Oh, Bring Me Back Old FDR

The new, long presidential campaign season needs banning by law because it inflicts great pain on those of us who cannot resist tuning in to what the candidates are saying, just to see if they say anything coherent.

Not that Americans demand coherent candidates. Look what the Supreme Court pulled out of the gutter in 2000 and, miracle of miracles, what in 2004 the citizens of the greatest republic on earth re-elected (if that is the proper term under the fishy circumstances of the Republican Supremes’ earlier involvement).

Even so, it would shock and delight to hear one candidate offer a skein of sense and logic.

To say that stretches the imagination as far as the Republican runners are concerned. Giuliani is the buddy of crooks and acts like a two-bit chiseler when it comes to hiding the expenses for visiting his honey. Huckabee is a two-bit chiseler, who as soon as he ascended to being Arkansas’ governor put a wicker basket beside his office door for cash love offerings, took free suiting to clad his puffy person, and with his lady posted a Target shopping list for those who wanted upon his departure from office to furnish the Huckabees with candelabras and humming-bird-tongue tweezers. McCain has a few moments of sense between bouts of lunacy about Iraq. Romney, when he reincarnates, will return as a pancake flipper. Thompson incarnates ennui. Paul is the only one among them with brains enough to get out of Iraq, but that’s about all he has going for him unless you’re in labor and he’s standing nearby; he does know how to deliver babies.

One expects the Democrats to offer more sense. They do in part. But none of the lot of them offers a coherent program that calls for federalizing all health care and making it universal, for fetching the troops out of Iraq before the war bankrupts the nation, for slapping grinding controls on credit-card peddlers and gougers and for once again pulling the rapacious banks out of the honey pots of creating and selling such bad investments as annuities, recently invented mortgage securities and other offerings for suckers. Nor does anyone call for cracking down on Wall Street, a casino with fewer rules and controls and more cheats now than the card room behind the Kitty Kat Klub.

Biden wants to be secretary of state. Mrs. Clinton trades on having been First Lady and having Bill at hand (sometimes). Dodd seems a smart fellow who should have known better. Edwards wants to go after the rich crooks and help the poor, but what about the rest of us? Gravel is a fool. Kucinich seems the only one with a philosophy, but he must know that disqualifies him in the U. S. Obama preps himself as the preppie of change. Anyone of these would be better than any Republican, but of them all, who looks as if she or he has enough gravity to anchor the country?

Where is FDR now that we need him again?

Big W as Comic Relief

Weyerhaeuser Corp. has raped the forest lands of North America and other parts of the world for 150 years and it’s not often that Big W provides haw-haws to those who follow its efforts to pretend in national ads that it really cares about Bambi and salmon.

But the other day, thanks to The Seattle Times’ excellent coverage of a recent storm and floods in southwest Washington State, including a picture that says it all about Big W’s timber practices, one of Weyerhaeuser’s chief timber beasts–the nickname for cut-‘em-down foresters–opined that he and his fellows would take a look-see at how and where they clearcut–that is, cut huge swatches of forest lands bare, screw the habitat for animals and other critters.

The company’s statement provoked belly laughs from those who appreciate Big W’s buying and selling of politicians and of university forestry professors, all to insulate and defend it and thus other timber companies from laws to protect the environment.

You can get more truth out of a used-car salesman needing a meth fix, literally.

From Weyerhaeuser’s point-of-view, what’s one more lie about causing avalanches, ruining creeks and rivers and helping flood people’s home? That’s just the cost of doing business–other people’s costs.

Farm Bill Ain't for Ma and Pa

Ever since the remote possibility murmured on the lips of politicians in Washington, D.C., that the new farm bill might pass Congress and president with a cut in handouts to those who pass as farmers in this country, letters have shown up in papers around the country from persons saying they are small farmers who say they will perish and the nation will starve if Uncle Samuel fails to give them their annual checks from the Treasury.

Anyone who pays attention to farm bills knows that those slavering for the federal dough are mainly big international corporations--Big Ag--and that most of the crops for which subsidies get paid don’t put grub on the table here but in China and India or don’t put food in anybody’s mouths: Few sup on cotton and tobacco.

As for those who pay the subsidies, most of us live in towns and cities. And most of us, because American schools rarely educate anyone about who is filching pence from one’s pockets, think the “farmers” are ma, pa, Dick and Jane with Bossy the moo cow. It’s like thinking the village blacksmith is still pounding his anvil under the spreading chestnut tree.

Politicians, however, act as if the majority of their voters are ma and pa and Dick and Jane--or at least excuse their votes by acting so, when in fact it’s Cargill, General Foods and the like, many with names no urbanite has ever heard of, that will rake in the cash that allows them to out-compete and kill off the small farmers. Ma and Pa ain’t got swarms of lobbyists infesting the capital. Big Ag does, and it pays off, big time.

Dine Well on Farm Fish Spiced With Bugs and Poisons

Thursday last Juliet Eilperin and Marc Kaufman reported in The Washington Post on how salt-water net pens jammed with hatchery salmon–commonly called “fish farms”–attract and grow parasites, sea lice, that attach themselves to passing juvenile wild salmon and kill them off and thus destroy runs of wild salmon.

Saturday David Barboza in The New York Times reported on the stew of sewage, pharmaceuticals and chemicals that cancer your body that fish on Chinese “fish farms” swim in and help place on the dinner tables of Chinese and Americans and other folk around the world. Made me want to rush out to buy a package of Chinese-raised prawns from my local supermarket. Nothing like a mist of PCBs rising from the frying pan to stir the appetite.

Either story could have been written about either set of “farms,” so-called because for the ignorant “farm” connotes pleasant pastoral images of Bossy and friends grazing on buttercups.

And in most countries, “farms” have dispensation from most pollution and health laws, while at the same time bring government subsidy checks to their “farmers.” Such tillers of the soil in the U.S. often are Cargill Corp. and other multi-national giants or doctors, dentists, actors, lawyers, etc., reaping income-tax write offs with one hand and grabbing a subsidy check with the other.

