No country for nice guys.

A billboard in Idaho comparing Obama to the Aurora mass shooter.

Messages such as the one above have been  made against Obama since he took office.  They say little about Obama.  They say much about a segment of the  country,  what motivates its politics, and what its essential values really are.  There is an intensity in the propaganda that attempts to discredit any human worth of Obama that has only one explanation.  A good portion of the nation has reverted to the kind of    racism that once was the province of  the Klu Klux Klan, and many of Obama's opponents do not hesitate to use that old racist appeal against him.  

When confronted with the racist basis for their attacks on Obama, they erupt in furious indignation and insist they are only using their right of free speech to make legitimate criticisms of the president.  But they continue with ad hominem attacks that go far beyond any argument against policy and assail the worth and mental capacity of the person in speech that is deeply rooted in and resonates with the old language of racial hatred. The tactic is so commonplace that it is used by the right wing in much of its propaganda against any liberals.

Obama's failure to confront this speech is his big failure.  He and his advisers have been reluctant to even acknowledge such speech because it might tear the country apart.  But the country is already divided between those who long for the days of overt discrimination, segregation, and the enforcement  of human classes that were the underpinnings of slavery, and those who think that the business of America is to promote freedom, equality, and justice for everyone.  

Drew Westen in the Washington Post  lists the three major mistakes made in dealing with the Republican opposition:

• Obama’s first mistake was inviting the Republicans to the table.

• The second mistake was squandering the goodwill that Americans felt toward the new president and their anxiety about an economy hemorrhaging three-quarters of a million jobs a month. That combination gave Obama, at the beginning of his term, a power to shape public policy that no one since Franklin Roosevelt had held. But instead of designing a stimulus that reflected the thinking of the country’s best economic minds, he cut their recommended numbers by a third and turned another third into inert tax cuts designed to appease Republican legislators whose primary aim was to defeat him.

• The third way the administration created opportunities for Republican obstructionism will someday become a business-school case study: It let a popular idea — a family doctor for every family — be recast as a losing ideological battle between intrusive government and freedom.

 Westen cites Obama's clinging efforts for bipartisan work as behind the problems in letting his programs work full force:  

The GOP had just decimated the economy and had been repudiated by voters to such an extent that few Americans wanted to admit that they were registered Republicans. Yet Obama, with his penchant for unilateral bipartisanship, refused to speak ill of what they had done. 

Westen sees this as a flaw among Democrats in general:  

If self-interest and self-righteousness are at the heart of the Republican Party today, cowardice lies too close to the spine of the Democrats.

The middle class is going to continue to be pushed into poverty unless someone is willing to name the  villains, confront the racism, and speak openly of what underlies the motives of those who oppose them and wish them ill.  

Dementia is big business. Can it restore the economy?

If, like me, you are an insomniac and turn to night-time radio to lull you back to sleep or occupy those restless hours, you know the night is populated with messengers of hate and derangement.  That is particularly true in Aberdeen, where the BBC night service can be, perhaps, a bit too boring; where the other alternatives are either the incessant and silly chatter about sports, or country music--for which I am restricted to very small doses.  That leaves so-called religious stations who are frantically warning the world that Obama is devil (After all, he has origins in the land of gargoyles.) and talk radio.


You can pick up some distant stations which offer a secular version of Obama as satan, but the dominant noise in the night is supplied by the widely syndicated Coast-to-Coast AM, usually presided over by George Noory, who is unusually qualified to address and propagate the benighted.  His program focuses on UFOs, alien abductions,  ghosts, the falsehood of all science, and the like.  The specialty is conspiracy theories.  In the Coast-to-Coast view, the universe is just one massive conspiracy theory out to get all the true believers out there.  


Over the years, talk radio has become a major source for feeding the dementia whose advocates are having so much success in dismantling education, the biggest threat to our constitutional freedom of bearing conspiracies.  Some of what comes out of talk radio fits only in the category of criminal insanity.  Last night was one of the toppers.


