Corrupting the Character

In his press conference last night, President Obama spoke about the corrupting of the character of America because of waterboarding, which he stated unequivocally was torture.

Here is a link to the briefing and to the press conference itself.

To date it's the strongest statement he has made although he avoided speaking about accountability, at least last night. In prior statements, he said it would be a decision for Attorney General Eric Holder. That's where it belongs, too: it should be a prosecutorial decision not a political one.

But back to the waterboarding, in Spain, five former prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, have joined in the case where a judge has authorized an investigation into the circumstances of American interrogations. According to an interview with Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, on WBAI last evening, if indictments result, so will arrest warrants against those found to have authorized and implemented torture. Since we can't expect that the United States will extradite those US officials, there will be arrest warrants issued. The impact of those will be that Bush, Cheney, and any others will not be able to travel to any European country.

That might not effect Bush, who never likes to leave Texas anyway, but will impede Cheney and Rumsfeld and their capacity to make more money through speaking fees.

That Rumsfeld is making yet more money through the swine flu spread is making me sick. He is one of the founding directors of Gilead Sciences, which owns the world wide patent for the anti-viral.

Pressure is certainly mounting on the United States to act itself, to purge itself, to correct itself. The discussion about whether torture works is a distraction. Imagine what George Washington might think! Let's see how true to the constitution those "originalists" really are.

Sidebar: There was something quaint, and I never thought I would use the word "quaint" about his directions on how to avoid the swine flu: wash your hands, cover your mouth, stay home if you or your children are ill.

He said it twice.

Arlen Specter and the Demise of the Republican Party

When the governor of Texas, Rick Perry, seriously discusses secession (and gets the history of statehood wrong), it's time for thoughtful people to consider the future of the Republican Party. (Rick Perry at the April 15th teaparty:

"Texas is a unique place. When we came into the union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that ...

"We've got a great union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what may come out of that?")

When politicians have to publicly apologize to windbag Rush Limbaugh, including Michael Steele, the chair of the Republican National Committee, it's time to reconsider whether there is permanent damage to the structure of the Republican Party, taken over as it is by single-issue fanatics.

When Bobby Jindal and Sarah Palin are Republican Party rising stars, we need to hope to hell that a new, more moderate third party is in the works, because it isn't healthy for America, or any country, to be run solely by one party.

Arlen Specter isn't ready to be retired by the right wing of the Republican Party, and I must congratulate him on his candor yesterday during his announcement. It sounded a bit arrogant, of course, but to Specter, being challenged in a Republican primary to retain his seat is much like Brad Pitt having to audition for a role.

Done that.

As Jon Stewart snickered last night, the fate of the US Senate is in the hands of Al Franken.

Having just returned from Franken country, although certainly not having access to any people who supported Coleman, I don't have many observations to make other than the housing stock of Minneapolis is just gorgeous! With the third party candidate out of the recount dragout, the vast majority of Minnesotans just want Coleman to go away. According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, 2/3 of the state's voters want Coleman to concede the election already.

On the Road During the Swine Flu Breakout

Because my plane was delayed for two and a half hours at JFK on Sunday in a hot, unair conditioned terminal despite the heat wave, I got to hear, involuntarily, the hysteria about Swine Flu fever, blasted from the flat screen televisions tuned to CNN. I am a bit germ-phobic to begin with, having gotten a sinus infection not once but twice this winter, each time after flying. Obviously when you sit near anyone with a cough or cold, you get it too, because the air isn't being circulated and filtered properly in the airplanes. Another marker of deregulation.

Now a mere sniffle, after hours of the bombardment of Swine Flu hysteria, will initially elicit fears of it being lethal, even for a healthy minded person.

Last night I had dinner with my friends in Minneapolis. We got back to the hotel late, and I had already missed The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. So I had to put on "real" news. It was Chris Mathews "Hard Ball." He had on Pat Buchanan, that xenophobic idiot, who blamed Swine Flu on illegal immigrants. He was shouting about how illegal immigrants come here with all kinds of diseases: TB, HIV, and now Swine Flu.

That's such a helpful analysis, don't you think?

Listen, Pat, we live in a global world. People move across borders, most of whom are legal, like those high school kids in Queens who took a class trip to Mexico and came back ill. Where do the illegal immigrants fit into the reality of what has happened?

The pandemic of 1918, the Spanish flu, that killed millions of people worldwide, spread not because of illegal immigration, but because of World War I. The close quartering of new military recruits brought together the human soup needed to incubate the virus, mutate it from a benign to a virulent bug, and then the movement of troops across American and the Atlantic to the war spread the disease. 28% of all Americans were infected. 675,000 Americans died. Worldwide the pandemic 2.5% mortality rate was high, killing perhaps 50 million people. What was so cruel about the Spanish flu was that it particularly hit young adults in the prime of their lives--20-40 years old. Since its outbreak was during World War I, its spread domestically was accelerated by the repressive Sedition Laws that prevented newspapers from reporting on the disease for fear that it would be considered information demoralizing to the war effort.

That isn't the problem this time around: the hysteria seems to be quite premature. Yes, pandemic flu does appear in less virulent forms first, then if it is going to turn nasty, it becomes more lethal as it mutates into a super germ. But no one knows if that is the fate of this virus. It does appear to spread easily among humans, not a good sign. Whether it mutates into something more dangerous, well, no one knows for sure. I suspect that those who believe in "intelligent design" might think it's in God's hands. I suspect that it is just chance.

Calm down, calm down. Breathe, exhale.

Faster, Faster, Faster

Brain researchers know that exercise, aerobic exercise specifically, increases cognitive abilities in all ages of people. It makes sense: when we were still living on the Serengeti, we had to keep moving in order to keep living, so that we were making evolutionary decisions on the run. Now we make decisions sitting in front of a computer terminal, and it's not the best way to get our brains running at full speed. I just started John Medina's Brain Rules, and it's fun, multi-media, and gives some pretty powerful arguments for life style changes that diminish the probabilities of spending our older years with diminished capacities.

Last week's The New Yorker also deals with how our brains work, focusing on neuro-enhancing drugs: how they work, do they work, and what are the ethics of having them available at the workplace and in classrooms. Margaret Talbot's "Brain Gain" is also worth the time to read.

We know that some stress is stimulating, but there are limits, and we appear to be walking through another of those evolutionary gates when intentional decision making is required. The pharmaceutical companies and the global workplace should not be the determinants of whether we start taking medication to make us all into more productive workers. Already, according to Talbot, there are cultures in some workplaces that encourage such competition among workers that these neuro-enhancing drugs are commonplace. At my daughter's women's college, they are, too: Adderall, Provigil, Ritalin. These drugs and their availability once again exacerbate the class, and consequently, racial divide. Who can afford these prescription drugs?