Most large dairies now operating in the American West are giant, filthy feed lots, with the cattle in them caked to their udders in muck stinking with manure. No one who has inspected such enterprises wants to drink milk again.

Fish farms are no different. Those in Puget Sound each deposit daily onto the sea bottom the fecal equivalent of what a town of 10,000 flushes daily

The fish in them, jammed together, dine on fish meal full of pharmaceuticals to save as many as possible from dying from disease. Even so, upwards of 50 percent of each net batch die from bacteria and viruses. These dead fish, called “morts” by Norwegian, British and American and Canadian operators, are not supposed to be sold for eating. But there are no inspectors looking at fish packers like there are meat inspectors at meat packers. “Morts” magically disappear into packing plants and end up with other salmon filets at your kindly Safeway.

The fish meal also is full of PCBs and other cancer-making goodies that likewise get transported to one’s dinner plate, fork, mouth and gut. Wild fish carry nowhere near this load, though they carry some thanks to all the crap the world pours into the oceans.

Few customers know that the “farm” salmon flesh they eat is infused with food dye, to color it from looking like squid flesh. Few countries in the world worry about what kind of dye gets used.

Salmon pens, aside from growing parasites to attack wild salmon, also grow and concentrate fish diseases that spread to wild fish, which don’t have the advantage of being fed antibiotics every day. The wild fish perish, but not before spreading the bugs to other wild fish.

Like “farm” lobbies everywhere, the fish raisers practice potent politics to protect themselves by passing out bucks to lobbyists and politicians, buying propaganda ads to keep the credulous eating their products and by mounting furious attacks on any attempt to regulate them. They hate having the protein they packed labeled “farm raised.”

Pen salmon escape into the wild by the 10s of thousands every year, everywhere, thanks to storms demolishing nets. These inferior fish breed with wild fish, by definition endangering or even wiping out the genes of wild stocks that evolution selected for a particular environment and certainly not for swimming in crowded pens.

Research shows that the offspring of hatchery/pen matings with wild fish have far greater natural mortality that pure wild-wild offspring, thus endangering even hybrids that spawn “naturally,” i.e., other than in a hatchery.

It’s probably too late to ban fish farming in the developed countries: Too many politicians dine on farm-fish money. It’s likely impossible to clean up the sewer-chemical fish farms of China: The whole country is a cesspool of biological and chemical pollution.

So the next time you dine in a restaurant on salmon or prawns or catfish or some other marine creature of unknown origin, bon appetit–and be sure to get your cancer checkups. Otherwise that lox may put you in a box.

Waterboarding As a Way to Find God

It pleases how major Republican presidential candidates other than John McCain have embraced waterboarding as the answer to our national-security and spiritual ills.

McCain, who endured years of torture from the North Vietnamese, knows that waterboarding is torture. Call waterboarding what you will otherwise, call it a national necessity if you like, it’s still something to tickle old Gestapo agents into breaking into rousing renditions of “The Horst Wesel Song.”'

So far as I can find out, for all their he-man bluster, the only shots Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson have ever seen fired came when a maitre’d put a match to a couple of fingers of brandy on a pudding.

Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, suddenly warriors hot for our torturing captives who might know when the next train leaves, up until recently, before they thought caressing torture would win them a few votes, in their pious ways preached spreading mercy around. Oh, well, mercy is always dear and in short supply and torture always cheap and readily at hand.

The fair thing to do, I think, is for Fox Broadcasting to waterboard Giuliani, Thompson, Romney and Huckabee on national TV, live, all the time asking each what he thinks about torturing prisoners.

All four are accomplished mountebanks and might lie a little, sputter once they start breathing again, that waterboarding is horrible. In that case they should be dipped under again, just to test whether waterboarding indeed produces truth. Huckabee, a Baptist preacher, could always go last and promise to baptize the others while they’re submerged, in case they want to take out a little heavenly life insurance with the Big Guy in the Sky.

It would be a good show, especially if we had a couple of waterboarders from our KGB–excuse me, CIA–do voice-over commentaries about what’s going on and what to expect next: CIA bigshots rushing in to blowtorch the show's tapes. High ratings for that, guaranteed.

Sticking Our Noses Where It Hurts

My father once rescued a black and white mutt named Tip, who turned out to be an excellent pointing and retrieving dog for grouse and ptarmigan in thick cover in central Alaska, where we lived.

Except for one thing: Tip harbored a relentless desire for revenge upon porcupines. One fine fall day among the high bush cranberries growing under paper birches, Tip coursed upon a porcupine going about its business of getting from one tree to another. Tip attacked. The porky bristled. Tip came up yelping and bleeding, with a snout full of quills that it took my father, brother and I several hours to remove. End of a good hunting day.

Ever after, no matter how many grouse might be under his sensitive nose, if Tip caught the faintest scent of a porcupine, off he went after it, no matter how many signals to stop and curses thereafter. End result: Tip with a bloody snout full of quills. End of another hunting day.

I thought about Tip last week when I listened to G.W. Bush, president of the United States, say that well, even if our CIA and other intelligence guys know what they’re talking about and it’s true that Iran ain’t making nuclear bombs, “they might learn how.” And, says the genius in the White House, we couldn’t tolerate that. Have to do something about it.

I’ll let pass that anybody with a set of good encyclopedias can learn how to make a nuclear weapon and do it, provided he’s got the scientists, engineers, industrial capacity and billions of dollars.

No, what grabbed me is Bush’s yen to mix it up with the Iranians when he’s already given the country a snout full of quills by starting the Bush Family revenge war in Iraq next door. American ground forces near exhaustion just hanging on there, in hopes something might chance from it: Maybe the Iraqis will kill enough of each other off to exhaust the remainder into a tired truce.

But have us invade Iran next door? With what? By calling up the Boy Scouts?

With just a year to go in office, G.W. may be thinking of a little bombing. After all, we’re maintaining a giant, costly strategic air force that’s not good for anything much: Nuking Iran would give them some live practice for a change.

