Home Sales

Our daughter graduated from high school three years ago, and we should have sold our suburban home then. But my parents sold our home two days after I graduated. I never really had a home again, so I wanted to spare our daughter that experience. And frankly, I was just too busy getting ready to change jobs, and to continue to work in the suburbs, so we missed that opportunity. Now only a single home has sold this entire year--2009--in our village. And the average home price is down by about a third.

Yes, I dream about an apartment in Manhattan, although frankly, I would love to be able to afford a little get-away place, too, where I could escape from the heat of the summer and plant things. My garden is important to me, and the thought of not having one is daunting. I kill most indoor plants, but my gardens thrive.

So, when I learned that Timothy Geitner, Secretary of the Treasury, couldn't sell his home in suburban Westchester, I was heartened, and had a great laugh. Watch John Oliver's segment on Wednesday night's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg

There was a time when there was less shame about being an immigrant in America, when the entire city of New York, south of midtown, spoke with an accent, and not just one. There were gang fights among the ruffians, there were hazings, there were clan feuds over romances and marriages. It wasn't some golden era, but it was part of our history, just as the new waves of immigrants are part of our history now.

Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, is a delightful yet provocative film about the enormously ambitious and talented Gertrude Berg, the writer, director and actor of the long-running radio then television (there's a film in there, too) series starring the fictious character of Molly Goldberg, an Eastern European Jewish immigrant and her family living in New York City.

Arlene and I shared the empty theater with an older Jewish couple. We gave each other permission to laugh and be raucous, and we were.

However, the story includes the Black list period, when progressive actors were banned from the screen and radio by gossip and hysteria over "Red" infilitration. And the film deals with the pressures placed on Gertrude Berg to fire her stage husband Jake played by Philip Loeb, an activist who fought for pay and benefits through the nascent Actors Equity Union.

Gertrude Berg was a feminist before it had a name, and the interviews with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginzburg, Susan Stanberg, and various relatives of Ms. Berg add much to an understanding of just how a woman insisted that she have a career, that she control her artistic dream, and that her dream became a part of America at a time when Nazis were rising to power in Europe and anti-semitism was rising here, too.

It's a taste of how situation comedies began, it's a glimpse into what made Lucille Ball so famous, it's a repose to a time when we thought we were less xenophobic, but maybe we weren't. We just don't want to admit that we were. The film is by Aviva Kempner and it's a gem.

Sarah Palin Says Goodbye, But Unfortunately, Not for Long

The Doublespeak of Sarah Palin is humorous, well, it would be if she wasn't still taken seriously by mobs of people. Even William Kristol of the Weekly Standard and one of her first aupporters, appeared to still believe she had a shot, although he did admit that she wasn't his first choice for the Republican candidacy in 2012, on The Daily Show Monday night.

Definitely take a moment to chuckle and brew together with Andrew Sullivan over Sarah Palin's meteoric rise in the media, in our consciousness, and hopefully she will burn out in just a few more months. This post is from last September and it contains all of the lies she was spouting during the campaign. Now that she is free from the restraints of the campaign, she is free to say anything she wants to. Check out how Jon Stewart portrays her resignation speech.

Lag Time For Confirmations

With Sonia Sotomayor's nomination up for a vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee today, and only Republican Senator Lindsey Graham (you will get confirmed unless you have a melt-down) agreeing to vote in favor of her moving onto the Senate for a full vote, Congressional Quarterly has a fun chart: it shows the length of time required to confirm the most recent Supreme Court nominees.

Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan nominee and the current swing vote, won for the longest confirmation bout, and John Paul Stevens, a Ford nominee and currently the eldest member of the court, for the shortest.

Republicans should watch out for the back lash from Hispanic voters, since one rarely sees such a qualified candidate so articulately respond to so many pointed questions about her writings.

Don't Ask Don't Tell

As my generation dies off, discrimination against gays and lesbians will disappear, hopefully. And there is some hope that we might not have to die before we see some more progress.

According to TheDailyBeast.com, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, of all people, is calling for hearings into possible repeal of this heinous failed experiment.

In an exclusive to the blog's Jason Bellini: After determining she didn’t have enough votes in support of a temporary suspension of the ban on gays in the military, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand tells The Daily Beast she has secured the commitment of Senate Armed Services Committee to hold hearings on “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” this fall. It would be the first formal re-assessment of the policy since Congress passed it into law in 1993.

A statement from the Gillibrand’s office, shared exclusively with The Daily Beast, notes that “265 men and women have been unfairly dismissed from the Armed Forces since President Barack Obama took office.”

Today marks the 400th entry on my blog: ascension at the stove. I began just under a year ago when the tension from the presidential election forced me into writing. I've enjoyed the experience and hope you have, too.

Profiteering on War and Health Care

Not everything is a market possibility, not everything should be a profit, especially war, prisons, and health care. (I would add public education to the list.) If you are a Bill Maher fan, and I am, his show Friday night was totally on point, on everything he said. Here is his column from the huffingtonpost.com, based upon the closing segment, "New Rules," where he sets out how we should be acting as a society or as individuals.

"In the U.S. today, three giant for-profit conglomerates own close to 600 hospitals and other health care facilities. They're not hospitals anymore; they're Jiffy Lubes with bedpans. America's largest hospital chain, HCA, was founded by the family of Bill Frist, who perfectly represents the Republican attitude toward health care: it's not a right, it's a racket. The more people who get sick and need medicine, the higher their profit margins. Which is why they're always pushing the Jell-O."

With a profit incentive, Republicans don't want to lose the opportunity to make a buck, even though those bucks are breaking Americans, our businesses, and our future. As Senator DeMint said, it is about making health care reform Obama's Waterloo. and as President Obama said in response, it shouldn't be political.

It is also about keeping health care as a profiteering center. Read about who is behind the racist Obama cartoon and the "patients' rights" movement, really teaparty nuts and health industry lobbyists.

