The dick has twittered

No jizm trail on a blue velvet dress, just a grey bulge:  it's like reading a Rorschach blot

Maybe, someday, better, more informed heads may prevail and the real significance of the Anthony Weiner business will be examined in terms of what actually happened and in context.

The Weiner affair is about sex and no one had sex. Or came close to it.  That we know of.  

The new media has intruded upon human communication in ways that merge real life and virtual life.  It has also made a generational shift in terms of who sets the customs and standards of society.  That shift, however, has been in motion for some time.

Adolescent culture has become dominant.  It became so when businesses realized that young people comprise a huge market force.  It began when the music business focused on adolescents in the kind of music it sold, and that expanded to entertainment, particularly the movie business.  Every summer we experience a weekly release of films that aspire to be blockbusters, films that are so popular to weekend movie-goers that they return millions and millions of dollars above their production costs.   Adolescents, and people of that mental age, comprise the largest part of those weekend audiences.  So the movies are created to appeal to their tastes.  As is the music, now issued through iTunes and other MP3 media sources.  And the clothing industry focuses on teen-devised fashion as a major component of its design and production. 

Mobile phones and the other computerized communications devices have also been designed to meet the interests of adolescents.  It is hard to imagine  teenagers without  mobile devices held to their ears.  Teens dominate the social media.  They were the first to appear in pubescent nudity on web cams.  They invented what we call "sexting" and the use of mobile phones and their applications for implementing their social divisions and exclusions, which includes the electronic forms of bullying.  Teen society reverts to the social instincts of the dog pack, the chicken flock, the cow herd.  It is primitive.  It is brutal.  It is motivated by the quest for status and power.  It is not moderated by those concepts of equality and justice that are the province of the better angels in human nature.  Those are the concepts of examined experience and maturity and education.  

 Anthony Weiner got caught up in the social media by conforming to the customs and behavioral practices common among our children.  He flirted as adults in real life do at cocktail parties, and then dismiss the suggestive talk as the work of their libations.   He apparently enjoyed the titillation of corresponding with women in ways that verged into sexual innuendo.   The factor in flirting through the social media that is seldom present at cocktail parties is that it leaves a textual-sexual and image record.  That record, when found, can be used as ammunition in the malevolent warfare we now accept as political discourse.  Weiner's indiscretions became the dominant focus of political propaganda writers and the media.

An often cited charge among Weiner's exchanges with women is with a 17-year-old girl from Delaware.The texts show no sexually suggestive messages, but rather an adult politician cultivating a potential supporter by using what he apparently regarded as a teen-hip level of communicating.  Still, his messages to the young Twitter follower are presented as suspect because of the nature of the messages he made with five other women.  


The significance of that focus on the young Delaware woman is how easily the media and the public can be led into a salacious frenzy through imposing their obsessive preoccupations onto banal exchanges.  Weiner's plight says as much, if not more, about the state of our culture as it does about Weiner's foolery.  

Weiner's serious offense was that he lied so flagrantly to the nation and to his leadership. That calls into question any trust placed in him.  

Now Weiner has announced his resignation and the media, Congress, and the public can get back to the serious business of hunting down another wienie to satisfy the quest for titillation and indignation.  


When Isaiah  said a child shall lead them, he probably did not mean that we would adopt childish, Lord-of-the-Flies society as the model for adults.  But it has come to pass. 

Paul had a different take in his letter to the Corinthians:  "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned as child;  when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways."  But that is not the American way. 

Why there won't be good jobs in America

The jobless rate is a political issue first, an economic one second.  The facts show that the political choices Americans have made are what has created a near-unsolvable job situation.  Americans have chosen to support corporations over working people.  Many of the jobs America is missing have been outsourced.  

The facts are contained in this chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics which shows the share of the national income earned by working people:

Workers' share of the national income has been in a state of constant decline for ten years.

Compare the rapid sinking of workers share of income with corporate profit earnings:  

In the same ten years that workers' share of income have fallen, corporate profits have hit record levels.

 There are not jobs because paying people to work interferes with record profits.  It's the way of the current version of the capitalistic system. 

Becoming a conservative convert; giving up on democracy

David Mamet, playwright, professed conservative

Conservative circles are doing much crowing because America's premier playwright--who is also a screenwriter, director, producer, and essayist--has made a noisy conversion to conservatism.  In 2008, Pulitzer-winner David Mamet wrote  an essay in Village Voice titled "Why I Am No  Longer 'A Brain-Dead Liberal.'"  This spring he published a book The Secret Knowledge:  On the Dismantling of America Culture.  Conservative propagandists are seizing on Mamet's loud proclamations as a kind of proof that the conservative attitude has been right all along.  

