European Symbol for the American Presidency. The Bush Administration has put the lie to its patriotic pretensions and revealed its black, globalist heart: the helicopter that carries the President of the United States is to be a European design with key European components. It would be assembled in Europe too if Congress didn't restrict defense purchases as to require some American input. What next? An Airbus Air Force One? Mercedes or Rolls-Royce limousines for the President and U.S. diplomats worldwide rather than Caddies or Lincolns? Replacement of the dollar by the euro? American flags for the White House and Capitol proudly bearing the label "Made in China"?
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The Financial Times, British equivalent of The Wall Street Journal, yesterday reported the deal thus. (Comments in brackets and italics are mine.)

AgustaWestland, the Anglo-Italian helicopter maker, last night won a contract to build the new US presidential helicopter fleet, dealing a blow to American rival Sikorsky, which has flown the president since 1957.

AgustaWestland, owned by Finmeccanica of Italy, and Lockheed Martin, its US partner, received a $1.7bn (£901m) contract to build more than 20 helicopters, in a competition that was seen as a litmus test for whether European companies could increase their defence business in the US. * * *

Richard Aboulafia, an analyst at the Teal group, said: "This is big news. It is the first time the US defence market has been open to a foreign helicopter. There is clearly a growing two-way street in US arms procurement." The decision was a major victory for Tony Blair, prime minister, and Silvio Berlusconi, his Italian counterpart, both of whom supported President George W. Bush's war in Iraq and lobbied him over the deal. * * *

Mr Blair believes the Bush administration is now more willing to reach out to America's European allies and particularly participate more forcefully in the Middle East peace process.

In awarding the contract for Marine One, the name given to the presidential helicopter, the Navy rejected Sikorsky's argument that the president should fly in a helicopter that was 100 per cent US-made. John Young, assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, said: "This decision truly reflects the best value and capability for the American taxpayer who is funding it, the marines who will operate it and the future presidents who will fly in it." [I'll tell you this much: if I were elected President, I wouldn't set foot in it unless Britain and Italy joined the Union!]

But the decision angered some lawmakers. Joseph Lieberman, a Democrat senator from Connecticut, home to Sikorsky's parent company United Technologies, said: "The Navy's decision today on the Marine One contract is not just disappointing — it is outrageously wrong."

Imagine that! I actually agree with Joe Lieberman about something!
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By contrast with the Financial Times's open recognition that this was a European coup, CNN and The Washington Post pretended that American company Lockheed Martin was the contract winner. CNN.com's headline was "Lockheed Martin to build Marine One". Its story quoted, of all people, New York Senator Hillary Clinton (!) as favoring the deal:

"The US101 will provide the president of the United States with a state-of-the-art-helicopter ... an Oval Office in the sky," said Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-New York.

Imagine that! The 'Oval Office' is to be European!
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I have always hated that witch and hope this puts the last nail in the coffin of her presidential ambitions. Oh, she is posing as a champion of New York workers, since a small part of the helicopter contract will be fulfilled Upstate, but a small local boost at huge national cost is not the kind of thing a U.S. Senator should be praising, least of all one who aspires to President.
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By contrast, another woman legislator, Connecticut's Representative Rosa DeLauro, said, in the same CNN story:

"'Made in America' should mean something .... The Defense Department has some explaining to do." [The Defense Department? Don't you mean the President who was just re-elected? Can anyone believe that such a deal could have been made without George W. Bush's active assent?]

For the winner the contract means millions of dollars in federal research funds, and a potential edge when the Pentagon looks to replace hundreds of search and rescue helicopters in coming years.

The Washington Post, under the headline "Lockheed Team Wins Redesign Of Marine One", reports that only

Sixty-five percent of Lockheed's aircraft will be built in the United States; the transmission will be built in Italy and the blades in the United Kingdom.

Let's be clear here: Lockheed Martin is not the "US partner" of AgustaWestland. It is the Trojan Horse by which Europeans are sneaking past American government procurement restrictions on foreign purchases. It is an economic Quisling selling out Americans because it years ago lost its own technological edge.
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How big is this contract, and future contracts that might be awarded to "Lockheed"? The BBC reports:

Victory for the Anglo-Italian design is expected to help Lockheed's bids for up to $6bn in upcoming defence contracts.

A US Air Force contract for up to 194 top-of-the-range helicopters is expected to be negotiated in 2006.

And the US Coast Guard and Department of Homeland Security [note the irony? our Homeland Security is to be in the hands of Europeans!] are reported to be searching for a supplier for about 200 helicopters.

Lockheed spokesman Mike Drake denied his firm's product would be a European product: "The helicopters will be built in Texas and customised in New York and maintained in the US," he said.

Bull. 35% of every plane, including its technological heart, would be built in Europe and merely assembled by Americans in English-speaking maquiladoras, no more dignified than the assembly plants in Mexico that line our southern border. It is appropriate that the major part of these maquiladoras will be in Texas. Texas. Why does that sound familiar? Texas. Hmm.
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In Texas, Lockheed can take advantage of low wage rates driven down by the easy availability of Mexican labor, since U.S. Government contracts require wage rates that are competitive LOCALLY. That means that if you put plants in low-wage areas, a rich Government contractor can pay its workers the same crappy wages everyone around them makes. As for Owego, New York, it is in the depressed "southern tier" of counties along the Pennsylvania border, so again employers can take advantage of the economically distressed.
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I did some searches at Salary.com, comparing wage rates in manufacturing for my own metro area, Newark, New Jersey, as against Owego, New York and Amarillo and Fort Worth, Texas, the three localities where the U.S. portion of the helicopter manufacturing contract will be performed. In descending order, Owego pays 91% what a Newarker could expect to make, Fort Worth pays 88%, and Amarillo 81%. In actual dollar terms, a "Floor Assembler I" can expect $26,298 in Newark, $24,009 in Owego, $23,238 in Fort Worth, and $21,535 a year in Amarillo. A "Floor Assembler III" could expect $38,928 in Newark, $35,540 in Owego, $34,399 in Fort Worth and $31,875 in Amarillo, the same 91%, 88%, and 81% of Newark pay rates. And Newark isn't even at the top of pay rates. A Floor Assembler I could expect to make $26,415 in Queens, an Outer Boro of New York City; $27,069 in Oakland, California (a semi-depressed area across the bay from San Francisco), $27,325 in Manhattan, NYC, and $27,559 in San Francisco proper.
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Fully 35% of the value of each helicopter will go to Europeans, whereas 0% of the tax moneys to pay for it comes from Europeans.
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Bush's war can now be seen as not just catastrophic to Iraqis but also hugely costly to Americans, not just in the $200 billion and more already anticipated in direct costs, but also in Dubya's opening U.S. defense procurement to Europeans to bribe them to help us out of his quagmire.
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He can't win European "allies" to his side by appeals to principle — because he betrayed our shared principles — so now he's trying to bribe them by sending BILLIONS of dollars of defense contracts to Europe, now, and probably elsewhere later.
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He's pretending that it is in American taxpayers' interest to buy the 'best' helicopter, even if it is from Europe. The decision was justified on the basis that the European copter would have more room for electronics. Oh? Earlier this month the Europeans showed off the new Airbus "superjumbo" airliner, the A380, capable of carrying almost twice as many passengers as Boeing's 747 at a cost (Airbus claims) "up to one-fifth below" that of the 747. Surely the Bush Administration should replace the 747 with the A380 as Air Force One if it is a superior plane, shouldn't it?
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No. The A380 hasn't flown so much as an inch (oh, sorry: millimeter — we're all going to have to adopt European measures ere long), so we don't even know IF it will fly, much less how efficiently it will run. And the President doesn't need a passenger capacity of 555 (the standard configuration) or 800 (the most that airlines can cram aboard the superjumbo). But even if the A380 really were to prove a superior plane, should the President of the United States make a European plane into Air Force One? I don't think so.
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How is it in our interest to send BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars to European companies and show the President of the United States flying around in a European plane? Are we a banana republic with no prestigious aerospace industry of our own?
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Taxes are moneys taken by force out of the pockets of working people, who are struggling to remain "working people". Under the globalist Republicans, those dollars stolen from Americans are now to be shipped off by the billions to Europe, along with our jobs!
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If defense and other GOVERNMENT contracts are to be thrown open to the whole world, let us be clear, there will be nothing left for American workers. Everything will go overseas. Everything. There is NOTHING the U.S. can produce more cheaply than China, India, even Europe. Nothing.
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The Republicans don't care about Americans. Capital has no country, profit no nationality, greed no patriotism. Dubya is a "true-red Amurican" — if that sounds odd, it should; the phrase is "true-blue American", and the Blue States are the very heart of this country. Dubya wraps himself in the flag — a flag that may soon be made overseas, even for military brigades all over the planet as his Administration pursues a policy of worldwide aggression for globalism — and the redneck fools he got to vote for him three months ago are now being sold out for people who will work even cheaper than ignorant Southerners.
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January 28, 2005 is another date that will live in infamy: the day the President of the United States threw open American defense contracts to foreigners.
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It is appropriate that the map that networks have used in recent presidential elections show Republican-won states in red. Red for redneck, red for redcoats. The British are coming! The British are coming! And George Bush has thrown open the gates, not to admission of Britain as several states of the Union, but to invasion by European companies who will now carry off American taxpayer dollars by the planeload.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:52 AM

