supposed fact, and don't back it up--the only reason you have to believe them is their word, which they're implying is worth something.

Now I'm sure there are honest politicians out there. I've even seen a few that I thought were pretty honest--on both sides, too. That's why I'm saying that these catchprases aren't always hype.

Just most of the time.

Note that providing substantiation isn't good enough--the substantiation has to be an impartial authority.

Bogus authorities include, for the left, advocacy groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and La Raza. For the right, it's supposed think tanks that are actually advocacy groups, and polling organizations that are actually owned by someone with an axe to grind.

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Hypedar lesson #3

"media bias" --Yes, there is media bias. However, far too often "media bias" means "someone who disagrees with me." The far right think the mainstream media is in the tank for the Democratic Party, and take as proof the fact that most reporters vote Democrat.

Amusingly enough, the far left think the mainstream media faithfully serves the interests of the multinational corporations who own the mainstream media.

Both sides are often totally unaware of what the other thinks about the mainstream media, because they never read or listen to or watch any source of information that differs from their own ideology.

And both sides generally lack the intellectual tools required to objectively assess the objectivity of a news source.

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Hypedar lesson #4:

"The American people" --actually, this almost always means "whatever % of Americans agree with me; anyone who doesn't isn't really American, so they don't count." This is a version of flagwaving--trying to associate your side with America in the most tribal way possible. Because if they can make your allegiance tribal, you'll forgive all the nasty stuff they do to you, because otherwise you'd be supporting the other tribe.

Healthcare reform woes partly the Demos' fault

Across America many millions of Republicans await anxiously to see whether their champions in Congress can defeat what they see as the foreigner in the White House and his European Socialist cohorts in Congress trying to bankrupt them and then kill them when they're old and useless.

It's such an irony that it's their heroes who want to bankrupt them and then kill them (when they can't pay their premiums any more).

But it's not just the $1.4M/day the healthcare denial industry is spending to defeat any kind of reform that might reduce their profits. It's not just the Republican partisans whose loyalty is more tribal than principled.

It's also Obama's fault, and the Democratic Congress--they've let the other convince a majority of Americans of one central point: that the Democrats plan to transfer some of their healthcare to others--bums and foreigners mainly. They've allowed this to happen by harping on the need to help those without insurance. Yet most voters have insurance, which they'll have until they actually need it. And then they won't. But that's not now. Now they need to hear about what Obama is going to do for them. And how what most pay for their insurance has zoomed up, but mostly out of sight.

Time after time the Democratic Party manages to sound like it cares about every ethnicity on Earth except for European-Americans, to use a phrase they never use.

I voted for Obama to get healthcare reform, even though, like most Americans, I'm concerned about illegal immigration--especially since I live in the part of America that's being overrun, far from the Beltway.

What happened to the realistic Democrats who knew how to win back Congress and the White House? Did they think the Republican Party's paymasters would just go away quietly? There's waaay too much profit involved. And Democrats must remember that the Blue Dog Democrats are blue dogs because more liberal demos couldn't have gotten elected, and without them the Demos couldn't have taken back Congress, and if the Blue Dogs appear to lose faith with their constituents they won't get re-elected, and then the GOP (Greed Over Principle) party will regain Congress. Do you want that to happen?

You can't get in the ring wearing gloves and talking about altruism when the other guy's stepping in wearing brass knucks and talking about what the majority of Americans most care about--their own healthcare.

Whining about how dirty the Republican leadership fights won't help either. Of course they fight dirty. They've been fighting dirty at least since Reagan painted the government as all bad all the time--a long-term investment in deregulation that has paid off handsomely for the Angry Billionaire's Club. If they fought fair they'd lose. So they don't (see my definition of G.O.P.).

Obama doesn't have to lose his cool. But he does have to deal with the Republican Party he's got instead of the one he wants. And he has to face the fact that this is only going to work if doctors get paid salaries instead of for piecework (procedures); and if the insurance industry profits get scaled back to those of ordinary businesses--and if the pharmaceutical industry's profits go likewise.

Obama's getting the poked hornet's nest attack anyway, no matter what he does. Might as well try to actually accomplish something.

--As long as he keeps making it clear that his beef is with the Republican leadership and their padrones--not the Republican rank and file.

