STILL DON'T BELIEVE IN GLOBAL WARMING?
Heat Wave Kills Up to 3,000 in France

From the AP via the Orlando Sentinel:

France's worst heat wave on record has killed as many as 3,000 people across the nation, the Health Ministry said Thursday, as the government faced accusations that it failed to respond to a major health crisis.

Deaths accelerated in the past week, with up to 180 people dying in one day in Paris due to the abnormally high temperatures that have smothered France and other parts of Europe, the ministry said. The August heat also has devastated livestock and fanned wildfires that have blackened tens of thousands of acres of territory.

It was the government's first official death toll estimate. After days of complaints about the slow government response, the government on Wednesday launched crisis management measures usually reserved for epidemics, terror attacks and catastrophes.

Another good reason to join the Green Party. Click here for the whole story.

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BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU AT SCHOOL
School district installs Web cams in hallways, classrooms

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Biloxi started installing the cameras two years ago, and now that the project is complete, there are more than 500 cameras in district schools, said Deputy Superintendent Robert Voles.

The cameras, which don't record sound, are contained in circular domes on the ceiling, giving a sweeping view of the classroom. Administrators can view the images on the Internet by entering a password.

Voles said the camera installation is a precaution, and that students and teachers have said they feel safer. The cameras were paid for with casino revenue received by the district, which has 6,500 students.

"They've been well received in the community," he said. "We have not had any problems or complaints whatsoever."

Click here.

I don't really know how this is going to make things more secure than simply having, say, a telephone in the classroom. Columbine type incidents of violence are still extremely rare, but the public schools' obsession with security continues unabated. Trust me, as a teacher, I believe in sensible safety measures, but this web cam thing is pretty extreme. These cameras aren't even being monitored in real time. How the hell are they going to prevent violence? Deterrence? It strikes me that such an intrusion can only add to the boiler room environment in schools that causes disaffected kids to freak out in the first place.

What these cameras amount to is yet another step in the direction of what schools are really about: authority and obedience.

If we truly want a safer school environment, what we need to do is actually address the problems that face America's children, rather than subjecting them to enforced conformity within an extremely confrontational climate. Of course, given the hidden agenda of schooling, such a suggestion is ludicrous. Schools exist to breed anger and fear, rather than hope and love.

It's all a pathetic racket.

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FOX GOES MAD, SUES AL FRANKEN
Is it fair? You decide...

From the Nation:

Lawyers for Fox argue that the network has trademarked "Fair and Balanced" to describe its news coverage and that Franken's use of that phrase in the title of his forthcoming book ("Lies and Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced look at the Right," due in stores next month--and now, thanks to Fox, certain to be a bestseller) would "blur and tarnish" those words.

Oh, for crying out loud. Click here.

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AT THE FUNDAMENTALIST YOUTH RALLY

From a New York Press essay via Eschaton:

Christians sure know who they’re going to vote for. What people on the so-called left have never figured out is that the strength of the Christian movement is that its people have had enough sense to openly reject the popular culture.

They’re just too stupid to do it effectively. They drop out, but they drop out into shopping malls and, in the case of Darien Lake, amusement park concert venues run by Clear Channel. Then they let a bunch of shysters preach self-annihilation and obedience to them before they are let loose with their debit cards into the Six Flags gift shops. What a joke: You see these people walking around with $17 glitter wigs, stuffing their faces with Coke and Tostitos, and they actually think their G.A.P. shirts (God Answers Prayers) identify them, not as suckers, but as cultural rebels.

For more, click here.

From Monty Python's Life of Brian:

Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't need to follow me! You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals!

Crowd: Yes, we're all individuals!

Brian: You're all different!

Crowd: Yes, we are all different!

Homogenous Man: I'm not.

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BUSH: Neither a Christian nor a Republican?

From ZNet:

First and above all, George Bush II is not a Christian, born-again or otherwise. I was born a Roman Catholic. Today, I am a visceral agnostic and perhaps a Buddhist. I know for empirical fact there is a spiritual (not necessarily higher) reality: How else, to name a trite example, to explain love and empathy? Not to mention mysticism at the core of all religion. I am convinced, however, that monotheism is a sickness of mind homo homo sapiens will outgrow if - if! -- it survives as a species. Yet I appreciate and love true Christians - Mother Theresa is a personal hero -, true Muslims, true Hindus and so on. And the truly true Christians I know are doing humanitarian development work in Africa, Latin America, Asia and the United States. I met a number of them when I traveled in Africa, first as a tourist in 1993, then as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ghana over 27 months, 1995-1997. Compassion, charity, Christian love, agape - call it what you will, it involves an active engagement with those most in need. Nor do they wage war. Never in his life has George Bush II indicated interest for the neediest of the needy, the downtrodden. (His trip to Africa was a PR op in a neutral area of non-strategic importance to the current regime. It pandered to the African-American vote and to Europe; his handlers also very clearly wished to show the diplomat reaching out to other nations in fine words. Yet when it came to the tipping point in Liberia, when more than fine words were required, he failed to deliver.) He is also guilty of waging pre-emptive war - an act entirely incommensurate with the teachings of Christ. I Corinthians 13, you Bible-thumpers.

For more on Bush's bogus conservative credentials, click here.

As I've said before, Jesus was more like a leftist progressive.

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OH MY GOD
GOP votes to fine absent Democrats

From today's Houston Chronicle:

AUSTIN -- Republican senators remaining in Texas voted today to fine the 11 self-exiled Democrats who are holed up in a New Mexico hotel for each day they are absent from a second special session on redistricting.

Without objection, the Republicans and one Democratic senator approved a resolution to fine the lawmakers starting at $1,000 a day, and the fine would double for each day they miss the session. The fine is not to exceed $5,000 a day.

Senators took the vote as the Democrats mark their 16th day in Albuquerque in protest over congressional redistricting.

And

Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, called the proposed fine a poll tax.

"I won't pay it," he said.

So the Republicans failed to get the Texas Supreme Court to force the Democrats to come back to Austin, so they're... fining them?!?!? Man, oh, man, what an enormous sense of entitlement the GOP has.

click here, for more.

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SURVIVING THE RE-EDUCATION CAMPS

I've gotta hand it to my school district: for the first time in five years, we did not open the semi-annual district wide faculty meeting with a Christian prayer. Instead, we had a "moment of silence," with which I can deal, I guess. Everything else today went just about as I predicted minus the "accountablility" statistics--I guess I should count myself lucky on that score. I did get the usual verification of what public schools are actually about: there were many stern advisements about obeying the bureaucratic routine and enforcing strong discipline on students--as always, school is about authority and obedience.

One thing did unnerve me: there was discussion of how to implement the new Texas pledge law. Come to find out, in addition to having to compel students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and have a (Christian inspired) "moment of silence" on a daily basis, we must also compel students to recite a pledge to the Texas flag. My job becomes ever more creepy. I didn't even know there was a pledge to the Texas flag. It's not that I have a huge problem with saying the pledge, myself, it's just that it's pretty hardcore to insist that all students must say it; it strikes me as anti-freedom and hypocritical. After all, the state law was adopted amid all the pro-war hysteria back in April and it reeks of McCarthyism. It's more like pledging "allegiance to the war" as Jello Biafra has observed.

I just keep saying to myself, "this is my last year; this is my last year."

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BACK TO SCHOOL
Back to Hell

I start four days of mind-numbing in-service work tomorrow at the high school where I teach. First, there will be what amounts to a district wide three hour pep rally for our decidedly authoritarian brand of "education," complete with cheering and clapping, cheap business seminar styled videos scored with crappy inspirational pop music of teachers in the act of indoctrinating children, displays of numbers and statistics that show us how "accountable" we have been, and lots of other crap, including a Christian prayer that always makes me nervous and uncomfortable.

Hooray.

Later, I will try to stay awake during meetings, meetings, meetings--I will probably be the only one who realizes how futile it all is. Thank god, this is my last year. The mayhem of students next week will be a relief compared to the "professional" side of the business of "education."

I'm so sick of this silly dance. I'm soooooooo burned out...

Anyway, expect my furious pace of summer blogging to slow down somewhat for a while. I'm going to try to post everyday, but my commentary may not be as insightful or lengthy as it has been for the last couple of months. Or maybe it will. I guess I'm just saying that I'm going to be more busy than I have been, so here's a disclaimer.

Maybe I'll try to write more tales from the trenches of the indoctrinational system that we call "school:" something like "A LEFTIST SUBVERSIVELY SURVIVES CONTEMPORARY CONCENTRATION CAMPS" or some such....

