Shrill Shouting in the Public Domain

This week I've taken a "news break." That means that I have watched no television, except for Monday night's Operation Iraqi Stephen, hardly listened to NPR except when I first wake up, and kept away from nytimes.com, well that's a lie. I do check it periodically during the day, but I've avoided reading much more than the headlines.

I decided to listen to music instead, and although I've been warned not to do this, I have had my iPod on while driving. Instead of arriving at work agitated, I get there in a state of ecstasy. Not bad.

Since the switch from analogue to digital television, my cable provider has taken MSNBC off of the basic cable service. With only one cable box, that means I can't watch Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann in bed anymore.

Not bad. They were beginning to sound too much like Jon Stewart anyway.

I haven't turned to television now that "In Treatment" is over (Gabriel Byrne as a flawed therapist). I didn't watch American Idol, although I did catch Adam Lambert singing "Mad World" and he broke my heart with his voice and talent. No dancing, no housewives, just music and reading.

And the world seems a bit quieter to me this week, which isn't so bad.

Disaster Capitalism Across America

Naomi Klein, author of "The Shock Doctrine," was on the Rachel Maddow Show last night and brought her analysis to the TARP right front and center. Click here for the clip.

According to Klein, who also writes for The Nation, once again we are taking enormous amounts of public money to bail out private interests, i.e. the banks, the very richest, because they made a series of very bad private mistakes.

When comparing the amount of money spent on the banks with the amount of money being spent on helping individuals, and the reticence in helping individual homeowners adjust their onerous mortgages, we should be appalled. Add to that those governors who are refusing to take portions of the stimulus package to pay for additional unemployment insurance -- Rick Perry from Texas and Bobby Jindal from Louisiana, to name two -- and our heads should be spinning.

Who is claiming that Obama is really calling for socialism in his health care and jobs stimulus package? We already have redistribution of wealth, but from the public to the private sector, in the TARP. Think about it. Three trillion or more has actually gone to the banks from the Federal Reserve and TARP.

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.

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.

State Secrets

There might be reasons, legitimate reasons, why the Obama administration used the same defense originally raised by the Bush administration in the Ninth Circuit case brought by five victims of post-911 extraordinary rendition. Let's remember what extraordinary rendition is: kidnapping a person, stripping them of their identity and clothing, sometimes beating or drugging them, flying them to a secret prison either under the control of the United States or one of our more brutal allies, and then keeping them in a secret site for "enhanced interrogation," i.e. torture at the hands of CIA, military, or some of the thugs hired by our government or a brutal ally.

The defense raised by Bush and by Obama was the same: state secrets.

Read about the Ninth Circuit case at the ACLU website.

President Obama did on day three of his administration issue executive orders suspending military commissions, holding interrogations to the US Army Field Manual, and ordering Guantanamo Bay prison closed within the year.

That was good. But why did the Obama Department of Justice continue the state secrets defense? Watch Ben Wizner from the ACLU for his explanation on Rachel Maddow last night.

OK, Eric Holder's confirmation as attorney general was held up. That might have delayed a thorough review of all pending cases.

But I don't understand why the Department of Justice didn't ask for an adjournment rather than use state secrets as a defense to allegations of kidnapping, torture, and maiming of foreign nationals caught up in the Bush "war on terror."

I am hoping that as each of the Bush policies gets reviewed, things will change. I'm hoping. I'm still hoping.

Bringing Guantanamo Bay Home

Last night Rachel Maddow interviewed former Guantanamo Bay prosecutor Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld in his first American television appearance. Vandeveld is the fourth prosecutor to resign his commission in protest to the conditions and methods used in pursuing "justice" against purported terrorists held in the Cuban prison. The evidence against many of his clients was shoddy, extracted by cruel, inhuman and degrading methods, and assembled in an unprofessional manner. As a career prosecutor, Lt. Col. Vandeveld ended up testifying on behalf of the defense in one of his own cases! His interview is serious, conscientious, and condemning of the treatment and prosecutorial methods. It's hard to watch, but do.

And then consider this: As the budget deficits increase around the country, 43 states are currently in deficit, we need to focus our attention on what is happening in our local jails and prisons. Cost cutting impacts the lives of the men and women held in custody as well as the working conditions of the men and women who work as correctional officers. In New York, we must, absolutely must, get rid of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, which unfairly incarcerate too many young people, especially young people of color, for possession of small amounts of drugs. We need recovery not incarceration. Read The Nation's January 23, 2009 article responding to Gov. David Paterson's apparent retreat from his once strong commitment to reform.

Every time a young person is jailed because of drug and alcohol problems, we engage in intentionally turning depression, hopelessness, and fear, signs of dependency, into criminality that will last a lifetime.

The End, This is the End, My Friend

The question is: Do we watch Bush's Farewell speech tonight, or just the deconstruction of it afterwards by Keith, Rachel, and Jon?

The question is really a matter of my nerves.

Do I shout out contradictions and obscenities in response to Bush's delusional denials? Or do I wait to listen more passively to Keith's, then Rachel's, and tomorrow to Jon's bemused reactions?

I will miss the humor of Bush. At least so far, Obama and his cohorts are far less absurd.

Will my nerves be able to take it? Watching just a minute of Cheney last night made me ill. He was talking about his cardiac disease, and suddenly I realized that he looks better now than he did when he squirmed his way into the vice presidency back in 2000. And I personally am going to be paying his medical bills, pension, and body guards for the rest of his life.

I'd rather be paying the costs of his trial and prison sentence.

What's in Store for 2009?