Maybe he’s thinking that starting a new Republican war might galvanize the public to vote heavily again for chest-thumping Republicans.

Whatever he starts in Iran, G.W. won’t deal with it after January, 2008. Or worry, if he ever has, about the good of the country. Or the guys burning and bleeding because of his hates. He’ll be back in Texas cutting brush and brushing up his new library. It’s bound to have something in it new to him: Books.

Tip the dog never learned. G.W.’s just the same. Except with him it’s the rest of us and a bunch of innocents overseas who suffer getting the quills pulled.

How to Flood Yourself and Wonder Why

A recent storm dumped rain on Southwest Washington State and Northeast Oregon. The floods that resulted illustrated on old principle known since before history but ignored by governments in the United States: If you displace water it will go somewhere else.

The storm was not by itself anything out of the ordinary for the Pacific Northwest. Such storms have battered this part of the U.S. since records were kept.

What on the short run is becoming out of the ordinary is the degree of flooding that follows. After this last storm for days 10 miles of Interstate 5 sat underwater. Semis with trailers lined for miles, parked, unable to move millions of tons of goods nationally or internationally.

I-5 again rises above water. Traffic flows. What also continues is one of the main reasons for the flooding: The filling up of flood plains with buildings and lately, in areas flooded in recent years, thanks to greedy but stupid local-government regulations, the building in the flood plain of malls, box stores and auto dealerships and the like on high mounds of gravel fill.

Why the mounds? To put the businesses above flood levels. Why the floods? Because these bumps of business in the flood plain reduce the size of the flood plain. The water seeking the sea has a smaller and smaller low area to spread through. Displaced, the water has to go somewhere and that somewhere is up, up the sides of the plain, flooding new areas, flooding to record heights.

The water level also elevates across the flood plain. Guess what now is happening? Even businesses on mounds built just a couple of years ago flooded. Got to go higher.

Who picks up the tab for the millions of dollars of goods ruined? Why the taxpayers, if the business owners were smart enough or forced to buy national flood insurance, which is backed by the U.S. Treasury. One forbears to mention the federal millions now coming into Oregon and Washington to help flooded homeowners and business people recover.

What are the government wise people deciding? Why, require higher mounds for locating new businesses on the flood plains. Stop allowing more businesses on the flood plain? You're insane to think of such an anti-American thing. It would kick the you-know-whats of flood-plain land speculators, which often are local officials controlling the building codes.

More and higher mounds will displace more water the next time a storm dumps an amount of rain that in the old days used to drain quickly and harmlessly into streams and rivers and thus to the sea.

That water in turn will flood new and higher areas. Mounds will have to rise higher. Eventually there will be no flood plain. Just malls, box stores and automobile peddlers on top artificial mountains reachable by elevated causeways crisscrossing constantly flooded and partly abandoned towns and cities.

Huckabee Got Hustled by Rapist

I was in the news business so long that it never surprises when a politician–especially one of those politicians oozing morality with which the nation abounds–gets shown to be sweating hypocrisy at every pore.

One such is the sudden political rocket in the Republican firmament, Mike Huckabee, a former obscure governor of Arkansas and a Southern Baptist minister before that. He denies that he arm-twisted the Arkansas parole board to parole a rapist, later a murderer-rapist, Wayne DuMond, because DuMond claimed to have been “born again” in prison.

You can’t spit in a prison exercise yard in the U.S. without spraying a half dozen born-again criminals hustling this divine or that to get them out of the joint because they’ve found Jesus and want to dedicate the rest of their lives to doing His good works.

A minister pal of Huckabee’s fell for it with DuMond and began hustling himself, hustling Huckabee to get DuMond back out on the street.

According to everyone connected with the case, Huckabee did. As governor, he wrote a letter to “Dear Wayne” in the slammer saying he wanted to get Wayne paroled.

Parole board members got the heat from Huckabee. They let ol’ Wayne out. He moved to Missouri: Though he may have cut his own testicles off after he was arrested, some folks in the family of the young woman he raped might still desire to relieve him of the rest of his sexual apparatus.

In Missouri Wayne strangled one young woman for sure, probably another. He went to the pen there without any hope of parole. He died inside of throat cancer. Probably caught that from singing all those hymns.

So what’s all this show about Huckabee? It shows he has a weak mind that’s willing for religious reasons to loose a rapist back upon the rest of us. And now it shows he has, at best, a deficient memory: Nope, not me, I didn’t put the arm lock on parole-board members to let “Dear Wayne” out. They all say he did.

At worst it shows he’s just another liar, a minister willing to cut the truth a bit short to cloak his scramble to lead Sunday prayers in the White House.

If Huckabee gets elected, God help us.

Romney: The Hooey Maker

Mitt Romney tied on his ballet slippers today to toe dance around his being a Mormon.

Romney performed his solo ballet before President George Bush I, who like his son George Bush II, has shown no taste whatsoever for dance or for the fine arts but does respect political fraud.

Romney aimed at his real audience, of course, Bible-banging, right-wing evangelicals, as they call themselves. They compose a wad of the Republican vote in this country and suspicion that Mormonism is a great departure from the literal reading of the King James Bible that they espouse. Which it is.

Romney naturally avoid slippering this truth. Instead, with some eloquent footwork, the footpadding of the con man, he bowed briefly to being a Mormon and instead tapped out a long sequence about how religion should not dictate what the president thinks, but equally, the president ought not kick God out of the White House.

The sum of it all: He high-stepped a message about how freedom can’t exist without religion and religion can’t exist without freedom:

"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.”

Pure hooey. Freedom as we know it had to be wrested not just from kings and dictators, it had to be wrested from prelates and other clerics.

As for religion relying on freedom to exist, hee-hee-hee. Catholicism and Protestantism flourished for centuries under totalitarian regimes, and still do. Few German priests or ministers said boo bad about Adolph Hitler. Many heiled with fervor, from the pulpit. As for Islam, name an Islamic country where there is or has been religious freedom. There may be one. It just doesn’t come to mind.

