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.