Bye bye National Parks and Forests

There have been artists and other like-minded individuals who have talked about leaving the country on political grounds. I am now making the same gesture on the basis of our National Parks. According to these links below, I have no reason to believe the American government or the private sector believes in these natural monuments. America essentially has no plan, no guide for the environment.

I suggest our National Parks be kept off limits while the bulk of the rest of the world, unfortunately, be open range. This way we also have some semblance of a guide for consumption that the supply-and-demand world readily needs. Consumption-driven societies primarily do not believe excess can exist in the same markets they are a part of. Humanity may be at the top of the food chain, but we are not above Nature.

About National Parks

1992

There is nothing new about politicians helping friends to raid commonly owned wealth. What is new in the past decade is the weakening of the federal agencies charged with preventing that from happening. Says Mintzmyer: "The politicians, congressmen, and executives have ... taken over the upper parts of the agency.... There is no longer any abiity on the part of the agency to protect its lower level people. They can be targeted and neutralized without real resistance."

The Forest Service is a main target. Clearcuts in the Targhee National Forest go right up to the border of Yellowstone Park, creating a straight-line edge that can be seen from outer space. Logging in many national forests is proceeding at rates well above the sustainable cuts mandated by law. Overcutting, hidden by what one Wilderness Society spokesman calls "a carefully orchestrated Forest Service coverup," is now coming to light in forest after forest.

Handouts to logging companies cost us not only our forests, their wildlife, and their protection of water tables and streams, but also our tax money. The Forest Service charges below-market fees for timber concessions and obligingly builds logging roads at public expense. The network of federal logging roads is now longer than the interstate highway system -- 6600 miles, with another 900 planned. The Forest Service earns from timber concessions 34 cents for every dollar it spends supporting loggers. In the Yellowstone area in 1990 it lost $12.6 million.

Salvage Rider affects fisherman

Salmon fishermen! Imagine -- if you can -- that Congress has just passed a bill requiring the destruction of the Northwest’s last best remaining salmon spawning areas and banning any further public participation in public lands management. Imagine also that Congress required this destruction to proceed regardless of the environmental consequences by suspending every single environmental law on the books. Imagine also that, under this new law, citizen’s will no longer have the right to appeal federal agency decisions on public lands, even though these lands were paid for by their tax dollars. Finally, while you are at it, imagine that you will be forced to help pay for this destruction, in effect using your own money to put you out of business.

You say Congress would never do any such thing in a democratic society? Think again. Congress just did! This abomination is called the “Timber Salvage Rider,” and its full effect is just about to bite you where you live.

Most salmon (and coho salmon in particular) need old-growth riparian forests in order to spawn and thrive. However, the Northwest has already lost between 90% and 95% of all its original old-growth forests as a result of a timber harvest feeding frenzy that lasted several decades, ending only in the early 90's when finally halted by court order. Just about all old- growth on private lands is long since gone. What little remains is almost entirely on public lands.

For years the US Forest Service and BLM pumped up timber survey figures to show far more available old-growth timber than was really there, and violated their own laws to make sure as much as possible was cut regardless of the consequences to old-growth dependent fish and wildlife. After seeing species after species go extinct as whole watersheds were literally strip- mined of old-growth, concerned citizen’s in the Northwest finally filed suit to stop this wave of extinctions -- and to their surprise, they actually won! The species that finally caused the courts to draw a line in the forest duff was a small little bird called the “Northern spotted owl.”

These court victories became the “spotted owl” cases, now used perpetually by timber industry propagandists to press for the total repeal of the Endangered Species Act. Yet none of these cases were ever based on the ESA -- the injunction that from 1990 to 1993 closed down most public timber harvesting west of the Cascades in the Northwest and Northern California was won on the basis of agency violations of their own laws, the National Forest Management Act (16 U.S.C 472a et. seq.), not the ESA. The spotted owl was only the indicator species anyway -- its plunge toward extinction was merely an indication that something was very, very wrong with public forestland management. In fact, what was going on was simply not sustainable. In the 80's public forestlands were being cut down at about 8 times what we now know to be a sustainable rate.

One of the tragic results of these decades of overcutting was the decimation or extinction of quite a number of the region’s best salmon runs, particularly coastal coho salmon (the most dependent on federal lands). Fishermen are literally the victims of years of illegal agency timber giveaways fueled by bottomless timber industry’s greed and a pliant Congress.

After the owl injunctions, President Clinton’s Northwest Forest Plan was finally adopted in 1993 and approved by the court as a (barely) legal plan. What the federal court (Judge Dwyer) actually said in the owl case injunction was that no more public timber giveaways could proceed until a legally acceptable plan for a sustainable harvest was adopted. The timber industry, of course, screamed bloody murder -- and still does today. They have devoted much of their efforts in Congress and in the courts to turning back the clock to the “good old days” when Congress, rather than scientists, set timber harvest targets based on timber lobbyist clout rather than the biological needs of salmon and other forest dependent creatures.

While there is no doubt that it was pretty hard on innocent mill workers caught up in the sudden forced closures, even today nobody gives much thought to the thousands of salmon fishermen whose livelihoods have utterly disappeared as a result of widespread clearcutting of important salmon habitat in these same forests. Salmon too are an old-growth dependent species. When the mills took away most of the old-growth, they took away wild salmon as well. Today between 90% --95% of the original old-growth is gone, more than 106 major salmon runs are extinct, and another 214 (more than 90% of the remainder) are facing extinction in the near future unless things change. Over the past 30 years, the salmon fishing industry in the Northwest has lost an estimated 47,000 family wage jobs due to the collapse of coastal salmon stocks alone (i.e., outside the Columbia Basin).

While I feel empathy for out of work timber workers and wouldn’t wish a layoff on anyone, the companies they work for and the agencies that allowed it to happen had no right to extinguish the very existence of the salmon which supported the families of fishermen. Douglas fir trees can grow anywhere, but once a river’s irreplaceable wild salmon runs are extinct, they remain extinct forever.

Salvage Rider facts
1.

On August 22,2002, President Bush released a new plan he said would address the issue of wildfire. Instead, the plan appears to be a resurrection of the disastrous 1995 Salvage Rider. Pro-timber industry Senators are planning to attach similar language to the Interior Appropriations bill, up for debate on September 3.

Bush Plan and Salvage Rider: Striking Similarities

In July 1995, following widespread forest fires during the previous summer, Congress enacted the Emergency Salvage Timber Sale Program (Salvage Rider) as part of the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations and Rescissions Act (P.L. 104-19).

The Salvage Rider was written principally by Mark Rey, a former timber industry lobbyist who was then an aide to Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) and is now the Bush Administration’s top forest policy official.

*

Like Bush’s so-called “Healthy Forest Initiative,” the Salvage Rider temporarily exempted salvage timber sales on federal forest lands from environmental and wildlife laws, administrative appeals, and judicial review.
*

The Salvage Rider directed the Forest Service to cut old-growth timber in the Pacific Northwest that the agency had proposed for sale but subsequently withdrawn due to environmental concerns, endangered species listings, and court rulings. Bush’s initiative also aims to increase logging of old-growth trees in the Pacific Northwest.

2.

The Salvage Rider expired at the end of 1996, and Congress made no effort to extend it. Vice President Al Gore subsequently stated that approving the Salvage Rider was the worst mistake the Clinton Administration made during its first term.

President Bush’s new forest plan bears strong resemblance to the Salvage Rider. Both seek to exempt timber sales from environmental laws, administrative appeals, and lawsuits. And both aim to allow timber sales of old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest that have been protected due to wildlife concerns.

The "Salvage Rider" -- A Subversion of Democracy

-- The "Emergency Salvage" timber rider was stealthily attached
to and signed into law by President Clinton as part of the 1995
Rescissions Bill, legislation supposedly designed to reduce
federal expenditures. The "salvage rider" is probably the most
far-reaching, anti-environment legislation in the history of this
country. We, the people, are paying dearly for it: in terms of
actual dollars; loss of critical wildlife habitat, endangered
species, and the last bits of our intact ecosystems and ancient
forests; and in the precedent it sets for lawmaking and the
separation of powers in this country. Utilizing the rider process
means virtually no process at all. Senators Mark Hatfield (R-OR)
and Slade Gorton (R-WA) subverted democratic lawmaking by
promoting the "salvage rider." The Rider bypassed the proper
channels of debate and analysis in Congressional committees, and
its actual text was still being withheld from members of Congress
when they were asked for an initial vote. Other individuals
instrumental in the passage and broad interpretation of the rider
include Senators Craig (R-ID) and Murkowski (R-AK), and
Representatives Dicks (D-WA), Taylor (R-NC), Young (R-AK), and
Roberts (R-KS). These decision-makers, as well as all those who
voted for the Rider, along with those who acquiesced to its
becoming law (President Clinton included), must be held
accountable.

Suspension of Laws

-- The "salvage rider" has put logging outside the law. It
suspends the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the National
Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the National Forest Management
Act (NFMA), three other major laws, and finally, as a catchall,
"all other applicable Federal environmental and natural resource
laws," such as the Clean Water Act. Three decades of
environmental legislation succumb to timber industry greed.

-- The public is blocked from the legal process through which
decisions affecting their public forests are made. All sales
under the "salvage rider" are exempt from the administrative
appeal process, and judicial review is essentially non-existent,
as it is severely limited to sales deemed "arbitrary and
capricious."

I'll be gone this weekend

I have a conflicting schedule and family picnic which will prevent me from blogging this weekend. I'd also like to thank you all for visiting. It's nice to know I am not talking to myself. LOL!

Some of the up coming things I hope to be covering: Are tax cuts (not raising them) appropriate in war time?, Is the US economy really in good shape with a national debt in the trillions?, Bush administrations environmental record, and Bush's newly passed energy bill.