Romney did not bow at all to Buddhism or Hinduism. No votes to leap for.

And he did not play out as he pranced that being a good Mormon he believes that his religion “perfects” the Christianity that Southern Baptists and other evangelicals and Catholics, etc., etc., hymn over. Would have been a political misstep.

Nonesense to the Fore--the American Way

The nation holds it breath for Mitt Romney to explain his Mormon beliefs and why they shouldn’t harm his chances to be president of the United States and thus the free world.

No religious beliefs that I know of can stand the light of reason. Granting that, Mormonism is one of the wackiest around and by my lights anyone who believes such badly written nonsense automatically disqualifies him or herself from high office, if only on stylistic grounds. The Book of Mormon is one of the biggest hunks of claptrap that has ever sandpapered eyeballs. There’s not enough bourbon in the world to make it read well.

Yes, I know that in the U.S. of A., unless you confess a fervent belief in one of the main brands of religious fairy tales and attend services accordingly, you can’t get elected to anything except, perhaps, candidate for a lynching. (White Southerners used to lynch atheists, Catholics and Jews now and them just to keep their ropes stretched.) But one at least ought to have the taste to embrace Unitarianism, which, while nonsense too, at least expresses itself in sentences honorable to the English language.

While Romney spews justifications for what can’t be justified, it looks as if another national obscurity, Mike Huckabee, might overtake him and the rest of the sweaters panting in the Republican presidential marathon. That may be because Huckabee of them all seems to have a conscience about inflicting pain on others.

Huckabee, however, is a Southern Baptist minister, no great accomplishment. It’s a religious belief that eschews reason and science and until such views became unfashionable and then illegal, as a creed lent its powers to upholding slavery, then racial discrimination. It has never stopped wanting to burn evolutionists on the street corners.

To me his being a Baptist minister tells me that Huckabee, like Romney, has a brain partly paralyzed in its reasoning powers, a dangerous thing for a president to have. Few of our presidents, alas, could or can qualify as clear thinkers; the incumbent seems incapable of thinking at all. But until lately, the presidential job, while important, was not so important that, as now, the fate of the world depends upon it.

If Romney and Huckabee emerge as the two chief contestants for blessings by other Republicans and primary voters, I can predict one thing: The right-wing evangelicals, many of them led and stirred by Baptists, will crank up a hate-Mormons campaign.

As for the Catholic establishment that bundles now with the evangelicals over abortion, it’s pretty much certain they will not sprinkle holy water on Romney. To Catholics Baptists are bad enough; Mormons are, well, abominations.

Republican Hypocrites and Abortion: The Rich Don't Care

Nothing angers me more about Republican presidential candidates than their hypocrisy about abortion.

Only Rudolph Giuliani, a bad man in other regards, will admit there is a role for legalized abortion in a civilized society.

The other Republican presidential would-bes condemn abortion absolutely and support a constitutional amendment or state law criminalizing abortion.

No one can convince me that if the daughter or grandaughter of one of these guys came up pregnant thanks to copulations with a brother or an uncle or a rapist or a father for that matter that that daughter would not find herself spirited off to a wealthy, discreet doctor for an abortion. Or came up pregnant with a fetus whose birth would threaten her life.

When I was a young police reporter, lo, eons ago, I learned that abortions in the U.S., though criminal then, happened all the time. The poor and the ignorant used coat hangers or what-have-you to rid themselves of the fetus.

The middle class, if they had the money, sent a daughter or wife off to a distant hospital or “rest” home specializing in abortions. If they didn’t have the dinero, they chanced with friendly fellahs who ran little shops specializing in high colonics and advertised as such.

The rich, of course, had the best medical doctors available and the best, most discreet treatment all around. No for them the high mortality rates of lesser creatures–i.e., those with less money. And not for them the indictment now and then for the felony of undergoing an abortion. Not for them seeing a daughter frogmarched off to prison for getting rid of an incestuous fetus or one that would have killed her during labor.

The Republican presidential candidates all have money, lots of it. They know they don’t have to worry if by a miracle they manage to outlaw abortion by constitutional amendment criminalizing it or allowing states to criminalize it. But they also know the issue plays to the boobs and the panting religous–that is, it translates into votes. And that’s what they want, votes, not justice.

Impeaching Bush and Cheney Can't Happen, Alas

So far I have resisted efforts to get me to support impeaching G.W. Bush and Richard Cheney, though I detest both men and think them criminals who lied with intent to hoodwink Congress and the people and military leaders to support going to war in Iraq.

This Congress, controlled by Democrats, will not impeach the president and vice president for a simple reason: Democrats do not have the necessary votes in the Senate, where they have only a one-vote majority. It takes a two-thirds vote of the Senate to remove a president or vice president once the House has impeached.

Even if the Democrats had enough members to kick Bush and Cheney back into private life, that would not occur because that would topsy-turvy next year’s presidential election, for which four Democratic senators are running: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Christopher Dodd.

Booting Bush and Cheney from office by law would make Nancy Pelosi, as speaker of the House, the acting president of the U.S. and therefore the leading Democratic candidate if she wanted for election as president next year.

Pelosi would find it hard to resist running to make the job hers for another four years. Democrats would find it hard to resist her running.

So Clinton, Obama, Biden and Dodd would be fools now to vote to sweep Bush and Cheney out into the gutter in which they belong.

It ain’t going to happen, alas. There’s no point in fussing and burning hormones trying to make it happen this year or next. A waste of time and energy.

Silly or Stupid for President?

The leading Democratic presidential candidates these days look silly. The Republican leaders look stupid.

In the United States it’s better to appear stupid than silly. Americans look upon being silly as repulsive self-indulgence springing from reading books and going to the ballet. They look upon being stupid as the common lot that hard work (not to mention money) can overcome. Witness the ascendency of G. W. Bush, a rich boy of small intellectual capacities. By assiduously kissing rumps of rich reactionaries Bush went from one soft job to another until he arose one day to find he was President of the United States–the “decider,” as he likes to say.

