Insane Commercials. New technologies have given advertisers the ability to create extraordinary images and sounds that bear no relation to reality. Being able to do something is not, however, reason enuf actually to do it. Levi Strauss & Co. is currently running an extremely bizarre and incomprehensible commercial for 501 jeans.
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(I pass over the fact that 501 jeans have a button fly, which is probably the stupidest affectation in men's clothing today. The zipper was invented 90 years ago. Isn't it time to put it into all of Levi's jeans? 505's have zippers. Let's retire 501's to the graveyard of once-useful devices like the buggy whip. Of course, some old things can become new again, like the nonpolluting, eco-friendly, non-greenhouse-gas-producing treadle-drive for sewing machines. Indeed, might we put treadles or similar human-powered drive systems into use for multitudinous other devices? If we had treadle TV's, this country wouldn't be nearly so fat.)
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In this puzzling but visually striking — if destructive — Levi's commercial, a young man starts to pull up his jeans, and his tugging on his jeans starts to pull a telephone booth and a whole other world up thru the floor of his room. He lowers the jeans a moment, and all the intruding things from the outside world lower back down thru the floor, out of sight. But he does need to put on his pants, after all. He also wants to see what happens. So he pulls his jeans up all the way, and the outside world smashes his floor to splinters and he is in the other world, with a young woman who saw him pulling up his pants and presumably liked what she saw. What the hell is all that supposed to mean? Why on Earth would such a grotesque and insane commercial be created, paid for, and aired on national TV?
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(There is, I see, a gay version of this same commercial, in which the person in the telephone booth who sees this guy with his pants partway down is a goodlooking young man, and after the first guy pulls up his pants, the two young men go off together. That version apparently airs only in places like the supposedly 'gay' cable channel Logo — which, however, is actually militantly antigay, endlessly pushing women at men and indicating by word and deed that women are the only important thing in the world. I wonder if Levi Strauss & Co. has any idea how few gay men can stand to watch Logo, which is 70% female, 10% "transgender", 10% transvestite, and only 10% male.)
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There is a similar grotesque commercial for some beverage in which what looks like a Transformer or aggregation of trash jogs thru streets, destroying things along the way, and progressively shedding bits of trash until a single human being, an athletic male jogger, is revealed. The commercial is apparently for some energy drink, but I can't remember which one — which is something the advertiser needs to consider. Yes, we notice strikingly bizarre commercials, but we don't necessarily know what they're supposed to be selling.
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A Lexus commercial followed the insane Levi's commercial in some program I was watching tonite. In that commercial a sea of what appeared to be gray, marble-sized balls or globes of indeterminate composition is scattered by a speeding car, which swirls them out of the way, in wake-like fashion. Why? What the hell is that supposed to mean? I was so puzzled as to what that commercial was for that I watched thru the end to identify the advertiser. But that 's the only reason I knew the ad was for Lexus. The striking visuals said absolutely nothing about the quality or performance of that particular brand of automobile. So why would it persuade anyone about anything?
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We are surrounded by techno-crazy infants in advertising and media who surround us with swirling images of violence, destruction, and incomprehensible, pointless movement and noise, as entertainment and advertising. What does any of it mean? Nothing, for the most part. It's just an attempt to capture attention. But if it says nothing, we are left puzzled and irritated. Why are you wasting our attention on this nonsense, this crazy, meaningless, extravagant, and pointless motion and sound? We may be couch potatoes, but we are not infants lying on our backs looking up at a mobile. At least a baby's mobile familiarizes an infant with basic three-dimensional shapes, visually and tactilely. The ultraviolent and destructive, explosive images we are now assailed by in advertising and entertainment do nothing useful for us. Shakespeare said it 300 years ago: this crap is but "a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing". (Macbeth, Act V, Scene v)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,645 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Comedy Central's Foreign Intruders. Jason Jones, a Canadian, was put forward as "Senior Political Reporter", as The Daily Show's first commentator in tonite's discussion of last nite's Democratic debate. The Daily Show is very heavily foreign, and I resent it. Samantha Bee is also Canadian. John Oliver is British. Why are they on an American political satire show? And why are they permitted to intrude into an election in which they are not entitled to vote? There are restrictions on foreigners contributing to American political campaigns, but none on their intruding into our elections as correspondents and commentators whose behavior can affect many votes. That makes no sense at all.
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There are 300 million Americans. Does The Daily Show really need to hire foreigners? It's insulting. I turned off tonite's Daily Show when a second foreigner, John Oliver, came on to offer his thoughts. To quote Jason Jones about his own comments, I "don't give a rat's ass what [he] has to say" about our elections. This is not Jason Jones's country, not John Oliver's country. They should mind their own business and stay out of our affairs. If they want to participate in our country's elections, they must become citizens, either as individuals or by bringing their countries into the Union. Then they'd be entitled to employment in the United States and to participate in our elections. As foreigners, they are not.
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How the hell did satirists and actors get past the border? There is no shortage of such people in this country. There has never been an actor shortage and never will be. So how do these people get the right to take jobs away from Americans in Americans' own country? These aren't jobs "Americans won't do". They are among the best and highest-profile jobs in media. They are also presumably very well-paid. All the best jobs in this country should go to Americans — only. I don't need foreigners telling me anything about my country's elections, and deeply resent The Daily Show's hiring foreigners for top spots.
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John Oliver in particular should have been fired the very nite he called George Washington, and I quote, "a douche". That is out of line for any foreigner, but especially for a Brit. He should not just have been fired from The Daily Show. He should also have been deported, and placed on a no-fly list and permanent blacklist to ban him from even visiting the United States for the rest of his life. There was nothing funny about his attack upon George Washington, a man without whom the United States might never have come into existence. And there is nothing funny about foreigners intruding into American elections. If I wanted to hear foreign views of our elections, I'd tune to a serious commentator on the BBC, CBC, or some other foreign network. But frankly, I don't give a damn what outsiders have to say about our elections. Our elections are none of their business.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,637 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:51 PM

