Ossie, Israelis from the Andes, SocSec Cures, George W. Hoover, and New York Gay Marriage (Separate Stories). A lot worth note has happened in the past two days.
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Item 1: Ossie Davis, distinguished black actor and civil-rights activist, died today in Miami, at age 87. I sort of met him once. He spoke to my (English?) class at the Freshman Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York on 42nd Street in 1967 or ’68 sometime, and I might have asked him a question. It was a long time ago, and I don’t remember what the topic of his talk was, nor what my question might have been. But the class was small, and we got a good sense of a good man. I was impressed that so famous a man (even then) would take the time to talk to so small a group of college kids.
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Alas, Mr. Davis later allowed his racial identification to overwhelm his good sense and principles in narrating a tribute to the notorious black Stalinist, Paul Robeson, on PBS, and praising that chip-on-the-shoulder fool who to the end of his life made excuses for Communist tyranny and mass murder. Ossie Davis, like all too many people, seems to have accepted the notion that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", even tho Stalin was not by any stretch of the imagination a friend to freedom, for black Americans or anyone else. Davis disgraced himself in praising Paul Robeson and passing over Robeson’s active connivance in Communism.
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Item 2: In my last entry, I spoke to how Israel is so desperate to boost the number of Jews in Palestine that it is casting its net wide, bringing in people it might better do without. The British colleague who alerted me to the Haaretz article cited in that entry later told me of another Haaretz article, as edited and reprinted in The Guardian newspaper of Britain on August 27, 2002. It starts out:

When a delegation of rabbis travelled to Lima [Peru] to convert a group of South American Indians to Judaism, they added just one condition: come and live with us in Israel. As soon as these new Jews arrived in the country, they were bussed straight to settlements in the disputed territories.

The story is startling in its madness and ugliness. One of the Indian converts says:

after he finishes the Hebrew course, he may join the army, "because I wasn't in the army in Peru and that is something I lack, and also because I want to defend the country and if there is no choice, I will kill Arabs. But I am sure that Jews kill Arabs only for self-defence and justice, but Arabs do it because they like to kill."

Despite Israel’s best efforts, however, a commentator on Charlie Rose (PBS) last nite said that immigration to Israel has declined to a mere trickle, Israelis have fewer children than Palestinians, and demographics impel Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories (we’ll pass over, for this purpose only, that all of Israel is occupied territory) and accept a "two-state solution" because in a single state, Arabs will outnumber Jews within a few decades.
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So there’s a population race in a desert! And we’re paying for the Jewish part of this overpopulation problem.
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Bizarrely, the U.S. is also turning a blind eye to illegal Israeli migration to the U.S. OUT of the danger zone. So on one hand we’re sending boatloads of cash to boost Israeli numbers, and on the other, we’re draining away the very people Israel needs to ‘survive’. That’s another of the idiocies of U.S. policy in the Middle East.
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Item 3: George Bush is hiding key facts about the Social Security system now in place, to hide obvious fixes.
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Did you know that the maximum salary on which Social Security taxes are paid is $90,000? Beyond that, no Social Security taxes are taken out whatsoever. So the rich and super-rich stop paying Social Security taxes above a relative pittance, while ordinary working people pay Social Security taxes on every cent they make! I suspect that we could solve the entire Social Security funding problem simply by eliminating the maximum tax base and continuing to tax the rich at the same rate the rest of us pay! — thru all their millions and tens of millions of dollars a year, year after year without end.
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Did you also know that everyone who pays Social Security tax is eligible to receive Social Security benefits, even Bill Gates?! The richest of us get a smaller percentage of their income on retirement — which may nonetheless be more than the typical person receives — but they still get a lot of money from Social Security at retirement, even if they have private pension plans, investments, and savings that provide them hundreds of thousands or MILLIONS of dollars a year. They also qualify for Medicare! Now, what happens when funds are limited, and the rich get some of those funds? Plainly, the poor and middle class get less than they otherwise would.
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Put these two huge factors together and you get the be-all and end-all of why Social Security could go bust: because the rich don’t pay Social Security taxes on everything they earn but are entitled to draw benefits as tho they needed them.
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We need, thus, do only two things to fix Social Security: tax the rich at the same rate as the poor and middle class, and means-test the grant of benefits. The program is called Social Security. The rich are already secure. They don’t need our money. They should be proud they can provide for themselves, and stop stealing public funds. If they should somehow lose their money in old age, as thru catastrophic illness, THEN, and ONLY then, should they get Social Security and Medicare. Just as we don’t give the rich welfare or Medicaid, we shouldn’t give them Social Security or Medicare.
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Item 4: The media have made the peculiar assertion that because January’s job gains, just announced, have brought us back to the number of jobs in the economy before Bush came into office, somehow he is no longer the only President since Herbert Hoover to have lost jobs during his term. But the comparison used, validly, in the campaign was to ONE term, which is all the people gave Hoover — as we should have given Dubya only one term. The January numbers take in part of his second term. So unless the numbers can be broken down by the first 19 days of January as against the last 12, and there is still a gain, the media may be comparing apples and oranges. Moreover, the United States has gained 3 million people since Dubya took office, so just regaining the number of jobs we had in 2001 does NOT equal the level of employment we had in 2001. We are still in the hole.
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Item 5: A New York State judge ruled today that present law permits same-sex marriage:

A Manhattan judge declared Friday that a section of law that forbids same-sex marriage violates the state constitution, a ruling which if upheld on appeal would allow gay couples to wed.

State Supreme Court Justice Doris Ling-Cohan ruled that the words "husband," "wife," "groom" and "bride" in relevant sections of the Domestic Relations Law "shall be construed to mean `spouse,' and all personal pronouns ... shall be construed to apply equally to either men or women." * *  *

I assume that decision will be appealed by the government. Let’s see what happens.
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My own view is that all the Blue States should just legalize same-sex marriage outrite, by forthrite legislative act, not by judicial stealth. That would drive the rednecks WILD.
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I’m planning to end each entry from now until the U.S. leaves Iraq with the number of dead American soldiers in the Iraq war to date. Today’s figure: 1,443. There have also been about 10,600 Americans wounded but not killed. No one knows how many Iraqis have died. They’re not important to the U.S. military. They are to me.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:48 PM