The annals of libel: a campaign strategy

It is understandable why the SD GOP may wish to disassociate itself from from the kind of materials run on the War College blog.  However, in many instances the SD GOP is clearly and unequivocally identified as the source of those materials.  In other cases, a source is not mentioned but party officers immediately issue a press release to comment on the allegations appearing     on the blog.  

An example is the posting of a statement of disbursement from the House of Representatives for the offices of Rep. Herseth Sandlin --the one in D.C. and three in South Dakota--for expenses accrued during the last quarter of 2009.  Both the original post and the press release issued by the SD GOP chair point to an expenditure of $1300 at a Sioux Falls store, Baby Element. The first post goes to some lengths to point out that the purchases were made  around the time that Herseth Sandlin gave birth to her son.  A follow-up post is from a press release from the SD GOP in which the party chair says, "  I can’t think of one legitimate reason I would spend $1300 at a baby store and then bill it to the taxpayer."  Then the post that quotes the chair reproduces the store's description of business : "In addition to framing services, Baby Elements also offers a unique selection of gifts, jewelry, home decor, and exclusive pieces..."  The post concludes with this statement from the chair:  “I’ve been in the State Senate for six years and worked another eight years in the Attorney General’s office.  I’ve been around a lot of politicians and have never seen anyone bill the government for expenses at a baby store,” said Gray.  “Stephanie Herseth Sandlin better have a good answer for this one.”  These statements follow those in the first post:  "Something is rotten in the state of South Dakota.  You’d think that our congresswoman could certainly afford to furnish her house and buy her kid’s presents herself. WITHOUT billing it to the taxpayers."   

The collusive efforts of the blog and the state party are blatantly apparent, as are numerous other news releases from the state party.  Many of them are obviously written for posting by War College, because no journalistic organization would touch them.  In this pairing on the disbursement statement, the party and the blogger openly accuse the congresswoman of embezzlement by charging baby clothes to the  taxpayers.  

If the party chair has so much experience around politicians and in the Attorney General's office, one wonders why he is not aware that the disbursement was for the running of the Congressional offices and the designation of "habitation expenses" applied to the offices refers to: "Minor, minimal expenses incurred for decorating offices (pictures, welcome mats, etc.). This category includes furniture items such as chairs, tables, etc., which cost less than $500. Furniture that costs more than $500 and less than $25,000 should appear under the expense category or budget object code for furniture and fixtures less than $25,000."

 He would also know, it seems, that line items in a disbursement statement get there by virtue of having expense reports and receipts submitted for a voucher:  "A document which authorizes payment through reference to necessary supporting documentation. Commonly, a voucher is a document that shows goods have been bought or services have been rendered, authorizes payment and indicates the accounting classifications in which these transactions have to be recorded."   And one wonders why the accusers do not know that such purchases for offices are  made by staff members, not the member on whose behalf the offices are run.


Apparently, the operatives who  found this document--Speaker Pelosi ordered Statements of Disbursement to be put on line--did not know that office expenses have to be audited and approved.   And, apparently, that is not how things are done in South Dakota state government.
 
 And what were the funds spent for?  For the mounting and framing of historic documents, photographs, and cultural materials, such as star quilts, for the member offices to inform visitors of the traditions under which Congress operates and to promote the features of South Dakota.  Anyone can  view these items on display at the offices.

Another kind of posting that enamors War College and its cronies is the publication of an unsubstantiated rumor or utter fabrication that trickles in through the party network.  A recent example is a posting which claimed that Tom Daschle was in Aberdeen on a recent weekend and showed up at Minerva's Restaurant, where there was a wait for seating. The post stated that Mr. Daschle got upset with having to wait and made a scene, asking "Do you know who I am?'  That contention right there raises a red flag about the veracity of this story for those who actually know Tom Daschle.  Then, the post goes on, the Daschle party got up and walked out of the restaurant just as the food was about to be served.

After the post was published, it was later removed with a statement that the blogger was going go give his sources of information a chance to clarify and verify their information.  Later, the post was deleted completely.  The question is, why was such a rumor posted in the first place?  The answer:  purely to generate malice.

