Month: May 2015

Republicans Affirm Commitment to Destroying Environment with E.P.A. Hearing Boycott (May 11, 2013)

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air-pollution

Where I come from, if you don’t do the job you’ve been hired to perform, you lose it. And when I say “do your job,” I do not mean that all functions and responsibilities are executed to perfection. We’re human and we fail, and there’s something admirable about the occasional stumble when one’s very best is given. It’s good for the soul. Mistakes keep us grounded.

There is however nothing to admire in the simple and cowardly refusal to fulfill one’s duties, be the inertia the result of laziness or entitlement. And though the phenomenon is nothing new among the Republican members of Congress, it is a pattern growing more common and profound. There are so many challenges the country faces, so many issues afforded a shrinking window of decision: climate change, immigration reform, gun control, pervasive and extended joblessness, the growing income divide between the top few percent and everyone else, aging infrastructure, the rising costs of food, fuel and especially education.

Candidate Obama asked Americans in 2008, and again in 2012, exactly what kind of nation we want to be. I was under the impression that We the People had answered by voting in favor of the President and his agenda by wide margins – on both occasions. As recently as the 2013 State of the Union Address, our leader reminded the American people of their most important focus after the derailment of the Bush years: “Every day, we should ask ourselves three questions as a nation: How do we attract more jobs to our shores? How do we equip our people with the skills they need to get those jobs? And how do we make sure that hard work leads to a decent living?”

I am tired of pretending that both political parties try to respond to this urgent, commonsense call to action. And even if I wanted to continue indulging the fantasy, I need only turn on the TV or go online to be reminded that the current Republican leadership (not the dwindling minority of old school G.O.P.ers with whom compromise in service of the nation’s future was once possible), just isn’t interested in anything else besides looting the treasury, environment and human condition for personal gain.

Two front page headlines digital version of The New York Times, told the story:

How to Stop Government: An Obstruction Field Guide

The Latest G.O.P. Temper Tantrum: Republicans Boycott E.P.A. Hearing

The first piece, by writer Andrew Rosenthal, is a gallows humor primer for preventing the passage of any and all legislation. It’s inspired by a “recent Pew Poll, [where] 80 percent of respondents said the president and Republican leaders were not working together to address important issues — and, by a two-to-one margin, said the G.O.P. was more to blame for gridlock.”

The second post, from Robert B. Semple Jr. Reports that, “Moments before a scheduled vote on Thursday on the nomination of Gina McCarthy to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Republican members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee announced a boycott. One result was to delay her confirmation…The other result was to make the Republicans look not only vindictive but supremely childish.”

To return to my opening statement: in the real world, a place that our right wing legislators appear to have left permanently, this complete dereliction of duty leads to termination. That, my friends of all political stripes (because I simply refuse to believe that a majority of conservatives condone this approach), is what elections are designed to address. If you really love America, if you’re a true patriot, join me at the ballot box in 2014 to repudiate this torpor. Let the majority finally hog tie the dangerous, extreme, reckless minority that we’ve allowed to take control.

 

Don’t Let the Door Hit You on The Way Out: Goodbye, April 2013 (April 30, 2013)

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april-2013

By any conceivable standard, this has been a grueling month. The term “War on Terror” was given new significance as it became clear that enemy combatants do not exclusively hatch their plots “over there.” In addition to the devastating work of the Brothers Tsarnaev, both longtime U.S. residents (19 year-old Dzhokhar, a citizen) at the Boston Marathon lo these two weeks ago, we have the still-unexplained Texas fertilizer plant explosion and a series of ricin-laced letters mailed to various office holders in Washington.

But the month of April 2013 also presents an argument for the idea that our interpretation of the word “terrorism.” is far too limited. In the wake of Congress’ embarrassing failure to address the growing problem of mass public executions through the passage of a universal background check law for would-be gun owners, eight of our nation’s children continue to be shot and killed everyday. According to a February report from The Washington Post, the U.S. has experienced at least one mass shooting per month since 2009.

Throughout the course of an incredibly violent month, martial law to catch a killer has increasingly become the norm. Boston went on lockdown during the denouement of the hunt for Dzhokar Tsarnaev and today we learned that the business of rural California town, Valley Springs, has come to a halt as law enforcement searches for the killer of an 8 year-old girl. The victim, Leila Fowler, was brutally and randomly stabbed in her home in front of her 12 year-old brother. If such community harassment and intimidation is not the stuff of terrorism, the word has officially lost all meaning.

Compounding the violent challenges facing the nation and the inertia of elected officials in addressing the relative ease of weapon procurement. As well as the mental health and socioeconomic stratification that is surely playing its role, April 2013 has also given the lie to the right wing insistence that climate change is but a liberal conspiracy. Ask citizens of the Midwest bailing themselves out of monsoon-esque flash floods (Chicago) or mid-spring blizzard (Minnesota) if they think global warming is a hoax. Extreme weather has become more frequent, bizarre and devastating (Hurricane Sandy in Manhattan). We don’t need scientific data to confirm this. We can see it for ourselves.