Sometimes I think that if we redistributed work among all of us, there would be no unemployment and we might have a moment to sit in our gardens and watch the tulips bloom.

100 Days

Energetic, thoughtful, conciliatory, perhaps a bit too conciliatory, hopeful, and we all love Michelle. As the first 100 days of the Obama administration move forward, there is no doubt that some on the left are disappointed, and some on the right are hysterical. When was the last time we heard the word "secession"?

Overall, Obama is as complex a president as the situation requires. Certainly on the "anything is better than Bush" meter, Obama is doing great. The magnitude of the issues facing America and the world make the thought of even wanting to be president seem impossible.

Yet he seems to be thriving, taking up each challenge, unafraid of conflict among his staff, as reflected by how the decision to release the torture memos was made. There is so much to do that the traditional 100 days meter seems silly.

I can't imagine anyone better than Obama as our president now.

He is evocative, creative, charming, smart, articulate, and he has vision. At least after 100 days his glamour has diminished, because what we need to revitalize America is not an iconic leader alone, but a true grassroots movement that brings together coalitions who are serving the interests of community and not just individuals. We need to end the era of selfishness and greed.

Here are links to some interesting assessments.

The Nation, gives a photo essay.

The New York Times has five historians blogging with comparisons to other presidents.

Politifact.com rates Obama in the low 60s for promises kept in the first 100 days.

San Francisco Chronicle also compares Obama's moves with presidents past.

Even Judith Miller, disgraced New York Times reporter who planted stories about Iraqi ties to 9/11, blogs on Fox and gives Obama decent grades on national security decisions.

Foreign Policy has scores of analysts scoring Obama's first 100 days.

Why We Need to Know

There is more than just curiosity at the heart of the need to know what tactics were used by the CIA, military, and private contractors when interrogating detainees in the Bush "war on terror." I don't like to go to the efficacy argument, because what makes Dick Cheney so desperate and offensive is his glib dismissal of American ideals in favor of pragmatism. And according to the military unit charged with SERE, the interrogation program favored by Bush-Cheney, well, it doesn't work anyway.

So if it isn't curiosity, why are there so many people so insistent that we learn what was done in the name of protecting the American people from future attacks?

America has tortured before, that we know from survivors of the right wing dictators of Latin America. But what makes this so different is that the orders to torture came directly from the White House, where Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, Rice, Addington, Rumsfeld and more involved the Office of Legal Counsel, subverting its role, to justify their decisions. (Somehow when they were in power, everything was secret, and any leakage was treason, now Cheney suddenly wants everything released.)

Propublica.org is a privately funded investigative journalism site where reporters have been partnering with NPR and The New York Times to bring some light to issues like TARP, the "war on terror," and the economic crisis. Read the comparison between the SERE guidelines, authorized by the various torture memos and the recounts collected by the RED Cross in interviews with former detainees.

Congressional hearings will be a distraction, but not a grand jury and criminal trials.

No One is Innocent

Last night I might have convinced a friend that criminal prosecutions of those who authorized the use of torture on detainees in the “war on terror” are not just feasible, but perhaps necessary. The way I got him to listen was by telling him that it appears that then Secretary of State Colin Powell was intentionally kept out of the loop on issues of torture in the aftermath of September 11th.

Powell’s absence from the decision making is raised by the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report, issued on Wednesday, April 22, 2009. According to the chronology in that report, key principals in the White House—John Ashcroft, then Attorney General; Condoleezza Rice, then National Security Adviser; and of course, Darth Vader himself, Vice President Dick Cheney—purposefully kept Secretary of State Colin Powell outside the meetings. Not surprising either.

Of all of the people making the decisions as to whether to use torture on detainees in the “war on terror,” only Colin Powell had served in the military and only Colin Powell had seen action. He knew the importance of the rules of engagement and more particularly, he knew the origins of the SERE training, which provided the basis for the Office of Legal Counsel’s memos permitting cruel and inhuman treatment and torture. Claims that the lack of historical understanding of SERE’s origins were somehow unintentional are disingenuous, since the person who would have balked immediately was left out of the bloody party.

Some people believe that Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, although not at some of these early Principals meetings, was indeed in the loop and knew from the start that torture was being used by the CIA and private contractors. Hence his dismissal of the images from Abu Ghraib that led to the court martial of Lynndie England (who is serving 36 months in the brig and who speaks up in a December 2008 article in Marie Claire) and Charles Granner, her then fiancé (who is serving a ten year sentence), as a “few bad apples” needs to be questioned.

However, as Glenn Greenwald reminds us today, the Washington Post in a December 26, 2002 story by Dana Priest and Barton Gellman exposed the use of “harsh interrogation” techniques by the CIA, so we knew what was going on. If we did, so did Colin Powell, which leads us once again down a familiar path: Did Powell have the moral courage to stand up in opposition to the Commander in Chief?

I hope that because both Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld profited financially from their time in public office that this adds to the level of outrage—authorizing wholesale disregard for American and international law, violation of individual rights and liberties, and ordering torture—and that the American public insists on investigations and prosecutions of those responsible.

Read the Los Angeles Times April 23, 2009 story by Greg Miller and Julian Barnes.

However as we grow angrier, we can’t forget that this use of torture is not new to American history. Ask Sister Dianna Ortiz about her kidnap and torture in Guatemala, and the numerous other people throughout Latin America who suffered at the hands of, if not CIA conducted or ordered, CIA trained and supervised torture of those believed to be political opponents to some of the worst tyrants in history.

8:30 pm Update: The Washington Post just obtained a document from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which runs the SERE program that trains U.S. military personnel to resist torture and also helped train interrogators in the methods that were used on terror suspects under former President Bush. Read Alex Koppelman's post in Salon.com.

If the agency with the most knowledge about how SERE worked and whether torture worked, too, said it didn't, the issue remains, did the White House Principals know, or like other information they didn't like, did they disregard this?

Sunday, April 26, 2009 Update: Frank Rich in today's New York Times elaborates on just what I have written here: no one is innocent, especially not the American people, who knew before the 2004 presidential election, when Bush-Cheney scared people into voting for them, that the United States was engaging in torture, had abandoned its public commitment to international treaties, and was using pragmatism as the rationalization.

Valentino: The Last Emperor

Escape: I needed some escape from torture, from the Holocaust, from the financial crisis. So I left work and by myself, something I am prone to do, I went to the Cinema to see Valentino: The Last Emperor. It's a documentary about the haute couture designer Valentino. Great, I thought as I sat in the back row with a medium popcorn for dinner. Fashion, frivolous fashion.