Suffering under Britain's socialized healthcare

In citing reasons for sagging public support for healthcare reform, not one right wing shill has noted one itsy bitsy fact: the $1.4M/DAY the healthcare denial industry is spending to defeat any kind of healthcare reform whatsoever.

At the same time the healthcare denial industry's shills and spokespeople pretend to support various denatured versions of reform.

At the same time its black ops specialists spread one vicious lie after another (according to nonpartisan sites www.politifact.com and wwww.factcheck.org), using anonymous chain emails and whisper campaigns, followed up by right wing radio and TV propagandists.

The other thing the shills fail to note is our nationwide parochialism. Most of us, left and right, seem to have almost no idea that other industrial democracies exist, all with universal healthcare, all spending less than us, all with greater life expectancy.

Sure, the right wing propagandists bring forth individuals from Canada and Britain who say what you might expect.

But those countries are all democracies. And in none of them will you find the money and power vested in the status quo as America has. So if their systems (highly varied, some socialistic, some regulated capitalistic, most a mix) all suck so badly--why aren't their voters clamoring for America's fabulous system?

They must just be anti-American...

Well, I have a friend in Scotland--a high tech businessman who has traveled here fairly often. I asked him if the Brits longed for our system. Here's what he said:

"That's easy - the NHS isn't perfect but it is very, very good. The Palin stories are about as accurate as you'd expect from someone who thinks the earth is 5000 years old. I would resist in the strongest possible terms any attempt to dismantle the public health system.

I can tell you first hand that the elderly - vis my parents - get astounding treatment without the slightest hesitation. My father collapsed at our Christmas lunch - we had a paramedic on site in under five minutes from calling 999, our emergency number. An ambulance was at our door in 10 minutes and he was in a high-dependency unit within 20. He was recovering rapidly, but they kept him in over night after moving him to a lower care level ward. No forms, no charge, just fantastic service.

This concept of them choosing not to treat people on age is simply invented by the nutjob right wingers.

At the end of the scale, one of our staff has been diagnosed with bowel cancer - she was operated on within 5 days and was retained in hospital for a full 2 weeks for recover with excellent care and access to all the latest medication etc etc.

BTW you can ask my American friends living here for their views - it's identical to mine!

And I think the vast majority of the rest of the country would agree - I think you'd get at least 95% if not 98% support. As someone said 'everyone knows someone whose life was saved by the NHS.'"

Nova ScienceNow provides a textbook example of propaganda

Nova ScienceNow is the video magazine spinoff of Nova, the eminent public television science series. Nova ScienceNow recently re-aired a segment on Dr. Quiñones, a brain surgeon who had emigrated to America illegally. The segment played up his contributions, his "American dream," the poverty of his childhood in Mexicali--and of course his illegalness.

As is true of most such anecdotal propaganda, it was left to the viewer to draw the intended conclusions, to wit:

1. One (1) of the millions upon millions of illegal immigrants became a brain surgeon. Therefore all the illegal immigrants who become strawberry pickers or hotel maids or ruthless gangbangers must be given citizenship.

2. One (1) person's heartrending/heartwarming story is more important than all those dry statistics about how immigrants depress working class Americans' wages below the poverty level, the numbers of illegals in state and federal prisons for horrible crimes, the havoc wreaked by endemic identity theft. the contribution to rich peoples' profits while the immense social costs are outsourced to ordinary taxpayer--none of that matters if this one person is a nice guy who's an asset to our country.

Right wing propaganda usually takes the form of inciting fear and anger. Left wing propaganda works more on middle class guilt, sob stories, special pleading. The biggest victims of right wing propaganda are working class folk who support right wing politicians. The biggest victims of left wing propaganda are the same. The middle class Democrats who support illegal immigration are rarely victimized by their support--since the main victims are working class folk, whether right or left wing. So for affluent lefties it's a freebie, with the social cost outsources to someone else. Guilt was never so free.

Political Propaganda 101

A friend of mine got sucked in by the "Obama's not an American citizen" scam. I showed him how it couldn't be true. Then he asked me why so much smoke if there's no fire. I tried to give him a brief answer but it evolved into the following piece:

The underlying goal of a political party is to defeat the other side and either get back in power, or to stay in power.

