Holding Hands

The TV pictures this morning of our President holding hands with Crown Prince Abdullah were very symbolic. I read somewhere that he kissed him on both cheeks, too. Is this our best strategy to lower gasoline prices?

What is it that connects this president with the Saudis more closely, apparently, than with our neighbors Canada and Mexico or our historical friends France and Germany? Or even our bankers, China and Japan? Could it be that the business relationship between the Bushes and the Saudi "royal" family goes back to 1925?

Hypocrisy and the Filibuster

This "Nuclear Option" is about power and manipulation. The demagogues--James Dobson, pretty boys Bill Frist and Tony Perkins, and backroom manipulator Orrin Hatch--are pretending that the filibuster is something that it is not. Notwithstanding the current posturing by buff Republicans and well-fed televangelists, the filibuster has been a strategy deployed by members of both parties.

This is not the first time politicians in a hurry have been frustrated by the filibuster. "Rule 22" was adopted because of filibustering by pacifists in the Senate before WWI. Rule 22 allowed cloture on a vote of a two-thirds majority. In 1975, cloture became possible with a three-fifths majority. Now that they control House, Senate, and the Executive, the Republicans want absolute control and want to abolish this last device of protection for the minority opinion. Eliminating the filibuster in this situation is the equivalent of saying "Shut up! There are more of us and we don't have to listen to you."

This address (http://www.tacitus.org/story/2005/4/5/231418/9021) is a link to the way the Republicans thought about judicial nominees when the White Hosue was in the hands of the Democrats. They were more underhanded, but willing to filibuster when the sneakiness failed. Ah, for those days!

The claim by the pious folk, who in other times attack other religions, that the filibuster of judicial nominees is an atttack on "people of faith" is quite a logical stretch, but Dobson and Perkins seem sure it will sell with the intended audience. For Presbyterian Frist, this is abouot consolidation of power, since "blue slips" and simply not holding hearings are no longer available to prevent the "up or down" vote these well-dressed and coiffed statesmen demand.

Politica and religion. What a formula for hypocrisy!

News vs NOTNews

TIME thinks Coulter is worthy of the cover, TV yakkers think The Liberal Media is attacking the new Pope (Panzer Kardinal to some: http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/), some magazine just did another hatchet job on Rather, and most of the radio and TV yakkers are in a sweat over Hillary Clinton's presidential ambitions. These topics may be news, but they are not NEWS.

NEWS:
1. The actual provisions of the bankruptcy legislation recently signed by the President. Everyone in the banking industry knows them and is smiling.

2. This so-called energy bill the Busheviks are flogging that does nothing for energy conservation, but shifts $30 billion of clean up costs from the oil industry to the taxpayer. The oil industry is smiling.

3. Harassment of Air Force Cadets by Christian wingnuts and the administration of the institution. This is probably a relief to the female cadets who were being harassed last year.

4. An analysis of the reasons the Busheviks would nominate John Bolton to be UN ambassador.

5. A thinkpiece on the dynamics of illegal immigration, the minimum wage, and lobbyists.

6. A study of how many companies in America employ 1.2 million people and have 700,000 of them insured by Medicaid. Can you say Walmart?

7. An analysis of the economic relationship between China and US. Someone said the reason Hitler didn't attack Switzerland is that you don't attack your banker. Any parallel there?

8. How about a historical study of the ever-growing NATIONAL DEBT tied to which party was in power when it grew at faster rates?

Now, those would be NEWS if they bubbled up on the MSM!

The rest of this post will list everything good and sexy about Ann Coulter:

Correction

Just to see if my meanderings are making search engines, I entered "Roll of Government" into the Google engine and did a search. I didn't find this blog, but I found 379 other hits, which is frightening. If that many people typed "Roll of Government" believing it to be correct, how many people will read my post and think I thought that was the correct spelling? I really do know the difference in "roll" and "role." At the time, I thought it would be fun to have a "play" on words. No more!

Left Wing Conspiracy

Could we convince the Bushies that Canada has WMD and is plotting to use them against us? Shouldn't take too much shock and awe to subdue them. We might even get them voted into the union in time for the 2008 election. Twelve new Blue States!

Convenient Targets

I get skeptical when I hear someone blame a deplorable condition on: public schools, the police, the ACLU, welfare, judges, teachers' unions, politicians, big business, secular humanists, rap artists, video games, Hollywood, the South, or the Blue states. But I get paranoid when someone starts extolling the family farmer and the small businessman. You can be sure when you hear a Congressperson getting poetic about those American icons that people who work for a paycheck are going to get the shaft. Case in point, has anyone cited ONE example of a family farm being sold or a business liquidated to pay the estate tax?

Teach Your Children Well

I know trying to be serious does not become me, but neither does trying to be funny when there are so many (see www.patriotboy.blogspot.com) who are so much better at it. The following is my Top Ten Things Parents Can Do to Raise Healthy Children.

