15 years later.  What have we learned?

Trucking Rules Are Eased

If Charles Dickens were alive today, he would not need to dream up Ralph Nickleby’s investment in the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company with its proposed monopoly of “vast national importance,” for Dickens would already have Joseph M. Clapp and his cronies at the American Trucking Associations, who, like their brethren throughout American industry, have perfected the Bush-era technique of issuing seemingly rational justifications of their rapacious and utterly selfish practices such as, “without longer work hours, the industry would be forced to put more drivers with little experience behind the wheel.” These upstanding capitalists must have read their Dickens, who 168 years ago portrayed the justification of a royal muffin monopoly as urgently needed lest “the houses of the poor” remain “destitute of the slightest vestige of a muffin.”

Sources:
Charles Dickens (Nicholas Nickleby), original year of publication: 1838.
The New York Times, "As Trucking Rules Are Eased, a Debate on Safety Intensifies" by Stephen Labaton (Ron Nixon contributing), 12/3/06 page 1.

Huis clos

In Iraq, Bush has created a problem with no solution.

I used to think the removal of American troops would defuse terrorist motivations, but I think back to the Gulf War, when H.W. Bush made his famous quick exit. A few weeks later, he had to go back in, shamed into setting up the no-fly zones by a worldwide outcry about the massacres of Kurds and Shiites.

Then I thought that the historical lesson we should be paying attention to was the Marshall Plan: pull the troops out and step up aid several times over. But then I thought of the oil; Iraq and the US claim the country is pumping 2.8 million barrels per day (oil analysts have it at more like 2.0 million barrels, but that’s still $40-50 billion a year). This is a country that ought to be able to pay for its own Marshall Plan and have plenty left over to help where it’s truly needed, like in Sudan.

So we are left with no choice but to keep on with the status quo. Perhaps we can leverage that; announce that we are never leaving. Or announce that we’re leaving in six months / one year / you-name-it while all the while knowing that we’ll ignore those deadlines when the time arrives.

I take it back. There is a solution: using the UN. There has to be a means of preventing barbarism from prevailing, but it has to be one that does not itself constitute a provocation. Made-to-order for a UN peacekeeping force.

But what a magnitude such a peacekeeping mission would be! Even if the Security Council, in the course of time, eventually becomes disposed to mount a mission that it would never have had to, were it not for one ignorant and conceited US president, the force would have to be in the hundreds of thousands, dwarfing all previous peacekeeping efforts combined.

As Longstreet said (before releasing Pickett’s division for its doomed mission at Gettysburg), “But that’s Hancock up there, and he won’t run, so it’s mathematical after all.”

Ineffective Vote Suppression

Little Rock School Board Has First Black Majority

Skinheads

Hate Groups Are Infiltrating the Military, Group Asserts

Dear Rummie:

Morris Dees’ Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) documents skinhead recruiting is on the rise, but Rumsfeld has no comment. That's not good enough. Citizens have a right to know. What happened to Perry's zero-tolerance policy? Are you just hoping to lie your way through this one, too? Or is it a "national security breach" that SPLC spilled the beans on your new see-no-evil policy?

Some samples of what SPLC found YOUR soldiers writing:

"Light infantry is your branch of choice because the coming race war and the ethnic cleansing to follow will be very much an infantryman's war," he wrote. "It will be house-to-house, neighborhood-by-neighborhood until your town or city is cleared and the alien races are driven into the countryside where they can be hunted down and 'cleansed.' "

He concluded: "As a professional soldier, my goal is to fill the ranks of the United States Army with skinheads. As street brawlers, you will be useless in the coming race war. As trained infantrymen, you will join the ranks of the Aryan warrior brotherhood."

That’s from Steven Barry, formerly one of YOUR Special Forces officers.

"There are others among you in the forces," another participant wrote. "You are never alone."

Do red state maps prove anything?

Does the 2004 election prove that the country is primarily red? An interesting twist on the usual red-blue maps is available at Maps and Cartograms of the 2004 Presidential Election. The authors note that the followoing purely state map is misleading:





If you make a map that takes population into account, you get the following:




And if you take counties and percentages into account, and shade colors from red to blue by the percentage votes, you come up with a truly complex conclusion of where we stand on red v. blue:



What are the views of all of those purple counties?

Food for thought.

Dubai Travelogue

And now for something different: Richard's trip to the Middle East!



After a delicious salmon dinner in a Kennedy Airport restaurant with a surprisingly chic feel to it, I located the discreet entrance to the business-class lounge used by Emirates Airlines, Aer Lingus and others, where I indulged in wine-and-cheese largesse until my business associate arrived, not long before boarding the airline’s wide-body Airbus.

Once airborne, I forced down the evening light meal, secure in the knowledge that the bathroom was only a few steps away from my aisle seat. After determining that the seat-to-seat phone was out of order (my companion being seated at the far end of the cabin, beyond the bathrooms), I focused on understanding the articulating motorized chair. The personal video apparatus kept tempting my attention, but eventually I got the footrest to extend enough to straighten my legs. I said a silent thank-you and wondered what I would have done back in coach class, with my recently-arthritic left knee jammed up against the back of the seat next forward for thirteen hours (fourteen on the return). I decided I would have had to be sedated.

