Yoo Who -- The Drink of Forgiving and Forgetting

Reported today, in the New York Times:

After five years of often bitter internal debate, the Justice Department concluded in a report released Friday that the lawyers who gave legal justification to the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation tactics for terrorism suspects used flawed legal reasoning but were not guilty of professional misconduct.

John Yoo, who in a decent country would have been considered a war criminal, escaped even the lesser charges of professional misconduct for harnessing his talents to the waterboarding and "enhanced interrogations" that shocked the consciences of good people around the world, if not here at home in the land of the free and the home of the indifferent. Where war crimes are simply shoved under the rug in the interests of some faux bipartisan amity, of binding up the untreated wounds of the nation, and where such behavior can be expected to occur again. The moral hazard of our exceptionalism.

Shame. Shame.

Massachusetts

Connecticut has inflicted Joe Lieberman on the nation; no doubt many in the Nutmeg State regret that choice. Now Massachusetts appears likely to send Scott Brown to Washington. One wonders how Barack Obama can deliver on the promise of change when states like these stand in the way of progress. Can the good people of Massachusetts not know of the burden that is now on their shoulders?

Remembering Dr. King today -- we miss his wisdom and character today, and his practical commitment to the work of making real progress happen. If good men and women do nothing, the liberal agenda of social justice will go down to defeat. I hope that the voters in Massachusetts will be mindful of their responsibility to the nation.

Hope abides

At the end of an awful decade, one so marred by the dismal, disgraceful, and destructive Bush presidency that its stain will not be removed in our lifetime, we entered into 2009 with a spirit of hope. Americans had just elected an African American to the Presidency -- a bold departure from our past that was broader even than the gulf between the previous President's incoherent faux-cowboy belligerence and the soaring rhetoric and highmindedness of Barack Obama. Though we entered upon this last year of the decade of naught with two failed wars still in progress, with a rapidly collapsing economic system, and with the mountain of debt left by the GOP Congress and Mr Bush, nonetheless some of us also felt a deep and reassuring hopefulness -- a sense that we were finally heading in the right direction, that our highest aspirations might finally begin to be met. With such hope and such aspirations came expectations that have not been met.

This last year has been disappointing. We are more deeply engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan than I had hoped. The health care reform bills have fallen short of my expectations. The economic program has been too timid -- too much of a trickle-down Republican model, and too little has been done to help the unemployed and those in real difficulty in these hard times. Watching the Democrats in Congress take their lead from blue dogs, "moderate" Republicans, and Joe Lieberman, has been profoundly disheartening.

Yet, even on the darkest days, hope abides. It is a hope that I cannot explain or defend, but at its center is the belief that a nation that could elect Barack Obama is a nation that can come to understand the righteousness and wisdom of the progressive agenda, and to support that agenda so that Congress and this President can bring its benefits to our children and the generations of Americans who will inherit the America we leave behind when we go.

Wishing you all a happy new year. May all your highest aspirations be realized in the year to come.

Neil

Progress: The Best Gift

Progress is slow, and has many enemies. They fear the cost; they see only the sacrifice and worry that something important is being overlooked. And so they wait and suffer for the waiting: the poor, the uninsured, the unemployed, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The dream that is America - a dream of equality and human dignity expressed in the words of our Declaration of Independence but has taken two centuries and more to even approach realization. How far we still are from realizing that dream for all of us, for the least of us.

And yet, there are days when you can feel the progress, and sense the dream in motion, like a moving river or the shifting plates of the Earth herself. It may be naive, but I believe in progress. I believe in that dream. This is the Christmas spirit flickering brightly in the heart of a nation born to be a light unto the world.

Merry Christmas to all of you.

KMSR RIP

A good friend sends sad news. The Boy Scout Council that received a generous gift of land in the 60's for the purpose of camping and outdoor activities, has decided to close the camp and sell the land. More about this later; I have no time now to do more than provide the link to this appalling and deeply shameful act.

Conservation is a fundamental value in Scouting, and what this news amounts to is a gross failure of stewardship -- a disgraceful failure to conserve the benefits of a generous gift so that it might be enjoyed for the ages. In just 40 years, the incompetents in charge of the Council have managed to screw it up so badly that the lands we loved are now on the auction block. They can claim to be doing this as a service to the boys, and in making such a claim they confess their own culpable dishonesty and reckless destructiveness.

When the camp is no more, and the lands have been put to other uses, who will know the true cost? Those of us who slept soundly on summer nights under canvas tents beneath familiar Hemlock trees, and who tread the trails from one end of the camp to the other a thousand times, will have our memories. Little did we know how lucky we were, nor appreciate how vulnerable such things are in a world where even Scouters fail to conserve.