 
Inexplicable Snubs. The nominations for the Academy Award were announced yesterday, and the past year's two most noteworthy films were not nominated for Best Picture. Neither Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ nor Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 was deemed worthy of the Academy's highest honor. Preposterous.
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Everyone who is indignant at this incomprehensible snub of important films in favor of minor films about unimportant things should boycott the awards this year. Don't hold or attend Oscar parties. Don't watch the broadcast. Don't even watch any 'runup to the Oscars' program. And if you feel like writing an indignant letter or email, or phoning a rebuke to the Academy, here's some contact info you might use:

Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences
Academy Foundation
8949 Wilshire Boulevard
Beverly Hills, California 90211
Phone: 310-247-3000
Fax: 310-859-9351
E-mail: ampas@oscars.org

When important films are glossed over in favor of movies about flying children or boxing women, people indignant about the waste of a major medium on nonsense should speak out.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:31 PM

 
Not Contesting Unemployment Claim. I may have done my former firm a slight injustice. Or not.
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Today, the firm that fired me for this blog and other websites, participated in a conference call with New Jersey Unemployment to determine the grounds for my dismissal. The office manager repeated the claim that I "associated the firm" with my views by linking to the firm thru my blog, and I both told the interviewer that there was NO link from my blog to the firm and no mention of the firm anywhere in it, and gave her the URL to this blog so she might herself do a search of the archives, which contain every single message ever posted (except a temporary message testing whether the blog was updating, which I deleted once I determined that it was working after all) so Unemployment can see for themselves that the firm's name NEVER appeared.
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The office manager (I think she prefers the term "administrator", so, fine) was reduced to making vague assertions such as that I mentioned that I worked for "a major Newark law firm" and told of a secretarial luncheon the firm hosted and showed pictures taken from that event, but the venue for that event was the Newark Club, which hosts many events, and anyone attending the Newark Club could have taken pictures from its windows.
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I was actually pleased to hear the office administrator's voice because we had had, before this rupture, a very cordial relationship, and I will miss the people I used to associate with. But it's time to move on.
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The office administrator made the point, expressly, that the firm is NOT contesting my application for unemployment benefits, and I hope the interviewer made note of that fact. I will grant the firm the benefit of the doubt, that they genuinely did not intend to contest my receiving benefits — but why did Unemployment feel such an interview was necessary? — and not that my entry to this blog yesterday made them aware of how shaky their position is.
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Still, I was done an injustice, am confronted with financial difficulties if I do not find work at a comparable pay level in these last few years before I retire (Social Security's payout is determined more heavily by one's income in the last few years of work than in earlier years), so I must still consider my legal options vis-a-vis human rights commissions, etc.
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Still, I had, before my firing, spoken with a couple of my (former) co-workers about wanting to make a change. One of them had asked herself the same question I had, whether there was anything else we could do that would bring in as much money, and concluded that given our skills and inclinations, working for lawyers brought in the most money.
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I don't want to work for lawyers again. I've worked in law for some 30 years (I don't know the exact figure, since the file-cabinet drawer that contains my resume has rusted shut; I'll have to pry it open to revise — I hadn't sent out any resumes in all the time I worked at my former firm because I had no desire to work elsewhere). And I don't want some other attorney asserting the right to punish me for my views expressed on the Internet. I don't want to be looking over my shoulder when I'm taking a principled stand, asking whether this can get me fired. I don't want anyone ever to have that kind of power over me. It's time for a change.
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It's actually sort of exciting to contemplate a new career after decades of doing the same thing. I was stunned at being fired, and realized in watching television last nite that perhaps one reason it was so surprising, other than that people you expect to have great respect for freedom of speech turned out not to, is that I had been fired ('I consider that you have quit') only once before in my entire life, in 1963, from my first job, at McDonald's. I then looked for work outside my immediate area, in New York, and found a job as a clerk-messenger in a documentary unit of ABC News, which set me on the road to moving to New York and all the other changes I made in my life. Now it's time to make yet other changes.
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Maybe I could get a real-estate license and try to get more gay men to move to Newark from New York, to enjoy a more relaxed lifestyle at much lower cost, as might as well help in Newark's revival. Maybe I could do website design. Between two such part-time careers, I might make enuf money to ensure I get a good payout from Social Security after retirement.
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But to be maximally effective, I should improve my command of the three 'foreign' languages I can read, Spanish, French, and Portuguese, so I can actually converse in them with potential customers. All this will take time and some additional education. I don't know what Unemployment says about seeking education/retraining rather than taking a new job right away, but, then, I won't know for seven days whether I will be awarded Unemployment benefits at all.
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With or without them, life goes on, and I will keep on fiting the good fite until the world is perfect!
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:36 AM

 
Employer Trying to Deny Me Unemployment. My vindictive former employer, not content with abruptly firing me without notice that I had done anything "wrong" and refusing me severance pay, is also challenging my right to receive unemployment benefits. I received a notice from the State of New Jersey that "[I] may have been separated for misconduct in connection with [my] work." What outrageous bull.
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I am to be telephone-interviewed tomorrow morning by Unemployment to get my side of the story, but I don't know in advance what I should say nor how to prepare, because I don't know what "misconduct in connection with [my] work" I am supposed to have engaged in. I will, however, make my own points, that such charges are likely frivolous, bogus and pretextual for what may well be unlawful discrimination.
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I am allowed to have witnesses speak to Unemployment but know of no witnesses to statements by my former employer that would prove discriminatory intent, but people who intend to violate antidiscrimination laws to discriminate against a person for one thing -- or several things -- while using another thing as pretext do not ordinarily speak openly about intending to discriminate illegally. I will merely tell Unemployment that I am a

1. single,
   
2. homosexual,
   
3. partially disabled
   
4. Christian
   
5. man, who
   
6. turned 60 years old 15 days before I was fired, and only a few days after the office manager expressed surprise that I was that old, by
   
7. Jews from
   
8. a job (legal secretary) that is typically held by women, within a month after
   
9. the firm's health plan became subject to extraordinary costs due to the long-term admission of its managing partner, who may need a heart transplant (with all its attendant costs) a few short months after the firm's health-insurance premiums went up sharply. I was told that one particular webpage of mine was offensive to the firm, but that page comprises over 30,000 words and includes
   
10. religious criticisms of Judaism as well as
    
11. political opposition to Zionism.
    