Power enables a party to reward its patrons. The goal of the patrons is those rewards. The goal of the party is power and its cut of the take, distributed in various ways, from lunches and travel to unbelieveably lucrative jobs—usually for lobbying—on behalf of the patrons’ businesses, acquired after a politician retires from Congress or the Executive Branch.

Many of these reward paths aren’t spelled out in a memo (which could be leaked, after all). They’re just understood.

Often you have to betray your voters in order to reward your patrons. This is best accomplished by making your side so tribal—and so antagonistic to the other side—and so fearful of what will happen if the other side wins—that your side votes your way, betraying themselves and their loved ones, because you’ve convinced them that it’s that or the deep blue sea.

And people tend to be swayed by appearances. As long as your side looks and speaks like the epitome of your-side-ness, many won’t believe that you’re robbing them blind. Likewise, you need to make the other side look and speak unlike your base.

That was why, for example, the Republicans repeatedly ran ads showing John Kerry windsurfing, showing clips from when he was a young longhaired war protestor, showing him speaking in the Senate in long, convoluted senatorial sentences, showing his African wife acting all foreign. Bush, on the other hand, concealed his Harvard MBA by talking like bubba down the block—as if he’d grown up as a cowhand on a ranch (he bought his ranch after winning the presidency), instead of being the scion of an immensely wealthy, well-connected family..

Gaining or retaining power is best achieved by a multipronged, multilayered approach: tactically, you fire up your base, persuade the middle to lean your way, and make the other side depressed and confused, depressing their vote and their advocacy for their side. Strategically, you define every potential presidential candidate as untrustworthy and belonging to the Other Tribe—the one with bad morals, disrespect for everything good and pure, and on the take from Special Interests (well, neither side has to make that one up). Layered under that, on the Republican side, is a campaign that has been going on since FDR was president to make Americans distrust and dislike government; then this is tapped whenever the Democrats have a chance of reregulating any business the Republicans’ patrons own. Conversely, the Democrats have been trying to paint the Republicans as the Party of the Rich for the same length of time—defining G.O.P. as meaning Greed Over Principles.

Come time for the actual campaign—once each party is close to having a candidate---the following steps are applied:

First you have to fire up your base. Those are the people who will win primaries for you. Psychologically these people see the world in sharp divisions and bright colors. White hats, black hats.

Each side has a core constituency that will vote your way—if they vote. You don’t need to convince this group to vote your way. You just need to get them to the polls. They’ll go if they’re mad and/or scared. So you need to enrage/terrify them.

Outside that core constituency is a group that’s inclined to vote your way but who aren’t as tribal as the hardcore constituency. They will treat what you say more critically, and if you go too far with what’s used on the core group, you run the risk of turning them off or even driving them to the other side. So to fire up the core group with the real red-meat stuff that won’t hold up to close scrutiny, you make sure the wild stuff comes from “friends,” not your party, not officially.

This is the “clean hands” approach.

In America today, it’s a snap to set up superficially independent advocacy groups, directed and financed by the same special interests that contribute lavishly to the party. Then for the less-committed, the party fronts its own peeps, speaking more reasonably—or at least sounding more reasonable in terms of tone of voice and general deportment. Then they do the denial-affirmation dance. That is, they disavow any connection to the crazies saying the crazy thing (whatever it is). But then they go on to say that, however, maybe there’s fire where there’s smoke. Maybe responsible people should look into these claims. Maybe there’s some substance to them, somehow. Not really, of course. But…

So in this way the Party keeps its hands clean while continuing to stir the pot, while not alienating its own zealots, while at the same time sowing distrust and confusion about the other part to the less-passionate-middle and those in the other party who are susceptible to these sorts of manuverings.

Remember, in the world of politics, the parties are the outward manifestation of power, but the real power is often in the shadows, because its goals are so antithetical to yours that exposure does it no good. For the Left, it’s trade unions, organizations representing hyphenated groups (Latin-Americans, African-Americans, Catholic-Americans as far as illegal immigration is concerned, etc. For the Right it's the inversion of Socialism--those who believe business should control government--mainly the bulk of the wealthiest 1/2 of 1% of the country.