That's not what the film is about.

Valentino designed hand stitched dresses for the rich and beautiful for 45 years. He is fabulously wealthy with a villa in Rome, another in Paris, and a yacht. His face is now too tan, his hair doesn't move, and one suspects might not still be his. He is a tiny man without a bit of fat on his seventy-five year old body. For all of those 45 years, he has been the friend, lover, and business partner with Giancarlo. Giancarlo runs the business, or should I say, ran the business.

This is the story about genius, about creativity, about an intimate relationship, and about how beauty turned from creation for the super rich to industry for those who long to be.

The film was directed by Matt Tyrnauer. This is his first film. According to Matt, he was fired every night by the unpredictable Valentino, and every morning received a call to come back and film again. That isn't in the documentary.

The film is pretentious and impossible, too. The rarefied life of those who flutter around the haute couture fashion shows--Gwyneth Paltrow, Sarah Jessica Parker, Princess So-And-
So from Bulgaria--what do we have in common with these women? They are Valentino's muses, they are the women he dreams about when he designs clothes.

The film is also about the demise of fashion, from houses where clothes were sewn by hand, made to order, to corporate licensing, where the designers are just logos and decisions are made by money men. Off the rack clothes, belts, shoes, and handbags are designed by anonymous young stylists, stitched in sweat shops in the country with the lowest wages, then sold for enormous amounts of money to hard working women who long to look like Gwyneth Paltrow, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Princess So-And-So from Bulgaria. Those same belts and handbags are all knocked off in factories in China, sometimes with the logos misspelled, and sold on the streets to the less successful women who want to look like, well, you know who.

The clothes are fantastic, pure fantasy, and there are 45 years of gowns to see. Really, I thought I was going to see something mindless, but instead I glimpsed into the world of a genius and corporate culture.

Yom Hashoah

April 20 was Hitler's birthday and the tenth anniversary of Columbine. If you recall, there was a reason for the calendar madness. Yesterday was Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. It didn't exist when I was a child, when the first accounts of what happened in Germany were making their way into novels by Leon Uris and Meyer Levin, when The Diary of Ann Frank was compulsory reading for any Jewish girl, whether observant or not.

A day of remembrance. I attended a lecture given by the son of one of Germany's most renowned legal ethicists, Max Friedlander. His son, Gerhardt Friedlander is a nuclear chemist, worked on the Manhattan Project, at over 90 years of age although frail, still has a riveting mind and a clear voice. He read from his father's memoir, which he translated from German. His father's work on legal ethics had been plagiarized by the man who would later become a chief judge of the courts that presided over bar admissions and practice. And the man who presided had stolen the work of his father! Gerhardt later told the story that when he was attending UC Berkeley, he received a letter from his father who was still living in Germany, although by then not allowed to practice law under the Nazis. The Germans had issued another suffocating law, this time that all Jews had to include the name "Israel" as their middle names. "My father wrote to me and told me to take my passport and have it amended. Even under the Nazis, my father believed in obeying the law."

Of course, Gerhardt did not.

The other speaker was Douglas Morris, a Holocaust scholar whose expertise is in Nazis and the legal profession. He told the story of Max Hirschberg, who coincidentally had been an apprentice in the law offices of Max Friedlander. Max Hirschberg was the most renowned criminal defense attorney in Munich when the Nazis came to power. Their first act against the Jews in 1933 was to prohibit Jewish lawyers from practicing law. However, this first act had exceptions: if the attorney had been admitted since before 1914, had served in the German army during World War I, or whose father or son had served in World War I. Professor Morris explained that in the beginning, the German attorneys and judges continued to apply the law to the facts in a forthright way, and since Hirschberg had been admitted to the bar before 1914 and was himself a WWI veteran, he was not disbarred. That intellectual honesty didn't last long, because the next exclusions, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, had no such exceptions.

When I got back to the office, I learned with relief that President Obama had not excluded the possibility of prosecuting the architects of the "war on terror" whose distortion of legal analysis and legal reasoning produced the Office of Legal Counsel memos that authorized the use of torture on detainees in the "war on terror."

Dick Cheney is Ruling My Mind

OK, we might already be 100 days into the Age of Obama, but Dick Cheney is still ruling my mind! I spent all day yesterday immersed in these torture memos, and this morning, I woke up to hearing his gravel, Darth Vader voice defending the use of torture, as effective.

He had been speaking on Fox News last night. Now he is calling for the release of all the CIA memos to prove that torture works!

In 2009, in the United States of America, where the Rule of Law was born, nurtured, and then overtly discarded, I can't believe we are having this conversation.

And remember, Dick Cheney made millions while serving as vice president of the United States. He profited from his position, from his decisions, and from the decisions of the Bush administration.

But last evening I went to hear women read their stories at an opening ceremony for Herstory, a womens writing workshop. Some of the women had begun to tell their stories while serving in prison. I heard about the cruelty of punishing women for self-medicating by taking them away from their children, far more humiliating than taking away their freedom. I heard about the desperation, of cutting, of blinding drunks, of loving the wrong men for too long. These are the prisoners who are afforded due process.

Waterboarding Used 266 Times on Two Detainees

Sickening, and done in our names. Read The New York Times.

Yesterday I wrote that comparisons to Nazis were hyperbole. I still agree, but. Two suspects, Abu Zubaydah, was waterboarded 83 times (he was known to be crazy, had been cooperative, and was also known not to be a high placed al Qaeda operative) and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed,the purported mastermind of the September 11 attacks, was waterboarded 183 times.

This is torture. This is disgusting. This is what George Washington refused to do when British soldiers were captured, back when we were first becoming a country. How could we allow Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld--and their lackey lawyers Jay Bybee, John Yoo, and Steven Bradbury-- to destroy over two hundred years of history?

What We Know and What To Do With It

It's taken a long, long time, but finally there is a flood of scholarship that admits the German people knew that the "Final Solution" meant rounding up Jews from throughout Germany and the occupied territories and sending them to their deaths, whether in mass graves, work camps, or gas chambers.

There were just too many witnesses to the arrests, confiscation of property, cramming people onto cattle cars (if they were lucky) or into ditches if they were shot on the spot. These acts were carried out by human beings, German soldiers, some of whom kept diaries, wrote letters, and spoke with colleagues and family. Rail stations had ticket sellers and conductors. The witnesses had nightmares, too.

Read the book reviews in the May issue of The Atlantic, Hitler's Co-Conspirators, for the details of when and how German citizens knew of the "Final Solution," and how that knowledge made them complicit in the exterminations.

