tales of copper city

"Crazy Heart"

Well, we saw "Crazy Heart" the other afternoon in Sierra Vista and Carole and I both loved it, if that's the right word.  It was a very painful movie for me; I know a little about a life that can drift out of control, running on empty, even as it might seem to some as if things are all right.

Jeff Bridges played the part of an aging, alcoholic country and western singer who had become a legend and was fading from view, playing in bowling alleys.

Bunting on Bunning?

The Democrats as usual look inept in the face of Senator Jim Bunning's (R.-Ky) "filibuster" on an extension of the unemployment benefits for hundreds of thousands of Americans. 

The Republicans look far worse, as the heartless party they truly have become.  The president has hinted that he might "take Bunning on" soon" if the hold is not lifted.  What's he going to do, "bunt on Bunning?"

Retake: Lost in America: or the films of my life

I am going to see "Crazy Heart," with Jeff Bridges, this afternoon.  That the movie finally came to Sierra Vista is in itself a great gift.  We seldom get the best movies here and when they come they vanish within a week or so. 

"Crazy Heart" promises to be a good movie, one that I think will remind me of "Tender Mercies," but I'll not decide that in advance.  Robert Duvall, the star of "Tender Mercies" is in "Crazy Heart," so the connection seems plausible.

Movies for me work best when they capture the various way in which I feel lost in America, a sense of displacement and disorientation that I can't quite put my finger on.

Callie, again

When our retriever Dexter died in September of 2008, shortly after we returned to Bisbee, Arizona, a town we had lived in for 10 years and then left and then moved back to, we vowed we wouldn't get another dog, at least not for a very long time. It wasn’t the trauma of his dying that got to us so much; it was the huge gap it left in our lives.

When he died I wrote about that gap.
 
The things we miss are in the absences, the gaps in our glances. We get out of the car and find ourselves looking and not finding him. We turn around at the pantry expecting him behind us and he isn’t there. We pull away from the house to visit friends or a restaurant and his solemn face is not at the door, watching, waiting, hoping.

Coming across as arrogant

One of the difficulties in talking with people about health care reform is that most people don't have the time or the resources or the information to get past the slogans ("I'm worried about the deficit...." or "I'm worried about government taking over everything...") and the stories ("I know someone from Canada who says...).  

If someone who has worked with the issue for years or someone who's paid the price of learning the facts about the soaring costs of health care and its impact on our economy and much else tries to counter with evidence, he or she is considered "condescending."  

McCain is running against...Obama!

I heard about this yesterday from a friend, the radio ads of John McCain declaring that he's running against Obama. Not against health care reform, not against anything specific, just against Obama. This sounds to me like nothing more than the covert racism that runs throughout the right wing today.

McCain is facing right-wing opposition in the Republican primary, and he's taking up the clarion call of the Tea Parties: O.B.A.M.A. (One Big Ass Mistake America)--- the mistake of electing a man of color to the nation's highest office.

There are kids standing on the street corners of the neighboring town of Sierra Vista, where Fort Huachuca is located, and they are wildly waving One Big Ass Mistake America hate signs at street corners. It takes me back to the big smear days of Senator Joseoph McCarthy, and later, in California, to the days of the John Birch Society and "Impeach Earl Warren!" billboards.  

The way forward for health care reform?

Here's a good explanation (two actually) of how the House and Senate could get it done, given the disparities between the two bills.  It's from Kevin Drum and Mother Jones.

Back to the election maps and the future

It helps from time to time to recall the differential distribution of election results as filtered through our system of 50 states and the electoral college.  It's complicated but it reminds us that even though public opinion may be skewed toward, say, reforming the health care system, the fortunes of the two parties are so equally distributed that a more conservative democracy may lose in a presidential election yet lose because conservative democracy has a fallback position: stalling, obfuscation and outright lying.

And the winning party may be less than skillful in countering these fallback maneuvers on the part of the losing party.

In time the public may grow so frustrated, disgusted, and mistrustful of the winning party for its inability to deliver on its promises and even administer a punishing rebuke to the winning party in a state like Massachusetts that should have been perfectly safe. 