The most valuable of the many things I collected during the flight, besides a lot more calories from what seemed like three more meals – but the wine was flowing and I tend to lose count at three glasses (or was it four?) and so also at three meals – was the elegant white canvass toilet bag (and another one on the return). Six months later, I am still using the after-shave, cologne and several other items. (But not the razor – it had an old single-edge disposable cartridge which scraped from the first. Makes me wonder if Emirates has been slowly doling out the kits from some gargantuan purchase order of the 1960s.)

English was the primary language, though Arabic took precedence in signage (with French nowhere to be seen). The crew made its announcements, such as of meals and toilet kits, in English (recorded safety announcements began with Arabic and included several other languages after English). By their accents, the crew were not native English speakers. I wondered whether the preference for English stemmed from the period of British hegemony (before gaining independence in 1971, the Emirates’ were the Trucial States, a protectorate of the Crown) or whether it simply reflected English as the “world” language. (John McPhee would have tracked down the answer rather than make guesses.)

Our midnight arrival at Dubai International Airport saved us from immediately being subjected to the full light of the desert sun. On the gangway between the plane’s exit door and the long exit ramp, the midnight air felt warm and soft, reminding me of my two years in Liberia (or at least of my fonder memories of tropical breezes wafting through my little house by the ocean).

The surprising humidity continued inside the terminal, where we breezed through customs without purchasing visas and without inspection of our carry-on bags. Some of this should be attributed to our business-class tickets (reportedly costing four thousand dollars, though I did not pay the freight and so cannot speak with authority). Also, I am told that during daylight hours the terminal is jammed. The inspectors spoke to us in English, and seemed happy to see our US passports.

At our hotel on Sheikh Zayed Road (the main drag, only recently upgraded to multi-lane, divided-highway status), a letter from management, handed over with our card-keys, wished us “a memorable stay during the Holy Month of Ramadan” and then detailed the procedures concerning acceptable modes of dress and venues for eating, drinking and smoking (also don’t chew gum in public).

Certain areas, curtained off between sunrise and sunset, were reserved for off-limits activities (though none permitted consumption of alcohol during daylight hours) so that non-Muslims would not be forced to forego their meals until sundown for nearly thirty days running. Despite these warnings, one morning I absent mindedly donned my accustomed baseball cap prior to my workout (it clamps down my headphones and covers my balding pate) and had to be asked to remove it when I emerged from the locker room into the health club.

In the evenings, nightlife resumes; indeed, I am told and have read that during Ramadan nightlife takes on an extra savor and energy. Dubai’s great malls (new ones being built all the time) open up at sundown and stay open past midnight. The flood of shoppers is remarkably reminiscent of Herald Square in December. Not surprisingly considering that the daylight hours are supposed to be a time of fasting, the evenings also bring peak activity to the restaurant trade. Bars for the most part remain closed, which has resulted in a trend to do one’s drinking in restaurants that have liquor licenses (most of which are attached to the large hotels, which have justified the licensing on the basis of the tourist trade that is so vital to them).

In my hotel, one of the city’s larger luxury high-rise establishments, the Western-style sports bar was open, as well as the hotel’s several restaurants. I do not know how this was justified, although there is always the excuse that, like most sports bars, copious amounts of nachos and other munchies are downed every hour. What remained shuttered 24/7 throughout the Holy Month was the hotel’s piano bar. Even though Dubai has relaxed much of the restrictive character of Ramadan, the combination of alcohol with live entertainment still crosses the line of being deemed unseemly, even in a tourist establishment.

But there was another exception to the Ramadan restrictions. This was an establishment called “Cyclone, The Club,” which, judging by my cover-charge receipt (sixty dirhams, about sixteen dollars) is a part of a larger local entertainment firm called Al Nasr Leisureland. Cyclone was, needless to say, ready, willing and able to do business as a bar throughout Ramadan. On the evening of my appearance there, we had completed a lengthy post-sundown dinner with enough drinking to make us tell our host we’d like to see “something different.” When we arrived, we were told that the club had just opened for the evening, and it was implied that it would be open all night.

To get in, not only was there the cover charge but also a walk through a regular airport-style metal detector and a frisking by bouncers with what looked and felt (going up and down my legs) like nightsticks. (They also used one of the handheld metal-detector wands.) Opening the front doors of the two-storey building brought us into a long, narrow lobby with two sets of saloon doors, one on the right and one on the left.

We chose the right-hand doors and swung through in the time-honored style. Coming in behind my two hosts, I let the door swing back behind me then looked up and my jaw dropped. Slightly to my right was a long, U-shaped bar surrounded by what seemed like dozens of blondes in tube tops about whom I could hear my local host, a transplanted Brit, explaining, “Russians on the right.”