The Third Reich at War, by Richard J. Evans, Penguin

Life and Death in the Third Reich, by Peter Fritzsche, Harvard

Germany and the Second World War, Vol. IX: German Wartime Society 1939–1945, Oxford

Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution, by Ian Kershaw, Yale

I'm not saying that the Bush administration's "war on terror" reached the level of the Holocaust. And I resent folks who offer such hyperbolic comparisons. But here is where I do find a parallel: in the complicity.

Now we know. Well, we've known that the White House Principals were obsessively involved in tracking the interrogations of prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and black sites around the world. Those stories were leaked back in 2004. So when former CIA director Michael Hayden defends the use of torture on, where else but Fox News, we know we are at a turning point.

President Obama, I know it's hard, it's painfully hard to withstand the criticism of authorizing an investigation into just what was done in our names from 2001-2009.

It was torture, no matter what Jay Bybee, John Yoo, or Steven Bradbury called it.

Read this post from Sheri Fink, a medical doctor on propublica.org. It's still torture if it's done in front of doctors:

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the memos is their intimation that medical professionals conducted a form of research on the detainees, clearly without their consent. “In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented,” one memo reads. The documentation included not only how long the procedure lasted, how much water was used and how it was poured, but also “if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled… and how the subject looked between each treatment.” Special instructions were also issued with regard to documenting experience with sleep deprivation, and “regular reporting on medical and psychological experiences with the use of these techniques on detainees” was required.

The Nuremberg Code, adopted after the horrors of “medical research” during the Nazi Holocaust, requires, among other things, the consent of subjects and their ability to call a halt to their participation.

So now we have knowledge, and with that knowledge comes complicity, just like the Germans during World War II, if we don't do anything. That isn't a pleasant comparison, it's uncomfortable. But now that Dick Cheney isn't running the American government, we don't have the same fears of retribution either, not like the fear that silenced the Germans during WWII.

How will we use this knowledge?

Nowhere to Go Nothing to Do

That mantra was given to me as a gift by my friend Anna when my mother was dying of cancer, and I had no control over anything, except for being there with her in the present tense and letting her know that I loved her. Intentionality. Moving and acting with purpose. What I admire so much about President Obama and Michelle is their intentionality.

Yesterday was a perfect spring day, sunny with a light breeze, temperatures reaching nearly seventy. So I spent the morning in the garden, no gloves this time, but hands directly into the soil, readying one bed for herb planting. I pruned rose bushes, too. Then I sat and read the pile of magazines that had accumulated over the last month: The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's, and I even leafed through my daughter's Vogue.

What surprised me about the Vogue were the ads for less than glamorous places right up in the front of the magazine: H & M, Walmart, and Target. One cover story for the May 2009 issue is "The Real Lives of Models" and another is "You're Fired! Surviving and Thriving After the Pink Slip."

David Sedaris was wicked and one can tell that he still longs for his cigarettes in his new essay in The New Yorker. I quit smoking on March 23, 1996, and must admit that after September 11, despite the debris that was falling all around us for days afterwards, I did long for a cigarette. Instead my husband and I drank a bottle of 1989 Le Tours with a Mario's home delivery pizza. I don't write about smoking anymore this many years later.

The Harper's Index is always illuminating. We might think that suddenly Americans are saving a lot of money, hording it for the worst that is yet to come, but according to Harper's, since March 2008, Americans have used far less credit through credit cards: -$349,300,000,000. That's a big number. And it is estimated of all new US savings last year that 3/4 of it was really payment of credit card debt. That might be why the credit card default rate hasn't ballooned yet: 9.33% default rate as of April 15, 2009. Another marker to look for in despair.

Next I read a scary story about fundamentalist Christian soldiers serving in the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although as a whole, the military is less religious than the population at large, 20% of the roughly 1.4 million active-duty personnel checked off that they have no religious preference, those who are religious and in the military are militant about it. In addition to the 22% who identify themselves as evangelical or Pentecostal, there is another 7% who although attached to a traditional religion, also see themselves as evangelical. And of the 19% of military personnel who are Catholic, there is "a small but vocal subset who tend politically to affiliate with conservative evangelicals." It's the Officers' Christian Fellowship, with 15,000 active members at 80% of US military bases that is worrisome. These officers like to make the war in Iraq and Afghanistan a religious one. One officer had "Jesus killed Mohammed" painted onto a military vehicle in Arabic, as it drove into battle. A friend of ours son left the Air Force Academy after three years, his dream dissolved, because of the fundamentalist culture that had taken over the place. These are the Crusades to some acting in the name of all of us.

Sipping some wine, I turned to The Atlantic, also the May 2009 issue. OK, I admit to reading the trashy book review by Caitlin Flanagan about Alec Baldwin's memoir, A Promise to Ourselves, in which he tells his side of the divorce and custody battle over Ireland. I adore "Jack," the character Alec plays on 30 Rock. It was sunny, it was hot. I wanted a moment to just forget that the world was on the brink once again.

That led me to Jeffrey Goldberg's hysterically funny, but oh-so-true, description of his naivety surrounding the collapse of his 401 k in "Why I Fired My Broker: An Everyman's Guide to Financial Survival."

Jeff's broker hasn't called him in seven months. What is wrong with this picture? Mine called me on Friday and told me there was nothing for me to buy. She doesn't trust anything available in the current market. Goldberg interviews some of the smartest financial people, including George Soros' son, and concludes? Well, I'll let you discover for yourself. Just know this, everytime my husband came out to join me on the patio of our house, which is desperately in need of repairs we can't afford, I read aloud another brilliantly ironic paragraph from Goldberg's piece.

The Real Meaning of Presidential

Some presidents are certainly more hands on than others. In reading through the latest torture memos, it is sickening to read the level of detail that was included in the Office of Legal Counsel analysis of what constituted torture, in the case of the August 2002 memo, of one specific individual.

By hijacking the Office of Legal Counsel, intended to provide neutral and dispassionate advice to the executive branch, Bush has blood on his hands now, too.

Last night I saw Mary Stuart, a revived translation of Frederick Schiller's original, about the prolonged incarceration and eventual beheading of Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, at the hand of her Protestant cousin Queen Elizabeth I. After years of being held in prison, isolated from her people and her religion, Mary is still perceived as an enemy by her cousin. Mary was implicated in the death of her last husband, she had three, and in several plots to overthrow Elizabeth and restore Catholicism to England. Elizabeth swears out a warrant for her death and when it is carried out, and her cousin, after nearly twenty years is freed from the horrors of her imprisonment, Elizabeth recants and arrests her own advisers for releasing the warrant that led to Mary's death.