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards all ooze education and sophistication while they natter over which of them has devised a better health plan to seek for the unwashed. Their nattering gets the coverage from reporters bored with what has become an endless campaign. Their health plans get ignored because they sound like same complicated contraptions torturing the millions of Americans who endure them in the absence of something better–universal health care–yes, what fat-cat Republicans call socialized medicine. Socialized medicine is the health coverage enjoyed by the president, members of congress and high-ranking federal officials that all of us should have.

For the Republicans Mitt Romney, who has changed political positions more times than he has changed his shorts, can’t remember what he said about not having Muslims in his cabinet. As a Mormon he's up on religious tolerance. Rudolph Giuliani says he’d have no qualms about nuking Iranians who refuse to knuckle to Uncle Sam. As new slaughters douse Baghdad and environs in blood, John McCain creaks about telling New Hampshire hicks that a new day of peace and quiet and democracy dawns over Iraq.

The future leader of the Free World romps among these six? My goodness.

Saudi Civilization: Barbarism Slicked With Oil

We Americans, especially we Republican Americans, will tolerate any evil if it produces oil that we may purchase at any price to calm our petroleum addiction.

Witness the Saudi regime of immensely rich barbarians, a family of male tyrants who pour incredible amounts of dollars into financing Islamic schools that teach that the Americans incarnate the devil and need to be destroyed.

A gang rapes a woman and her male companion. She complains. The rapers go to prison, admittedly no fun house in Saudi Arabia, first for five years, now raised to 10.

The woman, what does she get? She gets sentenced to 90 lashes of a whip against her bare body for being in a car with a man not her relative. She appeals. Big mistake. Because of the appeal, she receives a new sentence: 200 lashes and six months in prison.

Her companion keeps his mouth shut and takes his 90 lashes, which is usually enough to maim and in some cases, kill.

There’s no report yet on the raped woman, whether she’s survived the whipping, handed out under the crude brand of Islam the Saudi potentates personify.

Now the government claims the woman had an affair with her companion, confessed to it. Big surprise, confessing under torture. That, says the royal family, justifies the punishments she’s received.

George W. Bush holds hands with these rich savages, literally. The White House says it is “astonished” by the sentence inflicted on the raped woman. My, oh, my, I bet that makes the playboy Saudis quiver.

Walking the Walk in Baghdad

Sen. John McCain hit the tubes today to brag that he is the only presidential candidate touting the U.S. military build-up in Iraq as a good thing and now, says he, as a successful effort.

Until the presidential bug bit him, McCain seemed like a reasonable conservative–that is, for every good idea he tootled (reigning in campaign contributions and pointing out that TV preachers are generally con men), he snuggled up with the usual right-wing nonsensicals (against abortion, against tax reform, love those military build ups, let every citizen carry a gat).

Now he’s foot-kissing the evangelicals for votes and declaring that our army has Iraq coming into control.

McCain has to know better. There’s one test of whether Baghdad, for instance, has returned to sweetness and light. It is whether McCain or any other American, much less any other American politician, can hop off a plane at Baghdad International, grab a cab and walk around any Baghdad souk by himself.

Small chance of that. The Iraqis of whatever side would blow his brains out in a minute, or kidnap such a fool and cut his head off for a video lead-in for an a terrorist commercial.

If McCain truly thinks our pouring of 10s of thousands more troops into Iraq has poured molasses upon the fevered souls there, he should prove it: Go take a walk there without any Army or mercenary escorts, to shop for artifacts looted from the museums. And take Vice President Dick Cheney and the meathead in the White House with him.

The Nuclear Dole

I am spending Thanksgiving in Richland, WA, the bedroom community for the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the most-polluted nuclear site in the United States and one of the worst in the world.

Richland now sprawls into its neighboring town on the Columbia River, Kennewick. The river separates Kennewick from the ville of Pasco, once a sleepy farm town and county center and now a transportation hub and also depot for the cocaine, heroin and meth trades.

Together the three towns make up the Tri-Cities, which have annexed all the nearby sagebrush steppes and riverbanks and hills. Giant houses mushroom the terrain, with the greatest and most ugly, per the rule of the rich, fungising the hilltops and waterfront. The whole area booms with population and has, with the exception of some of the older neighborhoods in the town, all of the charm of a monstrous strip mall.

Hanford hasn’t produced much in the way of nuclear materials in decades. A couple of plants generate electricity.

Pollution–the federally financed effort to neutralize some truly dangerous nuclear remains and accompanying nasty chemical baths–drives the economy and the population boom.

The cleanup so far has generated, aside from vast of handouts of money from the U.S. Treasury, far more errors, delays, mistakes and petty frauds than riddance of bad stuff with half lives reaching into the oncoming eons.

It doesn’t seem to make much difference in accomplishments whether a Democrat sits in the Oval Office or a Republican: The U.S. Department of Energy can withstand any effort to make it smart, capable and efficient.

I used to live in Richland and served a few years on its city council. The voters gave me my freedom because I said yes to a motion to fluoridate the water. I still love the area, especially the great river, and delight with my wife Sonjia in visiting dear friends, Rich and Wanda Steele.

Beyond that, Richland and environs provides the entertainments to mind and soul that come from seeing the power of the federal dollar at work, providing many with high-paying jobs that even if they don’t accomplish much do help to sustain a burgeoning economy for many others.

Richland’s many, many highly educated engineers and other professionals consistently vote Republican and, with a few exceptions that keep the Democratic Party breathing here, argue that federal taxes are too high and too many federal dollars provide welfare for ne’er-do-wells without college degrees.

Plainly, the money must go instead in large doles to Hanford and like projects to keep nuclear, chemical and other engineers and professionals in beefsteak and vino and provide enough extra spending money to allow for contributions to the Republican Party.

Yes, the cleanup must go on. But will it ever come to fruition? Then what?
Hanford shut down? All these lucrative jobs lost? Tumbleweed rolling down shuttered streets?

I know better. The federal tit will come up with new milk. Don’t want to put an army of conservatives out the streets pushing grocery carts, after all: Too cruel. They might want welfare.

