Politics and Press

The interaction of the press and politics; public diplomacy, and daily absurdities.

U.S. Domestic Policy

Canucks cruise into offshore power

By

September was one of the finest months for Canadians to demonstrate their rising power in the arena of foreign politics. The US government has shut down through the monty pythonish behaviour of  the so-callled pillars of democracy. John Cleese, where are you when the Ministry of Silly Walks would represent a  a crucial place  of stability and order in the otherwise dysfunctional pecking order of Washington D.C.?  I’ll tell you where you could ussefully demonstrate your walks.   Take a stroll  on the floor of the US Senate for 25 hours with Canadian-born Senator Tom Cruz, an expat Canadian currently living in Texas.   You could follow him as he paced about telling  you everything he knows about the awful socialist, maybe even Commie health care system in his northern  homeland, where every citizen – even Cruz, should he ever visit his homeland  – has the absolute right to free medical care, no matter who they are and what they earn.  And amazingly, he seems to know absolutely  nothing and says he didn’t even realize he was a citizen of another country, which disqualifies him from becoming US president.  He also says that he is ready  to replace President Obama, but looks like foreign affairs won’t be his strong suit.  Instead he rambled on about everything under  the sun except the tiny little step towards some sort of sanity that Obamacare would bring to the  the US medical system, which  as it is is adequate  for most of the middle and great for the upper class and non-existent for something like 45 million US citizens, who have no insurance at all if  they have any medical problem.

Meanwhile in another election in a far-off universe, the people of the Republic of Austria went to the polls, and gave a new party named after and led by Canadian auto-parts magnate Frank Stronach almost 10% of the vote.  His main strength  seemed to lie in the feeling that anybody from  a place like Canada would have to be a better leader than anyone currently involved in the chaotic dysfunctional political climate of the splendid imperial city of Vienna.   As if to prove the point, the major  right wing party received 21 % of the vote in Austria while the one with similar views on immigration and the European Union in Germany   received an almost invisible  percentage of the votes in last month’s German election, coming nowhere near the 5%  needed for entering parliament. So what do we make of it.  In a single month  a Canadian wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, another one  becomes a political force to be reckoned with in Austria, and a third one is a major mover and shaker  in the self-inflicted shutdown of the US government and considers himself to be a dark horse shot for President.  Watch out!   From Vienna to Stockholm to Washington D.C.  The Canuck are coming, the Canucks are coming!  If only they would take on Ottawa next.

What’s the Matter with Maine?

By

“Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.” — Herman Melville

The short response to the question above is: Governor Paul LePage and the members of Maine’s Tea Party. They personify the political dynamics in Maine that led to the election of a governor who is now doing serious long-term damage to not only the people of the state. but also to the political culture of the state.

Lepage’s 2010 election was the result of the support of Maine’s Tea Party and, Maine’s historic pride in being strongly ‘independent.’ LePage garnered less than 40% of the vote in his election but since the majority of the vote was split between Independent and Democratic candidates, it was enough. So the people of Maine have a governor, elected by 38% of the voters, who is committed to an “ideology” created by Tea Party fanatics who have a slim grip on cause and effect reality and a demonstrated non-existent learning curve.

Among LePage’s antics:

  • removing  serious historic works of art depicting workers from the states Department of Labor building because of a written complaint from a “secret admirer” and complaints from unnamed business owners. Among the inflammatory works was one portraying Rosie the Riveter;
  • promising that when elected he would “tell Obama to go to hell” ;
  • hiring his wet-between-the-ears 22 year-old daughter to a $41,000 job with $15,000 worth of benefits AND a $10,000 housing allowance while she lived in the Governor’s mansion;
    hiring his brother-in-law to a $68,000 state job;
  • resisting the banning of BPA in baby bottle and other plastic containers because heating up plastic bottles only causes it to “give off a chemical similar to estrogen. So the worst case is some women may have little beards…”
  • pushing legislation that would allow public funding of religious schools despite state constitutional issues;
  • and, offending many with his characterization of the Supreme Court decision to allow the Affordable Care Act to proceed as a decision that “has made America less free. We the people have been told there is no choice. You must buy health insurance or pay the new Gestapo — the I.R.S.”;

He did a sort-of apology for the use of the term “Gestapo”

According to a recent report in the Boson Globe, he has joined those Republican governors who refuse to accept federal funding for an expansion of Medicaid; an expansion that would provide medical care to a significant number of uninsured citizens of Maine. This most recent step by LePage plays to his base of Tea Party fanatics in a state in which – unlike most states – unemployment is growing.