But what falsehoods should you peddle?

Answer: those that give concrete expression to your base’s deepest fears and anxieties—while at the same time giving the base plausible deniability that any of these concrete expressions are related to anything that’s indefensible in polite society.

Thus you can’t oppose a candidate because he’s a she, or not white, or too smart, or not a Christian (or perhaps a Jew). But that’s no problem. If he’s a she you accuse her of being tough/combative—implicitly a ball-buster. If he isn’t white you accuse him of being foreign—of only pretending to have American values/heritage. If he’s smart you accuse him of having foreign ideas, of looking down on ordinary people (this can work even if the person comes from low-to-middle class circumstances and the opponent is filthy rich, as long as you manipulate appearances appropriately). If he’s a Christian you can accuse him of being a bad Christian, liking a controversial Christian pastor, or being Christian in a way that’s different from familiar white Christianity.

In each case you must be very, very careful to never say what you want them to think. You just link what the opponent actually is to something that sounds plausible that gets them to think what you want them to think.

For example, a majority of Republicans came to believe Saddam Hussein pretty much planned 9/11 and provided logistical support for it. Bush never said this. But every time he mentioned 9/11 or Bin Ladin he then mentioned Saddam Hussein. It was artful. Then when he was accused of claiming Saddam did 9/11, he could honestly say “I never said so.” Which is true. But he knew that what he did say would make his followers think that. So he wasn’t a liar. He was a deceiver. That’s better, right?

Of course there are a multitude of tricks I haven’t mentioned here, but which both sides use to make you think Good Things about what they want you to agree with and Bad Things about what they want you to oppose.

For example, during his election campaign Obama said we have to grant illegal immigrants some sort of amnesty because it would be logistically impossible—and unkind—to round up and deport so many millions of people. This is what’s known as a False Choice Fallacy. He never mentioned the simple fact that if we change the way we do things so they can’t make a living here, they’ll go home the same way they came—on their own hook. Whether you advocate for or against illegal immigration, you should recognize that this was a patently false and misleading argument.

There’s also sarcasm, which both sides use constantly. For example, Sean Hannity, part of the right wing noise machine, commonly refers to Obama as The Anointed One. The propagandists who give Hannity his talking points use this to make Obama’s popularity seem like a bad thing, and his supporters like dazzled dopes.

And of course the campaign goes on after the election, because there’s always the next election, and even if the president isn’t up for reelection, a good chunk of Congress is.

So even though Obama’s citizenship will never be challenged successfully in court, the birther campaign serves to delegitimize him and allows those who don’t like his race, his foreign father, or that father’s religion, to attack Obama’s race, foreignness and not-religion without having to do any of those things explicitly. Again, plausible deniability. So the Republican Noise Machine will flog this issue on the down low as long as they can, using the AIDS virus model that worked so with with the Swift Boat Campaign.

The great thing about being on the Republican side of this is that there’s always money to finance the innumerable right wing radio stations and the TV network and the push polling (fake polling designed to plant rumors) and the whisper campaigns and the astroturf organizing. Sometimes the Democrats have to scramble for funds. And though most journalists are registered Democrats, their livelihood depends on chasing scandal, so they’ll gallop off after anything that promises juicy headlines. Clinton’s peccadilloes got spread all over the mainstream media, leading to his very testy relationship with the press that was supposedly in the tank for him. Most reporters like Obama but that didn’t stop them from running after everything the Republican Noise Machine put out there.

There’s also the art of omission. You ignore something you'd said previously was crucial. Thus when it was Clinton vs. Bush I, character was why you should vote for a president, because Clinton was a womanizer and Bush I was a loyal family man. Obama is a loyal family man, while McCain cheated on his first wife flagrantly, then dumped her after she was crippled in a car accident. Plus, Obama's and his wife and children are America’s darlings. They did take a whack at Michelle, calling her an Angry Black Woman, but she blew that one into bits on the campaign trail. So in that campaign, character--at least of the family variety--no longer mattered a bit. The issue just vanished.

