De gustibus non est disputandum
“There’s no accounting for taste.”

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

I’m sitting here in The Bunker listening to George Soros on CNN and searching the world over for a beautiful sentence to start yet another Sunday column. Do a Google search for “beautiful sentence” just for the heck of it and check out some of the 273,000 hits.

There is no way any one reporter, writer, columnist, or blogger can please everybody, as evidenced by the Latin phrase above and the diversity of publications out there in Webland. But just maybe, if your intention is pure, you can please some of the people some of the time.

So let’s talk a little politics and some science.

With only three weeks to go before we finally get to vote in this incessant, way-too-long presidential race, I want to write something that will add something to the discussion. I suspect, however, that everything has already been said that would matter and most people know how they are going to vote by now.

I want to get past this election and know that George W. Bush — our C-student, frat boy, king-in-chief — is gone from American politics forever.

Some writers are so afraid of Bush and Cheney and Rove that they think we will not have an election, or that it will be stolen and Sarah Palin will be in charge of the new police state.

Sarah Palin: Head of the Coming Police State?

I am going to stand with Obama for another week and hold out some “hope” that we will somehow make it through to the other side and the free world will not come to an end. Not that I am altogether confident that this is the case. It’s just that’s the only sensible position to take short of suicide : )

After this election, I want to get back to covering some interesting issues in science, since no matter what color the next president happens to be, we must get back to thinking about science instead of bashing it and allowing religion to control our politics. That is unless we want America to become the world’s backwater of dead political ideals.

Which means Sarah Palin cannot be vice president. And if that must be true, then John McCain can’t be the next president.

Even Karl Rove’s computer hacker buddies who know how to steal elections must realize this. Unless they are complete Turd Blossoms, which is possible. But since I know they love to read and hate this blog, I offer this up as a warning. Don’t steal it guys. You’ve done enough damage already. Let the voters decide this time.

Bush should never have been elected in the first place, and of course many people think he wasn’t. But not enough to stop him from moving into the White House. Once there, he should never have been reelected in 2004. Maybe he stole that one too, who knows?

Sure the oil company and insurance company executives got wildly rich in the Bush years. But if the people were really in charge of this democracy, that could be changed pretty easily. Maybe the problem is the press, which is clinging to its wealth in the “end times” for the printing press.

If we really had a liberal press in this country, the whackos that Rove has been sending to McCain-Palin rallies lately would hold far less sway in this country. The reason is that TV reporters get most of their news from newspapers, still. And all they want is for little old ladies who go to church to like them so they can win in the ratings. So they become an echo chamber for the fears and prejudices of people who lack a sound education.

If the educated minority in this country wanted to change things badly enough, they could. There is evidence it’s happening.

Obama Camp Relying Heavily on Ground Effort

And there is some evidence that the local press in Alabama has heard our call for more coverage of science here, although their first stab at it shows they lack the expertise to pull it off. In fact, the Newhouse press in Alabama got scooped by The New York Times this week, in more ways than one.

Look at this example and tell me who does better reporting — and writes a more beautiful sentence.

From the Sunday Birmingham News:

UAB scientists searching for cancer cures and Huntsville engineers designing rockets to carry Americans back to the moon are hoping a new president will reverse the erosion of federal spending for science and research and keep the government’s current commitments to rockets and missiles.

Alabama Economy Boosted by Federal Research Dollars?

That sentence reminds me of a series in The Decatur Daily in 1986 that ran under the headline: “The Good and Bad News On Browns Ferry,” a series that talked about how a nuclear plant in North Alabama caught on fire and almost melted down and never produced a single kilowatt hour of power. In other words, there was no good news. But you know newspapers. There’s two sides to every story. Right.

Compare the News lede sentence to this one in today’s New York Times.

They huddled in a quiet corner at the US Airways lounge at Ronald Reagan National Airport, sipping bottomless cups of coffee as they plotted to turn America’s missile defense program into a personal cash machine.

Insider’s Drained Missile-Defense Millions

As Bush would say, in other words, the Times exposed the corruption going on in Alabama in the search for federal dollars in defense contracts, in a readable news feature, while the News promotes the idea of bringing more research “pork” dollars to the state in one big long piece of public relations.

One is journalism. The other is PR. Choose the style you prefer.

And then let’s go a step further into blogland, where we can go where no editorial bureaucracy has ever gone before.

It just so happens I studied under the political science professor at the University of Alabama who was largely responsible for getting then-President Ronald Reagan to go after a missile defense shield in the early 1980s, Donald Snow.

He published a book called Nuclear Strategy In A Dynamic World in 1981, and another called The Last Frontier: An Analysis of the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1986.

But he was wrong about a lot of things, including a prediction that we would go through a series of one-term presidents after Reagan, and that Bush would lose the election in 2004 if he went to war with Iraq.

