President Obama's flawed address casts shadow over noble action

Let's be clear from the beginning. Yes, stopping a murderous tyrant like Qaddafi is the right thing to do. It is in the interest of free world to prevent genocide and the potential displacement of millions of people. If it must come by force, than so be it. What I can't understand is why Barack Obama continues to be so condescending, contradictory and almost comically illogical when he explains his actions. Last night's televised speech is his latest exercise in this endeavor.

Problem number one is that no matter what, President Obama will use terrible logic to insulate himself from criticism. Eliot Spitzer's article "Last Chance for Libya," summarized quite well that the Libyan rebels had nearly been quashed in Benghazi--and waiting any longer would have enabled Qaddafi to extinguish the torch of freedom. In making his case for intervention, Obama himself spelled out the disaster that was unfolding in human terms:

In the face of the world’s condemnation, Qaddafi chose to escalate his attacks, launching a military campaign against the Libyan people. Innocent people were targeted for killing. Hospitals and ambulances were attacked. Journalists were arrested, sexually assaulted, and killed. Supplies of food and fuel were choked off. Water for hundreds of thousands of people in Misurata was shut off. Cities and towns were shelled, mosques were destroyed, and apartment buildings reduced to rubble. Military jets and helicopter gunships were unleashed upon people who had no means to defend themselves against assaults from the air.

Pretty terrible, huh? I guess waiting for a month before acting was a failure that you should own up to, eh Mr. President?

Not exactly. Demonstrating that his arrogance knows no bounds, Obama congratulated himself for acting so quickly. "When people were being brutalized in Bosnia," he reasoned, "it took the international community more than a year to intervene with air power to protect civilians. It took us only 31 days."

Imagine if Franklin Roosevelt had waited until February 7th, 1942, to declare war on Germany and Japan. Extrapolating on Obama's timeframe, Roosevelt could have reasoned, "It took Woodrow Wilson two years after the sinking of the Lusitania to confront the German Menace. I only waited two months!"

Perhaps more important was Obama's omission of Congressional approval. If we take him at his word that he "consulted with bipartisan members of Congress," why didn't he follow Constitutional procedure and schedule a vote? It took George W. Bush less than one hour to get Congressional approval concerning Terri Schiavo. No approval after 31 days for a noble cause such as this is nothing to boast about.

Why was a vote in Congress not necessary? And if it wasn't necessary in the case of establishing and enforcing a no-fly zone, why should the President ask for Congressional approval for upgrading our dilapidated infrastructure? Or funding our public schools? Or hiring more police officers in high-crime areas? These are are all noble goals as well, eh, Mr President? The same president who refuses to sign virtually anything into law unless he has 60 Senate votes--regardless as to how popular the legislation is with the general public.

And he didn't bother to mention any sort of exit strategy. It's not like the general public has over 100,000 reasons to be skeptical on that one.


I wish I had some sort of witty punch line to sign out, but I don't. I guess the take-away is that doing the job poorly is better than utter failure. I'm glad he's not Donald Trump, but the President needs to understand that he's not Abraham Lincoln either.

Reflecting on the significant Geraldine Ferraro

My first thought when I received the news about Geraldine Ferraro's recent passing was, "wow, that woman had been fighting cancer for 12 years? She certainly had me fooled!"

In a way, her fight against cancer was in keeping with the rest of her life, often (not always) able to overcome adversity and making it look easy. Like our current president, she was the product of a single mother of modest means. Her stellar academic accomplishments got her into law school at a time when it was quite rare for women to do so; she was a very successful lawyer when few women practiced law. Her election to the House of Representative's seems quaint by today's standards--an era when a female running for Congress garnered attention simply because she was female, as opposed to a female candidate garnering attention for being batshit insane.

However, the real complication to Ferraro's legacy is not that women candidates can be just as terrible as their male counterparts. Buried deep within Ferraro's personal history is that by 1984, she had accrued more wealth through her own means than George H.W. Bush had accrued in his entire life at that point. This prompted a jealous Barbara Bush to complain: "I can't say it, but it rhymes with rich." And how Barbara's husband acquire his vast fortune? I can't say it, but rhymes with dorally metestable!

Perhaps the cosmos where trying to tell us something given that Ferraro died within hours of Bob Herbert's final New York Times column, "Losing our Way," his final swan song to 98 percent of Americans on the other side of wealth and power. While many of the pundits will opine--correctly--that Ferraro's candidacy for vice-president was a watershed moment for women in politics, it is unlikely someone from such modest means could achieve such success financially in today's economic climate.


Before feeling so hopelessly lost and dejected, perhaps we should remember most that we can overcome long odds. Ferraro's many gallant fight against an incurable disease should remind us both of the struggles we face, be it economic injustice, gender discrimination, or obnoxious people like Barbara Bush. Hey, we can overcome!

The mural asked for it!!

Conservatives loathe the New York Times as a bastion of Marxist doctrine. Liberals often confuse the paper's generally good reporting as a consistent source of objective reporting. On a day like today, one can easily see that both are wrong.

Times reporter Steven Greenhouse took notice of Maine Governor's Paul LePage's most recent outlandish behavior. LePage recently took exception to a mural depicting workers in the state's Department of Labor Office as being pro-union propaganda. Of course, this is absurd, as one can judge simply by reading Greenhouse's article.

If you squint, you can see Vladimir Lenin!

Pointing out that LePage acts like a cartoonish moron isn't hard to do: This tax cheat "won" election with a whopping 38.2 percent off the vote in November, and has taken his 9,000 vote margin of victory as a clear mandate ever since. But that's not the issue here.