I cannot know if all the other things THAN item 11 of this list were irrelevant to the decision to fire me or if any, several, or all of them combined with objections to my political views as to cause my termination, nor even if they are simply using my political views as pretext to fire me, and they really wanted to get rid of me for one or several of the other 10 items in this list, or some other reason not permitted by antidiscrimination law.
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If ANY of those protected areas played ANY PART in the decision to fire me, the firm is guilty of illegal discrimination. That is, if I had made the exact same political remarks but would not have been fired except that I also made religious remarks or was homosexual or just turned 60 or was disabled or any of the other things on the list above, then the firm has acted illegally.
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They will presumably deny that anything but my political remarks mattered
in their decision, and will prep anyone Unemployment may talk to to stick to that line.
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Mere denial of illegal activity does not, of course, constitute proof that they haven't used unprotected political expression as pretext for firing someone for MORE than just political expression, especially inasmuch as the particular webpage they cite and this blog have commented critically on religious precepts of Judaism, not just political objections to Zionism. If they are striking out at me because of my religious views, they are presumably guilty of illegal religious discrimination. Others of my webpages than the one cited, and my blog, have also criticized various religious doctrines, and I said expressly in this blog on April 21, 2004:

I reject many teachings from many religions, from antihomosexualism and animal sacrifice in the Old Testament (Jewish) book of Leviticus, to "predestination" in Calvinism (before a person is born, God chooses who will go to heaven and who to hell, and there's nothing anyone can do to change that fate), to reincarnation (and thus the insignificance of this present life) in Buddhism, to the caste system (people choose, between lives, what caste they will belong to in the next life, and it is not for us to make life better for people in a low caste because they chose to suffer its conditions) in Hinduism.
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The difference between rejection of doctrine and religious bigotry is that the bigot (or zealot) says that because s/he rejects a given doctrine, no one should be allowed to believe it! I don't say any such thing. If anybody wants to believe the ridiculous things I find detestable, that's fine with me, as long as they don't try to inflict that doctrine on me. Thus it is defensible to reject the antihomosexualism of Leviticus but indefensible to use the power of the state to suppress homosexuality because "God says so". * * *

Judaism and Zionism are not beyond discussion or criticism. Nothing is.

I might also add here that it is also indefensible to fire a person from a job he is performing very well, because of his religious views, using closely related political views as pretext. We'll see what Unemployment says.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:47 PM

 
Divided Loyalty. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican foreigner who would be President, retains Austrian citizenship! AOL News today reported:

VIENNA (Jan. 22) - California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a citizen of both the United States and Austria, should be stripped of Austrian citizenship for allowing a convicted murderer to be executed, an Austrian politician said.

How cheaply do we value U.S. citizenship that we permit foreigners to hold major government offices!
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It's time for the U.S. Government to outlaw all dual nationality and force people to choose: the U.S., or some other country. If some other country, GET OUT of the United States! There is no place for dual loyalty in a superpower that is called upon to act for its principles, and its interests, all over the world.
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I don't care if it's Austrian citizenship, Israeli citizenship, Italian or Irish citizenship. If you want to be a citizen of another country, by all means do so. But renounce your U.S. citizenship. Be faithful to one country or another, because there may be times when you cannot be faithful to both.
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To all those cowardly Americans who travel under foreign passports because some ancestor came from Canada or another foreign country that they may regard as inoffensive in hotspots, or retain or have actually newly taken foreign citizenship to give themselves an escape route if things get too dangerous here, I say, GET OUT of the U.S. Go to your beloved Ireland or Italy, Austria or Israel. There is no place here for cowards, traitors, or potential traitors. Burn your bridges — or retreat across them now!
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:25 PM

 
Except for Israel. George Bush declaimed in his second inaugural address yesterday a stirring, total commitment of his Administration to "freedom" (a word that appeared in his speech 27 times, along with 15 references to "liberty"). An editorial in today's New York Post hilited these excerpts:

"We will encourage reform in other governments by making clear that success in our relations will require the decent treatment of their own people. * * *

"The rulers of outlaw regimes can know," said Bush, "that we still believe as Abraham Lincoln did: 'Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it.'"

The Post asserted, in its tedious, endless campaign of lies about the Bush Administration's aggression against defenseless, innocent Iraq:

Not once during his speech did Bush refer directly to Iraq or Afghanistan, which saw pro-terrorist regimes toppled by U.S. intervention.

So Iraq was governed by a "pro-terrorist regime", was it? The implication is that Saddam was supporting and training Islamist fanatics to attack the United States. In truth, Saddam never attacked the United States, and any "terrorist[s]" he may have supported were guerrillas working only in his own region to strike back at Iraq's enemies, including Israel — which had bombed Iraq despite the lack of a common border or any prior attack by Iraq upon Israel.
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The U.S. has consistently supported Israel's aggressions against all its neighbors, including those hundreds of miles from its borders, and Israel's infliction of endless discrimination, death, and destruction upon Arabs under its control, in Israel proper, Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, in a campaign that almost the whole of this planet regards as "state terrorism".
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Decent, progressive Jews know that the behavior of Israel is terrorist, but too many have been intimidated (terrorized?) out of speaking aloud the disgust and shame they feel at the behavior of the Israeli government. In the progressive Jewish magazine Tikkun, Lev Grinberg, an Israeli dissident, asks:

Who should be arrested for the targeted killing of almost 100 Palestinians? Who will be sent to jail for the killing of more than 120 Palestinian paramedics? Who will be sentenced for the killing of more than 1,200 Palestinians and for the collective punishment of more than 3,000,000 civilians during the last eighteen months [before May 2002]? And who will face the International Tribunal for the illegal settlement of occupied Palestinian lands, and for disobeying UN decisions for more than 35 years? When is Sharon going to be defined as a terrorist, too? [Emphasis added]

I and most of the world define Sharon as a terrorist. Dubya does not. So let us speak aloud George Bush's unspoken exception to all pronouncements on decent treatment of human beings by governments. Such bold statements of principle apply to every government on Earth — except Israel.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:34 PM

 
"Not One Damn Dime" Day. Remember that today everyone who is unhappy or angry about the inauguration of George W. Bush should show their displeasure by refusing to spend any money at all.
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If you have already spent a little something at a local coffee shop or in a vending machine from which moneys will not be collected today, that's one thing. You might assume that a small business's owners aren't Bushites. You might be wrong. A lot of businesspeople are deluded that they can become as rich as the Republicans want them to think they can, even tho for most it will never happen, and their dreams are just used to promote the interests of the obscenely rich. So unless you know with certitude that a smallbusinessperson is hostile to the Republican agenda, don't buy anything from anyone today!
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Certainly do not spend any money in major stores, especially those like Wal-Mart that contributed heavily to the Bush victory, pay low wages, provide poor benefits, and import heavily from Communist China as to undercut American workers and even Mexicans who were supposed to benefit from NAFTA.
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Here in New Jersey, where the high is supposed to be at the freezing mark and the low down to 10 degrees, it's easy just to hibernate a day and leave shopping trips to balmier weather. People in warmer climes should have on hand at home, already, enuf of everything to get thru one day without spending a cent. Not one damn dime? Hell — not one cent!
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:13 PM

 
Failure of Imagination. Phil Rosenthal, executive producer of television's most popular sitcom today, Everybody Loves Raymond, admitted in an AP story today that the show is ending its nine-year run because his creative team just ran out of ideas:

"The reason we're stopping is that we've done every single thing that we can think of," Rosenthal said. "We are bone dry."