Environmental reviews reflective of our environment

I had to put these reviews down because the first one made me laugh so hard, and the second frankly is a hallmark to a kind of second sight you just will not hear normally. It unfortunately does tell a real truth: The Wise Use crowd, that being those who only know the developed, metropolitan way of life, know what is best for the environment. These are the people who know nothing about the great outdoors and camping under the bright night lights. These are some of the people who would laugh at the mention of a healing and spiritual relationship with nature. These are the unplugged who would simply dismiss John Denver's environmentally-aware music as nothing more than granola-munching cheesiness. These are the politicians who base the environment not on the environment, but on economics. These are examples of all the people who are defending their right to live an excessive consumer-driven life without consequence.

For the sake of human progress, do I have the answer for the environment? No, I haven't a clue. The environment will continue to decline for our development. (Noting Front Page's "environmental experts" devotion to a more developed economic globe does not lead to a improved natural environment because humanity will in fact use up more land.) All the excesses though will one day catch up and be realized that these over-romanticized green nuts, who are killing the environmental message in many ways today, were right about this one thing after all. Humans did misread God's plan by thinking the land was strictly for the taking instead of as being part human developer, part caretaker.

Earth Report 2000

What a great read. Nothing like a good political book. We rightwingers enjoy books like this because it provides science that we know to be false that we can use to back up our profit-driven agenda through the usual propoganda outlets such as talk radio. For example, in the excellent chapter on Air Quality, the authors talk about whether or not we humans are actually causing the air quality to go down or not. Although we all know that pollution is real, when folks like me own stock in large factories, the financial bottom line is all that matters. If the Big Government puts heavier restrictions on such companies, that means their costs will go up, and folks like me will lose money in our stock portfolios. Not a good thing. The chapter on Pesticides provides another example of misinformation that we can use on our talk radio shows to make sure the masses will vote Republican. I don't really care if pesticides are hurting people or not; what matters is when I, like Tom Delay, have a vested financial interest in a pesticide company, the last thing I want are the liberal scaremongers causing the government to force us to shut down our companies, causing us more financial losses. It's all about money. And that's why a book like this is such a good thing. Sure, the science is bad and absurd, but it helps us push forward our agenda.

Ronald Bailey’s dumbed down “Earth Report” is nothing more than vulgar anthropocentrism marketed as feel-good ecology neatly packaged for the McMasses. Actually, even the title of the book is a misnomer. While Bailey’s book is a “report” of sorts, at no point does the author seem to express a sincere or grounded interest in the “earth”.

Perhaps the book's greatest flaw, aside from the curiously misinterpreted statistics and erroneous conclusions, is its perverse avoidance of addressing the spiritual and philosophical issues logically raised when considering mankind’s roll in the natural world. While the book does a good job of inundating readers with all sorts of statistics and corporate-sponsored meditations, Bailey refuses, in a rather disturbingly determined sort of way, to pose the “larger questions”. The result is a book that too often feels intentionally rushed and suspiciously simple.

In Bailey’s worldview nature is a tangible commodity with a value that can fluctuate (...). “Ecology” is seen only as a tool to better manage natural assets to meet corporate and economic needs. This “nature as product” ideology has been practiced by capitalist entities since the industrial revolution, but Bailey’s attempt to bring it to the masses, and the simplistic manner of his presentation presents a new and dangerous trend. Bailey even insists that we should judge a species as “good” or “bad” depending on its relative worth to mankind. For example, Bailey believes that North American white-tail deer are, “dangerous mammals” and “killers” because they have the audacity to stray onto roads and highways where they often cause serious accidents when struck by fast-moving cars and trucks. Not only do these deer/vehicle collisions cause human fatalities, they ALSO result in over 1 billion dollars worth of insurance claims annually. To Bailey this represents a prime example of poor asset management (the deer of course being the poorly managed asset). Bailey never once considers that the massive deer overpopulation (which has logically increased the risk of deer/vehicle collisions) may have something to do with reduced deer habitat and the almost complete annihilation of the white-tail deer’s natural predators (courtesy of mankind).

Bailey’s disarmingly pronounced hubris in “Earth Report” is matched only by his inane insistence that there aren’t even any real ecological issues at all (at least in the “green” sense)! Counter arguments are seen as radical and suspicious.

The technocrat-friendly ideas presented by Ronald Bailey in “Earth Report” are not only arrogant and misguided, they are downright dangerous. Bailey’s subtle and consistent suggestion that all is really well in the world, may just cost us that, the world.

This book is full of propaganda and misinformation. The general concensus of the larger scientific community is all but ignored by the various authors on virtually every subject. The one example I will site is in the essay Fishing for Solutions:The State of the World's Fisheries. Although the book has a copyright of 2000, and the author sites some data as recently as 1998, he chooses to paint a rosy picture of the fishing harvest by limiting his data to data available up to 1996. He fails to mention that it was at this point that the fishing harvest hit its peak and that it has been in decline ever since. Being a biology teacher, I have spent considerable amounts of time researching the literature on various environmental problems including population growth, global warming, loss of diversity and the state of our fisheries. In every case, the authors of this book are at odds with what I have found to be the general concensus of the larger scientific community. I find it troublesome that the publishers of this book apparently did no research of their own to determine the validity of the views expressed within the pages of this book. Such misinformation is dangerous and unconstructive and presents a real risk to our environment and the economic health of our country in decades to come.


I have been researching the motives of the good news industry for some time. As a population ecologist, my area of research concerns our understanding of the relationship between species richness and ecosystem function, as mediated through diffuse and strong multi-trophic interactions and feedbacks. What's scary is that, at present, we really have very little idea how large scale processes, such as nutrient and energy transfer in food webs, stabilization of the atmosphere and other life-sustaining ecosystem services at broad scales are generated at much smaller scales, where selection works at the level of individuals organisms. We do know that global ecological systems generate processes which serve as our life-support systems, and that their simplification impairs the ability of the biosphere to generate these life-sustaining processes for humanity. That's the state of the field right now. Many of my eminent colleagues across the world are working hard to understand how our continued assault on the natural world might affect the services upon which we depend for our own survival. In the background, are those, with virtually no scientific credibility, and who represent very vested interests (their paymasters in the corporate world) who dish out the news that everything in Eden is fine, without a shred of scientific credibility to support this. The alarming fact is that our current knowledge of ecological systems and their functions is too limited to support the argument that Bailey and his ilk (Easterbrook, Budiansky etc.) have been constantly dishing out to the masses: that the Earth is in a fine shape and can withstand everything that our species is throwing at it. While systems are somewhat resilient to change (bearing in mind that they are dynamic and become new systems in the face of environmental stress), there is no reason to believe that these same systems will be so robust in providing those services which permit our survival. This is a hard fact.

I am particularly dismayed by the non-scientific propoganda which spews forth from a long line of libertarian think tanks - The CATO Institute, the Hudson Institute, The Competitive Enterprise Institute, The Reason Foundation, are just a few - which contain very little credible science but considerable misinformation. Consider the so-called blurb at the beginning of the piece, which says that the list of writers are scientific "experts". Ronald Bailey's scientific credibility is about as thin as it can get: he has covered science as a writer for Forbes magazine and as a producer for PBS. That's it. And the ecological "authority" obtained a diploma in field ecology from the University of Zimbabwe. Unbelievable: considering the wealth of expertise available, they can only recruit someone with these credentials? I think that this is indicitive of the backlash and of their motives. I checked to see how many peer-reviewed papers this ecologist has published in relevant journals, and I couldn't find any. His chapter is a mish-mash of misinformation, misinterpretation of facts, and a basic misunderstanding of many important areas in conservation biology. I do not have the time here to expand upon this in detail: however, his take on the rate of current biodepletion and the consequences for nature and humanity was appalling. Invoking the use of classic species-area models to defend the backlash view that current extinction rates represent a fraction of the extant global biota was disturbing enough, but many key parameters were omitted in his thesis. For instance, diversity is multi-dimensional: extinctions at the species level are one problem, the other, hidden in this deceitful tome, is that of losses in genetic variation within populations. There is profound evidence which suggests that many, many species, particularly in tropical biomes, are declining rapidly and are therefore losing the genetic variation which enables them to respond evolutionarily to changing environmental conditions. Its part of a two-edged sword which may lead to a cascade of extinctions: reduction in habitat reduces the number of populations, which further reduces the ability of species to adapt to habitat reduction. Species lose their economic and conservation value long before they approach extinction. Furthermore, a reduction in the population diversity of a species coincides with the potential disruption of interactions with other species. Multiple interactions function by anchoring the stability of communities, and serve as cornerstones in our understanding of food webs.

There is an unspoken belief pervading these right-wing organizations that all government is harmful and that corporations are a boundless good, which underpins the motives of Bailey and his ilk in writing this patent nonsense. I would gladly debate any of these individuals on these issues, to expose the degree of their scientific illiteracy, which stands out in the pages of books like this. It seems to me that these publications are meant to dupe the nonexpert into believing the corporate line. However, these publications do serve a dual purpose: they have inspired me and my colleagues in environmental science to enter the public forum and to expose Bailey and his backers for what they really are.

Federal budget analysis

It appears the Bush administration is making the same mistakes Reagan's did: Giving out tax cuts in a time of heavy military spending equates to a country in serious national debt. How can any conservative say the economy is getting better when our national debt is increasing yearly? Is this not another effort of a administration, any number of administrations, to hand out tax cuts on the basis of votes? Is it not a false sense of prosperous times, and one that will come back to hurt the economy, namely the people, sooner or later?

The annoying thing is this macro economist's article is from 1994! Those who do not learn from history will repeat history.

Note: This is a leftist economics text (see the last paragraph under the first link), so all interpretations are welcome, including conservatives.