Sigh...

Time for bed. It's a school night.

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NOAM CHOMSKY PUTS IT TOGETHER

In a new essay, Chomsky does a fantastic job of cracking the puzzle of how US foreign and domestic policy under Bush interact:

For the political leadership, mostly recycled from the more reactionary sectors of the Reagan-Bush Senior administrations, the global wave of hatred is not a particular problem. They want to be feared, not loved. It is natural for the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, to quote the words of Chicago gangster Al Capone: "You will get more with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone." They understand just as well as their establishment critics that their actions increase the risk of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and terror. But that too is not a major problem. Far higher in the scale of their priorities are the goals of establishing global hegemony and implementing their domestic agenda, which is to dismantle the progressive achievements that have been won by popular struggle over the past century, and to institutionalise their radical changes so that recovering the achievements will be no easy task.

And

The Wall Street Journal recognised that Bush's carefully staged aircraft carrier extravaganza "marks the beginning of his 2004 re-election campaign" which the White House hopes "will be built as much as possible around national-security themes". The electoral campaign will focus on "the battle of Iraq, not the war", chief Republican political strategist Karl Rove explained : the war must continue, if only to control the population at home.

Before the 2002 elections Rove had instructed party activists to stress security issues, diverting attention from unpopular Republican domestic policies. All of this is second-nature to the recycled Reaganites now in office. That is how they held on to political power during their first tenure in office. They regularly pushed the panic button to avoid public opposition to the policies that had left Reagan as the most disliked living president by 1992, by which time he may have ranked even lower than Richard Nixon.

(Emphasis added by me.)

For more, click here.

It's all like a bad dream, a nightmare from which there is no waking. They knowingly stole the White House. They may very well have allowed 9/11 to happen in order to create a pretext for their insane agenda. They lied repeatedly to the nation in order to justify their criminal invasion of a relatively defenseless country: now, our soldiers are dying, day by day; now, the risk of radical Islamic terrorism is much greater than it was before; now, our diplomatic relations with the world are at their lowest point in history. Meanwhile, their absurd and evil neo-liberal economic philosophy is slowly turning the US into a third world country. Somehow, they still have a great deal of popular support.

We're in big, big, big trouble. At what point do we pronounce the United States of America dead?

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THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED BY NEO-LIBERALS
Transgenerational Financial Terrorism

Still don't believe me when I say that insane neo-liberal economic policies are literally destroying our nation? Read this segment of an essay posted on AlterNet:

Media consolidation helps obscure the gross mismanagement of the nation's financial affairs as both parties embraced the University of Chicago's "neoliberal" economic model. As the 1980s began, the national debt was already a hefty $909 billion. After 20 years of leadership by two like-minded, neoliberal-inclined parties, that debt – our debt – is on track to reach $7384 by September 2004. In a 2003 survey on transgenerational accounting, economists working for the U.S. Treasury identify $43 trillion in unfunded government liabilities.

At every turn, this expanding liability – our liability – was used to expand the wealth of the already-wealthy. In 1981, while I served as counsel to the Senate Finance Committee, Republicans Reagan and Bush proposed supply-side investment subsidies enacted at a fiscal cost of $872 billion, every cent deficit-financed. In the mid-90s, Democrats Clinton and Gore enacted a similar investment subsidy at a fiscal cost of $268 billion, also totally deficit-financed.

Both the debt and the interest owed on that debt are backed by our full faith and credit. Interest payments – received by just four percent of U.S. taxpayers – grew from $58.5 billion in 1980 to $247.5 billion by 2000. Combine our interest payments with investment subsidies paid for with our debt and what's the result? In 1982, when the supply-side subsidies first became law, Forbes required $91 million for inclusion on its list of the nation's 400 richest. The average wealth of those listed was then $200 million. By 1986, average wealth topped $500 million.

By the close of the Clinton era, $725 million was required just to make the list (versus an inflation-adjusted $161 million). Average wealth by 2000 topped $1.4 billion as, from 1998 to 2000, the wealth of this politically favored few grew an average $1.9 million per day.

And

What does this mean? Even as both parties trumpeted "our" economic boom, most Americans had roughly the same or even less. Meanwhile, neoliberal lawmakers leveraged up the national balance sheet with massive debt while holding us personally liable. Don't pay your taxes to repay "our" debt and off to jail you go.

To keep up, households leveraged up their personal balance sheets, helping fund a Wall Street-boosting illusion of shared prosperity as purchasing power was sustained with home equity loans and massive credit card debt.

At one end of the "Chicago" food chain, the pace of personal bankruptcies held steady at 1.4 million for each of the past five years, an average 7,000 per hour, as household debt topped $7.6 trillion in 2001, a record-breaking 73% of GDP, while home mortgage foreclosures reached a 30-year high. Meanwhile Daimler-Chrysler launched its $300,000 Maybach luxury sedan and high-end boatyards report continuing strong demand for super-luxury yachts, 150 feet or longer.

For the very disturbing big picture of long term neo-liberal economic devastation, click here.

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WHAT THE HELL IS A NEO-CONSERVATIVE, ANYWAY?

After my post, "NEO-CONSERVATIVE SPAWNING POOL," a few days ago, it occurred to me that many of Real Art's loyal readers might not know much about the neo-cons--after all, I don't really know that much about them, myself, and, compounding confusion, I have thrown around a similar term, "neo-liberal," quite a bit, as well. Sometimes I wonder if these weird labels are confusing by devious design. However, it really is important to know what these guys are all about. They're running the country now...into the ground.

For starters, "neo-liberal" is a term that refers to an economic point of view. This view is strongly committed to the concept of laissez-faire, or "a doctrine opposing governmental interference in economic affairs beyond the minimum necessary for the maintenance of peace and property rights" as defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Neo-liberalism, as a modern philosophy, was, by and large, first articulated by economist Milton Friedman during the early 1970s. Even though this is a very conservative point of view, in many ways dating back to Adam Smith's treatise The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, adherents to this philosophy call themselves "neo," meaning "new," and "liberal," meaning "open-minded, desiring change." Why? The strange explanation I was given years ago by my neo-lib economics professor in college is something to the effect that because governmental economic interference is, in reality, a conservative philosophy (the monarchs and nobility of old often interfered with business and trade), keeping government out of the economy has always been the true liberal philosophy.

Whatever. Crap, by any other name, still smells as bad. The neo-liberals are just plain conservatives with a fancy name.

"Neo-conservatives," on the other hand, are somewhat related to neo-liberals, but not quite the same thing. Both points of view seem to be associated with the University of Chicago, as my above mentioned post notes. However, the neo-cons have some very different emphases in their philosophy. From an essay in the Straits Times:

The first neo-cons were intellectuals, mostly Jewish, who began as leftists but migrated rightwards in the 1950s and 1960s, in disgust over the Soviet Union's suppression of Eastern Europe and what they took to be the weakness of the West's response. As Irving Kristol, a founder of the movement, put it once, a neo-conservative is a 'liberal who has been mugged by reality'.

They didn't give up their liberalism in the process, though. If anything, neo-cons might be called muscular neo-liberals, or liberals with boots.

They believe fervently in the supremacy of Western civilisation - in particular its American variation, liberal capitalism plus Jeffersonian democracy - and are possessed by a messianic zeal to spread its virtues throughout the world.

This idealistic strain is most evident in the next generation of neo-cons - the Wolfowitzs, Perles and Kagans. They all cut their teeth fighting a supreme realist, Dr Kissinger, opposing what they believed was his amoral 'balance of power' conception of foreign policy.

Detente was for them appeasement, containment of the Soviet Union a form of defeatism, nuclear arms control the legitimation of an unacceptable status quo, and rapprochement with China a cynical betrayal of Taiwan.

For more of this essay, click here.

Because they used to be liberals, but changed into conservatives, they are “new” or “neo” conservatives now.

Cute, huh? Crap, by any other name…

Given the neo-cons’ blatant use of Machiavellian tactics to gain power, I would assert that they don't really love democracy; they simply say that they do. To me, it sounds like these guys are simply imperialists in the old British sense: they want to spread their view of Americanism (whatever that is) to the rest of the world by force. In short, they're bloodthirsty hawks draped in the stars and stripes--unfortunately, they now seem to have free run of the White House; they are the face of America abroad. Also, as far as I can tell, they support neo-liberal economics, for the most part.

Have I confused you even more?

The point is that they're all conservatives, neo-lib and neo-con alike. They simply have different priorities. Both groups are dangerous to our nation and the world. Both groups now have a great deal of power.

God, I'm creeping myself out, here.