What happens when you run out of ideas but have things you still need to do, for which there is still public demand? Well, some people just close up shop anyway. Others seek new people with new ideas.
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Everybody Loves Raymond made a decision some years back to focus on the adults, not the three children. They decided that the parent-child dynamics they wanted to stress were those of the adults (the parents and grandparents), not the actual children, and they kept to that decision to the end.
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"Ray Barone" (the Ray whom everybody loves) has three children, a young-teen girl and younger twin boys. But teen girls couldn't possibly be interesting, and twins? Who's interested in the potentially complicated emotional lives of identical twin boys?
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"Robert Barone", Ray's middle-aged older brother, got married only a few months ago, after a long, insecure life spent mostly with his parents, and one failed marriage to a horrible woman. He and his wife's quirky parents couldn't provide an alternating focus to Raymond? Robert and Amy have no children. What if they decided to try fertility treatments and ended up with sextuplets? and Amy's Middle American, born-again Protestant parents moved close by to help out, where their value system and the Barones' laid-back New York Catholicism clash over how to raise the kids? Might that provide fresh territory for the show?
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Ray's wife, Debra (Deborah?) has been a stay-at-home wife for the show's duration. The children are now old enuf that she could return to the workforce in some capacity, but the show's producers couldn't see any potential in her choices, nor in the new parenting arrangements that Debra's getting home late after a long commute into Manhattan might make in Ray's relationship with his kids and extended family, nor the differences that might emerge between Ray's newly-working wife and his traditional stay-at-home mother.
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And what of Debra's new job? If she worked in Manhattan, she could choose among hundreds of different industries, in different-sized companies, where dynamics with co-workers (including attractive male co-workers) might become relevant to her family life. She might make more money than Ray. She might find work at a newspaper that competes with Ray's, promoting (she was a publicist before marriage) a competing sportswriter. Nope. No potential in any of that.
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How about an unexpected pregnancy for Debra? when Robert still hasn't been able to have children?
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How about weather conditions on Long Island, where the show is set, introducing complications? Long Island gets blizzards that pass by the inner portions of the Tristate Metropolitan Area — and hurricanes. No potential storylines there, as far as Rosenthal & Co. could see. No snow-induced auto accidents. No damage to either of the two houses across the street from one another as might force everybody temporarily under one roof — Ray, Debra, their three kids, Marie, Frank (the parents), Robert, Amy, and their six kids.
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Nor could Ray, a sportswriter who occasionally appeared on television, have lost his job due to a change in management or a public slip of the tongue, à la Jimmy the Greek, which might have rendered him at least temporarily a stay-at-home dad while his wife became sole breadwinner.
+
Nor could the mother, Marie, meet a real gentleman who tempted her to leave her loutish husband. Nor could the parents realize from watching Antiques Roadshow that an heirloom one or the other of them has long had stored in the attic is hugely valuable, and selling it would empower one to do whatever he or she wanted, without the other exerting any restraint. No, Frank couldn't pursue the singing career he's always daydreamed about (modeled on Tony Bennett), nor Marie write a best-selling cookbook, be approached about doing a cooking show, and suddenly become too busy to bother anybody in the family.
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Robert, a New York City cop, couldn't possibly run afoul of the Mafia or a youth gang, which threatened the entire family. Nor could Ray's daughter shine so britely in gymnastics that the parents are approached about grooming her for the Olympics, even if that means she must enter an intensive boarding program in a distant city. Nor could the twins start to become aware of their sexuality, and realize one or both (more typical) are gay. Nor could Ray win a Pulitzer while Robert makes a horrible mistake that gets him demoted.
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No, I guess there just isn't anything the producers could have done to save the show for even one more season, much less another ten years.
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Did the producers even ask the cast what direction they'd like the show to go in? ask viewers for ideas? interview new writers? Or did Ray Romano, the star, just decide he was tired of it all and wanted to move on, so everyone else has to lose their job?
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I will miss Everybody Loves Raymond, but I won't watch it too often in reruns, because if I can remember how it ends, some episodes are too grating to watch. Writers of other shows, keep that in mind. For syndication, a show must be watchable over and over again. Tension must ultimately be outweighed by pleasantness. Disagreeable situations must be resolved away so one feels good about the characters and the resolution of problems. At end, we must laf with the characters, not at them.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:11 PM

 
Defective Election. Because of dangers to named candidates, a large proportion of all candidates seeking elective office in the upcoming Iraqi elections are ANONYMOUS, running only as members of a given political party. The BBC reported on December 15th that "More than 230 parties and groups, gathered into about 80 blocs or alliances have to try to sell their messages amid the violence and chaos."
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That's democracy? I don't think so.
+
Iraqis literally have no idea whom they are to vote for.
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How is rule by parties democratic? How is a voter to hold anyone responsible if a collective entity, a political party, imposes "party discipline" and overrules the individual conscience of members of the legislature? This is carrying parliamentary government to a ridiculous extreme, and I'm not persuaded that such a system qualifies as democracy at all.
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Once elected, will the members of the legislature become public, or will they continue to hide behind anonymity? Would we like anonymous elections and government officials here? Would you trust anonymous legislators to serve your interests, or would you expect them to ignore you or crack the whip over you and utterly ignore complaints? Would Americans like to have to send any comments or criticisms we may have to one central mailbox for all the members of a given political party? How responsive is such a government likely to be?
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If conditions are too dangerous to permit election of named individuals, maybe it is not at all wise to hold elections now after all, if all they do is install a government of people who can hide behind anonymity.
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Perhaps government by parties — is there even a word for such a thing? partyocracy?— is a tiny step up from government by people appointed by a military occupier, but is it so BIG a step as to subject the people of Iraq to extraordinary violence in the runup to the election and at polling places on election day?
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Will such a government really have the confidence of the people and be able to give people a feeling of ownership of their government?
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I don't know of any comparable "election" in history and have serious misgivings about the wisdom of proceeding in a way so dangerous to democracy thru so perilous a time. Iraqis are being asked to risk their lives to go to the polls to elect a government of nonentities. Is such a government really worth dying for?
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:53 PM

 
Over-the-Counter Abortion. The Associated Press today reports that the makers of a drug that can kill human embryos have applied for permission to market it without prescription.

The government is considering whether to make morning-after birth control available without a prescription, and like most issues that involve sex and pregnancy, it has generated heated debate.

Fierce arguments have gone on inside and outside the Food and Drug Administration, which may decide as soon as this week whether drug stores can sell the emergency contraception known as Plan B without a prescription to women age 16 and older.

Each side accuses the other of manipulating science for political purpose. * * *

The morning-after pill is a higher dose of the contraceptive hormones found in the Pill. It prevents ovulation or fertilization, and can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting into the uterus.

Because medical experts do not consider a woman to be pregnant until after an egg implants into the uterus, the morning-after pill is not considered abortion, although some conservatives object to any interference with a fertilized egg.