Capitalism and Other Superstitions Foster Global Suicide

A strong, effective and perhaps dictatorial world government will solve or stem from global warming, if homo sapiens are to survive the oncoming catastrophe.

No guarantee exists that we savage bipeds will live through the droughts, hurricanes, floods, swamping of seashores, death of existing agricultural areas that under the present system of governments we force on ourselves. Someday traveling intelligences from other worlds in the universe may dig up our skeletons in forlorn deserts and speculate scientifically about what we were and why we died off in such hordes and why many skulls show holes other than eye sockets.

Unregulated population growth drives much of global warming: The more of us there are, the more industry and agriculture must result, just to feed and clothe and house and quiet us all.

False ideas–religious, economic and political–drive our inability to try to stop the air and other pollution we now create just to go to the grocery, raise corn, keep our electrical gadgets beeping and blinking.

That some guy in the sky demands we keep spawning more and more of ourselves has such superstitious and political force that right now no national government except the most obnoxious–China’s–limits child births. Try to imagine one of the present herd of U.S. presidential candidates announcing that birth control will stand foremost among the first achievements of her or his new administration.

(For that matter, imagine any of them saying that global warming threatens us and everybody else far more than terrorism--which it does; and that consequently the new administration will bend all our national powers to reverse global warming all over the planet.)

Capitalism–the American holy of holy–amounts to another noxious superstition.
It’s noxious because as a philosophy resting on greed and the struggle for survival, its adherents choke efforts to stop global warming. Plugging smoke stacks costs too much. Such gives competitors an advantage. Besides, as the dominant U.S. economic religion keeps hawking: Ruling and regulating whatever any of us do to make a buck or a Yuan is evil. That belief is going to fry us or drown us all since only unchallengeable governmental power can stop what’s about to kill us.

There also exists the political bane of believing that every linguistic group tempered by geography, every set and subset of humans must have its own national government and each of those governments had equal rights and powers.

Most of the members of the UN are unspeakable hell holes run by tinpots getting rich off of American and other corporations dragging away their riches while dumping garbage on them in return. Getting these countries to do anything to stop pollution requires supplicating the top dogs at Exxon and like filth makers.

China and India have joined us and the Russians and other big countries in streaming carbon dioxide, methane and other poisons into the air.

Who can tell us or the Chinese or anybody else to stop such crime, such suicidal if lucrative stupidities?

Nobody, no agency, because none now exists. Such a world power will come into being because otherwise over time the lot of us will croak. Either we will form it voluntarily or like global warming, it will force itself down our craws–and rightly so.

The Debates: Slumming Toward Election

The new election stew from determining who will be the Republican and Democratic candidates for president reminds of the slum gullion of my childhood hunting trips with my father and his friends.

Into the stew pot dropped whatever what was hand, fish, fowl, vegetable, a dash of minerals–if it was eatable, in it plopped. A few slugs of whiskey before supping might make it tolerable and maybe nourishing.

November 15's so-called debate among the Democrats in Las Vegas proved itself as silly and formless as those previous and certainly those looming. The three leading candidates–Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards–spent most their time acting like high-school sophomores running for class president: Snipe, countersnipe. The other would-be presidents counted themselves lucky to get to speak at all, thanks to the inept moderation of what is called a debate but really is a made-for-TV show crying out for a good script and director.

Of such intellection the republic is to choose its new leader? Yes. The Republicans offer nothing better.

No candidate of either party has demonstrated a debate skill that would withstand 10 seconds of rhetoric from opponents in a British or French equivalent of our high schools.

Oh, well, speaking and thinking well at your feet in a hurly-burly have never stood out as qualifications to take over the White House, not since James Mason left the premises, Abe Lincoln being the main exception after, with Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy in his shadow but better than those they ran against.

What next in our election melange? All look forward to the Iowa caucuses, when a handful of party regulars and some naives–hardly enough to fill a few cars on a Manhattan subway train--gather over coffee and brownies to vote. Whatever these few decide will give our political and reporting classes the heebie-jeebies, just like the jim-jams that tainted meat into the slum gave all of us who partook.

Soothsayers will declare front runners, editorialists will froth, money folks will dump greenbacks into collection baskets, supporters will make reservations in the Hay-Adams across from the White House for the inauguration of the hand that will hold the red button.

Then more slum: More TV extravaganzas advancing human knowledge not an inch, and then primaries–New Hampshire and onward. More auguring. What fun. What a mess.

The Mitres Mitre Abortion and Law

The Roman Catholic majority on the U.S. Supreme Court no doubt will tuck into their judicial robes the latest billet doux from their cardinals and bishops about how Catholics of conscience must react to abortion.

The newest voters’ guide (http://www.nccbuscc.org/bishops/index.shtml) from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops–“Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility from the Catholic Bishops of the United States”–puts the matter plainly:

Along with euthanasia, human cloning, destruction of human embryos, abortion must “always be rejected and opposed and must never be supported or condoned.”

It’s true the document of 40 some pages, along with a shorter version, “The Challenge of Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship” (pun intended), when it comes to voting for political candidates provides an escape zipper:

Catholics with well formed consciences might discover moral reasons for marking yes after the name of someone who favors abortion. The documents leave it to the reader to figure out why and when.

The bishops, however, do not leave it to the imagination about the law and abortion.

They call it a “mistake with grave moral consequences to treat the destruction of innocent human life merely as a matter of individual choice. A legal system that violates the basic right to life on the grounds of choice is fundamentally flawed.”

Among the Catholic justices on the court, Chief Justice John Roberts has scampered around how he might come down on a clear-cut abortion case. Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have not: They’d outlaw abortion. Samuel Alito has hinted he would too. Anthony Kennedy, now the decider on a nine-member court otherwise often split four-four, leaves us guessing on his final attitude toward abortion. Kennedy enjoys being the court’s swing vote. He gets to write a lot of decisions.