The book to read about our political stalemate

If I were to recommend one book for anyone to read about our political stalemate it would be Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. 

There is a sad irony in my recommendaton because Jacob Hacker, of Yale, is the person who more than anyone else gave life to the "public option" now so in contention in the Senate.  Hacker's idea was in fact ingenious; use the "frame" of competition to create a public plan that would keep private insurance honest and begin to break up the monopolistic tendencies of health insurance in the United States. 

The real world of crazy conservatives

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones on the sad fact that, while some conservative writers hold nuanced views on the issues of the day, in the real world that liberals live in, they are fighting some truly crazy ideas.  Here's an excerpt from Drum's piece, which is a must-read:

The brain, the environment, and life itself

I have long been interested in what I term "life itself," a bracketing of the word life to bring our attention to the existential experience of life as well as to heighten our appreciation of the miracle we are "given," engaged in, dancing with, and so forth. Life itself is in front of us, is something that we experience, even enact.

I am also interested in consciousness and the unconscious, or the brain or what some call "the shadow" and in what ways does consciousness produce what we think of as life itself.

Alva Noë is a philosopher at UC Berkeley and he warns of making the serious error of assuming that we are our brains;  this is a serious fallacy. We have a brain and with remarkable capacities but consciousness and our awareness of the processes of life are an achievement, an upshot of the interaction with our environment that we participate in, not something that is produced within our brains.  

Drinking games, or what the anthropologists saw

Apparently there is nothing that Malcolm Gladwell is not interested in.

Take his latest book,  What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures. There are nineteen essays there, all of them written for his employer, The New Yorker. The essay from which the title is taken, "What the Dog Saw,"is about Cesar Millan, the “Dog Whisperer” and television personality, about how he works, which turns out to be so complicated and intricate that it requires the skills of not just ethologists---people who analyze animal behavior---but also psychologists, Millan's wife, dance movement experts, former clients and so on.

Getting rid of Rahm

Leslie Gelb has written the best piece around on how President Obama can save his presidency.  And he needs to save his presidency.   Gelb's article is in The Daily Beast.

Why Washington loves the filibuster

Jonathan Chait of the The New Republic has an excellent piece on why official Washington is reluctant to give up the filibuster.  Meanwhile the nation lies in gridlock.  An impressive electoral victory by President Obama is dribbling away, which, of course, is why the Republicans love the filibuster.

And Obama refuses to retaliate with recess appointments over the Senatorial "holds" on his appointments.  

Barack Obama seems harder to understand the more we get to know him.  He lets the Republicans have their way with him.  

What's Spanish for quagmire?

Jorge Casteñeda, a leading Mexican intellectual and professor of politics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City and Global Distinguished Professor of Politics and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University has written a fascinating analysis of the violence attendant to the "war on drugs" in Mexico.  

The subtitle of the article is Five Myths that Caused the Failed War Next Door.

What if the Senate were different?

Annie Lowrey in the Washington Post has written an eye-opening piece about how the Senate works, and why the original design was set it up that way.  For example, half the population of the U.S. lives in 10 states with 20 Senators; the other half of the population lives in 40 states with 80 Senators.  

Lowrey asks the question: what if the Senate were apportioned according to income or race instead of by states?

My only complaint is that in showing the roots of this disastrous imbalance in representation, Lowrey doesn't mention how this was not simply a small states versus big states compromise.  If so, the big states were snookered.  This was an argument that was principally about slavery.

Dogs and blogs

If you want to hear from old friends and others put a picture of your dog on your blog.  An old friend (Bill Beery) whom I hadn't heard from in some time just noticed my "Callie" entry and told me to find Pablo Neruda's poem, "A Dog Died" and I did.  Here is the link I found, and thanks, Bill, and don't be a stranger.

Dancing at two weddings

Obama's latest comments expressing admiration for several top bankers, and indifference to their bonuses, despite his recent criticism of the same, is a reflection of his attempt to "dance at two weddings."

He's trying to convince the chief capitalists that he understands that they live in a "winner take all" capitalism, while the rest of us don't and that this is just how capitalism works and he's okay with that.