Bill Moyers' Journal did a segment on decoding the talking heads on health care reform. Take a look.

The Age of Apology

For eight years no one, except for the weatherman when he missed the scattered storms and you forgot your umbrella, took the time to admit to any mistakes.

Times have changed.

Yesterday Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, the originator of the mighty Kindle (which I love) posted this after deleting from people's Kindles and from their Amazon.com computer-libraries, copies of the George Orwell classic 1984, among others, without warning:

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers, Jeff Bezos Founder & CEO Amazon.com

Ironically, it was the novel 1984 that was deleted. The entire episode revealed the vulnerability of using a Kindle in terms of the ability of Amazon to continue to fiddle with readers' downloads. In this instance, Amazon removed entire books, could it also just remove portions of books, articles from newspapers? Being wired means being connected, with many privacy implications, some quite scary.

The President of the United States also engaged in some apologizing yesterday, after his improvised remarks at his press conference about the Henry Louis Gates' arrest in Cambridge, riled police across the country.

So we got an apology from President Obama, too: “I obviously helped to contribute ratcheting it up,” the president said in an appearance in the White House briefing room. “I want to make clear that in my choice of words, I think I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sergeant Crowley specifically, and I could have calibrated those words differently.”

Suddenly I feel like we are a nation of grownups again. Now that might be overly optimistic, after listening to the Republican defense of the health care status quo, but adult behavior is being modeled for us once again. It takes courage to apologize, it takes character.

And Who Says We Live in a Colorblind Society?

Whether it was the arrest of Henry Louis Gates in his own home or the circulation by an anti-health care reform doctor Dr. David McKalip who serves as a delegate to the AMA of a racist doctored photograph of President Obama as a "witch doctor," this is all proof that race is very much a factor in American life.

I'd be indignant, too, if a police officer asked me to identify myself in my own home. I'd be indignant, too, if someone felt comfortable sending out a doctored photograph of me as an indigenous "witch doctor" when the debate about the reform of health care isn't being advanced by that email, but inflamed instead.

Which all goes to show us, right in our faces, that we are far from living in a post-racial society. Are you paying attention, Chief Justice John Roberts, from your cozy life? Are you paying attention, Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who believe that Sonia Sotomayor doesn't have another perspective that might be an asset to the Supreme Court?

Health Care Debate--Listen, Learn, and Then Press For Action

As I watched the press conference last night with my twenty-year old daughter, we marveled at how articulate and smart President Obama is, especially when we compare the spectacle of his press conference to what we suffered through rarely, albeit, with Bush, Jr. No one ever pressed Bush like Obama was pressed by reporters last night. Why is it that Bush silenced the press so and now suddenly we are asking for Obama accountability? There is an element of "truthiness" in Obama that somehow makes us feel smarter ourselves.

Being in the midst of a health care dilemma myself, I support a single-payer system with private options for those rich folks who want another level of health care. My husband and I were solicited last year, before the sky fell in, with a boutique medical plan: no insurance would be allowed, we would pay a premium to have access to a cadre of doctors immediately without waiting. We turned it down then, and I would turn it down now, too.

On one level we need to continue to fund research in medicine. The advances in cancer and heart disease are spectacular. The understanding of human fertility, genetic conditions, immune-deficient disease, well, it's inconceivable how much information has been amassed. The technology is also pretty phenomenal, too. The issue raised by this technology was well stated by Mike Dowling, the President and CEO of North Shore LIJ Health Systems, the largest health care provider on Long Island. At a luncheon several years ago for the Health and Welfare Council, Dowling described the new body scan machine that the hospital had purchased. This procedure could "see" inside the body, find blocked arteries, almost any abnormality, way beyond the PetScan, which only finds cluster of cancer cells once they reach about 1 cm. in size. The question raised by this advanced technology is: do we have the resources to treat all of the conditions such a body scan might reveal? Do we need to?

Where we haven't advanced is matching the diagnosis and treatment with the best practices. And let's not fool ourselves: most people have to wait uncomfortably long periods of time to see doctors, get a diagnosis, and begin treatment. So all of this crap about health care reform meaning rationed health care is bull. Here on Long Island, many board certified doctors don't take any insurance. You pay the doctor directly and then fight with the insurance company. If you are in an HMO, forget it. You have to go to less qualified physicians, when a more experienced doctor might provide a better outcome.

Here is a transcript of the press conference last night.

iLife, iLove

I am a Mac person and have been since 1987 when my husband bought me a Mac II as a wedding present. Since then, I have had several generations of Macintosh computers and laptops, although I haven't gotten an iPhone, just don't need one, and now own my first Nano iPod.

My Macbook died just before I had to leave on a week-long business trip, OK, I panicked, and arrived at the mall with my comatose machine and a problem: I needed contact with my office email while I was gone, and understood they didn't have enough time to fix the ailing beauty, just eighteen months old.

The mall is a Simon Mall, upscale, with Macy's, Bloomingdale's, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Lord & Taylor as the anchor shops, along with that maze of stores that appear in every Simon Mall across the country: Coach, Bebe, all of the Gaps, Banana Republics, Abercrombie, etc.

The mall was empty except for one store: The Apple Shop. I had to make an appointment to purchase a new computer, that's how crowded. And lucky for me, I happened to have gotten there on the release date of the new MacBook Pro, the upscaled Macbook with the seven hour battery and the amazing screen, which allowed me to save a lot of money if I had wanted to buy a MacBook Pro although I ended up spending more money than I would have if I had just bought another now-obsolete Macbook.

Genuis Bar, those are the men and women, who answer all of our dumb questions. They are the best, funniest, smartest, quirky customer service people in industry.

So it doesn't surprise me to learn that despite everything, Apple profits continue to rise. What about Steve Jobs?

