Stand Up Americans

Men, we all need to grow up and realize how a small group of money men is using us, via the vehicle of the NRA, to make money and more money by creating and selling an emotional climate that all of us should be ‘packing.’ There's a need here for strong womens' voices to tell us that “Guns are America’s insanity.  And it is getting worse, not better.”  There’s a need for strong men to listen to these voices. 

Let’s take a brief look at three examples of my contention of insanity which all occurred after yesterday morning’s tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  The Michigan House of Representatives recently passed and sent to the governor a bill that makes it easy for people to carry concealed weapons in schools. After the massacre, a spokesman for the Michigan House Speaker Jase Bolger, said that it might have meant “the difference between life and death for many innocent bystanders.” implying that the school teachers and school administrators should have been armed. Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America, blamed Friday’s shooting on gun control advocates: “Gun control supporters have the blood of little children on their hands. Federal and state laws combined to ensure that no teacher, no administrator, no adult had a gun at the Newtown school where the children were murdered. This tragedy underscores the urgency of getting rid of gun bans in school zones.”  Former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee reacted to the tragedy by asking that since prayer is banned from public schools, "should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?" Apparently Huckabee is not familiar with the separation of church and state embodied in our constitution, but that's another story.


“We need to look at what drives a crazy person to do these kind of actions,” said Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, one of the highest-ranking Republicans in the House.  I respond by saying that these people do these things because they can.  And one of the major factors that they ‘can’ is the easy accessibility of weapons of mass destruction like assault weapons with no conceivable purpose for existence other than taking the lives of other human beings.  Surely, no hunter would use an assault weapon, nor police officer, nor target shooter.  It was an assault weapon that was used to commit yesterday's murders.  It was assault weapons that were used in Aurora, Colorado and in Portland, Oregon.  

Women and men of America; we all need to stand up and do the right thing, the responsible thing, the thing that is most consistent with the spiritual values of our country.  Love your neighbor.  Don’t look for an excuse to shoot him.  Don’t contribute to a emotional climate that says, "Shoot first and ask questions later.”  We need to start somewhere.  Contact your state and national elected officials.  Let them know you want a permanent ban on assault weapons.  Tell them to put politics aside.

Just saying . . .

Not So Fast

The word “lunatic” will be stricken from federal law under legislation that passed the House on Wednesday and is headed to President Obama for his signature. “The term ‘lunatic’ holds a place in antiquity and should no longer have a prominent place in our U.S. code,” said Representative Robert C. Scott, Democrat of Virginia, shortly before the 398-to-1 vote in the House. The word, derived from the Latin word from moon, arises from ancient beliefs that people could become “moonstruck” by lunar movements.  But how we will understand Rick Santorum if this word is removed from our lexicon?  Who but a lunatic could conceivably think an attempt by the United Nations to help disabled people around the world is a direct assault on “us and our family.”  This week, spurred on by Santorum’s ‘lunatic’ thought processes, the Senate refused to ratify a U.N. treaty on the subject. The vote, which fell five short of the necessary two-thirds majority, came right after 89-year-old Bob Dole, the former Republican leader and disabled war veteran, was wheeled into the chamber to urge passage.  The rejected treaty, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, was based on the Americans with Disabilities Act, the landmark law Dole co-sponsored.  But Santorum was upset about a section on children with disabilities that said: “The best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.”  After the vote failed, “We did it,” Santorum tweeted in triumph.   I strongly urge President Obama to veto the legislation striking the  ‘l’ word, because how else could anyone describe Santorum?

Just saying . . .

Mumbly, Grumbly Party of No

I have looked back at my blogs over the past four years and have found that I was quite critical of Obama a number of times.  My areas of concerns included his apparent inability to conduct negotiations properly; For example, he negotiated with himself and rejected a single payer option on Obamacare.  What do I mean by negotiating with oneself?  Consider that there are two parties to an issue.  One of the parties starts the process of negotiations by offering the solution which he/she would like to reach.   Then (normally) the other side responds by offering its proposals.  The process continues with each side winnowing down its various goals and objectives to a point when it can be said that a decision as to the outcome has been reached.

When someone is said to be negotiating against himself, he offers a change in his own initial position before a response is elicited from the other side.  For example, a guy agrees to sell a used car for ten  thousand dollars.  The prospective buyer says “I can’t afford that much.  How much do you really want for the car?”  The seller then offers to sell the car for seventy five hundred dollars and the buyer walks away a happy man because without even entering the process of negotiation he has walked away with a good deal. i.e. the seller has negotiated with himself.  In the conduct of negotiations, the corollary to the principle of not negotiating with oneself is to never begin the process of negotiating unless one is willing to walk away without reaching a conclusion.  In the current situation over avoiding the fiscal cliff, the Republicans, the mumbly grumbly party of No, is behaving exactly like the Romney/Ryan ticket did during the entire campaign (which, in my opinion, cost them the election).  The RR combo then, and the party of No now, refuses to say what it wants; i.e., they are not participating in the negotiating process.  Obama finally gets it.  He is refusing to negotiate against himself.  He is in a position of strength in doing so because if the party of No continues its refusal, the public is smart enough to realize who is the party responsible for placing the American economy at risk.