For even more on the twisted history of neo-cons, click here.

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"WELCOME TO DICK CHENEY'S AMERICA"

Graduates settling for less as their degrees gather dust,
Underemployed face harshest job market in a decade

From the Houston Chronicle:

The underemployed -- those out of work and discouraged workers who have accepted jobs below their expectations -- reached 10.3 percent of the nation's work force in June, the highest level in almost a decade, according to the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. Underemployment is a problem in any economic slump, but it tends to fall more harshly on students coming out of college, who often cannot compete with more experienced candidates in a tight job market.

And

For some graduates, getting a job at all can be a challenge. Employers with low-skill jobs often are reluctant to hire applicants with college degrees, who will leave as soon as something better comes along.

Escovar says the job market is putting her in a difficult position. For the marketing jobs she's seeking, she often has less experience and fewer degrees than her competitors. At the same time, people won't hire her for less skilled jobs because of her degree.

One restaurant turned her down for a waitressing job after she told the owner she was a Rice graduate.

Click here.

I've been in this position before. Here's some advice: lie. Believe me, employers in the low-wage service sector have no problem lying to or withholding the truth from you. Don't tell potential bosses how educated you are; odds are that the person considering you may very well feel threatened by your degree. Don't tell potential bosses that you may be moving on to something better; tell them that you're there to stay for a long while—it doesn't really matter, anyway; employee turnover in the service sector is already high, and your eventual departure won't hurt them.

When you get your crappy McJob, work hard and make your boss like you--this is your source of income now, so don't blow it with a stupid sense of elitism. Don't give up looking for better work, however, and don't get discouraged—remember, this isn't about you; it's about insane neo-liberal economics that have destroyed the US job market overall. Lots of people are hurting.
Finally, service sector work, contrary to the conventional wisdom, is honorable work. It is not below your or anybody else's station. We all must work in order to make society function. Don't despair, and take pride in what you do. The problem is not that you have to work in a lame job: the problem is our sick society that overworks and underpays most everybody.

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BUSH THE BRAT
Our President as Wonka Character Veruca Salt

Funny, funny! Click here.

Thanks to Eschaton.

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RETURN OF THE BOSS
Perot gears up

From an essay by Micah L. Sifry at Salon:

But should we really just treat Ross as a bad joke? My read of his proposal is that he is serious about addressing the country's economic problems, furious at the GOP's irresponsible tax cuts and anxious to return to the national stage, possibly with some form of grass-roots movement by his side. For anyone who remembers how little respect Perot has shown for the Bush family over the years -- not only did he break Poppy Bush's hold on the White House, in 1994 he went out of his way to publicly endorse the Democratic gubernatorial opponents of both George W. in Texas and Jeb in Florida -- there's an intriguing subtext to all this: Ross may think that by launching this new effort in time for 2004 he can crack the Republican lock on power again, to stop the party's "radical agenda" and prevent a "fiscal disaster."

Perot and Champy's take on the current scene is quite pungent: "The United States loses 100,000 jobs a month. The recession won't go away. The stock market tanks. Great companies cook their books. Airlines fail. Foreign investors pull out. Healthcare doesn't work. Social Security is a mess. The space program is grounded. Homeland security is a jumble. Congress can't agree on a budget. And just as federal tax revenues plunge, leaving states in the lurch, the United States takes on huge new military costs across the planet, swelling an already soaring federal deficit and creating the biggest national debt in world history."

They argue that the great American superpower is in danger of becoming "superpowerless" because Americans have stopped being thrifty and self-reliant and given up on insisting that government effectively manage our common safety and prosperity. It's an argument that some Republicans and political moderates, like Concord Coalition head Pete Peterson and pundit Andrew Sullivan, have been raising as well of late, and may signal the same kind of fissure in the dominant Republican coalition that helped doom the first President Bush in 1992.

For more, click here (by the way, if you didn't know already, Salon now let's you see their premium stuff for free but you've got to sit and watch an ad for a couple of moments...hassle yes, but it's worth it--viewing the ad allows you full access to the site for a day).

I’ve hated Ross Perot for many years. His educational “reforms” in Texas during the 1980s still piss me off—his work in this realm gave me my first instinctive distrust of “accountability” as a concept in public schooling. Later, his weird, down home rantings during the 1992 presidential campaign season allowed me to see him for the nut he is. By the time I learned about his crazed allegations of the Viet Cong hiring the Black Panthers to assassinate him during the 60s, I was no longer surprised: Ross Perot is a freak.

Nonetheless, Perot can be a dangerous political player when he puts his mind and money to it—somehow, the American Mussolini has been able to con millions of Americans into buying his bullshit. Forget Nader, Ross the Boss is the undisputed spoiler of this era: his hatred of George H. W. Bush gave Bill Clinton the White House. I cautiously welcome Perot’s return to the political realm.

Cautiously.

Thanks to Tom Tomorrow.

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WHY DUMPING SOCIAL SECURITY
INTO THE STOCK MARKET IS A BAD IDEA
and why 401ks are a shaft

Revealed: the great stock market swindle

From the London Guardian:

Shares rose at a real average annual rate of just 0.2 per cent during the first three-quarters of the century, even worse than the previous century's trend. During the euphoria of the 1990s, some commentators claimed that twentieth-century stock market statistics were misleading because of major drops in 1928-32 and 1972-74. According to them, one should ignore these two oddball sell-offs for a truer picture of stock market profitability.

The bear market of 2000-2003 eroded support for this theory. In fact, if you take a step back and look at the big picture, the recent downturn reminds us of the existence of a remarkably consistent long-term trend. The simple truth is that stock market prices do not rise all that much over the very long term. Periodic catastrophic declines that destroy years of accumulated profits are the norm, not the exception.

Never trust corporations, especially with your money. Click here.

Thanks to J. Orlin Grabbe.

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POCKET ARNOLD

I have kept silent about the California gubernatorial circus because, frankly, I don't have much to say about it. Gray Davis is being blamed for a lot of problems over which he had no control--the energy crisis was solved by him, rather than caused by him. However, he is the kind of pathetic, wimp, professional Democrat that I hate. It's difficult to shed any tears for his impending demise.

What else can I say? California is now a political madhouse.

So, instead of any insightful commentary, I now offer the Pocket Arnold in honor of the Terminator's entry into the fray. This bizarre virtual device comes from the same people who gave us the Pocket O'Reilly a while back, PoisonSkin.com.

Have fun with it. I sure do.

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forget Reagan
THE BEATLES BROUGHT DOWN THE USSR:
Their Gift of “Internal Freedom”

From the London Guardian:

Beatlemania washed away the foundations of Soviet society because a person brought up with the world of the Beatles, with its images and message of love and non-violence, was an individual with internal freedom. Although the Beatles barely sang about politics (our country was directly mentioned only once in their repertoire, in Back in the USSR), one could argue that the Beatles did more for the destruction of totalitarianism than the Nobel prizewinners Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov.

The Beatles slipped into every Soviet flat, on tapes, just as easily as they assumed their place on the world's stages. They did something that was not within the power of Solzhenitsyn or Sakharov: they helped a generation of free people to grow up in the Soviet Union.

For more, click here.

I think that the Beatles also did for me what they did for citizens of the former Soviet Union. That is, they endowed me with “internal freedom.”

I look back on my personal philosophy’s gradual transformation from right to left over the years and several major factors come to mind. I remember my first real intellectual doubts about conservatism occurred when I spent the summer of 1988 working at a stock brokerage firm in Houston: for the first time, I saw, up close, intense and disgusting greed; I saw love of Mammon personified—that the Iran-Contra scandal and a major market crash had happened just a year earlier only magnified my sense of needing to reevaluate my political views. My studies of theater and RTF at the University of Texas also pushed me to the left: I saw how badly the political establishment treats the arts; I saw the increasing corporate influence over popular culture; I also became friends with many students who embraced left-leaning political views.

But before all that there were the Beatles.

I was a bit of an oddball as a Beatle fan when I was a child and teenager in the late 70s and 80s. Corporate pop culture celebrates the Beatles today—they are still big moneymakers, after all, so they get a lot of hype and promotion. When I was a kid, however, there was a weird period when the Beatles were consigned to oldies stations and bargain bins. I tried telling my friends how great they were, but not many seemed to understand. My seventh grade yearbook has a message from a girl telling me to “forget that Beatles stuff, think Rush!” (Rush, I must say, is a fine arena-rock band, but they are simply out of their league when compared to the Beatles.) Perhaps the fact that almost none of my peers were into them made me love them all the more. I don’t know. But I sure did love them.