Macro Economics

I. The BBA's Achilles' heel

It is generally understood that the BBA (Balanced Budget Amendment) would cause a tangle of definitional, accounting, legislative, judicial and federal/state/local-relations nightmares. But its real Achilles' heel can best be understood by looking at the federal budget's two functional components, as shown in the accompanying chart.

The Policy Deficit is controlled by the Congressional tax and spending policies which are the BBA's ostensible concern. But the HI-Unemployment (HI-UE) Deficit (the difference between the total deficit and the Policy Deficit), reflects the economy's growth rate and unemployment rate, which are controlled mainly by the Federal Reserve -- over which Congress now has no effective control.

When the Fed slows the economy and increase's unemployment to combat inflation, federal outlays for welfare, unemployment benefits and other means-tested entitlements automatically increase. But the biggest effect is the automatic nosedive of receipts from income and employment taxes -- much like the effect on laid-off workers and recession-hit businesses. A one percent change in unemployment automatically changes the HI-UE Deficit by more than most of the spending changes that Congress votes on -- nearly $60 billion a year in 1995, $80 billion in 2000.

Thus, contrary to the allegations of BBA and "smaller government" ideologues, most past deficits and resulting increases in federal debt have been caused more by Fed-induced revenue deficit than by "out of control" non-military deficit spending .

The BBA's requirement of a politically impractical 60% vote for a tax increase implicitly forces Congress to try to respond to every Fed-induced revenue reduction by an even greater reduction of current policy outlays. This would hardly facilitate stable businesslike management of the government.

Causes of past deficits.

Historically, the Policy Deficit has been caused mainly by Congress's political unwillingness to impose higher taxes to pay for higher military spending. The Policy Deficit was over 2% of GDP in the Korean War (1952-53), nearly 2% in the Vietnam War (1967-68), and varied between 2«% and 3«% during 1983-94 (when the military buildup over 1979 levels accounted for half of the total Policy Deficit). But the structurally endemic nature of the Policy Deficit since 1982 was also caused by the calculated "Reagan Revolution" political strategy of trying to "reduce the size of government" by cutting taxes and then pushing for cuts in non-military spending "to balance the budget." The renewed "Republican Revolution" now seems to be adopting this same strategy.

The HI-UE Deficit has been a serious problem mainly when governments have rejected an "activist" approach to managing the economy and abandoned full employment as a primary goal of national policy. The HI-UE Deficit reached temporary peaks of 3% of GDP in 1958 and 1960 (Eisenhower) and over 2% in 1970/71 (Nixon). But it became endemically high (over 1«%) only in 1974 when the OPEC cartel's first extortionist "oil tax" caused an economically- devastating worldwide inflation and ensuing recession -- and governments continued to rely primarily on "tight money" and high unemployment to combat the inflation. Since then HI-UE Deficits have accounted for 2/3 of the total increase in our national debt -- and the interest payments on it.

In fact, interest payments on the HI-UE debt are a key link between the HI-UE and Policy Deficits. If interest on the HI-UE share of the debt were included in the current HI-UE Deficit the Policy Deficit would now have a surplus of over $80 billion.

Why federal fiscal responsibility is fundamentally different from non-federal.

Households, businesses and state/local governments have little current control over their own income. But the federal government, through Fed monetary policy, has major control over not only its own income but also everybody else's. Governor Pete Wilson recently referred to his California as a "proud sovereign state." But states, counties and cities are not sovereign economically. In an integrated national economy, mismanaged policy in Washington can bring California to its knees along with everyone else.

Thus, federal fiscal responsibility also requires federal economic responsibility -- with much more systematic coordination of all our economic policy tools. By ignoring the HI-UE Deficit and putting the Policy Deficit in a straight-jacket the BBA would make businesslike economic management impossible.

II. There is a better way than the BBA to achieve real fiscal responsibility

2) Recognize that the key economic responsibility of fiscal policy is to maintain stable low real interest rates -- by "counter-cyclical" adjustments of the federal budget's deficit or surplus to maintain a stable balance between the economy's total supply and demand for credit.

"Cyclical" fluctuations of borrowing, particularly consumer credit, home mortgage borrowing and business credit to finance the capital investment needed to meet these credit-financed fluctuations in consumer demand, are key factors in continuing the "business cycle."

* Excessive total borrowing, federal and non-federal combined, as in 1994, drives up interest rates and increases the Policy Deficit through interest on the federal debt. In addition, excessive consumer borrowing tends to cause inflationary market conditions in credit-financed sectors such as houses and cars, thus causing the Fed to slow the whole economy and increase the HI-UE Deficit.

* Insufficient total borrowing, as indicated by abnormally low real interest rates as, in 1980 and 1992-93, makes it difficult for the Fed and the banks to maintain a recovery rate of money growth, and thus increases the HI-UE Deficit. In this case a temporary increase in the Policy Deficit would tend to reduce the HI-UE Deficit.

Thus, how fast the present Policy Deficit can be appropriately reduced depends mainly on the national credit balance, as indicated by short-term real interest rates. Because total borrowing is now excessive, with short-tern rates about 2% above their historical norms, faster reduction of the Policy Deficit would be economically appropriate -- by either spending cuts or tax hikes. For instance, now would be an ideal time to eliminate the inappropriate tax deduction for interest on non-housing-related home equity loans. It would also be an ideal time for an energy tax -- to help reduce our dangerous dependence on foreign oil and reduce the huge trade deficit which matches our federal budget deficit.

But any kind of tax cut now would be economically inappropriate. Fed Vice Chairman Alan Blinder says that the Fed is likely restrict economic growth even further if the Republican "smaller government" ideologues repeat the Reagan era fiscal irresponsibility by combining tax cuts with another military buildup.

III. The Philosophical and Political Context

The Preamble of the Constitution says that one of the purposes of the Constitution and the federal government is to "promote the general welfare." Thus the government has two choices:

* an "activist" philosophy to prevent problems and help people by long-run "framework" planning to create the kind of social-economic, full-employment environment in which businesses, workers, consumers and investors everywhere can have maximum confidence to plan further ahead in pursuit of the American Dream without having to call on government for the kind of assistance which tends to concentrate power in Washington;

* a "laissez-faire" philosophy which permits the traditional "business cycle" and free-enterprise profit motive to work without interference -- until things fall apart (like the savings and loan debacle), and then reluctantly and inefficiently yield to public demands for the government to "pick up the pieces."

Conservative opposition to the goal of full employment.

After WW II, Congress passed the "Em ployment Act of 1946." Although it is often referred to today as "the full -employment act" conservatives forced Congress to take the "full" out of the title because they recognized that if an "activist" government accepts effective responsibility for maintaining stable full employment growth it would require many "interventions" in the economy which are opposed by those who know how to profit from "the business cycle" and from the absence of effective legislation protecting the general welfare. The H/H Act kept "full " in its title and set specific economic goals, but conservatives made sure that it had so few real teeth that it has been largely ignored.

The "size of government" issue.

Undoubtedly, some supporters of the BBA either really believe it would help reduce the deficit or don't realize that there are more effective means of doing that. But for some conservative ideologues the most basic purpose of the BBA is to "reduce the size of government" by putting artificial pressure on Congress to reduce non-military federal spending, even when that clearly diminishes the national welfare. When they were pushing the BBA in 1936 they were really trying to prevent FDR, whom they hated ideologically, from mobilizing the full powers of the government to get us out of the Great Depression. In 1982 they pushed it in support of the Reagan Revolution. Now they are using the general public discontent with the results of past government mismanagement of the budget and the economy to gain public support for the BBA. But if the public fully realized the nature and implications of the BBA's basic ideological purpose, it is doubtful if many would support it.

Since 1929 the relative size of the federal government has been greatly increased by four factors: the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and excessive unemployment most of the time. All of these might have been avoided by a more effective "activist" federal government with more vision to understand what was needed to prevent those catastrophes and better leadership to help the public understand what needed to be done.

If "size of government" is measured by the amount of current spending, and if the self-financing Social Security system, other pension programs and Medicare and Medicaid are excluded, then the great bulk of policy budget spending goes for current military spending and the interest cost of previous HI-UE Deficits and deficit-financed military spending. In this perspective, the best way to "reduce the size of government" is to eliminate the HI-UE Deficit by managing the economy for stable full employment, reforming and strengthening the United Nations so that it could take over a good share of America's national defense and foreign military responsibilities, and enacting a universal, effective, cost-conscious and largely self-financing (like Social Security) national health-care system . Everything else is marginal.

World Socialist

On January 6, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued new projections showing that the cumulative deficit between 2004 and 2013 would reach $2.3 trillion. But this is generally acknowledged to be an understatement.

A study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities issued on February 1 noted that if likely or virtually certain costs, left out of the CBO projection, were added back in then the deficit projection for the next 10 years rose to $5.2 trillion.

The Center’s analysis made it clear that the budget blowout is not due to increases in domestic spending but is the result of the Bush tax cuts—aimed primarily at the wealthy—and increased spending on the military and “homeland security.” As a result of the tax cuts, revenues in 2004 will total only 15.8 percent of GDP—the lowest level since 1950—and will only average 17.1 percent of GDP over the coming decade, lower than average levels for every decade in the second half of the twentieth century.

In January 2001 estimates from the CBO showed surpluses for the 10-year period to 2011 totalling $5 trillion. Now it is estimated that there will be a deficit over the same period of $4.3 trillion. According to the Center’s report, approximately 35 percent of this $9.3 trillion turnaround is due to the tax cuts made by the Bush administration. Another 28 percent is due to increased spending, more than two thirds of which arises from increased costs for the military, homeland security and the “war on terrorism”. Only one-twenty-fifth of the new spending represented the increased costs of domestic programs outside of homeland security. The remainder of the turnaround was accounted for by over-optimistic estimates by the CBO in 2001.