These torture memos were not intended to reach the public although they were intended to provide cover to the CIA, military, private contractors, and eventually the White House Principals. The Bush administration, working most probably through Dick Cheney and David Addington, authorized these memos so that if ever there was an investigation into the use of torture on "war on terror" detainees, they could claim that they were operating under legal counsel. Now that the memos have been released, we know that first, some of the memos were written after the torture began, and second, that the factual narratives contained in the memos is blatantly false, and was known to be false at the time of the writing. Like a recalcitrant, arrogant Elizabeth, the Bush Principals cannot claim innocence, they cannot claim they were acting in the best interests of their country. They subordinated and perverted the rule of law, and got rich at the same time.

President Obama can't walk away from prosecuting those responsible for bringing the United States so close to its own destruction. This isn't a matter of morale. This is a matter of compliance with international treaties that prohibit cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. This is a matter of the US historical stand against torture. This is about honoring those men and women who risked everything and said NO, when they learned what was happening in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

We have no choice but to investigate and truly close this horrendous chapter in our history.

Read through some samplings on what other folks are saying about the torture memos.

Use the Rule of Law to End the Lawlessness

Four more Bush era memos authorizing the use of torture on detainees held by the US in the "war on terror" were released yesterday by the Obama administration. Download the memos here. Before the documents were distributed, only one of which was redacted to any real measure (taking out mentions of agents who participated in the inhuman and degrading behaviors), Obama differentiated between the agents who did the dirty work, and it was disgusting, and the officials who promoted and authorized it:

According to the New York Times: "Mr. Obama said that C.I.A. officers who were acting on the Justice Department’s legal advice would not be prosecuted, but he left open the possibility that anyone who acted without legal authorization could still face criminal penalties. He did not address whether lawyers who authorized the use of the interrogation techniques should face some kind of penalty."

Reading through one of the memos yesterday, written by now federal appeals court judge Jay Bybee, I was horrified at the detailed descriptions of the techniques--walling, sleep deprivation, stress positions, slapping, confinement in small cages, use of insects, and of course, waterboarding. That the Office of Legal Counsel was hijacked to write particularized authorizations for the use of inhuman and degrading interrogation techniques is evidence enough of the abuse of authority conducted by Dick Cheney, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, Donald Rumsfeld, at a minimum. The role of George Bush himself is less clear.

Consider the Bybee memo on sleep deprivation, which held that it wasn't torture to keep Abu Zubaydah, an allegedly high-ranking al Qaeda member (but he wasn't and they knew he wasn't) awake, so long as it didn't last for more than eleven days: Sleep deprivation may be used. You have indicated that your purpose in using this technique is to reduce the individual's ability to think on his feet and, through the discomfort associated with lack of sleep, to motivate him to cooperate. The effect of such sleep deprivation will generally remit after one or two nights of uninterrupted sleep. You have informed us that your research has revealed that, in rare instances, some individuals who are already predisposed to psychological problems may experience abnormal reactions to sleep deprivation. Even in those cases, however, reactions abate after the individual is permitted to sleep. Moreover, personnel with medical training are available to and will intervene in the unlikely event of an abnormal reaction. You have orally informed us that you would not deprive Zubaydah of sleep for more than eleven days at a time and that you have previously kept him awake for 72 hours, from which no mental or physical harm resulted.

One memo admits that the technique of waterboarding was used too often and too violently: Waterboarding was used “with far greater frequency than initially indicated” and with “large volumes of water” rather than the small quantities in the rules, one memo says, citing a 2004 report by the C.I.A.’s inspector general.

Immediately Senator Patrick Leahy called for a full investigation. America needs more. We need investigations and prosecutions of the principals who authorized and promoted the use of torture. I agree that the agents themselves shouldn't be prosecuted; they should lose their jobs, however. We don't need those kinds of men and women working for our country. But the officials responsible for ordering the abuses, well, they deserve the full force of the rule of law, which they denied to others, in search of the truth.

Teabagging

Only a lobbyist-inspired and Fox-promoted event like yesterday's anti-taxation demonstrations would take on the rather ambiguous and sexually charged name of "teabagging" without any understanding whatsoever of the innuendo attached to the word. As Rachel Maddow took viewers last night from one demonstration to the next was the entire audience chuckling?

The signs displayed at these rallies made me realize that indeed there is more than just one reality. TARP was from the Bush administration, remember, and I don't recall much fuss from the "grassroots" Republicans then, although the tone of the McCain rallies was getting raucous and desperate, and the folks showing up appeared more from the fringe. Everything appeared in code yesterday, like Bush's use of biblical terminology, letting people see and hear that they aren't alone. I don't know if I should be afraid, but Fox seems to be doing what the "yellow journalists" of the by-gone era did: making news instead of just reporting it.

Historically, America has always been divided, between North and South, between urban and rural, and then between urban, rural, and suburban, between races, between classes, although for some reason Fox refuses to admit the class aspect, as if class warfare is somehow worse than anything else.

Why? Because they promote it.

April 15th--Where Has All The Money Gone?

For those of you worrying about how you are going to get that check to the IRS today, consider this: on April 13, 2009, in an article in The New York Times, Luis A. Ubiñas, the new head of the Ford Foundation admitted that it lost one-third of its endowment in the last year.

Last year, Ford’s assets fell 30 percent to $9.5 billion, yet it remains the country’s second-largest foundation after the Gates Foundation.

Ford didn't do much better than I did with my retirement fund. Happy Tax Day.

Why I Love 30 Rock

I didn't like it at first. It took three years before my daughter sat me down in front of her computer and showed me the light. Although she and I adore 30 Rock for very different reasons. She finds the characters delightfully wacky and funny.

I find Jack, such a corporate parody, so self-absorbed, so full of MBA management truisms, as the head of the microwave and entertainment divisions of NBC, the real dark humor of the show. Jack is the character constructed by Alec Baldwin, and in real life, Jack is sinister.

What amazes me is that NBC hasn't pulled the show.

It truly is subversive.

As we watch the functions of government get privatized through disasters, war, and fear--entire communities outside Atlanta, GA are now independent fiefdoms run by private companies, the same companies who brought us post-invasion Iraq and post-Hurricane Katrina, who profits?

According to Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine, "...General Electric, which owns NBC, purchased InVision, the major producer of controversial high-tech bomb detection devices used in airports and other public spaces. InVision received a staggering $15 billion in Homeland Security contracts between 2001 and 2006, more of such contracts than any other company."