Just saying . . .

Hell yes, it was racist

Since the landslide election of President Obama last Tuesday (in which fifty five percent of white women voted for him) I have been inundated with comments from all my white old guy private country club republican contacts.  Perhaps the most succinct way to describe these comments is the statement repeated time and time again that the outcome is racist because 95% of African-Americans voted for Obama. One of the recipients of my blogs e-mailed me with the following question; “I'd like your comments as an "independent" on how this guy got elected.  Do you think race had anything to do with it?”  It is noteworthy that the e-mail contained a reference to a website that described a story about a “newly elected state assembly in Michigan [which] includes at least one ex-con: Brian Banks, who's been convicted eight times for felonies involving bad checks and credit card fraud, won a seat representing the east side of Detroit, Harper Woods, and the tony Grosse Pointes.”  I will leave it to the readers of this blog to determine what the reason for including that reference was and just point out that the article contained a photograph of Mr. Banks who, incidentally, is black.  I would also point out that Michigan has no ‘state assembly’, but facts do not appear to be important to the throngs that are now screaming about the racist result.

Getting back to the question, my answer is “Hell yes, I think racism had something to do with the outcome of the election.”  I think there was a tremendous backlash against voter suppression laws bringing more minorities to the polls, not fewer. Republican efforts to block the votes of minorities were attempted in a wide variety of ways; Photo IDs, deliberate misinformation as to places of polling and misprinted ballots to name, but a few. In Ohio, for example, blacks jumped from being 11 percent of the voters in 2008 to 15 percent this year after Republican government officials attempted to eliminate pre-election day voting only in cities with large black populations. The same thing occurred in Florida requiring minority voters in big cities to stand in line up to nine hours on election day in order to exercise their right to vote.  Quite frankly, any black person would be crazy to vote for the party that was attempting this crap.  Particularly when Romney, the leader of the pack, stood silently by, waiting to capitalize on the success of voter suppression.  Perhaps, the best way to understand the racist element to this election is to consider what happened after it became clear that President Obama won.  A protest by students at the University of Mississippi against the election results grew into crowd of about 400 people shouting racial slurs. Two people were arrested on minor charges. The university said in a statement Wednesday that the gathering at the student union began late Tuesday night with about 30 to 40 students, but grew within 20 minutes as word spread. Some students chanted political slogans while others used derogatory racial statements and profanity, the statement said.  Ted Nugent, the poster child for racist idiocy, tweeted his hundreds of thousands of followers “Pimps whores & welfare brats & their soulless supporters hav[sic] a president to destroy America,” and “What subhuman varmint believes others must pay for their obesity booze cellphones birthcontrol abortions & lives.”

For the last four years we have listened to this type of claptrap in a variety of forms and the results of this election brightens my heart and my mind as the citizens of the United States have overwhelmingly rejected this bigotry and hatred.

Perhaps the best advice I can give to my republican friends is the same advice offered to Americans by Justice Scalia after the Supreme Court handed the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000;   You lost so “Just get over it.”

Human People Win

Amid all the opinionizing and speculating about why Obama won, there is little being said about who the real winners of the election are; human people, all of us, Democrats and Republicans alike.  By this I mean that the declaration by the U.S. Supreme Court that corporations are persons and, as such, are entitled to the same constitutional protections and rights enjoyed by human beings placed the character and essence of our society at extreme risk. In the Citizens Union case which held that corporations are people for the purpose of exercising freedom of speech through limitless campaign spending, our country was placed at risk of becoming a third-world banana republic controlled and manipulated behind the scenes by the likes of the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, big Pharma, international gas and oil megacorps, not to mention Karl Rove and all the secret corporate donors.  I submit that the net result of this election has more to do with what real people stood to lose if Romney prevailed.  The Court as it stands now has, in reality, been the most politically activist court in the history of our nation.  In case after case, the court has swept aside precedent to effectuate a far right wing philosophy that serves no interests other than big business.  In the next four years, it appears likely that two, maybe three, seats on the Supreme Court will be vacated either through illness or ageing.  President Obama will have the opportunity to reshape the Court into a more moderate presence in our society.  The litmus test for any new Justice must be the return of sanity to the Court by reversing the ‘corporations are people’ bent that the present Court has cultivated and refined through its pseudo-intellectual reasoning process.  