I studied them. I read as much as I could about them. I collected their albums. I hung their pictures on my bedroom walls. I learned to play guitar with a Beatles songbook. I took up songwriting in order to emulate my heroes. Through them, I learned about the 60s, about revolution and counter-culture. I learned about the very confusing Vietnam War. In sixth grade, I proclaimed myself to be a hippie in a poem I wrote, which completely perplexed my baby boomer language arts teacher.

Strangely, at the same time, while doing research for the debate tournaments in which I competed for my suburban school, I was learning about and embracing conservative politics and economics. I was also regularly attending Southern Baptist church training classes and Sunday school—I became “born again.” I embraced fundamentalist Christianity and became a youth group leader. The Texas indoctrination machine had done its work: I graduated from high school as a conservative Republican.

But the Beatles were still entrenched deeply within my identity, within my soul, biting away at my harsh, stern conservative views. Something had to give, and, ultimately, it did. I’ve embraced my inner mop-top. Their messages of peace, love, and freedom (not to be confused with the conservatives’ bogus usage of these words) and the fact that they expressed these messages through art set the template for what now gives my life meaning and purpose: without the Beatles’ gift of “internal freedom,” I might never have become a politically conscious artist.

It’s funny: in the 1960s, both Soviet conservatives and American conservatives regularly denounced the Beatles. That, in and of itself, means that John, Paul, George, and Ringo must have been doing something right.

Thanks to J. Orlin Grabbe for the link to the Beatle story.

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AL GORE HITS A HOMER

From a speech made on August 7th to members of MoveOn.org at New York University:

In any case, what we now know to have been false impressions include the following:

(1) Saddam Hussein was partly responsible for the attack against us on September 11th, 2001, so a good way to respond to that attack would be to invade his country and forcibly remove him from power.

(2) Saddam was working closely with Osama Bin Laden and was actively supporting members of the Al Qaeda terrorist group, giving them weapons and money and bases and training, so launching a war against Iraq would be a good way to stop Al Qaeda from attacking us again.

(3) Saddam was about to give the terrorists poison gas and deadly germs that he had made into weapons which they could use to kill millions of Americans. Therefore common sense alone dictated that we should send our military into Iraq in order to protect our loved ones and ourselves against a grave threat.

(4) Saddam was on the verge of building nuclear bombs and giving them to the terrorists. And since the only thing preventing Saddam from acquiring a nuclear arsenal was access to enriched uranium, once our spies found out that he had bought the enrichment technology he needed and was actively trying to buy uranium from Africa, we had very little time left. Therefore it seemed imperative during last Fall's election campaign to set aside less urgent issues like the economy and instead focus on the congressional resolution approving war against Iraq.

(5) Our GI's would be welcomed with open arms by cheering Iraqis who would help them quickly establish public safety, free markets and Representative Democracy, so there wouldn't be that much risk that US soldiers would get bogged down in a guerrilla war.

(6) Even though the rest of the world was mostly opposed to the war, they would quickly fall in line after we won and then contribute lots of money and soldiers to help out, so there wouldn't be that much risk that US taxpayers would get stuck with a huge bill.

Now, of course, everybody knows that every single one of these impressions was just dead wrong.

If only he'd had these kind of juevos during the 2000 campaign...ah, well. It's a great speech. Go read it here. You can watch it with RealPlayer, here.

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SATURDAY POLITICAL LEVITY

A really funny comedy routine about US foreign policy that invokes Abbot and Costello seems to be making the email rounds lately--my old friend, Matt, sent it to me just the other day. A bit of Googling found what appears to be the original source over at Anarchie Bunker. Here's a brief sample:

Q: Daddy, why did we have to attack Iraq?

A: Because they had weapons of mass destruction.

Q: But the inspectors didn't find any weapons of mass destruction.

A: That's because the Iraqis were hiding them.

Q: And that's why we invaded Iraq?

A: Yep. Invasions always work better than inspections.

Q: But after we invaded them, we STILL didn't find any weapons of mass destruction, did we?

A: That's because the weapons are so well hidden. Don't worry, we'll find something, probably right before the 2004 election.

Q: Why did Iraq want all those weapons of mass destruction?

A: To use them in a war, silly.

Q: I'm confused. If they had all those weapons that they planned to use in a war, then why didn't they use any of those weapons when we went to war with them?

A: Well, obviously they didn't want anyone to know they had those weapons, so they chose to die by the thousands rather than defend themselves.

And it just keeps getting better as the routine proceeds. It's pretty darned funny. Go check it out. It's well worth the time.

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WOLFOWITZ'S BIG MOUTH
Deputy Defense Secretary Admits
No Link Between Iraq, al-Qaeda

In an interview with conservative radio personality Laura Ingraham, Wolfowitz was asked when he first came to believe that Iraq was behind the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

"I'm not sure even now that I would say Iraq had something to do with it," Wolfowitz said in the interview, aired Friday.

Wolfowitz's answer confirms doubts long held by critics of the Iraq war that the Bush administration had no evidence linking Iraq to 9-11 or al-Qaeda, but simply used the horrific terrorist attacks as a reason to overthrow Saddam Hussein and his Baathist regime.

"I think what the realization to me is -- the fundamental point was that terrorism had reached the scale completely different from what we had thought of it up until then. And that it would only get worse when these people got access to weapons of mass destruction which would be only a matter of time," Wolfowitz said in the interview. "...What you really got to do is, eliminate terrorist networks and eliminate terrorism as a problem. And clearly Iraq was one of the country -- you know top of the list of countries actively using terrorism as an instrument of national policy."

Since the United States invaded Iraq 111 days ago, no chemical or biological weapons have been found in the country.

No link to bin-Laden, no WMDs...this is from one of the architects of the war, for god's sake! How much more evidence do we need?!? My god, the Niger-uranium thing is just a puff of smoke compared to the overall picture. These guys in the Bush administration really need to be hung out to dry; the way things are going, I wonder if that's ever going to happen.

For more, click here.

Thanks to J. Orlin Grabbe.

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PATRIOTIC ACTION FIGURE!
Flight Suit Bush

Get yours now.

Thanks to Tom Tomorrow.

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What administration is doing appears not to be working

From the Houston Chronicle editorial board on job loss in the Bush economy:

Since President Bush took office, according to Labor Department figures, the United States has lost 2.5 million jobs. Of those losses, 44,000 came in July, blessedly down from June's loss of 72,000. Last month the jobless rate curiously shrank from 6.4 percent to 6.2 percent, but only because nearly half a million discouraged Americans quit looking for a job. Without a paycheck, these Americans won't be doing much spending, investing or saving.

President Bush says his policy of large and repeated tax cuts targeted toward those who pay the most taxes will create jobs. So far there is little evidence his tactic is working.

Bush administration officials argue that the job losses would have been worse without the tax cuts, but it is difficult to imagine more catastrophic losses under a single president. Unless the United States adds about 4 million jobs to its economy in the next 16 months, Bush will rack up the worst employment score of any president since Herbert Hoover.

Supply side economics or "trickle down" is an abject failure. At this point it simply amounts to a vast looting of the US economy on a scale that dwarfs the war spawned looting seen in the wake of the invasion of Iraq.

Worst...President...EVER!

For more, click here.

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We already have a 'fair' GOP redistricting map

From a Houston Chronicle essay by Texas state representative Jim Dunnam:

Dewhurst has tried to explain this outrage by saying that all Republicans want is a "fair" congressional map that has "somewhere in the neighborhood of 19 or 20" Republican seats. Guess what? That's exactly what our existing map does.

According to official state statistics (viewable online at http://gis1.tlc.state.tx.us) Texas' current map has 20 districts that are more than 53 percent Republican. You heard right. In the 2002 elections, Perry, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn and Attorney General Greg Abbott each won in those 20 districts -- and President Bush carried 21 of them.

Perry's own expert witness on redistricting in the 2001 federal court case called our current map a "pro-Republican gerrymander." Perry and then-Attorney General John Cornyn did not even appeal the court ruling of the bipartisan federal court that drew the map. Why? Because they knew it favored them.

Not only is the current congressional plan so "fair" that it actually favors the Republican Party, it's also been found legal by the U.S. Supreme Court and our Republican Texas attorney general. But sometimes even the best laid gerrymanders don't go as planned. The voters had their own ideas. That's why they sent 17 Texas Democrats and 15 Texas Republicans to the U.S. House.

For the entire essay on Texas congressional redistricting, click here.

