Tea Party Bozos: Brown Shirts, Or White Sheets? Neo-Nazis, Or The Klan?

By Manifesto Joe

You didn't see this kind of blatant disrespect for the office of the presidency, even back in 1993-94, when the Clintons were trying to put across a version of national health care. President Bill Clinton, an indiscreet man, always caught hell from a lot of directions; but no congressman ever called out during one of his speeches to a joint session, "You lie!"

President Barack Obama is, from all evidence, a good family man, so they can't get him there. Other than cigarettes and an occasional chili dog, he has no major vices. So, why all the vitriol?

I'd really hoped our society had matured beyond this. But I think the general disrespect comes from one very ugly thing: To millions of white Americans, this is President N----r. That's the big difference between Bill Clinton in 1993 and Barack Obama in 2009.

During the past weekend, "Tea Party" bozos gathered in large numbers in Washington, D.C., and in cities around the country. They reportedly carried signs showing Obama depicted as the villainous Joker in the Batman series, with a Hitler mustache, and with a Pinocchio nose. "You lie!" appears to have become a mantra with these people.

Imagine that, during some speech back during the 2002-03 run-up to the Iraq war, that Rep. Dennis Kucinich had called out, "You lie!" to Bush's horseshit about weapons of mass destruction, now clearly one falsehood among a vast number from the Il Doofus administration. Or, that some Democratic congressman had been playing with his Blackberry during such an event. (Rep. Eric Kantor, R-Va., was caught on video doing exactly that during Obama's speech.) I can imagine the bulging neck veins on Fox "News" the next day, and the calls for resignation.

In case anybody thought that these Tea Party protests were some kind of spontaneous grassroots uprising, this article from veteranstoday.com by Gordon Duff gives a list of the corporate sponsors of this organized trashing of the president. It's quite a list, and would make up a good boycott.

This is from Mr. Duff's commentary:

Did you notice the pile of insurance companies, the defense contractors, the US Chamber of Commerce and the NRA? Check the list carefully. Look into who these folks are. This is the group funding, what they hope will be, a civil war in America.

These are the folks sending out gun toting protestors talking about "watering the tree of liberty."

These are also the richest people in America and the most powerful and include some of the biggest polluters, the biggest protectors of illegal immigration and thousands and thousands of lawyers working for big business against everyday Americans.

This is the single biggest group of "Washington insiders" ever assembled, if not insurance industry or defense, all are directly aligned to the Republican Party and help formulate failed Bush policies.

Let's face the truth. There is only one reason all those uneducated white people are out yelling and screaming, guns left in their luggage on busses paid for by taxpayer money sucked in by the biggest pack of corporate thieves that ever bribed a congressman.

Its all about the "N" word. We are having a convention of Americans in love with the "N" word, people who use it every day, folks afraid of black people they don't know, people easy to scare.

Joe Wilson for Grand Wazoo: If the sheets fit ...

In case there was any remaining doubt about U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson (KKK-S.C.) and his background, here's a tidbit from The Daily Beast. Before Wednesday night, Joe seemed to be someone who could pass as just your typical Southern Republican congressfool. But he may not be so typical.

The "You lie!" outburst was unprecedented, and there's no way it would have happened to a white president, however liberal.

This is the very first time on this blog that I have "played the race card." Sometimes one has to play the cards that are dealt, and I sure as hell didn't deal them.

I'm not going to go far into the accuracy of what Obama said, because it's virtually irrelevant. The crux of it appears to be that although the House version of the health care bill expressly forbids noncitizens from getting services under this measure, there's no explicit provision for enforcement by requiring proof of citizenship. That, of course, is something that could be added during the process. But no disagreement like this can possibly justify such blatant disrespect for the office of the presidency.

Throw shoes at Joe?

No, not at me. I'm talking about Joe Wilson. I challenge someone out there to throw a pair of shoes at Joe "You lie!" Wilson. There's no direct parallel, but it would be interesting to compare the U.S. reaction to such a thing with the one regarding Bush in Iraq.

The Obama school speech

In Arlington, Texas, school Superintendent Jerry McCullough apologized Friday for administrators' decision not to show Obama's speech to local schoolchildren live on Tuesday morning. There were many other districts that did the same, but Arlington's decision became national news when it was reported that 500 fifth-graders would be bused to a Sept. 21 event with former President George W. ("Il Doofus") Bush speaking at the new Dallas Cowboys Stadium.

If the hypocrisy weren't clear already, it ought to be by now. Unfortunately, there are plenty of people who have no problems with being hypocrites.

Or racists.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Big Problem With The MSM: TV Journalists Are Often Political And Economic Illiterates

By Manifesto Joe

It caused me great pain and consternation to see a CNN anchor trying to interview a Tea Party leader during the big 9-12 march on Washington on Saturday afternoon. The anchor stammered something about the U.S. being a "democracy" and that capitalism is our system of government, or something to that effect.

It was appalling that the Tea Party fool had at least been paying some attention in high school civics and was half-right about one thing, in contrast to the anchor. He said that the U.S. is a "not a democracy," but rather "a republic." He was somewhat right on that point.

The U.S. is generally described as a democratic republic, with the former word the modifier in that there is a great deal of democracy, direct and indirect, codified at different levels. As a republic, it is offset by federal checks and balances, and by the fact that we are largely governed by representatives rather than through direct referendums and such.

But then the Tea Party fool veered off in the usual phallus-headed direction, saying something to the effect that the Constitution does not allow things that should be personal responsibility, such as the provision of health care. The CNN anchor kept stammering and was totally ineffectual at shooting down this pig dung, which is precisely what media professionals are supposed to be trained to do.

The U.S. Constitution does not address issues such as health care, one way or the other. It is silent on the subject, neither prohibiting nor institutionalizing a federal role.

If there were anything there that the federal courts could construe as a prohibition of any kind, then Medicare and Medicaid would both have been declared unconstitutional long ago. Even when the Supreme Court has had conservative majorities, as it has mostly had in recent times, there's no way they were ever going to go there, because it simply isn't there.

Medicare and Medicaid are both single-payer systems for specific groups, and could therefore be described as "socialized medicine" for the benefit of qualifying people. There is nothing in the Constitution that forbids certain sectors of the U.S. economy from being "socialized."

This brings me to some of the salient points that this CNN anchor, and the Tea Party cretin with whom he was botching an interview, fail to grasp in the least.

Democracy, and Republics, are POLITICAL systems. Capitalism and socialism are ECONOMIC systems.

There is no intrinsic relationship among any of the above. There are democratic republics that one would characterize, in economic terms, as semi-socialist -- to wit, the Scandinavian countries, and to a lesser extent the rest of western and central Europe. There have been many dictatorships that have not only tolerated capitalist enterprise, but have encouraged it.

Moreover, redistribution of income does not constitute socialism. ANY sort of taxation and appropriation redistributes income. It is strictly a question of to whom. The basic definition of socialism is ownership of the MEANS OF PRODUCTION by either government or cooperatives.