What others are saying at American Progress

The White House predicted recently that the budget deficit would drop to $333 billion, $94 billion less than expected, and continue falling for the next four years to $162 billion in 2009. In light of recent tax changes, increases in defense spending, and the war in Iraq, this declaration startled many and caused numerous Wall Street analysts to warn of over-excessive optimism. The Bush administration attributed the drop to supply side economics, as an auspicious sign that his tax cuts are paying for themselves. Others pointed out that "triple-digit deficits for as far as the eye can see" were not a cause for celebration. Furthermore, the prediction does not take into account the costs needed for Iraq past the next year and excludes full funding for programs such as job training and Medicare. Even nonpartisan firms such as Goldman Sachs warned of the accuracy of these numbers. Here is a sampling of what America is saying about the budget deficit.

Jackson, Mississippi - The Clarion-Ledger
July 18, 2005 - Editorial

"Putting a positive spin on the latest federal budget deficit figures, President Bush is claiming his economic policies are cutting the growth in the deficit by $100 billion. …

"That sounds good, but wait a second. The annual mid-year report didn't say the budget deficit was cut; it said it was less than expected by $100 billion. So, how high is it?

"As it turns out, this year's budget deficit will 'drop' from what was anticipated as the largest budget deficit ever.

"In fact, with this new "drop," the budget will be the third largest deficit in history, at $333 billion, following the two previous records under Bush last year and the year before."

NASBO

Are tax cuts always good?

This is an older column on how Bush's tax cuts follow a supposed cyclical pattern to Reagan's. I'm not sure I agree with everything the columnist says, but it does beg the question: How can a political party, namely the Bush administration, claim the economy is "better than ever" when the country is in trillions of dollars in debt? Are we not utilizing someone elses money in order to be prosperous? I'd love to hear from any economist, let alone anyone else.

http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0530-02.htm

You may recall the last time the feds raised taxes was 1993, when the Democrats gutted up and raised them on the richest people in the country by exactly one vote. Rush Limbaugh and others of his ilk went ballistic over "the biggest tax increase in history," even though it affected no one we know. (All tax increases and cuts are "the biggest in history" because the size of the economy keeps growing.) In 1994, the Republicans took over Congress. That's cause and effect there.

Now Bush breezes in and starts by sending everybody in the country a check for "up to" $300 (that's being done at the insistence of the Democrats, who keep trying to get something for everyone, rather than for large political donors only). This is the Clinton Bonus, what we get for having Clinton and Robert Rubin in for eight years. What do you think the next president's going to face?

Apparently, we're dumb enough to fall for this once every 20 years. Ronald Reagan gave us a nice, shiny new tax cut in '81, and it only cost us $2 trillion in debt.

Back at Bad Government Central, the session was one long hangover from the Bush years. If it didn't cost any money — like the hate crimes bill and keeping kids out of the back of pick-ups — it got done. However, they could not bring themselves to stop executing the mentally retarded. Even with a record-large budget of $114 billion, the state still can't afford the level of services that would get us up to average in anything.

So here's the news bulletin from our parts: Living with the aftermath of Bush is a bad hangover. Some people are smart enough to see it coming. When Ronald Reagan was pushing tax cuts 20 years ago, a Republican voted against him, predicting the cuts would lead to massive deficits. The guy's name was Jim Jeffords.

Blackout of August 14, 2003

This is one version and thorough account of what went wrong in the midwest and eastern portions of the country. You'll pardon my being two years late. I stumbled upon this by accident and just assumed the blackout occured on non-managerial grounds.

Power Plays

"Politics, not lack of power, is to blame for the great American blackout," wrote the Economist on August 21. While cautioning that "not all the facts are in," researchers at Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), a private energy consulting firm, have tentatively concluded that the massive power blackout of August 14 began with a series of failures by First Energy, a power conglomerate created from the merger of Toledo Edison, Cleveland Electric, Ohio Edison, Pennsylvania Power, Pennsylvania Electric, Metropolitan Edison and Jersey Central Power & Light. The nation's fourth largest investor-owned electric system, according to its web site, First Energy has been cited previously for plant mismanagement and accounting irregularities.

First Contributors Have a History
First Energy executives are among Bush's top campaign fundraisers. First Energy President Anthony Alexander was a member of the "Pioneers" -- the Bush campaign group composed of individuals who raised at least $100,000 each during the 2000 campaign. As a member of the Republican National Committee's Team 100, Alexander raised $250,000 in 2000, and personally donated $100,000 toward Bush's inauguration events. Alexander also served on the Bush energy transition team. And on June 30 of this year First Energy's chairman, H. Peter Burg hosted a $1,000-a-plate dinner at the Akron Hilton that raised $600,000 for Bush's 2004 campaign. In 2001-2002 First Energy executives contributed more than $1 million to federal candidates, with over 70% going to Republicans, placing the firm in the top ten political contributors from the electric utility industry. First Energy also spent $3.8 million lobbying Congress and the administration in 2001-2002.

In the 70s, Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich confronted one of First Energy's predecessors, Cleveland Electric (CEI), when it sought to undermine the City of Cleveland's ability to operate a municipal electric system, Muny Light. Muny Light provided power to streetlights and many city facilities, and to residential customers in parts of Cleveland at a savings of 20 - 30% over CEI. In a precursor to schemes that Williams and Enron would use later in California, CEI worked to prevent Muny Light from buying power from other suppliers, and then tripled the rates it charged. When Muny Light began to lose money as a result of CEI's schemes, CEI cited Muny Light's deteriorating financial condition as as evidence supporting their contention that the city should sell Muny Light to CEI. With the aid of local media that, in Kucinich's words, "received substantial advertising revenues from CEI," CEI succeeded in convincing Cleveland's mayor and city council to sell Muny Light in 1976. Kucinich, who held the elected office of Municipal Court Clerk at the time, organized a campaign to prevent the sale, and ran for mayor of Cleveland on the issue. He won and canceled the sale.

Two years later Cleveland Trust, Ohio's largest bank, informed Kucinich that it would not renew 15 million in loans taken out by his predecessor, unless he agreed to sell Muny Light to CEI. The bank offered $50 million in new credit if Kucinich would agree. Kucinich refused, and the City of Cleveland defaulted. Kucinich lost the election in 1979. Later it would emerge that Cleveland Trust that Cleveland Trust held a substantial interest in CEI, and that the firms had four directors in common. Kucinich's decision was vindicated in 1993 when Muny Light, now renamed Cleveland Public Power, announced the largest expansion of any municipal power system in the country.

First Failures
Fast forward ten years. At about 2pm on August 14, 2003 First Energy's 550-megawatt coal-fired Eastlake power plant east of Cleveland, OH, shut down. An hour later a single transmission line near Cleveland went out of service. By themselves, these incidents should have been routine. According to CERA Senior Consultant Hoff Stauffer, "they're designed to be able to withstand that kind of event without any problem." But those events were only the beginning.

The control room alarm system, which ordinarily would have notified operators of the generation and transmission problems, apparently did not work. With a transmission line unavailable, power that might have traveled along it flowed onto other lines, which heated up -- "as anticipated," says Stauffer. Also anticipated is that overheated power lines sag, which First Energy's did. But not anticipated was that one of the lines would sag into a tree. "That tree was not supposed to be there," Stauffer observed dryly, and so a second power line went out of service. At this point First Energy was experiencing four simultaneous problems, "and systems are not designed to be able to withstand that without some kind of blackout to at least some of their load," said Stauffer.

The American Electric Power (AEP) system to the south and the PJM to the east, successfully disconnected from First Energy, thereby protecting the supply of electricity to the Midwest, including Chicago, and to the east, including most of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland. "But," the New York Times's Richard Glanz and Andrew Revking wrote, "the severing of the two crucial Ohio lines was the equivalent of suddenly damming an onrushing stream: the flow had to divert to find a way to reach the Cleveland area." The power flowed into Indiana, Michigan, and back into Ohio. As a result, within a few seconds power in a grid serviced by the International Transmission Company (ITC) in lower Michigan went from a modest 200 megawatts to nearly 2000. At the same time, power that had been flowing from ITC to Ontario began to flow the other way, into northern Ohio. This caused instability in ITC's system, which took plants and transmission lines in eastern Michigan out of service, eventually causing a blackout in Detroit.

Responses to Dennis Prager and Rush Limbaugh

About a year ago I was a staunch conservative who had only the highest praise for Dennis Prager and conservative ideology alike. As you know, I am The Middle Ear now, and these columns further demonstrate to me what is the even more distancing of these individuals. The last column, on Rush, is such a devastating account of the man which it makes it awfully difficult to persuasively support him.

A Response to Dennis Prager

In an op-ed piece in the L.A. Times on Sunday, May 29th, conservative political pundit Dennis Prager revealed a great insight that came to him some years ago in a debate with Alan Dershowitz, whom Prager dismisses as "a Harvard liberal." That insight or "epiphany" for him was that the central genesis of the culture war in America is not between religions per se, but rather "the great divide in values is…between those who believe in a divine text and those who do not." "What distinguishes leftist Jews from rightist Jews and leftist Christians from rightist Christians…comes down to their belief in the bible, not their belief in God." He then goes on to argue that some Jews and some Christians believe that their sacred texts come "from God" and "are divine" and some Jews and Christians believe that biblical texts are "man-made": "conservative Jews and Christians share the belief that God revealed a text (while) liberal Jews and Christians share the belief that this text is man-made."

Then:

The problem with this smug argument is that it mischaracterizes the belief of those who disagree with a narrow, literalistic reading of sacred text as people who fail to hold sacred writings as divine, who are guided more by heart and sentiment than by the Word of God.