 
Sic 'im! Public opinion seems united in thinking that if the charges of dog-fiting are proved against Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick, he should be punished much more severely than the law provides. Wikipedia says that the legal penalties Vick faces, if convicted, are a prison term of up to six years, fines of $350,000, and forfeiture of proceeds and property involved. The estate on which the dog fites at issue were conducted is valued at $700,000.
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My friends and I agree that a guilty Vick should be placed in a pen with very high fences around it that he cannot climb, and a group of vicious dogs of the type he pitted against each other in fites to the death, but which are a pack of companions who cooperate, not fite among themselves, should be unleashed into the pen to mete out their own justice. If that means they rip him to shreds and he dies in agony, so be it. If it means only that they maul him severely and society has to patch him up — at his own expense (there are times, if extremely isolated, when it's good that we don't have a single-payer health-insurance system — tho even in a universal-healthcare system, criminals could be punished corporally and made to pay for their own medical treatment), well, that will have to do. But we can hope that a pack of pit bulls would end Vick's evil life, not just rip his face and body to bloody tatters.
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At this point it seems extremely unlikely that Michael Vick is innocent, altho the legal system of the United States provides that the accused is "innocent until proven* guilty". (Not every country has that legal standard.) The fact that Vick has not issued a hugely indignant public denial speaks volumes.
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The civilized world has moved far beyond the bad old days of cruelty to animals as "sport". Britain's loathsome 'entertainment', bear-baiting, was outlawed in 1835. Legislators in both New Mexico (first, effective June 15th of this year) and then Louisiana have voted to outlaw cockfiting. They were the last two states of the Union to outlaw that monstrous blood"sport", popular among barbarian invaders from Latin America. The Louisiana ban doesn't take effect until next year. Yet we're supposed to feel sorry for Louisian(i)ans hurt by hurricane Katrina. Maybe Louisiana doesn't deserve anybody's sympathy after all.
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NBC Nightly News today reported that even the savages of Spain are thinking of outlawing the grotesque medieval sadism of bullfiting, something you'd have thought the European Union would have struck down years ago.
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Some 60% of American households have pets. You wouldn't know that from TV, however, since the near-aliens who control television are not like the rest of us. Think about the TV shows you presently watch and watched historically. Bill Cosby's Huxtable clan had no pets. Roseanne's family had no pets. These were No. 1 shows for years at a time. Now and then "Vanessa Huxtable" would ask "Can we get a dog?", but they never did. One episode of Roseanne dealt with a dog given to her son, "D.J.", by the family of a friend. "Roseanne" said they couldn't keep it — too much trouble for the adults, who assumed the kids would never feed or walk it — and then she had to keep calling the mother to insist she take it back.
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And how many TV families can you think of with a cat? Cats are much less trouble than dogs. You put down one big bowl of dry food and another of water, and cats will feed themselves. Provide a litterbox and you don't have to walk them, just clean the box from time to time, an infinitesimal imposition upon any family. Cats don't need a big yard to run in; they'll climb anything you've got and sleep most of the day from the oddest, most uncomfortable-looking perch. But few TV series show pets as the integral part of a family's, or single person's, life that in fact they are for most Americans. Still, the fury against Michael Vick shows how deeply we care about our pets, who are an indispensable part of our emotional lives.
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It would seem that the people who dominate television hate animals, one of the many ways in which they differ from Americans, and from human beings generally.
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Americans love many kinds of animals, not just cats and dogs (I put cats first because I like them better, tho some dogs are terrific, and I have (not "own"; one co-resides with cats; they are more roommates than possessions) a number of cats, who love their daddy). Ferrets and fish, snakes and salamanders, turtles and tarantulas, parakeets, pot-bellied pigs — you-name-it — Americans love their pets. But Michael Vick and other nuckle-dragging throwbacks look at animals and see only helpless creatures they can torture for their own astoundingly twisted gratification.
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Throw him to the dogs, and what the dogs don't eat, feed to lions in Zoo Atlanta. But first strip away the skin (burn it and use the ash as fertilizer in a rose garden, or to grow catnip, or grass in a dog park) so no human scent attaches to the meat. Maybe the lions will think it tastes like chicken.
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* Or "proved", tho "proven" is more common, at least in the U.S. Altho it is commonly the case that "strong" verbs, that change in the stem rather than add suffixes to show a change in grammatical tense (ring/rang/rung rather than ring/ringed/ringed), are older than the regularized forms, it seems that the regular form "proved" is older than the irregular form "proven", which is now more common as past participle and almost unchallenged as adjective. Language, he is strange.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:35 AM

 
Red-Iculous. I was desperate for entertainment in the middle of the nite tonite and, in channel-surfing, chanced across a bizarre Fox News Channel show called Red Eye w/Greg Gutfeld. In this grotesque and ugly show, a number of youngish, self-important nobodies comment on the news, as tho anyone should care what they have to say. They are mainly negative and condescending, as tho somehow their accomplishments in life entitle them to look down upon people and offer nothing positive. Their unintelligent, uninteresting, and unconstructive remarks are punctuated by patently phony lafter more telling of the utter unfunniness of the proceedings than the tinniest laftrack on the corniest, lowest-production-value sitcom in Fifties television.
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It would be bad enuf if that sad little excuse for a program ran 15 minutes. In actuality, it appears to run an hour, an hour that seems much, much longer. I sat before the TV in amazement that something so charmless and lacking in news value, humor — any redeeming value — could be on any major cable channel, even Rupert Murdoch's FNC. I kept waiting for something funny, or insightful, or in any other way worthy of the time and attention of anyone on this planet to turn up, but saw nothing and heard nothing that would justify putting that white noise on the air for an hour or even 3 minutes. I am left wondering how there could possibly be an audience for a program so lacking in substance, style, wit, or appealing personalities. Red Eye might well be the most pointless waste of time in all of cable. Bass fishing is more worthy of your attention. I beg of you, don't see for yourself. If despite what I have said you wish to check out Red Eye, and come away as astonished as I that something like that could be on nationally broadcast TV, don't blame me. I warned you not to waste your time.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,629 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Microwave in Reverse. Why don't we have a device that can instantly cool or even freeze foods? We have the microwave, which can speedily heat something. But if we need a beverage to be cold in a hurry, we have to add ice cubes. And sometimes that's not appropriate, as in the case of beer or milk. Why hasn't anybody created an instant cooler? Just asking.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,631 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:42 AM

 
Revolting. Yesterday it seemed that New York City Mayor (and multi-billionaire, and probable Presidential candidate) Michael Bloomberg's "congestion pricing" scheme was off the table due to opposition in the State Legislature. Today, however, reports have it being resurrected. The benefits of the measure are assuredly exaggerated, and to institute it would require the expenditure of literally hundreds of millions of dollars! The New York Daily News reports today:

State leaders and Mayor Bloomberg were on the brink of a deal last night on a far-reaching traffic congestion relief plan for the city — one that could qualify for some $536 million in federal startup funds, officials told the Daily News.