Normally you attack the other guy’s strengths as well as his weaknesses, if you can find a cleavage line to drive a wedge into. Thus Kerry’s war record, which was vulnerable because Kerry is such a stiff, and because so many old veterans loathed him because of his vocal opposition to the Vietnam War, which they’ve revised in their memories so they can think we were winning but were forced to lose by the Democrats. Kerry played into that unintentionally. With Clinton his home life was vulnerable mostly because of his womanizing, but also because Hillary is smart—which lots of men find threatening—and his daughter was homely (ironic, since she’s gorgeous now). So they attacked his whole family, though only the most hardcore took the bait about his daughter’s ugliness (Rush Limbaugh being the best example).

But another feature of propaganda campaigns is that you try lots of stuff and see what sticks. As long as the attempts don’t come from party officials you can always dislaim them if they don’t work.

I hope all this answers your question as to why the birther business has been pursued to diligently.

Republican gun nuts vs. Democrats' whiteguyphobia

I entered the following passage as a comment on the latest op-ed piece by liberal New York Times columnist Frank Rich. In it he decried the gun nuts attending rallies outside town hall meetings on healthcare reform, then went on to talk about Republican perfidy in promoting an array of out and out lies about healthcare reform.

The New York Times editors censored this comment, refusing to run it. Feel free to let me know why you think they did that.

An honest originalist reading of the Second Amendment would guarantee all American citizens in state militias the right to carry flintlocks around (which take a minute or so to reload between each round). And in this case at least I agree with the Rich's assessment of the dangerous direction the Republican Party leadership has taken, abetted by the voices on the radio and the raging faces on Fox TV, well-funded by the Angry Billionaires' Club. Their inflammatory language fuels the paranoid fantasies of the deluded pawns we see screaming at Town Hall meetings.

That said, however, the Democratic side has helped feed these paranoid fantasies. Nobody has clean hands in this mudslinging.

1. The Democratic Party has for 40 years worked hard for the benefit of everyone but working-class whites--even subordinating them to the needs of citizens of other countries residing here illegally. This has driven down the wages of those whites--and working-class blacks and browns, for that matter--some 5% to 25%, depending on job category and region. Yet the Democratic Party tries to sweep this under the rug as it trolls frantically for the votes of every American it can hyphenate and promise special benefits to.

2. In this media age you can't tailor your message to each special interest you run after; your "special favors" message will reach the ears of those you've disfavored, usually within hours. It's not like the '50s, when you could get away with this. Remember George Allen's "macaca" blunder? The demos have plenty of their own as well.

3. The Democrats have failed--flagrantly failed--to make it clear they're against the Republican leadership, not their actually conservative rank and file. Continually branding Republicans as "racist" and other epithets enrages them, racist and non-racist alike, driving them into the eager arms of self-described conservative leaders who are actually shills for the Angry Billionaire's Club, and laughing at them behind closed doors. But the Democratic Party has done yeoman work at forcing these people into the GOP's deathgrip.

4. Affirmative action is a bone in the throat of the white working class. We're paying a heavy price for this form of reparations for the slavery practised in the 19th century. That's exactly how working-class whites see it, and every time they have to deal with indifferent-verging-on-downright-rude civil service bureaucrats "of color," it reinforces their sense of aggrievement.

5. Private sector unions have declined greatly since their heyday in the 1950s. But public sector unions are in heaven--across the nation their workers enjoy lifetime security, fat pensions, terrific healthcare plans, and a total compensation of around 43% more than their private sector counterparts. Moreover, declining public services--right down to bridge and street maintenance--are happening in part because money is being diverted into lavish pensions as public sector workers retire. It's not just Senators--this advantage extends right down to manual laborers at City Hall. And working-class Americans are starting to wake up to this fact--and to the fact that this disparity is stoutly supported by the Democratic Party.

Just how long can you ask people who are behind in their mortgages to keep sacrificing to groups of people who appear to spit on them? It forces the white working class into the sort of tribalism, the "only we are true Americans" the Republican leadership wants them to believe.

In the propaganda war the Demos keep acting as deer-in-the-headlightsey as John Kerry did. But in reality as well, the Democrats keep stiffing the working stiffs who they once worked for.

A majority of Americans may let the foxes back in the henhouse if this keeps up. Democrats can't keep pandering to every special interest without paying a price in the voting booth. And we may lose healthcare reform over these simmering issues. Which will be a dirty shame.