To argue that scripture is "from God" (Prager) is too simplistic by far; for what conservative Christians and Jews really suggest is that scripture is "authoritative and determinate" based on its "inerrancy." Evangelicals, faced with inconsistencies in scripture - e.g. the creation story in Genesis One in which God creates man and woman in his image simultaneously and Genesis Two in which man is created first and needing a helpmate, Eve is formed from Adam's side - argue that in their "original autographs," God's word is without error and that until these are found, we are bound to a corrupted and yet authoritative text.

From this "high theology" of scripture, conservative Jews and Christians argue for a closing of debate on settled issues of moral values (and by implication public policy). In his op-ed piece, Prager argues that there are four: that marriage can not be redefined to include gays and lesbians; that human life, not animal life, is sacred; that murderers should be executed and that people are not essentially good. (That conservative Roman Catholics read the same text and hold the same high regard for scripture as God's Word and conclude that a consistent and seamless regard for the sacredness of human life makes the death penalty unacceptable and immoral seems to have eluded Mr. Prager; that the Hebrew scriptures he holds so dear say in Genesis that "God saw all he had made, and indeed it was very good" [Genesis 1:31] also seems to have been lost.)

The sin (defined as "missing the mark") of Dennis Prager is to selectively elevate portions of sacred text which justify conservative politics (the death penalty, "defense of marriage", exploitation of the environment) and to ignore the vast witness of both Testaments which, for example, condemn the abuse of the poor by the rich. To paraphrase Jim Wallis, a progressive evangelical, in speaking of these believers: "I don't question their good faith; I question their bad theology." To say that scripture is "divinely inspired" is simply to say that God, not the written word, is divine. There is a danger in idolatry, including biblio-idolatry. Such narrow and uncritical reading of scripture leads not to God but to human enmity and strife.

Surely Dennis Prager knows that the scriptures of the so called "New Testament" were written by Jews who told the story of a Jewish rabbi who claimed that "no one comes to the Father but by me." If God's word is divine, then why are these words not binding for Jews, liberal or conservative? Many conservative Christians believe that they are and that there is no place in God's economy for the unconverted. That Mr. Prager, as a Jew does not accept this portion of 1st century Jewish sacred text as binding for him as a Jew, does not make it less so. The great pathos in Paul's epistles is his sadness for his fellow Jews who refused to accept Jesus as the Messiah. His call to them was to "repent and believe (accept as God's revealed truth) the gospel" that Jesus is Lord.

Dennis Prager is a gifted speaker and writer but his dismissal of those who don't agree with him as being merely "guided by the heart" ("do I listen to my heart or to what I believe is God's word?") is intellectually dishonest and unworthy. Many of us believe we should and must read the bible in the fullness of our humanity, through the God given faculties of head and heart; and to approach these texts with humility and wonder but ultimately knowing that they point the way to God but are indeed not Gods' self.

Dennis Prager and other conservatives have the right to read and interpret scripture as they wish. As progressives, we honor their voice and their perspective in that on-going dialogue with texts which are indeed "living words" which speak with newness and power to each generation. But we will not allow the conservative and repressive voices to claim for themselves the mantle of true and sole Godliness, nor allow them to dismiss those of us with an alternative view as being people of less faith or less integrity.

-St. Augustine

Dennis Prager and The Ecological Indian

Buffalo
Krech, a white anthropologist, says Indians killed more buffalo than they needed when they drove them over cliffs. Prager acts surprised by this "revelation." My response:

1) That’s a fairly well-known fact, despite what Prager thinks 99% of Americans think. To pretend it’s a secret the PC police have tried to conceal is nonsense.

2) The buffalo jumps were carried out by a few tribes out of many that hunted buffalo. For one thing, you had to have cliffs nearby to conduct the maneuver. Vast stretches of the Great Plains had no usable cliffs...which is probably why there weren’t many buffalo jumps south of the Dakotas.

3) So what if some Indians killed, say, 50 buffalo when they needed 10...when there were still a million buffalo extant? Do conservationists use every scrap of wood and bark when they cut down a tree? Every scrap of meat and hide when they kill a cow? Do they never litter or discard a half-eaten meal?

Of course not. We don’t live in that needy a society. Even the best of us wastes a little because we can.

To equate Indians killing an extra 40 buffalo to Europeans killing the remaining 999,850 buffalo (leaving 100 of 1,000,000 alive) is the worst sort of joke. It’s intellectual sophistry and Prager is guilty of it. Does the word "vile" or "reprehensible" suggest anything to you?

Were the Indians comparable to today’s conservationists? Hell, yes. They wasted a little because all humans do, but they didn’t touch the overall supply. Their actions conserved the population even if they didn’t conserve every animal.

Were the Indians comparable to today’s Euro-Americans? Hell, no. The Europeans killed entire species—as in permanently extinguished them. They also clearcut 90% or more of the virgin forests they found. In no way, shape, or form were the two groups equivalent.

Deer and beaver
Krech claims the Indians of middle America almost wiped out the deer and beaver. My response:

Both these alleged cases of massive hunting happened after Europeans arrived with their colonizing culture—a fact Prager the sophist neglected to mention. In the 1700s and 1800s, especially east of the Mississippi, Indians were no longer acting on their original beliefs, uncontaminated by outside contact. They were no longer completely free agents.

The Europeans forced them to adopt a cash economy and so they adopted one to survive. If they wanted to buy guns (to defend their lives) or food (because they were forced from their bountiful homelands) they needed something to trade. The Europeans valued furs, skins, and meat. Can you guess what happened?

That’s right, the Indians got co-opted into the European system. So if Indians decimated species, it was because they mimicked European culture, not because it was inherent in their own culture. If the Europeans hadn’t come, the Indians wouldn’t have harmed the deer or beaver populations.

Again, the conniving Prager didn’t bring up these points, though they seemed obvious to me. The anthro Krech didn’t sound like he had an axe to grind, but Prager sure did. Even if the three examples were valid—and none were close—they’d cover only a third or so of the continent. So where does Prager get off claiming Indians as a whole were as bad as Europeans?

Because they decimated two animal species while aping Europeans and mildly wasted one species on their own? While Europeans laid waste to flora and fauna like a nuclear holocaust? Who was it, exactly, who wiped the passenger pigeon from the face of the earth? Who came close to extinguishing the buffalo and the bald eagle, our national emblem? Who caused the Dust Bowl, the burning rivers, the eggs laced with DDT?

Native Americans? Don’t think so. Look in the mirror if you want to know who, because we’re still putting profits before polliwogs. Which reminds me of the massive die-off of frog species occurring now, but that’s another story.

Then:

The message here, and in all my multicultural postings, is that every culture has something to offer us. What I dispute is the incessant exaltation of Western civilization above all others. Western civilization exists only because it borrowed from earlier, non-Western traditions. (See my posting, Multicultural Origins of Civilization, for more on that point.)

The corollary to my message is that every culture has problems. I'm not exalting a Native American culture or lifestyle over its Western equivalent. You don't see me living in a tipi, hunting Bambi and kin, or grubbing for roots in the dirt, do you? Clearly I enjoy the benefits of our so-called civilization; I don't deny them.

I'll grant that Indians might have been no better than "average" in terms of their stewardship of nature. But Euro-Americans have been far worse than average. Despite their much larger populations, are China and India paved over like parking lots? No. The idea of conquering nature and replacing it with something "better" (cities, farms, strip malls, McDonald's) is peculiarly Western.

Bigotshtick: Rush Limbaugh on Indians
[The following award-winning essay was first published in Native Americas Journal, Fall 1995, after Rush Limbaugh made one of his "provocative" racial comments about American Indian people.]

"The American Indians were meaner to themselves than anybody was ever mean to them. The people were savages. It's true, they damn well were ? these people were out there destroying timber, they were out there conquering and killing each other, scalping people." - Rush Limbaugh

"Bigoted: Obstinately and blindly attached to some creed, opinion or party and intolerant toward others." - The Oxford Universal Dictionary



In my car, alone, and sometimes at home - to my wife's discomfort - I listen to Rush Limbaugh or catch his TV appearances.

I have heard enough of Limbaugh over the years to get the gist of his message and of his style, which is the medium of his message. The man's opinions might not be of much interest except that they are nearly inescapable. He has national airtime for over 20 hours a week and he reaches some 20 million people a week, in long, continuous monologues. Limbaugh, a veritable rotor of right wing politics in North America, is furthermore an entertainer. He can make people laugh.

The problem is that the man has an ugly side - a very ugly side.

The quote above must be considered. It is vintage Limbaugh when he gets rolling on his radio show. (He writes books, too, but they are severely whitewashed; you have to listen to Limbaugh's radio voice to get to know him.) On the radio, usually from a position of outrageous umbrage, he is one major national commentator willing to prejudice a whole race of people and perpetrate a racial slur that must be seen as significant, considering the breadth of the source. Why would a man in Limbaugh's position call Native peoples savages in this day and age?

Limbaugh is neither stupid nor particularly careless. True, he is self-promoting to an embarrassing degree, but he is nevertheless a master of public discourse with stated political goals. He is also a commentator who regularly uses the power of the medium and of his formatted personae to persuade, cajole, and at appointed times, command a large public to political action.

With a message well-suited for those mean times - his dominant idea seems to be championing unmitigated business development by dismissing all gestures of cooperative (as opposed to confrontational) thinking, and all efforts to regulate human activity to protect the earth and its resources - he plays to a major national audience, whose frustration and anger he mines in pursuit of ideological imperatives.

Dismissed for years as mostly a buffoon while his popularity increased exponentially, Limbaugh whips up the troops throughout the year, ditto, ditto, ditto, and come November elections, delivers for the Republicans. TIME has put him on its cover then and Ted Koppel has invited him to comment on his news show (as if 20 hours of national airtime per week is not enough for one mortal). Thus Limbaugh proved himself a hugely influential and highly marketable commentator. All of which makes it particularly troubling that dehumanization through racist stereotyping (used against Indians since Cotton Mather) is a trademark of the (formerly) rotund disc jockey.

