Posted inPolitics: National

‘A Christian thing’

Of all the detail that emerged about the Michigan so-called militia, which hoped to start an uprising against the government by killing a police officer and then bombing the funeral, two stand out. One was when a neighbor, asked about such groups, their heavy armament and violent beliefs, responded that it was "no big deal" around there. Another came from the ex-wife of the accused ring leader, who told the Associated Press, "It started out as a Christian thing. You go to church. You pray. You take care of
your family. I think David started to take it a little too far."

Ya think?

As a Christian, it's painful to hear the media incessantly describe this as a "Christian militia." Being a Christian is about far more than going to church, praying and taking care of your family. It's not about premeditated murder. It's not about revolution against the government, for Christianity in practice is revolutionary enough (e.g., love our enemies, such as Osama bin Laden). It is about helping the least, the last and the lost. It is about social justice, and forgiveness, and grace. Jesus ministered to the poor, ate with sinners and didn't deny healing based on pre-existing conditions. The faith is, in other words, about many things that American right-wing Christianity despises — a Christianity not merely preached in snake-handling backwoods outposts but in some of the largest mega-churches. Better to pick highly selectively from the Old Testament: keep women down, stone gays, smite and slay mercilessly in the name of the Lord, overthrow the government (of the Antichrist!) and establish a theocracy. So in Holy Week, these so-called Christians would have Jesus suffer yet again.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

Passages

If my editor and publisher allow it, the new David Mapstone Mystery, South Phoenix Rules, will come out in December. I've never written a novel in, essentially, three months, but I know Mapstone fans have been without a fix for some time. Thanks to blog readers for their patience.

In Arizona, two passings. Stu Udall, who served as one of the small state's two or three congressmen, and later became the distinguished Secretary of the Interior under Kennedy and Johnson, died at 90. The gift of years had its pain: Seeing his beloved West become overrun with people, independent old Arizona become a hotspot of white-right extremism and the conservation ethic he embodied undone in so many ways. Roy Elson also passed away. As the powerful top aide to Sen. Carl Hayden, Elson was one of the most important players in winning the Central Arizona Project. So lacking is the Information Center in institutional knowledge or curiosity — or a desire to be relevant — that it failed to note Elson's death for a week after it was being discussed in Phoenix. When what should be the state's newspaper of record thinks "there's no history here," why should we expect a different attitude from the Midwesterners and inland Californians who have swarmed the place like a biblical plague? Elson was a friend of my mothers, and after I returned to the state, I vowed to trek to southern Arizona and spend time hearing of the old water-war days. I regret that I never did it.

The Kookocracy has begun to attain its goals as Arizona becomes the first state to eliminate health care to children of the working poor. This underscores the cruelty, "devil take the hindmost" and sociopathic nature of the white-right (see "The Party of Cruelty" on The Front Page). Much more is being churned out of the Legislature, including the destruction of the state park system, draconian cuts to education and Medicaid, and hundreds of other measures. They will make Arizona's dire economic situation worse. But will voters reject the Kooks? Or will the state's large number of Anglos in low-wage jobs, who have seen their living standards drop and opportunities whither because of Republican policies, be led by talk radio to vote for more of the same? It's a national question, too. And, of course, the ruling elites want you to be stupid.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Simple justice

During the Clinton impeachment trial, when I was a "right-wing columnist," I wasn't particularly concerned with his canoodling with Monica Lewinsky. Being of the Goldwater persuasion, I could care less what he did in the bedroom. It was a shame that he lacked the good sense to find a woman closer to his age who wanted to be a discreet mistress in the timeless and useful European model. I was concerned about the allegation of subornation of perjury by the nation's chief magistrate. Yes, it was a small spark, a sexual indiscretion, but the attempted cover-up seemed to carry deeper troubles. It seemed to invite a reckoning in the future. I was uneasy about the fate of a nation that produced such a situation. All this has been brought back by Ken Gormley's book, The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr.

Now, 11 years on and it seems so much longer, the reckoning is becoming apparent. We lived through eight years of Bush and Cheney. They reached at least within striking distance of victory in 2000 because many were disgusted with the Clinton chaos, remembered the pragmatism of the first Bush and believed the "compassionate conservative" line. Instead, they used the 9/11 attack as a pretext to embroil America in a string of endless foreign wars. The power of the executive branch was extended far beyond the despotic fears of Jefferson, far, even, beyond the "energy in the executive" intentions of Madison and Hamilton. The abuses of power were monumental, from corrupt contractors, to hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian deaths, to the enshrinement of torture as American policy. We witnessed political prosecutions and election fraud at home, the rendition of innocents abroad and the mask fall away from the quiet coup of unprecedented corporate control. Much of this continues under President Obama, who refuses to push his corporate lawyer-Attorney General to pursue even justice under law, once a key American virtue. Or to explicitly renounce and outlaw the power arrogated by Cheney/Bush.