Educated Guesses 2003 — Predictions from UA Experts

War Against Iraq would Cost Bush Re-Election

President George W. Bush will lose his bid for re-election if the United States goes to war in 2003 against Iraq, predicts a University of Alabama expert in military and political affairs. Dr. Donald Snow, professor of political science at UA, places the likelihood of a 2003 war with Iraq at 2:1 in favor of a military strike. “If we go to war with Iraq, it will cost George W. Bush the election in 2004,” Snow said. “Even if the war itself goes well, the post-war will not, and that’s what’s going to do him in. “Post-War Iraq is going to be an extraordinarily messy place that we are going to have to occupy for a long time,” said Snow. “We will become the recruiting poster for al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.”

Well, he got that last part right. But as I have been saying for so long I am tired of saying it, a missile defense shield will not work. It only got us into trouble in Georgia recently, when we almost ended up in a real war with Russia because of it.

And The New York Times shows how the program just becomes another source for corrupt defense contracts to waste your tax money. The Birmingham News story shows that in a backwater, red state, even the newspaper editors and publishers want the corruption to continue because it props up the economy — and they can keep making a fine living wasting all those trees and paper and ink.

The good news is Bush will be gone soon.

Long live the Web Press!

The Bush Administration sent a $700 billion plan for a U.S. government bailout of bad mortgage debt to Congress on Saturday, seeking extraordinary authority as it tackles the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Democratic lawmakers, who control both houses of Congress, said they hoped to approve the bailout quickly but wanted changes such as more oversight, limits on executive pay at participating firms, and assistance for homeowners.

Congress Examines Bush’s Proposed $700 Billion Market Bailout Plan

Corporate welfare, otherwise known as market socialism. So much for American capitalism…

Under the Gun
by Glynn Wilson

Conservative rhetoric doesn’t kill people. Guns do - in the hands of crazed lunatics without hope fired up by “conservative” rhetoric.

No matter that their dire economic circumstances are Bush’s fault, not the Democrats’. They would never go after “whose the man” Bush, who they fervently voted for, twice.

And now that I think about it, why is it that liberals don’t kill people - not even loony conservatives?

They just want to feed their hunger and ease their pain, the bleeding hearts. Maybe feed them a Xanax and some Yuengling Black and Tan or a bowl. They would feel better, and then the cops would feel better too, and we could all get back to partying like it was 1999.

The problem is, the cops are looking in all the wrong directions for the people who are truly dangerous. Why? Because that’s what the Bush Empire wants them to do. Harass peace groups and environmental groups, and of course the crack heads, since they are Black and armed - and tend to vote for Democrats.

The Real Terrorists

The real terrorists who screw up people’s lives are not poor and Black - and they are certainly not liberal.

They are the angry white guys with money, who fire up the angry white guys without much hope, and send them off on a killing spree like they did in Knoxville, Tennessee, last week and Little Rock Arkansas this week.

In one of the best examples of Web journalism I’ve seen yet, on a newspaper Website at least, the Knoxville News-Sentinel online made me proud after spending four years pioneering Web journalism there and teaching the young reporters how to do it. The staff did a thorough and interesting job of covering the church shooter who interrupted that Sunday morning’s service with his shotgun and tried to bag himself 7 “liberals,” sort of like Dick Cheney does his friends. He managed to kill one and wound six.

The Reverend Chris Buice, trying to collect his thoughts on the gunman who invaded his congregation, Jim David Adkisson, 58, said he’s curious whether any clues might be gleaned from the writings of right-wing radio talk-show host Michael Savage and Fox News personalities Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, whose books were seized as evidence from Adkisson’s residence by police.

“The words you choose may be the difference between war and peace,” Buice said, speaking to a belief in the power of “dehumanizing language.”

“I believe in free speech, in rigorous debate,” he said. “But what’s the difference between a political opponent and a cockroach? You stomp a cockroach. You debate a political opponent.”

Take Back The Highways From Who?

I was thinking about that over the past couple of days, along with the man who fatally shot the chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party, Bill Gwatney, when I was pulled over by the Birmingham Police Department Thursday afternoon on the eve of Alabama’s now infamous “Take Back The Highways” weekend. It started out on holiday weekends a few years ago, but now appears to be every weekend. That’s a lot of your federal tax money being spent locally by the Bush and Riley Homeland Security Departments.

We don’t know if the crazed gunman in Arkansas who was shot down by police left a manifesto like the killer in Tennessee, who lives to tell about it. But we know Timothy Dale Johnson left a Post-It note at home with the victim’s last name and phone number along with 14 guns, antidepressants and a last will and testament, according to the AP. AlterNet has an interesting perspective on that too here.

All three incidents together prompted me to send out an e-mail notification on a list known to be frequented by Democrats and liberals and progressives — and even some Unitarians, libertarians and independents — from all over Alabama and the country, warning people to be on their guard more than ever.

The warning was not the same as the Homeland Security Department’s color-coded system to warn us of the threat from “radical Muslim terrorists.”

This warning is simply a blog post and an e-mail message warning open-minded people of all kinds everywhere to be aware of their surroundings at all times. They should be on the lookout for gun-toting rednecks hell bent on a Revolution of their own — to stop a Black man from inhabiting the White House.