(Of course, as Paul Krugman points out, these particular capitalists nearly brought the whole show down, which is far, far more important an issue than their grotesque salaries.)

And Obama is also trying to say that he's on the side of Main Street and those who are not participating in  "winner take all" capitalism and never will. 

This is the basic contradiction of the Democratic Party: it wants to cozy up to the chief capitalists and not just for campaign contributions, and it also wants to appear as dyed-in-the wool populists or at least progressives. 

 This is what I mean by "dancing at two weddings" and it is killing the Democratic Party. 

Callie

When our retriever Dexter died shortly after we returned to Bisbee, we vowed we wouldn't get another dog, at least not for a very long time.  But then about six months later I was walking with Carole in the Farmer's Market in Bisbee, a block behind our house, and passing the Border Animal Rescue (BAR) stand, I noticed this small puppy sort of cowering under a chair from a group of playful children trying to lead her around with a short leash. For just a moment I caught her dark, mournful eyes---eyes that had seen too much in her short five months of life, as we found out later.

I turned to Carole and said, "We're screwed.  I think I've just seen our next dog."

Three days latter we brought Callie home.  She was frightened, spooked, anxious, suspicious and fearful.

She had been raised in a "hoarder" house in Douglas with as many as 20 or 30 dogs at a time.  She likely never had a moment when she felt secure and safe. And then she was adopted by an older man who abused her and BAR took her back.

She will be a year next month.  She's still nervous but she has grown from 15 pounds to almost 40.  She's happy, playful, and a little manic.  She has gone a long, long way to fill the empty place in our hearts when Dexter died. 

 The things we miss about Dexter we still miss, but when we turn, we see Callie, part retriever, part Australian shepherd or Border Collie, and totally tubular joy.

 
 
 
 

The corrupted core of Washington: Congress

Lawrence Lessig in the Nation has written a brilliant essay, "How to Get Our Democracy Back, " on why it is Congress and money that lies at the heart of our political paralysis.

Gratitude

For all my complaining and criticizing I am so grateful that President Barack Obama is sitting in the Oval Office. Here in .pdf format are some wonderful pictures of  The_First_Family that are surely making it around the Internet.

Gracias a Dios.

A striking contradiction

As noted in by Henrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker, a headline in the Village Voice, the day after the Massachusetts election, read like this: “SCOTT BROWN WINS MASS. RACE, GIVING GOP 41-59 MAJORITY.”

And this:  Kevin Drum reports on Bruce Bartlett's response to Governor Pawlenty's likely race for president in 2012.  Bartlett, a former Bush adviser, argues that Pawlenty,

Like all Republicans these days, Pawlenty wants to have it every possible way: complain about the deficit while ignoring everything his party did to create it (Medicare Part D, two unfunded wars, TARP, earmarks galore, tax cuts up the wazoo, irresponsible regulatory and monetary policies that created the recession that created the deficit, etc.), illogically insisting that tax cuts are a necessary part of deficit reduction, and never proposing any specific spending cuts.

Across the border line

I spent the morning across the U.S.-Mexico border at Naco, commemorating two years of operation for El Centro de Recursos para Migrantes, the Migrant Resource Center.  A special part of the ceremony was to dedicate our new toilet, a much appreciated addition by volunteers and migrantes.  The baño was built by some of the volunteers and others who are friends of the Center.

Founded by Cecile Lumer and Peter Young, both of Bisbee, the purpose of the center is to offer food, clothing, water, limited medical attention, a telephone call to family, and, for many, money to return home by bus, if the returned migrants so wish.  

The system is rigged

The State of the Union speech the president gave last night was good, but I'm still concerned that President Obama is not fighting the way he should to defeat our democratic system's built-in advantages for conservatives and the status quo. 

There is no doubt that the president understands how the system is biased against progressive change; yet he shows little tendency to use the resources of his office to fight back against these biases by really getting into the faces of some conservative Democratic Senators or by constantly reminding the public about how the system is stacked in favor of money and power.