It's also clear that the Lewinsky matter was part of the broader failure of the Clinton presidency. Clinton was focused on bin Laden and warned George W. Bush. But he failed to adequately articulate this new threat to the nation, both to prepare it for a future of non-nation-state conflict, and to caution against an overreaction where the people would give up their liberties in exchange for false security. He faced a powerful Republican Congress, but much of the fault for that lies with his botched health care overreaching in 1993. And, yes, there was and is a "vast right-wing conspiracy." All this limited Bill Clinton.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

Teen Age Republican

The maxim holds that people move right as they grow older. I moved left. In each case, I was in the minority. Only one other child wore Goldwater buttons in 1964 at Kenilworth School, Barry's alma mater; LBJ buttons were in profusion. Later I handed out leaflets for state Rep. Betty Adams Rockwell. In high school, I manned the phones for Jack Williams and Richard Nixon. Even on a shallow, but oh-so-important level for a high-school boy (oh, I've grown up, honest…), being a Teen Age Republican was a lonely avocation. Back then, all the pretty girls, much less the pretty and smart girls, were Democrats. There were certainly no blond goddesses such as Monica Goodling, who led the hiring thought police at the Bush Justice Department. 

As a young columnist, I staked out what at the time was the Dead Career Zone in newspapers, as a supporter of free markets, free trade and limited government. Now I feel the need to put all of those goals in quotation marks. For I did move left, knowing, as Whittaker Chambers said in a different context, "that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side."

I must say a few things in my defense besides "young" and "stupid." I was raised in a staunchly Republican family, where my grandmother never voted for a Democrat again because of the way Woodrow Wilson treated Theodore Roosevelt. My mother was involved in Arizona GOP politics. It was an intensely political household, with dinner-table conversations over public policy. My mother's rule was that one could take any position, as long as he could defend it with learning and logic. Barry Goldwater was an icon and seemed to embody the best of Arizona and the West, as did leaders such as Paul Fannin and John J. Rhodes. In a house of books, I gravitated to the ones that tended to support my positions — a fatal intellectual flaw, of course. Buckley and Goldwater conservatism encouraged independent thinking, as opposed to the rigid ideologies of the left, or so it seemed. Growing up in old Arizona, I was in a sparsely populated place where abstractions seemed borne out by everything around us. And the existential struggle of the Cold War towered above all else; here the Republicans seemed stronger, no small thing.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

The Full Kook

Gov. Jan Brewer is pulling Arizona out of the coalition of Western states and Canadian provinces trying to make some regional progress in limiting greenhouse gases. J.D. Hayworth is taking on John McCain in the Republican Senate primary (make your own gasbag jokes). For awhile, I worried Arizona might be denied what I call "The Full Kook," where the Kookocracy implements its most cherished and dangerous proposals, rather than being the crazy aunt in the attic down at the Capitol whose ravings are muted by the adult in the governor's chair. Now I'm more hopeful. Why? Because the Full Kook is the only way I can see that Arizona might save itself. For decades, the creeping growth of the Kookocracy has slowly been damaging every part of the state's social and economic health. But still, the Kooks kept control of the Legislature because most eligible voters stay home. Only the Full Kook might shake most Arizonans out of their torpor — and we'll see if there's what Saint Janet called the "sensible center" majority — or if the Big Sort has turned Arizona into the nation's largest insane asylum.

Brewer is falling into line with the successful reactionary effort to halt any measures to address climate change — or even to accept its scientific legitimacy. Even the New York Times has strangely bought into this. The deniers of established science are "skeptics." What next in the flagship of the liberal media: "Evolution skeptics"?  Thus the big snowstorm in the East is a sign that "global warming is a hoax," when in fact it is confirmation of the destabilizing weather patterns we were told to expect from climate change. In Seattle, we just had our warmest January on record. (Stephen Colbert has a great retort for the deniers, in media most Americans can understand). No matter. The strategy is to keep arguing and prevent action. In D.C., any meaningful action to limit emissions is dead, another casualty of the Hoover/Carter/Obama malaise. What is barely reported is how much money Exxon/Mobil and other corporate giants are pouring into not only lobbying against action, but to prop up the elaborate propaganda machine of the "skeptics." Nor is there ongoing, serious discussion of the costs of inaction, whether because of what's coming from climate change or because we're abrogating opportunities to create new industries to help slow or reverse its effects.