With temperatures well below freezing last night, winds howling, and treacherous icy roads, our plans for New Year's Eve were canceled. My husband and I stayed home instead. I stopped by the grocery store on the way home from work (it took almost two hours to drive an ordinarily forty minute commute in the snow and ice) and treated us to fresh lobsters that were on sale, steamed vegetables, a Maytag blue cheese, and popcorn for later in the evening. Our daughter joined us for dinner before she left to party with a few friends from high school who were home from college.

After dinner, with the cat on the couch between us, my husband and I watched two movies, neither notable, spoke with other friends who were home keeping warm and safe, and lasted until midnight to watch the ball come down in Times Square.

And now it's 2009!

For humor, watch talkingpointsmemo.com's Golden Duke Awards for the worst of the political arena, and there were many candidates for those awards this year. Or you can read them instead.

For humor with the charm of Rachel Maddow, watch her New Year's Eve special that also features her first annual awards for the most ridiculous in 2008.

And now with a twinkle in our eyes, we have to face the reality of 2009. Nassau County, the richest county in New York State, is the subject of an editorial in the December 31st issue of the New York Times on the new homeless: the same people who once donated food to local charities are now clients.

Also in the New York Times, is a series called The Debt Trap, which is required reading if we are going to fully understand how unrestricted and unprincipled access to credit has created this turmoil. The most recent issue explores how a student attending college can be lured into signing up for a credit card that pays a commission to the host college. The commission gets bigger if there is a trailing balance! Earlier articles in the series detailed how lax lending policies provided so many credit cards that too many Americans spent most of their free time juggling the obligations, until a medical emergency or a lost job, brought the whole house of cards tumbling down.

One of the first acts of this new Congress has to be an examination of debt and consequently, credit, and a review of the bankruptcy laws so that more Americans can get relief from their credit card debt. For a good review of the financial meltdown, go to ProPublica.org, which just lost some of its funding to the Bernie Madoff scandal when the JEHT Foundation lost its funding to the ponzi scheme.

When we look at the worst of the political scandals--ProPublica.org says that 21 members of the 109 Congress were under investigation--Ted Stevens in Alaska, Rod Blagojevich in Illinois in the continuing saga of the appointment of a replacement senator for Barack Obama, Charles Rangel milking the rent control system in Manhattan and forgetting to disclose income, or just the raw, unrestrained lying of Sarah Palin as she exploded onto the national scene--we look to our newly elected president and hope that his temperment, presence, and intelligence will provide leadership to bring us out of this mess.

With George W. Bush sulking someplace in these waning weeks of his administration, we see what the failure of leadership can bring: two wars, a collapsed financial system, a federal government in disarray, a bailout system that can't guarantee that the funds taxpayers are giving to banks and corporations aren't being spent on bonuses to unworthy executives, Guantanamo Bay where this country has abandoned its principles and engaged in torture, enhanced interrogations, and stripped detainees of basic human rights, and our car makers tottering on the brink of bankruptcy.

Barack Obama speaks about the steadfastness of our national character, deeply rooted in our tradition of arts, poetry, literature, and music. Hopefully our local and national arts organizations will not disappear in the financial crisis, but will sustain us spiritually as we find solutions to these profound problems. Hopefully our public education system will not be starved, and instead we will revitalize our country by investing in our children's futures. Hopefully a reorganized health care system will also invest in these children with preventative care and not direct all of our resources to the elderly. Hopefully we will join together as Americans, the great melting pot, and lend a hand to each other locally.

We can't put too much on the shoulders of the skinny kid from Illinois.

Keeping Church and State Separate

Every time Barack Obama tries to inject his campaign and now incoming administration with evidence of his Christianity, he blunders. First, it was Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, and his often incendiary rhetoric, a story broken by ABC News in March, 2008. Those videos distributed on YouTube.com thrust the issue of race front and center, and led to Obama's insightful and calming Philadelphia speech on race. It also led Hillary Clinton to affect a twang and insinuate that she was the candidate of white America. We know how that ended.

Now Obama has made the strange decision to ask Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church, to give the invocation at his inauguration despite Warren's rather public and condemning stand on homosexuality. And just at the time when Proposition 8 is dividing California and the country, and the bioflick "Milk" is reminding us that twenty years ago a bunch of homophobic idiots tried to remove homosexuals from the teaching profession.

The Obama controversy led Warren to remove from the Saddleback Church's website the language previously noted that said that homosexuals could not be members of the Saddleback Church. That could be perceived as a good thing, a gesture of conciliation, perhaps.

NO! Watch Rachel Maddow take us through the timeline of the controversy to Rick Warren's December 22nd posting on the Saddleback website of his "unscripted" and "untruthful" retelling of his views on homosexuality. His latest meandering discussion is frankly disturbing and disingenuous. Listen to his December 22, 2008 News & Views post, if you dare.

Or read through Frank Rich's column today in the New York Times on Obama's decision to ask Rick Warren to perform such a prominent role in the inauguration.

Which leads me to conclude that this pandering to the religious elements of the American electorate must stop. The Heritage Foundation has been trying to rewrite American history with revisionist analysis that "proves" the Founding Fathers were indeed Christians, yes, and intended to keep religion in American government. NO! There is a reason why we need to keep the two separate, and that was why there is a First Amendment that contains not one, but two limitations on government and religion: the establishment and the free exercise clauses. The document, not a sacred document, but a foundation of our government, doesn't use Christian language, but uses secular language to establish the strcutre of America.

So after watching eight years when global warming, science, evolution, birth control, environmental protection, to name just the obvious, were disregarded, distorted, and denied, isn't it time to recognize that using religion as a justification for these delusional views was an insane tactic and one that might lead to the destruction of the planet?

All the while, of course, that sin of Christianity--greed--was allowed to fester as evidence of the vitality of the free market system.