This is not a liberal-conservative issue. It is a reality-fantasy and morality-immmorality issue.
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As this story makes plain, media are intent on calling the "morning-after pill" a "contraceptive", altho it does NOT prevent conception, which is the combining of a sperm and ovum (egg) to form a "zygote", the first stage of human life. When that single cell, which combines DNA from both parents and is different from both parents, divides, it becomes known as an embryo. An embryo needs nutrition to grow and become an adult. It gets that by attaching to the interior of a woman's uterus, altho human embryos have been kept alive for at least 42 days without being implanted in a uterus. By preventing a zygote or embryo — not a "fertilized egg", which makes it sound as tho we're still talking only about an egg, a nonviable, incomplete human cell from one parent — "Plan B" (or RU 486, or whatever they want to call it) kills that separate human life. That is the real science, not the make-believe, pseudo-science that the makers of this death drug want you to accept.
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Every single human being now alive was once a zygote or embryo. None of us was once an egg, because the zygote/embryo we were had all our DNA; neither the egg nor the sperm that combined to form us did. Once our unique DNA comes into being, it grows us. That's right, each of us grows him- or herself. The mother is only a temporary host for a separate human life that grows itself whenever there is nutrition, safety, and warmth enuf to survive. That's why a child can be conceived in a little glass dish and implanted in a woman who is not its biological mother. Indeed, one must wonder if human embryos could be implanted in the uterus of other species, closely related (like chimpanzees) or not (cows).
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Adults are responsible for their acts, and biological adulthood is achieved at puberty, around age 13. Zygotes and embryos are not responsible for their acts. That makes all the difference in the world.
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Adults have many different ways to prevent conceiving a child. A webpage by JHPIEGO, "a not-for-profit international public health organization affiliated with Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md.", titled "Contraceptive Methods" lists at least 22 different ways that women can prevent conception, NOT including abortion, plus a further method, vasectomy, in which men can keep from conceiving a child. Adults don't need a 24th or 37th or 409th method to prevent conception or to avoid abortion (open or disguised) but still not bring an unwanted child into the world. What they do need is to take responsibility for their acts.
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If they don't want to conceive a child, women must take all precautions necessary. But if they do conceive a child, they must accept the fully foreseeable consequences of their acts and bring the child to term. If they decide to keep it, they will have heavy responsibilities, but they'll also have enormous rewards. If they decide to give it up for adoption, they will give someone else those responsibilities, and those rewards. They are morally entitled to employ as many true contraceptive methods as they feel necessary and to give a child up for adoption.
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What they are not entitled to do is screw around irresponsibily and kill a kid they don't want.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:04 PM

 
Our Abu Ghraib "Heroes". The Associated Press reported today:

Army Spc. Charles Graner Jr., convicted of mistreating Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison, took the stand for the first time Saturday and said he had been ordered to abuse detainees. * * *

Graner, the suspected ringleader of the abuse, described himself as a by-the-book prison guard corrupted by superiors who ordered him to physically mistreat and sexually humiliate detainees. * * *

His mother, Irma Graner, testifying in the sentencing phase, described him as a kind and gentle man who faithfully served his country.

"He is not the monster he's made out to be," she said quietly. "In my eyes he'll always be a hero."

That is precisely the problem.
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"Our boys" (and now, also, military girls) can do no wrong, because we are good and just and wise, and God is on our side. So here we are, days after it was announced that not only have we been unable to find any Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq but also that Saddam had in fact complied with the United Nations' demand that he end all programs to develop them — but there is no mass revulsion by the American people, and no sign that we are prepared to accept the heavy moral judgment that that revelation imposes.
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The entire justification for invading and massively devastating a country 6,000 miles from the nearest part of the U.S., killing uncounted tens of thousands of Iraqis and subjecting some of them to vicious, degrading, sado-masochistic abuse (from which at least one prisoner DIED) turns out to be a fraud, yet we're not furious. 'Oh, it was an honest mistake. Mistakes happen.' So what if 100,000 Iraqis have died and more are killed every day in the chaos we caused. That doesn't mean our soldiers aren't heroes. Yes, it does.
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Bush and the American people are still pretending that this vast crime against humanity was justified and worth doing. That no matter the ongoing violence, terrorism, and economic hardship we have brought upon people who never attacked us, "Iraq is better off" now than before we invaded, because we have ousted Saddam Hussein. Never mind that none of the devastation we did is Saddam's fault. He didn't bomb Iraq's power plants, electric-generating stations, water-treatment plants, schools, hospitals, private homes, and on, and on. We did. Our "heroes" did.
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Much of the damage our "heroes" did has still not been repaired, and some can never be repaired. Some harms, like dead sons and mothers, can never be undone. Some things, like family fotos and heirlooms destroyed, can never be replaced. For that matter, our reputation as a decent, civilized people who never attack anyone who hasn't attacked us, can never be restored. That's gone. Forever.
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Now, it would seem, we are to ignore the fact that the nitemare we have brought to the people of Iraq was our fault, not Saddam's. We are not even to think that the chaos in Iraq (a formerly prosperous and well-ordered society), the thousands of deaths from terrorists that the Iraqi people have suffered and continue to suffer could not have happened if we had just left Saddam in power. "Oops. My bad." doesn't cover it.
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Our "fighting men and women" are still "heroes", and tens of millions of twisted-ribbon magnets on cars tell us we must "Support Our Troops". No. They're not heroes. They deserve no support in their continuing crimes against Iraq. They have no business being there, and never did. They aren't protecting anyone, as we can plainly see from the dozens — or hundreds — of Iraqis being killed every week, including high government officials and their bodyguards. Why are we there?
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The people of Germany were extremely, jump-up-and-down proud of their brave fighting men — their heroes — who crushed Poland in less than 40 days. That is, they were proud, at the time. They're not so proud now.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:32 PM

 
Item 2 (posted later): Bullying from Former Employer. I received today a threatening letter from the law firm I was fired from, ostensibly for my political and/or religious views, claiming that I have defamed the firm and demanding that I remove 'offending materials' from the Internet or they "are prepared to take legal action to restrain [me] from continuing to injure our Firm's reputation and goodwill."
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Are they serious? Would they really like a jury of my peers to consider whether I have "defamed" the firm by saying what I said? Do they really want that kind of notoriety in the legal community of New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, in which their attorneys operate? Do they really want a jury of ordinary "little guys" deliberating whether a multimillion-dollar law firm has the right to punish employees for what they say on the Internet? or whether they are using my political views as a pretext to get rid of a disabled older gay man whose age and infirmity might cost them more money than a younger (heterosexual) replacement? And do they expect me, if sued, not to assert counterclaims for very substantial financial injury and attempts to injure my reputation (remember, I have been in both Who's Who in American Politics and Who's Who in America) caused by their behavior?
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I started to write "Truth is an absolute defense to charges of defamation." but thought I should check that on the Internet. I came up with this quote:

Truth is an absolute defense to defamation: if what you say is true, it cannot be defamatory.

