Self Respect - America faces many tests–including national character
October 21, 2008
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson
At the bottom of this piece, you’ll find a little questionnaire that a friend sent me today. In essence, it asks you to imagine if the personal stories and backgrounds of the principals were each that of the other side. “Obama/Biden vs. McCain/Palin, what if things were switched around?…..think about it. Would the country’s collective point of view be different?”
A sample question is “What if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage, including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?” Read more
The Revolution Has Arrived
October 21, 2008
by Jeanmarie Simpson
The current global economic crisis has rekindled the wannabe hippy spirit I carried as a kid in junior high in the early 1970s. My generation admired our flower child elders. We played guitar and sang about the golden hill, the wide water and all the little creatures roaming the green earth. It was a romantic idea - living simply, communally and cooperatively - chopping our own wood, growing corn and eating lettuce from our own gardens. We argued whether or not we would hunt and eat the meat killed by our own hands (we argued whether it was ethical to hunt with guns, or more fair to the animal to use bows and arrows).
Today’s climate - environmental, socio-economic, cultural, pop cultural, religious - begs for a new sensibility, or, more accurately, an old one. Read more
Zoroastrians, carpets & reading Ann Tyler in Yazd: My report from Iran # 3.5
October 20, 2008
by Jane Stillwater
Yesterday I left the highly-westernized capital city of Tehran and headed out to the province of Yazd, famous for its ancient water systems, Zoroastrians and carpets. You shoulda seen me. I was absolutely WALLOWING in carpets.
Once upon a time, I used to work for a lawyer. My job was to write personal injury settlement briefs — and I was good at it too (writing settlement briefs is an awful lot like writing soap opera) so when the bus I was riding on in Yazd got hit by a car, I was really interested to see how Iranians handled this type of stuff. Here’s how it went: Read more
Teflon vs. Velcro - The GOP puts all its political eggs in the specious attack basket
October 20, 2008
by Ellen Snortland
Why is it Republicans seem to have a Teflon coating, whereas Democrats have coats of Velcro? Whether the event — real or cooked up — is a sexual indiscretion, tenuous association with someone with an unsavory past or extremist religious views, Democrats seem to get stuck and their GOP counterparts are able to just slip-slide their slimy way through the muck. WHY IS THAT?!
VP hopeful Gov. Sarah Palin is in pit bull attack mode, accusing Sen. Barack Obama of “pallin’” around with terrorists and basically calling him a traitor. I can’t help but reflect on Palin’s own “skeletons” that seem to slip off her like scrambled eggs in a Teflon pan. Let’s review her eggs (that’s a joke, son), shall we? Read more
None of the Above
October 19, 2008
by Larry Sakin
As the 2008 election winds down, more and more friends are asking two questions I cannot bear to answer. The first is: “Have you watched the presidential debates?’ and the second is “Who are you voting for?”
I don’t watch presidential debates because they are essentially free advertising venues for the candidates to demagogue their breezy talking points, which are mainly tiny bits of red meat to keep their party faithful frothing over the election. Frankly, there are already too many commercials on television. These corporate media gifts to the two major parties are just a little payback for the onslaught of paid campaign adverts to come. Read more
GOP Dirty Campaign - graphic opinion by Dicky Neely
October 19, 2008
by Dicky Neely
Blowing Bubbles - Giving credit to deflation
October 19, 2008
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson
One of the posters on Usenet, someone with the nym of Video61, mentioned “debasing the currency and deflation.” The phrase puzzled me.
First, there’s the term “debasing.” I tend to think of it as meaning things like dilute, alloy, pollute, weaken, water down, and a bunch of even nastier things. What it really means, in economic terms, is to take the currency off of a backing such as gold or silver, and make it “full faith and credit;” in other words, fiat currency. That this inevitably results in dilution, alloying, pollution, weakening, and watering down of the currency, usually over time and at an ever-increasing rate, is the source of the confusion. But as a currency weakens, it decreases in value. Something that cost $1.00 last year might cost $1.05 this year. And $1.11 next year. This is familiar to everyone as inflation. The opposite of inflation is deflation, and in an economy, deflation is a deadly symptom of impending doom. Not to be dramatic about it or anything. So I asked him how debasing the currency could cause deflation. Read more
“Religulous” you say? - a Review
October 18, 2008
by Stephen Uhl, PhD
I thoroughly enjoyed comedian Bill Maher’s just released documentary, “Religulous,” directed by Larry Charles. The two-hour documentary insightfully focused on the incongruities of the world’s harshly insane facts of religious life. The crowded theater rocked with uproarious laughter again and again. Our enjoyment here in Tucson was shared by a midwestern Ordained Humanist Celebrant who emailed me that their “First week sold out every showing. We loved it. I thought Maher could have gone into a little more depth in places, but trying to squeeze it all into a 2 hour film would present a challenge.” Read more
Getting ready to be ready on Day One: Working on the division problem, NOW
October 18, 2008
by Robert A. Letcher, PhD
When the “ready on Day One” debate broke out among Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama, they all (defensively: the conventional approach) boasted their experience and strutted their accomplishments. But, somehow, they never got around to debating what they actually had to be ready for, on Day One. Nor did they ever get around to debating proper criteria according to which readiness for that should be assessed. They also didn’t get around to debating specifically what they could or should or would undertake beginning That Very Day to make themselves readier for Day One. Beyond lost opportunities to use the debates to sort out their positions on “readiness”, they also wasted a terrific opportunity to begin to dialog with the public, to help them learn the practical particulars of “being ready” as an issue.