Why on Earth should any revenue-PRODUCING measure require HALF A BILLION DOLLARS in startup costs?
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The preposterous cost of instituting such a system is the least of it. The plan is just plain immoral and must be stopped. The poor and middle class of New York City and its suburbs in New York State, New Jersey, and Connecticut must be prepared to take this fite to the streets, before those streets are stolen rite out from under them.
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I sent the following message today to New York's Governor Elliot Spitzer, NYS Senate President Joseph Bruno, and NYS Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.

You must stop "congestion pricing", which is an effort by the rich to steal the streets from the poor and middle class who built them and own them, for the exclusive use of the rich. It is morally, and probably constitutionally, impermissible to steal public property and turn it over to the rich. The PEOPLE, not the rich, built the roads. The people own them – all the people, not just the rich. The rich did not physically build the roads; the rich do absolutely none of the work of maintaining them. Why should the poor and middle class lift so much as a finger to repair roads they are not allowed to use?
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What next? Charge people to use the sidewalks? To breathe the air? To cross the street? How about charging people to send their children to school? to receive textbooks? to take books out of the library? How about charging people for police rescues? Will you have the fire department send bills to people for putting out fires?
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Be clear on this: the Republicans want to charge the little guy for everything in order to cut the taxes on the rich, so that the rich can CHOOSE which things to pay for and which responsibilities to escape. You must not permit this destruction of the social compact. Roads not built as toll roads cannot be stolen from the people who built them and turned over to the rich. City workers who repair the streets must be prepared to refuse to repair any road stolen from the people, and citizens' groups must sue the City, State, and indeed the Federal Government as well if you permit the theft of public property and transfer of invaluable and indispensable public roadways to the rich.
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Government is counting on passive acceptance of any abuse by the people of New York City and its suburbs. That might be a serious miscalculation, and if this crime against the people is passed, I would indeed favor violent revolt, from barricades across the streets to rocks thru windshields, tire slashings, and even physical assaults on the rich who steal from the poor. That includes assassination of public officials who think society belongs to the rich, and that the "riffraff" should be cleared from the streets THEY BUILT.

This must not pass! No elected official nowadays will do anything the people want. Government is ripping away everything the people own and reducing the poor and middle class to penury and slavery. Let "congestion pricing" be the straw that broke the camel's back. Fite it. Stop it. Prove that the people have power. But if the people cannot stop this, if the people consent to this, then the end of our civilization is at hand, and we might just as well formalize our surrender to the rich and take away the rite to vote from all but the rich. If the many cannot stop the few from rolling over them despite having the rite to vote, the loss of the vote won't make a damned bit of difference. It will just make absolutely clear what is becoming all too plain already: the rich own this country lock, stock, and barrel, and will do anything they want, to anyone they want, anytime they want, and there's nothing we can do about it.
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Or is there?
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Lest anyone think my remarks above incendiary, let me offer two quotes from another incendiary, one Thomas Jefferson:

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

and

What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?

Bloomberg, Spitzer, Bruno, and Silver should consider themselves warned.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,628 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:27 PM

 
(Lack of) News Judgment. I tried today to watch the evening national and world news broadcasts on ABC and NBC, as I usually do (ABC as base, NBC during ABC's commercials. I like ABC a bit better, and my first job in New York, when I was 19 in ye olden days, was as a clerk-messenger for ABC News, so I have residual loyalty to my former employer). But ABC wasn't showing national or world news tonite. No, there was a steam-pipe explosion in Midtown Manhattan, and that was the be-all and end-all of ABC News's universe today. So I turned to NBC, and was able to catch some other stories until NBC also knocked the national/world news broadcast off the air. So I turned to Univisión and Telemundo, which I do when there are commercials on the other networks. Univisión also knocked its world-news broadcast off the air late in the half hour. Telemundo was in commercials, so, gagging and wretching all the way, I turned to CBS News with Katie Couric. CBS alone went on with its national/world news broadcast.
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I cannot know if these pre-emptions were national or only local to the New York Tristate Metropolitan Area.
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New York's WABC, following the nitely news, knocked Jeopardy off the air to follow this event of no importance, updates concerning which could have been broadcast as a "crawl" across the bottom of the screen.
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So I sent the following message to ABC and NBC (whose New York stations are flagship to their respective networks, and are as well my local stations, New York being, from my point of view, a suburb of Newark.

What were you thinking, in knocking the evening news off the air tonite (at least in the New York area) to show instead a report about a broken steam pipe in a tiny part of Manhattan? Let me remind you of something you have apparently forgotten. Your station serves a Tristate Metropolitan Area of 22 million people, almost none of whom give a d*mn about a steam pipe explosion on 41st Street near Lexington Avenue, given that it was apparently an accident and has no larger significance. It was not the result of terrorism. It didn't kill lots of people. It didn't stop the subway from running, nor the trains at Grand Central. It was, in short, a matter of no importance whatsoever to anybody outside PART of Manhattan. What were you thinking?
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Americans are citizens of a superpower, who desperately need to be well informed about the entire planet, not about 41st Street and Lexington Avenue. Whereas WABC completely pre-empted its "World News" program, and WNBC bumped part of its world-news broadcast, CBS kept its 'eye' on its mission: to inform Americans about the world, not about 41st Street and Lexington Avenue.
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Surely you could have run a "crawl" across the bottom of the screen to update interested people about this story, but left other stories in the major part of the screen for the great preponderance of the population who don't care about a steam pipe explosion on 41st Street.
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Everyone who caused the pre-emption of your evening WORLD news program (in at least the New York Tristate Metropolitan Area) for a trivial local story should be bounced out of New York, the Nation's (if not the world's) news capital, pronto, and kept out for, oh, say, two years. If they are so fascinated by local news and think it the be-all and end-all of the universe, let them do local news in, say, Minot, North Dakota for a couple of years. Maybe then they will appreciate what is and is not national, much less world, news. Cheers.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:23 PM

 
Microbial Magic in Pakistan. High-tech does not equate with well-educated nor intelligent. Consider this item hilited on AOL News today.

Pakistan is recovering from an episode of widespread panic that gripped the nation late last week thanks to a vicious prank. Cell phone providers reported a high volume of customer-service calls inquiring about a deadly virus transmitted by cell phones. This illness was not some kind of bacteria you pick up from talking on a dirty phone, but a curse said to be responsible for 20 deaths. According to Reuters, the hysteria reached such critical mass that many mosques were warning of the virus and cautioning cell users to "be aware of God's wrath."