That latter post is comparatively trivial in the defamatory dimension,  The significance of it is in its malicious purpose.  The post regarding the purchase at Baby Element, a framing and decorating store, is not trivial.  Court precedents virtually eliminate political figures (and other public figures) from recourse in regard to libels uttered about them.  Things said in the course of the official business of a legislative body or a court are privileged, and that privilege is extended to a certain degree to public discussion of office holders and candidates for office.  However, the accusation of embezzlement is serious enough to permit recourse.   In this case, the allegation was made that the store owner is a friend of the Congresswoman's, thus implying that the store received benefit from an act of embezzlement.  The store owner was implicated in the defamatory statements and has interests that go beyond the political.   

The author of the blog issued a challenge to produce any evidence that the blog operates in concert with the SD GOP.  The posting of GOP press releases, the interaction between the blog and party, and the history of such interaction speaks loudly to that challenge.  And the mailing of a flyer by the Noem campaign based on the expenditure indicates more the extent of the collusion.  More specific information, beyond what is apparent and available on the blog itself, will not be made a subject of blogging.  Such  information would be compromised by the obfuscation and equivocation that comprises the mode of discourse of most blogs.  There are appropriate venues for examining such information and determining the responsibilities of individuals and political parties in the generation of  defamatory allegations.  The right not to be defamed is a precisely stated right by law.  We support anyone who pursues that right, so we will not engage in exchanges which could complicate their efforts to enforce that right.  Any assistance we can give will be done in a more appropriate venue.  

The matter of libel and deception will not end with this election campaign, no matter what the outcome.  There is accounting to be made and people to be held accountable.  We operate in what we call a nation of laws.  It is time to determine whether such a nation exists or if it is just another myth designed to deceive people.  
 

The Breitbart Syndrome and rule by defamation

A blogger, in conjunction with the political party for which he is an "operator," posted an item about a political candidate, Clark Schmidtke in District 8, that led to some disclosures about the candidate's involvement with the criminal courts.  The original post was based upon speculations and implications drawn from some hearing minutes of legal agencies in Minnesota.  It did not bother to establish whether the identity of the subject of those hearings was in fact the candidate, nor did it publish the complete information about the disposition of the matters dealt with in those hearings.  Cory Heidelberger at Madville Times contacted the candidate and obtained further documents and the candidates' account of court proceedings in which the candidate was involved. 

Cory Heidelberger has done a service in behalf of decency in pursuing this story and removing it from the realm of speculation and implication and placing it in the world of documented facts.  Urging Mr. Schmidtke to clarify this matter and providing him a place to do so is one of the, unfortunately, rare instances of integrity and good purpose in the South Dakota political blogosphere.

He performed an obligation and responsibility that should rightfully have been assumed by the blog and its perpetrators that initiated this story without any qualifying facts or with any certainty as to the identity of the subject.  Those omissions display pure malice.  And the cast of the Libel Follies obliged us with an encore performance in comments on Cory's  blog.  

Mr. Schmidtke, the candidate who is the subject of the posts, certainly must have considered that a candidacy for public office would involve an examination of his past.  A part of the function of political parties is to examine and evaluate candidates' backgrounds before they are allowed to bear the party banner.  I assume that is why Mr. Schmidtke is running as an "independent Democrat."  That system seems not to be working in South Dakota where candidates with eighteen traffic-related arrests have the unqualified support of their party.  When violations of that magnitude in number occur with persistence over a long period of time, they signify matters of character and attitude, and they cannot be dismissed as youthful indiscretions.

  Mr. Schmidtke's problems with the court raises an issue about equal protection of the law that the advent of blogs has made unsettled.  The blog that initiated the inquiry into his past has accrued a history of libels that parallels the long histories of flouting the  laws of those candidates for office.  It publishes absurd and petty rumors, charges--often false--of wrong doing that omit mitigating aspects without any attempt at verification or accuracy.  And it does this with the full complicity of the SD GOP.  It publishes its own evidence of that complicity by showing the sources of its alleged information and by the frequency with it attempts malign attacks.    For people who value freedom of speech, it is alarming and dismaying to see that freedom so maliciously and obscenely abused.

We have laws that ostensibly establish a principle against wanton defamation: "Every person is obligated to refrain from infringing upon the right of others not to be defamed."  ('SDCL chapt. 20)   And the law provides a definition of libel and its effects:  "Libel is a false and unprivileged publication by writing, printing, picture, effigy, or other fixed representation to the eye which exposes any person to hatred, contempt, ridicule, or obloquy, or which causes him to be shunned or avoided, or which has a tendency to injure him in his occupation."

Furthermore, the state constitution states the conditions under which truth relieves the responsibility for libel:  "In all trials for libel, both civil and criminal, the truth, when published with good motives and for justifiable ends, shall be a sufficient defense."