Contrary to wrongheaded right-wing attempts to link socialism with all authoritarian governments, Nazi Germany operated with the loyal support of Germany's industrialists, such as IG Farben. In fascist Italy, Mussolini, a one-time socialist, outlawed strikes, hammered down wages and put a lot of socialists in jail. Capitalist enterprises had no problems operating, with gracious deference, in Franco's fascist Spain.

To summarize, there are:
1. Semi-capitalist dictatorships
2. Semi-socialist/mixed system democratic republics
3. Socialist dictatorships (the old USSR, etc.)
4. Countries like China (commies-in-name who make American capitalists look like warm fuzzy liberals)
5. Mostly capitalist republics like the U.S., with lightly mixed economic systems and which feign democratic institutions, but are mostly ruled by big-ass money (plutocracies).

In short, political and economic systems, while related, are to some extent two very different animals. They can, and have been, mixed and matched in all sorts of ways, according to the mores of their populations and ruling elites.

Now here is a point that will modify most of what I've written above:

There has never really been, and probably never will be, an economic system in the world that is either purely capitalist or purely socialist.

Read your history, and check out the current world situations. They are pretty much all mixed systems, merely differing in the mix. The U.S. is the perhaps the world's prime example of a system weighted very much toward capitalism. But even here, much has changed in about a century, and it was arguably of necessity. Can you imagine what daily life would be like for a very large minority of the population if we had no Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid? No GI Bill? No workers' comp? No OSHA? Or even lacking some of the less-popular programs, such as food stamps and AFDC?

I can tell you one huge truth -- the fact that we eventually got those things is the main reason that communist movements never took hold in this country the way they did in other parts of the world. To wit: During the 1930s Depression/Dust Bowl era, Oklahoma had a surprisingly large and active Communist Party membership, inspired no doubt by a lot of hungry bellies. About 75 years later, that state is one of the most Republican in the country.

Want a vivid picture of what America looked like, circa 1905, from the viewpoint of an underclass worker? Read The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair. It's on a lot of American literature reading lists.

You want to really fight communism? Support a measured, reasonable welfare state.

To wrap up, it was very dismaying to see a "professional" TV journalist getting his ass pathetically kicked by a Tea Party half-wit. It doesn't take a degree in either economics or political science to grasp most of these concepts. The 100-200 level of courses, plus some common sense and a willingness to read a few of the pertinent books, is what I would expect of any person professing to become a real journalist.

Unfortunately, what we largely have on the current scene are a lot of pretty-faced DJs with amnesia.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Furor Over Obama Speech To Schoolchildren Is Epitome Of Right-Wing Lunacy

By Manifesto Joe

Reagan did it, in 1988. So did Bush I, in 1991. So, why is it controversial for President Barack Obama to address schoolchildren tomorrow about working hard to become good scholars?

Today the White House released a Web page with Obama's address. Here's the link.

Now, here's a video of President Ronald Reagan's address of Nov. 14, 1988. If this wasn't at least a generically political speech ... well, compare it with Obama's personal, rather than ideological, tone.

My first impression about the White House releasing Obama's speech a day early is that perhaps the intention was to embarrass the right-wing goons who have stirred so much feces about this. But you can't embarrass insane people.

And when insane people -- at least, the right-wing brand -- become vocal enough, authority figures listen. School districts around the country have been opting out of carrying Obama's speech in their classrooms.

Among these are a number in my home state of Texas. A bunch are in Tarrant County (Fort Worth, Arlington and suburbs), which, unlike neighboring Dallas County, was carried by McCain-Palin in 2008. Here's some of what the chairman of the Tarrant County Democratic Party, Steve Maxwell, had to say in a recent e-mail:

As you may have heard, President Obama is planning to deliver an address to the young people of our nation, on Tuesday, September 7. The message he will deliver is one of hope, of encouragement and of importance. President Obama is a shining example of what can be accomplished in this country by anyone willing to dedicate themselves getting an education, and has the willingness to pursue his or her dreams. This is the message he wants to deliver to the school children On Tuesday, the President will encourage students to care about their education, to apply themselves, to stay in school and to graduate. I believe this is a message our kids cannot hear enough.

There can be no more effective promoter of such a message than the President of the United States.

Unfortunately, some local radio hosts and Conservative activists have interpreted this as an attempt to indoctrinate students. Predictably, schools have received numerous complaints. As a result Arlington ISD, Aledo ISD, Mansfield ISD, Eagle -Mountain Saginaw ISD and Grapevine Colleyville ISD are all declining to show the speech live.

And then, there are those parents who have declared that they are simply going to keep their children home tomorrow so that they don't hear the simple story of an African-American who, against great odds, became a law professor, a U.S. senator and finally the leader of the "free world."

It's been said that it's often better to laugh at, rather than weep over, a sad and grotesque situation. So I'll leave you with a bit of morbid humor gleaned from YouTube:



Here's one of the comments this comedy video got:

Tell me something then, WHY does Obama need to address the CHILDREN?!? WHY??? Their own parents and teachers can't tell them to try hard and be good little communist fascists?  Hitler did the same fucking thing. Ever heard of the HJ? The Hitler Jugend or Hitler Youth.

That's coming next. Obama has already laid out his plans for MANDATORY civil service or community service. Either you are too stupid to see it or you approve of BIG BROTHER OBAMA telling our CHILDREN what to do and think.

Sigh ...

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

2009: A Right-Wing Odyssey Of Spaced-Out Idiocy

By Manifesto Joe

The right wing seems to have gone completely into orbit this year, outdoing itself at every turn. The galaxy of Goonville stars is lit up with names old and new.

Pat Buchanan: This mainstay of the kook right is often good for laughs, albeit pretty dark-hued ones. I have to confess that in 1996, with Clinton up for re-election and nothing interesting going on in the Texas Democratic Party, I actually held my nose and cast a disingenuous protest vote for Patsy in hopes that a good showing from him would help shake things up in The Party of Satan. ("I'm going to vote NAZI this time!" I exclaimed gleefully to one of my very few Republican friends. That comment didn't make us any friendlier.)

I was doing the same thing, in reverse, that a lot of nasty little Republicans have been doing here in Texas for many decades. If there's no pressing reason for them to vote in their own primary, they cross over and pollute the waters in ours. The idea is to vote for the candidates you figure are the most likely losers in the pack, or who would cause the most organizational trouble.

By the way, I gave up on that kind of subversive cross-voting, in large part because of all the Republican junk mail I would get in the ensuing months. (You know, polls from the local Congressfool that feature questions like: "Do you think that baby-murdering Supreme Court justices should be impeached? Yes/No)

I had to hold my nose to vote for Patsy, but I admit that I was actually (and pleasantly) shocked when I read parts of his book The Great Betrayal. Although the motives behind his economic nationalism were suspect back then, I was astounded by the opening chapter. It read like it could have been written by Jesse Jackson.

Unfortunately, Patsy didn't really, truly change his stripes. He's still a 1940 edition America Firster. He's not a neocon, because he's not even that evolved. He's a neolith.