Government officials are now said to be bracing for further civil unrest when word of Cooties spreads.

(I suppose "be aware of God's wrath" should have been "beware God's wrath", but that's a quibble.)
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The problem the world has always had is that a great many people can cope with some of the gizmos or technologies that science produces (like fire, in ye olden days, then the pulley, Archimedes screw, vacuum cleaner, videocassette recorder, personal computer, and cellphone in more modern times), but all this intellectual sophistication is but a perilous superstructure built on a base of fearful superstition. There are people who can master the intricacies of molecular biology or nuclear physics but who still check their horoscope every day. Makes you proud to be human, doesn't it? Jeez.
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(This is an entry for Tuesday uploaded Wednesday due to time (and energy) constraints.)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,617 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:55 PM

 
Catholic Prostitutes. The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has paid 508 people for sexual favors, rendering them all, instead of victims, into prostitutes. This was never about anything but money. The "victims", who had sex — ohmigod! nobody would ever have sex against his or her will! — with priests or other church personnel, sometimes for years(!), are now being paid for services rendered. Pretty expensive lays, I'd say.
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I am tired of these people, many of whom had sex over and over again with their "abusers", claiming utter innocence. A statement by one of the attorneys today said that this payment is a reassurance to the "victims" that they did nothing wrong. No, they didn't. Sex isn't wrong. Inflicting sex upon the genuinely unwilling is wrong, but trivial. Just say no — or shout it, or fite it if you don't want it. But don't have it "against your will" — again and again — and then submit a bill.
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The time for these "victims" to have spoken out was immediately after the "offense", not years or even decades later, sometimes well after the "offender" has died, so cannot defend himself from false accusations. And the penalty for the offense should have been public exposure and possible (brief) imprisonment for the offender. Criminal acts deserve criminal punishments, not civil lawsuits.
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Justice is about retribution and restitution. Payment for pain and suffering is a civil-law, not criminal-law construct. These asserted assaults were criminal matters. Restitution in criminal law constitutes paying people back for money stolen, or expended to recover from a crime. Civil law monetizes harm, and this society monetizes too much. The best things in life are free. So are the worst. Life is not about dollar signs and zeros separated by commas. Everybody in this country has come to see any life problem as a chance to rake in big bucks, and that is not healthy.
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As for getting paid for sex, we have a name for people who demand money for sex. Actually, we have several names for such people. "Victim" is not one of them.
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,616 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:55 PM

 
Beckham, Shmeckham. Who the hell cares about, hm, what's his first name? Let me check: David. Let's start again: Who the hell cares about David Beckham? Or the moronic game he plays? Beckham is today's Pele. Brazilian soccer superstar Pele absolutely, miserably failed to make soccer a major professional sport in the United States. What's-his-name Beckham is almost certain to have the same non-effect.
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The single most important feature that rendered the human creature into a species capable of civilization is the ability to walk erect and thus free two limbs to grasp things and manipulate the environment. Soccer doesn't allow its players (except the goalie) to use their hands. Soccer is uncivilized and anti-civilized. (Small wonder that it is accompanied by barbarous fan behavior all over the world.) It can be played by horses, elephants, or dogs. It is not a fit game for human beings.
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Despite a minimum of 50 years of endless, high-pressure efforts by government and media to make the United States into a soccer country — for reasons completely beyond my comprehension — the United States HATES soccer. Children play it, because of government pressure and the soccer leagues government supports at public expense (all those fields cost money to construct and maintain, you know), but when they grow up, they outgrow it and join the legions of fans of AMERICAN sports. When will foreigners and the anti-American militants in government and media stop pushing soccer at us and admit that we just plain HATE the game?
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Stop forcing kids to play soccer in phys-ed classes, which will save millions of kids from being kicked in the shins, which is what soccer resolves to for the bulk of kids forced to play it in school, against their will. Stop pushing kids to join soccer leagues. Stop showing soccer in commercials for things that have nothing to do with soccer. Convert all those soccer fields to football fields — or cornfields for ethanol. Tell all those "soccer moms" to get out of the United States if they want to push their children to play a foreign game. Drive the term "soccer mom" out of media. Tell the media to stop broadcasting soccer and news of soccer. And tell David Beckham to go back where he came from. We don't need him (nor his hideous, grating, lower-class accent) here. And we don't need his stupid game here either.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,613 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:16 PM

 
Open Letter to Michael Moore. My friend Gaetano forwarded to me an open letter Michael Moore sent to CNN about its refusal/failure to date to correct inaccuracies it broadcast in a supposed 'fact check' of Moore's documentary Sicko. At the end of that open letter was an email address for Moore, so I sent him this email, which I am now opening to you, since I don't know if he himself will ever see it.

Subject: Don't let up on universal healthcare
Warren Buffett recently remarked that he pays Federal income tax at a lower rate than his secretary. Did that make the Nation recoil in horror at the unfairness of a tax system that favors the rich? It did not. His observation sank almost instantly out of public view, while some conservatives made excuses (the corporations from which he derived his income already paid taxes — as tho the corporations ordinary people work for don't) and recalculated his secretary's tax rate to show it should be lower than Buffett said (tho still higher than Buffett's). Your film Sicko (which I have said should instead have been titled Shame: http://antipost.blogspot.com/2007/07/sicko.html) is the most powerful force to move the Nation toward universal healthcare ever to have been put forward. But you can't let up. I chanced to see only a few hours ago a documentary about the Clearwater environmental group (Hudson River cleanup) in which folk singer/activist Pete Seeger says, more than once (aptly): "The price of liberty is eternal publicity."
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Pete Seeger and the tens of thousands of people he helped to mobilize made a huge difference in the cleanup of one of this Nation's great rivers, whether he be remembered into the future for that or only for writing "If I Had a Hammer". YOU have a hammer, your celebrity, with which to get the endless publicity we will need in order to smash resistance to universal healthcare in the United States. Please do not be distracted, by relatively petty corrections to Sanjay Gupta's report or anything else, from the need to hammer home to all Americans that we MUST enact universal healthcare, and anyone who resists that is un-American, an enemy of everything this country stands for. This is the Nation of barn-raisings and quilting-bees, of volunteer fire departments and 999 other Points of Lite. We need to be reminded of our tradition of caring for each other, of cheering for the underdog and fiting for the little guy against The Powers That Be. You can make universal healthcare as American as sandlot baseball or a pickup game of touch football. You must not move on to your next project until you have seen this project thru to completion (even if you must run for President to force all the other candidates to embrace that cause). "The price of liberty is eternal publicity" — well, if not eternal, then at least until the job is done — but few of us can get the publicity you can. Take that to heart. Please.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,613 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Our Pakistan Problem. Pakistan has made itself a passive accomplice of Al-Qaeda in not permitting U.S. action against Al-Qaeda training camps and such in the Tribal Areas of northwest Pakistan. ABC today says that the U.S. provides Pakistan a billion dollars to fite Al-Qaeda, but the Pakistani regime (a military dictatorship) seems instead to be making its peace with Al-Qaeda. We cannot accept Pakistani inaction but must warn Pakistan in no uncertain terms that it must destroy the Al-Qaeda safe haven (that it denies even exists, but we have very good reason to believe does exist) or we will destroy it, with no regard to "collateral damage". We should say something very like this:

The Tribal Areas of Pakistan are enclaves of savagery that the civilized world can no longer tolerate. They must become civilized, whether the people now resident there wish to do so or not. At end, civilizations must be ruthless toward barbarians, and we have the right to treat savages as savages, enemies of civilization, and do everything necessary to raise them up, or raze them to the ground.
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Therefore we warn the people of the Tribal Areas that if they do not demonstrably enlist in the war against Al-Qaeda, we will regard them as active enemies of the United States and of civilization, and do everything in our considerable power to end their ability to injure or even threaten us. That includes indiscriminate tactical nuclear weapons attacks upon every area of the Tribal Areas we have any reason, including defective intelligence, to think might be shielding and co-conspiring with Al-Qaeda. It is not enuf passively to stand by and permit Al-Qaeda to do what it wants in your vicinity. If you do not actively enlist in destroying Al-Qaeda, to at least report Al-Qaeda locations to the Pakistani government, we will regard you as a member of Al-Qaeda, and do our best to kill you.
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President Musharraf may or may not be doing everything he can to stop Al-Qaeda from using Pakistani territory as a safe haven and training ground. If our information that parts of Pakistan nonetheless remain safe havens, then he is not doing enuf, and not doing enuf is for all practical purposes not doing anything. We have reason to believe that Al-Qaeda militants trained in Pakistan are trying to make their way into the United States to unleash major terrorist attacks that will dwarf the attacks and attempted attacks in Britain of late. They should not have been able to train in Pakistan. They should not have been alive to leave Pakistan for the United States. Any damage they do is Pakistan's fault. And we will no longer sit idly by and let more violent lunatics graduate from terror schools conducted on Pakistani territory.
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The defense policy of the United States cannot rest on one person. Already there have been a number of attempts on the life of Pervez Musharraf. Even if we were to regard Musharraf as a trustworthy ally who really is doing everything he can do to suppress Al-Qaeda, what he is doing is plainly not enuf, and he might be killed by domestic enemies with or without the help of Al-Qaeda. We cannot wait for months or even years to find out what his successors are doing, for good or ill. Our patience is ended. We gave Pakistan plenty of time to control activities within its frontiers. It has not secured all parts of the country from Al-Qaeda infiltration and activity. Move over. We'll fite alongside.
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If Pakistan will not work with us, we will have no alternative but to think it is working against us. Thus we must warn the Government and people of Pakistan that the United States will not stand idly by and let Pakistan fail in its efforts — sincere or fraudulent — to destroy Al-Qaeda's safe haven in Pakistan. If we do not see the Islamabad government taking effective control of all parts of the Tribal Areas and destroying Al-Qaeda in Pakistan, we will be forced to attack those areas ourselves, with all the force necessary to ensure that Al-Qaeda has been wiped out in that area, up to and including multitudinous airstrikes, smart bombs, cruise missiles, napalm, defoliation, even tactical nuclear weapons to secure quick extermination of every living thing in suspect areas. We apologize in advance for any ecological destruction and deaths of innocent animals that may entail. We do not apologize for the deaths of people such attacks would entail. Animals have no obligation to destroy terrorist training camps. People do.
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If the Government of Pakistan refuses permission for the U.S. to act in any area we regard as an Al-Qaeda safe haven, we will act anyway. If the Government of Pakistan fites us, we will take every measure necessary to destroy that Government's ability to harm us, up to and including nuclear strikes upon all of Pakistan's nuclear facilities, missile-launching facilities, military airports, and government offices of suchever type as we in our sole discretion may choose to destroy, including Parliament and the Presidential Palace. Do we really need to point out that that would leave Pakistan defenseless against India? Do we, indeed, need to say aloud that if we need to go to war against Pakistan, we will seek to bring India into the war on our side, and give to India after Pakistan's defeat, as much territory and other concessions as it may desire. If indeed India should wish to reincorporate the whole of Pakistan into India's national territory, we will actively assist in merging Pakistan back into India.
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At end, we will do whatever we feel we need to do to secure the United States and other parts of the civilized world against Radical Islamist terrorism. If Pakistan wishes us to help in defending the civilized areas of Pakistan by destroying the barbarous areas, it should work with us. But if Pakistan sides with barbarism against us, we will destroy Pakistan. In doing so, we need not send so much as one ground soldier into the conflict. (We cannot say whether India would supply ground troops.) We ourselves need merely act from the air. If to end Al-Qaeda's free ride with Pakistan, we must wage full-scale thermonuclear war against Pakistan, make no mistake: we will do so.