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NEO-CONSERVATIVE SPAWNING POOL

I have bashed the evil creator of neo-liberal economics, Milton Friedman, here at Real Art on more than one occasion. His work at the University of Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s started an economic movement that eventually became so influential that his crackpot ideas are now considered by most economists and politicians to be fact. He even won a Nobel Prize for his lunacy.

Friedman is not the only Dark Lord with roots at the University of Chicago. Indeed, such evil names as John Ashcroft, Robert Bork, and Paul Wolfowitz are also associated with the school. It appears that, in addition to giving an air of intellectuality to the now fashionable steal-from-the-poor-give-to-the-rich point of view, the U of Chicago is also a spawning pool for anti-democratic Machiavellianism in general.

From a Counterpunch essay by U of C alumnus Francis Boyle:

Chicago routinely trained me and numerous other students to become ruthless and unprincipled Machiavellians. That is precisely why so many neophyte Neo-con students gravitated towards the University of Chicago or towards Chicago Alumni at other universities. The University of Chicago became the "brains" behind the Bush Jr. Empire and his Ashcroft Police State. Attorney General John Ashcroft received his law degree from the University of Chicago in 1967. Many of his "lawyers" at the Department of Injustice are members of the right-wing, racist, bigoted, reactionary, and totalitarian Federalist Society (aka "Feddies"), which originated in part at the University of Chicago.

The grand mess that this country is currently enduring is no accident; our predicament is by design, and it was first planned decades ago. For the entire essay, click here.

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BOB HOPE WAS MORE SOPHISTICATED THAN I THOUGHT
Gay subversion in his humor, support for gay rights

Say whatever you want about Hope as a person, but at least have the smarts to give him credit for helping solidify a playfully queer approach to humor in the American mainstream. I know, Hollywood homoeroticism is now something of a cottage industry...but the fact that it's easy to overdo the search for queer subtexts doesn't mean those subtexts aren't widely present. Hell, in Hope's case, the queerness never flies very far under the radar, which makes it even more amazing that so many folks miss it until the obvious is pointed out to them. Mark Rappaport's documentary "Color Me Lavender" looks like a great place to start; it apparently lingers over the queer content found in all of Bob Hope's most popular films.

For more, click here.

Click here to go to a page with a video of Hope's 1988 anti-gay bashing public service ad (look to the left).

Courtesy of Eschaton and the Sideshow.

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JOSEPH LIEBERMAN:
A REAL REPUBLICAN'S DEMOCRAT

I mean this literally; he really is the Republican's favorite Democrat. If you know anything about Lieberman, there's really no explanation needed. Just go read this.

Oh, how I despise him!

Thanks to Tom Tomorrow.

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AS WITH THE PENTAGON
SO WITH THE TREASURY

Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times via Working for Change:

Traditionally the Treasury, like the C.I.A., stands somewhat above the political fray. Externally, it is supposed to provide objective data that Congress and the public can use to evaluate administration proposals. Internally, long-serving Treasury analysts traditionally ride herd on political appointees, warning them when their proposals are ill conceived or irresponsible.

But under the Bush administration the Treasury takes its marching orders from White House political operatives. As The New Republic points out, when John Snow meets with Karl Rove, the meetings take place in Mr. Rove's office.

To the general public, the most obvious consequence of this subservience has been Treasury's meek acquiescence in an economic policy that hasn't produced any jobs, but has produced a $450 billion deficit. Insiders, however, are if anything even more dismayed by the erosion of Treasury's intellectual integrity — an erosion exemplified by its denial and deception on the subject of tax cuts.

For more White House tales of Enron style behavior, click here.

In an episode of the Simpsons from a few years back, Marge tries her hand at real estate sales, but has problems succeeding in her new job due to her honesty. Her boss, sleazy lawyer Lionel Hutz, takes her aside to explain some of the realities of salesmanship:

Marge: But all I did was tell the truth!

Lionel: Of course you did. But there's...(face becomes unfriendly, voice deepens) the truth (shakes head, "no"), and (voice becomes chirpy, smiles) the truth (nods head, "yes")!

More and more, the White House is sounding like it's being run by Hutz...funny, yes...comforting, no.

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FROM THE DEATH PENALTY CAPITOL OF THE WORLD

Excerpted from a Houston Chronicle editorial on the HPD's continuing crime lab scandal:

The grand jury whose term has ended released a report Friday that was not a criminal indictment but a moral one. While the ethical charges carry no fines or prison time, they convey plenty of shame for officials still capable of harboring that emotion.

The report regretted that knowledge of problems in the crime lab and failure to correct them do not constitute criminal negligence: "Ethics and moral violations, even if they severely violate the public trust, are beyond our jurisdiction."

The grand jury's scathing report concludes that incompetence and irresponsibility are not against the law. However, deliberately presenting false testimony and misrepresenting sloppily handled and erroneously analyzed evidence in court constitutes perjury. This grand jury did not collaborate with Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal. The public would have more confidence in the grand jury's decision to return no indictment had the panel enjoyed the expertise of an impartial special prosecutor.

Click here.

Ever wonder how Houston has always managed to get so many death penalty convictions? We cheat.

Houston represents the worst of an American judicial system that is far more concerned with convictions than it is with truth and justice. This crime lab scandal, which apparently includes the city's zealous prosecutors who seemingly turned a blind eye to the faultiness of the lab's findings, is inexcusable, but not atypical. DA Rosenthal's involvement in the investigation of the scandal is a big time conflict of interest--he has a personal stake in the outcome. But I guess that's just business as usual down here in Bush country...

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"FREE TRADE"
Globalization's Lost Decade

From ZNet:

On July 8, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) released its annual Human Development Report, which revealed what the British Guardian called a "Lost Decade." During the economically prosperous 1990s, U.S. trade representatives and International Monetary Fund (IMF) economists promised that a rising tide of global corporate expansion would lift all boats. In fact, 54 countries ended the decade poorer than when they started.

In places where the majority of people live on less than a dollar per day, or where life expectancy is less than half that in the U.S., these declines have grave consequences.

People in the United States often believe that while global poverty is tragic, poor countries have only themselves to blame. Certainly, the developing world is not free from the scourges of corruption, mismanagement, and political opportunism. But documents like the UNDP report show that the development policies promoted by wealthy countries have done far more harm than good.

For more, click here.

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THE LEFT SHOULD GET LOUDER
Perception is Everything

A couple of years ago, I watched on C-Span a fascinating “debate,” ostensibly about the role of religion in public life, between Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz and right-wing talk show host, Alan Keyes. Dershowitz, a much better debater than Keyes, quickly tightened the noose: “the Bible can be used to prove almost any proposition,” and, therefore, is an unsuitable foundation on which to base policy. Indeed, the arbitrary nature of religious authority and interpretation is the major reason why our founding fathers erected what Thomas Jefferson called “a wall of separation between church and state.”

The fascinating thing about the exchange, however, was Keyes’ response, and the reaction of much of the audience, composed primarily of college students. Instead of rebutting Dershowitz’s argument head-on, Keyes passionately proclaimed his dedication to his Christian values, raising his voice, pounding the podium, invoking the fiery evangelical preachers seen on TV all hours of the day. A surprising number of audience members vocally expressed their support for Keyes’ hot-tempered rhetoric. To all appearances, Keyes had scored some debating points by simply ducking and yelling.

In short, the “debate” reinforced something I have long known. Conviction and passion are the most effective rhetorical tactics when persuading Americans—the majority of our countrymen embrace their most cherished beliefs not because of careful, rational thought and contemplation, but because of emotion and authority. The public schools prepare us to believe “experts” and leaders readily and unquestioningly; our primate-derived genetic heritage makes us susceptible to the display of extreme emotion: thinking is impeded by both societal structure and human nature.

Thinking is also tedious and not very fun. America’s mass media drenched environment offers a menu full of quick laughs and cheap thrills, but little else—even the news is now more “infotainment” than informational. Why think when TV can think for you? Why have TV think for you when you don’t have to deal with thinking at all? Don’t be so serious; you’re spoiling all my fun.

Furthermore, distrust of both intellectuals and their challenges to conventional wisdom seems to be part of America’s historic character. A nation of pioneers and frontiersmen had little need for philosophers and unmasculine Ichabod Cranes—besides, their fancy talk sounds like a bunch of hooey. Traditionally, many Americans prefer plain, simple speech and ideas.

It shouldn’t be this way, but it is.

The right wing clearly has an instinctive understanding of the demagoguery that Americans seemingly crave. The left, on the other hand, loves to talk about ideas, and tends to be boring; it also tends to engage in off-putting elitism and arrogance, an albatross around the necks of many outspoken liberals. Unless American progressives can rediscover the rousing rhetoric of William Jennings Bryan and other populists of bygone eras, unless the left can learn to do a better job of speaking to the common man, we can expect conservatives to dominate the public discourse.