The newest hardback offering from Patsy is a Nazi apologist treatise that was explained in shorter form in a recent column. Here's an Air America review of all this. I always smelled 1930s anti-Semitism behind Patsy's "thinking," sort of like the notion that the problem with World War II was that "we fought the wrong people." I actually heard a ranking editor at a newspaper I once worked for say exactly that. He noticed that I was looking at him funny, and he explained that "Hitler was the more pressing problem, but" look at all the horrors and atrocities of Stalinist Russia and other communist regimes.

This is not to minimize the enormities committed by the likes of Stalin, Pol Pot, and from all evidence, Mao Tse-tung as well. But to slough off the clearly murderous and insane Adolf Hitler as merely "the more pressing problem" is itself insanity. And, tragically, there are millions of Americans who would agree with that assessment.

Michele Bachmann: It will be a curiosity for the ages as to how a person this imbecilic ever got elected to Congress, and especially in a state like Minnesota that has produced the likes of Hubert Humphrey, the Farmer-Labor Party, Paul Wellstone and Al Franken. One thing I have noticed about Minnesotans is that there aren't many moderates from there, at least none that I've met. I love and admire the progressives from there (even you, Jack Jodell!); but, in contrast, one of the most demented and intractable religious-right fanatics I've ever known was from the Minneapolis area. And this is a state that actually elected Jesse Ventura governor. It's a place given to some extremes.

Onward to Michelle: She has repeatedly argued that while diversity sounds like a good thing, not all cultures are created equal. Some are apparently anointed by God His Own Self, and others just aren't. Here's one of her statements. And then, here's a link to the World of Health Care According to Michele, again courtesy of Air America.

The odyssey continues. The idiocy, too. Stay tuned.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Listen American: This Country Has Produced Great Unheralded Composers: Roy Harris

Roy Harris conducts the ABC (American Broadcasting Company) Symphony Orchestra in his own composition Phantasy c.1945. Watch this one -- the still visuals are wonderful. One is the famous painting Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper (1942). -- MJ:



Roy Harris 1898-1979. Posted by Gordonskene on YouTube, March 14, 2009.

Glenn Beck Suffering Psychotic Episodes On The Air

Our master of ceremonies here is Keith Olbermann. Take it away, Keith:

Obama's Eulogy For Kennedy

MJ has been busy lately, but can't let much more time pass without posting a tribute to a flawed yet genuine hero, the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. Here is President Barack Obama's eulogy to, arguably, the most effective lawmaker of our era.

Click here.

RIP, Ted. -- MJ

From Joe's Vault: 'Great' American Health Care System Isn't Cutting It On Life Span

By Manifesto Joe

Since health stats seem to be a hot topic now, it looks like a good time to dredge up a post from a couple of years ago. This was published on this blog Aug. 12, 2007.

This just in -- the U.S. is now ranked 42nd among the world's nations in life span. How can this be happening in a country that spends so much on medicine, the most worldwide per capita? It's a paradox: When it comes to insurance, less isn't more; but when it comes to medication, less can indeed be more. And, we need news media that will actually report on the problem rather than essentially shill for the medical/drug establishment.

To get the stats out of the way, this is from the Associated Press report:

Countries that surpass the U.S. include Japan and most of Europe, as well as Jordan, Guam and the Cayman Islands. ...

A baby born in the United States in 2004 will live an average of 77.9 years. That life expectancy ranks 42nd, down from 11th two decades earlier, according to international numbers provided by the Census Bureau and domestic numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Andorra, a tiny country ... between France and Spain, had the longest life expectancy, at 83.5 years ... It was followed by Japan, Macau, San Marino and Singapore. ...

Researchers said several factors have contributed to the United States falling behind other industrialized nations. A major one is that 45 million Americans lack health insurance, while Canada and many European countries have universal health care, they say.

OK, so far, so good. At least someone is observing that the number of uninsured Americans may have a lot to do with this. But wait, there's more. This Mainstream Media report lapses into whitewash and absurdity.

But "it's not as simple as saying we don't have national health insurance," said Sam Harper, an epidemiologist at McGill University in Montreal. "It's not that easy."

Among the other factors:

• Adults in the United States have one of the highest obesity rates in the world. Nearly a third of U.S. adults 20 years and older are obese, while about two-thirds are overweight, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

"The U.S. has the resources that allow people to get fat and lazy," said Paul Terry, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Emory University in Atlanta. "We have the luxury of choosing a bad lifestyle as opposed to having one imposed on us by hard times."

• Racial disparities. Black Americans have an average life expectancy of 73.3 years, five years shorter than white Americans.

Black American males have a life expectancy of 69.8 years, slightly longer than the averages for Iran and Syria and slightly shorter than in Nicaragua and Morocco.

• A relatively high percentage of babies born in the U.S. die before their first birthday, compared with other industrialized nations.

Forty countries, including Cuba, Taiwan and most of Europe had lower infant mortality rates than the U.S. in 2004. The U.S. rate was 6.8 deaths for every 1,000 live births. It was 13.7 for Black Americans, the same as Saudi Arabia.

"It really reflects the social conditions in which African American women grow up and have children," said Dr. Marie C. McCormick, professor of maternal and child health at the Harvard School of Public Health. "We haven't done anything to eliminate those disparities."

Most of the above displays an astonishing lack of critical thinking by this MSM reporter, or perhaps by editors who got hold of the piece later. The story attempts to drive some wedge between the absence of universal coverage in the U.S. and (1) racial disparities, and (2) infant mortality. A national health insurance system would do a vast amount to address these two problems. Our current system is the precise reason why many minorities do not or cannot get adequate care, when they are either old or newborn. It's the lack of insurance, stupid.

The passage points out that Cuba and most European countries have lower infant mortality rates than the U.S. Guess what those countries have that we don't.

Obesity is certainly a problem in America, and one for which individuals can largely be blamed. Or can they? As decades of my life have passed, I have witnessed a socially irresponsible advertising culture that graduated from making people into two-pack-a-day cigarette addicts into junk-food junkies who wash it all down with sugary soft drinks. If one ate a steady diet of what one sees every day on TV ads, billboards, and in the urban sprawl of any given U.S. city, it's the superhighway to diabetes and heart disease.

A thing I find quite revealing and disturbing is that although the Japanese smoke twice as much as Americans -- they light up the way we did in the '60s, back when my childhood senses were ablaze with TV cigarette commercials -- they don't have nearly as much heart disease as we do, and they're living longer than us. A simple observation is that they don't have quite the same advertising culture as we do, and so they're more likely to eat fish, tofu and veggies than a bacon cheeseburger. A decent diet can actually compensate some for other kinds of vices.

Something else to consider is that, for the poor in America, a good diet is actually hard to afford. It's cheap for our poor and working class to consume a lot of starch and sugar. Even the simplest staple items like rice and pasta -- not good for diabetics -- are much cheaper than the more healthful choices. We've had a reversal of roles between rich and poor in modern America: In the bad old days, the poor were skinny because they went hungry, and the rich were plump because they had all they could eat. Now the poor eat, but it's the wrong foods, sold cheap. The rich can afford the sauteed vegetables and the catch of the day.