I had written only the extra words "charges of", which were not part of what I first wanted to say, which was exactly what the author of that webpage says: "Truth is an absolute defense to defamation".
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Everything I said in my January 10th blog entry is absolutely true, and thus an absolute defense to defamation.
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The burden of proving it false — an impossible burden, since it is absolutely true — would rest upon the firm if it sued me. But how much time and money would it cost me to establish the absolute truthfulness of what I wrote? And how much time and money can a law firm with 50+ attorneys (tho they've been losing a lot of lawyers lately, a trend I hope will continue and intensify) devote to persecuting me? I have better things to do with my time and money than defend a frivolous lawsuit instituted by a big company with "deep pockets", millions of dollars, as against my very limited resources, especially given that I just LOST MY JOB due to their bigotry.
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The letter claims that a webpage I created about the firm's softball tournament this past September, and told everyone at the firm about, "was linked through [my] blog to [my] website at www.geocities.com/lcraigschoonmaker/NoIraqAttack[.html], a site that contains inflammatory and derogatory statements that are extremely offensive to the members of our Firm."
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However, there are NO hyperlinks whatsoever, of any kind, to any website, from that softball-tournament page — not to this blog, not to the "No Iraq Attack" page, not to my personal homepage thru which one might find my "No Iraq Attack" page! Nor are there any links from this blog to the softball-tournament page. So the assertion is factually false, as anyone could plainly see.
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Nor does the attorney in question say exactly what on my "No Iraq Attack" page is "inflammatory and derogatory". Is it my opposition to the war and deriding of George Bush and other supporters of that war? That would be political expression, which may not be protected by antidiscrimination laws.
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Or is it my commentary on the religious conflicts and similarities among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam? On that page I quote the New Testament at length, citing chapter and verse as to the murder of Jesus and persecution of early Christians by zealous Jews. That would be religious discrimination, which I believe is a protected category under antidiscrimination law. Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ was attacked by Jews who wanted to suppress it. They didn't get away with such censorship, and Christians, 90% and more of the population of this country, were not silenced by the 2% — and shrinking — portion of the population that is Jewish. Is it really wise for Jews to try to persecute Christians in a country that is preponderantly Christian and more Moslem than it is Jewish? Apparently the idiot at my former firm thinks so. Is the New Testament "inflammatory and derogatory"? Are Christians not entitled to believe its account of the murder of Jesus? Surely it is not for a Jewish employer to say that Christian employees are not entitled to believe the New Testament or agnostic employees entitled to criticize features of Judaism, or Islam, or any other creed.
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I now have an express statement, in writing, that I was fired for things I said in at least one webpage, which constitutes an admission that I was fired for expressing myself on the Internet. That one page, however, is over 30,000 words long, and addresses both religious and political matters. It seems to me that I am plainly entitled to tell anyone I wish about that admission, including clients of that firm who may not wish to be associated with religious intolerance or suppression of political speech, but I will consult with free-speech experts before I resume my crusade — and yes, I did choose that word deliberately — to tell the world about that firm's bigotry.
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(That little bastard, by the way, is one of those tiny men with big pretensions that people around him, if behind his back, speak contemptuously of as having a "Napoleon complex". I never liked him and always thought him a phony. He and the office manager who fired me are of the kind who are perpetually smiling and jovial, but you dare not turn your back on them. I'm sure everyone has encountered someone like that. You wonder, "Can they really be that nice?" and answer, to yourself, "I don't think so." You'd be right.)
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His letter also claims that I "made direct and indirect references to certain clients and work product of the Firm in [my] blog during the course of [my] employment [specifically] commenting at length on the filing of lawsuits against Al Qaeda ... while [I] was working on such a matter at the Firm. The use and disclosure of this confidential information, no matter how vague, violated the Firm's Personnel Policy Manual."
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Oh? I never mentioned any client in any identifiable way, and my only reference to a lawsuit against Al Qaeda is a September 10, 2004 blog entry that leads off:

I recently discovered that various insurance companies have launched civil lawsuits against hundreds of terrorists and asserted terrorist-front organizations to seize their financial assets as compensation for payments they have had to make to survivors of victims of the 9/11 attacks. I'm sure al Qaeda is quaking in its boots. They'll face Marines and missiles, but they've never faced off against American lawyers!

There is no "direct [or] indirect reference" to a specific law firm, insurance company, or judicial district in that blog entry, and lawsuits against terrorists had been reported by media before that entry appeared on the Internet (e.g., on CBS News in August 2004, New York Lawyer on September 11, 2002, and, most tellingly, by NewsMax.com on September 11, 2003:

A group of insurance companies says it filed complaints Wednesday not only against Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, but also the governments of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria and Sudan for their alleged responsibility in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Even before that the Asbury Park Press here in New Jersey reported on July 14, 2003 that:

Insurance companies for hundreds of firms that were located in the World Trade Center have notified victims' families that the insurers may sue countries, individuals and other groups funding terrorists to recover money paid through workers compensation claims.

It is well-settled law that if information disclosed is available thru public sources, there is no breach of a confidentiality agreement. Considering that my references to such lawsuits were generic and not specific to any firm, any jurisdiction, or any insurance company, my former employer hasn't a leg to stand on.
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Did I really "link the Firm to [my] unsavory commentary"? Passing over the disparaging, if not actually 'defamatory', adjective "unsavory", I say, emphatically, No!
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There was absolutely no link from my softball-tournament page (for which, I repeat, I had been thanked and praised by many people at the firm; indeed, the firm's marketing manager had sent one of those pictures to the New Jersey Law Journal, which published it, giving favorable publicity to the firm!) to ANY OTHER PAGE of the well over 130 webpages that I have on the Internet. Moreover, there is and was also no link from this blog nor my "No Iraq Attack" page to the softball tournament page. Further, not even on that softball-tournament page does the full name of the firm appear.
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This disgusting-excuse-for-a-human-being of a partner of the firm I used to work for also asserts in his ridiculous letter (which he may have typed himself, since no secretary's initials appear on it, perhaps to keep his shameful behavior secret from the staff) that I "ridicul[ed] [them] for assigning Jewish lawyers to represent Arab clients". I did no such thing. Quite the contrary, I had been proud that Arabs and Jews could get along so well, here in the United States, that Arab entities would entrust their interests to defense by Jewish lawyers. What I did imply was of questionable intelligence — no: friggin' moronic! — is the firm's permitting one of those partners to display an ISRAELI FLAG in his office, on the firm's premises. That seems to me much more dangerous to the firm's business than anything I could say in this little blog.
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Nonetheless, since I don't want to be sued by a multimillion-dollar LAW FIRM, which could divert as many of its staff as it might wish (well, those who consent to be assigned to persecuting someone for speaking his mind), at least until I have gathered support from civil-libertarian groups such as the ACLU, Amnesty International, peace groups, or Internet-free-speech litigation groups, I am gladly removing the softball-tournament page from the Internet. I don't want to be associated with that firm any more than some members of that firm want to be associated with me. But you know what? I searched that page for "Schoonmakr", the name of my personal homepage, and confirmed that it did not appear there. Then I thought to search that softball-tournament page for my actual name, "Schoonmaker" — and THAT does not appear either. So (1) not only do I not (hyper)link, directly or indirectly, from that page to my blog or the "No Iraq Attack" page, and (2) the softball-tournament page does not contain the firm's full name, so only people intimately familiar with the legal scene in Newark, New Jersey would know what firm was referred to, but also (3) I didn't even have my name associated with the firm's name on the softball-tournament page!
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I would have removed that page IMMEDIATELY after I was fired except that I did not want anyone accusing me of trying to 'hide the evidence' of my having mentioned that I was part of the [firm name] 'family' — a dysfunctional family, it turns out — by removing it. It remains on my hard drive and a copy resides on a backup CD-ROM so that if there is any question of what that page said or when it was last revised, I have documentary proof for any court to which this matter might ultimately go.
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Moreover, I am content as well to remove all reference to the disgusting, disgraceful piece-of-sh*t 'law' firm I used to work for from my January 10th entry in this blog. (I'm so glad someone at the firm was reading! This tiny bit of the Internet needs all the readers it can get.) I am replacing all references to that odious bunch of bigots with "[firm name]", as one of my brothers had suggested. I will nonetheless continue to seek allies in fighting its bigotry, and if I find, thru consultations with the ACLU, other free-speech organizations, the human-rights commissions of any jurisdiction in which that firm has offices, etc., that I have a case for discrimination, I will pursue whatever measures seem to me wise to take.
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I will let the firm censor my blog only until I get the go-ahead from lawyers to resume my attacks on their attempt to control what their employees say beyond the office. I have learned from guerrilla movements worldwide: when directly confronted by an insuperable enemy force, retreat, regroup, and attack again some other time, some other place. Or, as we say in the United States, "He who fites and runs away, lives to fite another day." (That's good advice for Palestinians, by the way).
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Stay tuned.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:26 PM