I write a lot about how we have two systems of democracy in the U.S.: progressive democracy and conservative democracy that uses the built-in biases of our Constitutional order originally designed to defend the Slave Power (the South) and slavery and ever since to defeat a more progressive democracy.  

"Our wars are killing us."

"Our wars are killing us" is the name of the excellent piece by Tom Englehardt at Tomdispatch.com.  The folks in Massachusetts are worried about the deficit according to one interpretation of the Republican victory.  

One trillion dollars over 10 years seems too much, even if we do cover almost all Americans and get closer to controlling health care spending.

But the voters in Massachusetts aren't worried about the one trillion dollars we will spend in Afghanistan; oh no, that's for our national security, like the two or three trillions we will spend on Iraq.  

Health security no; national security yes.

Of course, our wars are killing them, Iraqi and Afghani civilians who have committed no crime except getting in the way of our national security steamroller. For every death of a terrorist killed by a drone, the Brookings Institution says that we will kill 10 civilians.  (See Tomgram: Droning On."  

And, of course, each one of these death by drones will only help Al Qaeda recruit more young men to get on airplanes with bombs hidden on their persons.

What in the world is wrong with the American voter, anyway?  

What happens after Massachusetts?

Yesterday, I would have wagered that Martha Coakley, the Massachusetts Attorney General and Democratic candidate for the Senate in Massachusetts would in the end squeeze out a victory on Tuesday. 

I was wrong.  And now we will have endless analyses about what happened and what needs to change. Here's mine.

1.  Retail politics.  People everywhere like to be asked for their vote, face-to-face as much as that is possible. Massachusetts especially likes retail politics. Martha Coakley didn't seem to appreciate this fact and even if she did she isn't good at it, and this counts in a state that reveres hands-on politics. 

Actually, I think Coakley knew her weaknesses and she was determined to coast to victory given the overwhelming number of registered Democrats. Why give a political unknown free publicity with a too aggressive campaign? And this angered Independents and some Democrats and energized the Republicans.  

And by the way, where was the White House back when it became obvious that Coakley was running a bad campaign?  Why did they wait until it was too late?

Above all, voters don't like to be taken for granted.  They read that as arrogance.  I saw the same thing happen here in a small town election and it ain't pretty.

2. The divides within the Democratic party. The far more important point is that the Democrats have a huge problem.  The opposition Democrats  face within their own party in rounding up sufficient votes for victory, whether in reforming Wall Street or health care, has not been lost on the ordinary voter, whether Democrat, Independent, or Republican.  

This endless controversy has given the average voter pause. Who is taking their side when they are losing their homes and the banks are thumbing their nose at the Obama administration? And given all the confusion over health care reform, do the Democrats know what they're doing?

Government

I found this entry under government in Frederick Buechner's Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter's Dictionary.

If...governments don't reflect the dreams of the people they govern or serve their wills...you wonder what on earth governments are.  Reading the newspapers you get the sense of them as small, irascible groups within each capital---far more of them men than women---who behave in ways that under normal circumstances would land them in the slammer in no time flat. They seem to have a life and purpose of their own quite apart from the lives and purposes of anyone else. They are perpetually locked in desperate struggles with each other that have little to do with the general human struggle to live and let live with as little fuss as possible. It's we ourselves who have given them the power to pull the whole world down on our heads, and yet we seem virtually powerless to stop them...

About the only objection I have to Buechener's lament is that it is too narrow in scope.  The same powerlessness we feel toward our democracy we also feel toward those gigantic institutions in the so-called private sector who control our lives in ways that we are powerless to prevent.

I have taught government and politics all my life and in my retirement I wonder if in my teaching I had become something of an apologist for a democracy that has simply proved inadequate to our times and challenges, incapable of bringing the powers that be, inside and outside of government, back to the business at hand of helping us live out our days with as little fuss as possible. 

Instead they largely seem interested keeping us on the edge of our seats waiting for the next fresh hell that government should have prevented or prepared us for years ago.