As old journalists can attest, the threat of lawsuits has been the driving force behind adherence to slander and libel laws.  Since the coming of the Internet, changes have been made in the application of libel law.  One problem is that lawsuits, as Mr. Schmidtke relates, can be terribly expensive so that individuals cannot afford protection of the law, and blog libelers tend not to have the financial standing to make recovery of damages possible.  When they are allied with a political organization, however, such recovery becomes more  possible.  Another problem is that case law sets the parameters for interpretation of the law.  Some states have better, more specific precedents than others.  South Dakota is in libel limbo.  

During the last legislative session,an attempt was made to bolster the right not to be defamed, but the question of ultimate responsibility was difficult.  And the proposed law did not address accessibility to the protections of current law.  For those interested in protecting both freedom of speech and the right not to be defamed, it is clear that political action is probably not the route to follow.  With the laws already in place, it will probably be more effective to expend organizing and fund-raising energies on obtaining precedents which provide clearer definitions and affordable accessibility to the law.  We have some perfect storms of libel that have swept across the Internet in the last six years to examine toward that end.

Expect some developments in this regard after the election.  People of good will and good purpose do not wish to live in a political climate that becomes geared to  malevolence and the degradation of the community from malicious and generally untrue gossip.  There are people, both victims and perpetrators, who deserve their day in court. 

Do not answer fools according to their folly

Do not answer fools according to their folly,

or you will be a fool yourself.

Answer fools according to their folly,

or they will be wise in their own eyes.

Proverbs  26: 4-5

I generally resist getting drawn into the puerile spats that characterize so much of what passes for discussion forums on the Internet.  Proverbs provides the rationale for avoiding such exchanges.   But on occasion, the scurrility makes factual assertions that are too maliciously false not to address.  

A raging soul full of  sound and fury visited the Beacon and left  one of those messages that cause both derision and despair.  I hesitate to answer that sound and fury and the false accusations spewed forth, but falseness must be identified and refuted lest the more discerning souls think I assent to the foolery.

The comments were provoked by the posting of a link to a story about the unlimited and often secret spending by corporations on election campaigns.  My position is that corporations are given unbridled rights, while individuals have severe restrictions put on the donations they make.  Individuals do not have protection under the law any where near what corporations do.  If individuals behave like corporations in their spending on corporations, they are under severe penalties of law.  


The main bone of contention is that corporations can pour unlimited funds into campaigns in order to dominate the media.  And there are a multitude of loopholes by which corporate money can be kept secret.  They have rights that the rest of us don't.

Timothy Egan succinctly and clearly defines the inequalities created by the recent Supreme Court decision to regard corporations as individuals:

Your average voter can dash off a letter to the editor, or fire up a blog, or put up a yard sign — a nice fantasy of citizen democracy. Your corporate equal can spend $23 million (the outsider amount spent so far in Colorado) to bludgeon the electorate. And, with loopholes in the tax system, they can do it while making it virtually impossible to know who they are.

The comment argues that corporations are created,owned, and supported by people.  So are the Mafia and Mexican drug cartels.  And they are run for the same purposes:  to acquire money and power over other people.   

The comment begins by stating that I have the same rights endowed by the creator and acknowledged by the Declaration.  We are still struggling to make equality, equal justice for all, and liberty available to all people.  Corporations and political factions, however, stand in the way.  The declaration of our inalienable rights did not make them manifest or factually inalienable.  We have had to fight for those rights every step of the way, had a civil war over them, and now face a quickly emerging plutarchy which flaunts the Declaration at every opportunity.   

This is not to say that there are no corporations who regard themselves as having the same rights and obligations as citizens, and who strive to be good citizens.  But then, there are those exemplified by the ones I list below.  

I distrust corporations.  Big corporations fall heir to the same dangers as  government, because they, too, are bureaucracies.  I name a few of the reasons for my distrust:  Enron, World Com., AIG, Lehman Brothers, BP,  Massey Energy, and all those fine corporate entities who created the recession we are struggling out of.  

 The  comment goes on to assert that my mind is clogged with Marxism and preoccupied with Marxist class war. It does not pay to engage someone who uses a word only as cudgel and has not the slightest knowledge of my history and thinking in regard to the many brands of Marxism or any but the crudest notion of what the word means.