So Arizona needn't worry. America will remain paralyzed. Reality will not, and the costs, destabilization and even national security perils from climate change will continue to creep forward. Brewer doesn't even hear the contradiction in her statement, when she withdraws from the Western Climate Initiative — hardly perfect but a start among serious leaders — and wants to avoid California emission standards, but also wants green-tech jobs. Sorry, the two work together. This is why Germany is solar-power central. And notice that China is working furiously to corner the technology and manufacture of renewable energy. In the U.S., the best shot at ameliorating the effects of climate change are happening in the smart states, not the cheap states. Even if ASU makes some research breakthroughs, Arizona lacks the economic capacity to exploit most of them.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Mad hatters at tea

Now the meme is how we must show the "tea-party movement" more respect. After all, it was responsible for Republican Scott Brown's victory, taking a Senate seat held for decades by Democrats. The "liberal media" flagship, The New York Times, carried an analysis that said, "The remarkable Republican victory in Massachusetts demonstrated
convincingly that the deep populist anger fueling the Tea Party
movement has migrated from the political fringe to the mainstream,
forcing both parties to confront how to channel a growing mood of
public resentment to their own ends." Others have talked about the movement's "diverse" elements, and how we shouldn't judge it merely by its loudest advocates. Some liberal talk-radio hosts have urged progressives to co-opt the tea-partiers.

Anyone who has lived in Arizona knows this is nonsense. The tea-baggers are Republicans, not independents. They an ignorant, easily-led rabble that is energized, most of all, by the fact that a black man is president of the United States. Where, for example, was their outrage when George W. Bush was running up the biggest deficit in history? Gathered and ginned up by Fox "News" and talk radio, they are against government — all government. They are against taxes — all taxes. They are animated by all manner of strange fetishes, from President Obama's birth certificate to communist plots lurking in every element of public policy. They love to hate, no matter the large number who are evangelicals. Force is their first resort, whether dealing with the Muslim world or local gun laws. They make "low information" voters seem like Plutarch, with the most recent poll showing large numbers of Republican voters believe Obama is a racist, a socialist, and not an American citizen.

In other words, the tea party is the Kookocracy taken to a national level.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Spaced-out America

We choose to go to the moon in this
decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because
they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the
best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we
are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which
we intend to win…" — John F. Kennedy, 1962

NASA's grand plan to return to the moon…is about to
vanish with hardly a whimper. (Obama's budget) is also a death knell for the Ares 1 rocket,
NASA's planned successor to the space shuttle — The Washington Post, 2010

China's "efforts to dominate renewable energy technologies raise the
prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the
Mideast for a reliance on… China." — New York Times, 2010

Tell me we're not a nation in decline. Not relative decline in the peaceful and prosperous world that a generation of American leaders worked to build from the ashes of World War II and all its poisonous causes. Absolute decline. The night I saw Neil Armstrong step onto the surface of the moon, I couldn't have imagined our country would be here 40 years hence. I was certain we would at least have bases on Mars, if not have embarked on some deep-space exploration. But, then, during the great panic of the fall of 2008, I thought we might actually turn away from an economy based on sprawl and financial speculation, face reality as a nation, and get busy making the Great Transition to address the Great Disruption that has only just begun.

And you say I'm not an optimist.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Difficult days ahead

Despite all the progressive wishing away, the election of a doctrinaire right-wing Republican to Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat is a calamity and a sign of calamities to come. The implications are national and international. Yes, Martha Coakley was a weak candidate who ran an inept campaign. Sure, the economy is bad and the party in power always suffers. And, yeah, the Obama and progressive voters stayed home in large numbers (this is to be comforting?). Meanwhile, the White House, said to be "blindsided" and "in disarray," seems to have interpreted the special election as an excuse to tack even more to "the center," i.e. the right.

We've got difficult days ahead.

Imagine if Franklin Roosevelt had failed in his first term: failed to enact meaningful legislation to immediately address the suffering of Americans and bring some fair play back to the republic; failed to take on, with relish, the "economic royalists"; failed to connect, in a visceral way, with Americans suffering from the Great Depression; failed to be wiley, cagey, downright dishonest in pursuit of his goals; failed to surround himself with a cadre of brilliant, independent, highly competent lieutenants, and failed to be willing to experiment with almost anything but a continuation of the Republican policies that had caused the Depression. Communism was popular, fascism perhaps even more so thanks to the seeming success and popularity of Mussolini. It was especially potent in the hands of populist demagogue Huey Long. The forces of reaction, although in disarray, still commanded great wealth and also had fascist sympathies. "Dictatorship" was a good word at the time.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Zeitgeist hunt

Is it just me, or does the Obama presidency already have the flavor of "in the past"?

