One Little Victory

Well, not really a tantrum… I am too sick to throw a tantrum. I’ve had the damn flu for almost a week now and am getting a little tired of being cooped up at home. I am finally starting to feel better, but still sitting in bed today to gather up some strength to get back to work.

In the meantime I have not blogged nearly as much as I would like, and there are just too many good headlines to let pass. So between coughs I am going to at least capture the items closest to the surface.

Sean Taylor Killed

I am sure by now that most people know that Redskins’ safety Sean Taylor was killed after a burglar broke into his home and shot him. Taylor died defending his girlfriend and his young child. While Taylor had been a bit of a problem child for the Redskins, including an incident last year where he spit on another player, Taylor had for all accounts gotten his life on track and was nursing an injury to his knee at home at the time of the break-in. According to Clinton Portis, Taylor’s teammate both on the Redskins and at the University of Miami, “It’s hard to expect a man to grow up overnight. But ever since he had his child, it was like a new Sean, and everybody around here knew it. He was always smiling, always happy, always talking about his child.”

To think that there is a little child that will never know her dad because of some trigger-happy punk is a real tragedy.

More on Sean Taylor here…

If He Only Had a Heart…

OK, it’s probably not nice to make fun of medical conditions, but this one is too good to pass up…

Naturally my first reaction when I heard that Vice President Cheney was going in for a “heart procedure” was to hope that the doctors were going to trick the veep and put in a heart while he was under. But alas, no such luck. Instead, it was merely another Frankenstein jolt to keep our zombie of a Vice President moving. Damn you, Science.

More on Frankenstein here…

He’s Right, You Know…

As Hillary’s fight for the nomination continues on, I am thankful that Barack Obama is making a point that needs to be made. According to Obama, “I think the fact of the matter is that Sen. Clinton is claiming basically the entire eight years of the Clinton presidency as her own, except for the stuff that didn’t work out, in which case she says she has nothing to do with it. … There is no doubt that Bill Clinton had faith in her and consulted with her on issues, in the same way that I would consult with Michelle, if there were issues. … On the other hand, I don’t think Michelle would claim that she is the best qualified person to be a United States Senator by virtue of me talking to her on occasion about the work I’ve done.” (source)

That’s right, Hillary, being the wife of a President does not qualify as presidential experience.

It’s my impression that Hillary is so enamored with being president that she is running to whatever political ground seems the most advantageous, without regard to principle. And the reason I am distressed about this is that, left to her own devices, Hillary has relatively sound principles. But she is no Bill Clinton, and I think she is selling her political soul right now for the advantage, which will only result in a strengthening of the status quo during her presidency, something the health care industry, defense industry, and multinational corporations will be only too happy to see.

Stop the Presses

That’s right, I am going to publicly admit that Pat Buchanan just might have a point.

*gasp*

While I find Buchanan relatively amusing most nights on MSNBC, I never put much stock into his political positions. While he has a fair amount of common sense, his political “whorism” and his natural slant to the right always leave me scratching my head. And, despite the fact that Pat may have some points, I never agree with his solutions. Buchanan still doesn’t believe in global warming and seems to be enamored with Ron Paul, who I am pretty sure is insane.

But on this one Pat may well have some points that we don’t want to hear.

In his new book “State of Emergency”, Buchanan attacks illegal (and legal) immigration as well as free trade for having contributed to the demise of the American economy. I still remember Buchanan talking about these issues when he was running for President, and think there are some elements of truth to be found in his arguments. Most notably, I am becoming increasingly convinced that free trade is having negative affects on our economy and we have devolved into a consuming nation rather than a producing one. In addition to seeing our dollar devalued, it occurs to me that we are relying on the good will of our competitors, sometime adversaries, to look out for our best interests. The recent problems of products from China underscores my concern; what do the Chinese care if some American babies die from putting some of the Chinese-made toys into their mouths? I think I am starting to lean towards getting on board with Buchanan and Lou Dobbs in thinking that NAFTA was a really bad idea and that we might want to return to the days of protective trade with tariffs where necessary.

Buchanan also spends a fair amount of time it seems (I haven’t read the book yet), bashing the imperialism of the Bush Administration and its rush to start World War Three. On that Pat and I can both agree. Interestingly, an article from the Left (from Truthdig) underscore the end result of the administration’s policies. This is worth the read:

America in the Time of Empire
Posted on Nov 26, 2007
By Chris Hedges

This column was originally published by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

All great empires and nations decay from within. By the time they hobble off the world stage, overrun by the hordes at the gates or vanishing quietly into the pages of history books, what made them successful and powerful no longer has relevance. This rot takes place over decades, as with the Soviet Union, or, even longer, as with the Roman, Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian empires. It is often imperceptible.

Dying empires cling until the very end to the outward trappings of power. They mask their weakness behind a costly and technologically advanced military. They pursue increasingly unrealistic imperial ambitions. They stifle dissent with efficient and often ruthless mechanisms of control. They lose the capacity for empathy, which allows them to see themselves through the eyes of others, to create a world of accommodation rather than strife. The creeds and noble ideals of the nation become empty cliches, used to justify acts of greater plunder, corruption and violence. By the end, there is only a raw lust for power and few willing to confront it.