They should also be on the alert against the more establishmentarian types of enforcers of the King’s code, if you know what I mean, those in blue uniforms with badges and guns and fast cars.

More than 125 additional state troopers will be on Alabama’s roads and highways as part of what is being billed as a crackdown on speeding and drunken driving in the so-called “Take Back Our Highways” campaign, according to the official press release. Tennessee and Mississippi do it too, in three of the states in the union with the least options for mass transportation for their citizens.

The crackdown trickles down to every police department as well, where anyone with a gun and a badge, under orders not to look for Muslims with bombs but hippies with peace signs, read “liberals,” can inflict even more damage.

And if they were not already aware of it, they should be concerned since the passage of the FISA spying bill a few weeks ago in Congress and along with telecom immunity. Now anyone with a government e-mail address or who works for a telecommunications or power company can “research” their subjects like never before with the Google Earth-Virtual Alabama Big Brother system.

And now this, to appear in Saturday’s Washington Post:

Bush Justice Department to Allow More Spying Locally

The Bush Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years. It would revise the federal government’s rules for police intelligence-gathering for the first time since 1993 and apply to all of the nation’s 18,000 state and local police agencies that receive roughly $1.6 billion each year in federal grants. Quietly unveiled late last month, the proposal is part of a flurry of domestic intelligence changes issued and planned by the Bush administration in its final months.

Gitmo On The Platte

And for anyone going to Democratic Party’s National Convention later this month in Denver, and who might happen to be thinking about protesting — or maybe photographing a protest — a CBS news crew has uncovered a huge warehouse holding facility in Denver, consisting of steel cages topped with barbed wire, ready to receive thousands of protesters at this year’s convention.

On seeing the footage one local political organizer told the crew it resembled a “concentration camp,” while another described it as a “meat processing plant.” The facility has already been dubbed “Gitmo On The Platte.”

It might be a good idea to carry a digital recorder and/or a digital camera around with you in case you are stopped or anything else happens. You might be able to pop a shot with your cell phone camera, if you practice being discrete. If caught, they will surely confiscate your phone.

The cops may very well be on high alert themselves about now, and perhaps a tad trigger happy.

If you hear of any instances that look suspicious, please report them here. I’ll report on them if I’m alive, and not in jail : )

fast2write@charter.net

Right-Wing Rhetoric

A guest letter originally published in The Daily Telegram, Wednesday, August 06, 2008

First, my definitions:

Neoconservative (neocon): Not your grand daddy’s style of fiscal conservatism. Neocons are conservative only when it comes to the poor/working poor, committed only to money and power (mutually inclusive), without concern for the Constitution or the canons of human decency. They’ll expend any amount of capital and lives to enhance their economic power.

Corporatist: Advocate of Corporatism, wherein the government is run by and for the corporations. First cousin to “fascism,” as defined by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who said (paraphrasing) that Fascism occurs when government and business become one in the same.

Their application:

The Goebbels-Rove propaganda network disseminates half-truths, innuendoes and falsehoods from the neoconservative-corporatist wing of the Republican party, which is choking the life out of our country. It’s as if Karl Rove studied Joseph Goebbels’ tactics (Hitler’s propaganda minister) and followed them closely. One of Goebbels’ first moves: control the media. Now, we have Rupert Murdoch and others of his ilk, with a right-wing monopoly on most of the news, disseminating neocon-corporatist propaganda can be controlled by telling them they’re in danger and keeping them in constant fear, then, denouncing any dissenters as unpatriotic and treasonous. Sound familiar?

Many attacks on Obama smack of “talking points,” from the Goebbels-Rove propaganda machine, through their right-wing media outlets.

Obama didn’t get to visit the troops in Germany because the Defense Department said it would be inappropriate as part of a campaign stop. Obama honored this. The neocons would have griped either way.

Flip-flops? McCain claimed to be a maverick Republican. In 2000, surrogates (swift-boaters of their day) pulverized John McCain in the South Carolina primary by claiming, among other lies, that McCain fathered an illegitimate Black child. McCain knows how vicious neocon-corporatists are and I believe he decided to capitulate. So, he reversed much of what he said he was for or against, including permanent tax cuts for Bush’s filthy-rich oil buddies and, worst of all, sanctioning torture as a policy that violates the Geneva Convention. McCain’s flip-flops make John Kerry look as faithful as Horton hatching an egg. By dangling the White House in front of him, the same neocons who destroyed him in 2000 can lead McCain anywhere.

McCain is a defeated (by the neocons) old man, desperate to catch one last ride on the merry-go-round, before the tents fold up and the carnival of life closes, willing to become the neoconservative-corporatists’ next puppet … just so his portrait will hang in the White House, next to that of George W. Bush.

Obama’s policies couldn’t be any worse than the neoconservative-corporatists’ were under Bush and would be under McCain.

— Dale R. Botten,
Lake Nebagamon