First of all, I have a long history of opposing Marxism.  It began during the Cold War when I was assigned as part of my duties in West Germany to analyze propaganda.  I was among a group given training in order to monitor the communities where we had installations for any indications of communist organization.  The post I was  on had some unused barracks which housed a task force that was putting together a study under the direct order of President Eisenhower.  When the Korean War ended with a truce, he was very concerned and disturbed that a number of prisoners of war held by the North Koreans chose not to remain in North Korea rather than be repatriated to the U.S.  He wanted to know why Americans would make that choice.  The conclusions of the study resulted in an intensification of the desegregation of the military services and informed the background of Eisenhower's decision to send troops to Little Rock in September 1957 to desegregate the schools.  The study revealed the motive of the turn coats.  It was simple:  they were treated in the North Korean prison camps as prisoners of war with more respect, dignity, and a sense of equality than they were in their own country and in the service of their country's military.  The civil rights movement was in its early stages and the researchers who wrote the report warned that inequalities and oppression were setting up a form of alienation that made communism a more attractive prospect than the oppression under which minorities and the poor lived.  Marx did not invent the concept of alienation and class struggle; he defined on economic terms.  Some latter day disciples of Marx had developed a way to exploit these factors psychologically.  


The first order of business was to eliminate prejudice and racial discrimination in the military, and the second was to be alert for indications that people who felt alienated from their defeat in World War II might be politically exploited.  Put simply, this meant displaying America's best face.



However, beyond the political dangers of Marxist-based agitation was the fact that dialectical materialism operated on the corollary psychological theory of behaviorism.  This theory was even reflected in literary theory and criticism.  For a quarter of a century in America it was the dominant theory in education.  I have spent much of my professional life criticizing and opposing this brand of Marxism.  

Words have meaning.  The biggest danger to our world right now is people who use words only as weapons to incite hatred and create unbridgeable schisms among humankind.

I know and understand what Marxism is and how it is applied, and the accusation that I am immersed in theories of class envy malevolent presumption.  Being against slavery, oppression, lynching,  concentration camps and gas ovens, and exploitation of humans in any form is not a matter of class envy.  It is a matter of morality that transcends the dog pack theology of people like the errant visitor to this web log. 

Becoming Iraq. Or maybe Mexico.

Bureaucracies, whether they are private corporations or government agencies, ultimately can be depended upon to  act on what is the worst that is thought and said in human culture. And so it was when NPR fired Juan Williams.

Eugene Robinson makes the point that Williams' comment about obvious Muslims making him nervous on airplanes was in no way a statement that all Muslims are terrorists.  Williams quite specifically and carefully stated that such a conclusion should not be drawn.  He was making an observation on the climate created by 9/11, and that there is good reason to be wary these days when getting on airplanes.  In fact, the Homeland Security advice is to be aware of people acting in suspicious ways.

What is clear from Williams' firing is that someone inside NPR was looking for a pretext to fire him.   The situation has all the markings of a pattern that is played out numerous times in journalism and academe.  NPR admits that there has been pressure because of some of Williams' remarks in the past, but this situation has all the aroma of personal rivalries and rancor that have been simmering, waiting for the right moment to come along.

Williams' relationship with Fox News has been troubling.  Although NPR and Public Television are often accused of having a liberal bias,  they are the most prominent news organizations that promote impartiality in their reporting and news analysis. NPR's policy states that its reporters should avoid speculation and punditry and refrain from indulging in inflammatory controversy.  The charges of liberal bias are largely because the organizations do not immerse themselves in the name-calling, false accusations, distortions, and outright lies and defamation that the right wing regards as acceptable news.  NPR and PBS are as far from Fox News and the Limbaugh purveyors as it is possible to get, not necessarily  politically, but certainly intellectually and morally.

The handling of the firing of Juan Williams was grotesquely incompetent.  It was as mindless and precipitous as the Shirley Sherrod firing by the USDA.  NPR had good reason to be concerned about Juan Williams' appearances on Fox News, especially with the likes of Bill O'Reilly.  As a representative of NPR, his participation in a news organization so overtly a part of the Murdoch propaganda empire to serve the American  plutarchy does bring into question of how he compromises the integrity that NPR tries to maintain.  Fox has no pretense toward integrity to lose, and for an NPR correspondent to participate in the Orwellian charade of Fox News is a serious compromise of the journalistic integrity that NPR makes its objective.  Nothing is of greater danger to the plutarchy than accurate reporting and rigorous news analysis, as opposed to the tabloid fabrications that are the mainstay of  what the right wing endorses as proper media.  The First Amendment gives Williams the right of free speech, but it does not give him the right to a job when he compromises the reason-for-being of his employer.