To my left, a few steps farther than the Russians but not many, was another U-shaped bar, this one surrounded by a like number of women in the requisite tube tops (the scantiest allowable mode of dress?), except that these women’s ancestry was plainly Asian. Hence, my host continued, “Asians on the left.”

While my Texas host (himself a transplanted Canadian) and I were recovering, three of the left-hand crowd took the bull by the horns (perhaps it was still early in the evening for the Russians) and stepped over close to us, smiling broadly. Squaring off, the taller one faced me and got out the words, “How are you?” in halting English.

Because of the usual bar noise, I couldn’t hear our British friend’s conversation at all and could carry on with Alan (not his real name) only when he and his partner sidled in close to me and mine (and then only by slowly piecing together the conversation for each of the girls). When Alan turned toward the bar for another round, his self-nominated escort would concentrate on me, giving me two to deal with, and in those moments I learned a bit more about her. (The beers were thirty dirhams, so we nursed them, but bouncer-like employees circulated among us, leaning over to check our bottles and offering to get us another when we were approaching halfway through.) Most of the time (we are talking about a half-hour max), I had to make conversation with my volunteer, piecing together the meanings and trying to check her for understanding.

My escort had arrived in Dubai six weeks before from Beijing and was Mongolian. (Alan’s comrade hailed from Taiwan and was a month in-country.) My partner, whose name was very clear to me for at least a week after I got back to the States but is now lost in the vagaries of memory, claimed to be a descendant of Genghis Khan. I tried to establish whether she was Mongolian by nationality as well as by descent, and I think it came out that her parents’ village was on the Chinese side of the border (Inner Mongolia). I asked about the Great Wall but am not sure she understood to what I was referring. The name of her village sounded like the old Mongol capital Karakorum, but she did not understand about that, either.

As the minutes passed, she began touching my arm and my midsection while describing herself as an expert in Mongolian massage. Feeling myself inexorably being backed into the proverbial corner, and knowing the way these things ended from encounters deep in the past with the much more aggressive women in Liberian bars, I quietly asked Alan for cab fare. He said, “Yeah, I’m not staying much longer myself,” and handed me a hundred dirhams. (Alan bankrolled me in everything I did in Dubai, it being understood the trip was on his company tab.) I slipped the bill in my pocket, feeling sure that, because of the language barrier, my attentive companion had no idea of my plans for it. Then I waited for her to smile, smiled back and said goodnight, using her name, then patting her hand and at the same time turning for the door a few steps behind me, not stopping until I was out in the night air. A taxi roared up and soon I was back in my sanctuary at the hotel.

Some of my questions to her concerned how she had come to leave her village and go to Beijing and how thence to Dubai. She seemed to be saying that something had happened to her village; her parents had had to move. (Shades of the rural land grabs that are a hot issue in China?) Of Beijing, she said there were no jobs. This may seem incredible, but I judged her age to be about twenty, and Beijing may not have been welcoming to a twenty-year-old female without much education (and possibly without much grasp of Mandarin). In fact, for her, being very pretty, and much in need of accommodation, all roads in Beijing may have seemed to lead to the brothels. In that light, Dubai, probably described in terms of all the new people arriving all the time (which is true) and all the money that’s building whole new neighborhoods (also true; they seem to build whole business districts at a time and boast that twenty percent of the world’s high-capacity construction cranes are engaged on Dubai projects), could very well have been made to seem a place of true possibility that contrasted mightily with the realities of Beijing.

The question is, and this question did not really sink home to me until afterward, what compromises did she and Alan’s girl from Taiwan and the dozens of Russians have to make in coming to Dubai? In entering through the security gate, inside the cordon of truncheons, was I in effect entering a prison? What if I had wanted to avail myself of her? Would I have taken her with me in the taxi, or, as seems likely, been escorted through a door at the back of the bar and shown to a room?

As against this, it is interesting that both girls were so recently arrived in Dubai. Could it be an indication that such arrivals are quickly paired off, departing the likes of the Cyclone for a life with a member of the Emirate’s largely immigrant work force, also newly arrived but with a reliable construction job?

The prison-like character of the nightspot would seem to argue against this, but, to push further down a speculative trail, there is some evidence, though very slight, that may indicate there’s yet something in this matching-up idea. The evidence, stamped right onto the aforementioned admission receipt (that I keep pinned to the wall next to my desk here at home), is the words, in Arabic and English, “Department of Tourism Commerce Marketing… Entertainment Control.” Could it be that Dubai imposes some kind of time limit on the proprietors of places like the Cyclone, after which each woman brought into the Emirate must be released? The time limit might be long enough for the proprietors to recover – from the women’s services – the cost of the recruiter middlemen (and their sources, going all the way back to Beijing and Taipei and dozens of other cities), plus, of course, a healthy profit.

Having tossed out all these guesses, it seems only right to add, once again, that John McPhee would have gotten answers rather than settle for guesses.

Perhaps that can be the next direction of this travelogue. I can do a little homework on the international female slavery market and try to find out if Dubai has a mercenary but still somewhat humanized way of dealing with it.

Class Rank: It hurts.