The other plot to wreck America

Frank Rich's Sunday New York Times op-ed piece, "The Other Plot to Wreck America" is crucial reading about the upcoming Congressional hearings on the fiscal crisis beginning with the September 15, 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers.

Listening, again

In hearing or reading about how we as a nation talk to each other---how little we listen and learn---I was brought back to a blog entry I wrote last summer after the Fourth of July about listening.  I wrote about listening in the context of "focusing" a kind of meditation that I fitfully practice.  But "listening" is also central in the writing of another author that I "listen" to: James P. Carse and particularly his book, The Silence of God.  I have written about Carse before.

This book is the best thing I have ever read on prayer, on faith, and on the power of listening and being heard. 

As a former college professor who often described the graduate school setting as "the academic captivity," I now realize its most devastating feature: no one listens.  Professors don't listen to each other and they don't listen to students and, consequently, students tune out professors. And then professors go home with the voice of God in their mouths and there no one listens to them, either. This creates the most incredible loneliness, all the way around: the academic captivity.

At any event, I thought I would run the entry again because it captures so great a weakness that I suffer and should, above all else, seek to remedy. It is the principal spiritual challenge I face.

A very wise economist

I have learned over the years to be careful that I pay attention to the right economists.  Too many of this breed are simply ideologues for free market fundamentalism. But Joseph Stiglitz is one very wise and experienced economist and his article on lessons we should have already learned about markets is well worth reading.  It's in the China Daily, of all places.

Way to go, Harry Reid!

The Senate passed the health care reform bill, 60-39, and if anyone deserve the lion's share of the credit, it's Senator Harry Reid, the Majority Leader.

President Obama also deserves huge credit for making this his number one priority and Speaker Pelosi for shepherding the House bill past the opposition.

Certainly the legislation has serious defects but the simple fact is that we cannot reform health care unless and until nearly everyone is covered. And this first giant step has been taken.   (See Jonathan Chait's wonderful summary in The New Republic of why this bill is hugely important.)

And now undeniably the footprint of the federal government in health care will overshadow the private health insurance industry, making clear that it will be government and democratic majorities who will have the major say in shaping the future of our health care system.

Way to go!!!

A seriously dysfunctional Senate

Paul Krugman, in his latest post on health care reform, argues that our primary goal in the next Congress should be to reform the filibuster rules in the Senate.  It's required reading.  The crucial point is that a simple majority vote when the Senate organizes should be sufficient to overturn the Senate's filibuster rule, according to a report from the Congressional Research Service.  

Hope against hope

The news today about "Joe Lieberman" winning is yet more evidence of how deeply entrenched in our politics is sectionalism and a conservative vision of our democracy.  Conservative democracy remains a force in our democracy in significant part because it can manipulate arcane anti-majoritarian rules in the Senate. 

So many hopes will be frustrated by this setback.  So many moved to Washington to help secure a better America and they must feel betrayed and abandoned by the president and many in their own party.  Some will be tempted to give up hope for the American democracy altogether.

And so I thought it might be time to write about the roots of our hope, about the politics of hope. 

"Evil does exist in the world..."

President Obama is receiving widespread praise for his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.  Here is what I see as the key assertion, made after he praised the moral example of Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

To equate Al Qaeda's 100 to 300 terrorists and Hitler's armies is simply rhetoric totally out of control. Worse, it is to stretch the doctrine of self-defense beyond recognition, giving the United States permission to invade other countries at will.  

The scary Senate health care reform bill?

Who knows if the outlines of the Senate deal will hold?  The deal, as I understand it, will be to permit individual Americans to enroll in public insurance version of Medicare at age 55, and would also expand Medicaid to 150 percent poverty and would create some version of  a national insurance exchange to enhance competition, the exchange being overseen by either not-for-profits or government.

If the final Senate bill is an expansion of both Medicare (as public insurance, not as entitlement) and Medicaid is signed into the deal, we will have a much higher percentage of health care spending  coming from government sources than have now, perhaps as much as 65 percent.  And that makes the big reform we are going to need---something close to a single payer---much closer to a reality in the next 10 years.

If I were a progressive in the House, and this deal passes the Senate, I would take the deal and send it to the president.