The host on Coast-to-Coast last night was the big voiced John B. Wells, who seems unusually steeped in the rich lore of dementia.  His specialty is the conspiracies that American government and other institutions harbor to do in the whole human race.  His guest was a man named Roger Tolces, who claims to be an expert in the use of electronic surveillance devices for getting control of America--control by whom is left to the imagination or identified by conspirators of one's choice.  


Tolces took on the mass shooting at the theater in Aurora, Colorado, last week.  The shooter, James Holmes, according to Tolces, is a kind of Manchurian candidate, conditioned by his conditioners solely for the purpose of carrying out the mission for a massacre in Colorado.  When asked what the purpose of such a massacre is, Tolces said it was to create such a revulsion against guns so that the people who are gaining control of America can have the pretext for disarming the citizens--as he claims Hitler did in Austria.  

America's Manchurian

James Holmes is just a creation of the conspirators.  

And the dementia goes on and grows day by day.

On the bright side,  Willard Romney, who found the trees in Michigan to be just the right size, found the organizers of the Olympics in London coming up a bit short.  

It is really hard to keep up with all these advances of the intellect.  

It's back!

Mascot of the Wart Collage:  all that is ugly all the time. 

The South Dakota Wart Collage is back with a full display of the deformed and ugly.  Ain't no way to make this sucker look good, so you might as well go with extreme ugly.  

The significant aspect of its reappearance under open authorship of the Powers that be, and probably always were, is that it reaffirms the role of the blog as the official voice and spirit of the Republican Party in South Dakota.  While Pat Powers has officially resigned from his job in the Secretary of State's office,  he is still working the office for any tidbits he can contrive into defamatory falsehoods with which he kept the blogidiotocracy supplied in the past, whether openly or as an inside undercover operative through pseudonymous persona and other party stooges. 

When Powers deleted all of his blog archives upon taking his job with the Secretary of State's office, most people who monitor the political scene assumed that getting rid of old blog posts, many of which contained false defamation against people who inspire malice in Powers, was a condition of employment.  The Secretary of State's office could be harmed by being associated with someone who posted with fully intended malice.    Prior to deleting the posts altogether, he often deleted individual posts or made revisions to eliminate portions that ventured into dangerous allegations. 


However, erasing the blogging record did not eliminate the record of offenses, the distrust, and the disgust it had built over the years.   When Jason Gant took over the Secretary of State's office, there was a mass change of personnel.  Old, trusted, and respected workers quit or were forced out. The trust and respect that they had earned over the years was replaced by the distrust and resentment that Powers brought with him into the office. 

That distrust and wariness regarding partisan schemes and ploys became most apparent when blogs, such as South DaCola, noted that Powers seemed to using the office to promote some of his partisan schemes.  Protests and investigations resulted, and Powers resigned.  The Attorney General said there was no evidence that warranted criminal prosecution, but the Secretary of State's office, both from the schemes of Powers and Gant's own performance, has been tarnished to the point that raises the question of whether it should any longer be the office that supervises elections for the state.  


There is some sense of relief that Powers is no longer in charge of operations, but that doesn't mean that his connections and access to the office as a political operative have ended.  Prior to his vaporizing his blog archives, the Wart Collage was coordinated with the state GOP party office and the attacks and allegations against anything Democratic were given the Wart Collage treatment simultaneously with their issuance as press releases.  It was apparent that the party headquarters and Powers were working in full complicity.  This was a working pattern with which the party was familiar.  As a candidate,  John Thune's campaign paid Jon Lauck, then a history professor at SDSU, for blogging defamations against Sen. Tom Daschle.  The GOP widely claimed that the blog was a big factor in defeating Daschle, and the party was hoping that the Wart Collage could carry on in that tradition for the state GOP. 

Now that Powers is back in full charge of the Wart Collage, he appears to be resuming his practice of malicious fabrication full throttle.  And that he will be using his connections and access to the Secretary of State's office to accomplish those ends.