Fortunately, I am now seeing signs of liberal anger and emotion, but the trickle must turn into a torrent. Liberals must become louder and simpler in their rhetoric. I know that I have addressed this subject before (most notably, when praising Michael Moore’s Oscar night speech back in March, here and here), but I feel that I need to keep pounding away at it. Being right is not the same thing as being perceived as being right: in America, perception is everything.

Don’t be nice. Don’t back down. (Don’t talk down, either.)

Get mad.

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A PENTAGON INSIDER TELLS ALL

From the Houston Chronicle editorial page:

After eight years of Bill Clinton, many military officers breathed a sigh of relief when George W. Bush was named president. I was in that plurality. At one time, I would have believed the administration's accusations of anti-Americanism against anyone who questioned the integrity and good faith of President Bush, Vice President Cheney or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

However, while working from May 2002 through February 2003 in the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Near East South Asia and Special Plans (USDP/NESA and SP) in the Pentagon, I observed the environment in which decisions about post-war Iraq were made.

Those observations changed everything.

It's as bad inside the Department of Defense as previous reports have made it sound. Click here.

Thanks to Tom Tomorrow. (Now, why didn't I notice this one? It's my own hometown paper!)

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Confessions of a Recovering Economist

From ZNet:

Economists believe the 'value' of something is its monetary price. How, then, do we understand the truly powerful passions and desires and emotions that dominate our lives? Think of how most of us felt during the SARS scare.

Ask Canadians at that point which was more important - tax cuts or public health - and the choice would have been overwhelming. Ask someone who's just lost a loved one to place a dollar value on their feelings, and you'll probably get socked in the face. For the things that really determine our ability to lead a good life - family, health, community, peace - there are no price tags. Yet the business pages and the classifieds and the Sears catalogues are full of them.

And

Mainstream economics is arrogantly ahistorical. In most cases, capitalism is presented as a natural, eternal state of human affairs. Even the term 'capitalism' is rarely used: naming the system, after all, might imply that there are others. The preferred euphemism is 'market economy,' which implies that the economy is like some big flea market where anybody can set up a card table on Saturday mornings and sell their wares. It's just coincidence that General Electric has $575 billion (U.S.) worth of capital assets sitting on its card table, while you and I have only our brains and our brawn to offer.

Modern economics was not actually invented until the early days of capitalism. So the very discipline is historically relative - not to mention the economies it purports to study. And the roots of neoclassical economics were always inherently ideological: to justify, in the guise of explaining, the perverse distribution of power and wealth that emerged under this new social order. Studying economic history, and the history of economics, is the best way to critique this knee-jerk determinism, and to place the whole profession in a healthier, more contingent context. In economics, history itself is subversive.

For more, click here.

Economics, while useful in many ways, ultimately constitutes a dangerous philosophy due to the absurd amount of reverence the pseudo-science is paid by schools, politicians, and the news media. Rife with unfounded assumptions, plagued by a herd mentality, and wildly materialistic, economics is the priest caste of America's true religion, Mammonism.

For more of my views on economics, click here.

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THE END OF FREEDOM
US anti-war activists hit by secret airport ban

From the London Independent via J. Orlin Grabbe:

After more than a year of complaints by some US anti-war activists that they were being unfairly targeted by airport security, Washington has admitted the existence of a list, possibly hundreds or even thousands of names long, of people it deems worthy of special scrutiny at airports.

The list had been kept secret until its disclosure last week by the new US agency in charge of aviation safety, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). And it is entirely separate from the relatively well-publicised "no-fly" list, which covers about 1,000 people believed to have criminal or terrorist ties that could endanger the safety of their fellow passengers.

This is sick and disturbing. Such a list is, at worst, comparable to the Nazis, and, at best, comparable to Nixon's secret "enemies list." Needless to say, this secret list strikes at the very heart of American freedom and democracy: this country's political health absolutely depends on honest, heartfelt dissent from both the left and the right. That the Bush administration is gunning for loyal Americans who are brave enough to do their patriotic duty despite strong social pressure to shut up is very, very sad.

Even worse, such news must come to us from the foreign press.

For more, click here.

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RUMSFELD IS A METROSEXUAL
OR
Why does Maureen Dowd still have a job?

From the New York Times:

On the vice president: "I'd love to see Cheney with a pierced ear and a diamond stud. Or in a body-hugging black T-shirt, just for the pure sport of it.

"He needs new eyewear. With his big face and lantern jaw, he should lose those five-pound glasses. There are some fabulous frames out there.

"About his hair, all I can offer is my sincere regrets."

On the defense secretary: "In his own sort of antediluvian way, Rummy is a metrosexual. He works. He may be a warmonger, he may be intemperate, but just about every third woman I know wants him."

As Tom Tomorrow put it in his link to the editorial, "If it's on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, chances are it's going to show up in a Maureen Dowd column." Click here for more fluff-crap that has no business being in the "newspaper of record." (If you haven't registered for the NYT online, I urge you to do so; it's free and, as far as I can tell, unobtrusive.)

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BUSH'S COURT JESTER

The Houston Chronicle reporting on Secretary of Education Rod Paige's legacy as Superintendent of the Houston Independent School District:

"As far as I'm concerned, he walks on water, snow and weak bridges," said Alma Allen, a Houston member of the State Board of Education. "For a black man to achieve what he has achieved, he has to. He politically can lay claim to all that's going on in education."

But the dropout controversy and the reappearance of the achievement gap have sparked criticism that Paige created a boiler-room, no-excuses atmosphere that effectively forced employees to massage scores and statistics.

Teachers say pressure and performance-based bonuses encouraged corner-cutting. But Paige's defenders counter that dishonest reporting by administrators at substandard schools is only an unintended consequence of otherwise successful reforms.

For more, click here.

"Otherwise successful reforms." In a pigs eye.

The public schools are a racket. Designed more for warehousing than educating, individual schools only perform well when a certain critical mass of local parents insists that both their children and teachers perform well. Without that vital component, schools simply go through the motions, sending out numerical messages of educational success for the political class to use in their endless drive to stay in office--this is not to say that schools don't perform their hidden, true function, indoctrinating children into the culture of authority and obedience; this is one area where the public schools thrive.

In other words, if a child has well educated, highly motivated parents who live in a neighborhood with like-minded individuals, that child will be educated. Otherwise, it's a crapshoot. In fact, studies have shown a high correlation between family income and SAT scores. Until this issue is addressed, the public debate about education is just a silly dance.

"No Child Left Behind" is a joke. Rod Paige is the court jester.

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The Educational System Was Designed
to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile

There are good reasons that teaching is akin to bashing one's own head into a brick wall repeatedly:

It's no secret that the US educational system doesn't do a very good job. Like clockwork, studies show that America's schoolkids lag behind their peers in pretty much every industrialized nation. We hear shocking statistics about the percentage of high-school seniors who can't find the US on an unmarked map of the world or who don't know who Abraham Lincoln was.

Fingers are pointed at various aspects of the schooling system—overcrowded classrooms, lack of funding, teachers who can't pass competency exams in their fields, etc. But these are just secondary problems. Even if they were cleared up, schools would still suck. Why? Because they were designed to.

How can I make such a bold statement? How do I know why America's public school system was designed the way it was (age-segregated, six to eight 50-minute classes in a row announced by Pavlovian bells, emphasis on rote memorization, lorded over by unquestionable authority figures, etc.)? Because the men who designed, funded, and implemented America's formal educational system in the late 1800s and early 1900s wrote about what they were doing.

For more on the hidden agenda of the public schools, click here.

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Conservatives invade the classrooms

More like conservatives have already invaded the classrooms. From an essay on one of America's major ideological battlegrounds:

For years, conservatives have spouted claims of liberal bias within academia. David Horowtiz, a conservative who founded the deceptively named Center for the Study of Popular Culture, claims, "In the nation's universities Republicans (and conservatives) have become almost as rare as unicorns. In most schools, Republicans are less well represented than Greens, Marxists and sects of the far left."

Horowitz is not alone. Many figures on the right, from Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter to the Heritage Foundation and Accuracy in Academia, are part of a large movement to shift education away from perceived liberal groups like the National Education Association. The movement is simple: pundits like Coulter and Horowitz use rhetoric to create a semblance of a problem, while interest groups like Accuracy in Academia provide slanted research to justify pundits' claims. Finally, the Christian Right provides ground troops, money and moral authority.