They could not have read Mamet's rationalizations for his conversion from a liberal by context and habit to conservatism.  That  is, unless the neo-conservatives are ready to deny liberty, equality, and justice as part of their belief system.  In the "Brain-Dead Liberal" essay Mamet explains his change of mind from liberal orthodoxy to conservative orthodoxy:

I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

He further  makes this observation:

I'd observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.
 

He concludes:

For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.

... people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.

His new book is a series of essays that expand on these idea, not with argument, but with the emphatic recitation of neo-conservative cliches on liberal education, the New Deal, Al Sharpton, global warming, "Obamacare,"  the bailout of the auto industry, and the usual resentment and whining about taxes.  

I cannot offer a legitimate review of the book because I have not read all of it.  I put it down and gave it away because of statements like this:  “The Left insisted that we abandon, in 1973, a war we had just won in Vietnam…”   If I want to read falsehoods, I will choose fiction rather than a political polemic which falsifies events in history I have lived through.  


I have taught Mamet's work  in American drama courses.  A distinguishing aspect of his drama is his ability to give incisive portrayals of the way "lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals" dominate so much of human life.  His Pulitzer-winning Glengarry Glen Ross is a deep probing of the values of the "greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt" as it operates in American business.  (The film version, adapted by Mamet, is a powerhouse featuring actors Al Pacino Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, Kevin Spacey and Jonathan Pryce.)  It explores two days in the lives of four real estate salesmen who are told that two of them will be fired and the two who remain will be those who sell the most in a real estate development called Glengarry Glen Ross.  A sleazy office manager, has a list of leads, who he parcels out according to his  own power-hungry whims.  As an act of revenge, some of the salesmen conspired to steal the list of leads and sell them to a competitor real estate firm.   The drama explores the social psychology that motivated the real estate bubble which underlies the Great Recession we are struggling to climb out of.




D.H Lawrence, the English novelist who took up residency in New Mexico, once advised critical readers to trust the tale of writers not the teller.   In Mamet's case, this seems advisable.  What he portrays in his writing, which actor Jack Lemmon summarized as how "the morals and ethics are in America and how they have eroded in the quest for success," lends an insidious element to his contention that the market forces are superior to any government intervention.  When he states in his "Brain-Dead" essay that  "I began to question my hatred for "the Corporations"—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live," he is making an admission that the material comforts and conveniences produced by human predation trump any moral or ethical considerations for him in the long the run. 



Mamet's reasons for his embrace of neo-conservatism are at once a definition of its premise and the admission of a moral defeat.  He contends that human nature is essentially perfidious, that nature cannot be surmounted, and so he accepts it as the determinant rule of human life.  Those lofty aspirations in America's founding documents--liberty, equality, and justice--are superfluous and irrelevant to the controlling realities of human nature. Democracy, rule by the people, is ultimately ruled by the contending forces of  greed, lust, duplicity, and corruption.

As one of America's most prominent literary figures, Mamet may well define contemporary America with more reality and precision than all the hopeless aspiration striving for true liberty, equality, and justice.  His dismissal of government intervention in the affairs of mankind, however, is done in the face of some salient events in American and human history.  Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, Eisenhower's ordering troops into Little Rock, Kennedy's plan to reach the moon, Lyndon Johnson's signing of the Civil Rights Act are milestones in the quest for liberty, equality, and justice.  Mamet's statements relinquish the progressive motive to a corporate-run world that supplies a lot of fraud and oppression along with what it thinks is neat stuff.

David Mamet has done something that is deadly for artists and teachers to do.  He has deferred to the small-minded, petty, and mindless imagery of partisan politics.  Artists and teachers may form political viewpoints from their examinations of life, but when they allow the trite and unexamined expressions of attitude to become their means of thought and expression, they betray their talents and their work.  Mamet has done just that.  I will continue to admire, read, watch, and teach his dramatic writing, but, as in this case, I won't waste time with his partisan hackery.  

Neo-conservatives may celebrate Mamet's vision of America; others who believe that liberty, equality, and justice are worthwhile pursuits will just have to pursue them in other places.    


Read more about David Mamet.