In his latest foray into misrepresenting facts and maligning the Democrats,  Powers uses two filings that the Democratic Party made to the SOS office.  He cites two letters that inform the SOS of when the party's state convention is to be held for 2012.  The first letter states the convention will be held in June, the second that it will be held in July.  The one in June was held at the Ramkota Convention Center in Aberdeen; the one in July was held at the party headquarters in Sioux Falls.  Powers contends that the June convention was a "fake" to fool the party constituents into thinking that they were participating in a democratic process while the real decisions were made at the July meeting.


The most important aspect of the convention report filings is that official candidates for statewide and national offices are fomally endorsed by the party.  Reports for both convention dates list the same candidates.  The reason that two dates were established was because of a concern about recruiting and obtaining candidates.


The procedure was covered by reporter David Montgomery at the time the letters listing convention dates were filed and in a follow-up blog following the Wart Collage post.  Montgomery asks, "Was this maneuver by Nesselhuf good strategy, or deceitful manipulation of the democratic process?"

 It is difficult to find any hint of deceit in all this, except in Powers' attempt to turn it into an act of deception.  It has more to do with trying to satisfy the stipulations of the state party constitution, the Roberts Rules of Order (which the party adheres to in its parliamentary proceedings), and the requirements of filings with the SOS.  


What the two listings do, in effect, is indicate that the June convention was adjourned to the July meeting date.  As the June meeting approached, the party was in the process of recruiting and confirming candidates for the state Public Utilities Commission.  There was some concern that a roster of candidates was tentative and could not be confirmed by the committee-as-whole session of the delegates at their June meeting. If candidates had not given full consent by the June meeting, the party had 30 days after to make final its official list of candidates.  Ben Nesselhuf indicated to David Montgomery that the July meeting of delegates would be held by teleconference, if it was necessary.


As it turned out, the convention business concerning candidates was finished at the June meeting so the the adjournment to July was not needed.  The report for the July meeting merely confirmed what had occurred at the June meeting of all delegates.


I suppose there might be other ways to handle these kinds of contingencies, such as the delegates authorizing the executive committee to make the final confirmations of candidates within the time required.  However, it is preferable that the final list of candidates be made by vote of the convention and not by delegation of authority.


But the Wart Collage is back.  And that means that South Dakota politics is returning to its usual dreary business.  

A national holiday to celebrate mass shooting

Mass murder by gunshot has become a great tradition in America.  It is beginning to eclipse the stars and stripes and apple pie as the national cliche.
It is the expression of American exceptionalism and what it is to be free, equal, and just.   It is a celebration of one of our great freedoms and of the deaths of those who have been sacrificed in the name of that freedom.


We have the ritual and liturgy worked out in detail. 


Monica Hesse summarizes it:

The president makes a statement. The leader of the other party makes a statement. The anti-gun Brady Campaign and the NRA make statements. The statements all express sorrow and regret and a desire for justice for this tragedy. It’s always “a tragedy.” The statements all see the horrible deaths as unfortunate arguments for their sides. It wouldn’t have happened if the country had stricter gun-control laws. It wouldn’t have happened if citizens had the right to carry concealed weapons. No one will try to politicize the shooting, but some might accuse others of trying to politicize the shooting. It will be disgusting.


We will get reactions from the man-on-the-street.

We will discuss our perpetual culture of violence.

We’ll feel sorry for the killer’s mother.

The Onion also points out that we have got this routine down pat:  

According to the nation's citizenry, calls for a mature, thoughtful debate about the role of guns in American society started right on time, and should persist throughout the next week or so. However, the populace noted, the debate will soon spiral out of control and ultimately lead to nothing of any substance, a fact Americans everywhere acknowledged they felt "absolutely horrible" to be aware of.

All we need now is for the government to stop intruding on our freedoms and name a day to celebrate them.  In fact, this holiday is so huge and significant, a day cannot do it justice.  It needs at least a week.