The Brotherhood of the Wandering Dick

With Jeff Sharlet's book, The Family, published in paperback, we now know that there is a hypocritical theocratic Christian cult in Washington where fallen wandering dicks who like to judge the moral incapacity of other wandering dicks, from the other party, of course, like to pray and sleep.

The latest round of scandal in the wandering dick segment of the Republican Party, John Ensign and Mark Sanford, are both members.

According to talkingpointsmemo.com: C Street, in which a bevvy of current and former lawmakers portray the house -- as well as The Fellowship, the shadowy religious movement, also known as The Family, with which C Street is affiliated -- as a benevolent prayer group that offers "crucial counseling" to its powerful members, helping keep them on the straight and narrow.

In trying to turn the powerful theocratic center into a counseling center for wayward right-wingers, this new publicity about The Family leaves Zachary Roth at talkingpointsmemo.com flat:

More broadly, here's the major problem that's elided by the image of the benevolent prayer group: it's one thing for lawmakers to have a group of trusted friends and peers with whom they can talk about their personal lives. But, for a range of pretty obvious reasons, when prominent elected officials cheat on their spouses (OK, wives), they often commit other, non-sexual transgressions -- which go to their official responsibilities -- in trying to cover it up. That puts their religious confidants in the compromising position of knowing about non-personal wrongdoing that the public has a right to be aware of, but being obligated by the bonds of the group to keep it secret. Indeed, that seems to have been exactly what happened in the Ensign case, in particular with Sen. Tom Coburn, who has refused to speak publicly about what he told Ensign, citing his role as a "physician and as an ordained deacon."

Politico.com also has a C Street story. As does RollCall.com.

Dead in the Water--Not Quite

This afternoon President Obama engaged in "truthiness." He quoted a Republican Senator who said that if they could defeat his health care plan, Obama will be dead in the water.

Listen to Obama's comments, his first real push back on the Republican messaging that any health care reform is too expensive.

According to the President, this shouldn't be about him or about politics. But it is, because this fight is about power and money, about privatizing medical care rather than opening it up to everyone, and about the future of the Republican Party. Actually, according to me and a lot of other people, it's about the future of our economy, too.

Here is a wonderful resource--FactCheck.org-- to help wade through the propaganda that is being put out there by the lobbyists who don't want to do anything that will change the status quo. Remember these lobbyists are being paid by folks like insurance companies, for profit health care systems, and pharmaceutical companies. Notice that I didn't include the doctors, because many of them, especially the younger ones, acknowledge that the current system is unworkable and as my generation ages, will bankrupt the nation. This FactCheck.org article deconstructs two "independent" ads that make claims about the Canadian single-payer system. Beware!

It's time for Obama to do more than just set out guiding principles. It's time for a health care reform summit and for all of us to demand an end to the politics of destruction.

Post Script: Watch Lewis Black from The Daily Show on July 21 make fun of the Republicans tirades against health care reform.

Braking Government

After eight years of secrecy, incompetence, indecency, and a belief that government is inherently bad and the free market is inherently good, America elected Barack Obama whose philosophy begins with a different assumption: that government should serve the interests of the people. As a brilliant politician with an ambitious agenda to set the country right again, Obama has attracted to government some especially bright, and qualified, personnel.

According to CQ Politics, President Obama has been making these essential appointments at record speed. However, confirmation by the Senate is necessary to place these top officials in the bureaucracies that need to be functioning in order to move the ship of state. And the Senate is dragging its feet. Even though the Senate is now controlled by Democrats.

Obama is filling these vacancies faster than any recent president, but the pace isn't fast enough, especially after the debacle of the Bush administration.

A tally by the White House Transition Project, a group of academics funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, found that after 160 days in office, a mark that came during the July Fourth congressional recess, less than 40 percent of the most plum political jobs had been filled and that Obama had sent nomination papers to the Senate for slightly more than half of the jobs.

Finally Harold Koh, former dean of Yale Law School, was confirmed by the Senate to become Legal Counsel to the State Department. A more worthy choice would be hard to find, but the Republicans managed to question this amazing scholar's credentials because he is also an activist.

And also troubling is the delay of the confirmation of Dawn E. Johnsen to be the Director of the Office of Legal Counsel, the same office that under Bush-Cheney authored the infamous torture memos that might, hopefully, send some people to prison for violating domestic and international law. Those memos are a perversion of legal analysis and should be used in every legal ethics class to illustrate how professionalism means standing up to power and saying no when asked to rationize illegality. Because Professor Johnsen testified before the Senate about just how much the Office of Legal Counsel had been derailed, Republicans have branded her a radical.

With Obama's popularity slipping, in the wake of Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase's announcement of record quarter profits after taxpayers bailed them out (under the Bush administration, remember, not by Obama) while unemployment continues to rise and foreclosures do, too, we need to get government seats filled with the best and the brightest. Now. There is so much to do and not a lot of time to do it.

Another Icon -- The Man Who Understood Us -- Is Gone

Walter Cronkite was the news for our generation. He was the only evening news anchor who got us. When the streets of Chicago exploded in 1968 with Richard Daley's police revving for a fight, it was Walter Cronkite who cried to see the children of America beaten by those uniformed thugs outside the Democratic National Convention. At a time when we trusted no one over the age of thirty, even we trusted Walter Cronkite.

From 1961-1981, according to the New York Times, Walter Cronkite was how we learned about the course of the world. My father used to quiz me at night, over dinner, which we didn't eat until 7:30, about current events. My sources, like most kids before computers, were the Times and Uncle Walter.

That Walter Cronkite died of dementia breaks my heart. This man seemed to have understood the changing world. He narrated sympathetically as the first layers of the bonds of slavery were cast off in southern cities and towns as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, first, then Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, marched men and women, black and some white later on, through fire hoses and taunts of angry white folks. He told us that President Kennedy had been shot, then Dr. King, then Bobby Kennedy. He rejoiced at the miracle of landing on the moon.