With the news media struggling for survival in the Internet age, nearly all media, even the most reputable, are feeling the pressure to appease the plutarchist interests.   The Washington Post is a ghost of the newspaper it once was.  Many newspapers have allowed their editorial quality to be contaminated with comments that do anything but enlighten or expand the news coverage.  The Supreme Court's United Citizens decision has established the plutarchy as the rulers of the land, and their wealth is dominating the political advertising, advertising in general, and, therefore, news coverage.  It is to the plutarchy's advantage to divert public attention by stirring up controversy with Fox News-like agitation and promotion of tabloid silliness as news.  NPR and PBS stand in the way of total news domination.

This is why the Juan Williams firing is such a disaster.   It gives the agents of the plutarchy a new reason to pull public funding from NPR and PBS and eliminate any efforts at neutrality from the mass media.

The news media are not the only ones to be compromised by the political interests of the plutarchy.  During the Daschle campaign, SDSU was compromised when one of its history professors, Jon Lauck, made it the base of operations for the defamation campaign  in John Thune's behalf.  He posed for pictures in his SDSU office for news stories.  Although Lauck left his professorship to work full time for Thune after the election,  the situation left lingering questions about why the university allowed its integrity as an institution of higher learning to be associated with blatantly partisan activity.  It was not a matter of Lauck having the right to free speech;  it was a  matter of whether using that right compromised the purpose and reputation of the university.

This matter is addressed by a contract and policy article under which South Dakota (and most) professors work:

The concept of freedom is accompanied by an equally demanding concept of responsibility.  The faculty unit members are members of a learned profession. When they speak or write as citizens, they must be free from institutional censorship or discipline, but their special position in the community imposes special obligations. As learned people and as educators, they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence, they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should indicate that they are speaking only for themselves.

During the time I was an active professor, I did not blog or consider any such activity.  Political activity was largely confined to reporting on events and policy analysis.  The above policy was regarded as prohibiting overt political activity in any way that would involve the university.  That prohibition seems to have been relaxed.  One blogging professor in South Dakota confines himself to reporting and commenting on political matters, but the bloggers at Northern State have gone far into the ad hominem defamation and scurrility that characterized the Lauck efforts.  Now the bloggers have a political television show on a local cable channel, so the institution seems to fully endorse their political activities.  The bloggers often advertise their professorships in conjunction with the opinions they express, a few token disclaimers notwithstanding.  Many people, including professors at NSU, think that the university has abandoned all pretenses to neutrality. 

There are no established standards for what is considered "appropriate restraint" in professors' political speech, but it is clearly evident when an institution verges from promoting vigorous discussion into full partisanship.  It makes it difficult to support an institution when doing so supports a highly partisan propaganda agenda.

Members of the GOP see the firing of Juan Williams as a liberal purging of a reporter who does not conform to a party line. Serious journalists see it as a failure of Williams to maintain the standards on which his employing organization tries to operate.  NPR has confidence ratings that its commercial media competitors do not.  And many journalists have commented that they wondered why NPR waited so long to terminate its relationship with Williams.

Sen. DeMint has promised to introduce a bill that will end NPR's funding.  We assume he and his cohorts mean to go after all public broadcasting, as impartial reporting is an anathema to those of that plutarchist political stripe.  It could happen, and pubic broadcasting would either have to make the subscriptions which provide most of its operating funds as its only source of support, or simply go out of business, which has been the right wing dream for some time.  However, if federal funding of  NPR is ended, that brings up all the other tax supported programs that people find odious and downright pernicious.  That includes farm subsidies which the urban population does not understand or want.  It includes the support of wars which, as the Wikileaks documents show, kill tens of thousands of civilians and is a major, but seldom mentioned, part of our national debt.  In fact, there are few federally funded programs that cannot be regarded as partisan offenses. 

If government is to be dismantled, the question is why not be fair and thorough?  The answer is, of course, that the plutarchy with its billions will dismantle only those programs which it finds annoying and which will give the plutocrats more power over more people.
  
The Juan Williams case was stupidly handled.  That is a habit of bureaucracies.  But the implications of the loss of neutrality go far beyond the partisan cant that the situation raises.  A plutarchy is not a democracy.  It is a return to governance by  the feudal model. What were once our neutral institutions, news organizations and universities, have been thrust fully into the service of the plutarchy.  We are beginning to look more and more like Iraq.