RE: Schools Avoid Class Ranking, Vexing Colleges (in The New York Times, March 5, 2006)

This article, featuring several pompous college admissions officers, was followed up by the publication of five letters to the editor -- including my own.

Do Class Rankings Help or Hurt? (5 Letters)

Two of the other letter writers, one a high-school teacher, were emphatically in agreement with my POV (NO to ranking). One, a college dean, offered an apologetic defense. And one, a certain Kevin Dayton of Roseville, California, was himself a valedictorian and has "no doubts and no regrets that the ranking helped distinguish me from 'the total child' of other applicants."

Interestingly, I believe I stood face to face with Mr. Dayton, on opposing sides at a political rally almost fifteen years ago (unbeknowst to Mr. Dayton). Here's how that works out:


First, how did I figure this out? Google, of course. Intensely curious about Mr. Dayton because of his in-your-face response on the class rank issue, I succeeded in unearthing that he is a "Fellow" of the "Pacific Research Institute" (read, the Pacific Right-Wing Propaganda Mill) of Sansome Street in San Francisco. In fact, even though his regular employment is as Vice President of Government Relations for the Golden Gate Chapter of the Associated Builders and Contractors, he is "PRI's" Senior Fellow in Labor Union Studies (!!).

Still not satisfied, I unearthed Mr. Dayton's bio on the PRI site, which pegged him as a Yale grad, placing him in Connecticut, my former home state. Then, what do I read but that, during 1992-94, he was Legislative Assistant to Republican Congressman Gary Franks of Connecticut.

What's the significance of this? In 1992, I was quite active in the campaign against Franks. So active, that one Saturday in my home town of Wilton, I showed up at a Franks rally in the local supermarket parking lot, ostensibly to campaign for an opposing candidate, but really much more intent on being a spoiler for the Franks rally (much as I used to sit on home plate in our backyard baseball games when I didn't get my way).

I had been asked by my candidate to bring my camcorder, and, having filmed our candidate's counter-rally, parading round the parking lot, I found myself finished with my task, still holding my campaign sign, and directly opposite Gary Franks, who was propounding to the locals. I still had my camcorder, and I was standing about five feet from Franks, so I turned it on him, and he stared back into the lens, not knowing what to make of it. (An early instance of a private citizen using video to document the doings of the other side?)

Anyway, Franks was standing next to an aide, and -- this is where my memory is just not going to help me, for I have no mental picture of Franks' assistant -- couldn't that just possibly have been the Connecticut-based Dayton, who went on to become Franks' legislative assistant?

Such a satisfying search result (for me, anyway): once a jerk (working for Franks), always a jerk (sticking his class rank in our faces). And doubly confirmed by his cushy jobs: getting paid both by contractors and to opine on "Labor Union Studies."

And now, just in case The Times takes away the link (above), here's the text of my letter (for the text of the article, which The Times has already archived, you're going to have try your library... or your library's database... or buy it from Times "Select"):

To the Editor:

The demand by parents and high schools to look at the "total child" seems legitimate; colleges are looking at class rank because they are relying on grade point average, which seems illegitimate.

Comparing grades across schools is too fraught with pitfalls to be rescued by the addition of class rank. College admissions personnel, extending even to the Ivy League, behave like a secret society; they might as well be interpreting animal entrails to decide who shall walk their hallowed halls.

That they behave this way is understandable; they lack the resources necessary to assess the totality of their applicants' qualifications.

But the answer is not to devote more resources to the admissions process; the answer is to open up higher education to all who truly have the ambition for it.

Stop concentrating resources in elite institutions that (with questionable accuracy) award admission to those whom they deem deserving.

Richard Wolfe
Cumberland, Me., March 5, 2006

As goes Harvard, so goes the Nation?

How the Liberal Arts Got That Way
By MATTHEW PEARL
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/opinion/26pearl.html

And, therefore, reason to hope that the present cycle of reaction will eventually come to an end?

Mr. Pearl wishes to explain the resignation of Summers by comparing it to the University’s pre-Civil War ferment. His comparison seems a bit strained, but the course of events from the 1830s to 1869 (the election of Charles William Eliot) is a fascinating story of liberalization followed by repression and culminating in the collapse of reactionary resistance.

Perhaps it is foolish to generalize from a nineteenth-century college campus to a twenty-first century megastate, but I offer the thought in hopes of injecting a note of optimism to offset my previous expressions of pessimism about the fate of our country.

Minimum wage -- scare tactics

Re: Wage talk more than minimum by Edward D. Murphy, and

Minimum wage hike wouldn't have a big impact on MaineAs such, it's probably not worth sending this anti-business message.



I don’t have time to show up and wait on you at your Editorial Board hearings, either here in Cumberland or at your Portland offices, but I do care and most strenuously OBJECT to the shallow, sloppy work that Edward Murphy and John Porter did in today’s minimum-wage coverage and associated editorial, which belies the banner across your building trumpeting your perennial status as “New England’s Newspaper of the Year.” (You look more like a small-town gossip sheet to me.)