That's Jack's microwave division, albeit more insidious. We aren't talking about a pocket size microwave, as featured on a show this season, but an entertainment company whose back end is all munitions, private security, and war. And we wonder why corporate media wasn't critical of Bush and Cheney before the invasion of Iraq?

Mandatory Reading

As painful as it is to read these books, as citizens who desire a more humane and egalitarian world, we must know what has been done in our names. At least three books are mandatory: Philippe Sands "Torture Team"; Jane Mayer "The Dark Side"; and Naomi Klein "The Shock Doctrine."

Each points a finger at top members of the Bush Administration for taking the reigns of our government and turning our resources to defiling America, eroding a commitment to civil and human rights, devastating the efficacy of government, and all the while making exorbitant profits. The hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed by the Bush Administration during the course of its "war on terror" is horrifying in and of itself. However, the profits made by American corporations as the functions of government here and abroad were privatized add another dimension to the last eight years, especially when one sees just how much Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and George Bush, Sr. made through the war in Iraq and the more pervasive "war on terror."

As informed citizens of this country and of the world, we must insist that the Obama Administration take the steps necessary to investigate, prosecute, and undo the damage done by the ideologues of the last presidency. We have no choice. This information is out there, and to choose not act is an act of such hubris and arrogance that I doubt the rest of the world will ever respect the United States again. No matter how popular Obama might seem today.

Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them

The play begins in a cheap motel room. A beautiful young woman, Felicity, wakes up in bed with a foreign looking man, Zamir. She doesn't remember anything: not meeting him, not marrying him, not engaging in adventurous sex with him the night before.

This is not funny. My brain labels what has unfolded in just two minutes as drugging and raping, and something more than racial profiling, more like overt racism since the look and name of the male character is distinctly Middle Eastern. When Felicity suggests that they get an annulment, Zamir warns her of his temper. So let's add domestic violence to the list of what's wrong with this picture.

And then the sphincter muscle in my brain relaxed and what unfolded was a delightful absurdist farce written by Christopher Durang and impeccably directed by Nicholas Martin.

The play was written for Kristine Nielsen, a gifted comedienne, who plays Felicity's mother, Luella. This is a role of a lifetime. Luella would rather live in the world of theater, it's just more real than her life arranging flowers in a suburban home while attending to her right-wing reactionary husband Leonard, played by the able Richard Poe. Nielsen delivers a comedic line like a fabulously complex cabernet: there is a long, distinct aftermath that plays out for minutes as her face takes us to where her mind wanders. It's luscious and lovely.

No one has lines like Luella. Laura Benanti is gorgeous, a fine comic actress who knows how to use her beautiful face. The mother-daughter relationship is precious and funny, and again, as politically incorrect as this play is, once Felicity finally takes control, she knows how to do it. Audrie Neenan is Hildegarde, a fellow right wing conspiracy believer with a running underwear gag who is madly in love with Felicity's father and Luella's husband Leonard although she insists on calling him Roger. Amir Arison plays a menacing yet accessible Zamir. We had seen him last season in Charles Mee's delicacy Queens Boulevard and I just learned that although he has played a Middle Eastern Muslim and an Indian prince, he is actually of Israeli heritage. He brings intensity to his comic performance. (After the show, we met Amir and his mother and father!) David Aaron Baker rounds out the cast as the moderator and a cartoonish character with tourette's syndrome. Talk about timing!

In addition to some fine and playful writing about theater, and a much broader and less surprising dialogue about terrorism and the need for a shadow government, there is impeccable directing that adds a lot of detailed business to each of the actor's performances. The set helps, too. David Korins did the scenic design, a set that is divided into a pie that rotates, and the action of the play includes the rotation of the set with clever little nuances. I won't go where the play ends up going, but just trust me. It's funny and it works.

The play has been extended through May 3. There are two worthy plays at The Public Theater currently: The Good Negro, which I reviewed two weeks ago, a serious and important play about the early years of the modern civil rights era and this treat, Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them.

Where Have All the Journalists Gone? Part II

While Howard Fineman, Senior Washington correspondent at Newsweek and frequent talking head on MSNBC is trying to be heard through the numbing noise of cable news and journalism without investigation, by suggesting that perhaps Barack Obama isn't up to the task, ordinary people like you and me have to decide where we are going to find our news.

Yes, I find the smug tone of Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow entertaining, but I can't watch both, since they repeat the same stories and frankly, by the time a news item gets onto their shows, I've read it somewhere else. Except for some of Rachel's interviews. She's had some thrilling guests on, telling harrowing stories, especially about the Bush administration's war on terror.

I wake up to NPR, but lately they seem to be reading press releases and not really doing the hard work either. When I tune to WBAI, I sometimes wonder what year it is! Air America doesn't come in over the radio here, so I can only listen on the computer and during the day, I'm just too busy.

How could I have forgotten Democracy Now! If you miss it on local radio or television, you can watch the daily broadcast on line. In addition to getting arrested at the Republican National Convention despite her "big access" press credentials, Amy Goodman, founder and principal of Democracy Now! believes in the adage made famous by I.F. Stone: All governments lie.

And it's up to journalists to uncover those lies.

In celebration of I.F. Stone's 100th birthday celebration, he died in 1989, the first Izzy Award, was given to recognize independent journalism. The award was shared by Amy Goodman and Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer turned blogger on Salon.com.

Watch an extraordinary interview conducted by Bill Moyers, one of the best of America's journalists, with both of these independent journalists and then reorder where you get your news from.

Unfair and Not So Balanced

It seems that the right, playing to the right media, is claiming that in addition to President Obama disavowing his Christianity (see, we said he was a Muslim) when he said, out of context, that America was not a Christian nation, he is dangerously demilitarizing the military. However, no matter how much Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) claims otherwise, the Obama budget raises our commitment to the military. The numbers are astronomical. How did we get so jaded that a few billion in increases is a decrease?

Talkingpointsmem.com put together a mixture of which news shows got it right.

What Spain is Doing for the United States

Since President Obama doesn't seem to quite have the stomach yet, a Spanish Court last week began a criminal investigation into charging six former Bush administration officials with war crimes. The six under the prosecutorial microscope are: Douglas Feith, the former Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy; former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; John Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer, infamous for the torture memos that tortured legal analysis, precedent, and international law; and David Addington, the chief of staff and the principal legal adviser to Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Why Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and President Bush aren't on the list bewilders me.

According to Jane Meyer, the National Book Award author of "The Dark Side," the basis for the investigation is the work of Philippe Sands, the British professor whose book "The Torture Team" blazed the way through the lame excuse that those pictures we saw from Abu Ghraib were the result of a "few bad apples." According to Sands' research, what horrified us in those photographs of degradation was the result of high level authorizations from either the White House or very close by. There is an incredible interview conducted by Bill Moyers of Sands that shouldn't be missed.