An old friend Franklin just this week sent me the dvd of Walter Cronkite's broadcast that July day forty years ago when Neil Armstrong flubbed his lines, but the world watched him walk onto the surface of the moon. My roommate and I ran across the corridor of our apartment house to our neighbor, Brad, a quiet man from Milwaukee who tolerated our antics. He had a television and we didn't. We shouted when then President Nixon ruined the excitement as he spoke with the astronauts on a split screen. Brad was annoyed, but let us stay anyway. The only channel to watch was CBS, the only man to listen to was Uncle Walter.

Today in honor of Walter Cronkite, our family will watch the dvd, and I will remember when we could trust the integrity of the nightly news, before it became entertainment.

According to the Times, here is how much America trusted Cronkite:

In 1968, he visited Vietnam and returned to do a rare special program on the war. He called the conflict a stalemate and advocated a negotiated peace. President Lyndon B. Johnson watched the broadcast, Mr. Cronkite wrote in his 1996 memoir, “A Reporter’s Life,” quoting a description of the scene by Bill Moyers, then a Johnson aide.

“The president flipped off the set,” Mr. Moyers recalled, “and said, ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.’ ”

Salon.com has video highlights of Cronkite's most memorable broadcasts: the assassination of JFK and that of MLK, the lunar landing, and his last broadcast.

My daughter rushed in last night with the news. "How come everyone is dying?" she asked. The icons of my generation have come of that age.

Obama As a Black Man

Last night at the NAACP gala, the first African American president delivered the speech about race that he had avoided giving since the debacle over Rev. Jeremiah Wright that almost derailed his campaign for the Democratic nomination.

In some ways it had the tone of the speech Bill Cosby had been so criticized for making: the get off your ass, parent your children, and stop complaining.

What made this different? It was given by the President of the United States, a man who dabbled here and there with the lifestyle that has brought so many young African American men and women into despair.

But we can't forget, not for a moment, that racism is internalized, every moment that the disparities between whites and blacks continue, based not on happenstance, but on the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and institutional racism that affects people of color not just daily, but throughout the day, for some. White people's attitudes are the problem, too.

Scroll down to the link to the bottom of the page and watch the speech. I was in awe of his ability to speak the truth, something so rare in any politician, especially after eight years of Bush.

Or read the speech and wonder how we can move to real conversations about race, like Eric Holder tried to do in February, his nation of cowards speech, and this one from the President hmself.

Pre-Existing Condition

As we age, the thickness of everyone's medical file, whether healthy or not, increases, and inevitably most of us evolve into a "pre-existing condition," a chronic or episodic illness that makes moving from one to job to another nearly impossible without major lapses in health care coverage.

The reason: portability of health care. The new insurance, if the prospective employer offers it, or more likely, the insurance privately purchased after the 18 months of COBRA extensions end, will exclude coverage for any pre-existing condition.

That's what bankrupts most people. According to recent studies, two-thirds of all people who file for bankruptcy had health insurance at the time of the onset of the disease, but lost it either from attrition, inability to continue working through the crisis, or being fired.

So when I see this kind of crap from the GOP, I want to scream. Check out the new confusing way the GOP is describing the Democrats incremental attempt at health care reform.

Millions of dollars are being poured into the debate on health care reform. Voice your opinion, voice it more than once. Write to your legislators and insist upon real health care reform. NOW!

Blogging with Sonia

The spectacle of the Senate Judiciary Committee interrogation of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is proof certain that old white men don't get that they are making fools of themselves by claiming that they don't operate on the basis of their race, class, and yes, gender.

Some of the bloggers who are following the grilling of this highly disciplined woman are doing the kind of analysis those of us with full-time jobs can't. I'm listing some so that you can check in during the day as the next round of public hearings continues. To keep updated, you will have to hit the refresh button on your internet browser every once in a while.

The New Yorker (observant of the gender and ethnic dynamics)

Talkingpointsmemo.com (Andrew Pincus is really smart and has himself argued nineteen cases before the Supreme Court, so he knows what he is writing about.)

New York Times (each day a variety of reporters chime in with their observations)

The Daily Beast (watch their fifteen best moments of the confirmation hearings and you won't have to waste all of your time waiting for the most sardonic exchanges)

Who's Getting Rich From the TARP? Not You and Me!

Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, whose alumni conceived and implemented the TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program)-- remember Henry Paulsen, the former Secretary of the Treasury under Bush Junior--he was a former chair of Goldman Sachs. Well, Goldman is about to announce today a quarterly profit of $2.7 billion, the largest in its history. Remember it was Goldman Sachs's influence that got the Bushies to save AIG (which Goldman needed to cover its losses) and to let Goldman's rival Lehman Brothers fail.

However, before you sink your last savings into the stock market, check out Matt Taibbi's latest article in Rolling Stone. The Great American Bubble Machine points a finger at Goldman Sachs as the master manipulator of the Stock Market.

Listen to Matt's interview and more on The Takeaway on NPR.org.: Damned if You Do: Profiting in the Recession.

The Myth of Colorblindness Revisited

Wouldn't it be great if race weren't the first characteristic we checked off upon meeting a new person! But it still is, no matter who we are. It's about clan, it's about tribe, and the negative aspects of this way we identify ourselves gets exacerbated when there are hierarchies: when one race predominates over another.

In America there is no meritocracy, not yet, not even close, so let's not pretend that race doesn't play an enormous role in decisionmaking, both public and private.

And as the Judiciary hearings begin today into the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, think about all of the code words that will be used, both brazen and more subtle, to distinguish her being Puerto Rican as either a plus or a minus.

Listen. Listen carefully.

And then read the New York Times this morning. In a front page story, a reporter disingenuously wonders why unemployment has hit African Americans so much worse in New York than people without color.

By the end of March, there were about 80,000 more unemployed blacks than whites, according to the report, even though there are roughly 1.5 million more whites than blacks here.