Your reporter (Murphy), failed to conduct even a rudimentary investigation of the true nature of the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), the supposed “think tank” that testified against the wage hike. EPI is in reality the creation of a restaurant-hotel-alcohol-tobacco lobbyist. (See footnote (1), below.) I looked through the list of minimum-wage studies on the EPI site. They look like they’re coming from academicians – then I remembered David Card and Andrew Krueger, the Princeton University economists whose studies showing no job loss from a moderate increase in the minimum wage have been reviewed and accepted by hundreds of economists. Neither Card’s nor Krueger’s name appears on the EPI site. That EPI is a smokescreen is built into its very name, chosen to confuse (reporters like Murphy) by its resemblance to the Economic Policies Institute, which supports increasing the minimum wage. The EPI site also includes a great deal of character assassination of Acorn, a grass-roots organization that represents the lowest-paid workers.

Your editorial page editor (Porter) is willing to set aside justice for fear of damaging an image of our state that’s he’s bought into at the behest of vested interests. The fallacy that he offers us, equivalent to “don’t make waves,” is, for an editorial page, just plain childish. But it’s a tipoff that the people Porter listens to are the state’s movers and shakers, especially those nearby the Press-Herald’s offices in the financial district. Porter probably lunches with corporate lawyers and bankers, maybe even hobnobs with them in his home community. As a result, when it comes time to make a tough call, he parrots their line. (Or maybe he just reads Murphy’s reporting and, like Murphy, starts taking at face value what EPI and like-minded “think tanks” have provided for the consumption of expedient thinkers such as himself.)

Let’s take an example of one way in which Porter’s reasoning could be extended: billboards. When I drive across Maine, I don’t have to look at billboards, and I’m thankful. I’m thankful because I get to see all that Maine has to offer, unsullied, and also because there’s a message in the billboards’ absence. It’s a sense of what’s just and a proper sense of priorities. I’m also thankful because, when I visit Michigan or Florida or Texas, there’s a billboard in every direction. I never get to see what those states have to offer, and I get a message about where their priorities are. Porter has been listening to people whine about how our state supposedly discourages business (never mind about the businesses that have been encouraged to locate in Santa Fe, New Mexico or San Francisco, California, because both of them have higher-than-national minimum wages, and never mind, right here in Maine, that there are plenty of people who visit, buy second homes, spend money on guides/antiques/hotels/restaurants because of a sense that the state is pristine that they get when they drive across it) for so long that it wouldn’t be beyond reason to see him come out in favor of allowing free rein to billboard advertising in the name of “improving” Maine’s business image. As with billboards, so with the Governor’s Dirigo health-care effort, environmental protection, and a host of other considerations, all for fear of sending an “anti-business” message.

In conclusion, I think you would do well to get rid of both Murphy and Porter and take me in their stead. That would save you money, plus you would get the job done right.

(1) From Source Watch, a project of the Center for Media and Democracy: (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Employment_Policies_Institute)
“The Employment Policies Institute is one of several front groups created by Berman & Co., a Washington, DC public affairs firm owned by Rick Berman, who lobbies for the restaurant, hotel, alcoholic beverage and tobacco industries. EPI, registered as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization, has been widely quoted in news stories regarding minimum wage issues, and although a few of those stories have correctly described it as a "think tank financed by business," most stories fail to provide any identification that would enable readers to identify the vested interests behind its pronouncements. Instead, it is usually described exactly the way it describes itself, as a "non-profit research organization dedicated to studying public policy issues surrounding employment growth" that "focuses on issues that affect entry-level employment." In reality, EPI's mission is to keep the minimum wage low so Berman's clients can continue to pay their workers as little as possible.
EPI also owns the internet domain names to MinimumWage.com (http://www.minimumwage.com) and LivingWage.com (http://www.livingwage.com), a website that attempts to portray the idea of a living wage for workers as some kind of insidious conspiracy. "Living wage activists want nothing less than a national living wage," it warns (as though there is something wrong with paying employees enough that they can afford to eat and pay rent).”

VARSITY. The principal team representing a... school in sports competitions.

Dear Editor, Portland Press-Herald:

Isn't it time for this newspaper to rethink the kind of message it's sending in its sports section?

Despite widespread worries about student achievement and endless debates about school funding, the sports section, in columns like "Athletes of the Week" goes right on in its little world of pretend-professional sports. Couldn't you at least recast this column? Let the jock-writers go on with their business of touting teeny sports heroes/heroines, but add, right alongside, "Scholars of the Week"?????? (And I DON'T mean "scholar athletes" -- have your real writers get out there and uncover heroes in all the other walks of student life: scientific inquiry, the arts, public service…) GIVE KIDS WHO AREN'T VARSITY FIRST-STRINGERS SOMETHING TO BE PROUD OF, SOMETHING TO ASPIRE TO !!!