But, I'm recalling that Emory University professor's remarks about Americans being so soft, not having a tough lifestyle imposed on them by adversity. This seems like an absurd contradiction as well. During hard times, people have trouble eating -- at all. Good food, or bad. And life spans were much shorter then. Something tells me the professor hasn't missed many meals.

Now for an unintended consequence of living in an "affluent" society -- affluent for some, anyway. The U.S. is the most overmedicated nation ever. Our "health care system" is largely driven by the pharmaceutical companies' greed, and they are hooking people on meds every day with the same foresight and scruples as the corner dope dealer.

Statin drugs are being pushed as though half the adult population should be on them. They may do a lot for people with severe cholesterol problems, but they can have very serious side effects. I have known a number of people who have given them up, despite warnings, because they complained that they always felt like they had the flu. My mother passed out and had to be hospitalized after three days on Zocor. I took Lipitor for three days, and I think my supervisor at work suspected that I was drunk.

I have been hospitalized twice in recent years after having adverse reactions to medications. Doctors who aren't into this dope craze describe patients coming to them looking pale and wan. And wait, there's more, from a site called Health and DNA:

ADRs are the fourth to sixth greatest killer in US with more than 100,000 deaths per year; and 2.2 million serious adverse reactions per year according to a 1998 Journal of the American Medical Association report. (JAMA 279:1200 1998) This study is a meta analysis of 39 research reports published from 1966 to 1996.

21.3% of the 548 most recently FDA approved medications were subsequently withdrawn from the market or given a black box warning. JAMA 287:2215 2002
The GAO reports that 51% of new drugs have serious, undetected adverse effects at the time of approval.

Of the best selling prescription drugs, 148 can cause depression, 133 hallucinations or psychoses, 105 constipation, 76 dementia, 27 insomnia and 36 parkinsonism. "Worst Pills Best Pills: A Consumers Guide to Avoiding Drug-Induced Death or Illness," third edition, 1999.

I know from the experience of being overmedicated that it's hard some days just to get out of bed under those conditions, let alone get one's regular exercise for general health and weight control.

I have yet to see Michael Moore's Sicko, but I anticipate seeing it this week. It shouldn't be hard for him to win me over. This "health care system," coupled with a predatory advertising culture, looks likely to make either my generation or the next one the first to have a lower life expectancy than our parents had. As my fellow baby boomers age and become more dependent on this broken system to get decent and well-considered care, this is clearly one of the crucial battles that Americans must win.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Health Care And Infant Mortality: When It Comes To A Population's Health, Statistics Don't Lie

By Manifesto Joe

A commenter on my previous post brought up something often raised in defense of America's indefensible health care status quo. That is the alleged wait time for specialists in Canada. The commenter mentioned, in particular, OB-GYN wait times alleged to be 10 to 12 months.

I rather doubt that as something typical, although I have heard from less biased sources that wait times for Canadian specialists can be up to six months. But regarding OB-GYN wait times, statistics about infant mortality should be revealing. Here are some, courtesy of the United Nations World Populations Prospect report revision of 2006:

Countries with "socialized" medicine:

Japan: 3.2 per 1,000 live births
Sweden: 3.2 per 1,000 live births
Norway: 3.3 """
France: 4.2
Germany: 4.3
Denmark: 4.4
Australia: 4.4
U.K.: 4.8
Canada: 4.8
Cuba: (Those godless commies!) 5.1

And then we have:
United States: 6.3
The U.S. ranks below Brunei (5.5), Cyprus (5.9), and New Caledonia (6.1).

I guess now we know why so many long-suffering Canadians, and so many other people in countries with "socialized" medicine, are clamoring to trade in their government-run systems for the private U.S. monopoly/oligopoly model. Ours is clearly so superior.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Health Care: When Americans Voted For Obama And Democrats, What Were They Voting For?

By Manifesto Joe

A recent (Aug. 3-6) nationwide telephone poll by the Marist Institute of Public Opinion found that 45 percent of Americans disapprove of President Obama's handling of health care reform, while 43 percent approved. Here's a link.

Obama won the popular vote last year with 53 percent. This begs the question: What did the "swing" voters, the independents, think they were voting for when they cast ballots for Obama and other Democrats?

And, as for those who are wavering on the issue, did they not expect yet another disinformation barrage, perhaps even worse that the "Harry and Louise" campaign of 1993-94? There are many interest groups -- insurers, pharmaceutical companies, stockholders, doctors and other health care "professionals" -- who have a big stake in the status quo and fear they will lose money if a public option comes to pass. Wasn't a propaganda flood, financed by the vested interests, expected?

My disapproval of Obama's handling of this would be purely idealistic: I favor a single-payer model similar to the ones in Canada and Germany. Even the English, whose National Health Service is often vilified here, are getting highly pissed and coming to the defense of the NHS. Here's another link. No less than renowned scientist Stephen Hawking has asserted that, contrary to U.S. right-wing demagoguery, the NHS saved his life from the longtime ravages of ALS. (Yet another link.)

The idealist in me says, if "socialism" is what they have in Norway and Sweden, where do I sign up? They live longer than Americans do; their babies don't die nearly as often; and their middle class doesn't have to live in fear of bankruptcy if someone comes down with a catastrophic illness.

You don't even have to look at Scandinavian countries with hyperactive welfare states. Australia, perhaps the closest nation to the U.S. ideologically, has something resembling "socialized" medicine.

Among other developed countries in the world, you don't see any of them battling to trade in their government-run programs for the U.S. "Land of the Fee" model, do you?
Their way looks much more like the right path to me.

But -- living in America, and especially in Texas, made me stop being an idealist long ago. It's clear by now that Obama and his "allies" are going to have a hard time just putting over a public option, so single-payer will have to wait, probably until after I'm dead.

Back to the American public -- that 45 percent who disapprove. I'd wager that few of them ever had to actually USE their underperforming health insurance to battle a chronic illness. I have allergies so severe that I depend on multiple medications just to live, and the co-payments and deductibles eat up much of my income. This was not something I did to myself; I was born with allergies.

Let's talk about "death panels." I have the impression that among that 45 percent, their answer for me would be, "Just die and get out of the way." Such people protest loudly at being called Nazilike, but it sounds a lot like eugenics to me.

That 45 percent probably never had to battle cancer, as my wife did in 1992, on one of those swell 80-20 private insurance plans, with a deductible. That experience hurled us into debt that we've never gotten out of to this day. Bankruptcy was actually on the table for us a couple of years ago -- fortunately, we found an alternative.

But we are like many other middle-class Americans in that, even with both of us insured, another major illness could very well plunge us into so much debt that bankruptcy would be certain. And, the insurance companies would have the complete prerogative to drop either or both of us.