April 2013 has also been marked by the loss of great artists, thinkers and newsmakers.  Adieu Margaret Thatcher, Roger Ebert, Annette Funicello, George Jones, Jonathan Winters and Ritchie Havens, among others. Will inspirational leaders rise up to take their place?

I realize that the simple transition to May has no direct correlation with the shift in toxic anti-mojo I desperately desire for my country. On behalf of myself and the Newtown families, the Boston bombing victims and their loved ones and everyone else facing an exhausting cluster of defiance this month, the movement of a date promises no release. But let’s try it anyway, shall we? Rumors abound that the media and constituent flogging unleashed on members of the House and Senate after the shameful defeat of the gun bill may just cow them into tuning out the NRA and adhering to the will of the 90 percent.

May the plentiful miseries of this month produce some good in the next.

The George W. Bush Presidential Library Takes the Lazy Road to Rewriting History (April 23, 2013)

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george-w-bush

The present is a tough, emotional place to be right now. The pain and reflection upon our increasingly violent, stratified society, can be summarized neatly in the Boston Marathon bombings that happened early last week. If the ongoing investigation into its genesis, has left you drained, maybe it’s time to take a step farther into the past.

In fact the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, which will open later this week, invites the former POTUS’s fellow Americans and other visitors to be transported back to the early aughts The goal being of reassessing some of Dubya’s most disastrous policy decisions. In a New York Times piece entitled,Rewinding History, Bush Museum Lets You Decide, Peter Baker writes: “In a new brick-and-limestone museum, visitors to an interactive theater will be presented with the stark choices that confronted the nation’s 43rd president: invade Iraq or leave Saddam Hussein in power? Deploy federal troops after Hurricane Katrina or rely on local forces? Bail out Wall Street or let the banks fail?”

Folks, this news manages to be thoroughly frustrating, exhausting and yet somehow vindicating all at once. Am I alone inferring that there is an admission here, an acknowledgment that perhaps things could have gone better? You don’t say! This is a far cry from former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s contention that there is no “Bush baggage” standing between him and a 2016 Presidential run.

At the same time, it’s hard not to reach for the migraine pills at the contemplation of this: in 2013, the choices of the Bush II regime are up for public discussion and an actual vote. If only that option has existed in 2001. How many lives would be saved, how many resources unwasted, jobs protected and how would the economy look today if we’d been informed and included in policy deliberations? Instead, under the cover of “War on Terror” necessity, most of us were forced to stand by idly as our Constitutional rights were suspended (the disingenuous Patriot Act.) While unprecedented tax cuts for the wealthy were doled out alongside the expenses of two armed conflicts. American citizens were left stranded in crisis by an overstrained, disorganized FEMA and its chain of command (Hurricane Katrina).

Interactive museums which afford the opportunity to revisit important historical decisions can be an enjoyable and important educational exercise. However, the prospective entertainment value of this particular museum suffers from the recency effect. The policies of George Bush do not exist in a “long ago in a land far away” vacuum and in many real ways, the country continues to pay for the price for some of the most egregious bungling in recorded antiquity.

And apparently the museum opening does not put a celebratory end to the Bush administration’s attempt to reframe historical events. Right on cue, Baker reports “A six-minute introductory video narrated by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledges disputes over Iraq and interrogation techniques while defending them as efforts to protect the country. ‘If you were in a position of authority on Sept. 11,’ she says, ‘every day after was Sept. 12.’”

Great Condi, except let’s try this once more with feeling: the Iraq war of choice was unrelated in every way to the events of 9/11. Saddam Hussein had nil to do with the devastating terrorist attacks that rocked New York City, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania that fateful day. We had every right to head in Afghanistan to take care of some Al Qaeda business, but your team’s consistent attempts to create justification for the unjustifiable quagmire that Iraq became is a bad rerun very few of us want to watch anymore.

With all this in mind, I am placing the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum very low on my bucket list of travel destinations, perhaps slightly ahead of Antarctica and the Bermuda Triangle. May the Bush legacy be rewarded for another expensive, high tech effort to insist the Emperor is wearing clothes with our collective disregard.

ICYMI – Recap of TO HAVE KIDS or NOT TO HAVE KIDS: There Is No Wrong Answer (May 23, 2015)

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On Tuesday, May 19, a group of powHERful women converged on Lakeview’s Pizzeria Serio‘s second floor to continue a conversation that ABOUT WOMEN founder Nikki Nigl began over a year ago. Speakers Rebecca Waterstone Halperin,Martii Kuznicki, Nora Fox Handler, Julie Roberts and Erin Waitz – women from different walks of life with varying experiences – took to the stage to share their stories of motherhood.

The question of whether to bear or raise children, despite a modern 21st Century world that affords women heretofore unthinkable opportunity, remains a sticky sociopolitical one. While recent decades have witnessed remarkable advances in family planning options and professional development for our gender, it’s impossible to ignore the loud and abundant opinions from all corners about what with we should do with our bodies and what our sex is “meant” to accomplish.