The New York Times takes on the top seven GOP lies about healthcare

An editorial in The New York Times has finally taken up the falsehoods spread by the GOP and special interests about health care reform.  If you care about living in the world of facts, rather than malice-inspired fantasies, the entire editorial is reproduced here: 

Republican candidates and deep-pocketed special interests are spreading so many distortions and outright lies about health care reform that it is little wonder if voters are anxious and confused.

Here are a few basic facts that Americans need to keep in mind before they go to the polls, and afterward. First, most aspects of the reform do not go into effect until 2014. Second, things are indeed bad out there: The costs of medical care and insurance premiums are (still) rising, and some employers are (still) dropping coverage. But for that, you should blame the long-standing health care crisis and the current bad economy. Health reform is supposed to help with these problems.
Here is a look at the claims being made on the campaign trail — and the distortions they contain:

PURE NONSENSE: John Raese, the Republican candidate for the Senate in West Virginia, is claiming that the law will require patients to go through a bureaucrat or panel to reach a doctor. That is flat out untrue. You will still choose your own doctor or insurance plan without interference. Nor, despite other claims, will the law provide subsidized insurance to illegal immigrants. They are precluded from using even their own money to buy policies on new exchanges.

The Obama administration will not be compiling a federal health record on all citizens, including each individual’s body mass index, as Ann Marie Buerkle, a Republican running for a House seat in upstate New York, has claimed on her Web site. The administration is offering incentives to doctors to record various vital statistics in electronic medical records and report the data in the aggregate, to help understand national health trends.

WE CALL THAT CAPITALISM: Republican politicians never tire of denouncing health care reform as a “government takeover” — or socialism. What is true is that the law relies heavily on private insurers and employers to provide coverage. It also strengthens regulation of those insurers and provides government subsidies to help low- and middle-income people buy private insurance on the exchanges.

Those exchanges will promote greater competition among insurers and a better deal for consumers, which last time we checked was a fundamental of capitalism.

WHAT ABOUT MCDONALD’S? Conservative commentators pounced after the fast food chain and several other large employers that provide skimpy, low-cost policies to their workers warned that they might drop their health plans entirely if forced to comply with the new law. They particularly objected to a requirement that they begin raising the low annual limits on what their plans are willing to pay for health care.

In response, the administration has granted some 30 waivers for one year (Rush Limbaugh promptly accused the administration of allowing these employers to “break the law”) and has signaled willingness to smooth out other bumps on the road toward full reform. In 2014, all plans will have to meet minimal standards and large employers will have to provide coverage or pay a stiff fine.

WHAT ABOUT MY PREMIUMS? Some Republicans are also claiming that health reform is driving up premiums. There have been sharp increases in some states, primarily in response to soaring medical costs. Some insurers may also be trying to increase their profits before the reform law holds them in check. A few very welcome provisions that take effect early, like requiring insurers to cover preventive care without cost-sharing, will play a minor role in premium increases for next year.

Reform has also energized federal officials and many state regulators to challenge and force down big increases sought by insurers. The Justice Department just filed suit against Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Michigan for allegedly using its market power to drive up costs for its competitors and its own subscribers.

MEDICARE SCARE TACTICS: Republican candidates routinely and cynically charge that the reform law will “cut” $500 billion from Medicare — leaving the clear implication that benefits will be reduced. In reality, the law will slow the rate of increase in payments to health care providers over the next decade, and benefits for most beneficiaries will be as good or better than they are now.

The only beneficiaries apt to see a change are those enrolled in private Medicare Advantage plans that will lose their unjustified subsides. Many of these beneficiaries, roughly a quarter of the Medicare population, may have to pay more for their plans or may lose the extra benefits, like gym memberships or dental care, that the subsidies pay for. Some inefficient plans will die out, but the efficient private plans will compete successfully with traditional Medicare — on an even playing field.

MEDICAID SCARE TACTICS: Republican governors are complaining bitterly that reform will force them to expand their Medicaid programs. What they are not saying is that the federal government will pick up the vast bulk of the added expense to cover millions of vulnerable Americans. States that do not want this largess will be shortchanging the health of their poorest citizens, who will continue to use costly — to the state and the taxpayers — emergency rooms for routine health care.