That 45 percent: I shudder to think that there are so many profoundly misguided Americans. One can go back to relatively recent history and witness the fickleness of the electorate. In 1992, Clinton pulled off a plurality win, and the Democrats took both houses of Congress solidly. Two years later, the Republicans and their "Contract With America" turned the tables utterly, though not for long.

Back a bit further, in 1974 the Republican Party seemed repudiated and in tatters after Watergate. It only took six years for the Reagan right wing to turn that completely around.

I hope that Obama can stand his ground, and that the electorate doesn't prove to be that fickle in 2010. If my insurance company decides to kick me to the curb, I'd like that public option, or at least something that keeps me from going broke.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Postscript: CNN reports that at 1:03 p.m. Mountain Standard Time, at a presidential event in Phoenix, a reporter saw a man in the anti-Obama camp carrying an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. (Arizona has an open-carry law.) Are those mean-spirited lib'ruls gonna call him a Nazi?

A Classical Change Of Pace: The Most Magnificent Howard Hanson (1896-1981)

Mr. Hanson was one of the most underrated classical/symphonic composers of his time, mainly because he did not follow the trends of his era, between the world wars. The American concert hall was filled with much Stravinsky and Copland during that time. I have absolutely no problem with either of them. But Mr. Hanson, a Scandanavian-American from the Midwest, was a bit neglected because of his unabashed romanticism.

Some film buffs might recognize this as the piece that was played at the end of the 1979 Ridley Scott film Alien. By the way, this symphony, No. 2, "Romantic," debuted in Boston in 1930.



This one has moved me to tears. -- MJ

1993 ISSMA State Champion Carmel High School Symphony Orchestra performing Hanson's Symphony No. 2, 3rd Movement. Conducted by Thomas Dick at Valparaiso, IN.

Palin Steps Up To Lead Nazilike Campaign Against Health Care Reform

By Manifesto Joe

It's a departure from historical norms, but nobody ever demonstrated that a fascist movement couldn't be led by a pretty middle-aged woman. (She's not my type, but Sarah Palin has what could be described as generic good looks.) And it's happening -- I don't think she can ever legitimately vie for high elective office again, but sundry Brown Shirt types, jackbooted thugs and brainwashed hillbillies may be lining up behind Sarah Palin.

Maybe this is why Palin resigned her Alaska governorship. It's kind of hard to lead a Nazilike movement when you've got a full-time job in Juneau.

True, she's not as articulate (or bellicose) as Limbaugh. Hell, she's not even Father Coughlin. But Klondike Hottie seems to speak for a lot of manure-headed people out there, and now I think I dig where she aims to go.

Dean Baker of Truthout is on the money when he blames what's left of our "news media" for a lot of this. Palin was given a huge pass when she publicly conjured up fictions about a "death panel" and rationing of health care while denouncing Obama administration policy plans. Traditionally, media are supposed to function as a "truth squad" and shoot down pig dung like this. Here's a link to Baker's article.

Palin apparently has enough gutter political savvy to see a movement in the making. Nazilike hooligans have been showing up at "town hall" meetings to intimidate anyone who favors health care reform, up to and including the Congress creatures themselves.

There have been some scenes that recall the fascist thuggery of Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s. On Friday, Justin Rubin of MoveOn recorded a few nuggets that show a sampling of what's been happening to members of Congress, and continues, from coast to coast:

-- Last night in Tampa, Florida, a town hall meeting erupted into violence, with the police being called to break up fist fights and shoving matches.

-- A Texas Democrat was shouted down by right-wing hecklers, many of whom admitted they didn't even live in his district.

-- One North Carolina representative announced he wouldn't be holding any town-hall meetings after his office began receiving death threats.

-- And in Maryland, protesters hung a Democratic congressman in effigy to oppose health-care reform.

The Associated Press filed a more detailed account of the right-wing marauding in a Saturday story. Here's a link to that one.

Back to Sarah Palin, I realize that Klondike Hottie has plenty of competition for leadership of the GOP's gaping primate squad. Limbaugh has been whipping them up for 20 years, and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck are most decidedly in the running.

But Klondike Hottie has them beaten in one crucial area -- sex appeal. To me, her appeal is very limited -- she reminds me too much those Young Republican college women who always seemed to belong to a sorority that was called "Betas" for short.

But, Bubba apparently digs it. And he may be willing to misdirect some of his testosterone toward neo-fascist asskicking, if she gives the word. Stay tuned.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

"Birthers," Wingnuts Who Think Obama Was Born In Kenya, Make Me Ashamed To Be From The South

By Manifesto Joe

This has become the Whitewater of the Obama era. Despite evidence and still more evidence that Barack Hussein Obama was born Aug. 4, 1961, in Hawaii (a belated happy birthday to a fellow Leo, Mr. President), a large number of Americans, almost all Republicans, don't believe that he's an American citizen. And they are heavily concentrated among white Republicans in the South.

This reminds me a lot of Whitewater in the '90s and the "questions" that dogged Bill Clinton throughout his eight-year presidency. I was not quite as intolerant of right-wing kooks back then as I am now. I suffered through a litany of conspiracy theories from acquaintances.

Bill and Hillary were not only dogged by the specter of an investment in which they lost money. Bill Clinton, I was told by these crazies, was directly involved in over 100 murders back in Arkansas, during his governorship. We went through various "Troopergates," "Tailgates," and so forth. A special prosecutor was appointed, and spent over $40 million to eventually find out that Clinton apparently got a couple of blowjobs from an White House intern and lied about them. And then he wasted a lot of time and money getting Clinton impeached, and without a conviction, over the likes of that.

Now we have the same raving lunatics sizing up Barack Hussein Obama. Clinton was indeed a wheeler-dealer and a Falstaffian figure who had a hard time keeping his pants zipped. Obama admits that he sampled a few drugs while he was in his twenties, mostly pot. Now it's a big deal for him to have a beer, and there's much ado about trouble giving up his smokes. Other than that, he's a model father and husband, a regular Mr. Cleanhands.

So, the rubber-room refugees zero in on this citizenship horseshit. And they're mostly, though not exclusively, Republicans in the South. To wit, a recent column from usnews.com:

According to a new poll from Research 2000 (commissioned by Daily Kos), a majority of Southerners either believe that Barack Obama was not born in the United States (23 percent) or are not sure (30 percent). Only 47 percent of Southern respondents believe Obama was born in the USA. By contrast, 93 percent of Northeastern[er]s said yes, he was born here, 90 percent of Midwesterners did and 87 percent of Westerners.

Here's a link to the whole column.

I have been argumentive and contrarian quite often with people who characterize Southerners as stupid. Why? I have encountered my share of dumbass Jersey-talking Yankees, and my one visit to Southern California was quite an eye-opener. There, I learned that there's just a marginal difference between a philistine who sips Chardonnay and wears designer jeans and a philistine who chugs Miller High Life and got his or her jeans at Wal-Mart.

But after seeing the results of this poll, I don't know if I can muster a defense for fellow Southerners anymore. Forrest Gump was only partially right -- stupid is not merely what stupid does. It's also what it says. Words can be poison, and this notion is utterly toxic.