LePage’s leadership has resulted in Maine’s ranking last among all states in personal income growth and – again, according to the Globe – Maine’s median income is less than $48,000 and 27% of the state’s residents are already enrolled in Medicaid – compared to the national average of 20%.

The Globe provided examples of those who will lose benefits due to LePage’s actions and it is not pretty. The victims are the usual mix of the elderly, the uninsured seriously ill who cannot afford insurance, the working poor, etc. .

So one result of the Maine commitment to its treasured image of being populated by “rugged Independents,” is a political system that has allowed only 38% of the population to elect a Governor of tremendous mediocrity – even crass stupidity. It is their democracy and they can cherish it, but they will pay for this in many ways that will show up in very human terms while the Tea Party continues to work against their fellow citizens.

The Slandering of Chuck Hagel

By

The United States Senate, once known as “the world’s greatest deliberative body”, has become a stage for narcissistic Republican poseurs and clowns. The Senate Armed Services Committee hearings on former Senator Chuck Hagel’s nomination as Secretary of Defense has produced one of the most embarrassing episodes in the ongoing saga of the dumbing down of the Republican Party.

The rookie, Deb Fisher, a Sarah Palin pal from Nebraska who finds Hagel; “too extreme – far to the left of Obama” – whatever that means.. (Her refusal to refer to “President” Obama a pathetic reminder of her connections to the Nebraska Tea Party). That Hagel had the good sense to endorse her opponent, Bob Kerrey, in her election campaign apparently fueled her ire but so what? This is about the Secretary of Defense not about Fisher’s feelings.

Noted global warming denier and biblical scholar Senator James Inhofe (R from Oklahoma) found that Hagel was an “appeaser” without specifying why other than to refer to a statement by the Iranian Foreign Minister describing Hagel as someone with whom they might be able to talk.

Noted Chicken Hawk Saxby Chambliss, Republican Senator from Georgia and previously a slanderer of Senator Tammy Baldwin who had lost both legs piloting a Blackhawk helicopter in Iraq, found that Hagel’s commitment to the concept of international negotiation was really simply a commitment to “appeasement” – again, whatever that means.

Senate newcomer and Tea Party pet Ted Cruz of Texas decided to become the reincarnation of Joe McCarthy, raising the suspicion that Hagel has been paid by enemies of the United States for speeches, questioning the patriotism of a battlefield decorated marine with a mythical list hidden away in his pocket.

But the main attractions in the early hearings – before Inhofe and Cruz pushed the process over the Crazy Cliff – were Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Noted poor loserJohn McCain got all red-faced with anger when Hagel refused to concede that McCain had been right in his support of the Iraq War “surge”, the grand strategy that delayed the inevitable U.S. withdrawal from a war that almost no one ended up supporting. His emotional, post-adolescent demand that Hagel agree that McCain was right and Hagel wrong on the surge was a sad display by a once admired Senator known now chiefly for his unwillingness to accept that he lost an election.

As for Senator Graham, what can be said about his obsession that Hagel is soft on support for Israel, or that he once said “the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here, I’m not an Israeli Senator I’m a US Senator, this pressure makes us do dumb things at times”? Or that he is somehow responsible for telling us what went wrong with Benghazi?

It is depressing enough to see a major political party sink into a cesspool of gratuitous innuendo verging on slander without watching the national press serve as a largely unquestioning conduit of cheap shots, distortions and outright lies. Where is Edward R. Murrow when we need him?