WHAT THEY’RE NOT SAYING: Health care reform has already brought substantial benefits, mostly starting in late September. Insurers are now barred from dropping coverage after a beneficiary becomes sick. Dependents can stay on their parents’ policies until age 26. Insurers must cover preventive services and annual checkups without cost-sharing. Lifetime limits on how much insurance plans will pay for treatment are gone.

The major benefits start in 2014, when tens of millions of the uninsured will gain coverage through Medicaid or by buying private coverage — with government help for low- and middle-income Americans — on the new competitive exchanges. If you lose your job, you will no longer lose access to insurance. And with government help the coverage should be affordable.

Far too few Democrats are explaining this on the campaign trail. The barrage of attack ads are hard to push back against. But the voters need to know that health care reform will give all Americans real security.

Mosquitoes won the Revolutionary War

Soldier on the side of the Revolution

It turns out, according to an entomologist, that mosquitoes turned the tide at the Battle of York. 

An obituary for the humanities

Stanley Fish, a multi-disciplined professor who has held positions with the most prestigious universities in the U.S., has written in effect an obituary for the humanities.  That obituary has been in the writing for some decades.  The death has been slow and anything but painless.

Fish responds to an announcement that the SUNY campus in Albany is terminating its French, Italian, classics, Russian and theater majors.  His piece does not cover humanities curricula that have been eliminated in the past.  He thinks the elimination of the humanities is too bad, but he really makes no case for their value, other than that they give some intellectual types jobs.  In fact, he dismisses the idea that the humanities contribute to the vitality and richness of human culture as a mere piety, which no longer has any relevance.

The idea that the humanities were becoming obsolete in academia was first addressed in my hearing in the early 1970s.  Ross Paulson, a Harvard-trained historian, warned the faculty  senate at the institution I worked for at the time that vocationalism was a threat to the quality and integrity of higher education.  The idea that a college degree should largely prepare students for jobs was often raised.  The  college believed that the education it offered should certainly qualify students for  specific vocations, but should also prepare them for viable and productive intellectual and cultural lives.  The philosophy of the institution, which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year, was that a competent student had background in how culture developed and works, and a knowledge of the many cultures that  have been established.  The institution was strongly committed to the liberal arts, so that a degree from it signified that the students knew the language and literature of their own  tradition, knew at least one foreign language, knew the reaches of history and social sciences, understood the sciences,  and all this in addition to their vocational preparation.

In the 1970s, the threat to the liberal arts was met by expanding them.  I instituted courses in Native American literature and culture. In addition to the traditional literary survey courses in British and American literature, we devised courses that reflected  the cultural complexity of our nation.  I taught an introductory course, for example, in the immigrant, the Native American, and the African American.  The civil rights movement was in full swing, and students were very hungry for information and perspectives that helped them understand the world in which they lived.

When I came to South Dakota, however, NSU had just downgraded its foreign language offerings so that one could not major in the languages.  Since then, the college has gone back and forth over its foreign language requirements and offerings.  For a while, it offered Mandarin and also Russian.  A puzzle to me and many of its sister institutions is that a degree offered in international business does not involve the study of foreign languages and cultures.  I find it puzzling because the man who lived next door to me back in Illinois, who knew Spanish like a native speaker,  was  a Latin America expert for Deere & Co.  The company had such specialists who knew the language and culture of any of the countries where it did business.  It thought that having representatives with such knowledge was an essential part of doing business. 

At my former college, we had a history professor who was a specialist in Russia, and he, too, knew the language thoroughly.  He did not last long, because he was hired away by a corporation that did business with the then-Soviet Union, and it desperately wanted his expertise, so that it had information it could rely upon for its important decisions and negotiations. 

We have perennial problems with being at the mercy of hired interpreters in countries the U.S. is involved with.  In Iraq and Afghanistan, one of the biggest strategic problems is finding someone who knows the languages of those countries and can provide reliable, trustworthy translations and readings of situations.   The Iranian takeover of the U.S. embassy caught us off guard because we had no one on the Iran desk in the State Department who knew enough about the culture and language to detect the opposition to America that was growing.  However, there are people from opposing interests who know well American language and thought and use their knowledge against us.   Our intelligence operations have been consistently deficient because we are dependent upon perfidious local nationals to feed us intelligence about other countries and cultures.  We do not train people who can make informed observations and direct analysis of the information they collect from the standpoint of  American nationals. 