As to the future, David Brooks has seen it and it's the…tea baggers. In a remarkable column in the New York Times, he cites a raft of anti-Democratic/sour mood polling, then:

The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single
idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over
the past year.

The educated class believes in global warming, so
public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated
class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against
them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun
control is mounting.

The story is the same in foreign affairs.
The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is
now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The
educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of
Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.

A year ago, the Obama supporters were the passionate ones. Now the tea party brigades have all the intensity.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

On the border

By Emil Pulsifer

Guest Rogue

Whatever your position on
the difficult issue of immigration, looming events make the need for
comprehensive immigration reform more important than ever, for America as a
whole and for Arizona in particular.  Mexico's proven oil reserves
are dwindling fast and may be exhausted at the current rate of production
within less than ten years: the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
estimates that Mexico will become a net oil importer by 2017.

Why is this a source of
concern for America in general and Arizona in particular?

First, is the fact
that Mexico has consistently been one of the top three sources of
America's imported oil (with Canada and Saudi Arabia). As of late 2009,
Mexico was the second largest source of America's imported oil. More importantly from the
standpoint of immigration policy is the reality that oil exports constitute
Mexico's largest source of legal revenues (about 40 percent); second to
this, and larger than tourism, are the remittances sent home by immigrants
working in foreign countries (chiefly the United States).  Remittances
are, in fact, so large a component of Mexico's economy, that they constitute a
peculiar form of foreign investment. So, barring rosy developments in
Mexico's oil industry, and unless the United States takes an even greater
nosedive than Mexico is going to in coming years, expect massive immigration,
on a scale to make the recent wave look puny, within a decade.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

The 2010 thing

I've never been big on predictions, much less had the talent to match the trenchant dazzle of Jim Kunstler's annual revel (my favorite line: "Unlike the 1930s, we are no longer a nation who call each other 'Mister' and "Ma'am,' where even the down-and-out wear neckties and speak a discernible variant of regular English, where hoboes say 'thank you,' and where, in short, there is something like a common culture of shared values. We're a nation of thugs and louts with flames tattooed on our necks, who call each other 'motherfucker' and are skilled only on playing video games based on mass murder.")

No, history is too filled with contingency to make crystal balls reliable. The conventional wisdom of our experts is perhaps more corrupted and thus worthless than at any time since 1929 or 1914. Our collective inability to see things as they are, rather than as we wish them to be, makes any clear-eyed assessment immediately consigned to the perdition of "doomers" and "he's so negative." We have more "information sources" than ever before, and we are more ignorant. Even so, we can take a spin through the major themes that the new year and decade will bring.

For America: The continued bleeding of multiple wars will continue to be underreported and ignored by most of our fellow citizens, barring a major calamity. And yet it will be an uber-burden that will keep building new matrices of trouble for the nation. One example is how our military is essentially providing cover for China to spend billions extracting Afghanistan's resources for the good of the Chinese economy. The military is the jobs and stimulus program for the United States, but unlike investment in, say, infrastructure and research, it will not repay itself. It is, in Ross Perot's famous locution, the giant sucking sound. We can't pacify tribal "nations" driven by medieval theology (and I'm not talking about Gilbert, Ariz., here). Our efforts will not stop terrorism. Let me go really far out on a limb and say President Obama's "limited" Afghan surge will end up like LBJ circa 1966.

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Posted inPolitics: National

The Maloney Doctrine

As the cops say, "thank God for stupid criminals." For whatever reason, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was unable to detonate the powerful plastic explosive strapped to his legs and Detroit was spared the further indignity of being the scene of a new terror attack. If the early reports hold, the explosive was easily detectable by current screening techniques. The suspect was also on terror watch lists in the U.S. and the U.K., but was somehow able to board an airliner.

A cynic would say: After all this crap law-abiding fliers have been through for the past eight years, and all the federal snooping into the lives of American citizens, here's what we get. Ted Kennedy was prevented from flying because his name was on a "no-fly" list, but not Abdulmutallab. Oh, but he dutifully took off his shoes like every other schlub going through the long, long security lines. Some things are remarkable: that the detection gear didn't work, and that with all the computing muscle at its disposal, the feds couldn't get this guy on the right list (despite a warning about the man to American officials from his father, a Nigerian banker). The man also used cash to buy his ticket. Suspicions, anyone? Anyone? Otherwise, the reality is that terror attacks will happen in an open society. We haven't gotten our La-Z-Boy heads around that yet.