The headline of the article is a passive sentence. It reads: "Mural of Maine's Workers Becomes Political Target." How exactly did it "become" a political target? Who, outside of the John Birch Society, would see a painting of a shoemaker, a lumberjack, Rosie the Riveter and striking paper mill workers as pro-union? Half of those professions predate workers unions! And Rosie the Riveter? Has LePage no decency? (That's a rhetorical question. Obviously, he does not).

Aside from the fact that passive sentences are grammatically incorrect, the headline gives the impression that Paul LePage is merely passive in attacking this artwork as "pro-union propaganda." Apparently, he saw a rendition of the iconic Rosie the Riveter and couldn't help but scream "Communism!"

The problem is not with artwork but with LePage himself. To say otherwise would be akin to writing: "attractive women in skirts invite themselves to sexual assault." If the Times were to run that headline, the public would rightly excoriate the editorial judgment of running such a headline--regardless as to the content of the article.

Women do not "invite" themselves to sexual assault anymore than this particular mural "invites" itself to political controversy. And I'm willing to bet that a good reporter like Greenhouse didn't write this awful headline--that was probably done by an editor for the paper. Perhaps this editor didn't want to appear biased, but let's face it, calling LePage an anti-union shmuck who will stop at nothing in his pursuit of attacking worker's rights isn't biased--it's objective reporting based on facts. And if by some reason this is spelled out in the headline, then so be it.

*Although somewhat tangential,  fans of art and/or history can't help but be reminded of Diego Rivera's lost mural, "Man at the Crossroads." Nelson Rockefeller contracted the great muralist to paint a huge mural at Radio City Music Hall, then objected because Rivera included Vladimir Lenin in the mural. Unable to reach an agreement with Rivera, the mural was destroyed. Why? Would anyone have seen the mural and said, "wow, Nelson Rockefeller is a communist? I had no idea!" Certainly no one outside the John Birch Society!

Time for wind to replace nuclear

With the effectiveness of a corporate media driven propaganda campaign, coupled with a weak and often ineffectual government, one of my fears is that soylent green will be sold to the general public. Instead of keeping their ingredient a secret, however, the propagandists will tell us that humans taste great! And what's so bad about cannibalism!

That's how I feel about the nuclear catastrophe unfolding in Japan. As heroic workers struggle round the clock to protect the populace from the worst nuclear catastrophe in a generation, Senators, Congressman, and even Bill Saleton are telling us not to worry about toxic sludge. Beg your pardon?

At least Saleton makes the good point that coal-emissions kill 13,000 Americans annually.  But the usually right-center libertarian-ish Ann Applebaum made a very good counterpoint: If the Japanese can't make a nuclear power plant completely safe, who can?

With the problems so very real and documented, it's time to start focusing on solutions.

First of all, let's remember that nuclear power cannot exist without massive taxpayer investment. First, the taxpayer must finance construction of the nuclear power plant. Then the taxpayer must finance costly storage of said waste (to say nothing about the potential hazards of temporary storage). Finally, the government spends billions to determine a long-term solution for the waste. That should be the third strike against nuclear power--this electricity option is out!

If we the taxpayers are going to spend billions of dollars on electricity, we might as well put solar panels everywhere. Every roof, residential and commercial, should receive solar panels. The money we allocate for this project should come out of what we are currently spending on this nuclear boondoggle.

Second, we should acknowledge the current potential of wind power. The wind corridor in the plains of Texas all the way to the Dakotas is sufficient to provide enough power to 20 percent of the United States. That is the exact same percentage we currently derive from Nuclear Power. That wind potential does not include winds off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. We should repeal the $46 billion tax breaks for oil and coal companies and use that money to finance construction of the turbines.

Lastly, to eliminate the corrosive influence of avaricious energy companies, we should nationalize all remaining power plants through eminent domain. No more lobbyists spewing smoke about their right to spew smoke in our air or asking Uncle Sam for more taxpayer handouts. That gravy train is over!

What this blog is about

No one who works should be poor.  This fundamental tenant of human decency and respect essence is under attack in too many places--and it's not just the shouting heads on Fox News or the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. It's everywhere.

It's in in the business section of the New York Times. It's practically standard fare at the University of Chicago School of Economics. It's a fixture of one major political party, a statute that another major party is too full of cowardice to challenge. And yes, it's  even on NPR and PBS. Every day.

I first saw this poster at a Bursar's Office. Only one of us got rich.

This blog exists because when I graduated from high school 10 years ago, I was told in no uncertain terms that a college degree was going to make me rich--and I needed that education to find out how to wisely spend all that money.

This last decade has been the decade that wasn't in terms of job growth. This country has just as many jobs in 2011 as it did in 2001. If we had adapted the economic policies we have now from the onset of when this country was founded, not a single American would have worked. That's worse than the Soviet Union!

Well I say no more. No more should Americans of both political stripes take an existentialist approach to our economic system. Stagnant job growth should be viewed as a failure of economic policy as apposed to the wheelings and deelings of "the invisible hand." No more should nonsensical abstract concepts like "innovation" take precedence over actual, measurable economic output. No more should politicians attack smokers and drinkers as the sole targets of "sin" taxes, as the sin of excessive greed causes more harm to our economic system and thus, should require heavier taxation. And no more should politicians and economists be fixated on providing economic growth to China and India. Nothing personal, we've got to take care of own first.

There will be plenty to blog about. It's pretty weird--to say the least--to hear Scott Walker attack public school teachers as a vestige of communism or listen to Barack Obama calmly explain that he intends to cut home heating oil subsidies for the poor. That's weird, all right. But when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Who knows, I might even end up on CNN--not that anybody watches that network anymore.

~The Connecticut Yankee.