tales of copper city

Cap-and-trade 101 by Kevin Drum

If you want to finally start unraveling the intricacies of cap-and-trade---the carbon-reduction method of choice in battling global warming---Kevin Drum's piece in Mother Jones is the place to start.  

For my money, Kevin Drum's is the best political blog around. He is a real virtuoso of modern public policy. I read him every day.

One flew over the Texas state mental hospital, too

Of all the experiences of my long life, nothing comes close to my two years of serving as an attendant, really a guard, at the Texas State Mental Hospital in Austin, from 1960 to 1962.

After six months as an attendant in an older male ward filled with many patients suffering from end-stage syphilis, I was transferred first to the white maximum security ward and, after a year, to the black maximum security ward. These were still the days of segregation and the hospital wanted me on the security wards because I was 6'5" and a veteran.

I was finishing up college at the University of Texas and it was a good job for older students like me, paying $225 a month for 44 hours a week, with plenty of study time during the night shift while the patients slept off their heavy doses of Thorazine and other major tranquilizers.

But in another way it was one of the worst jobs of my life.

Acceptance and the grace of insecurity

In a recent Sunday, in church, we read Second Kings, 5:1-14.  This is a wonderful story about Namaan, a top commander for the King of Aram, a man who had saved the King's fat in battle at various times.

Namaan was a leper. "The man, though a mighty warrior, suffered from leprosy."  

The Serenity Prayer and acceptance in everyday life

The Serenity Prayer is one of the best known prayers in the world.  Written by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr to serve as part of a sermon during WWII, it soon became a cornerstone of Alcoholics Anonymous and all manner of recovery groups.

I have written about the Serenity Prayer before here and, on the origins of the prayer, here.  Niebuhr's daughter Elizabeth Sifton, in her book The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War, traces the origins of the ideas in the prayer to the famous Deportation Strike of 1917 in Bisbee.

Originally the prayer was a communal prayer, a prayer for groups. Niebuhr's prayer was meant to sum up his theology of "realism," of facing the injustice that is written in our hearts, and to get the churches more involved in changing society instead of saving souls.

God give us grace
to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things
that should be changed,
and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

Quitting booze taught me almost everything I know

I wrote this piece almost a decade ago and it ran, somewhat differently, in the Bisbee Observer. Since then, there's been a lot of water under the bridge. I have changed it somewhat  near the end to clarify my meaning that we must "bear up" our imperfections.

Somehow it seems appropriate today, to help me remember that our serial selves are all part of who we are, just as, with the United States, our complicated and imperfect past(s), must be kept in mind and drawn upon, rather than denied or ignored.

There is also a different ending to this story, an ending that I will recite later.  Suffice it to say that after 35 years of sobriety, and three years of pretending otherwise, I am celebrating my first year one more time.

This is my Valentine for Valerie and, of course, for Carole, the two women in my life, with all my love.

"Have you ever considered giving up drinking?" This from a young associate pastor of the Methodist church I attended as a young man, in San Antonio.

I was 21 at the time, fresh out of the Army, already in trouble with drinking. Serious trouble.

I turned to the church first.

Say goodbye to the filibuster

While I am on this particular rant, why do we keep the filibuster? 

Why, when we do keep it, do we make it easy to invoke, creating a permanent place and role for hard-line conservatives and blue dog Democrats?

The filibuster, or the requirement for a super majority in the Senate, is a creature of the nineteenth century and the politics of slavery.  Originally, it meant "extended debate" and was present in the earliest days of the republic. Extended debate is the rule that an individual  Senator can talk continuously and force the withdrawal of a piece of legislation that he deemed objectionable. 

It later became a tool of the political party opposing legislation that a section of the country found heinous around 1830.

For example, the filibuster was used in the 1920s to defeat anti-lynching legislation, thereby preserving a hallowed tradition in the American South.

The world we may be losing, one more time

In my last post I argued that Obama is at war, with himself, in the struggle to fundamentally shift the categories of American politics by overturning market and religious fundamentalism and its death-grip on America's future.

I have been as excited as any Democrat that the prospects for fundamental change (pun intended) never looked so promising in recent decades.

But there are storm clouds galore and warning signs that the new President has formed a team that is far more "centrist" than we expected.

This post titled, "A Team of Zombies," by David Sirota at the Campaign for America's future only deepens my concern.

Sirota notes that economists like Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz who have valiantly opposed the market fundamentalists who haunted the Clinton and Bush administrations was appointed to the new councils of the Administration in favor of those like Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard who as a Clinton adviser encouraged the financial deregulation that led to the economic collapse that we now face.

Obama at war...with himself

We have seen enough of President Obama, on the campaign trail and in the early days of his administration, to suspect that he holds two theories of political reform, two theories that unfortunately can be at war.

The first view is that better, more high-minded, bipartisan politics and values produces better, more high-minded, bipartisan policy. A new politics creates new policies.

The second view stands this idea on its head: new policies create a new politics, not just the other way around.