It will go hard on the Obama administration, especially Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who is discovering she's not in Arizona any more, coddled by the powerful women of the "sewing circle" and the hagiography of the Arizona Republic. First she said the system worked "like clockwork," now she says it failed. Andrew Sullivan, hardly an enemy of the administration, has called for her resignation, so that the Bush era of unaccountability and incompetence doesn't persist.

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Posted inPolitics: National

McCain Agonistes

Am I the only one who notices how radio news reports — even on NPR — on everything from health care to the budget always seem to lead with sound cuts from Republican opponents. They get the time to spout a talking point, then the announcer moves on to the next story. We're left to wonder why these bills that have passed garnered any support. Considering how bought-and-paid-for the Democratic Party is by corporate interests, I find this odd. What are the corporate media afraid of? In any event, when the roles are reversed, and the Democrats are reduced to theoretical powerlessness in the Congress, we will not hear their voices. We will still hear Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and, of course, the wealthy Republican presidential standard bearer John Sidney McCain III.

Even Tiger Woods' numerous paramours had more sense than the media do over their darling, the senior senator "from Arizona." Lately many stories have swooned over McCain "finding his voice again," "leading the opposition to health care legislation," etc. An only slightly more balanced report came today from the New York Times. I hear McCain on CSPAN and he sounds like a bitter old man. The media hear him and angels sing. Old fighter pilots never die, they still get the girls (and guys). That's the best explanation I can muster.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Turning and turning

We are told repeatedly by our rulers in business, politics and the media that the big hurdle to addressing climate change and health care is cost. Somehow war without end, the global effects of climate change and the towering costs of health care even as more Americans do without it are "free." And so it goes.

This is how we live now. There was indeed one conservative in last fall's presidential election and he now sits in the White House. Barack Obama fits the Burkean mold of slow change, respectful of tradition and custom, seeking to preserve the best of existing arrangements. Unfortunately, thirty years of right-wing revolution (represented by Mr. Obama's opponent, the wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III) have driven these laudable benchmarks so far to the extreme that Mr. Obama's innate restraint is exactly the wrong temperament for this pivotal moment in history.

On health care, one wonders if his heart was ever in it. This has been a colossal failure of the Democratic Party. The New Deal was not the product of a single, 2,000-plus page bill, but of scores of pieces of legislation over years. It delivered nearly instant relief to the nation's suffering, in both substance and confidence-building, helping to ensure continued Democratic majorities to keep it going. Under Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, we have a massive dog's breakfast that will come to no good, and be undone by the Republicans because its good elements will take too long to kick in. Why, for example, not one bill that outlawed the savage practice of denying insurance based on pre-existing conditions, or charging outlandish premiums for it — and having it implemented the moment the president signed the legislation? Another could have instantly required pharmaceutical companies to bid for Medicare drugs, lowering costs at the stroke of a pen. Yet another would have eliminated antitrust protections for the big insurers. And another still would have been a public option, if not Medicare for all — and let the filibuster happen and its instigators pay the fearsome price in the next election.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

Go Goddard?

Terry Goddard is a good man. He was a popular and effective Phoenix mayor, and after failing to achieve the governor's office in the '90s came back to become the best attorney general in the state's history. Among his top achievements has been going after the wire transfer companies that are enabling the smuggling of people, drugs and guns. He's also knocked off some of the rough edges he was said to possess as mayor and, I would assume, collected lots of political IOUs. For all these reasons, I wonder if he should run for governor.

A Rasmussen poll showed Democrat Goddard only 9 points ahead of Gov. Jan Brewer and in virtually tied with Treasurer Dean Martin, his likely Republican opponents. Another survey indicated Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio as a huge favorite of Republican voters and, according to the Info Center, leading Goddard by 12 percentage points. It's unclear whether the Badged Ego will run.

This seems like madness, or, if the polls are accurate, the pulse of a madhouse. The Republicans have wrecked Arizona through their policies and set it on a collision course with a very nasty future. The party's cruel, spiteful behavior is epitomized by Arpaio and detailed in the brutal budget cuts of the Kookocracy Legislature. Brewer and Martin are empty suits. Arpaio probably won't run because the exposure of a statewide race might finally cause the mask to slip and leave him exposed as the calculating bully he is. Yet why would any of these clowns even be in contention against Goddard, a man of genuine accomplishments and a centrist one would hope represents the best of my home state and the hope for its future?

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