Conservatives have always taken aim at education, and in 1994's Republican Revolution, it seemed conservatives had their window of opportunity. Freshman lawmakers, unsuccessfully, tried to drop or significantly cut the Department of Education. The reforms failed, however, because the American public felt uncomfortable with education cuts. Republican lawmakers shifted their strategy to more overt ways of diminishing the government's role in public education: reeducation and privatization.

For more on conservative textbook "purification," evolution bashing, "abstinence based" sex ed, and vouchers-as-funding-siphons, click here.

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ART AS BASTARD STEP-CHILD
Economic woes cause controversy
behind the scenes for
Houston's Miller Theater

The Miller Theatre Advisory Board and city parks officials are battling over control of the Miller Outdoor Theatre, one of Houston's most cherished cultural venues and home to dozens of free concerts and plays every year.

The theater, donated to the people of Houston 80 years ago by local mining engineer Jesse Wright Miller, hosts thousands of people every year for free Houston Symphony concerts, Shakespeare in the Park, Independence Day celebrations, and eclectic dance and music recitals.

While most of those programs will likely remain, it's the "free" part that some fear is in danger.

Everyone, including Parks and Recreation Director Roksan Okan-Vick, says they want to keep the events free, but they differ over how.

Advisory board members believe Okan-Vick is jeopardizing the theater by cutting its budget and laying off some of its staff.

"There's an underlying feeling on the board that we are at odds with the priorities of the department," said Tim Cisneros, who chairs the board.

And the conflict has not escaped the notice of City Council.

"What you're seeing is a board frustrated with a bureaucratic parks department with misplaced priorities," said councilman and mayoral candidate Michael Berry.

For more, click here.

I fully understand the economic realities our time. States and cities are taking the brunt of the recession because the federal government is wasting our tax dollars on wars and giveaway bonanzas to the rich. It's just that stories like this one remind me that the arts are treated like total crap in this country. If it's not some controversy about the laughably paltry amount of tax money going to artists who are found to be objectionable in some way by fundamentalist zealots, then it's a simple lack of understanding that the arts are absolutely crucial to cultural self-understanding.

Art is treated as quixotic commodity, rather than the lifeblood that it is. This is our weakness; this is our shame. If art were more highly regarded and understood by our leaders, we could have a more just society--we could have a renaissance. Call me an idealist, but I believe that if the government both hyped and funded the arts on a level comparable to Europe, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in today.

Sigh.

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THE ART OF REPUBLICAN HYPOCRICY

From the Austin Chronicle:

One of the attacks on critics of the current administration is that we are so wrapped up in our hatred of Bush that we'll automatically dismiss any Republican action. Huh? This administration has led a broad-based assault on the economy, offered a stunning tax cut for the rich at the cost of social services (to be borne by future generations). They have promised that no child will be left behind while cutting education funding, demanded we support our troops while cutting funds for veterans. There's an ongoing assault on individual freedoms. We invaded Afghanistan, promising to help that country rebuild. Underfunding that pledge, we invaded Iraq for reasons that are at best controversial. It isn't George W. Bush the man we hate, but his administration's policies. Certainly, many may now hate Bush, but it's for what he's done, not who he is. The true artistic touch here, of course, is that we are supposed to forget the eight-year, blindly hateful, personal assault on President Clinton and everything about him. It is beyond hypocrisy for people to express moral outrage that supposedly personal hatred of Bush is dictating attitude when they so joyously embraced their personal antipathy to Clinton.

For more, click here.

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MORE EVIDENCE THAT BUSH
ALLOWED 9/11 TO HAPPEN

PNAC, Project for the New American Century, was organized in 1997 by Zionist neo-cons Robert Kagen and William Kristol. It is funded by three foundations closely tied to Persian Gulf oil and the weapons and defense industries.

Members of PNAC included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush and Paul Wolfowitz, a director of the organization.

All signed a statement of principles, one of which was to promote "American global leadership" with special emphasis on Arab countries. Another was to "transform" the U.S. military with huge increases in defense spending.

Here's the chilling kicker: To convince the American people to spend extra billions for defense instead of on Social Security, Medicare, etc., PNAC suggested it would take a "catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor." (PNAC's exact words.)

My incremental transformation to conspiracy-nut continues. Click here.

Thanks to J. Orlin Grabbe.

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MOTHRA IN TEXAS
Giant moths turn up in towns hit by Claudette

Egad!

She was in the middle of a hurricane, but Nancy Pomykal was transfixed by the large black insect flying outside her Port O'Connor house.

"All during the storm it fluttered around," said Pomykal, as Hurricane Claudette's winds howled and the rain pounded her home like bullets. "It was so large, when it flew away in the air, it looked like a bird."

Meanwhile, on the shore of Matagorda Bay, birder Brush Freeman had ventured out onto a second-floor balcony as the calm core of Claudette passed overhead. He was hoping to see some rare seabirds, pushed inland by the hurricane, but instead saw hundreds of giant black moths that his neighbor mistook for bats.

"They were literally falling out of the skies," he said.

Click here.

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GREEN BASHING

A member of Team Eschaton recently posted a few words about and a link to an anti-Green Party screed. The post's bottom line is that it is the mandated duty of everyone who is to the left of the Republican Party to vote for whomever the Democratic candidate is in 2004. Even though the post seemed to imply some of the Democratic arrogance and misplaced anger toward the Greens that have made me hate the donkey butts all the more, it was not particularly mean-spirited. The debate that then raged in the Eschaton comments section, however, became quite evil at points.

Here is the comment I posted:

I voted for Nader in 2000, myself, but I live in Texas, so I'm sure it didn't affect anything at all--I may very well do it again because it feels pretty damned good to vote for what I believe in. However, one thing that I'd like the venom-spewing Nader haters to tell me is why I should vote for a candidate that doesn't represent my views. "Get rid of Bush at all costs!" Well, okay. I suppose that's a laudable goal. I hate Bush, as well.

And then what? Odds are, I'll probably end up hating any Democrat that might win, too, and I'll have voted for him. (This happened to me years ago when I idealistically voted for Clinton in 1992. D'oh!) The fact is, the Democrats just don't represent my views.

Either way, Republican or Democrat, I'm disgusted: Democrats are for slow and smiling national self-destruction; Republicans are for fast and frowning national self-destruction. I feel like the choice you guys are demanding that I make is suicide by shotgun or suicide by sleeping pills. Either way it's suicide. I know the Greens can't win the presidency, but there's no way in hell I'm going to endorse this bullshit with my vote.

Instead, I'll continue to vote my conscience. Doesn't that concept mean anything, anymore? Don't you guys have any respect for that? I guess not. Whatever. It's my vote, and I'll use it however I please.

Berate me all you want; I'm not on your side.

And here is a link to the hard core hate-the-Greens/love-the-Greens debate.

The pompous, spiteful attitudes displayed by many Democrats during this debate do nothing but push me further away from the liberal pretender party. Even so, there is some sense in the argument to remove Bush at all costs, despite the fact that if the Democrats win, the left will be ignored once again. A writer for whom I have a great deal of respect, Norman Solomon, makes a better and friendlier attempt at persuasion:

The Green Party is now hampered by rigidity that prevents it from acknowledging a grim reality: The presidency of George W. Bush has turned out to be so terrible in so many ways that even a typically craven corporate Democrat would be a significant improvement in some important respects.

Fueled by idealistic fervor for its social-change program (which I basically share), the Green Party has become an odd sort of counterpoint to the liberals who have allowed pro-corporate centrists to dominate the Democratic Party for a dozen years now. Those liberal Democrats routinely sacrifice principles and idealism in the name of electoral strategy. The Greens are now largely doing the reverse -- proceeding toward the 2004 presidential race without any semblance of a viable electoral strategy, all in the name of principled idealism.

For the full essay, click here.

I guess that I haven't yet made up my mind. The more I learn about how totally evil the Republicans are becoming, the more scared I get about the future of this country. I've got a lot of thinking to do.

One thing's for sure: there is no way in hell that I'm voting for Joseph Lieberman.

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REPUBLICAN HYPOCRICY

BuzzFlash interviews Salon columnist and political editor of the New York Observer, Joe Conason:

I believe that in the White House, someone like Karl Rove puts out stuff that’s false with great political calculation, and he knows that a lot of it isn't true. On the other hand, there are people on the radio like [Chicago radio personality] Mancow, to take one example, who probably can't tell the difference –- isn't bright enough to know the difference between propaganda and facts. So there’s a broad spectrum of people out there promoting these views, promoting this ideology, and promoting a very skewed view of the world. Some of them know that it’s phony, or that some of it’s phony, and some of them have no idea at all.