How long will we have to avoid the Sunday talk shows as they wheel in McCain so they can help him lick his wounds from a defeat that is now 5 years old? Or watch the likes of Dick Gregory sidle up to Lindsey Graham without calling him on what has become a bizarre personal vendetta against one of the few Republican Senators to have had the good sense and political courage to admit that President George W. Bush’s Iraq war turned out to be a bad idea, poorly implemented.

As for the soft on Israel charge? Do we elect Senators to act in the national interests of the United States or of Israel? When they come in conflict – which they occasionally do – can we have an adult conversation in the press – as they do in the Israeli press? Or do we continue to put up with a national press unable or unwilling to consider the real implications of blindly following the lead of a foreign leader like Benjamin Netanyahu?

As the Republican Party moves toward reconsidering their “message” after a serious defeat at the polls last November, will they finally – at long last – have the decency to accept that President Obama is indeed the President and that the American people expect them to behave with respect to the office and to the national interest?

God, Guns and the Press in Newtown

By

There is little to add to all that has been written or talked about in the media. The killing rampage in Newtown, Connecticut is a transcendently horrible tragedy, almost impossible to comprehend. But of course there are always fanatics to make it worse.

Former Republican presidential candidate and current Fox TV Analyst Mike Huckabee did not disappoint, saying, “Well, you know, it’s an interesting thing. We ask why there is violence in our schools but we have systematically removed God from our schools. … Maybe we ought to let him in on the front end and we wouldn’t have to call him to show up when it’s all said and done at the back end.”

I guess the Reverend Mike’s point is that 20 innocent children are dead because we didn’t let them say Christian prayers in school.

But perhaps an even better example of how incredibly stupid people can be is the comment from the Executive Director of Gun Owners of America, Larry Pratt: “Gun control supporters have the blood of little children on their hands. Federal and state laws combined to ensure that no teacher, no administrator, no adult had a gun at the Newtown school where the children were murdered. This tragedy underscores the urgency of getting rid of gun bans in school zones.”

So our choice is to blame the framers of the Constitution for separating religion from politics, or gun control supporters, for the  assault weapon murder of 27 people. We are not to consider the lack of effective controls over the availability of assault weapons of semi-mass destruction as relevant. Nor are we to consider inadequate and antiquated mental health systems as relevant. Or that Huckabee’s version of God is really only his personal fantasy.

There are over 300 million guns in American households; they account for ca. 48,000 deaths each year, more than half by suicide, but thousands by homicide. Our country used to be able to address national problems but in the world and time of Tea Party ignorance, Koch Brothers money, Roberts Court sycophancy and a House of Representatives inhabited by a large number of people 6 eggs short of a dozen, we seem to be totally screwed by the forces of ignorance, stupidity, and greed. So for those of us wishing for a rational approach to downsizing the violence we can only hope against hope.

From time to time this blog tries to hold the press to some standards of truth. The work of the press during this slaughter of the innocents has reminded me of the incredible damage the internet has done to journalists’ efforts to report the truth. In the race to be first with “breaking news” the following non-facts have been reported by so-called “reputable” news sources over the last couple of days.

The prime case was the rush to name the killer as Ryan Lanza.. It was his brother.

The killer was allowed into the school because they knew him..Wrong, he broke a window and forced his way in.

The killer’s mother was a teacher at the school. Not true..

The killer shot his mother in the school where she was a teacher—wrong on both counts – not a teacher and not killed in the school.

An investigation in New Jersey led media to announce that there was a death there – one source said it was the father of the perpetrator, none of this was true.

The semi automatic rifle was in the trunk of the car and the perpetrator had only two pistols when he entered the school. Wrong again.

At one point media reported that the killer’s father was one of the killers.

All of this is an  example of what happens when the Internet and Twitter take over; no actual reporting, no control, no truth.

Richard Ford writes the great American novel – and calls it “Canada”.