*'Jesus wants me for a douchebag'*

While teaching journalism courses and advising publications, I was still teaching the dangers of libel as covered in text books and professional journals, but the rules were changing.  They were changing not by revisions of applicable laws, but because of a changes in the way those laws were regarded by the courts and by custom.

I practiced journalism in a time when the rules were simple:  if you libeled someone, you and your publication would pay heavily in damages for doing so.  If the facts stated were untrue and potentially damaging, the damage was presumed.  The victim did not have to prove damage.  The fact that something damaging was said or published and was not true was sufficient to provide recompense to the person defamed.  And the defamed did not have to show that the damage had hurt them in their occupations; if it defamed them socially, the damage was presumed inflicted.


I and my journalistic colleagues spent a prodigious amount of time insuring that nothing libelous ever made it into print.  If we had information about a person that was damaging but true, we had to make sure of our facts and literally build a court case in support of them, should they be challenged. The press had two responsibilities that defined the matter of libel:   it took serious its responsibility to monitor acts by officials and others that affected the public, and  it worked prodigiously to report those acts; it took just as seriously its responsibility not to unfairly and falsely tarnish or destroy the reputation of any individual.


Among writers, editors, teachers, and other students of the language, keeping the integrity of the word was a sacred calling.  Students of language understood that free speech had to be practiced with a commensurate responsibility to keep speech free of malignancies that decay and destroy language and the trust in it as a constructive tool.  


That reverence for careful and responsible use of language has been severely diminished by the new media.  Blogs, their comments, and discussion boards in general show the severe deterioration and state of decadence to which language can be reduced.  Now people feel free to utter any malicious, nasty, ignorant, and scurrilous thing that pops into their minds.  The new media is an eternal playground on which people give in to their infantile and malevolent urges to bully and malign, and that playground defines a part of the culture that shapes much of current society and politics.  People are not afraid to appear stupid and mean anymore and, in fact, take great pride and pleasure in displaying those characteristics.  Part of this is because of the serious decline of language arts education, which is really in a much more deplorable state than the U.S. lag in math and science when compared with other developed countries in the world.  Juvenile bullying is regarded as witty repartee, and the most uninformed, ill-formed opinion is regarded by its utterer as a jewel of free speech when in reality is merely mental fecal spatter on face of discourse.  Free speech is valuable, but not all free speech has value.

An example of the decline of rhetoric into the detritus of decay is part of a political campaign in Rapid City.  Flyers which have been produced and distributed against city council candidate Ritchie Nordstrom have been covered by Cory Heidelberger at Madville Times and Kevin Woster at the Rapid City Journal.  The mailing is the work of Family Matters PAC, a group which claims to uphold Christian family values.  The only thing remotely Christian in the mailings is that they perversely refute the commandment not to bear false witness.   Their  only purpose is to make false and defamatory representations about the council candidate.  


The situation could be called ironic if it were not so decadently perverse.  People use a Christian posture to preach a theology of hate, intolerance, and falsehood.  They allege that candidate Nordstrom's support of equal rights for all people comprises "a radical homosexual agenda."  The appeal of these flyers to gay haters is of precisely the same appeal of the KKK to the anti-Semitic and anti-racial-minority hatreds harbored by some people.  It is the same appeal the Nazis used to mount their pogrom against the Jews. 



And, like some of those Nazis, they claim their defamation rises from a Christian motive. The only relationship the pink flyer campaign has to Christian principle is in its flouting of the commandment not to bear false witness.  The perpetrators of the flyer baptize themselves by  immersion in falseness.

 As it turns out, Ritchie Nordstrom received the largest number of votes in his district and is headed for a runoff election.

What goes on in Rapid City is a symptom of a very serious national malaise of the soul.  People of a certain political strain seem most vulnerable to it.  And one of the most prolific vectors that spreads disease of mind and soul is the nightly talk radio show Coast To Coast AM, hosted by George Noory.  Noory presents an unctuous front and a smarmy claim that the show, which obsesses on paranormal kookery, extra-terrestial aliens, and every conspiracy theory that dementia can dream up, is the only medium that concerns itself with truth.  