That should do the trick. If the Moslem world thinks we will permit any government to protect Al-Qaeda, it had better think again. If it wishes to see the conflict with Al-Qaeda as the first stage of a historic, conflagrative clash of civilizations, then it must consider whether Islam stands any chance at all against full-scale thermonuclear war, or if Islam's history will end — and not with a whimper, but a bang.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,611 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:12 PM

 
(1) (of 2) Congressional Overreaching. Congress is not superior to the Presidency. The Supreme Court is not superior to the Presidency. If anything, among the three legalistically co-equal branches of the Federal Government, the Presidency is supreme as a practical matter, because the Executive Branch includes the ARMED FORCES. It is commonplace throughout history that overreaching legislatures and courts have found to their dismay that a chief executive holds all the marbles. Some of those overreaching fools have found themselves face down on a chopping block, or standing with a blindfold on, in front of a firing squad.
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In the United States we have not (yet) had a military coup, but it really is not beyond the realm of possibility. Andrew Jackson was told by the Supreme Court in 1832 that he 'could not' expel the Cherokees from their traditional lands in the Southeast. He in effect told the Supreme Court to go f*k itself and found a way to send the Cherokees on the "Trail of Tears".
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Congress does not have the right to compel the President or any other member of the Executive Branch to testify before Congress. Period. If Congress is unhappy with the Executive Branch, it can cut off funding to whatever it disapproves of, or impeach him or any other member of the Executive Branch:

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 4. That is all that Congress is entitled to do.
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The President is entitled, of necessity, to staff the top executive positions of every part of the Executive Branch as ever he wishes, subject only to confirmation of major appointments by the Senate. How else can he govern? You can't have subordinates who don't do what you tell them to do, or do it badly or incompetently.
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No outsider is authorized to second-guess staffing decisions within the Executive Branch, and the President needs to tell everyone outside the White House to shut the hell up and mind their own business.
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The people get to judge the President once every four years. Congress can cut funding to the Department of Justice if they're unhappy with its current leadership, and impeach the Attorney General or President if it thinks he has committed a crime. At the impeachment trial that follows, we can see if the impeached executive wishes to deliver the information the Congress wants, in his defense.
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The courts, however, have absolutely no jurisdiction of any kind over the Executive Branch, so cannot take sides in a power struggle between Congress and the Presidency. Bush, and every President, has an absolute obligation to defend the Presidency against partisan attempts to weaken it. And Democrats who aspire to recapture the Presidency should certainly not want that institution weakened by Congressional assaults, because a Democratic President can easily find himself (yes, HIMself) facing off against a Republican Congress.
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The Framers of the Constitution attempted to create three separate and co-equal branches of government, with a slite edge given to Congress, which can pass laws over the veto of the President. The President can, however, simply fail or refuse to enforce a law he disapproves of, and there is nothing Congress can do to compel enforcement except impeach.
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The Framers deliberately gave almost no power to the Supreme Court (as Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist Paper No. 78), and the extreme power grabbed by that Court has no constitutional warrant. One remedy to Judicial overreaching, however, does lie within the Constitution. Congress can pass legislation that courts may not review (Article III, Section 2). Congress has almost never done that, tho I seem to recall some recent antigay measure in which it did attach such a provision. It would be much better if we were to amend the Constitution to provide a means by which Congress and the President, acting together, or Congress alone, acting by supermajority, can overrule any Supreme Court decision, for any reason, any time. No such amendment has yet been passed, nor even introduced.
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If Congress and the Judiciary think they can order the President around and reduce the Executive Branch to a slave of the Legislative and Judicial Branches, someone should remind them of this remark.

When told the Pope [Pius XI] thought Stalin should stop repressing Catholics under his yoke, Stalin famously asked, "The Pope? How many divisions has he got?"

How many divisions has Congress or the Supreme Court got? Moral suasion and appeal to legalities are as nothing as against military force.
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A powerful and insistent President can get his way, by hook or by crook, in almost any system. In Venezuela recently, Hugo Chavez got permission from the legislature to rule by decree! In U.S. history, Andrew Jackson was unhappy with a Supreme Court ruling that barred the expulsion of the Cherokees from East of the Mississippi. He declared:

"John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it."

(Jackson gets my vote for our very worst President ever, and not just for the "Trail of Tears", for which he was responsible, even tho the forced removal of the Cherokees to Oklahoma actually took place under Van Buren. Jackson also not only allowed but actually facilitated the British invasion of the "Falkland Islands" (which we should call the "Malvinas", like "Marianas") in flagrant violation of the Monroe Doctrine, which warned European powers not to establish new colonies in the Americas. Thanks to Jackson, we made tens of millions of enemies for ourselves in Latin America almost 150 years later, when the British Empire, by then just a ragtag collection of scattered islands, committed war crimes in defense of the 'freedom' of that COLONY, and the U.S. stood idly by, effectively siding with British imperialism against a fellow American republic.)
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In any case, Jackson sidestepped the Supreme Court's ruling by simply arranging to have a tiny minority of Cherokees sign a treaty they had no authority to sign, which consented to removal to Oklahoma, and then having the Senate ratify it. There's always a way for a powerful President — or dictator — to get his way.
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President Bush is so rarely right on anything that it is a delite, if not an astonishment, that he is ever right. But he is right, here. He should go on the offensive, as with a short, concise national TV address to this effect:

Congress is provoking a Constitutional crisis that threatens to distract us from the work the Federal Government needs to do at home and abroad. Congress is not — repeat, NOT — the superior of the Executive Branch. It has no authority to run the White House, nor the Department of Justice, nor any other Executive agency. That is the President's job. Nor should Democrats want to weaken the President vis-à-vis Congress if ever they hope to control the White House themselves. Because a Democratic President could easily find himself facing an Imperial Congress controlled by militant Republicans who frustrate every Democratic initiative. Is that what we want, for the separate branches of Government to step all over each other and paralyze Government?
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If Democrats in Congress want a showdown, they can have a showdown. If Congress feels it is entitled to run the Executive Branch, maybe I should just start legislating. Would Congress like me to introduce bills in the Cabinet, and upon approval by the Cabinet, sign them into law, then enforce them? Perhaps the first bill I should introduce is a measure to arrest and imprison Members of Congress who attempt to subpena White House staff. And the second act of Presidential legislation could establish a separate court system not under the control of Congress nor subject to review by the Supreme Court. Such behavior would not be authorized by the Constitution? So what? Congress seems to think the Constitution doesn't matter, and it can assert superiority over the Executive Branch. Two can play at that game.
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We are asked today to judge who is wiser, the Framers of the Constitution, who created three separate branches of Government, or the current Democratic majority in Congress. I have no trouble deciding that case: the Framers were very wise men, the current partisan snipers in Congress are fools.
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As I hope I have just brought home, Congress has no more right to run the Executive Branch than the President has to pass laws without Congress. Indeed, if Congress asserts the right to run the Presidency, why should I not assert the right to sidestep Congress and rule by Executive Order? I don't have to pass new laws, just rule by Executive Order that makes no reference to Congress's rules or, as the Declaration of Independence put it about another overreacher, King George I, "Acts of pretended Legislation".
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I would remind Congress that the President is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States, a very large and very powerful body. The President can defend the White House from a few Federal Marshals sent by Congress, all within the ordinary construction of the Constitution. But the President is entitled, indeed obligated, to interpret the Constitution as he understands it, and enlarge the powers of the Presidency in times of crisis. Congress should not be eager to find out how far the President can enlarge the powers of the President in times of crisis.
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Throughout history, people of extreme views have forced a confrontation from which they then suffered catastrophically. Many republics have seen their institutions destroyed in power struggles. Altho we would like to think ourselves immune from such an outcome, we are not.