I stand ashamed to be a native Southerner, with deep roots in states other than Texas (Alabama, North and South Carolina, Arkansas). I hope I can consider myself an exception, but we seem to have de-evolved from the rest of Western culture.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

While Demagoguing Health Care And Jobless Benefits, Governor Goodhair Lives Large Off Taxpayers

By Manifesto Joe

I would like to know what a man who lives in a house that rents for $9,900 a month, and has his every whim taken care of by chefs, stewards and housekeepers to the tune of $168,000 a year, knows about the travails of working people.

Rick "Governor Goodhair" Perry of Texas seems to think he knows enough about the subject, since he is refusing $555 million worth of federal unemployment aid. And he says he would invoke something about states' rights in the 10th Amendment to the Constitution to keep any Obama-spawned national health care plan out of Texas.

Let's go back to the lead paragraph. This money is coming from the taxpayers of this state, even as Governor Goodhair rails against the wicked largess of the federal government.

The Houston Chronicle has run a couple of insightful pieces about the propensity of the longest-serving Texas governor (who started out as an ordinary West Texas farm boy) to live very high on the hog.

Here's a link to a March commentary, and here's another link to a report published just the other day.

In addition to this brazen hypocrisy and demagoguery, there's the matter of his response to swine flu. Perry solicited federal help to avert a pandemic, right after he all but advocated Texas secession. He taketh and does not giveth when it comes to questions of ordinary Texans' day-to-day survival. But, understand that a flu pandemic wouldn't exempt Governor Goodhair's superrich friends, or even him. That federal loot certainly comes in handy during times like that.

It's a long way to go until the Texas Republican Primary in 2010, so I expect plenty more hayseed grandstanding from Perry in the meantime. Stay tuned.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Just When It Seemed Safe Again To Admit That You're A Texan ...

By Manifesto Joe

... Rick "Governor Goodhair" Perry takes his buffoon rube act on the road yet again. This time, he threatened to invoke the 10th Amendment, pertaining to states' rights, to keep any national health care plan that might emerge from the Obama administration out of Texas.

You know the good old conservative/libertarian ideology: It's better to starve, fester and die homeless on your feet, than to get any sort of relief check and thank God and Congress on your knees.

Being interviewed Thursday by right-wing talk show host Mark Davis of WBAP-AM Radio in Dallas (The uniquely untalented Mr. Davis used to write a pathetic wingnut op-ed column for the Fort Worth newspaper; his minuscule "talents" are decidedly geared toward AM wingnut talk radio.), Perry said the president's health care plan would be "disastrous" for Texas. By the way, Texas has a frightening number of uninsured residents, many of whom are children and women of child-bearing age. The taxpayers end up paying for their ER bills anyway, as they generally end up in charity hospitals supported with public funds.

So, Governor Goodhair is going to defend us Texans against those godless socialists with their health care plans, the same way he's been defending thousands of jobless Texans from getting extensions on their unemployment benefits with federal money. (He's been refusing it.)

It's so good to know that the governor is so concerned about the long-term interests of Texans, even as so many face foreclosures from being jobless and/or unable to afford mounting medical bills. Changes in the law during the Bush era have made bankruptcy a very unattractive proposition, but many people now have no choice but to limp down that road.

By the way, here's a link to the story about Perry's latest redneck grandstanding.

There are some people who would perversely describe Perry's recent rhetoric as "populist." That would describe it accurately if "populism" is the art of putting it to the people in the posterior and then distracting them such that they don't know where the reaming is coming from.

Texas has a long and sad history of this sort of "populism," which is ultimately a manipulative, chauvinistic anti-populism. Our officeholders have typically been servile to the rich, especially oil and gas money, while our poor have had to endure all manner of regressive taxation, such as sales taxes, and various user fees. We've rarely had real populists in control, even when our "Blue-Dog Democrats" have been in power.

Perry himself isn't shocking, because as long as I can remember, we've mostly seen the likes of him in high office in these parts. It's just disappointing that, after all these years, ol' Bubba out there still hasn't quite figured out who made his butt feel so sore the next morning. A hint: It wasn't Barack Obama.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

An Independent Texas Would Be A Third-World Country

By Manifesto Joe

The jokes about Gov. Rick Perry's veiled threat of Texas secession have faded into collective memory now, but a few of us were given pause to consider the "what ifs" about this.

What if Texas legally could, and did, leave the United States?

If these figures available courtesy of Texas state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, are any barometer, we would be little more than a Third-World country.

Here are some nuggets from the senator's Web site about Texas' standing when stacked up in 2007 against the other 49 states:

Percentage of Uninsured Children
1st

Income Inequality Between the Rich and the Poor
2nd

Percentage of Population without Health Insurance
1st

Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) Scores
47th

Percentage of Population over 25 with a High School Diploma
50th

Percentage of Non-Elderly Women with Health Insurance
50th

Rate of Women Aged 40+ Who Receive Mammograms
44th

Rate of Women Aged 18+ Who Receive Pap Smears
47th

Cervical Cancer Rate
5th

Women's Voter Registration
43rd

Women's Voter Turnout
49th

Percentage of Eligible Voters that Vote
44th

For more on the subject, go here.

And the coup de grase: The president of our great reborn republic would apparently be (you guessed it) Rick Perry, he of the 2.3 GPA as an animal husbandry graduate of Texas A&M.

Am I sure that a dolt like Perry would be somebody that an independent Texas would actually elect as its president? I suppose nothing in this life is truly certain, but a recent piece of evidence points to this as the case.

Perry has been governor since Il Doofus resigned in December 2000 to go on to bigger and more horrific things, and Perry is finally facing his first serious challenge for re-election, from U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas. Hutch is almost certain to go through with a challenge in the 2010 Republican Primary.

There's one big problem with her chances. She's regarded as a moderate (chortle) in this state, and the Texas Republican Party still wants the U.S. to unleash Chiang Kai-shek's skeletal remains on the mainland of Red China.

A poll conducted jointly by the Texas Politics Project and the University of Texas' department of government had Perry with a 12-percentage-point lead over Hutch, 38-26. Let's face it, the 'necks will go to the polls for Governor Goodhair, not for Kay Bailey H.

And although Democrats here have made a few admirable gains in recent years, they are still in a shambles when it comes to having a viable challenger for governor. The undecideds are way ahead among Democrats; but among those potential voters who have made up their minds, the poll leader is Kinky Friedman, with 12 percent.

Kinky, for those unfamiliar, is a veteran Austin singer-songwriter and humorist whose talents in those areas are considerable. But in his foray into Texas politics in 2006, he was inept as a politician, made a gaping ass of himself in debate, and ultimately split the meager progressive vote here in a year in which Perry seemed a bit vulnerable (He won re-election with 40 percent of the vote against three challengers).