The bishops’ manifesto is worth the reading. They condemn racism, torture (the White House shudders), war, executions, exploitation of workers, deprivation of children, thumb-screwing the poor, hatred of migrants, the usual grist of American practice and politics.

The prelates remain tight-lipped about homosexuals, except to say marriage must be between a man and woman. They want government money, however disguised, to help pay for putting your kids in a Catholic school and they want the government to keep doling out bucks to “faith-based” outfits, which, they say, should be allowed to discriminate against hires who hold to different, offensive religious values.

Finally, they want a taste of government censorship to keep bad things away from the eyes of children and other corruptibles.

They don’t carp about divorce. That’s favors Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Fred Thompson, who now and then acquire younger wives. But the bishops’ restatement of their church’s condemnation of abortion doesn’t do Giuliani much good. Unlike another Republican presidential would-be, Mitt Romney, Giuliani has never abandoned his support for abortion rights.

The bishops wave the cloak of nonpartisanship, but since Democrats in general support abortion and sometimes gay rights, the bishops’ bull cannot make Democrats skip with joy.

As for the Supremes, well, I’m betting all those Catholic justices appointed by the Republican Presidents Reagan and Bush I and II will outlaw abortion, to usher in a new period of jurisprudence to be known as Back to the Coat Hangers.

Vacuities Conquer All

Mrs. Clinton showing too much cleavage? Other Democratic presidential candidates jealous because they have no cleavage–nothing worth bragging about at least?

Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate who can pussyfoot around in flip-flops, is he ever going to reveal all about Mormonism?

Did Dennis Kucinich, the only real liberal slavering for the kiss of the Democrats, accept a packet of soynuts and an Intergalactic Dr. Pepper from crew member on the flying saucer Kucinich approached?

Reporters assigned to the living hell of covering and traveling with presidential campaigns know how boring their job is, especially to such highly educated, sensitive souls as themselves, suffering hangovers for the good of humanity.

The candidates say the same thing over and over. The essence of the news business is to find news–something new.

Thus when the cleavage of the only woman candidate for the presidency receives mention during spin by other candidates and their staffers, that’s news, compared say, with Kucinich’s trenchant but politically hopeless yawners about the sins of G. W. Bush and his flunkies.

So if a few reporters wheezing along the campaign trail seize on Hillary’s cleavage and the criticism thereof as the hot lead to shovel off to thick headed assistant national-desk editors who just refused to OK their expense-account bar bills, then suddenly the nation rivets on accounts of how much breast work a female candidate may or should show without opening herself to charges she is pandering to (1) the female vote or (2) the male vote.

If the story flows from the laptop of an Associated Press reporter, or if an A.P. rewrite soul picks up the cleavage story, this major question facing the fate of the nation suddenly races around the country and the world. Those campaign reporters who did not favor their betters with a piece on the subject feel their cell phones jingle with irate calls from their masters, demanding to know, where is our bosoms story?

If a poor sod on the campaign bus tells her editor, geez, that’s not news, the wax gets reamed out of her ear by her boss saying, the wires have it, or the competition has it, or CBS is leading the news with it, or The New York Times thinks it’s news: Don’t argue, write me a tits story and if you want, dress it up with the women’s angle, OK? Oh, your think piece about Obama’s thumbsucking over global warming, it didn’t make the cut for tomorrow’s paper. It’s in holdover, and we’ll see. Now give us 200 (words) on Clinton’s cleavage. You’ve got 20 minutes.

So inconsequentials become news, to titillate the imaginations of millions of Americans vaguely pondering which of these candidates I can tolerate enough to vote for–if I vote at all.

Now that the presidential campaign stretches in time out to absurdity, causing more and more political reporters to watch their sanities and livers shrivel, we can drool in anticipation of reports on how X charmed a manure spreader in Liverspot, IA, or how Y attacked Z for chewing Red Man tobacco during a debate before the assembled Doukhobors of Squat Swamp, NH.

As has been noted, Rome wasn’t ruined in a day.

Fred Thompson Uber Alles

Poor Fred Thompson. He has the presidency of the United States wrapped up if only (A) he can get the Republican nomination and (B) Hillary Clinton fails to get the Democratic nomination.

Thompson is a literal giant among presidential candidates. He stands almost six foot six inches in height. Were he running against any of the male Democrats so far boring the world, Thompson would win easily under the workings of de Yonge’s Law of Hair and Height.

That law states–please note the subtle wording–that the candidate who seems the taller will win. None of the men Democrats even come close to Thompson in towering, physically, that is. Thompson not only seems taller; he is taller and will look so on television, where tallness counts when it comes to setting off instinctive responses among the voters.

The matter of the candidate appearing the tallest winning the presidential election remains untested, however, if Hillary Clinton receives the Democratic nod and becomes the first woman to run for the presidency as a major-party candidate.

If a Clinton-Thompson contest occurs, the scientists among us will tease the results to yield many, many papers of deep sociology to publish in such learned journals as The National Review and The Nation about whether de Yonge’s Law also applies to females.

Thompson, of course, while interesting to talk about theory, is unlikely to be the Republican candidate simply because he also appears to be incompetent, as a campaigner and as a thinker.

Chaos stirred by his wife characterizes his political campaign. Aside from a few gags that awaken the reporters condemned to covering the now-endless presidential campaign purgatory, Thompson has contributed zero to the so-called debate with other Republican worthies. If there is a bad idea, Thompson has embraced it with gusto, but that hardly distinguishes him from Rudy Giuliani and the rest.

Whoever other than Thompson the Republicans manage to fish out of the lake of banalities central to their mindset, if that person runs against Clinton, an interesting test will otherwise occur of de Yonge’s Law.

The second half of the law states that if two presidential candidates appear to be equally tall, then the candidate that seems to have the most hair will win.

Having a woman in the race with a considerable head of hair not only is a new thing but genetically might bestow upon women candidates over time, whenever matters of height are more or less equal, a leg up in winning, since many male candidates–John McCain, for instance–cannot compete in hirsuteness. Balding is a curse in presidential politics.