Limbaugh developed his national audience by cleverly employing an old shtick: funny umbrage at imagined groups - the media, people on welfare, immigrants, feminists, black athletes, American Indians - that he props up to hit with a wide-slapping brush of ridicule, outright misinterpretation, and wanton disrespect. Limbaugh's shtick, becoming increasingly evident in media and in politics, is a 1990s kind of bigotry.

Those who like their politics mixed in with ridicule especially enjoyed his antagonistic sarcasm, ostensibly directed at "Liberals" but hitting, double-barreled, at many of the poor and resourceless groups whom Limbaugh giddily and nastily defines coast to coast. A master at reducing truth to comic line, he also knows how to repeat a half-truth that serves his purpose so regularly that it becomes a sort of reality substitute. Apparently, he is confident enough in his own positioning to hurl out stereotypes at whole classes and races of people without the slightest fear of rebuttal. In this era of trial by airtime, Limbaugh is a hanging judge.

The comment quoted earlier is not his first on Native peoples. I remember another, from 1992, when Native delegations met at the landmark Rio conference on environment and development. "What a ragtag looking bunch," he laughed on the air, expounding then too on the savvy ways of Indians and mocking "these fools out there" in the environmental movement who support Indians and want "us to live like stone-age people."

As Limbaugh is unabashedly political, one must assume that his attacks are orchestrated, his targets carefully selected. In this context, the connection with Native peoples is about the general public concern over environmental degradation, which Limbaugh and the interests he truly represents would like to see discredited or at least reduced. In the promised new era of non-regulated exploitative extraction of natural resources now well under way, concern over environment and Indians is a troublesome factor.

But, hey, the Indians ? "these people were destroying timber."

What Limbaugh is doing is transparent. It is part of the lining up of forces. Since Native peoples' issues often and naturally coincide with environmental concerns, Native peoples themselves must be attacked. As environmentalists are increasingly recognizing, interest in Native peoples and causes offers a convergence point where ecological issues can be creatively conceived. Native peoples' traditions are not made up by counter-culturalists or academic theorists - they are long-standing human ways that speak to the relationship to the natural world and can form the core of a realistic discussion among broad sectors of the population. Native traditional knowledge is sometimes abused or trivialized, but it is now widely accepted as a base on which to develop a true environmental philosophy.

A man in Limbaugh's position, I believe, must find ways to discredit that connection. That is his job. And Limbaugh is clearly very diligent about doing his job.

We might do well to consider Rush Limbaugh and his ways with words - not to banter with him, but because he should not so wantonly dominate and even seriously impact the most serious of topics. He should not be allowed to issue bigoted and racialist statements unchallenged. We should not pretend such languages and attitudes are proper for a public commentator of such wide reach.

Let's remember what Limbaugh said.

"The American Indians were meaner to themselves than anybody was ever mean to them."

This is the basic stereotype on Indians: a war-like nature. Limbaugh is starting by harping on this one. Watch him run with it again and again. It has just enough reality in it to make it useful. For instance, it is true that Indians warred, and that during wartime people sometimes acted with meanness and brutality. You won't hear from Limbaugh, however, how the damage inflicted in traditional Indian disputes pales in comparison to the mass exterminations carried out against tribes, or by nation-states against tribes, or by nation-states against civilian populations. It is a cheap stereotype. A trick.

"The people were savages. It's true, they damn well were ? scalping people."

This is a deepening of the stereotype, deceitful and manipulative, not only for what it says, but for what it hides and obfuscates.

By focusing on the "war-like" Indian image, by invoking the designation of "savage," the far more prevalent philosophies of Native American societies - governmental and spiritual application - the documented reality of Native American knowledge systems is completely left out of the listeners' perceptions. This reflects the Limbaugh style: over hours and hours each week, only negative images are reinforced of anyone Limbaugh perceives to be an enemy.

One never tunes in to find Limbaugh asking a Carl Sagan about ozone layer depletion or interviewing Native scholars on the variety of Native cultural viewpoints. Why present a balanced view when ridicule can suffice? Perhaps for Limbaugh a dialogue with "savages" would be unthinkable. "I am equal time," the commentator is prone to answer when questioned on the lack of balance in his shows.

They taught at my journalism alma mater that principles of public information handling were worked out over many decades. Major thinkers in American life contributed to the idea of balanced use of information channels - especially the national networks. Whether the law dictates it or not, the ethic holds that balanced journalism, well documented, is of central value to society. Simple, preferably depersonalized styles were expected from information handlers.

In that context, Limbaugh is to the national discourse what professional wrestling is to sports. Blowing his point of view often and loudly he takes center stage in the arena. His loud reductionism bombards the mind. His trick hold? The most scurrilous form of argumentation - crafting straw men for demolition - which he has down to a fine science. His sarcastic, constantly mocking style stresses the negative as primary - the negative, of course is whatever he is against; the positive and only the positive, of what he is for.

Still, despite his self-consciously arrogant style, Limbaugh can make people laugh. He is superb at skewering politicians' vanities, for instance. And no one is better at pulling out the loose threads of the Liberal coat, which he can then retie in clever knots of common logic, bathed in acid humor. He identifies some of what is wrong with the country after 40 years of (so-called) Liberal policies, and he can make sense. The problem is that Limbaugh projects his options in such one-sided, pin-the-blame contexts that the truth of matters is inevitably trivialized.

Limbaugh is superb at reducing environmentalism to some "animal rights nut" who won't kill a rat even to save her child from going through painful rabies shots. Listeners can identify with Limbaugh's outrage as his unbroken monologue guides us through. But then, hey, how about that spotted owl, he says and feigns eating a spotted owl, as if that somehow eliminates the need for bio-diversity conservation. Limbaugh tells us that there are more trees today than a century ago. Deforestation is not a problem. According to him, well, ahem, "there is not damage to the ozone layer, ha ha." Indians and the environment? Hey, "these people were out there destroying timber."

We used to know the difference between a stand-up comic with a political bent and a social commentator who, with respect and journalistic balance (the operative principle), integrates a range of information, analyzes the conflicting viewpoints, and strives to provide the public with a better ability to interpret. But Limbaugh blurs the two roles more thoroughly than anyone. His ego expands visibly as his "talent, on-loan from God," apparently grants him infallibility.

Limbaugh likes to run down a long list of people and causes that, in his eyes, fuel the Liberal conspiracy to end free enterprise, which must be saved from those he seems to consider less legitimate peoples with inferior viewpoints. That free enterprise might have excesses or that market-driven ideas are not always sacrosanct does not enter the picture. That some situation, might not fit within the Left/Right dichotomy seems inconceivable to Limbaugh. With him, it's full speed ahead, economically, and damn the rest. We can be sure how though: Native peoples - long condemned as "obstacles to progress" - are on the list.

It may be wise to keep watch on the bigoted views of Rush Limbaugh. Since he serves as a barometer of the national climate, familiarity with his points of attack can be useful. But remember also this truth, Native Americans - Limbaugh's so-called "savages" - carried out a prescribed protocol of participatory democracy that sat human beings in a circle. The object of discussion was placed in the center of the circle and in relation to it, everyone in the circle had a view, a unique vantage point. The truth was said to emerge from the common discussion, the respectful appreciation of everyone else's point of view. Highly trained specialists (elders) gathered the consensus. This style of governance spawned confederacies and produced a palpable freedom, a shared experience that inspired colonial American leaders, and that is more "of America" than Rush Limbaugh, from his glass-enclosed, push-button, over-blown, self-aggrandizing world will ever be.

Jose Barreiro, Ph.D., is senior editor at Indian Country Today.

An apology

I'd like to personally apologize for breaking email confidentiality to the author over at Greenie Watch. It wasn't appropriate to show the name of the email. I'm sure his website is invaluable for those seeking green extremist news. It isn't something I'm for as a whole ideology, but nonetheless I feel I'm in the wrong.

Also, I'm not sure "Opponents of the Environment" is an appropriate title either. It will be an investigation into the records of the Bush administration members, but to exactly what it should be titled, I'm not sure. As an fyi, I had originally intended on "Enemies of the Environment," but thought better of it.

Being their records do not strike me as pro-environmentalists, maybe something a little more subtle is appropriate?

Two-party system: Inadequate ideologies

I'd like to thank News Snipets for providing me with the single most important column I have read in many moons. This column almost perfectly encapsulates my frustrations with the two party's, and their supporters.It is better to 'defend to the end', no matter how awful each party's position is, then to agree for the sake of justice.

Chuck Colson's Inadequate ideologies

Recently, a Wall Street Journal poll announced that both political parties—Republicans and Democrats—are now held in low regard by the American people. Usually if the fortunes of one party decline, the other party increases—sort of a zero sum game. Now, however, for the first time in polling history, both parties come up in negative territory.

Why would this be? Well, the driver who took me to do a CNN broadcast recently gave me a hint. He didn’t know who Karl Rove was, and he didn’t know who all the people up on Capitol Hill were who were calling for his scalp. Nor did he care. He dismissed it as just politics, that is, ideologically driven politics.

When ideology begins to replace revealed truth as the basis for governing a society, you inevitably have the kind of polarization we have in America today, Reds vs. Blues. Ideology is a man-made political formulation for how people should live their lives together and is, therefore, from our perspective as Christians, inherently flawed. And it’s dangerous when a society becomes so polarized over ideology that it lacks a frame of reference for agreeing on the common good.