Rather than talking this horseshit about seceding from the union, Texans should be damned glad of the union. It's damned near the only thing that keeps us from becoming Guatemala.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

A Different Take On Independence Day

Jose Marti was a guy who truly walked the walk. He died in 1895 at the age of 42 in an abortive uprising in Cuba against the Spanish government. He was one of the most prolific and important writers of the Spanish language. He spent 12 years in exile in New York City before returning to Cuba to meet his fate.

The venerable American folk singer Peter Seeger has kept Marti's legend alive, and spread it to English-speaking audiences. Here are a couple of videos of Seeger's tributes.



And again:



Have a happy Independence Day, and be grateful that most of us don't have to die for it the way Jose Marti did. -- MJ

Functional Illiteracy And The Medusa

By Manifesto Joe

During Web surfing, I happened upon an ad that posed a question: "SHOULD MADONNA BE ALOUD TO ADOPT AGAIN?"

It would be just fine with me if Madonna were never allowed to do anything ALOUD ever again, certainly not music. Her songs all sound the same, anyway.

But, I found a certain appropriateness in this, an ad about "The Medusa" (as parodists have had their way with her), and the functional illiteracy of those who composed and posted this ad. I sincerely hoped that this was a joke.

Sadly, I don't think it was. Whoever did this was "computer-literate" enough to post this on a Web page, but so functionally illiterate in basic English as not to know how moronic this looked. And, there being no copy editors patrolling the Net, there was no one to correct it and get a belly laugh afterward.

I'd gauge that the spread of this public imbecility began in earnest around the time The Medusa scored her first pop-music hit. (Early '80s?) Anyway, TV had a seriously erosive effect for decades before then. But somehow, the group of Americans just about my age (I was born in '56, The Medusa in '58) was the first to put this gross ignorance on public display and somehow not feel ashamed enough to seek remedial education.

My high school was mediocre at best, but I went to a rather demanding college and discovered my educational deficiencies quickly. As a freshman I took some early beatings for one used to making A's, and then was making A's again by the time I was a college junior. But I got the impression that I was atypical. Many of the people my age just didn't care enough to address the gaps, even after they were made gapingly apparent.

Has the Internet contributed to more decadence since then? It's still a question for study, but I can't see how it has helped. Amid all the gaming, LOL and BFF horseshit, I've gotten the distinct impression that a new semiliterate culture has "evolved" around this technology. It's gone beyond the functional "TV" illiteracy that became so obvious in my generation.

Here's a link on which to ponder this question.

It's very sad that one has to do a double-take to realize that this link is a joke.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Iranians Are Showing Major Juevos -- Unlike "Murkans"

By Manifesto Joe

Maybe they had it right, in a sense, when they said it can't happen here. In 2000, the U.S. had a presidential election blatantly stolen, with the 5-4 blessing of our Supreme Court. Four years later, the national election results sharply contrasted with the exit polling, and it was eventually demonstrated that the technology and means to "hack" some of the voting machines existed.

With few exceptions, almost no one raised any serious hell in the U.S., either time.

Not so right now in Iran, and richly to the credit of the people there. They are being asked to buy the idea that nearly 40 million handwritten ballots can be accurately counted and tallied in about 12 hours, and then with a clearly unpopular hard-line incumbent president winning by a huge, overwhelming landslide. Guess what -- they aren't buying it.

The unrest has become vast, with all those young Iranians taking to the streets in defiance of official repression. It makes me feel proud of the Iranians. And, it makes me feel just a bit ashamed of Americans. In words paraphrased from an old movie set in Mexico, with Federales looking for a gringo troublemaker: "Don't just stand there like burros! Haf you seen heem?"

We, my fellow "Murkans," just stood there like burros. Twice. No juevos, no cojones, either time. Nada.

The Iranians, for better or for worse, are not. Before them, recently, the Ukrainians didn't, and to good effect. Even in Mexico, many didn't "just stand there like burros" after a questionable election outcome in 2006. And in Tiananmen Square, 20 years ago, and not in any election setting, the world witnessed one of the greatest, albeit futile, exhibitions of human courage ever seen.

So, where was the outrage in America in 2000, or in 2004?

I'd say we lost it when we stopped being America, and became, as George W. "Il Doofus" Bush always mispronounced it, "Murka."

And when we became Murka, a semiliterate frat pledge master like Il Doofus could have the presidency of the whole damned country stolen for him, perhaps twice. And amazingly few people said anything.

The unrest in Iran probably won't change things at the official level, and some unfortunate souls will be killed or injured. It may be all for nothing in the short run, as was the case with Tiananmen Square. But sometimes courage means that you have to fight injustice, even when you know you're going to lose.

We haven't shown that kind of courage here since about 1970. Way back then, with the long hair, bongs, ugly tie-dye and all -- we were actually America. Not Murka.

Right now, the whole world is watching -- but they're not watching Murka. They're watching Iran, of all places.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Death Waits For No One. Blog Posts Sometimes Have To

MJ's mom died over the weekend. My wife and I will be traveling for the funeral. Don't be strangers. I expect to be posting again in about a week. -- MJ

What Makes Cheney Lie?

The former vice president may be running scared. Indictments aren't out of the question.

By Manifesto Joe

I really hoped that, once repudiated at the polls, the Republican right wing would give it a rest for a while. No such luck -- they are more vociferous than ever. And one of the lead attack dogs is none other than the former "vice president." We've seen more of that sneer in recent weeks than we had to for years during the Il Doofus administration.

Much of what Dick Cheney has been saying in speeches and interviews, appearances of unprecedented frequency for an ex-VP, is not squaring with the facts. Torture, CIA memos, Richard Clarke's repeated warnings about an imminent attack -- Cheney's accounts have consistently been pig manure. He seems to be a pupil of Joseph Goebbels -- you know, if you repeat the lie over and over ... Here's a link about this.

Not that adherence to the facts has ever been important to Cheney. He told countless whoppers during the run-up to the Iraq war. And once the war was on, he kept repeating the shameless canard about Saddam Hussein being connected in some way with 9-11. This man makes Machiavelli look like the hero of a Frank Capra movie.

He's also well-versed in the "Repub" Party's practice of defaming anyone associated with the "Democrat" Party. During his speech to the National Press Corps, Cheney, who was supposed to be talking about Al-Qaeda, referred to "Obama" (bin Laden) not being in good communication with the terrorist rank and file.

What is Cheney trying to do? My theory is: preemptive strikes. You know, the best defense is a good offense. I think that, ultimately, there's probably enough there for Cheney, "Fredo" Gonzales and several others to be indicted on war crimes charges. Cheney's thinking, most likely, is that getting the first punch in with brass knuckles will rid any antagonists of such thoughts. I think he's running scared, but his strategy is to be a lying bully so as not to show it. He's made that work enough times that he expects it to work again.

I pray to whatever gods may be that we don't let it happen this time.

Postscript: It was bitterly amusing to see the right wing's reaction to President Barack Obama taking his wife out on the town in New York. Since when have right wingers been concerned about rich people setting good examples for the struggling? After all the unbridled opulence and unregulated swinishness that we witnessed during the previous two presidential terms, it's moronic pettiness to talk about Obama taking Michelle out for one night on the town. How much time did Il Doofus spend on vacation in Crawford, and how much extra security and jet fuel did all that cost?