Just Saying . . . 

When All is Said and Done

What is left when the show is over, when it’s time to pack up and leave the arena, after the fat lady has sung?  Will half of our population go off and sulk for the next four years if it is their candidate that loses the presidential election tomorrow?  In a very few minutes last evening, I had the snippets of a great conversation with a good friend whose thinking about presidential politics is different from  mine.  He is going to vote for Romney and I have voted for Obama.  In just a moment, I will tell you about this conversation, but first, a little background is in order.  For more than four years I have written frequent blogs about what I think and believe with regard to the two candidates.  In doing so, I have shared my efforts with a wide variety of people; those who share my beliefs and those who don’t.  It has never been my intention in doing so to simply “sing to the choir,” but to engage in meaningful discourse with those who disagree with me, not to sway their choices or opinions, but to push myself to examine my own beliefs and conclusions.  It is my fervent belief that America is truly unique, among all nations, in the zealous provision for, and protection of, freedom of speech and expression via the guarantees of the First Amendment of our Constitution.  The use of the word “zealous” is appropriate here because since 1776 brave men and women have died to create and protect this right, first among others.  My blogs have received a wide array of responses ranging from vitriolic to nonsensical to well-reasoned viewpoints very different from my own.  The good friend mentioned above is in the latter category.  On several occasions he has replied in writing with detailed, common-sensical, expressions of his views. 

My friend’s adult daughter visited with him and his wife this past week. Their conversation turned to the difference in the views and opinions he and I have on issues such as who should be the president of the United States.  His daughter expressed a degree of amazement for and wondered, in effect, how in the world the two of us could get along and enjoy our friendship, frequent golf, etc., when our views are so far apart.   In telling me about his daughter’s reaction, he started to say how it was possible because we confined the expression of our opinions to the written word.  The conversation ended abruptly at that point because my garage door opener failed and I had to tend to it.   I think the point he was making is true.  Putting ideas in writing generally causes one to be careful about what and how ideas are expressed.  In saying this I do not include the ‘monkey, n- word, Muslim/socialist e-mails that circulate continuously on the e-mail circuit.  But there is genuine value in, and respect for, sharing different viewpoints among those who can agree to disagree without bitterness or rancor.  Why is it necessary to hate the opposition?  Last night’s snippet of conversation summarizes where we all need to be; win or lose, we are all Americans and should stand as one in support of whatever candidate wins in returning this country from the brink of disaster.  We can agree to disagree and live in perfect harmony . . .  as long as the other guy gives me three strokes.

Just saying . . .

Racism: Plain and Simple

A few of my close friends have chided me about discussing the concept of racism in the presidential contest.  Because I have a desire to portray myself as an objective thinker, one who thinks and writes and draws conclusions about real world events realistically (an oxymoron if ever there was one), I have learned to bite my tongue, metaphorically, to the occasional rants of the rabid Repubs who themselves don’t hesitate to use the ‘n’ word when referring to the president of our country.  I hesitate to call them on it, or use these incidents as examples, of the all-pervasive racism that permeates  current presidential politics because other Repubs shriek that it is me being unfair, that most Repubs don’t think about this issue or let it affect their thinking.  It is with this brief background that I was delighted that I was to have the opportunity to conduct a brief interview with the man who is the national director of the staged media event that people like to call the Mitt Romney presidential campaign, Mr. John Sununu.

“Frankly,” Sununu told me, “when you take a look at Donald Trump, you have to wonder whether that’s an endorsement based on issues or whether he’s got a slightly different reason for preferring Mitt Romney”



“What reason would that be?” I responded.

“Well, I think when you have somebody of your own race that you’re proud of being the potential President of the United States, I applaud the Donald for standing with him.”

Before I ask my next question of Sununu, I pause and think. I’m sure Donald Trump will be positively brimming with gratitude for, and basking in the limelight that his endorsement of Romney will bring him. I’ll throw a question Sununu’s way to make sure that the public understands completely the reasoning behind the essence of the Romney campaign.  After all, if the man managing the campaign can’t fill in the dots for us, who can?  So I "shucked and jived" on to my next question, “Is it fair, in accordance with your logic, for me to assume that you also support Romney because both of you are white?

Sununu glared at me with that same ‘deer in the head lamps’ look that has been so prevalent on Romney’s face when he is asked about his personal tax returns, or how 5 trillion dollars in tax cuts plus 2 trillion dollars more in military spending will reduce the deficit, or why he is against the Lilly Ledbetter Act.  Nearly a minute went by before he answered.

“No,” he said.  “That type of thinking only applies to blacks.”

Just saying . . .