It was that question from an African American reporter at a news conference last month, asking what the President was doing for men and women of color, when President Obama, who likes to ignore the issues of race, stumbled for the first time, claiming that the stimulus package was helping everyone. Well, it isn't. It doesn't seem to be helping anyone except for the bankers, frankly. And it isn't helping people of color because African Americans have the least job seniority, security, and are often employed in marginal industries that are heavily dependent upon a soaring economy.

If we all listen, we might learn about the hidden advantages that skin color offers or withholds, and find some room to grow inside ourselves.

Either It's Getting Closer or It's the Illusion of Getting Closer

Accountability for the torture used by the Bush administration in the "war on terror" might have come one step closer to being actualized, or the leaks to the press might be making it look like tortured, hard decisions are about to be made within the Obama administration.

I can't tell the difference yet. Newsweek's Daniel Klaidman reported in a long and very "personal" look into the character and family of Eric Holder, Jr., Attorney General of the United States, that four separate sources claim he is struggling with the decision whether to go after the Bush administration officials responsible for authorizing torture.

Four knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that he is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter. Such a decision would roil the country, would likely plunge Washington into a new round of partisan warfare, and could even imperil Obama's domestic priorities, including health care and energy reform. Holder knows all this, and he has been wrestling with the question for months. "I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president's agenda," he says. "But that can't be a part of my decision.

Citing the two recent extremes of attorneys general--Janet Reno who was fiercely independent and therefore not an insider of the Clinton administration and Alberto Gonzales, a mere "yes-man," Newsweek claimed that since Holder was the White House liaison during the embattled Reno years, he is extremely sensitive to the balance he needs to bring to his job--enforce the law yet also support the President's agenda. Rahm Emanuel, Obama's Chief of Staff, is the constant reminder of just what that Presidential agenda is. But according to these sources, what Holder has learned about what occurred during the Bush years is moving him closer to opening an investigation.

Then there is the New York Times story this morning by Scott Shane. What began as a disingenuous attempt by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to wiggle out of responsibility for knowing that the CIA was waterboarding has turned into admissions that the CIA, under orders of the evil mentor of Bush, that's vice president Dick Cheney, to prevent Congressional oversight committees from being briefing on a yet unnamed CIA program: extraordinary rendition, more wiretapping, assassinations, torture of detainees?

According to the Times: The disclosure about Mr. Cheney’s role in the unidentified C.I.A. program comes a day after an inspector general’s report underscored the central role of the former vice president’s office in restricting to a small circle of officials knowledge of the National Security Agency’s program of eavesdropping without warrants, a degree of secrecy that the report concluded had hurt the effectiveness of the counterterrorism surveillance effort.

This is major news. Surely the Sunday morning talking heads will be all abuzz. We have to find out what happened, and hold people accountable. That is the essence of the rule of law. Yes, Obama's popularity around the world has restored much of America's lost credibility. But the only way to restore our credibility at home, among the voters and citizens, is to undo the corruption to the rule of law and restore government to its foundations in the constitution.

The Art of Secrecy

During the first nine months of the Bush administration, nothing happened, because the new president had been elected to dismantle our confidence in the federal government. Remember he was vacationing, once again, when the ominous memo arrived warning Bush that Al Qaeda was planning to attack the country, and he was reading a book about a goat to school children when they did.

Suddenly the architect of do-nothing government and his evil mentor, Dick Cheney, panicked and abandoning the procedures and structures of constitutional government, in part to cover up their inaction (despite Richard Clarke, counter-terrorism aide in the White House and Bill Clinton's exit interview), came up with programs that attacked the very heart of American ideals: detention and torture of suspects both in the United States and abroad; extraordinary rendition, kidnapping foreign nationals to secret prisons where either contractors or "friendly" government agents beat, tortured, and often killed suspects; wiretapped American citizens who made telephone calls to Muslim countries to speak with family members, business associates, and friends; wiretapped attorneys and journalists, and perhaps members of Congress; and then denied it all.

The last gasp of American journalism, more likely because some real Americans with access to information leaked it to the New York Times and the Washington Post (as Daniel Ellsberg did with the Pentagon Papers), made us aware of these programs quite early in the Bush administration, early enough to have prevented Bush's re election. However, the scary tone frightened too many Americans into keeping with the guys who had failed to protect us in the first place and who were ransacking America in its aftermath.

This is more than incompetence. This was ideological warfare against the very traditions of American government and idealism, and it made money for the principals, too. Don't get me wrong: I've spent my career as an attorney and have no illusions about how government operates, no matter which party is in charge, and the egregious disregard for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, along with the Geneva Conventions, during prior administrations. But this was different, very different, because there were attempts to justify their actions, just as the Nazi's did, with trumped up legal opinions, deceitful briefings to members of Congress, and the United Nations, and there is much more that we don't know. And they profited from their actions: Rumsfeld and Cheney got richer while in office.

The New York Times presents a story today about just how ineffective all of this wiretapping really was.

And talkingpointsmemo.com reports that the extent of the secret surveillance is still unknown and goes way beyond our wildest expectations. The Inspector General's report alludes to stuff that makes my civil libertarian heart quake.

This is why we need a full investigation and prosecutions, if appropriate, of Bush officials who intentionally refused to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States. Remember that oath of office that Chief Justice Roberts blew during Obama's inauguration, well, it means something.

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Bank Robbery

I got an angry email yesterday from my friend Judith who needed some cash the other day while she was in New York City. She banks at a small regional bank that doesn't have branches in Manhattan. So when she went to a Chase ATM on Madison and 72nd Street, she was shocked to see the notice that if she did withdraw any funds, Chase would charge her $3. She decided against it.

When she got home, she received in the mail the notice required by the newly enacted Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009, from her cozy, local East End bank. According to this notice, Judith's bank was now going to charge her $1 for any ATM withdrawals made from banks other than her own. So if she had withdrawn that cash from Chase, the total surcharge would have been $4. That's bank robbery!