In that respect, the law does not discount for wearing a toupee or a wig, since appearing to have the most hair is what matters deep within the brains of the electorate, responding as they are to an evolutionary device, no doubt selected during millions of years of fighting with cave bears and tigers, that regards height first and hair second as signs of the savior. (Can you imagine a bald Jesus creating a religion?)

If Mrs. Clinton fails to get the nomination, then whoever wins out of the mob of lackluster Democratic male candidates will compete with one of the Republican con men. De Yonge’s law will function in its full scientific glory, and millions of Americans will make their ordinary enlightened choice based on unconscious feelings.

Rudy and Pat: Soulmates

Nothing pleases more than watch Republican hypocrites ruin the creases in their trousers by kneeling before right-wing hucksters masquerading as political prelates, to ask for their blessings in the upcoming presidential caucuses and primaries.

Of the rogues running for the Republican nomination none excel Rudy Giuliani
in sauciness and cant and none deserve more than he what he earned the other day, the kiss of that fading Elmer Gantry, Pat Robertson.

The Super Rev. Mr. Robertson, who when he is not shaking down the suckers for money has been foursquare against many of the things Giuliani embraces, spends much of his time talking to God, or at least Robertson says so. God had not said much to others on the subject.

God, you may remember, told Robertson that because of such sins in the United States as allowing abortions and protecting homosexuals from assaults and murders he, God, let the Islamic guerillas fly jet planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as recompense.

God also plays weatherman to Robertson, who relayed that God hinted the nastiness of New Orleans caused Hurricane Katrina to devastate the city and its population.

Giuliani likes to don frilly dresses from time to time, to cool his fevered groin, no doubt--something his sundry wives have not been able to do. He supports homosexual rights and supports the right to abortions (it took him awhile to say that plainly). His children detest him for his crude and embarrassing philandering. He touts himself now as a moral man, a devout Catholic. He never goes to church. His second and third marriages of course abhor the church. (Unless he wins the presidency. Then Rome will find a way to return Giuliani to the right hand of the Pope.)

None of that troubles Robertson. Nor does Giuliani’s ignoring the mob connections of the crooked cop he raised from being his driver and bodyguard to being New York City’s police commissioner, head of all cops, Bernie Kerik.

Kerik is now under federal indictment for a multitude of cheap but profitable sins. Kerik put his hands out for handouts and the wise guys filled them up.

Kerik when he was chief cop right after Sept. 11's attack had the city rent him a command center--an expensive apartment near Ground Zero, where his master, Giuliani, as mayor, was playing the mayor of a city suffering a terrible blow. Kerik, though, went Giuliani’s grandstanding one better: He used his command center for Kama Sutra sessions with his latest girl friend. While the Trade Center’s rubble burned, Kerik canoodled. Giuliani didn’t care. He still defends his former lackey.

Robertson, full of real politik, knows an endorsement now might win him the right to utter the benediction at what he hopes will be Giuliani’s inaugural banquet. Robertson explains his kissing of Giuliani’s forehead by saying he and Rudy traveled together some years back and discovered themselves soul mates. There’s no arguing with that. As the saying goes about grifters, it takes one to know one.

Caligula Strained Through a Sheet

THE CALIGULA IN THE WHITE HOUSE

When youthfully I first read some Roman history, I snorted with glee about Roman decadence when I chanced upon the story of Emperor Caligula’s effort to make his horse Incitatus a priest and consul, consul being the highest honorific and therefore most eagerly sought office below the rank of emperor.

Those who reported the tale, all members of the upper classes that Caligula cuckolded, robbed and murdered, also hinted Caligula was insane.

The Romans at least had the excuse that emperors forced themselves upon them and to oppose an emperor and his minions and hangers-on openly meant you had committed yourself to rebellion and, likely, immediate acquaintance with the lions in the Coliseum.

We Americans, on the other hand, thanks to the propagandistic and legal powers of the industrial-conservative establishment, have no such excuse. We elected G.W. Bush twice to our land’s highest office and, by extension of our imperial powers, to the world’s highest office.

Yes, it’s true that the first time around it took some wicked hokey-pokey by conservative Supreme Court justices to jigger a way unknown in American history or law to anoint Bush as president. But he had enough votes in Florida, the disputed state, to let the salivating right-wing Supremes be able to excuse their coup later over sherry, cakes and caviar.

The second time around the majority of U.S. voters elected Bush without knavery. Never abandon a president who started a war in order to stay in office: That still plucks an old instinct that pickles voters’ brains.

This Bush would not have succeeded even as a used-car salesman had he not been born into a rich, powerful political clan. Money has Vaselined over his characteristics and habits : Small intelligence, eschewal of learning, ignorance of books, distaste for the arts, eagerness to lie and believe his own lies, lust to force the nation and its institutions to bow to the president as emperor, as someone above the laws both of the country and of ordinary decency, someone who without blush drones that waterboarding a captive is not the same as torturing him.

Anyone paying close attention to the Bush regime cannot help but notice what distinguishes his from other presidencies: His drive to get Congress and the courts to kneel to the notion that the president has an inherent power as commander-in-chief to do anything he wants in the name of saving the nation from its enemies:That he can cause underlings to kidnap and torture those he or they accuse of terrorism; that he can jail anyone so accused forever, without right to consult a lawyer or a consul; that despite the Constitution, he can order our military into battle without a declaration of war from Congress; that he doesn’t have to rely on money from Congress to fund his overseas adventures, so long as the Treasury can create dollars by selling bonds; that spook agencies can wiretap U.S. citizens without a warrant and without warrant subpoena their personal records, including mail.

Unlike Caligula G.W. Bush does not claim to a be a god, nor has he so far put his horse forward, not even the asses in his cabinet, to neigh our prayers.

But Bush does claim to receive advice directly from God, who apparently has not yet told Bush about the commandment not to lie. Looking at Bush’s record so far as the biggest and potentially most dangerous fool so far embraced by our democracy, one can only observe that God’s record in politics leaves much to be desired, that God seems to be telling his lackey in the Oval Office that dictatorship is swell.