Richard Wolfe
Cumberland, Maine

Climate Expert Muzzled

Date:      Sun, 29 Jan 2006 11:56:41 -0800 (PST)
From:     "Richard Wolfe" <richardrwolfe@yahoo.com>
Subject:     Climate expert muzzled

In which Goddard Institute Director Dr. James Hansen finds himself dogged by people who (1) don't want to hear about global warming and (2) are careful never to put anything in writing.




To:     letters@nytimes.com


The question is, what hole did “recently appointed” public affairs officer George Deutsch crawl out of, and did someone get the axe to make way for him? This man is obviously nothing more than still another of the Administration’s enforcers, and the press ought to be investigating the circumstances of his appointment. Isn’t the real crime here the peopling of our civil service with apparatchiks devoid of any connection to the agency they serve, functioning for all practical purposes like Kremlin “political officers” under the old Soviet regime?


Richard Wolfe
Cumberland, Maine

Richard's New Republican Connection!

With the coming of another year in the annals of the Amerikan body politic, there appeared in my mailbox a missive entitled National Republican Congressional Committee Every Member Canvass. I dutifully completed the survey, and images of the filled-in document are included in this post. You may wish to amuse yourself by perusing my responses*, but for me, it is significant that I received the survey at all. Apparently, Dennis Hastert (author of the survey's lengthy -- and nasty -- cover letter) and company don't have such a sophisticated database after all (or they want us to think they don't). I'm so relieved that my numerous letters to the editor, which, as I hope everyone knows by now, are tracked to screen for people with an opposing point of view so that they can be blocked from attending the President's public appearances, haven't made it into Hastert's database.

Taking stock of the package as a whole -- attack letter plus slanted survey -- it comes off to me as amateurish cant, replete with errors of grammar and diction. (Intentional errors? To comfort The Base?). And yet, the letter contains one statistic, one unarguable fact, that chills my heart: "233". That's the number of House seats in Republican hands, 54% of the 435 total, a much firmer majority than in the 2004 Electoral College result. True, what I am saying amounts to nothing more than an unnecessary restatement of the status quo, but the House is a proportional representation legislative body and so proportionally, "they" have got hold of 54% to our 46%. And to me, that's scary.

A very charming Republican former business associate of mine, encountering me by chance recently at the gas pump, noted that he had seen my letter to the editor on the Alito nomination, and commented that, though he believed the government should not interfere in a woman's decision to end a pregnancy, "that's not where the country's at now." Now do you see why I'm afraid?







___________________________________________________________________________________
*Double-click on the image to see it at a legible size.

The Courage to Oppose... Alito

TO: Hon. Olympia Snowe, Senior Senator from Maine
Hon. Susan Collins, Junior Senator from Maine

RE: The Alito Nomination

You are presented with still another dilemma (assuming you still count yourself a moderate, and still believe in a woman's right to choose). What will you do, toe the line, or muster your courage?

In Leon Uris’ Mila 18, his novel about the Jewish inner circle in the Warsaw Ghetto, co-protagonist Paul Bronsky, after speaking out in the presence of brutal Nazi violence against a defenseless elderly colleague, finds himself paralyzed by fear. He longs for a way to preserve his erstwhile courage in a box, ready to be taken out and used, the next time the beatings begin. He ends up a collaborator.

Is that you, driven by fear into collaboration with what you oppose? If you vote for Alito, Roberts may stop him from overturning Roe v. Wade, but Roberts didn't make any promises about parental consent. You may find yourself returning home to a Maine in which teenage girls die rather than tell their parents. Is that what you want? Do you have the courage to oppose it?

Richard Wolfe
Cumberland, Maine

Spying on citizens

I cannot understand how it can be countenanced that Bush is simply going to continue listening in on whoever he wants to without a court order.



What do I mean when I say that “I cannot understand?”

I mean it makes me really, really angry. How angry? Well, here’s RudePundit’s take on last Saturday’s radio address, and it pretty much says it all as far as I’m concerned.

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2005/12/shorter-bush-saturday-address-heres.html

And what do I mean when I say that it “can be countenanced?”

I mean that if being a citizen is something that one takes seriously, then defiant lawbreaking on the part of a president cannot be allowed to pass without action, and if no action is forthcoming from our representatives, then a citizen just has to take action her/himself.

Are Japan's schools really better?

Date:      Fri, 25 Nov 2005 07:49:27 -0800 (PST)
From:     "Richard Wolfe" <richardrwolfe@yahoo.com>
Subject:     re Are Japan's Schools Really Better? (7 Letters)
To:     letters@nytimes.com

Dear Editor:
re Are Japan's Schools Really Better? (7 Letters)

Seven letters but not one that answered the question. My answer: no.