As such, the candidates missed a major opportunity to respond seriously to the admonition voiced by Sam Nunn, from whose stature I have sought to derive “oomph” for my recent series of essays. For readers who haven’t already memorized Nunn’s admonition, here’s part of what he said in a joint appearance with former Secretary of Defense William Cohen appearance on Charlie Rose (2/13/2008):
“…We’re talking about how we can cooperate in the world and how we can get people together across party lines and across all sorts of lines. There is a real opportunity in the campaign for the kind of dialog that can lay the foundation for whomever is the next President to really be able to successfully govern. […] If we don’t discuss some of these fundamental issues in enough depth to get some understanding out there among the American public, it’s going to be very difficult for anyone to govern, no matter how popular, no matter how much charisma, no matter the vote margin their vote is; unless they have some platform that really leads people to be able to say, “Yeah, that’s the direction we ought to go in as a nation; that’s the kind of nation we want to be.” And those are the fundamental problems we’ve got to deal with, including perhaps some sacrifice in the short run in order to have a better future for our children and grandchildren.” [emphasis added; transcribed from broadcast by RAL]
Not only did they lose the opportunity to discuss this matter “in enough depth” to develop their own understanding of “readiness”. They didn’t have dialog “in enough depth to get some understanding out there among the American public”. If this non-attention continues, “it’s going to be very difficult for anyone to govern”, as Nunn said, [my emphasis added] … Obama included – and that’s important to me, because he’s my candidate to be the country’s next President, and because the country needs its next President to govern successfully.
That brings me [back] to the “division problem”. That’s the problem that the next President must be ready for on Day One. It’s the problem that complicates all other problems, and confounds efforts to remedy them. Of necessity, Presidents rely on advisors, whose judgment and capacity for being informed they have learned to trust. If the White House phone were to ring at 3 AM on a military matter, only a cowboy President would act without first consulting the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who on the next President’s Day One would presumably be holdovers from the current President’s Last Day. And if the phone call described another Katrina about to hit, or the “Big One” earthquake having hit, it’s difficult to imagine any President not doing a better job than W and his “good job” Brownie.
But only a President – and in my view, only a President Obama – could be ready on Day One to answer Sam Nunn’s challenge: “[to] get people together across party lines and across all sorts of lines”. Indeed, I very much doubt that either of the other two then-candidates could ever be ready for answering this call: Senator Clinton, due primarily to residual animosities around her husband’s policies and philandering, but also to her “do what it takes” approach to campaigning; and Senator McClain due to a combination of his own and the current President’s out-of-touchness.
Obama’s readiness for Day One derives from his well- and oft-demonstrated capacity to inspire an ever widening circle of everyday people to dare to hope for less division, to risk envisioning a much more “together” America (to reintroduce a term from my younger days).
But we would all make a horrible mistake if we were to cast Obama as some sort of savior for our division problem. He’ll have to learn how to help us help him, and we’ll have to learn how to help him do that. Two-way learning isn’t a strong suit of most American institutions, perhaps because it entails mutually respectful dialog, entered into for the purpose of mutual exploration.
No! I’m not pollyannish enough to suggest that Obama even might lead us – with appropriate apologies – to completely end division as we know it. But I do think he will be able to help us learn our collective way beyond suffficient division to allow him and his advisors to work with a newly “un-divided” public enough to make his Presidency the success that so many of us yearn for and te Country so desperately needs.
A challenge this big won’t be easy to meet. Learning can never be reduced to following instructions. It can never come about through one-way conversations. Learning means asking questions, even challenging conventions and commonly accepted “truths”. It necessarily entails risk-taking. All things that conventional politics loathes.
But, we all need to change over to a learning oriented way of doing politics. And that is something that Obama and the rest of us could start doing now to make ourselves more ready for Day One.
This past weekend, I got an indication of how difficult meeting this challenge would be. I attended an Obama “Unity Party”. I did so in hope of persuading Obama’s local organizer to put at least some of the group’s effort toward working on the division issue. The organizer first claimed to agree that overcoming divisions was important, but then he went on to cite efforts to register the many new voters whom Obama had excited into getting involved. This sounded like more conventional politics to me: important, but not getting at the “division thing”. I just don’t see how we can hope to help Obama become a successful President just by telling other people the arguments that had persuaded us – perhaps adding only volume.
Obama needs to help us learn how to listen appreciatively. For example, people doing voter registration can learn how to listen between the relatively mechanical steps of registering a new voter. Is there anything in particular that Obama would like his volunteer’s to listen for? If an Obama volunteer were to notice a pattern among responses, would there be way to feed the information to someone closer to Obama who might actually be able to bring it to Obama’s attention? Should volunteers cast themselves as sources of substantive information, or as empaths? Is there a way to organize the experience of thousands of volunteers in ways that they could help each other?
There just has to be something Obama can call on us to do other than join the infantry and follow orders. And I’m going to keep writing until I find it.
Joe the Plumber – Get a Plunger
October 18, 2008
by Norla Antinoro
We met the new poster boy for the Republican Party last night and he’s quite a hunk. Let’s call him Joe the Plumber. Why not, everybody else is. JoeTP is the Great White Hope for the Republican Party and he’s looking to land a knock-out punch. Like his hero, John McCain, JoeTP flies a false flag. A flag of convenience. A flag of disguise. He claims to be an undecided voter and refuses to say whether he is registered as a Democrat or Republican. But he’s selling straight McCain. Read more
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Bob's Bail Out Plan by bobl-tlm
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How Do You Like Deregulation Now? graphic politics by Dicky Neely