(2) World's Tallest Man? Media proclaimed that "the world's tallest man" got married today. Oh?
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An April 17, 2004 AP story in USA Today, and a documentary I later saw on television, state plainly that Leonid Stadnik, a man in the Ukraine, is well over 8 feet tall. Why, then, are media today claiming that a [7' 9" tall] man in China is the world's tallest? Wikipedia says of Stadnik:

Assuming Leonid stopped growing in 2006, pictures taken of him in Early 2007 standing next to Dr. Jim Sperber who is 5 ft 10 in (1.78 m), give us a good estimate of his height at 7 ft 10 in (2.4 m). This would put him above Bao, but still below other claimants not verified by Guinness, such as Sultan Kosen at 8 ft 1 in (2.46 m) of Turkey. * * *

[Guiness says] Leonid Stadnyk refuses to be measured by us. We have been told that it is because he doesn't want to court publicity — yet he continues to claim to be the tallest. Unfortunately we can only conclude due to previous experience, that he refuses to be measured officially by us because he is not the height he claims to be.

There are medical records for Mr. Stadnik, whose growth was finally stopped by treatments by an American doctor [Sperber, as above]. Don't those records state Stadnik's height unambiguously and authoritatively? In any case, it seems to me that a certain caution is warranted in reports about the world's tallest man. Tho Bao Xishun is recognized by Guinness, a brewery is not the world's repository of unassailable truth.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,611 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:08 PM

 
Odd Reasoning. My colleague in northern England asked my reaction to an odd remark in a blog that linked Britain's National Health Service with the recent attempted terrorism by doctors in its employ.

What do you think of this blog posting about the reactions of American rightwingers to the recent car bombing plots in Britain?

By the way, the British NHS is a monolithic state health service, while countries on the Continent tend to keep the actual provision of health care in private hands while having a state-run insurance provider.

Altho the portion of a New York Sun article quoted within that blog did not expressly assert that the NHS produced terrorism, this passage makes the link:

No politician dares to reform the NHS, which is still run by its white-coated medical priesthood. Even Margaret Thatcher, who was fearless with terrorists, quailed before the doctors and nurses. "The NHS is safe in our hands," she said. But the question has long been: are we safe in the NHS's hands?

Aneurin Bevan, the man who created this monster, explained how he had persuaded the senior doctors to submit to the state: "I stuffed their mouths with gold." But training our own doctors is expensive. Today, the agencies that supply the NHS with doctors recruit their staff throughout Africa and Asia. Many are Muslims and, inevitably, some of them are Islamists.

I responded:

The idea that the NHS is somehow responsible for the recent terror attempt is, as the people at the blog you referred me to, put it, "wingnuttery". I was particularly intrigued by two points made in the extended discussion: first, that homeschooling contributes to wingnuttery, which is part of why I feel that homeschooling should be forbidden, as being antisocial and subjecting children to brainwashing; and second, that a society with universal healthcare frees some people to follow their hearts as to career for not having to worry about healthcare for themselves or their children. It is practically a truism that people do best what they like best. And so society has much to gain by empowering people to work at what they like, as can be seen in the brilliant results, in written materials and murals, of the WPA during the Great Depression. One of Newark's high schools has WPA murals in its lobby, and I think the Airport also has some WPA murals.
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As for a British- or French-style universal healthcare system, I suspect that what we will ultimately get — hopefully sooner rather than later — is a mix of the two, in that, as I have often observed, the United States is a both-and kind of society, not either-or. So we will have BOTH public hospitals and clinics AND private practitioners paid from a single-payer fund.
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There was a minor overstatement in that blog's extended discussion, about Medicare, which suggested that wealthier Americans need to hide assets in order to qualify for Medicare. In actuality, this year, and for the first time ever, they will pay slitely more than poorer Americans, with the richest paying only 1.4 times as much as the poorest. Why the poor should have to pay anything is beyond me, and we may fix this when we institute universal coverage, hopefully very soon. It is worth noting, however, that we have HAD universal healthcare under a single-payer system for the ELDERLY for many years, and the Nation didn't collapse. The idea that rich elderly people were drawing on Government 'welfare' -- and thus driving up taxes for the poor and middle class, is shocking, because they are so keen on complaining about such things being Government welfare for the poor.

There is one further point to be made: American medicine is filled with doctors from the Third World, despite the absence of a universal healthcare 'scheme' here. I am hostile to that. We should not be stealing doctors from Third World countries that desperately need them. We have the resources to educate our own people to become doctors. The Third World needs all the doctors it can get. We have got to stop stealing doctors from the poor, and stop giving the best jobs in this country to foreigners.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,605 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:05 AM

 
Sicko. I saw Michael Moore's latest documentary/advocacy film, Sicko, with two friends on July 4th. All three of us are all in favor of universal healthcare for the United States, and were indignant at the problems it showed that Americans have with healthcare, in this richest of all countries. Today, the Internet poll on iWon.com asked about reforming our healthcare system.

Survey for Fri, Jul 6, 2007
Health Care Reform

Filmmaker Michael Moore's documentary on the US health care system "Sicko" opened last weekend ....

Do you think that the US health care system needs to be reformed?