An example of the show's truth-telling is one of its regular visitors, Jerome Corsi who was a co-author of the book that Swift-boated John Kerry by making up falsehoods about his war record in Vietnam.  Among Corsi's exercises in truth-telling are these observations:

• on Islam: "a worthless, dangerous Satanic religion"
• on Catholicism: "Boy buggering in both Islam and Catholicism is okay with the Pope as long as it isn't reported by the liberal press"
• on Muslims: "RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters -- it all goes together"
• on "John F*ing Commie Kerry": "After he married TerRAHsa, didn't John Kerry begin practicing Judiasm? He also has paternal grandparents that were Jewish. What religion is John Kerry?"
• on Senator "FAT HOG" Clinton: "Anybody ask why HELLary couldn't keep BJ Bill satisfied? Not lesbo or anything, is she?"

The latest truth pursued by Corsi is Obama's false birth certificate.  His latest book is  Where's the Birth Certificate?: The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President.  The book was released after Obama produced his original birth certificate.  Corsi appeared on Coast To Coast AM last week claiming that he can prove the certificate is a forgery.  The claims of forgery are refuted by experts on the scanning of documents.  But one of the claims of forgery is that the official physician who signed the certificate put a smiley face by his signature.  Such claims send Noory into an ecstasy of praise has he lauds the truth-telling that takes place on his show.  He brings up the general disrepute that Corsi is held in by journalists, but then asserts that Corsi is just another journalist reporting what he finds in the online news publication WorldNet.Com,  which is one of the more extreme right-wing propaganda sites that publishes the character assassination of the more extreme and unbalanced wingnut hacks.  


When Corsi was finished with his unsupported and largely refuted claims on Coast To Coast, the next guest was a Dr. Dan Horowitz who came on to claim that the E. coli epidemic in Germany and other countries in Europe was a deliberate attack of biological warfare with a strain of bacteria that was designed somewhere for the purpose of killing off people to reduce the world population.  He said, "The kidney complications and hemorrhagic nature of this new strain of E. coli is suspicious-- it looks like a lab-created mutation, similar to how Ebola works. This seems to smack of the globalists' depopulation agenda," he said, adding that  military experiments have used E. coli as a weapon.

Then this week, Noory had on another conspiracy theorist who made the same claim.  His name is Steve Quayle who stated, "This is a specific biowarfare agent that has been designed to do...one thing well, and that's kill people." The strain, he  said, could perhaps be traced to a laboratory dealing with antibiotic resistance, and may be related to a scheme against natural foods. 



While Horowitz and Quayle depart from the personal defamation and fabrications make by Corsi against Obama, their attempts to incite fear and hatred against some unknown group  has the same intention.  These kind of messages go out from Coast To Coast every night on more than 500 radio stations to reach 4.5 million listeners.  It broadcasts misinformation in the guise of entertainment and discussion.  Unlike cable television prattle shows, it offers no discussion, however, that refutes or criticizes the contentions which often spin off into pure insanity.


Just as the libelers in Rapid City hope to gain power and influence by making false allegations against individuals and obtaining power through fear, the purveyors of preposterous conspiracy theories damage the trust that people rely upon for language to be a constructive medium.  Instead, language becomes a vector of the cancer of hatred, fear, and suspicion.  


And the defamers and spreaders of false rumors are always called upon by some god or motive of high purpose to unleash their hatred and fear.  They provide a portent of what is to come if their influence on the media and our educational institutions is not reined in. 

I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Weiner---

anything but an Anthony.

The most disturbing but significant aspect of the Weiner twittering is the obsessive fixation of the news media.  American journalism has gone tabloid, apparently under the assumption that a fixation on the seamy and lurid is what America wants above all else.  The incident needs examination and coverage in the form of periodic updates, but to fill the 24-hour news cycles for four or five days makes the problems that gave Weiner the urge to photograph and transmit erectile imagery seem insignificant and trivial.  That the news media would put so much effort and emphasis on an online, clothed whinky-doodle episode should be of much more concern of those who examine the state of the nation.  The nation's preoccupations with the Weiner episode is much more serious and alarming than the incident itself.


What Weiner did has become commonplace among a large constituency of society.  The social media and the technology which enables it is the special province of juveniles and adults who choose to act as juveniles.  The new media has changed the way people establish relationships with each other. As a Washington Post article points out, people are finding that virtual relationships result in some dire realities.   Thought and reasoning have been displaced by impulse.  We live in an uncerebral society.  A highly successful and  respected high school counselor I knew often pointed out to adults that the thing one had to remember about kids is that they can't think beyond lunch.  The new media has made many adults as impulsive and short-sighted as children.