A week-long celebration of fire-arm mayhem and death would speak to America's most cherished values and traditions.  It could contribute massively to the American economy and the spirit of competition.

The Aurora theater massacre is, according to the press, the biggest mass shooting in American history.  That gives the next competitor a very high bar to shoot over.  A national week for mass shooting would give the public a chance to prepare and organize to enjoy it, and it would give the shooters a very attentive, focused audience.  

Retail centers could devote 7 or 8 months to stock their stores and promote merchandise to celebrate National Mass Shooting Week with.  Maybe we could incorporate it with Christmas and New Years and make it a two-week affair. 

Education could be made more relevant and engaging for students.  Educators could emphasize our great tradition behind our greatest freedom by exploring the subjugation and massacre of Indians;  the joys and jubilation of slavery, segregation, and lynchings; the thrill of gang wars; the thrill of any wars; the potential of firearms and murder in domestic disputes; the art and science of planning a massacre.  The teachers who produce the most successful shooters in the national competition could be awarded merit pay.  Education would be revolutionized.  

The economic benefits go without saying, and the magnitude is hard to imagine.

The benefits to national pride and stature in the world would cement America's number one position in all those areas of power and glory that really count.  

We need a national holiday that speaks to our strengths, inspires in our children a new sense of competition and excellence, and provides a joyous occasion for all Americans to demonstrate their pride and mettle.  

A national mass shooting holiday could save the world.  If we can figure out from what.  

 

Update on Vern Traversie affair.

A Cheyenne River attorney has filed a lawsuit against the Rapid City Medical Center in behalf of Vern Traversie, who thinks he had KKK carved into his torso while undergoing heart surgery at the hospital.

The CBS News account can be read here.  

Crucifying Joe Paterno and education

In no way do I defend or support Joe Paterno and the football program at Penn State that made him famous.  However, all the fuss and furor over him covering up the pedophile predations of his assistant coach Jerry Sandusky is misplaced.  The fact is that Joe Paterno did exactly what he was hired to do, what his bosses in the administration and board of trustees wanted him to do, and what the students and alumni at the university demanded of him.  

He protected and nurtured the image that Happy Valley existed in a perpetual Saturday afternoon. Former FBI Director Louis Freeh explains why in his investigation of the whole business:  

The avoidance of the consequences of bad publicity is the most significant, but not the only, cause for the failure to protect child victims and report to authorities.  

The Freeh report also lists nine subsidiary reasons, but they all deal with maintaining the pristine reputation of Penn State and its football program. Penn State does not stand alone as a higher education institution that will go out and find buses, if necessary, to throw people under in order to avoid negativity publicity.  The first commandment of higher education is to never let out any information that would disturb donors and alumni, especially the ones who donate.  

While there is little disagreement that Joe Paterno and the administrators at Penn State totally dismissed any concerns about any possible victims and devoted their efforts to keeping the image of Happy Valley unsullied.  But there is probably not a nigher education institution in the U.S. that hasn't sacrificed some people in attempts to avoid scandal and embarrassment for the institution.  The first priority in higher education is not education and contributing to the human community.  The first priority is maintaining the pretenses of the institution, not the reality of what it does and how well it does it.

In Joe Paterno's case, he contributed mightily for developing Penn State, as  a New York Times reporter Pete Thamel put it,  "from a being a state-centered university with 9,500 students to a booming, internationally renowned institution with nearly 45,000 students. The influence Paterno had on Penn State on and off the field is so vast that it is almost unquantifiable."

Paterno's influence and efforts were not limited to the football program.  Thamel remarks upon Paterno's love of the classics and recounts his efforts in their regard at Penn State:  "Paul B. Harvey Jr., the head of the university’s classics and ancient Mediterranean studies department, said that Paterno helped raise more than $150,000, some of it his own money, for his department over the years, essentially saving it from extinction." 