65% - Yes, absolutely
23% - Yes, somewhat
8% - No, not really
3% - I don't know

Online polls are not scientific nor random-sampled, so may vary somewhat from a more controlled poll, but in this case the results seem approximately right. Can Congress and the President long continue to refuse the will of the people to move this country to the kind of simple, single-payer, universal-healthcare system in place in Canada, Britain, and France, all of which Moore's film showed to work brilliantly?
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Are there problems in healthcare in any of the industrialized countries with single-payer plans? Sure. Sometimes people have to wait for some procedures that require the most expensive and most modern equipment, because to control costs, the number of such machines bought is lower than 'ideal'. But if a large proportion of the people in this country who could benefit from such equipment can't afford the procedure, what difference does it make that we have machines aplenty? Canada has delays; we have denials. Which would you prefer if you needed an MRI: waiting a bit to get it, or not ever getting it at all?
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Moore made the wholly appropriate comparison of governmentally funded healthcare to governmental fire departments, schools, and public libraries. (Indeed, he showed the sign outside the East Rutherford public library, not 8 miles from where we sat.)
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Moore's lite tone belies the gravity of the situation. Americans are dying and being permanently disabled only because we don't have universal healthcare. I myself am permanently crippled because I could not afford to have knee surgery right after an accident. When I finally secured medical insurance, the surgery I was then able to get could effect only an incomplete repair, because needed tissues had atrophied. This happens hundreds of thousands of times a year, and millions of Americans die or live poorer lives, and are impaired in their ability to pull their own weight and contribute to society — has anyone measured that cost? — merely because the rich don't want to pay higher taxes so that everyone has the quality care the rich themselves get. The rich of the United States would literally prefer — far prefer — that the poor and middle class die or be wretchedly crippled for life than that they have to pay higher taxes. Too many of the rich of this country are so evil that they cannot appreciate the wonderful lives they have unless other people are miserable. But how have they managed to persuade even 8% of Americans that our present nitemare of a healthcare system is perfect just as it is? Or are those 8% the rich and the rich-wannabes who aspire to look down upon the poor from heights too great to see crippling health issues?
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This is why I'd like us to erect a monumental sculpture of a guillotine, say 60 feet tall, right in the middle of the Mall in Washington, DC, as a reminder to the rich and powerful of what can happen when they trample the poor for too long, too callously.
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The name of the film should, however, not be the too-playful Sicko. It should be Shame. Because that's what it inspires. To see it on July 4th made me especially ashamed.
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I fervently hope that enuf Americans will see this film and become so ashamed that they demand the Congress and President redeem the honor of the American people by instituting universal healthcare as fast as possible. If Republicans are smart, they will get this done before the elections of 2008, because if they resist, the Democrats will be able to smash them into minor-party status under the weight of a landslide unlike anything they have ever seen.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,592 — for Israel.)


- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:17 PM

 
Destroying the Poor. I went on Social Security early retirement at the beginning of this year (I'm partially disabled, have worked over 40 years, and have many things to do at home) and was talking to friends when the issue of food stamps came up. I wondered what the eligibility income limit is, so found a website at which New Jerseyans can calculate eligibility for several different government assistance programs. People anywhere in the Nation can check food-stamp elibility at the USDA's Food & Nutrition Service website. I was dismayed by what I found.
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Even after I told the program that my mortgage payment and medical insurance premiums together, without more, exceed my monthly income (unless I work or draw against a retirement account), and I also have to pay for heating, water, electricity, and gas — and that's without even eating so much as a single meal — the calculator told me I was ineligible for food stamps or any other program except possibly LIHEAP, the Federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. To qualify for any government assistance, I guess a homeowner would have to sell his house — even if that would entail a loss — and become absolutely, desperately destitute before receiving public assistance. We like to think of ourselves as a generous Nation, but we're not. Under Republicans, we are not just miserly: we are monstrous to the poor.
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The rich think the best way to fite poverty is to kill the poor, thru poverty, thru the crime that poverty produces against the people closest at hand, and thru the ravages of disease, accidents, and violent crime that the poor cannot afford to treat.
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Social Security is not enuf to live on unless you move to a very small apartment in a low-rent state — yet the Republicans want to cut benefits! They started taxing Social Security as income years ago, thus starkly reducing the money given to people who really need it. Benefits were not bounced up to account for that taxation. They were just effectively cut by whatever amount the tax man takes. The Nation did not rise up in rage at that atrocity against the poor, so the Republicans learned that the people will consent to the gradual reduction into nothingness of the entire Social Security system, whereupon the poor will just die and the Republican rich will be rid of them for good.
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The poor and middle class pay Social Security tax (FICA) on every dollar they earn, but the rich stop paying after the first $90,000 of income. That taxation limit, and payment of benefits to the rich who don't need it, are the only reasons we can pay only miserly benefits to people who do need Social Security. All we have to do is take out FICA from every dollar the rich make, just as we do from every dollar the poor and middle class make, and end payments to the rich (via some sensible means-test, that is, no SocSec benefits if one has other income amounting to, say, $35,000 or more a year), and the Social Security system will be permanently fixed. It really is that simple.
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A $35,000 permitted income for people still to receive Social Security benefits seems too generous to me, but to prevent the rich from fiting means-testing, we can surely set a $35,000 annual income limit. Who is going to fite to the death over that? Once we tax every dollar the rich make, and knock them off the rolls of recipients, we can raise, handsomely, payments to everyone remaining on Social Security, as would allow all Americans to end our days in dignity rather than desperation.
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Co-Conspiring in Fraud. I have mentioned here that I'm very angry at the various levels of government for turning a blind eye to the myriad frauds to which we are now subjected essentially every day. So when I saw yet another "Enzyte" commercial on an over-air broadcaster (WPIX-TV, New York), I sent the following complaint to the Federal Trade Commission.

Subject: Enzyte "male enhancement" commercials broadcast over-air

Enzyte claims that its product enlarges the penis. Sensible people know it does not, but because over-air broadcasters, licensed by the FCC and presumptively governed by anti-fraud rules of the FTC, accept Enzyte's ads, consumers are led to believe that "if it's on TV, it must be true". The commercials now being broadcast claim that 12 million packets of Enzyte have been purchased, which means that the FTC has effectively, thru utter inaction, smiled upon mass theft from huge numbers of Americans, and thus co-conspired in that fraud. You have an absolute obligation to crack down on Enzyte and all other companies that claim to produce "male enhancement". The criminals responsible for this fraud should be in prison. And the license of every broadcaster that accepts such ads should be suspended at the FTC's instance before the FCC. I believe that WPIX's license was renewed just this year. It should be revoked.

When the Federal Government does not do what it is supposed to do in preventing fraud from being openly advertised, the states or localities must step in. The Attorneys General (or, more sensibly, Attorney Generals) of all the States should have a Joint Prosecution Task Force (by any name) to exterminate fraud that the Feds won't do a thing about. The States are not powerless. They need only flex their muscles and crush criminals operating right under the nose of a Federal Government that so hates the poor and middle class that it seems actually to want them to be defrauded. "Hey, if you people are so stupid and insecure that you can be taken in by commercials for penis enlargement, you deserve to be robbed!" That's the Republican Party for you. But why haven't the Democrats demanded action against maliciously false advertising?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,586 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:51 PM