US schools are better. Why? Brent Staples’ arguments http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70F16FC345A0C728EDDA80994DD404482
are part of a decades-old, knee-jerk litany that he and every other talking head uses so much it seems like an MP-3 player on repeat. Excuse me, but I was hearing the exact same thing in 1972 when I graduated from high school. How is it that technologically and in terms of Nobel Prizes we remain at the top of the heap, still the world leader in industry after industry, still the leaders in space exploration, and the originators of the Internet to boot? C’mon! Something else is going on that makes the test-score comparison a meaningless diversion. I suspect it has to do with local autonomy as opposed to national standardization, but there may also be a sense in which our system is somewhat more open to late achievers (doesn’t make as much use of high-stakes tests that close off educational avenues). And one more thing: stop bashing our teachers. During the 1990s, Japan’s Education Ministry began to encourage emulation of US teachers’ more experiential approach: could they have concluded that their students’ high test scores weren’t doing the country any good? Instead of bashing our teachers for their methods or the state of their content-area mastery, how about doubling their numbers? Then that hard-to-manage 26-student class would be 13 students, a size that’s quite amenable to the new, individualized approach known as differentiated instruction.

Richard Wolfe
43 Blanchard Road
Cumberland, Maine 04021

Senators vote to deny civil rights

Date:     Sat, 12 Nov 2005 12:40:05 -0800 (PST)
From:     "Richard Wolfe" <richardrwolfe@yahoo.com>
Subject:     Senators vote to deny civil rights
To:     letterstotheeditor@pressherald.com

Dear Editor:

This past Thursday, both of our Senators voted in favor of denying “enemy combatants” access to federal courts.

The prisoners at Guantanamo Bay will have no recourse other than a challenge on the narrow question of whether the government followed procedures established by the defense secretary at the time the military determined their status as enemy combatants, which is subject to an annual review.

There was no coverage of the vote in this newspaper, but I think that Mainers would want to know of this action by their senators. The citizens of this state have a strong and abiding respect for their own rights and liberties, and they are proud of their country’s historic leadership among democratic nations. They would not want to see it compromised and sullied in this way.

And they have a choice. They can choose to vote for new senators. Perhaps they will, if they realize what company their representatives in Washington are getting them into in voting to abridge civil rights. It is not the company of our fellow democratic nations, but rather more in keeping with less-than-democratic regimes around the world and throughout history.

Speaking of electoral maps ...

Check out this one:

http://necliberia.org/results/

Looks like a Harvard grad is going to the Executive Mansion (multi-story pile on the beach in Monrovia, now full of bullet holes but looks like a resort hotel).

Isn’t it a trip to see an election in tropical Africa happening on line? Of course, they still don’t have electricity except here and there (not to mention running water, hospitals, schools...) so they can’t see it.

Also: check out the news “source” (below). Another mind-bender.

IRON LADY AHEAD BUT FOOTBALL STAR CRIES FOUL
IN LIBERIAN PRESIDENTIAL RUNOFF
DATE: 9 November 2005
SOURCE: Xinhua News Agency (c) Copyright 2005

Harvard-trained Iron Lady Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf took the lead
in Liberia's presidential runoff with more than 59 percent of
the polling stations counted on Wednesday but her rival,
football great George Weah claimed fraud immediately.

Johnson-Sirleaf has 293,363 votes at 56.4 percent while Weah
has 227,244 votes at 43.6 percent with votes from 1,813 of the
3,070 polling places counted, Frances Johnson-Morris,
chairwoman of the National Elections Commission, told a news
conference.

But it has to be quick to point out that the results are "still
partial" and can not determine who will win eventually. Final
official results will be announced by November 23. If Johnson-
Sirleaf wins, she will be the first female head of the state in
Africa.

Thirty-nine-year-old Weah early in the day alleged that more
than 35 pre-marked ballot papers were intercepted, intended to
be stuffed in ballot boxes in favor of his challenger Johnson-
Sirleaf.

The former FIFA player of the year, who rose from the slums by
dropping out of high school to take up a football career and
became a millionaire, urged the United Nations, the African
Union and the international community to look at his fraud
allegations.

The electoral commission chief said the evaluation of the
runoff should be left to observers but not Weah.

Paul Risley, spokesman for the United Nations Mission in
Liberia, told Xinhua the mission has not received complaint
from Weah or the CDC.

However, "the UN mission is awaiting report by international
and domestic observers who are deployed throughout the country
monitoring the election," Risley said.

"We are not aware of incident or violation of the kind Weah is
said to be alleging," he said.

On Tuesday, UN special envoy Alan Doss described the election,
the first since the end of 14-year civil war in the west
African country in 2003, as "peaceful and transparent" and
urged the two presidential aspirants to "accept the results
peacefully."

Meanwhile, he assured that the 15,000-strong UN peacekeepers
will "remain on full alert throughout the country to ensure a
secured environment."

International observers such as the National Democratic
Institute and the Carter Center are expected to hold press
conferences on Thursday to release their delegation's
preliminary statement on the runoff.

During the past several days, Weah repeatedly claimed he had
earned 800,000 votes, or 62 percent in the October 11 first
round instead of the 28.3 percent certified by the commission,
which was described by Johnson-Morris as "reckless and
irresponsible."

"We can revoke the CDC (Weah's party) registration
certification for seeking to undermine the security of the
Liberian state. His remark is totally foolish ... He is trying
to hijack the electoral process," she said in the morning of
the runoff day.

N.B. – Mrs. Johnson-Morris’s picture is on the home page of the elections site (link, above).