Read Jane Mayer's short piece in the April 13, 2009 The New Yorker.

Here is why, no matter what, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush should be investigated. At least Cheney and Rumsfeld made money while in office. Cheney held onto his Halliburton stock and influence, and guess what: Halliburton got a helluva lot of no-bid contracts in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion. Rumsfeld made himself richer, too, because he held onto his Gilead stock, which just so happened to own the patent for Tamiflu, the alleged antidote to Avian Flu. Remember that?

As I am finishing Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, the crimes of the Bush administration become more heinous and urgent. It's one thing to be incompetent. It's another thing to make mistakes. But it is indefensible to run government for private enrichment, and that's what Cheney and Rumsfeld did. There is no evidence in Klein's book that Bush did directly benefit, but the doors he opened to privitizing everything will welcome him in his post-White House days.

More Shopping Isn't The Answer

In our quest to better understand how our economy actually works, although frankly, corruption and greed seem to be the common denominators, The Nation has a series of videos on its website that truly are worth watching. If you have the stomach, that is. The series is called Meltdown 101 and it isn't anything we learned in college in the classroom. It sounds more like what we heard during the strikes, when classes were held outside on commons and the talk was far more radical.

Also included are a variety of articles that have appeared in The Nation, some of which are very informative. Ending Plutocracy is one of my favorites.

"In Eisenhower's America income over $400,000--the equivalent of less than $3 million today--faced a top marginal tax rate of 91 percent. Our current top rate: 35 percent."

Think about that for a moment!

Where Have All The Journalists Gone?

I'm of the age when journalists were once viewed as heroes. Edward R. Murrow was an icon in our home even with my Republican father. Our family watched Person to Person together in the living room around our RCA television, which had been built in the United States of America.

Walter Chronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, and of course, as played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

Our family was friends with Ralph Morse, the photojournalist at Life Magazine who followed the first astronauts into survival training and into space.

And now? We aren't getting investigative reporting from newspapers anymore with their publishers cutting news room staffs, closing bureau offices, and isolating America to its major cities. And television news is merely entertainment.

Investigative reporting seems to be limited to the internet site ProPublica.org. Funded by the Sandler Foundation, the family behind the fall of Wachovia Savings when it purchased Golden West Financial, and JEHT Foundation, tumbled by the Madoff ponzi scheme, somehow ProPublica is still doing some of the best investigative reporting around. Check out what the bank bailout is really doing, pain killer mills in Florida, psychiatric care in Illinois public hospitals. This might be the future, links between newspapers, radio stations, and well-funded nonprofit websites. This isn't the Drudge Report or The Daily Beast. This isn't just opinion writing, but real old-fashioned investigative reporting. Take a look.

Because we aren't witnessing much reporting unless hyping Obama's trip to Europe and Turkey is still considered reporting. It reminds me of Beatlemania. OK, we want to feel some optimism, we want Obama to succeed, but we have really serious restructuring issues: we have to undo the privitizing of governmental functions that Bush took to new heights, we have to transform our economy, we have to examine our health care, education, and retirement systems. We need critical thinking not cheerleading.

More on Critical Race Theory

With thirteen people dead in Binghamton, here is an opportunity to understand what it means to have racial literacy. The fourteenth, Jiverly Wong, the unfortunate perpetrator of this horrifying act, has been described as a "Vietnamese immigrant," as a "Vietnamese-American," and as a "naturalized Vietnamese citizen."

When a white person goes mad and shoots, no one ever says "a white person" or a "Caucasian."

It's as if white people don't have race, only people of color do.

Think about the assumption that is the basis for these kinds of descriptions. Any person of color is considered "other."

For Asians, there is the additional specter of "foreignness" that follows them. They are not just considered people of color, but also foreign, as if they don't belong here.

Critical Race Theory and the Election of Obama

No one should think that just because Barack Obama was elected president that we are at the end of race as a defining concept in this country. For two days I have been listening to the leading legal scholars who have spent their lifetimes revealing the racial policies behind the curtain of America's rise to power. Every time Justice Scalia and his little meanie Federalist Society followers call for "originalism" in interpreting the Constitution, we only need remind them that the very essence of our Constitution is slavery, and the decision, meant to keep the Southern States in line, to count Africans as less than a person. Soon thereafter the US Supreme Court held in the Dred Scott decision that an African American, no matter his state of enslavement or not, was not a citizen, and therefore not entitled to those precious protections we associate with freedom. And it wasn't only Africans Americans. Although to a lesser degree, women and poor people had few rights or power either. To vote then, one had to be a white male owning land.

A majority of white voters did not back Barack Obama nationwide, and especially not in Alabama, where only 10% of whites voted for him, and in those states where Obama won a majority, the portion of white votes didn't get much above fifty percent, unless we are looking at the youth vote. Among white youth, ages 18-29, Obama did well, from 32% to as high as 66% of the vote.

Our colleges, universities, and professional schools--law, medical, and business--also reflect far fewer African American and Hispanic students than the overall demographics might suggest. Discrimination and the impact of years of deprivation in housing, schools, and health care show their nasty faces when we try to find African American lawyers, doctors, and MBAs.

The attack on remedies intended to flatten the playing field between Blacks and Whites--affirmative action--and diminish the myth of meritocracy, I say myth, because of the often hidden advantages whites accumulate for just being white, has decreased the absolute numbers as well as the gains of the Civil Rights. It's now illegal in California, Texas, Nebraska, Michigan, Florida, and if Ward Connerly has his way, we will be thrust into his purposed "colorblind" world. But colorblind isn't colorblind for people of color, it merely is code for ending access.

We are not there yet.

Lani Guinier , once Bill Clinton's pick for Attorney General and now a Harvard Law professor, spoke about the need for racial literacy, a lens through which to see the distribution of power generally, and an invaluable tool to critique how power is organized, to see the hierarchy, and to see who is on top of that hierarchy. She asks people to examine the three dimensions of power: What are the rules? Who set them and what is their purpose? And what is the story the winners tell the losers in order to get the losers to continue to engage?

Think about that! Yes, Barack Obama is president, in some ways, because he manipulated his racial identity to make at least some white people feel unafraid of him. He didn't present himself as an angry Black man, but as a feminized, Metrosexual, a family man. This isn't colorblindness; Obama ran his campaign as an accommodation to racism. No one was saying that things aren't better, but because there is still an intersection between race and poverty, we cannot pretend to ourselves that this intersection is mere coincidence.