10. Reflect on what they see you do and how they will interpret it. ethically and morally, because they will.
9. Feed them nutritious foods if for no better reason than to have the satisfaction that MacDonalds is wasting advertising dollars. These folks are trying to bypass you, the parent.
8. Monitor and reduce their time in front of the TV and the computer monitor. You might need to reduce your own. The advertisers on TV are trying to bypass you, the parent.
7. Go outside and get exercise with them. You need it and they do, too. The schools don't have time for it any more; they're too busy leaving no child behind.
6. Go to the library with them and read to or with them. Introduce them to the authors you had to read--Faulkner, Wolfe, Dickens, . . .
5. Involve them in doing for others, whether that means working in a shelter, picking up litter, visiting the elderly.
4. Communicate with and support their teachers, keeping in mind that you may be more or less sane than the teachers and must temper your message accordingly. Sometimes, some of these folks will try to bypass you, the parent.
3. Do not model paranoia for your children. You're supposed to be the adult. There is no vast left/right wing conspiracy. There is no secular humanist conspiracy. There is capitalism, which is getting better and better at selling stuff. There are fearmongers who are demonizing everything from the ACLU to what I would call Christian charity. You don't have to join. You can be happy, sane, and constructive and your kids will be the beneficiaries.
2. Cheerfully activate your and your child's crap detectors. There is plenty of crap to detect from the Left, the Right, and the Commercial. No need to be paranoid or angry just because you're being alert.
1. Think for yourself and you will raise a child who does that too, scarey as it is.

I hope this doesn't sound patronizing. It is not intended to be and is only the advice I wish I'd had to raise my own. I didn't rail against rap music, or drugs, or chat rooms because they may not be the most insidious or dangerous aspects of the culture our kids live in.-

Miss Information

The Stars and Stripes was first published when the US sent soldiers and Marines to Europe in WWI. An early regular feature was an advice column for the loveworn entitled Miss Information. No doubt many young Americans were entertained, if not enlightened, by the tongue in cheek advice. As I was listening this morning to a very buff Republican Congressman from Missouri say the words "death tax" no fewer than fourteen times, I couldn't help but think about Miss Information and how serious our Republican friends are about their own brand of misinformation. We all know that Death Tax is their sobriquet for the Inheritance Tax, an attempt to finally collect a little tax from those trust fund folks who never worked for wages. We know that what started out as Private Accounts has now, in Miss Information's lexicon, become personal accounts. You are probably bored by hearing other examples of Miss Information's work such as the license to pollute know as the Clear Skies Act, the vehicle of exit from challenged schools for affluent chuldren called the No Child Left Behind Act, which of course is designed to leave some certain children behind, and so on.

And now, Miss Information likes to talk about a Culture of Life which does not apply to anyone in the line of fire in Iraq and which evidently doesn't refer to abolishing the death penalty. Somehow, the Culture of Life also doesn't refer to making sure every child has adequate health care. Clearly, Miss Information is back with us, but she's not as fun. Maybe someone needs to catalog other modern examples of perfidious obfuscation for political gain!

Minutemen--Wrong Battle, Wrong Place

Minutemen--Wrong Battle, Wrong Place

Is it possible that these people are being manipulated by . . . Republicans, BIG business, the Dems, the pols? Why doesn’t anyone want to enforce immigration laws? For the Dems, is it because of fear of appearing insensitive to needy people, the hope of future votes? It’s enough to give a right-thinkin’ American a headache! My big assertion, mostly true but possibly false in a few particulars, is that all those guys-- Republicans, BIG business, the Dems, the pols—are allowing this to go on at ordinary citizen’s expense exactly because they see dollars or votes in their future.

What the hell is a guest worker program? Is that an invitation to a certain number of foreign nationals to come do our worst jobs at very low pay? Who benefits from that? Wal-Mart? The hotel industry? The construction industry? Small businesses such as landscapers, farmers, restaurants? And at whose expense do these groups benefit? THAT is the ugliest question because all these businesses benefit from the availability of “guest workers” (the economic equivalent of “illegal immigrants") at the expense of less educated Americans and legal immigrants.

Strangely, these are the same folks who resist increases in the minimum wage with the argument that wages will naturally increase as labor becomes more scarce and demand increases. That would most likely happen if it were not for the easy availability of large numbers of immigrants, legal, illegal, or “guest” to fill lowest paid jobs. My amateur economic assertion is that this large pool of “brought in” workers has the effect of suppressing the wages of most all working Americans. And they are most certainly “brought in.” The availability of jobs is why they endure what they must in order to be here and fill them.

Not only does the presence of “brought in” labor suppress wages of American laborers, they undermine unionization. Unions are losing influence in this country in part because of their own inefficient structures, in part because of extremely anti-union rhetoric in the public discourse, but in large part because of the availability of workers desperate for any work. Does that argue for the influx of large numbers of “guest” workers?

The Minutemen would serve their cause and this country much better by going home and supporting their unions, letting their elected representatives know that they can be turned out of office for not enforcing the law, letting businesses know that they will support business that appreciate and fairly pay American labor, and by demanding sane immigration policies that allow people from other countries into the United States to become American citizens, not guest workers.

Our problem is not the people coming over that border; it is the people using them against American workers in the name of profits. These are the same people who have “outsourced” American jobs to countries who not only have no unions, but no laws against sweatshops, child labor, or even slave labor. Can you say Wal-Mart, Nike, Orvis, Tommy Hilfiger, Apple . . .