Last week I received a notice from Bank of America where my family has had a credit card for years. OK, we have never paid a late fee; we have been fortunate enough to have been able to pay off the balance monthly. Job loss, emergencies, and medical bills haven't prevented us from using credit cards in exactly the way banks hate: we have access to thirteen months of money on twelve months of income. And it doesn't cost us a penny, because we only use no-annual fee cards.

Despite this impeccable credit, we were given notice that our monthly rate for any trailing balances would go up to 11.99%, with a rather complicated formula of adjustable rates that could go as high as 19.99%.

Let's remember that you and I own most of Bank of America now, because TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, passed in a panic in the waning days of the Bush administration, with absolutely no oversight of then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, handed out so far, $180.9 billion to American banks. Bank of America has received the biggest handout: $52.2 billion, with Citigroup trailing slightly at $50 billion. Read ProPublica.org and cry.

For months it was a giant secret just who was getting the funding and how much. Now a privately funded site ProPublica.org is the best available source for this information, along with what we have given AIG, the car companies, and how much we have spent to buy up all of those toxic assets (bad mortgages where the banks made money anyway) so that the banks look like they are making money when they aren't. Ironically ProPublica.org was funded by JEHT Foundation, a victim of the Bernie Madoff scandal, and the Sandler Family, the originators of the "pick and pay" variable rate mortgage scheme that brought down Wachovia when it purchased World Savings (Golden West Financial) without doing due diligence.

So one would think that now that we own 611 banks in the US, including the two largest--Bank of American and Citigroup--the banks might be giving us taxpayers a break, a courtesy, a thank you. Despite the fact that we are suffering because we bailed them out, and no one is bailing us out, banks have increased interest rates and fees on credit cards, the only available credit for consumers currently. Try to go to your bank and borrow money, and see how generous those terms are going to be. I just tried to find out what the overdraft and monthly service fees are at Bank of America, and only found "sympathetic" videos. Finally after clicking and clicking, I found the lists of what the bank charges for these most common occurrences. With a twenty year old daughter, believe me, I need to know if these have changed!

And here is a tidbit to make you even angrier: As of today, the Federal Reserve is lending banks money at the rate of 0.50%!!!

President Obama as Frodo?

What we now know is that Dick Cheney was at the heart of the smear campaign against Joseph Wilson, former ambassador, and husband of Valerie Plame, CIA operative, after Wilson wrote that the Bush administration cooked documents about Niger and yellow cake to substantiate a claim that Saddam Hussein was trying to make a nuclear bomb.

Despite Obama's attempts to block the release of the interview between Dick Cheney, then Vice President, and Patrick Fitzgerald, special prosecutor, some aspects have been made public. Truthout.org by Jason Leopold has an interesting piece, and leaves one wondering: now that President Obama has the "ring" like Frodo, is he being tempted?

What is the extent of appropriate executive privilege? One of the most frightening aspects of the Bush administration was the insistence by Cheney that the office of the presidency be shrouded in secrecy, so much so that policy making avoided the channels of the State Department and Pentagon, and the White House pulled the Office of Legal Counsel way off course.

Will Obama have the strength to return the balance?

Why It Matters Who You Are When Acting on Behalf of the Public

As I've written previously, we are all constructed by identities: gender, race, religion, ethnicity, region, family style and makeup, and class. To ignore these aspects of character is stupid, especially now, when we have so many personal narratives that explore how different experiences bring perspective to decision-making. As a country of immigrants and misfits, too long we have allowed white men to make all public, and too often, private decisions.

Not anymore.

Just as we might not know what aspects of President Obama's character derive from his white mother or his African father, we also know that his experience in the world was heavily influenced by the fact that he is bi-racial. He wrote an entire book on claiming his identity: Dreams From My Father.

Sonia Sotomayor is Obama's nominee to replace David Souter as associate justice on the US Supreme Court. Her perspective has been forged from the experiences of being a woman, growing up Puerto Rican, attending elite schools where Puerto Rican women were more likely to be the custodians and housekeepers than the students, and being first a trial court and then an appellate judge. Her moderation appeals to our president. That there should be more than one woman on the US Supreme Court appeals to me. I won't be satisfied until half the court is comprised of women!

There is a fascinating interview with Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the upcoming New York Times magazine section that you can access now. It's long, but it's interesting, because Justice Ginsburg has spent her lifetime being a woman in places where women weren't intended to feel comfortable. As women, we all understand that feeling of being an outsider, of having to prove ourselves not according to the rules, but to defy some unspoken assumptions of incompetency. I remember being a young attorney and how many opponents assumed that I was sleeping with a partner, or was available to anyone with any power. I can't imagine the confluence of gender and race or ethnicity on the challenge of competency. Listen to the critics of her nomination and then think about what they are saying and why.

Fish on Palin

Stanley Fish was always a controversial academic whose work influenced my own when I taught writing to law school students. He had the unusual role of being both a professor of English as well as a professor of law at Duke, among other institutions. He is now a columnist for the New York Times.

Yesterday's column on Sarah Palin and Marc Sanford, the two confessing governors from the ultra-right, deserves a read. Both politicians were accused of giving rambling, incoherent speeches: Palin resigning from her first term as governor of Alaska with sixteen months left go to despite national aspirations and Sanford, after jumping into the public spotlight by refusing Obama economic stimulus money, admitting to a love affair, well, not just one.

The pundits were surprised by the illogic of both speeches. I also found them humorous, illustrative of Palin's erratic and narcissistic behavior and Sanford's hypocracy. However, for Stanley Fish, both politicians were giving speeches about how they feel, and that is not what we expect or even respect from public figures.