But his positive efforts, as Thamel explains it, did not qualify Paterno for sainthood:  

Paterno was not perfect. His players, especially for a stretch in the last decade, had too many brushes with the law. E-mails emerged in the wake of the Sandusky scandal that showed how Paterno attempted to bully and manipulate administrators. He had a short temper, cursed frequently and remained the team’s coach for far too long. In his final few years, he had little effect on the day-to-day machinations of the program. Paterno did not work nearly as hard at recruiting as many of his competitors, especially in his later years, but Penn State administrators, knowing what he had accomplished and built, swallowed hard and settled for having a living icon on the sideline.

Those of us who have been college faculty know that the sports programs are a key to maintaining support and funding for the institutions.  This applies to high schools, also.  If academic programs are threatened, the public shrugs its shoulders and clucks in tongues.  If the sports programs are threatened, then the public rises up and gets active, spouting all manner of stuff about character building and the like, and generally contributes to maintaining the programs.  The fact is that the public seems quite willing to let academic programs fall by the wayside if it means the sports can be saved.  So, faculty generally offer tacit support to  athletic programs, even at some expense to academics in order to maintain some degree of function for academics. 




An incident at the University of Colorado less than ten years ago illustrates the custom.  Its football team had a woman place kicker who charged that she was sexually assaulted by male team members.  The coach dismissed the allegations and commented snarkily about her performance as a kicker. 




When the University wanted to award its retired professor Vine Deloria, Jr. an honorary degree for his scholarship and leadership in Native America studies, Deloria declined because of the way the football scandal was handled.  He said the University's handling of the matter was an outrage and, "It's no honor to be connected to these people."









The devaluing of people and their sacrifice for excitements and delusions of the sports arena is an American value.  In all the natter about the state of education, there is no mention whatever of the role that sports programs and their degree of support and attention have played in the quality of our classrooms.  

Women place kickers and lost and forlorn little boys can be a detraction.  As are students struggling away in squalid classrooms under the tutelage of harassed and harried teachers.  

Compared to the attitudes and interests of the majority of people out there, maybe Joe Paterno was a saint.  He did what was expected of him by the University and people, and at least he did something.  

Parasites and predators as citizens

The biggest and most consequential issue confronting America is being ignored in the current political campaign.  Except in a tangental way regarding Mitt Romney and Bain Capital.  That issue is that business is hugely corrupt, is the cause of the recession we are struggling with, and is the obstacle to any significant recovery.

Most Americans know that:

The misconduct of the financial industry no longer surprises most Americans. Only about one in five has much trust in banks, according to Gallup polls, about half the level in 2007. And it’s not just banks that are frowned upon. Trust in big business overall is declining. Sixty-two percent of Americans believe corruption is widespread across corporate America.

Much that goes on in American business is hard to justify, as it contributes nothing to the economy or the quality of life.  In many cases, it acts in the obverse.  In those cases it degrades and devastates what it touches. 

This is the big argument against privatization of activities that maintain stewardship over enterprises such as Social Security, pension funds, and health care insurance. Private organizations that take over government institutions such as prisons and probation services set up processes that can best be described as scams and shakedowns.  Likewise with for-profit colleges. 

The New York Times has a feature on how a private probation company escalated an unemployed woman's $179 speeding ticket into 40 days in jail and a $3,000 bill--and mounting--that she now owes.  Furthermore, the private companies do not adhere to the procedures of due process that are stipulated by the Constitution.  Some argue, that being private agencies, not government agencies, they have no obligation to observe the niceties of the justice system.  Without leaving the country, they claim offshore status.   In their policies and behavior, they reject the very premises of American loyalty and justice.   

 If private citizens conduct themselves as big businesses do, they could be charged with treason. Now that the Supreme Court has bestowed the full status of personhood on corporations with its Citizens United decision,  they should be allowed full recognition of that status and their claim to citizenship.  They should be subject to the same criminal and civil laws as every other citizen and in their relationship to their country should be held to the same standards of loyalty and affiliation.  If they wish to betray their country and damage its economy, they should be held to the same rules that govern acts of subversion and treason of individual citizens.  