While having arrived at different personal decisions about what is right for them, the five speakers were united under a common theme of uncertainty. For those that opted to have children, there was ambiguity about career development, marital prioritization and in Handler’s case, concerns about a genetic irregularity that could impact childhood development. The speakers who were either unable biologically, or had made a conscious decision to skip motherhood, faced the possibility of regret or society’s judgment of them as “selfish.” The undecided, such as Waitz, are left to balance personal health concerns while trying to grow comfortable with the ambivalence.

While introducing the topic for the evening, Nigl informed the crowd that “To Have Kids or Not To Have Kids” was ABOUT WOMEN’s first repeat study alongside the ongoing body image conversation. Given the diversity of experiences shared by the speakers and attendees, it is easy to understand why. Either decision is, in its own way, a commitment. Kuznicki freely admitted of her choice to forgo childbearing, “Yes, I’m being selfish because somebody has to. I want to do me.” While Halperin spoke of the constant lack of control one must accept as a parent as such, “The best and biggest things are never what you thought they’d be – the feelings or the experience – and somehow that’s ok.”

I walked into Pizzeria Serio’s upstairs room that evening struggling with parental thoughts of my own. It was my distant, mentally ill 60 year-old father’s birthday and as I reflected upon my own tough upbringing, I wondered what drives people to make the decisions they do to bring lives into the world. As I suspected, the perspective and pressures are different for everyone, with more elements factoring into a decision either way than are found on the periodic table.

I didn’t come away with any definitive answers, because frankly, there are none to be found around this deeply personal and complex debate. But I did receive this stupendous piece of wisdom from Roberts, part of the evening’s amazing and brave panel: “No one is less because of what happens by nature or choice. No one.”

Even the GOP Doesn’t Care What Rick Santorum Has to Say Anymore (April 9, 2013)

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Rick Santorum Convention

Let us hearken back to the heady days of 2006, gentle readers, when former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum was universally considered a political punchline. That is the year the rejected lawmaker lost his re-election bid to Democrat Bob Casey by 18 overall points, struggling to connect with such obvious constituencies as conservative Catholics. The Washington Post ran a piece in early 2012 that characterized the defeat as such: “Santorum was left for dead rather early by the national Republican Party, which stopped running ads on his behalf a few weeks before the election because he appeared to be a lost cause.”

Unwilling to stay buried and sensing an opportunity to reclaim the political zeitgeist in the wake of the post-2008 Presidential election, Santorum once again foisted himself upon the nation as a shockingly credible candidate during the 2012 Republican primaries. What changed? The ascension of the Tea Party movement, which left a reshaped GOP with the impression that there was no such thing as a view too reactionary. Amongst a clown car’s worth of preposterous suitors that included Michele Bachman, Herman Cain and the also-back-from-banishment Newt Gingrich, Santorum managed to capture 11 primaries and caucuses, receiving over three million votes.

Unfortunately this brush with success erroneously convinced Santorum that his opinions and platforms are the stuff of mainstream, despite the wholesale rejection of his brand of neoconservativism in November 2012. Mitt Romney’s failure to connect with independent voters after shaking the Etch A Sketch, the frustration in divesting himself of the right wing albatross of orthodoxy hung about his neck, should have settled the question once and for all about the palatability of Tea Party values.

It seems that a number of Republicans, in an acceptance of Darwinian theory that would make members of the Westboro Baptist Church weep, have gotten the message. Notice the near-instantaneous party pivot on the subject of immigration overhaul and the reversal of Senators Rob Portman and Mark Kirk, who now favor marriage equality for same-sex couples.

Crackpots such as Rick Santorum, whose socially conservative views run the gamut from opposition to LGBTQ civil rights, rejection of a woman’s right to choose and a 1950s objection to the birth control pill, have once again assumed their rightful place (pun most certainly intended) on the political and cultural fringes.

So will someone please tell Santorum to shut up now? It’s over. A piece from writer Billy Hallowell, appearing on The Blaze website this week, bears the title Rick Santorum’s Dire Warning on Gay Marriage. Completely oblivious to the irony of the public’s double rejection of his policies (2006, 2012), Santorum nonetheless paints himself as a modern day Cassandra, predicting the collapse of the GOP if it does repent of its recent moves toward the social center.

Here is a summation of the failed politician’s advice to current GOP office holders: “I think you’re going to see the same stories written now and it’s not going to happen. The Republican party’s not going to change on this issue. In my opinion it would be suicidal if it did…Just because some of those things happen to be popular right now doesn’t mean the Republican party should follow suit.”

Did Santorum take the blue pill? It is precisely because the right has failed to move with the times and accept the changing demographics of the nation, that a slow, deliberate suicide has been evident. I personally don’t mind. Whatever finishes off this pathetic, extremist epoch in our two-party system so we can return to the checks and balances that once made our nation forward-thinking, is welcome. Increasingly, I am beginning to suspect that a growing number of Republicans feel the same.

So were I a member of GOP leadership, I’d be in search of chloroform and a dirty rag right about now. Is anyone still listening to this man? For a newly congenial Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s sake, the party of no-come-maybe, let’s hope not.