Moderates, Centrists, BlueDogs, and Other Useless Creatures

Health care reform may finally move forward, if the President's excellent speech is any indication of the likely course of future events. The bottleneck is in the Senate Finance Committee, where Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley have supposedly been struggling to forge a measure that would draw 60 votes. Baucus is no liberal champion, and Grassley's public statements show that he is actually out to block any reform at all, and it is no surprise that progress has been stalled in their shop.

The President has tried to move this legislation forward with bi-partisan support, but the Republicans see no advantage politically in helping him achieve what would be a stunning reversal of the sorry history of health care reform in this country. He is right to try to change the tone of public discourse and to seek to bring together people of goodwill to bring changes we can mostly agree on -- surely we do not need more of the kind of ugly and divisive behavior that was evident at McCain-Palin rallies and more recently at Town Hall meetings. But the idea that compromise is always the best course, and that mollifying the so-called centrists is the right thing to do, is just plain wrong.

Tying our policy, and our nation's future, to the meandering and mindless middle is what produced the war in Iraq, the Bush tax cuts, the torture of detainees, and the meltdown of our financial markets. Where were these moderates when these things were happening? They were happy to go along with Bush and his radical economic and foreign policies. They raised no objection to the suppression of regulatory oversight of our financial services industry. They endorsed and tolerated and compromised their way through eight years that ruined us financially, empowered our enemies, punished our military and our military families, and exposed us to dishonor and shame.

It is clear that we need to avoid rancor and insulting speech, the personal attacks, and the appeals to fear and bigotry that have reinforced and magnified the fringe elements and rowdies who have emerged from the bars, and other places that feature FOX news and similar degraded forms of entertainment, to take their place as political spokesmen and women of middle America and to claim the loyalties of the likes of Chuck Grassley and Mike Enzi. Is it any wonder at all that Chuck Grassley stood before such people and told them they were right to worry that the government intended to pull the plug on Grandma?

Much of what passes for moderation is nothing more than mindless passivity and amoral abdication of a citizen's responsibility to be informed and to give serious thought to the public policy issues of the day; a natural consequence of such complacent neglect is uncertainty and self-centered inertia. It is very common to fear change and to hold onto the status quo even as it becomes ever clearer that the status quo cannot be sustained -- it is also common to prefer to be called a moderate than to admit you are simply complacent, uninformed, and afraid.

The time for all that passed a long time ago. Change, at long last, is inevitable. This may be our last chance to reform our health care system before we all go broke. The President has put forward a sensible and decent plan. It is not the single-payer plan that many of us wanted, but it deserves our endorsement and full support. It is time the blue dogs and moderates got on board or out of the way.

Neil

You Lie!

My President gave a wonderful speech last night. So wonderful that it could not be marred even by the ugliness that we have come to associate with the Republicans since the fall presidential campaign and this summer's absurd town hall circuses.

A Congressman from South Carolina shouted an insult to the President, charging Mr Obama with lying. It would of course be no less offensive had the charge been made by a member of a party that had not already sold us the war in Iraq on the most dishonest and discredited terms, challenged the President's eligibility to serve in his office, and charged that he intended to pull the plug on America's elderly. But in this case, the charge is plainly ridiculous.

We have endured the dishonesty and belligerence of the Republicans for eight long, difficult and dishonorable years. It is time to move on. With or without these people, and we may well be better off without them, let us bring the change that America needs. Elections have consequences, I was told when we invaded Iraq. It is time that the last two elections began to make a difference in the lives of Americans.

I am proud of my President tonight.

Neil

Town Hall Republicans

The past few years have been a challenge for progressives and liberals. Going back to the failure of our political system in the presidential election of 2000, and moving forward from that flawed beginning, we have seen a series of plagues: the repeat of the Vietnam experience (ie, a war without justification and without an ending, and with American war crimes and dishonor), the disabling of government agencies like FEMA and the SEC, ruinous tax breaks for the wealthy, the attack on science and the promotion of religion as its substitute, an ugly pandering to homophobes and nativists, and the depressing degradation of debate of public policy issues.

It's this last bit that I am thinking of tonight.

In the 70's, the GOP included talented and serious people who were pragmatic and moderate in their approach to public policy. Even the hated Richard Nixon was capable of supporting Food Stamps.

The change in the GOP began with the rise of Newt Gingrich, but really blossomed under the presidency of George W Bush. These were the years when the party moved sharply from competence, pragmatism, good government and moderation, to become the party of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Chuck Grassley, and the townhall rowdies who shouted down a woman in a wheelchair in Red Bank today.

The career of John McCain from 2000 to 2008 tells the story: in 2000, Americans on both sides of the aisle supported his presidential campaign. I liked Bill Bradley and John McCain more than I did Al Gore. By 2008, he had completely rebranded himself -- even to the absurd extent that he was able to choose Sarah Palin as his running mate. A more convincing repudiation of competence and moderation would be hard to imagine.