Rather than find no reasons for Palin's surprise resignation, Fish found plenty of consistent reasons: It is true that her statement was not constructed in a straightforward, logical manner, but the main theme was sounded often and plainly: This is not what I signed up for. I’m spending all my time and the state’s money responding to attack after attack and they aren’t going to let up because, “It doesn’t cost the people who make these silly accusations a dime.”

Fish continues to describe the reasons that he felt she so clearly gave: But the pundits didn’t want to hear them or, rather, they were committed to believing that the real reasons lay elsewhere, and were strategic. They couldn’t fathom the possibility that she was just giving voice to her feelings. It must, they assumed, be a calculation, and having decided that, they happily went on to describe how bad a calculation it was.

Regarding Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina, Fish also criticized the pundits' inability to understand that he was being emotional, not logical: ... he wasn’t doing politics; he was doing cri de coeur, serial meanderings about sin, weakness, mistakes, duty, responsibility, irresponsibility and, above all, passion.

The ineptness of his remarks on every level was staggering; politically he was busy digging his own grave; personally, in terms of his family life, he was digging another. He declared in one breath that he was trying to fall back in love with his wife, and in the next he told the world that this was a love story, “a forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day.

Earlier in the week, Ross Douthat, another Times columnist, also had some interesting things to say about Sarah Palin's resignation. When she appeared on the national stage as John McCain's running mate, Palin wasn't ready. According to Douthat, she should have resisted and said no, because from everything we saw, she wasn't prepared for the position, for the scrutiny, for the responsibility.

A Sarah Palin who stepped down for the sake of her family and her media-swarmed state deserves sympathy even from the millions of Americans who despise her. A Sarah Palin who resigned in the delusional belief that it would give her a better shot at the presidency in 2012 warrants no such kindness.

The personal story of Barack Obama embodies the myth of meritocracy: anyone, even a racial mutt, can go to Columbia and Harvard Law School and become President. Palin's story is appealing to a different segment of America: her story is about class. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

She didn't do it right, because she was unprepared, but according to a Pew poll: 44 percent of Americans regarded Palin unfavorably. But slightly more had a favorable impression of her. That number included 46 percent of independents, and 48 percent of Americans without a college education.

Obama was able to diminish his race, and continues to, so that Palin's class issues become more prevalent. Interesting?

Whatever Works Doesn't

Woody Allen's new film, Whatever Works, brings Larry David into the character once held by Woody himself, and the similarity between the two men becomes all too familiar very early. Obviously Allen has had an enormous influence on David (who appeared in minor roles in two prior Allen films before Larry gained his reputation as co-creator of Seinfeld and then creator of Curb Your Enthusiasm).

This is essentially a film, clever in parts, about cranky, old Jewish men obsessed with death and existentialism, but with stagnant and infantile sexual fantasies about beautiful, young, stupid women whom they insult by feeling superior and don't miss an opportunity to admit throughout the film.

Now when Woody was younger, i.e. in the Annie Hall days, which I just rewatched and let me tell you, it held up and is still a delight, his fascination with stunning women, the schlemiel and the beauty, was humorous. The short, unattractive, but brilliant Jewish man and his shiksa--Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow-- made for the humor that made America laugh in the 1970s. We all adored him, because inside we were as insecure as Woody, perhaps not as funny, however.

But now, with Woody Allen at the age of 74, and Larry David, his alterego in the film at 61, this obsession with stupid, beautiful women over whom they have magical powers, it isn't funny. It's closer to pathetic.

Don't get me wrong: there is some interesting writing, some surprises in plot, and Patricia Clarkson is dynamite. But it's all about male fantasies, and frankly, since 1965, when he wrote his first screenplay, What's New Pussycat?, we have seen the same Woody Allen film over and over (except for Match Point). And as an aging woman myself, that he hasn't changed his obsession is illustrative of what's wrong with male-dominated media: women as crones are discarded, invisible, disappeared.

Well, Woody, I'm very much here, as are my beautifully aging friends, who happen to be less rigid, none of whom are cranky, and who seem more delighted in the freedom of aging than the men you portray in your films. And the cruelty of the Larry David character is not cute, it's misogynistic. I adore Curb Your Enthusiasm, but taking Larry for more than a half hour is trying on my nerves. So maybe, Woody, it's time to retire?

Joining the Health Care Debate

My dear friend Susan lives in Canada and complained the other day about how her friend has had to wait three months for a follow-up mammography when a first one came back suspicious. She used that as the example of why a single-payer system creates a terrifyingly rationed health care system. I have recently had a health care crisis, and I, too, having exorbitantly expensive health care paid for by my employer, have had to wait. The myth of rationed health care is part of the propaganda campaign being waged by the insurance industry lobby. We already have to wait for procedures. The difference in America is that if you know the right person, you can move yourself up the list.

Another privilege that remains invisible to most mortals.

We subscribe to the Public Citizen Health Research Group Health Letter.

Its June 2009 issue takes on the silence in the current health care debate on the efficacy of a single-payer system. Essential to the debate is a comparison between a single-payer system and the universal coverage based on multiple payers, meaning that there would be competing insurance companies providing service. Here is an excellent issue-by-issue discussion of the benefits of a single-payer system.

You can keep current with legislative efforts to change our health care system by going here.

Most of the criticism about single-payer is paid criticism coming from the insurance companies that have a lot to lose. Like most American industry, rather than invest in the future, insurance companies during the last twenty years, wasted money buying each other up and paying off massive debt while laying off workers. Back when, doctors were paid, some say extravagantly, but I believe commensurate with their education, but now its insurance executives and the owners of for-profit health care facilities that make the money. My primary health care doctor, a lovely man who spends time with his patients, no longer has the income he once had. He's even moved from being a Republican to a Democrat in the Bush years. Every time I open the New York Times and see another supplement advertising health care services, I get angry. We shouldn't be marketing health care, but promoting good health. There is a difference.