If they wish to place their wealth off shore and pledge loyalty and affiliation to a foreign entity, whether country or corporation,  they should be relieved of the encumbrance of U.S. citizenship and the rights and privileges that go with it.  


The natural world is developed by  creatures which produce and build the natural communities.  They are preyed upon and leeched upon by  parasites and predators, which are seen as population controls that keep the producers from over-reproducing and depleting the resources in the natural environment. In nature, predators and parasites are seen as checks on the natural order that keep nature in  balance.  The human economy is often compared to the natural economy in terms of the checks and balances that various functionaries perform.  Some business practices, such as forced buyouts, acquisitions which dismantle companies and rake off assets, dealing in junk bonds and bad mortgages are justified on the basis that they serve to eliminate the weakest businesses and business practices.  They are to the human economy what parasites and predators are to the natural ecosystem.  The flaw in that comparison is that the human economy is designed to support civilization, and civilization is meant to surmount the tooth-and-claw death balances of nature with human brain power, creativity, and good will.  Disease and death from parasites and predators are what civilization strives to control and eliminate.  


Right-wing America hates illegal aliens.  They say they take jobs away from Americans and leech off of our welfare system.  They take the money they earn here and send it home for their families in Latin America.  Private equity firms take over companies and take away American jobs, some through elimination and some by outsourcing to foreign countries.  They take advantage of tax breaks and financing programs paid for by American taxpayers.  They take the money they make off of the predations and put it in offshore accounts.


Right-wing America cherishes its image of the poor and unemployed.  It claims they don't want to work; they just want to line up for welfare benefits, paid for by the people who produce.  It also loves its images of the executives who give themselves huge bonuses, garner and exploit huge tax breaks for their companies, and condemn the poor and unemployed because they are not contributing more to their wealth.  A snarky person might call this the real class war.   

Business claims that it initiates and presides over the American economy.  The essential role it claims in forming and sustaining America exempts it from the moral and ethical standards that are applied to individual citizens.  Anything done under the rubric of a "business decision" has priority over those notions of liberty, equality, and justice that apply to individual citizens' treatment of each other.  Business rails furiously against any regulations that attempt to apply the general legal, moral, and ethical standards to the way business conducts itself.  Such regulations, business claims, hampers the excercise of free enterprise.


Corporate America, however, is not satisfied with the mere status of equality with other citizens.  It claims a special reversion of power over employees.  Employees are expendable and disposable.  The free enterprise of the slave market applies.  Strong, healthy individuals will bring a nice price for their owners for the labor they can produce.  But when they can no longer be as strong and productive, they lose value, are considered negligible, and can be disposef at the whim of their masters.  That is the problem business has with labor unions.  The rights it has established for workers runs counter to "business decisions."  And that is why Wisconsin and many other states are eliminating the right to collectively bargain and have a voice in the terms and conditions of employment for public workers.  Once business interests have established the right to determine the negligible status of public workers, it can move on to all workers.  Unions interfere with the exercise of free enterprise as the corporate mentality defines it.  So, they must be deprived of any sources of power and funding and eliminated, if possible.  


CEOs have set their role as being feudal lords.  There is great profit in fiefdoms.  The overhead of keeping serfs can be controlled and kept to a minimum.  


As shown by the history of fiefdoms, they get their wealth and power by being predators and parasites of the producers.  


This is not to say that there are no businesses that try succeed by creating beneficial products and services and dealing honestly and fairly with customers and employees.  But good businesses get absorbed into the corporate matrix and soon operate under the rules of depredation and parasitism.


A fact that patriots and optimists do not want to face is that America is being run for the benefit of parasites and predators, not for producers.  Business decisions and those assertions of human rights enumerated in the establishing documents of America conflict and oppose the premises on which predators and parasies can thrive.


The business news of the past four years is a chronicle of what happens when parasites and predators rule.  


American democracy was an interesting experiment.  But it is a deposed anathema to the corporate rulers and the politicians who they hold in thrall.