Knowledge of other cultures is not the only place that reflects our failures in the humanities.  While there is much furor about America's education lagging behind in math and science, for some reason the reports tend to gloss over our lagging reading scores.  Reading tests, which examine knowledge base and comprehension as well as the conventions of grammar, reflect the experience students have in their general command of language, including speaking and writing.  The magnitude of our national deficiencies in language is demonstrated in our media, especially on the Internet. While many blog posts demonstrate basic incompetence in rhetorical skills, the comment sections are where the deficiencies in thought and expression are overwhelmingly evident.  Often the comments fix on a phrase, a clause, or one sentence in a paragraph, not able to define the context for a sentence or the qualifiers that surround it.

The floundering ignorance that pervades America has produced an attitude in which the ignorant take great pride in their deficiencies, and regard those with actual knowledge and skill as elitist.  The phenomena of  the likes of Sarah Palin, Christine O'Donnell, and Rand Paul being touted as leadership is symptomatic of how education has come to be regarded.  All the attempts to reform education are frustrated by attitudes that revere and promote ignorance as a way of life.

When  higher education institutions divest themselves of humanities programs but allow themselves to be the platforms for the partisan hackery that makes up our political dialogue, we have an indication of the deterioration that is the real cause of the failures of education to keep our country competitive.  The decline of the humanities in American education is offset by intensifying them in other lands.

A few years ago, a best-selling book was Readng Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi.   The book is a narrative of how a woman university professor and some of her students in Iran gathered at her home weekly to discuss key American books, such as Lolita and The Great Gatsby.    Their weekly study sessions were a refuge from the oppression, particularly against women, of the mullahs and their followers.  They were also an inspiration and a resource for enduring and resisting the oppression.  I found Lolita, the Vladimir Nabokov novel about a pedophile, a surprising choice out of the American canon for study, but I did not read from the perspective of a suppressed and discriminated-against person living under a violently hostile regime.  Professor Nafisi's account probed a dimension of the book that would not be apparent to most Americans.

The Iranian women's study of American works was not uncritical.  They examined the aspects of American life that are less-than-admirable, but their main focus was on the intellectual traditions out of which America's liberty and opportunity were forged.  In the American humanities, they found not only hope but their opportunity to survive and surmount oppression. Lolita provided them with a resource and frame of reference for critical and penetrating thought through which they could define their own situations and devise courses of action.  Professor Nafisi eventually came to America. 

America's decline and diminishment in the humanities is part of an anti-intellectual movement that has  invaded our higher education institutions.While America is getting somewhat desperate to educate scientists and technologists in order to keep the nation competitive, it at the same time eschews the arts and humanities as preoccupations of an elite.  In effect, people want to sever the left lobe of the national brain, which controls verbal and analytical functions, from the right, which is the center for sensational and emotive perceptions. The humanities are the center of an important cognitive function of the human community.

No country has its formation recorded as thoroughly and deeply as the U.S.  Courses in American literature include not just the fiction, poetry, and drama, as is popularly supposed.  The surveys of early American literature include the diaries and correspondence of the nation's founding, the critical essays such as the Federalist Papers, the national documents, and the discourse that took place during its founding.  Early American literature is not necessarily the favorite of general students, because they prefer to deal with the more imaginative aspects, but it is an extensive record of the hows and whys and mental disciplines involved in the country's formation.   It is a record of the essential role played by the art of rhetoric in making political decisions, and some whose educations were self-directed, such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, were the most skillful practitioners. 

The degree to which the skills and values of rhetoric are in a state of disuse is no where more emphatically and painfully evident than in what passes for political discourse today.  It is rare to come across a communication that contains a basic rhetorical principle.  Rather, the model for discourse in today's political arena is war propaganda, which is designed to agitate hatred and other mindless passions. 

While I think the deterioration of the humanities reflects a faltering nation, I make no case for their rehabilitation.  Nations rise, and nations fall according to the viability of their culture.  When a culture loses access to the resources that have created it, it is far into dysfunction.

Like the women in Tehran, people who value the intellectual foundations of their nation and its culture will continue to study and discuss.  Many times I have been asked to lead groups that wanted to undertake a special line of study and investigation.  

When America was formed, it did so quite consciously from the best that was thought, spoken, and written.  Its contributions to the humanities have been studied and used as models for new and reforming nations worldwide.

And it may be time for those who value the humane and benevolent to think about a new nation.

For more discussion of the state and value of the humanities, go to this link to The New York Times.