Do not, however, blame the technology.  It only facilitates a human impulse that many so-called adults harbor.   The real problem with contemporary society is that rather than mature, experienced, and thoughtful adults setting the social parameters for children, kids have set the patterns of behavior and social interaction among for the adults.  We are hung up on high school, and the social and sexual furor that runs through adolescence.  

A number of commentators have suggested that Anthony Weiner fell victim to a deep mental issue that needs psychiatric examination.  The fact is that Weiner engaged the social media in a manner that is commonplace among high school kids.  Like many adults, he relived adolescence in his virtual life.  


After World War II, our culture moved into its obsession with youth.  Youth became a market that drives our entertainment, our popular culture, and our technology.  The quest for young bodies and unfettered, impulsive minds is a market that comprises a huge part of our economy.  Anthony Weiner is merely a very visible emanation of the youth cult, which might well define our culture at this point.  The quest for youth ends up with idiocy. 


The American high school is the great transformative engine in our culture.  It gives children the educational and social basis for becoming productive and fulfilled adults.  But education takes an increasingly diminished role in the high school experience for many.  Parents relive their adolescence through their kids, rather than prepare their kids to become adults who can function effectively and responsibly.  Parents and teachers emulate the society of the kids, rather than kids striving to become adults.  Alexandra Robbins, author of the book The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth visited seven high schools to analyze what life was really like for adolescent students.  She found that even teachers were emulating juvenile society:

...the adults who are supposed to be modeling social behavior for students are in some cases openly forming their own cliques, with names. That blew my mind. Even schools where they're paying thousands of dollars to sponsor anti-bullying programs and trying to ease social tension among the student body -- these same schools have teacher clique issues that they're not addressing. There was one teacher clique called Teachers Against Dumbasses.

I first became aware of the hold that adolescence has on adults through two women I knew quite well.  They were both mothers of big families, and talked often of their daughters.  One woman was pursuing advanced degrees in adult education and the other was in a Ph.D. program in American studies.  One taught in an adult education program for which I was a consulted, and the other taught courses in the college department where I worked.  And both were in clear competition with their own daughters.  When their daughters excelled in some academic enterprise, the women tried to outdo them.  


They were greatly talented women, but seemed trapped by trying to relive adolescence to find some satisfactions that they seem to have missed the first time around.  But in both cases, as they approached full middle age, their talents were compromised by personality issues that affected their relationships with other adults and their daughters.  Their attempts to regress into youth ended in broken maturity.  

Anthony Weiner with his wife Huma Adebin.

Anthony Weiner seems to have been caught up in a kind of adolescent social-sexual frenzy.  But in the fixation on Weiner and his twitters and his desperate lying, the nation's media and its audience seems to be caught in that frenzy even more. 













http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/weiner-and-the-modern-e-ffair/2011/06/07/AGnnjPLH_story.html?hpid=z1

Is child porn the new Salem witch hunt?

All I know about child porn comes from the term itself. I assume it is pornography that involves children. Just what parameters of decency it violates that make it such an egregious crime are matters that I cannot imagine. Furthermore, I have no idea where one would go to find it. And I don't plan to search. Having a search record on one's computer is extremely dangerous. People are convicted to prison constantly for having child pornography on their computers.

That circumstance is what sets off my alarm. The statute on child pornography is quite broad. It defines child pornography as the depiction of any prohibited sexual act with a child. It also has a number of mandates requiring people who might deal with photography films, videos, and computers to report any instances where they find child pornography on media they handle in the course of their businesses. I am confounded by how possession of some depiction of a pornographic act with a child can be conflated into a major crime. If the person who is alleged to have such a depiction but has not acted out any such acts, I ask how the absence of an anti-social act but mere possession can result in a harsh prison sentence and a record of sexual offense.

What brings this to mind is a story in the Rapid City Journal about a 19-year-old who was sentenced to180 days in prison and put on probation for seven years for having child pornography on his computer. He plead guilty to one count which prosecutors said was very disturbing, and his defense lawyer said he acknowledged he was wrong to download the depiction. He was 18 when arrested. No information was contained in the story about who found the depiction and turned him in. So, we readers of this report are given no indication of why he underwent such a harsh prosecution and sentence. What seems to be a mental health issue is regarded as a crime that puts a teenager in prison for six months and puts him on probation for seven years. Any chance he has to build a constructive life is pretty well destroyed by a prison record and being on probation until he is 26. I don't grasp the magnitude of the offense or why he is sentenced to severe punishment rather than a program of rehabilitation. Nor do I understand the quality of justice demonstrated by the prosecution and the defense.