Iowa: The Next State to Recognize Gay-Lesbian Marriage

Here in Iowa City where I am attending a critical race theory conference, the Iowa Supreme Court today issued a straight-forward, straight-talking decision overturning the ballot initiative that had banned same sex marriage. One long term couple who moved from Iowa to California where the sanctity of their marriage is hanging in the balance, was here in Iowa when the decision was announced. Thousands celebrated tonight. To experience their happiness was truly a gift.

Tonight one of the Lambda Legal Defense lawyers, Ken Upton, whose work helped made this decision possible gave a little history of Iowa: it was the first state to allow a woman to practice law, it recognized the right of African Americans to be human beings before the federal government did, and it made public school segregation illegal one hundred years before Brown v. Board of Education was issued.

If the foundation of our society is the stability of family units, then there seems to be no reason why we shouldn't encourage same sex couples to commit to a lifetime together. We all need intimacy, love, and forgiveness. Relationships are the way to teach folks how to do that. Shouldn't we be doing everything to sustain individuals so that our communities can nurture?

Improvisation

One wouldn't expect this, but economists have a habit of speaking confidently when they are really just improvising, thinking through a theory or ideological theory, even worse, and then having the balls to convince a government to let them try it out.

Reading The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, especially now, especially living in a post-Bush world with the consequences of a Bush presidency, we should be a bit skeptical about the decisions being made here, at the G 20 Summit that just closed in London, and inside the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. We have to get smarter about economics and money.

Economists like Milton Friedman, who won a Nobel Prize in 1976, was the expert helping the infamous, brutal war criminal General Pinochet "transform" Chile into a radical free market state. President Salvador Allende was assassinated during a military coup that was in large part orchestrated by Nixon-Kissinger to assure that the natural resources of the country would not fall back into the hands of the people who owned them. Then in came Milton Friedman and his "Chicago Boys" to destroy the safety net, the middle class, the trade union movement, and spread poverty while dividing up those rich natural resources among multinational corporations.

And Jeffrey Sachs, the guru of Bono now and a big name in international aid, was once the economist who helped Bolivia achieve the same rape of its people, although a bit less brutally than Chile, and who was responsible for leading post-Apartheid South Africa away from a socialized state with redistribution of wealth as a means of reparations to those Africans who had suffered so under colonialism, and into a give away that assured that South Africans, the dark skinned ones, would remain poor and in shantytowns. Unemployment rates are higher there now than ever before.

In America we look to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund as somehow benevolent institutions because up to now we have always controlled them, but that isn't how they are seen by developing nations. So these agreements that came out of the G 20 Summit in London should be viewed skeptically. We are watching a bailout that is destroying the middle and working classes in our own country, destroying the safety net and trade unions, while pouring money into the banks and investment houses. And we see some of the same economists in the background. Once again Larry Summers is right there. Read about him and then wonder if he should have the ear of the President. Now it's been disclosed just how much money he made spekaing with the same companies he is trying to rescue. Why is Paul Krugman so critical of Obama's decisions? Krugman is another Nobel winner for economics.

Essentially no one knows what they are doing! It's all improvisation.

Ironies

Last night I had dinner with a friend--D-- of over thirty years. We met through her second husband, a professor of mine from law school, and just as he predicted, D and I became fast friends and ended up discarding him, she by divorce and me by seeing him through her eyes.

D and I both met men and married them, several years later, when we were already in that age group when allegedly there was a bigger chance of being killed by a terrorist than finding a compatible mate of the opposite gender. That study was wrong, another bit of hype intended to control women, and twenty years later, both D and I are still married and D and I are still friends.

D is a social worker who sees individual patients in therapy. Although everyone is suffering from enormous stress, her client numbers are down, because no one can afford therapy right now. Now that's ironic. It's also worrying D.

The second irony is here we are, Second Wave Feminists, raised to be stay-at-home spouses with aprons and vacuum cleaners in tow, but having rebelled are now working our butts off at the age of 60 plus, responsible for investing our own 401 ks, and we are befuddled. There was a time in D and my relationship, when we would dress to kill and do the clubs in Manhattan, never arriving before midnight, in our own version of Sex in the City before there was a Carrie Bradshaw.Last night we spent most of the night nursing a single vodka martini and discussing how to preserve our meager retirement funds. Does she fire the investment adviser? What is the deal with annuities?

The world markets are up because everyone is in love with Barack Obama during his visit to the G 20 Summit in London. Are the markets up only for the institutional investors? If us little people dip in again, will it all collapse for a second time?

D is still beautiful, slim, funny, smart, and fun. We even ate a little bread last night.

Cleaning Up the Election Process

With Norm Coleman and Al Franken locked in litigation over an election court decision to review another 400 ballots, and now the New York Congressional seat abandoned by Kirsten Gillibrand in contestation a day after the polls closed, the Dem is ahead by 65 votes, the seriousness of the state of America's election crisis should be front and center.

Although the myth of the Bush experiment in spreading democracy was that elections were all one needed to claim a victory for "our side," except if Hamas wins the popular vote, elections are not the key to democracy. They are only an act that if uncorrupted can help develop civic engagement and self rule. As we are seeing in Burma/Myamar, the 2010 elections that the military is now tauting will not permit women to run for high government office. What a democracy!

What I saw at the polls in November 2008 frightened me. The poll lists were not up to date and there were no computers at the polling station to secure access to the latest, most complete lists. Instead, because I had a cell phone and the telephone number to the Commissioner of Elections, I was able to have County workers check the state computer. Many of the people who weren't on the poll lists were indeed registered and entitled to vote. Thankfully I was trusted by the poll workers who allowed folks to vote on the machines and not merely on provisional ballots, but what would have happened if there hadn't been that personal relationship? And what about those touch screen voting machines, and the hanging chads that led to Bush v. Gore and eight years of the "war on terror."

Let the competition of the marketplace produce machines that are reliable, and then let an uncorrupted decision making process choose the best and least finicky. But cleaning up the election process is more than just the machines, it's also getting registration processes working properly. One county administrator admitted to me privately that registration forms that come over from Department of Motor Vehicles and Department of Social Services often don't get included into the rolls. When political parties rely on volunteers to collect signatures on the street, they need to be better trained and screened for alterior motives.

There are very real reasons why Coleman isn't giving up, the Democrats will have a very large and effective majority in the Senate if Franken is seated (and we might have some more humor in the legislative process). But this fight over some 1000 votes exposes the real vulnerability of our election system. And we can't believe that the financing of American elections is uncorrupting. Money and elections shouldn't be connected.