 
No Weapons of Mass Destruction. Last nite's big news was that the hunt for Saddam's supposed stockpiles of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" has been called off in failure. Today's New York Post, which is perhaps the Nation's most outspoken conservative cheerleader, was utterly silent on that story. It does not appear in nypost.com's front-page screen of "World News" stories. It does not appear in the list of "Breaking International News" stories. It does not appear in the "Breaking News" section at the top right of the opening screen. There is no editorial nor op-ed piece about it. Nor did any mention of it appear yesterday.
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It would seem that the New York Post doesn't want its readers to know or think about the fact that the sole reason ordinary Americans were willing to break from our history and launch an attack upon a country that had never attacked us was at best a terrible, horrible mistake, and at worst an evil, cynical lie. But all decent people must know and think about that fact.
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David Kay, whom CNN.com has described as the "[f]ormer top U.S. weapons inspector", appeared on TV last nite to say that the final report of the searchers confirms his group's earlier finding that Saddam had long ago desisted from pursuing a program to develop WMD. ABC News showed President Bush saying to Barbara Walters (in an interview to be broadcast in its entirety tomorrow nite) that it doesn't matter that there were NEVER any WMD that the U.S. 'had' to invade Iraq to destroy because they posed an 'imminent danger' to the United States. "Saddam was a threat" to the world, Dubya continues to assert, and it doesn't matter that the premise upon which Dubya sold us a U.S. invasion was false.
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Oh?
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George Bush says it doesn't matter that the American people were tricked into destroying our reputation in the world as an enemy of aggression, slow to anger and willing to attack only after being attacked ourselves.
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It doesn't matter that we defied the international community, supposedly to enforce United Nations resolutions that the UN itself wasn't ready to go to war to enforce and which, it turns out, had already been complied with! — as Saddam said all along they had been complied with!
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It doesn't matter that we destroyed schools and roads and bridges and airports and telephone systems and sewage treatment plants and water supply systems and TV stations and radio stations and hospitals in invading a country that had never attacked us and had no plans nor ability to attack us.
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It doesn't matter that we may have killed 100,000 Iraqis, innocent soldiers merely trying to defend their "homeland" against a vicious foreign invader, and noncombatant women and children killed as "collateral damage", both in the initial attack and in the ensuing occupation.
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It doesn't matter that we have sent over 150,000 different Americans "into harm's way" in a war of aggression and militarist occupation that has to date killed 1,361 of them plus 160 members of other "coalition" forces. The grief that their families and friends suffered doesn't matter. Nor does it matter that over 10,500 Americans have been wounded but not killed in the war, nor that some of them will be left with serious disabilities, for life, from this war. Nor that 150,000 Americans are still in Iraq, still in harm's way, even after the Weapons of Mass Destruction they were sent in to find and destroy turn out never to have existed. We won't even mention the disruption to tens of thousands of companies whose National Guard employees were taken from their jobs to be shipped overseas.
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It doesn't matter that this war has cost us well over $100 billion (due to reach $152 billion by the end of this month and perhaps as high as $200 billion by the end of this year), essentially all of it borrowed, from the rich, in the form of deficit spending. Where's the money coming from? It comes, obviously, from higher taxes than we would otherwise have had to pay. And those tax moneys are not available for our own needs, from police protection to firefighting to education to economic development, job retraining, housing, roads, dams, bridges, ANYTHING productive. Almost all the interest to be paid on that debt will go to the rich. So poor and middle-class Americans must pay higher taxes to cover the interest on Dubya's war debt, in a transfer of wealth from the poor and middle-class to the rich.
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It doesn't matter that some 10 or more Iraqis a day — and sometimes 50 a day, the equivalent of 600 Americans a day being killed here at home — are killed in terrorist attacks that could never have happened under Saddam. Nor that destruction of oil facilities and disruptions to the flow of oil, Iraq's only export of value, have cost that defeated and depressed people $10 billion they cannot afford, $10 billion that goes only to repairing damage that could not have happened under Saddam.
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It doesn't matter that Iraqis are at each other's throats, and a country that Saddam held together may explode into civil war. Will the U.S. stay and fite all sides if such a war erupts? Or will we run home and disown the chaos we have caused?
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George Bush says that none of the massive death and destruction his war has caused, and continues to cause — to our reputation as a Nation devoted to peace and justice not least — matters. Nor does the fact that the only reason that persuaded Americans to embark upon this unprovoked war of aggression (that we could be attacked at any moment by Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction) was a mistake — or, far more likely, an outrite, cynical lie — matter either.
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In lite of all this, I have just one question: What, Mr. President, does matter?
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:52 PM

 
Fired for Blogging. Attention, all bloggers across the blogosphere and everyone who has expressed a political view on the Internet (websites, newsgroups, open bulletin boards, and the like): You can be fired for political views you express on the Internet, even if you do not so much as imply that your employer agrees with your views, even if you never so much as mention your employer by name. That just happened to me. Or at least I think it happened. The possibility exists that I was fired for other reasons and my blog and other websites were used as a pretext for that firing. Do you have any attribute that your employer might want to discriminate against you for but cannot because of the law? Well, perhaps your employer can get rid of you after all by seizing upon your political activities as pretext.
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(Having received a letter threatening legal action if I do not remove the name of the firm from this blog, I am acceding to that demand ONLY until I get advice from the ACLU or other defenders of free speech that I am entitled to be specific as to these bastards. For now, January 13th, I am substituting "[firm name]" for the actual name of that odious piece-of-sh*t collection of bigots.)
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Last Tuesday, January 4th, I was called into a conference room with the office manager and her assistant and told, point blank, that my blog and other websites had come to the attention of various of the partners of the LAW FIRM that I worked for; they found them offensive, "disgusting" (I think she said) and, ironically, "discriminatory" (I know she said — as tho I had fired her or taken an adverse employment action against people for reasons of their political views, race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.! — so I was being terminated immediately. I asked if I would get severance pay and was told no. None, even tho I had worked there for almost three years. I remarked that I thought a law firm would have more respect for freedom of speech, and the meeting was over. Then I was allowed to remove my personal property from my desk, and was escorted out of the building.
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Never was I told exactly what about my blog or websites — nor even WHICH website(s), for I have several — was offensive or "disgusting". As for the preposterous "discriminatory", merely speaking one's mind does not constitute discrimination! Firing someone for his political beliefs is discrimination. Never had I been warned that anything I was doing jeopardized my employment.
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I know the firm's legal staff was about half Jewish, and I am (nominally) Christian in distinct preference to accepting Judaism, and am as well outspokenly anti-Zionist — precisely because Zionism DISCRIMINATES against Arabs and other non-Jews! Perhaps I was fired because I openly reject the Jewish "God of Wrath" in preference for the Christian "God of Love" and reject as well the antihomosexualism, animal sacrifice, and dietary laws mandated by the Old Testament (Jewish) book of Leviticus. That would be illegal discrimination on the basis of religion.
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This blog and all my websites are consistently hostile to discrimination, save the right of any group (e.g., gay men) to have private places of their own into which government may not intrude. I have consistently spoken out against discrimination, especially the hideous, indeed murderous discrimination Israel commits every day against non-Jews, and have called upon progressive American Jews to be consistent in their principles rather than making a unique exception for Israel.
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It also strikes me as bizarre and profoundly unwise for Jews, a tiny, tiny minority, to fire someone for his religion, political views, or sexual orientation, since Jews have long (and loud) complained about discrimination against Jews. Would they really like to have employers, college admissions officers, landlords and rental offices, etc., etc., inquire into their political views and, upon finding they are pro-Zionist, discriminate against them for that political view? or use it as a pretext to keep them out of a given college, housing development, or country club, or to terminate or refuse to renew their commercial lease because of their religion? I suspect they would not.
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But then it occurred to me that perhaps "disgusting" was meant to apply to my being homosexual. "Disgusting" is, after all, a word more typically used against homosexuality than political or religious stances.
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So it occurred to me that perhaps the firm, which at almost 100 employees, has no openly gay or lesbian people among the legal or nonlegal staff, was really firing me for being gay but using my politics as a pretext because sexual orientation is a protected category in New Jersey's antidiscrimination laws and the firm even gives lip service to that stance in its own personnel policies.
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One of my sisters in California discussed my situation with a law professor of her acquaintance, and he said that not only was my homosexuality a possible real reason for my firing, but my age and disability status were also possible causes, for which my political views were used as pretext. I hadn't thought of that, but it makes sense.
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I became 60 years old 15 days before I was fired. Coincidence? Or did the firm want to get rid of me for someone who might be with the firm longer, required less money in matching funds for the firm's retirement plan (I was putting in the maximum), and would work cheaper?
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I am partially disabled, having had both my knees fail catastrophically a year and a half apart, as had to be remedied by very expensive surgery. When I was hired, I had problems with one knee. About 15 months after I was hired full-time (I had worked there part-time for several months but had no health insurance coverage as a part-timer), that knee was repaired by surgery, which required me to be out of the office for about three weeks. Three months after that surgery, however, I had another accident, to the other knee, which undid the surgery to the first when I fell and the first knee hit the pavement. That required a second expensive surgery covered by the firm's group plan, which required me to be out of work for several more weeks, since both legs were in braces. And then I had to have a third surgery, on the first leg again, which also required me to be out of work for a few weeks. I had been back to work for a bit more than five months. I was unable to use the firm's internal stairways but had to travel between floors by elevator and could not walk quickly, but that did not interfere with my job performance as a word processor/legal secretary.
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Quite the contrary. On December 13th, a mere three weeks before I was fired, I was praised in the firm's newsletter, emailed to everyone in the firm by the marketing director:

I, for one, am reassured each weekday afternoon when Craig Schoonmaker's e-mail missive arrives in my mailbox. I don't usually need his assistance but it's nice to know he's there. And on those occasions when we're preparing for seminars and other presentations (usually the night before!), he really is there. So there!

Shortly thereafter, the firm's managing partner had a very serious heart attack. He was admitted to the cardiac-care unit at a hospital near his home in New Jersey, then transferred to a New York hospital with better facilities, and has been in the hospital ever since. He may require a heart transplant, with all its attendant costs.
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The firm's health insurance rates went substantially higher this past year, in part, we were told in a meeting with the firm's insurance brokers, because there had been some major claims within our relatively small group (not just my operations but two knee replacements for a partner and various other significant claims) and partly because health costs generally are rising sharply. Maybe the firm's management was afraid that since I am old and have had serious difficulty with my knees, I might need future, expensive surgeries, at a time when the firm's health insurance coverage may be strained by the enormous costs of the managing partner's life-threatening difficulties, so it was prudent to prevent future such expenses by firing me. That, however, would entail both age discrimination and disability discrimination, and thus put the firm in serious trouble with state and even federal law. So perhaps they seized upon politics, which may not be protected, to get rid of me. I cannot know.
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Certainly it is unusual for a mixed Jewish-Christian law firm in New Jersey, one of the bluest of Blue States, to fire someone because of his political views, with the potential disgrace in the legal community that such behavior risks. Some clients might even be so offended by such behavior that they would pull their business. There are lots of law firms in New Jersey that would love to have their clients' business. (One can get a partial list of their clients from the Internet).
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Against such possible, but strictly hypothetical costs, which the firm's management may have regarded as unlikely or minimal, the possibility of an elderly employee's needing further expensive surgery at a time when the firm's insurance carrier may already be very tempted to raise rates drastically because of the strain of the managing partner's extremely expensive ongoing care, may have seemed a far worse risk.
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Let us, however, assume for the moment that the firm's management really did object to my blogs and other websites. Which ones did they object to, for what reason? Did they object to this blog? For my religious views (protected by antidiscrimination legislation), or my political views (unprotected)? Did they object to my homosexual self-assertion website — because they are antihomosexual, a forbidden reason to fire someone?
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Did they object to my Newark-booster website and blog on this service? My Simpler Spelling Word of the Day or main spelling reform websites? Does it matter? Or should what someone says beyond the office be irrelevant to his employment?
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The office manager asserted that I had "involved the firm" in my views by posting a webpage about the firm's softball tournament in September 2004. But (a) I had been encouraged by a co-captain of one of the teams to take pictures at the tournament and create a page about it; (b) I had told Everyone (an email group in the firm's internal email system) about that page; and (c) not only was I not told that it was inappropriate for me to post such a page and thereby associate my name with the firm on the Internet, but I was also both thanked and praised for that page by, among others, the office manager herself!
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Had I really "involved the firm" in my more than 130 other webpages and thus in identification with either my political views or forthright advocacy of 'the homosexual agenda'? No, I assuredly had not.
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As anyone could have seen from this blog before I was forced to redact it, there is no link from this blog to that softball tournament page. If you were to have searched this blog and its archives, you would not once have found the name of the firm I used to work for — and actually was proud to work for, at the time, tho I am ashamed of that now, in any entry other than this one. If you had clicked on the link at my profile above, to the Expansionist Party of the United States, and searched that page for [firm name], you would not have found it. Nor would you have fnd a link to the softball-tournament page on that site, nor on the Homosexuals Intransigent!/Mr. Gay Pride website; nor on the Resurgence City website; nor on my Newark blog; nor at my No Iraq Attack! page on GeoCities; nor on my Fanetik spelling-reform website nor on any of the many, many webpages I currently have on the Internet save ONE: my PERSONAL homepage, which lists all my websites and also gives a bio in which I make plain that I am homosexual.
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You cannot get to that personal homepage directly from this blog. You can get to it from some of my other webpages, but you would have to follow a link OFFSITE to another location on the Internet to do so. You cannot find my name and the firm's name linked by doing a Google search for "craig schoonmaker [firm name]". Google reports that such a search "does not match any documents". I emphatically did NOT "involve the firm" in my views.
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The mere fact that one picture of me happens to appear on the Expansionist Party webpage in which I am sitting at my workstation at [firm name] does not show a connection to [firm name] because it does not say that it is taken at [firm name], and no one outside the firm would know that the desk I was sitting at was at [firm name], especially given that the monitor displays a screensaver that says "Expansionist Party", so one would naturally assume that it was taken at the Expansionist Party's own office or my personal home office. (I needed a picture for an application to the Showtime reality program American Candidate, and it was convenient to have a co-worker take a picture of me when I happened to be at the office. I then used that photo as an illustration on the XP page without, of course, naming [firm name] in the caption to that photo.) That is NOT "involv[ing] the firm" in my political or gay-rights websites.
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Nowhere do I claim that [firm name] shares my views ON ANYTHING nor encouraged me to say what I say ABOUT ANYTHING. By contrast, one of the partners of the firm displayed, last I knew, an Israeli flag on the wall of his office, even tho he works on matters for Arab clients who might be offended and pull their business if they were to see that flag in the firm's offices!
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Still, I was fired from a very good job with very good benefits, supposedly for what I say on the Internet. Was that really the reason? Or were they trying to save money on employer contributions to two of those very good benefits I used to enjoy, a generous health insurance program and a 401(k) plan, and take a step to limit increases in future health-insurance premiums by firing an old man with knee problems? I really don't know.
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To the extent my political views or openly saying on the Internet that I am homosexual cost me a $50,000 a year job, everyone who says anything on the Internet should be worried lest something they say offend their boss and get them fired. And everyone on the Internet who believes that firing someone for his political beliefs is detestable, inexcusably abusive, and un-American should unite to fight that censorship. Tell your friends; warn everyone you know who publishes on the Internet. Let the clients of [firm name], the bar associations of New Jersey and New York (where the firm recently took conference-center space), and everyone else who should care about civil liberties know about this abuse. Freedom of conscience is a very serious matter.
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(I have skipped a few days in posting to this blog because I was stunned by my firing and had to consult with family and friends, then think about what to do in response. I will, however, resume posting several times a week — and will not be silenced by bigots at my former employer — a bunch of sh*theads who will likely see their fortunes decline in short order.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:27 PM