There are many compelling reasons why I have become suspicious and skeptical about child pornography charges. One of them regards a Sioux Falls attorney who was charged with possession and distribution of child pornography but was acquitted by a jury because he was looking at the pornography in preparation for advising clients. South Dakota law protects police officers and lawyers who gaze on child pornography in the course of their work. Federal law does not.

The question that comes to my mind is how this case got to court. If the police and prosecutors had investigated with due diligence, it seems the case could have been resolved without charges being filed. The stories did not indicate just who informed on the lawyer or why such an aggressive prosecution was mounted. Anyone who has witnessed some of the vindictive and prejudicial motives that operate in our justice system must wonder who was out to get this lawyer.

And that gets to some other experiences. I have supported and worked with organizations that investigate wrongful convictions. In one case a local man gave a neighbor woman permission to use his computer while he was out of town on business. She found child porn on it and turned him in to the police. Although convicted of the charge, he denied ever looking at or downloading child porn, and said he did not even know it was on his computer. An investigation revealed that he was very generous about letting other people use his computer, but we could not, of course, identify someone among the many people who had used his computer with evidence that one or more of them had downloaded pornography. The one interesting fact provided by the computer expert in the case was that the woman who found the child porn had to make a concerted and aggressive effort to search the files on the computer.

Another case involved a government official on whose work computer technicians found some pornography. He was forced to resign, but filed a report with an agency that looks into instances of wrongful accusation. We found that a young man in his office had often been seen using the computer when the official was out of the office. However, the official got a better job and willingly departed, but the investigating organization sent the officials who asked for his resignation a letter detailing the information produced by the investigation, along with a severe reprimand for prosecuting a careless and easily disproved accusation.

There were other cases of the sort that have shown the need to rewrite some laws to make officials, law enforcement officers, and prosecutors liable for wrongful accusations and prosecutions that stem from slovenly investigations and malicious prosecutions.


There are people who feel that they have power and consequence only when they can destroy the lives of other people.  There are others who harbor malicious hatred of individuals.  They do not seem to hesitate to use the law and the justice system to realize malevolent self-esteem and pleasure.

It appears that child pornography laws and the justice system is put in service of those motives.  Just as the State of Illinois has engaged in a stringent critical review of its justice system when it pardoned 13 men from death row because of wrongful convictions.

The stench of malice pervades the matter of child pornography prosecutions and convictions.  

Attacks on middle class insure failure of America

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich gives a detailed explanation of why our economy is faltering and why it will continue to do so unless the policies which have destroyed the middle class for the last thirty years are reversed.  His analysis, which is a summary of testimony he has presented to a Senate committee, makes clear why the anti-labor policies and actions of politicians such as Gov. Walker of Wisconsin can result only in the further decline of the American economy.

Reich explains the basic causes of the economic downturn:

1. "The pay of well-connected graduates of prestigious colleges and MBA programs has soared. But the pay and benefits of most other workers has either flattened or dropped. And the ensuing division has also made most middle-class American families less economically secure."
2. The government " slashed public goods and investments -- whacking school budgets, increasing the cost of public higher education, reducing job training, cutting public transportation and allowing bridges, ports and highways to corrode."
3. The government "shredded safety nets -- reducing aid to jobless families with children, tightening eligibility for food stamps, and cutting unemployment insurance so much that by 2007 only 40 percent of the unemployed were covered. It halved the top income tax rate from the range of 70 to 90 percent that prevailed during the Great Prosperity to 28 to 35 percent; allowed many of the nation's rich to treat their income as capital gains subject to no more than 15 percent tax; and shrunk inheritance taxes that affected only the top-most 1.5 percent of earners. Yet at the same time, America boosted sales and payroll taxes, both of which took a bigger chunk out of the pay the middle class and the poor than of the well off

Reich explains how the middle class coped with these changes in the policies working against it:

1. "Women move into paid work...But the vast majority of women who migrated into paid work did so in order to prop up family incomes as households were hit by the stagnant or declining wages of male workers."
2. "Everyone works longer hours."
3. These factors did not suffice and made people "Draw down savings and borrow to the hilt." 

 The circumstances of the fall of the middle class are, of course, created by political decisions.  With the GOP devoted to the subjection of the middle class and the creation of a plutocracy, those policies which obsessed about the size rather the performance of the government and operated on trickle-down economics will keep the U.S. plunging downward as long as they prevail.