This all started when moral relativism took root in America, beginning in the sixties on the campuses and then invading popular culture—back when Time magazine asked that provocative question, “Is God dead?” When this happened, the overarching standards of truth and moral behavior historically governing our society were undermined. And forty years of aggressive secularism since then have simply erased the idea of moral absolutes—no such thing as truth; everything is a matter of personal preference.

This eliminates the possibility of reasoned, intelligent discourse. Since people are attracted to different ideologies, all we can do is clash. So every issue about how we govern ourselves, or what our standards ought to be, ends up in a titanic wrestling match.

The American public is rightly disenchanted with this poor excuse for a political process. And while I would like to blame the politicians, I can’t. They are simply reflecting what has happened in our broader culture—the death of truth, the lack of any common standard by which we can judge what we do. The tragedy is, of course, that politicians will continue to lose stature in the public’s eye with the over-the-top rhetoric we saw in the Karl Rove case. With no agreed-upon standards, you just start shouting more loudly. Public discourse becomes course, unreflective, harsh, and when you don’t get your way, it becomes shrill. You set out to destroy your political enemies, because power is the way to win an argument. Obviously, people are going to be turned off by this.

As Christians, we should be the first to recognize that ideology—substituting human schemes for revealed truth—is the enemy of the Gospel, and the enemy of historic conservatism: conservatism not as political ideology, but as a respect for tradition, custom, a reliance upon the past, a belief in natural law and the religious underpinnings for society.

Well, how do you change a culture? You change it one person at a time. We start explaining to our neighbors why things are happening the way they are, why they are disillusioned with politics. We have a special obligation to talk about how the death of truth and the secularizing of America are paralyzing the political process, and we had better get busy and make our case quickly, because the way we are going, America could become ungovernable.

The key to global warming

According to Greenie Watch:

THE ANTARCTIC IS THE KEY TO SEA-LEVEL RISE, 8-6-05

From CO2 Science Magazine, 15 June 2005

In an important new paper, Davis et al. (2005) analyze the elevation change (dH) of over 8.5 million km2 of the grounded Antarctic ice sheet interior (~70% of the total ice-sheet area) using ~347 million dH measurements derived from ERS-1 and ERS-2 ice-mode satellite radar altimeter data (with coverage extending to 81.6oS) for the period 1992 to 2003, after which they compare the observed elevation changes of ~1500 1o x 2o (latitude x longitude) regions, 22 major drainage basins, Berkner Island, West and East Antarctica, and the entire region of coverage (ROC) to estimates of concomitant snowfall derived from meteorological models.

The primary result of this exercise revealed, in the words of the five scientists who conducted the work, that "the vast majority of regions in East Antarctica are thickening, especially in the interior, while regions in West Antarctica exhibit both strong thickening and thinning trends." At the basin scale, as they continue, "dH/dt values range from 0 to +6 cm/year for East Antarctica, while there is substantial spatial variability in West Antarctica with dH/dt values ranging from -10 to +19 cm/year." Overall, they report that the East Antarctic ice sheet interior within the ROC is thickening at a rate of 1.8 - 0.3 cm/year, while that of the West Antarctic ice sheet interior is thinning at a rate of 0.9 - 0.3 cm/year. For the entire ROC, the 5:1 ratio of East to West Antarctic area coverage "causes slight thickening overall at the rate of 1.4 - 0.3 cm/year."

[...] There are many implications of these various observations that remain to be determined. At this point in time, however, we can safely conclude that the climate-alarmist claim of dramatic global flooding of earth's coastal areas in response to the melting of polar ice due to global warming has been thoroughly discredited, for during the period of time that they claim the planet experienced the warmest temperatures of the past two millennia, Antarctica experienced a net buildup of ice that actually removed water from earth's seas.

Then:

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists.

Actually the environmental extremists are eco-imperialists.

When I asked the author of Greenie Watch in an email why the right only seems to focus on green extremism (not the positives) while their own party in question seems to be carrying out their own form of extremism, his reply was:

I note on my Greenie Watch blog that I support things that DO help the environment but most that can reasonably be done in that direction does get done anyway. Everyone wants a nice environment.

Most Greenie fads do NOT help the environmernt (e.g. the global warming panic) and unfortunately it is only the conservatives who oppose the hare-brained element.

Again, correct as far as it will go, but I was hoping for something along the lines that would disprove Bush's record or delve into how green extremism is so overwhelmingly in the majority. Instead I hope to in the coming days and weeks focus on a new column titled "Opponents of the Environment," which hopefully will provide some new findings that have not already been discussed thoroughly.

Global warmings whirlwind

Philip A. Cooney resigns

A former lawyer and lobbyist with the American Petroleum Institute, the main lobbying group for the oil industry, Mr. Cooney has no scientific training.

Replies:

It'll be a good day when studies funded by “pro-environment” groups are given the same scrutiny as those funded by big business. The former’s research and shenanigans are as bad if not worse than the latters. Since I have done a 180 as a result of extensive research, and come to realize that the theory of (human induced) global warming is weak to say the least, it should therefore be obvious which side I view as the worst offender.

FYI, in light of the recent slew of pro-global warming misinformation in the press, I posted this morning Part I of my attempt to set the record straight on the global warming “consensus” falsehood.

Again, "attempting to set the record straight on global warming" has been tried to the point I'm not sure anyone can accurately tell it like it is. By this time there is too much money and politics to accurately come to a truth. As a conservationist/environmentalist, I've decided this is a mute point which has been lassoed by agendas.

However, this person makes a good point by saying environmentalists are not under the same radar as big business, but then either doesn't acknowledge or misses that "Mr. Cooney has no scientific training." It's a point that trumps itself because usually if you want to convey to the public your pro-environmental record, you hire people with scientific experience, not ones without experience, or atleast do a better job of faking it.

Then this author makes some powerful points on the falsehood of global warming here.

But wait a minute (comments on the article):

Sounds like a 'deja vu' of the 2003 Steven McIntyre paper published by the same journal that is going to publish the unnamed Harvard scientists study.

Responses to Steven McIntyre article in Energy and Environment

Prepared by the Union of Concerned Scientists, October 28, 2003

1. The journal Energy & Environment is not a science journal and does not follow standard practices of scientific peer review. The journal has the explicitly political agenda to be “a forum for sceptical analyses of ‘global warming.’”

2. The author of the paper, Steven McIntyre, has no prior track record of research on climate issues or any record of training in this field.

3. The paper is said to be a direct criticism of Michael Mann, et al's paper "Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations” published in the mainstream climate research journal, Geophysical Research Letters in1999. In stark contrast to standard peer review practices, neither the authors of this study nor any leading paleoclimate scientists were asked to review Mr. McIntyre’s paper.

4. Contrary to this un-peer reviewed paper in a non-scientific journal, a number of studies have been published over the last several years by independent scientists using different data sources and methodologies replicating the basic finding that the late 20th century Northern Hemisphere average temperatures are anomalous in the context of the past 1000 years.

Bradley and coworkers in the prestigious journal “Science” published the most recent study coming to this conclusion only a couple weeks ago. The list of recent studies supporting this conclusion includes, but is not limited to, the following:

Bauer, E., M. Claussen, and V. Brovkin, Assessing climate forcings of the earth system for the past millennium, Geophys. Res. Lett., 30 (6), doi: 10.1029/2002GL016639, 2003.

Bradley, R.S., M.K Hughes and H.F. Diaz., Climate in Medieval Time. Science, 302, 404-405, 2003.

Briffa, K.R., T.J. Osborn, F.H. Schweingruber, I.C. Harris, P.D. Jones, S.G. Shiyatov, S.G. and E.A. Vaganov, Low-frequency temperature variations from a northern tree-ring density network. J. Geophys. Res., 106, 2929-2941, 2001.

Crowley, T.J., Causes of Climate Change over the Past 1000 Years, Science, 289, 270-277, 2000.

Crowley, T.J., and T. Lowery, How Warm Was the Medieval Warm Period?, Ambio, 29, 51-54, 2000.

Folland, C.K., T.R. Karl, J.R. Christy, R.A. Clarke, G.V. Gruza, J. Jouzel, M.E. Mann, J. Oerlemans, M.J. Salinger, S.-W. Wang, Observed Climate Variability and Change, in Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, edited by J.T. Houghton et al.., pp. 99–181, Cambridge Univ. Press, New York, 2001.

Gerber, S., F. Joos, P. Brügger, T. F. Stocker, M. E. Mann, S. Sitch, and M. Scholze, Constraining temperature variations over the last millennium by comparing simulated and observed atmospheric CO2, Climate Dynamics, 20, 281-299, 2003.

Hegerl, G.C., T.J. Crowley, S.K. Baum, K-Y. Kim, and W. T. Hyde, Detection of volcanic, solar and greenhouse gas signals in paleo-reconstructions of Northern Hemispheric temperature. Geophys. Res. Lett., 30 (5), doi: 10.1029/2002GL016635, 2003.

Jones, P.D., K.R. Briffa, T.P. Barnett and S.F.B. Tett, High-resolution palaeoclimatic records for the last millennium: Integration, interpretation and comparison with General Circulation Model control run temperatures, Holocene, 8, 455-471, 1998.

Jones, P.D., M. New, D.E. Parker, S. Martin, and I.G. Rigor, Surface air temperature and its changes over the past 150 years, Reviews of Geophysics, 37, 173-199, 1999.

Jones, P.D., T.J. Osborn, and K.R. Briffa, The Evolution of Climate Over the Last Millennium, Science, 292, 662-667, 2001.

Mann, M.E., Jones, P.D., Global surface temperature over the past two millennia, Geophysical Research Letters, 30 (15), 1820, doi: 10.1029/2003GL017814, 2003.