By

John Updike has passed on, Philip Roth has passed his peak, and like  Updike, will  not win the Nobel Prize, Toni Morrison, who did win it quite a long time ago, and Joyce Carol Oates have been productive but have long since levelled out on  a somewhat predictable plateau. So who will take on the mantel of the leading US novelist?   I’ll tell you who. It is Richard Ford, whose latest novel shows all the marks of a writer who learned his trade very well at the feet of masters and continued to improve and now in his mid sixties has really hit his stride with a novel that should remind readers of great works  like The Sound and the Fury by that splendid  fellow southerner William Faulkner – whom Ford met as a young man in Mississippi - or So Long, See You Tomorrow by the vastly underrated William Maxwell.  Richard Ford, born in 1945 in Jackson, Mississippi, has gradually pushed his imagination north, setting a couple of  his excellent earlier novels in places like Great Falls, Montana or central New York, and now, he has written what is  arguably the best American novel of the last decades, and titled it, against the wishes of his US publishers, “Canada”.  The publishers told him that this title was “a death knell for a book”, but Ford wouldn’t be pushed around, stood his ground on the title, and has seen his stubbornness more than vindicated with regard to both sales and reviews.

The leading US and European reviews have  been superlative, and the PBS interview is much to be recommended, but their focus has been  almost entirely on the extraordinary quality of the often meditative writing in the framework of a tale full of sound and fury. This novel  explores the relationship between memory and long-ago events yet  throughout catches the reader’s attention with an action story involving extraordinary and  dangerous life choices that is presented  through the recollections of  a terrific 60-year old writer looking back at his teenage years.  And what splendid writing it is; is there anyone else out there now who can write like this? And yet, overlooked by  -and perhaps incomprehensible to – the US reviewers is the title, which Ford comments on at length in the PBS interview.  Ford has spent a lot of time in Canada, and has said how much he likes being there  and his description, in the second half of this novel, of the journey across an almost unmarked border – of course that is no longer the case – separating Montana from the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan – is simply convincing.  Dell, the teenager in desperate trouble not of his own making, enters a world so different from the one he leaves that it sometimes almost seems like he is in a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale (perhaops that of the Snow Queen).  The author is neither judgmental nor prejudicial in his description of both sides of the border.  It all  just simply seems to be true, in things as different as language, landscape description, and customs.  If it is a fairy tale, there is a dark edge to both worlds portrayed, but, as Ford says in the PBS interview, he is very fond of Canada and believes that in his story  Dell is given the gift of the possibility of redemption and  consolation when he is kidnapped and taken off  to the nearby but unknown land of Saskatchewan.  This is a great novel on its own, but it is also the defining work that, almost in passing, catches the different ways in which life is now lived in the second and third largest countries in the world that used to share the world’s longest unguarded border, but no longer do.  Ford now lives in Maine.  He’s moving in.

May Day: Europe and the United States Compete for Worst Economic Policy

By

In a battle for world supremacy for economic stupidity America’s Paul Ryan is taking on Angela Merkel in a battle for the ages. While Ryan is only one of 435 Representatives in the U.S. Congress he has become the intellectual leader of the party that gave us the $3 Trillion Iraq War, the huge Bush tax breaks for the wealthy, the unpaid for prescription drug benefit for Big Pharma, and unleashed America’s investment banks so they could sell paper crap around the world and bring the world economy to its knees. Having participated in creating a recession that barely missed becoming a depression, Ryan is now regaining his strength with Mitt Romney, much of the American press and virtually all of the so-called Tea Party singing the praises of the Man Who Would Destroy the American Economy as an homage to his heroine, Ayn Rand. Ryan’s austerity budget has even managed to create a negative response from elements of the Catholic hierarchy – a group normally focussed on how best to reduce women’s power.

Across the Atlantic Angela Merkel serves as Ryan’s powerful competitor for the title of Master/Mistress of the Recession. With the help of France’s embattled President, Frau Merkel has managed to force Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland (the list will surely increase) to adopt economic austerity policies guaranteed to force most or all into a lengthy recession with devastating unemployment rates, low or no actual economic growth and a near suicidal commitment to doing more of what demonstrably does not work in order to avoid admitting to their mistakes.