For the full interview, click here.

Thanks to Tom Tomorrow.

and speaking of Republican hypocricy...
TEXAS REPUBLICANS BOTH SUCK AND BLOW
(with apologies to Bart Simpson)

Check this out:

In addition, on Monday, Gov. Rick Perry stated, "Today a minority of members in the state Senate prevented the Senate from finishing important work and killed legislation that would have generated an additional $800 million to help meet the priorities of our citizens. We could have spent that money to boost Medicaid payments for home care services, to help pregnant women receive Medicaid services, to expand health insurance for children of working families, to provide HIV medications for afflicted Texans, to train new doctors, or to address a number of other health and human services needs." This is disingenuous.

The facts are that this money has not been lost and exists as follows in rounded amounts: $372 million in appropriated federal funds, $231 million freed up as a result of an error in the implementation date of a transportation bill, $98 million as a result of various vetoes by the governor and $92 million from converting a new $30 fine attached to traffic tickets into fees that come to the state. The very next day, following these statements by Perry, the Republicans defeated every attempt by the House Democrats to use this money for the very same purposes stated in the governor's press release.

For more, click here.

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WORST...PRESIDENT...EVER!
US Nobel Laureate Slams Bush Gov't as
"Worst" in American History

American Nobel Prize laureate for Economics George A. Akerlof lashed out at the government of US President George W. Bush, calling it the "worst ever" in American history, the online site of the weekly Der Spiegel magazine reported Tuesday.

"I think this is the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history. It has engaged in extradordinarily irresponsible policies not only in foreign policy and economics but also in social and environmental policy," said the 2001 Nobel Prize laureate who teaches economics at the University of California in Berkeley.

"This is not normal government policy. Now is the time for (American) people to engage in civil disobedience. I think it's time to protest - as much as possible," the 61-year-old scholar added

And his predictions for the future are pretty damned bleak. Click here.

Thanks to Eschaton.

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MY DAWNING 9/11 REALIZATION

I really had nothing special to say tonight. It was getting late (even for me), so I figured that I would just post a few links, rehearse my monologues, play some Starcraft, and get to bed before sunrise. That plan changed in mid-flight. The stories I ended up reading have led me to a few tentative, disturbing conclusions.

For nearly two years now, I have resisted conspiracy-nut ideas about the horrific terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In the wake of the Congressional report on pre-9/11 intelligence, however, I now find myself drifting into wacko territory. I don't want to belive, but the evidence is mounting: it may very well turn out that the White House had a great deal of foreknowledge about the attacks and purposely allowed them to happen.

I'm a bit stunned, even though I've been reading about such theories for months now.

First, consider Nation writer David Corn's essay on the report (via AlterNet):

The committees' report covers many missed -- and botched -- opportunities. It shows that warnings and hints were either ignored or neglected. Some of this has been covered in interim reports released last year and in media accounts. But the final report does contain new information and new details that only confirm an ugly conclusion: A more effective and more vigilant bureaucracy would have had a good chance of detecting portions of the 9/11 plot. "The message is not to tell the intelligence community," said the source familiar with the report, "that you didn't have the final announcement of the details of the September 11 attacks and therefore you could not prevent it. We have to have an intelligence community that is able to connect dots and put the pieces together and investigate it aggressively."

This is pretty much the standard mainstream news media reaction to the report, as far as I can tell--of course, Corn, being a liberal, goes further into detail and blasts the government more harshly, but the idea is pretty much the same: we had enough information to figure it out, but we blew it. Reading the report more deeply, however, and considering some contextual information that is not included in the report paints a somewhat different picture.

Politicians and the media have made quite a bit of noise about the classified 28 pages in the report that refer to a "foreign power." Everyone, including myself, assumes that this mystery nation is Saudi Arabia. Our weird relationship with the Saudis is well known, but just how weird is it?

From journalist Greg Palast's weblog:

And on BBC TV last month, I reported this: following the bombing of our embassies, the Clinton Administration sent two delegations to Saudi Arabia to tell their royal highnesses to stop giving money to the guys who are killing us. But Mr. Bush, once in office, put the kibosh on unfriendly words to the Saudis.

Furthermore, in the summer of 2001, Mr. Bush disbanded the US intelligence unit tracking funding of Al Queda. What is it our G-men were uncovering? According to two separate sources speaking to BBC, the funders of Al Queda fronts include those who have previously funded Bush family business and political ventures.

And

And there's this: a document marked "Secret" and "199I" (meaning 'national security') which found its way out of the offices of the FBI in into the office of our BBC/Guardian newspaper team. It indicates (and whistleblowers confirmed) that, prior to the September 11 attack, the Bush Administration held back agents of the FBI from tracking two members of the bin Ladin family. According to the buried FBI report, the bin Laden lads were operating in the USA for "a suspected terrorist organization", WAMY.

It appears that our (and the Bush family's) relationship with Saudi Arabia is so weird that the President pretty much refused to allow them to be investigated. Bush also seemingly had no inclination to grapple with Attorney General John Ashcroft's unwillingness to take terrorism seriously.

Again from David Corn's essay:

According to the report, an FBI budget official said that counterterrorism was not a priority for Attorney General John Ashcroft prior to 9/11, and the bureau faced pressure to cut its counterterrorism program to satisfy Ashcroft's other priorities. (The report did not state what those other priorities were.) In a particularly damning criticism, the report notes, "there was a dearth of creative, aggressive analysis targeting bin Laden and a persistent inability to comprehend the collective significance of individual pieces of intelligence."

What the hell was going on? What the hell is going on now? It's really starting to look like it wasn't some screw-up; it's starting to sound like the White House was trying not to stop bin Laden from the get-go.

It gets worse.

Nixon White House lawyer, John Dean, a man who knows about presidential conspiracies, analyzes National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice's statements about the now-famous August 6, 2001 intelligence briefing received by Bush, and reaches some disturbing conclusions of his own. Rice essentially said that they understood that al Qaeda was considering hijackings, but they never dreamed that they would fly airplanes into buildings. Not so, says Dean:

But the Inquiry's 9/11 Report lays out all such threats, over that time period, in thirty-six bullet point summaries. It is only necessary to cite a few of these to see the problem:

*In September 1998, the [Intelligence Community] obtained information that Bin Laden's next operation might involve flying an explosive-laden aircraft into a U.S. airport and detonating it.

*In the fall of 1998, the [Intelligence Community] obtained information concerning a Bin Laden plot involving aircraft in the New York and Washington, D.C. areas.

*In March 2000, the [Intelligence Community] obtained information regarding the types of targets that operatives of Bin Laden's network might strike. The Statute of Liberty was specifically mentioned , as were skyscrapers, ports, airports, and nuclear power plans.

In sum, the 9/11 Report of the Congressional Inquiry indicates that the intelligence community was very aware that Bin Laden might fly an airplane into an American skyscraper.

Given the fact that there had already been an attempt to bring down the twin towers of the World Trade Center with a bomb, how could Rice say what she did?

It sure does seem like they knew.

Are you starting to see why I'm slowly moving into conspiracy-nut territory? Or is it that such territory is slowly moving toward me? Just for good measure, here is a list of some interesting quotes compiled by the Memory Hole about whether or not 9/11 could have been prevented. Also for good measure, and also from the Memory Hole, here is a link to some footage of Bush first hearing of the attacks--at the top of the video, a man in a suit whispers the terrible news in the President's ear; Bush just sits there with a sort of blank look, doing nothing for some five minutes (it's Quicktime, so you may need to download the software)--given all the above info, I ask, is this the reaction of a President learning that his country is under attack? Maybe he was learning about something that he expected...

God, I am starting to sound like a nut, here.

I still don't want to believe it, but it now seems like there is a good argument developing. And if it's true...well, stories about pipeline deals in Afghanistan, getting the PATRIOT act passed, the Iraq war...all these things must be considered in a new light. I don't want to believe it; it's an absolutely horrible thought, but...

I urge you to post your thoughts below. I'm very curious as to whether I really do sound like the wacko that I'm afraid I sound like. What do you think?

UPDATE on the Bush video. I don't know if you are having the same Quicktime problems I'm having, but I figured out a way to get it to work. Open up a Quicktime screen, open the File menu, click on "open URL in a new player," a screen will pop up asking for the URL, which is:

http://www.thememoryhole.org/911/bush-911.mov

copy and paste the URL onto the appropriate blank...it should all be easy from there...

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