The most damning indicators of national decline are upon us. We have watched an oligarchy rise to take economic and political power. The top 1 percent of the population has amassed more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, creating economic disparities unseen since the Depression. If Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes president, we will see the presidency controlled by two families for the last 24 years.

Massive debt, much of it in the hands of the Chinese, keeps piling up as we fund absurd imperial projects and useless foreign wars. Democratic freedoms are diminished in the name of national security. And the erosion of basic services, from education to health care to public housing, has left tens of millions of citizens in despair. The displacement of genuine debate and civil and political discourse with the noise and glitter of public spectacle and entertainment has left us ignorant of the outside world, and blind to how it perceives us. We are fed trivia and celebrity gossip in place of news.

An increasing number of voices, especially within the military, are speaking to this stark deterioration. They describe a political class that no longer knows how to separate personal gain from the common good, a class driving the nation into the ground.

“There has been a glaring and unfortunate display of incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders,” retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of forces in Iraq, recently told the New York Times, adding that civilian officials have been “derelict in their duties” and guilty of a “lust for power.”

The American working class, once the most prosperous on Earth, has been politically disempowered, impoverished and abandoned. Manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas. State and federal assistance programs have been slashed. The corporations, those that orchestrated the flight of jobs and the abolishment of workers’ rights, control every federal agency in Washington, including the Department of Labor. They have dismantled the regulations that had made the country’s managed capitalism a success for ordinary men and women. The Democratic and Republican Parties now take corporate money and do the bidding of corporate interests.

Philadelphia is a textbook example. The city has seen a precipitous decline in manufacturing jobs, jobs that allowed households to live comfortably on one salary. The city had 35 percent of its workforce employed in the manufacturing sector in 1950, perhaps the zenith of the American empire. Thirty years later, this had fallen to 20 percent. Today it is 8.8 percent. Commensurate jobs, jobs that offer benefits, health care and most important enough money to provide hope for the future, no longer exist. The former manufacturing centers from Flint, Mich., to Youngstown, Ohio, are open sores, testaments to a growing internal collapse.

The United States has gone from being the world’s largest creditor to its largest debtor. As of September 2006, the country was, for the first time in a century, paying out more than it received in investments. Trillions of dollars go into defense while the nation’s infrastructure, from levees in New Orleans to highway bridges in Minnesota, collapses. We spend almost as much on military power as the rest of the world combined, while Social Security and Medicare entitlements are jeopardized because of huge deficits. Money is available for war, but not for the simple necessities of daily life.

Nothing makes these diseased priorities more starkly clear than what the White House did last week. On the same day, Tuesday, President Bush vetoed a domestic spending bill for education, job training and health programs, yet signed another bill giving the Pentagon about $471 billion for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. All this in the shadow of a Joint Economic Committee report suggesting that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been twice as expensive than previously imagined, almost $1.5 trillion.

The decision to measure the strength of the state in military terms is fatal. It leads to a growing cynicism among a disenchanted citizenry and a Hobbesian ethic of individual gain at the expense of everyone else. Few want to fight and die for a Halliburton or an Exxon. This is why we do not have a draft. It is why taxes have not been raised and we borrow to fund the war. It is why the state has organized, and spends billions to maintain, a mercenary army in Iraq. We leave the fighting and dying mostly to our poor and hired killers. No nationwide sacrifices are required. We will worry about it later.

It all amounts to a tacit complicity on the part of a passive population. This permits the oligarchy to squander capital and lives. It creates a world where we speak exclusively in the language of violence. It has plunged us into an endless cycle of war and conflict that is draining away the vitality, resources and promise of the nation.

It signals the twilight of our empire.

Saving the Worst For Last

And finally to end this uplifting blog entry, I was following (between naps) the story of Baby Grace, who turns out to be 2 year old Riley Ann Sawyers. It turns out she was beaten to death and held underwater by both her mom and her mom’s husband. I watched the press conference with her dad and grandmother yesterday and my heart just sank seeing how devastated they were. What kind of sick fuck would do something like this to a defenseless two year old? I don’t care how disorderly kids can be or how much they get on your nerves on a bad day (remember I have three kids), it is inconceivable to me to take my frustration out on a kid.

Riley Ann Sawyers: She deserved better than this

According to news reports, mom’s husband (Royce Zeigler) tried to take his own life but was unsuccessful. How typical of such a coward not to be able to complete a simple suicide but to be able to inflict such harm on a child. I’m glad his attempt was unsuccessful and I hope he spends his prison life bunking with people who treat him the way he treated Riley.

OK, that’s about all the news I can handle blogging about for now. Sufficed to say that instances like these make me question why we even allowed to carry on as a society. When it is so easy for parents to abuse their kids, for our political leaders to abuse us, and for people to callously take the lives of others, what redeeming value do we hold?

And I know that I don’t treat my kids that way, nor do most parents, but anyone with a conscience has to be affected by these types of actions. They detract from all of us.