The worst aspect of the multiple payers health care system involves risk pooling. Under a single-payer system, the entire population is part of a single risk pool. People with pre-existing conditions cannot be excluded. However, in the current system, insurance companies attempt to attract lower risk patients, and premiums vary according to risk. Insurance becomes unaffordable for many with health care conditions that then lead to becoming uninsured. The New York Times, this week, finally wrote about the bankruptcy of those with health insurance, because the small print excluded many expensive and needed procedures. Three-quarters of those pushed into bankruptcy over medical bills had insurance at the time of on-set of their disease or condition. It's the limited coverage problem that pervades the private insurance business, and will pervade any health care reform if we do anything less than single-payer.

We need to inform ourselves and fight back against one of the most powerful lobbies in the nation. President Obama is right to take on the issue, now let's make sure he really solves it, and just doesn't do a cosmetic job that doesn't do what it needs to do. With so many Americans aging out of the job market, as the Boomers grow up, and with childhood obesity at crisis levels, we had better prepare for providing health care fairly and equitably across the population.

Palin Quits, Three Down

Most politicians run on their records, and if that remains true in this upside down world, then Sarah Palin has nothing to run on as she announced her resignation as governor of Alaska. Her record: She was mayor of Wasilla, then a town of 6300 residents, for three two-year terms. She was the first woman and the youngest governor of the state of Alaska, but only held office for just over three years, having announced yesterday that she wouldn't run for a second term, and to avoid being a lame-duck, she would resign within two weeks, handing over power to the lieutenant governor.

Her resignation speech seemed to have been written by the same folks who wrote South Carolina governor Mark Sanford's endless sexual confessions. (If you haven't seen Stewart's piece on Sanford, watch it and prepare to laugh out loud like a maniac. ) Palin's speech was rambling, long, and nonsensical.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are on vacation this week and must be regretting their timing, missing this opportunity to make fun of Sarah. Although Sarah suggests in one part of her speech and in a comment to a reporter that her demise is the result of another liberal media offensive.

Today's talkingpointsmemo.com lists all of the columnists who insist that Sarah is really launching a national campaign for the 2012 nomination. However, Vanity Fair just published a nasty piece by Todd Purdum based on leaks from the McCain campaign and others who have worked with Sarah and who now hate her. I suspect that her resignation has more to do with another scandal about to break than with her aspirations to become commander-in-chief. She seems delusional, uninformed, and erratic in her behaviors, but then again, that might be the list of qualities needed to lead the Republican Party in its current state of shambles.

talkingpointsmemo.com has its favorite 10 Palin videos up to remind us all of just how nuts she appears to be.

Friend Judith thinks that Palin is on her way to the Fox Network to become its "Rachel Maddow"! Going for the money and the celebrity!

One thing we know for sure: although the hypocritical right wing of the Republican Party continues to have sex outside their marriages, there remains a strong and fairly frightening theocratic thread that is keeping the party together. Read this interview with Jeff Sharlet from NPR this week, about the house on C Street. Sharlet's new book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, leaves those of us who believe in separation of church and state breathless. Some of this information was included in American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips' 2004 book that skewers the GOP, having been a former Republican strategist, but there is a lot of new information in The Family. And let's remember that Sarah Palin comes from that lunatic fringe of the party.

Are Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe the only sane Republicans left? And they come from Maine!

The Big Lie

It was the summer the Michael Jackson video retrospective History was released: 1995. We were visiting friends in Berkeley when Ben, Naneen's teenage son, turned my daughter, then six years old, onto Michael Jackson. MTV was playing every Michael Jackson video ever made and Ben and my daughter sat, danced, sang, well, they became Michael Jackson.

That's when her obsession began. It lasted not quite as long as her obsession with Star Wars.

After several hundred viewings of History, her favorite was Black or White, mine was Billie Jean, my daughter asked this question based upon the quite obvious observation that his looks had changed radically: "If Michael Jackson is a boy, how come he looks like a girl? And if he is Black, how come he looks white now?"

Sensible questions from a six year old. That's when I told the big lie: Maybe he is trying to tell us that gender and race shouldn't be that important.

As deeply disturbed as Michael Jackson might have been, one thing we know for sure: he was extraordinarily talented and gave the world a new era of pop music, changed the world of music videos, and ended the overt racism at MTV, which up to that point would not air music videos by African American performers. Michael Jackson was the break through artist.

Of course, the circus around his death is off the charts. It's been the reason why I haven't turned on a television for the week except to muse along with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. The interview NPR did with Spike Lee who worked with Jackson on the 1996 video "They Don't Care About Us," was perhaps the one I want to remember. Remember his talent, his work ethic, his enormous creativity, his gift.

The Chaos of Self Government

For years I taught Constitutional Law and was always surprised when my students, and these were law school students with a progressive bent, still bought into the American myth that somehow our history of democracy was a bit less messy. American history is full of bloodshed, anarchy, civil war (both declared and regionally isolated), and the kinds of stories that our parents kept away from us because of shame. I recall when I learned that my own grandfather had spent time in prison for embezzlement, that Aunt Rose and Uncle Willie had no children because he had syphilis, and that my father's sister had run off with a piano player at the close of World War II.

Look around and we see a lot of chaos: there is the little issue of California being close to bankruptcy because of the stupidity of Proposition 13 that limited the ability of the state to operate at a deficit. Proposition 13 is responsible for bringing down California's once fantastic public schools. The Terminator governor declared a state of emergency this week because of the budget crisis. New York, the other big state, has a dysfunctional legislative system, this time it's the Senate, which is deadlocked over "white man" power issues. And South Carolina might be getting rid of its governor because once again, there is a hypocritical wandering dick in office. The vast majority of states are in deficit.

There are some who look at the American criminal "justice" system and see it as the reflection of insurrection.

So as we look at Iraq this week that American soldiers pull out of cities, and Afghanistan, and all of the countries throughout the developing world, let's remember our own history and stop feeling so damned self righteous.