What has happened to the GOP is really a shame. It is also a tragedy for America and for the world that looks to America for leadership. Perhaps the worst thing is that the phony populism of the GOP affirms the misbehavior and encourages the belligerence of people who have suffered the most from Republican policies of the past eight years. The GOP draws its political clout from the resentments and bigotry of the least well-educated members of the lower fringe of a threatened middle class.

It seems likely tonight that the public option will be dropped from health care reform. This is also tragic, because it is a clear indication that the large companies that have been the beneficiaries of the current system -- who have benefited from the system that has so disenfranchised tens of millions of Americans -- have succeeded in protecting themselves and their profit margins from serious competition. For now.

With or without the public option, we need to extend coverage to all Americans now. It will be much more expensive without a public option, but so be it. First, let's get people covered, even those idiots doing all the shouting in the town halls. In time, when reform proves to have been a good thing for them and their families, we can come back and finish the job.

It's a big country with a lot of stupid people; progress is going to be slow and difficult.

Neil

Disillusionment

First, it turned out that a Democratic Congress could not, or would not, bring an end to the Vietnam, I mean the Iraq War.

Then it turned out that John Edwards was a liar - not just a man who was having an affair but a man whose ego would allow him to jeopardize the hopes of all the people who supported his candidacy for an affair, and who lacked the integrity to quit the race when it became apparent that his affair was the biggest threat to the otherwise inevitable Democratic victory.

Now Barack Superstar Obama is backing away from the public option. That's right. Not only don't we get single payer, we don't even get a public option.

Why? Because it would be so freakin' radical? A touch of communism? No, unless you consider the Veterans Administration to be a Commie institution. No, unless your Aunt Sadie's Medicare seems like a pinko conspiracy. What is it exactly that worries people about a public option?

And how could Barack Obama, the coolest, smartest, most popular man in the world so totally fuck this up?

How does a moron like Chuck Grassley get his way, and how can Obama sell us all out so easily?

Why are Democrats so useless?

Why?

Ghost in You

The Psychedelic Furs - The Ghost In You


Music from the mid-80's by the Psychedelic Furs, vocals by Richard Butler. The video is ridiculous, but I like this tune, and need to check out more of Butler's work.

Women of Ireland

With love to all.

Redemption Song

Odd what you can find on You Tube, isn't it?

There is something authentically Irish about the theme of this song. How many songs do the Irish sing about the struggle for freedom? Too many to count, I suppose.

And for those of us whose families made the journey to America in the 19th century, have not our ancestors hopes and dreams been redeemed? To celebrate St Patrick's Day in America is to celebrate those hopes, their dreams, and that redemption.

In a year of economic hardship for so many, it is good to recall that others with fewer resources and far greater troubles persevered and found redemption. It is also a good time to look upon our neighbors in this world and see our own refugee ancestors in their eyes, and hear our own songs in their music.

It is a great day to be Irish and American and to feel connected through that unique identity to all those who struggle in this world.

Have a wonderful and happy St Patrick's Day!

Neil

Remembering Derek Bell

The late Derek Bell is featured on this performance by The Chieftains of O'Carolan's Fanny Power

Irish A Capella

AIG Bonuses

Can anything be more damning than this - that AIG executives in the business unit that has absorbed more than $100 billion of taxpayer dollars, due in large part to their mindless negligence, are now being paid millions in bonuses?

In Pakistan, thousands have taken to the streets to demand an independent judiciary. Here in America, we are placid. Complacent. Resigned, perhaps. But utterly passive.

We do not deserve the freedoms we enjoy, and we may not keep them. We think they are God-given, inalienable, but that does not guarantee them in perpetuity.

In the comfort of our lives, we have granted powers to the managerial class - the highly compensated stewards of our major corporations and capital markets - and their political allies and servants. Why have we been so willing to abdicate in the exercise of our citizenship? Because we have vastly undervalued that franchise.

I watched Oliver Stone's "W" recently and wondered once again, as I did in 2004, how Americans could vote for such a mean-spirited punk, such a second-class mind, such an undeserving pretender. It says much about us, and we have not learned a thing from the experience of the past 8 years. We think George W Bush is to blame, but the blame is ours, and we must understand that if there is to be any hope at all of fixing what is so greatly in need of fixing.

I do not believe we have it in us, as a nation. I live among silly, self-centered, under-educated, incurious, and unreflective fools. A nation of such people cannot long remain great.

America is a great nation, and Lincoln was right to see her as the last, best hope of man. Were he here today, I wonder how hopeful he would be.

Reel Fiddling

Mairead Ni Mhaonaigh, of the group Altan.

The Bush Stain on American Honor

Read all about it.

Now what? Where do we go to get our good name back?

Que lastima.

Lover's Waltz

Lovely music.

Dreaming of the one I love

I think we could dance to this - eh?

Pretty Music

Heard this tonight on WFUV. Just lovely.