Ryan and Merkel have so far avoided being compared to David Cameron whose ongoing commitment to economic disaster seems to have been missed by much of the press, but that could change at any time as Britain has entered its second recession in four years. But before Cameron can be allowed into the field he must rid himself of the attention given to his love affair with Rupert Murdoch which has greatly diminished the attention given to his disastrous economic policies.

The next several months will determine the success of Ryan, Merkel and Cameron as they struggle – each in his or her own way – to bring national economies to their knees. The U.S. election, the budding resistance to Merkel’s stubborn commitment to folly among other Euro zone countries, and the shakiness of of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat ruling government in Britain will play out as the three head for the finish line in this race to the bottom.

Rick Santorum: The Catholic Church’s Trojan Horse

By

The Republican primaries continue to amaze and entertain with Mitt finding new ways to sink lower into the mire of pandering to the lowest common denominator, the aptly named Newt Gingrich self inflating at the sight of a microphone – any microphone – and Rick Santorum ranting against the joys of sex. Of particular recent interest is the role being played by the Catholic bishops in a strange, retro fight over birth control.

As the self appointed guardians of American faith and morals the bishops are mostly known by members and former members of their faith as the enablers of countless Catholic priest pedophiles. Just to be clear, we are being asked to buy into the morality of a group that ensured that priests under their administration could continue to rape young boys by moving them to ever new pastures of altar boys at the slightest threat of disclosure. The photo in the Boston Globe of the new Cardinal Dolan from NY being hugged by Boston’s chief pedophile enabler Cardinal Law after Dolan was elevated to Cardinal by Pope Benedict tells us all we need to know.

So now in a country that used to pride itself in its ability to keep religion largely out of our political life, the likes of Cardinal Dolan and his old friend Bernard Law have inserted themselves into the presidential election on the issue of birth control. in doing so the bishops are promoting a largely ignored and even ridiculed Church’s view that birth control is against God’s law even as virtually every Catholic woman in America has moved beyond that medieval view.

The moral power of the Catholic church is contributing to the dingbat wing of various state legislatures which are imposing laws that are intended to remind American women who is in charge – white guys in suits waiting in line to order the legal rape of any woman who might wish – for whatever reason – to have a legal abortion. In states like Texas and Virginia women are faced with these bizarre laws regardless of whether a pregnancy is the result of rape or incest or whether a woman’s health is threatened.

Rick Santorum follows the bishops’ lead and and would have everyone in America have sex only when they are intent on conceiving a child. We are truly in a dark and strange area here; an area where state legislators begin to practice medicine of the ob-gyn variety..

As for the Catholic Church – I refer readers to Catholic historian Gary Wills’ history of the church’s screwing around with contraception (“Contraception’s Con Men”)
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/feb/15/contraception-con-men/
and how it became “Catholic Dogma” on the NY Review blog. And let’s all pray for the lives destroyed by pedophiliac priests and their bishop enablers, and the lives lost to AIDS because the church won’t support condoms in Africa, and for the disappearance of Rick Santorum into the dustbin of history.

Partisanship in America: A Commitment to National Failure?

By

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
–Leonard Cohen

Having (barely) survived the nonsense of the Republican-generated debt ceiling fiasco we are now looking at two new opportunities for partisanship to screw the majority of Americans: the deficit reduction Congressional Committee and the attempt to produce more jobs in America. And right out of the chute we are seeing the lines drawn and the vapid sarcasm of the likes of Eric Cantor leading us again toward the edge of the cliff.

None of this should surprise anyone. From day one President Obama faced a lunatic fringe questioning his birthplace, his religion, comparing him to Hitler etc. This fringe was aided and abetted by so-called national political leaders in the Republican party while so-called “moderate” Republicans like Senators Scott Brown, Susan Collins, and Olympia Snow forced a reduction in the stimulus bill and refused to consider a single payer health care approach. Obama and the Democratic Senate rolled over and accepted tepid progress when radical approaches were needed.