Here’s a page with Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s picture:

http://people.africadatabase.org/en/person/2655.html

And George Weah:

http://www.unicef.org/people/people_george_weah.html

Terminate this, Arnold!

State Ballot Measures
100.0% ( 17726 of 17726 ) precincts reporting as of Nov 9, 2005 at 7:27 am

Statewide Returns	County Returns | County Status

Propositions Yes Votes Pct. No Votes Pct.

73 N Minor's Pregnancy 3,130,062 47.4 3,465,629 52.6 Map

74 N Teacher Tenure 2,987,010 44.9 3,662,932 55.1 Map

75 N Public Union Dues 3,092,495 46.5 3,551,011 53.5 Map

76 N Spending/Funding 2,522,327 37.9 4,115,388 62.1 Map

77 N Redistricting 2,673,530 40.5 3,920,487 59.5 Map

78 N Rx Drug Discounts 2,719,999 41.5 3,821,957 58.5 Map

79 N Rx Drug Rebates 2,523,803 38.9 3,950,763 61.1 Map

80 N Electric Regulation 2,189,126 34.3 4,182,374 65.7 Map

Y - Proposition is passing N - Proposition is not passing

Antiwar Sermon Brings IRS Warning

As you know I’m a very religious guy.

You didn’t know that?

But haven’t I tried to sell you on UUism, the faith without a creed, the people who, if crossed with Jehovah’s Witnesses, would knock on your door without quite knowing why?

Ah, good then. Now you remember. (In the confession booth: I haven’t been to church more than once or twice a year since Robert became too big to intimidate into coming with me.)

That off my chest, let’s get down to business: the title of my post is from this link:

Anti-War Sermon Brings IRS Warning

I actually forwarded this to my minister, saying that I was doing so in my capacity as “Former Finance Chair” (of the congregation).



I used that (admittedly small) leverage to make the point that taking away tax-exempt status is a non-event for the typical American congregation. I.e., there simply isn’t any net income to be taxed.

I thought this piercing insight might be valuable to my minister because, although of course all ministers are wo/men of principle, it’s nice to know that, even if that nasty revenue agent does take away your tax-exempt status, it’s not going to cost you anything.

I further thought my advice timely because today is Election Day.

In Maine, as in Collie-fahnya (sorry, but our state’s name is easier to pronounce – maybe Arnie should’ve lived in Maine – nah, it’s boring, tiny, parochial), there are seven ballot initiatives. No. 1 in Maine is: "Do you want to reject the new law that would protect people from discrimination in employment, housing, education, public accommodations and credit based on their sexual orientation?"

This question came before voters twice in the 1990s (three times if you count the first one, which was City of Portland only – the right got clobbered in that one, but the pinch-faced people prevailed in the statewide elections … polls say otherwise this time), and our church played a role in each of the statewide referendums (the city referendum having taken place while I still lived in Connecticut – which passed a Lesbian/gay rights law in the 1980s – and in any case I live in Cumberland, not Portland).

In the first statewide election, our minister (not the present one) offered – and obtained a face-to-face meeting (in a local watering hole) with the instigator of an initiative to amend the state constitution to override the Portland Lesbian/gay rights law. That initiative failed (55% to 45%).

The second time around, the Legislature passed and the Governor (not our present Governor) signed a Lesbian/gay rights bill, and the right petitioned it onto the ballot and won 54% to 46%. (How do you read the two elections???)
Anyway, that time, our minister (still another one) sermonized from the pulpit while the TV cameras rolled, cutting back and forth between our pulpit and that of the right-wing pastor who had spearheaded the repeal initiative (who appears to do nothing but campaign against gay people but apparently without attracting the notice of the IRS).

Anyway, ………it seems to me that if the Pasadena congregation stepped over the line, then we did too, and in spades.

So the IRS should lean us, too. It should try to get us to admit fault, just as it did with All Saints Episcopal in Pasadena.

Last month, the Maine Department of Human Services announced

http://morningsentinel.mainetoday.com/news/local/1978526.shtml

that it was turning down US government funding for sex education because of the Bush Administration’s abstinence-only restriction (a gag rule).

That took courage. Only two other states have done it. It costs real money to do that.

It doesn’t cost any money for the typical congregation, even the typical mega-church, (and with 3,500 members, All Saints is a megachurch of the left) to do the same: i.e., to tell the IRS to go to hell (and still comply with the tax law).

I long for my church, and my minister (who is gay, and married to his life partner, under Canadian law), to play a more prominent role in terms of political advocacy (never mind what a prominent profile the church already has). I conceive of that in terms of issues; I want my church to come right out and take a position on Lesbian/gay rights (it already does), health care (it doesn’t), war (it doesn’t), political prisoners (it does), the minimum wage (it doesn’t), and so on.

And so it would be a big laugh – on me – if the “play it safe” people in the congregation – practically a dominant force, now – since most of us are AARP members – were to impose some sort of guidelines that were intended to make sure we never run afoul of the IRS thought police.