Mann, M.E., Ammann, C.M., Bradley, R.S., Briffa, K.R., Crowley, T.J., Hughes, M.K., Jones, P.D., Oppenheimer, M., Osborn, T.J., Overpeck, J.T., Rutherford, S., Trenberth, K.E., Wigley, T.M.L., On Past Temperatures and Anomalous Late 20th Century Warmth, Eos, 84, 256-258, 2003.

This article and opinion piece assert that the famous “hockey stick” diagram of recent rapid global warming (see attached) is incorrect. Both the USA Today op-ed by Schulz and the Energy and Environment (UK) article by McIntyre and McKitrick are false, misleading and biased. Neither contradicts the wealth of evidence that late 20th century Northern Hemisphere warmth is unprecedented in at least the past six centuries (and likely much longer).

· The Falsehood: The USA Today op-ed by Schulz contains the accusation that Dr. Michael Mann, lead author of the scientifically peer-reviewed articles on 20th century warming, “never made his data available online nor did many of the earlier researchers whose data Mann relied upon for his research. That by itself raises questions about the U.N. climate-change panel's scientific process.”

· The Fact: The data used by Mann and colleagues have been in the public domain for nearly two years, at the readily accessible website: ftp://holocene.evsc.virginia.edu/pub/MBH98/.

· The Misleading Statement: McIntyre & McKitrick say that they re-examined the Mann et al data and find the conclusions about warming to be inaccurate.

· The Fact: McIntyre and McKitrick – neither of whom is a scientist – did not re-examine Mann’s data. They analyzed jumbled datasets that combined several columns of figures – like trying to calculate a single grocery store receipt by adding data from five other cash registers. They then applied flawed methodologies to reach a result wildly at odds with the overwhelming weight of peer-reviewed science. Technically competent paleoclimatologists might have realized their errors – but neither author is a scientist, nor was the article peer-reviewed by any of the world’s leading climatologists. McKitrick is a long-time climate skeptic, and McIntyre’s principal qualification, according to his bio, is his thirty years working in the mining industry.

· The Unrevealed Biases: Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, the editor of "Energy and Environment", has co-authored numerous pieces with fossil fuel industry-financed and/or industry-affiliated climate skeptics. By her own assertion, Ms. Boehmer-Christiansen follows a political agenda, rather than scientific standards of peer review.[1] Says Boehmer-Christiansen, who condemns the climate treaty as “unnecessary, unfair and self-interested,” "I'm following my political agenda -- a bit, anyway…isn't that the right of the editor?"

· TechCentralStation is financed in part by Exxon-Mobil Corporation.

(Usually to have credibility on the environment, one must be associated with similar organizations. -Bouncie)

For more information on how to get the real story from the world’s leading paleoclimatologists, contact Annie Petsonk at Environmental Defense at 202-365-3237.

[1] R. Monastersky, Chronicle of Higher Education, "Storm Brews Over Global Warming" (Sept. 5, 2003).

If anyone would care to share their ideas on this subject, please do. I've just about given up and need some refreshing from new sources.

Kerry's chances in '08 sinking

The Moderate says "Republicans Fare Better in '08."

A majority of Americans say they have favorable views of Republican and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. On the other hand, more Americans view Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., unfavorably than favorably, and his ratings have grown more negative since his loss to George W. Bush in last fall's presidential election. The trial heat matchups show the two possible Republican candidates holding an edge over the two Democratic candidates among registered voters.

Of the four, Giuliani is rated most positively, with 64% of Americans saying they have a favorable opinion of him and only 19% with an unfavorable opinion. Clinton (53%) and McCain (51%) have similar favorable ratings, although Clinton is the much better-known figure (only 4% do not have an opinion of her, compared with 27% for McCain). Clinton's unfavorable ratings (43%) are nearly twice as high as McCain's (22%).

Attempting to put an end to the Bush/Kerry military records

Evidence came out which clearly, if indirectly, proved that John F. Kerry was dishonorably discharged from the US military. Briefly, Democrat president Jimmy Carter ordered a panel of officers to examine his discharge; this is only necessary for a veteran with a "less-than-honorable" discharge. On a side note, Kerry only released his military records after the 2004 election. Bush released his long before the election.

This quote from an undisclosed source suggests once again for me the real problems of the legitimacy of two party's squabbling over an issue where neither can possibly win on the basis neither candidate in the '04 elections had a clear cut stellar record. You see, it doesn't matter how awful we are on a subject. It doesn't matter the average person hearing both sides of the issue doesn't have any trust for either candidate. It only matters we focus on what the others doing. The two-party system has fallen, if not always, to a point where the party's don't even know their voters.

I fully admit these are sketchy schemes by the DNP to hide Kerry's record. Heck, the RNP was in the right for attacking Kerry's record after the DNP attacked Bush's record without considering their own candidates questionable past. But does any of this diffuse Bush's sketchy military record? No! By retaliating, the RNP brought themselves back up to a stalemate postion where both party's candidate has a sketchy record. This issue during the '04 election is a mute point. If this was not the case, then one would have clearly had an exemplary and proven record while the other a coward.

Tom Paine's investigation shows Bush's record was absent from 1972-73. This diatribe needs to be put to rest once and for all. Jeez...

The truth about Bush's military record

In his annual evaluation report, Bush's two supervising officers, Lieutenant Colonel William D. Harris Jr. and Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian, made it clear that Bush had "not been observed at" his Texas unit "during the period of report" -- the twelve month period from May 1972 through the end of April 1973.

In the comments section of this evaluation report Lieutenant Colonel Harris notes that Bush had "cleared this base on 15 May 1972, and has been performing equivalent training in a non flying role with the 187th Tac Recon Gp at Dannelly ANG Base, Alabama" (the Air National Guard Tactical Reconnaissance Group at Dannelly Air Force Base near Montgomery, Alabama).

This was incorrect. Bush didn't apply for duty at Dannelly Air Force Base until September 1972. From May until September he was in limbo, his temporary orders having been rejected. And when his orders to appear at Dannelly came through he still didn't appear. Although his instructions clearly directed Bush to report to Lieutenant Colonel William Turnipseed on the dates of "7-8 October 0730-1600, and 4-5 November 0730-1600," he never did. In interviews conducted with the Boston Globe earlier this year, both General Turnipseed and his former administration officer, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Lott, said that Bush never put in an appearance.

Then:

In this official summary of Bush's military service, I found something that was not mentioned in Bush's records from the National Guard Bureau in Arlington, Virginia. When Bush enlisted his commitment ran until May 26, 1974. This was the separation date shown on all documents as late as October 1973, when Bush was transferred to the inactive reserves at Denver, Colorado. But the date of final separation shown on the official summary from Denver, is November 21, 1974. The ARPC had tacked an extra six months on to Bush's commitment.

Bush may have finally "made-up" his missed days. But he did so not by attending drills -- in fact he never attended drills again after he enrolled at Harvard. Instead, he had his name added to the roster of a paper unit in Denver, Colorado, a paper unit where he had no responsibility to show up and do a job.

AWOL Bush has another take on not only Bush's record with side-by-side comparison of the two candidates, noting that nothing is mentioned of the 'Veterans against Kerry' movement.

Deciphering "better" and "less worse" for the undecided voters

The Perfect Storm

THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA is often inconsistent in covering stories. They gave us wall-to-wall coverage when George W. Bush's National Guard service came under scrutiny, but suddenly made themselves scarce when over two hundred Vietnam veterans pointed out hole after hole in John Kerry's service narrative. When Rush Limbaugh ran into legal problems surrounding his addiction to painkillers, we heard breathless updates on subpoenas and court orders, but when Eason Jordan revealed his predilection to slandering the U.S. military, again the press pulled a disappearing act.

This column reeks of liberal news bias, and the paragraph above highlights the two-party systems downfall into its proverbial cat-and-mouse game.

The supposed statistics on whom people vote for has been in the past measured by 25 percent of the vote going to the Democrats, 25 percent going to the Republicans, and 50 percent is still the middle or undecided voter. I'm sure those numbers are not accurate but are nonetheless being used as a guide.

The undecided voter is so because they are confused by the mass amount of every day indictments one party bestowes onto the other. The voter, let alone the undecided voter, has cynicism for politics in general. There can be much good to politics, obviously, but the truth is people have cynicism because politics built up its dirty reputation up by itself by lying, corruption, making empty promises, and so on. As a customer service slogan at a grocery store once said in so many words, 'It takes a long time to build up a customers trust with excellent customer service, but just a second to lose it with poor service.' This is evident in peoples mistrust of politicians.

It is why I propose for now on all politics alike mute topics where both party's candidates appear to have questionable military pasts. These back-and-forth attacks do nothing for the undecided voter because they just push themselves further into oblivion. Rather, it wouldn't be so bad if in fact Democrats/Republicans are so much better on most issues than the other, then they should be promoting those issues they have a rock solid foundation to fall back on. Even better, both party's, if they are so much better than the other, won't be afraid to highlight their pros and cons. Because, after all, if they are that much better than the opposing, they will have no confidence issues because their pros will heavily outweigh the cons. I mean, it's all about campaigning to the undecided voter, right?

The unfortunate reality is neither movement has any intentions of giving even one iota to the other party. It would mean they are acknowledging the other has a point -- and we wouldn't want to do that! Politicans and bloggers alike want to win and only win. They want nearly as much as the two opposing sides want at a planning commission. (Minnesota Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty should be applauded for suggesting his capital members, for once, get something accomplished by going into a "lock down" at a military barracks because he recognises with two sides there needs to be some middle agreement.) The people in general need to hear the truth: Politics isn't about whose "better." It is about whose "less worse." The choice is yours, but the cynical undecided voter (and for good reason) doesn't want to hear the "We're the good guys, they're the bad guys!" Most want to make an informed choice in voting for the lesser of two corruptions, and then move back into whatever their life interests are, particularly like raising a family. The rest of the yo-yo political spiel just confuses them and makes them more of an undecided voter.