But that was then and now is even worse as the Republicans begin their final assault on the Obama presidency regardless of its effect on the country they say they serve. We are in a leaderless world with Europe breaking down over its inability to manage the Euro zone and the US looking for rational policy development from people who are unable to agree on the simplest things, never mind the tough ones. This is looking like a very painful yearlong run for the presidency with an increasingly likely chance that the people who ruined the economy in the first place and then refused to help fix it will get the reins once again.

For a discussion of President Obama’s job plan by Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman in today’s NY Times, click here.

Mike Huckabee: Ignoramus of the Day

By

“I would love to know more. What I know is troubling enough. And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, [is] very different than the average American…….if you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.”

Republican presidential candidate, Fox News analyst and former governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee  on Steve Malzberg’s right-wing radio talk show.

There are three problems with Huckabee’s comments: 1) Obama was not raised in Kenya; 2) he made them on a national radio talk show; and 3) he has had no comment about them since having it brought to his attention that he was 100% wrong**.

I will add a fourth problem, that he is a likely candidate for President and we really do not need an ignoramus in that position. It would be more than troubling to think of him mistaking Kenya for – oh maybe Hawaii or Indonesia –the two places where Obama actually was raised. What is symptomatic in his comments and most reprehensible is the subtle racism. It is no secret to anyone who follows American politics that the fact that Obama is a black man drives some people nuts. Kind of the way Hillary Clinton’s gender drove them nuts. The fact that people are getting used to hearing this kind of nonsense is not a good sign.

**Huckabee’s spokesman Hogan Gidley did comment::“Governor Huckabee simply misspoke when he alluded to President Obama growing up in ‘Kenya.’ The Governor meant to say the President grew up in Indonesia.” Which does not explain how or why he then segued to discussing how Obama must have thought of the Mau Maus.

Unions, Politics and the Press

By

Oligarchy: a form of government in which all power is vested in a few persons or in a dominant class or clique; government by the few.

The moves by Republican governors to eliminate collective bargaining rights by public employee unions represent an attack on what had become a basic human right and goes far beyond any attempt to address states’ deficits. Issues related to costs of pensions and health insurance have been successfully addressed by some cities and states via negotiations; the new strategy of simply eliminating unions’ bargaining rights is a callous affront to the public employees who teach our  children, patrol our streets, fight our fires, treat the mentally ill, etc. The fact that corporate America is running away from providing health insurance and pensions does not make it right.

America’s financial elites managed to take the country to  the  edge of the abyss and then feathered their nests with taxpayer bailouts to save the country from the results of their near criminal behavior.  Add to that the idiocy of choosing an unnecessary war that will cost the country upwards of $3 trillion (according to Nobel prize economist Joseph Stiglitz) and we have the need to find a scapegoat. Could it be that it is the thieves and cheats of corporate America? the “too big to fail” investment banks? the bailed out auto executives? the hedge fund manipulators? the mortgage crooks? No. It is determined in Wisconsin and Indiana and New Jersey and throughout the country that it is the teachers, the school custodians, the librarians, the police and  firefighters, the mental health workers, the hospital scrubbers, the prison guards, the snow plowers, the bus drivers, etc.   They are the unionized public workers with living wages, health care benefits and pensions. They are the ones to punish for having gained those benefits in honest, open negotiations.  Welcome to the new America – the country run increasingly by big money, Ayn Rand greed and – alas – a major dose of ignorance fostered by a weak or complicit press, a  simple-minded tea party and a fully aware, manipulative Republican party leadership.

And just where is the press in all of this? In an apparent intent to present divergent views, it too frequently ends up a tool for information manipulators, promulgating, for instance, the big lie of the Wisconsin governor that unions are responsible for the deficit and that they have some mysterious power to bring the state to its knees. The fact that the Wisconsin unions have offered to make the concessions asked for by the governor has gotten lost in the lack of honest coverage of the governor’s plan to cripple unions as a reward to his corporate sponsors.

Whether workers are entitled to paid vacations, health insurance, retirement pay, paid sick leave etc. are issues of concern to all workers – unionized or not – but having the right to negotiate for those benefits is a human right that needs to be defended.