Stupid wars

Barack Obama, while still in the Illinois legislature, said, "I'm not opposed to all war. I'm opposed to stupid wars." 

Well, now we know how wrong he was---about himself.  It turns out President Obama is in favor of stupid wars. 

Within a year many more American troops will be in Afghanistan and many more Americans will die for stupid reasons.  Just as importantly, many, many Afghani citizens,will die, innocent of everything except being in the way of the American war machine.  We even have a term for them: collateral damage.  And we will seldom hear about them except for the work of brave researchers who show us the costs of our inhumanity.

The picture of the President hailing a sea of West Point cadets and smiling from ear to ear nauseates me.  Some in that sea will die for no reason because of this decision made in stupidity.

How to have faith when you don't 'believe' in God

Thanksgiving morning, as we get ready in our small church to serve Thanksgiving dinner to over 200 people in Bisbee, I think it might be a good time to reflect on why I spend so much time in church when in fact my thoughts about faith and God are so, well, unusual.  Besides, politics and health care reform are beginning to drive me totally crazy. So here goes.

I am a Christian.  I have faith but I don't 'believe' in God.

There, I've said it and I'm glad.

But hold on a minute:  the statement "How to have faith when you don't believe in God," does not quite mean what it might seem, at least for me anyway.

How the filibuster has changed....everything

A letter written by a staffer for Lyndon Johnson just after his victory in 1964 explains what the filibuster was like in former times and what it is today.  And, to my surprse and embarrassment, I never appreciated this huge difference, despite a lot of time spent getting a graduate degree in politics from a very fine university.

I found out that the filibuster is today a tool for  a supermajority for almost anything that matters rather than an temporary halt in the Senate's business to try and slow the majority down and arouse the energy and attention of the nation.. 

In other words the filibuster was used in the past to try and halt a vote but not to actually prevent it from ever happening.  But today, with a radicalized Republican party and a Democratic Party asleep at the switch, the filibuster is now used to make anything and everything pass a 60 vote hurdle.

Here is the article by Ezra Klein in the Washington Post relating the analysis by a staffer under LBJ.  The staffer was Mike Manatos and he served as White House liaison to the Senate.  The really interesting part was the vote for Medicare, which was, initially, 55-45.  The vote swelled to over 65 when it was apparent it was going to pass because the Republican Party, in those days, was not a party determined to defeat a president and discredit an entire opposition party at any costs.

That was then, and now is now.  Surely, we can change this, in 2010, when the new Senate is organized.

War and health care reform...and Princeton economists

Uwe Reinhardt, a Princeton health care economist, was the big dog during my years in health care reform.  He was witty, informative, and everywhere. 

Reinhardt's no longer everywhere. It must be hard to be seen when another economist from Princeton, the Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, is everywhere and constantly making sense on health care reform. But Reinhardt is still witty and full of insight as this column reveals, comparing health care reform in the U.S. and the war in Afghanistan. 

No, it's not just the annual costs that are similar; it is far more than that. It is the attempt by the U.S. government to somehow wade in and control a nation full of bristling, protective, and corrupt tribal chieftains fighting to protect and expand their turf, tribal chieftains who maintain their home base in the nation's capital.  And so on. It's a wonderful column.

I got this reference from Brad Wright's blog, Wright on Health, which has become one of the best on the web.  Be sure and read it every day.  You will learn a lot.

What day is today?

We watched JFK, Oliver Stone's riveting film last night, mainly because I have started reading JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters, by James Douglass, another (and very good) case for the assassination of Kennedy by groups connected to the CIA and to the Special Ops group within the military, the group that during and after WWII assassinated foreign leader, rigged or stole elections, and overthrew governments.  

Douglass's book focuses on Kennedy's turn toward struggling for peace, ending our involvement in Vietnam, and the growing menace of the CIA and the national security state.  Kennedy was far from perfect but it seems certain he was turning toward nuclear disarmament with Russsia and there were enormous pressures resisting this turning, including many leading generals and the Joint Chiefs who wanted to launch a preemptive nuclear attack on Russia.