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Governor Goodhair Saga Continues: Stimulus Millions To Help Fix Up Guv's Mansion

By Manifesto Joe

Lesson of the day from Rick "Governor Goodhair" Perry: We mustn't accept federal stimulus money to help the unemployed -- that's godless socialism. But $11 million to help repair the Governor's Mansion in Austin -- that's civic pride. Any questions, class?

Well, to be honest, it's actually our Legislature's idea. This is from an Associated Press story that ran in papers Friday:

Top budget negotiators said Thursday that a House-Senate committee agreed on the expenditure late Wednesday.

The mansion was set on fire in June by an arsonist who has not been caught. About $10 million in state tax money will also be spent on a renovation, which is expected to cost about $20 million, officials said.

... Perry spokeswoman Allison Castle released a short statement late Thursday: "We are continuing to work with lawmakers on the budget."

... Since the mansion burned, Perry's family has been living in a rented three-story, limestone home with a heated pool, an outdoor cabana and a guest house. The state is paying about $9,900 monthly in rent.

But wait, class -- there's more. The story pointed out that Perry has "railed against federal bailouts and the free-spending, power-hungry ways of Washington."

As usual, the Republican animal talks fiscal responsibility, just so long as YOU are the chump who has to be responsible. As power-lunch partners, these types will tip light for their share and leave you to pick up the check.

Meanwhile, as taxpayer money is ponied up to repair his digs and pay his exorbitant rent, Governor Goodhair stands firm in his decision not to accept hundreds of millions in federal stimulus money to extend benefits for Texas' unemployed. As Texas' chief executive goes for a dip in his heated pool, how many Texans' homes are in the foreclosure process?

And that, class, is our lesson for today in fiscal responsibility, Republican-style.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Governor Goodhair Aide's 'Whorehouse' Remark Is Insulting To Whores

By Manifesto Joe

As Jerry Jeff Walker sang -- "When I get screwed, I like to be kissed." Following is our connection: David Carney, a consultant for Gov. "Goodhair" Rick Perry of Texas, warned against turning the Republican Party into a "whorehouse" with the aim of casting a wider tent for voters. Here's a link to an Associated Press story.

This raised the ire of proper Republican women across the Lone Star State. But another group should be equally pissed: practicing whores.

I confess that, despite macho posturing among fellow Texas men, I passed on any and all opportunities with those practicing the oldest profession, and therefore have no firsthand experience. But I have heard this on good authority: Good ones, the real pros, will kiss you first.

Not so with Republicans. And this remark by Perry's strategist is actually a bigger insult to a group seldom quoted by the mainstream media.

The Iraq war, tax breaks for the rich, overseas tax havens for corporations, Enron, the subprime mortgage debacle, abuse of credit card holders, assaults on civil rights and liberties, incentives for polluters and corporations that export jobs, neglect of returning veterans, whittling away at Medicare and Medicaid ... I never got kissed before any of those mind-boggling travesties.

So, it seems like a worse insult to those hardworking women who are, well, honest enough to be hookers out in the open. They are at least above-board, and I doubt that they would put you at risk for diseases much worse than the ones Republicans have already inflicted upon us.

The standard political response to all this, of course, is that "Governor Goodhair" is in trouble yet again, not long after his infamous secession remark. And this gives plenty of cannon fodder to U.S. Sen Kay Bailey Hutchison, a "moderate" Republican who is almost certain to be his challenger in the 2010 GOP gubernatorial primary.

But I'm honestly concerned about the aspersions cast herein upon the hardworking crack whores of our mean streets. They're a skanky bunch, to be sure. But, to even suggest that the current stalwarts of the Republican Party, especially in this state that spawned the likes of Il Doofus, are a lot better than them? Well, it's a "stretch." (No double-entendre intended -- really!)

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Bringing The New Torquemada To Justice

By Manifesto Joe

I confess that I've been a little nonplussed about the Obama administration's lack of aggressiveness in bringing the Bush-era war criminals to justice. The man who seems to present the biggest legal target is the modern Grand Inquisitor himself, Dick "Torquemada" Cheney.

It isn't merely that Cheney is a contemptible, sneering weasel who doesn't know when to give up on his special brand of right-wing whitewash. From the available evidence, it was the "vice president" of the time who is most directly traceable to orders to carry out "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Writing for Truthout, Steve Weissman brought out a few unsavory points about the employment of torture (yeah, let's call it by its honest name):

Cheney's signature success with torture came when the CIA sent al-Qaeda operative Ibn al-Shayk al-Libi to Egypt, where he "confessed" that Saddam Hussein had trained al-Qaeda in chemical weapons. Al-Libi's statement, extracted under torture, was the smoking gun that Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell all used to sell their pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. So, don't tell Cheney that "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" do not work. They damned sure do if your goal is to get the propaganda you want to go to war.

Few in Congress or the mass media have pushed Cheney on this "great success." Fewer still have seen that that Bush and Cheney's illegal use of torture to sell their pre-emptive war in Iraq was probably their single greatest crime. Why the reluctance? Why do so many Americans refuse to see the obvious?

In large part because Congress, the corporate media, and even the general public were to some degree complicit in the crime. Whatever the CIA told Congressional leaders about waterboarding, sensory and sleep deprivation, stress positions, or sending captives to other counties for interrogation, only the mentally challenged had any excuse for not knowing from the public record at the time the rough outlines of how far Bush and Cheney had stepped beyond the law.

To read the entire article, go here.

The implications are far-reaching. It isn't merely a matter of Cheney, Il Doofus & Co. knowingly and deliberately violating the Geneva Conventions. They used evidence extracted from a terrorism suspect as part of the argument to drag the U.S. into one of our most needless and regrettable wars. The Iraqi loss of life has been staggering in proportion, comparable to that of the "pacification" of the Philippines over 100 years ago.

The probable waterboarding of one suspect may have led to slaughter on a mass scale, and robbed the U.S. of any moral authority it may have had, for generations. "We" weren't supposed to be doing this sort of thing -- that was the kind of thing that "we" said made the "bad guys" bad.

It's pretty obvious now that basing a war, at least in part, on the confession of one wretch who was being subjected to prolonged torture was the height of pseudo-pragmatic imbecility. I consider myself a reasonably tough person. But if you waterboarded me enough times, I would probably sign my house and car over to you and confess to the murders of Jonbenet Ramsey and the Lindbergh baby.

There's a rogue's gallery of suspects implicated in this, but the biggest cheese of all seems to be the gangsta that Il Doofus picked to be sort of a de facto president, his chief operating officer, "Torquemada" Cheney.

(An aside: One thing I am very proud of is that I never bought into any of this. I could see Bush becoming a neocon opportunist with his "Axis of Evil" State of the Union speech in January 2002, and I never believed anything the bastards said from that point on. Unfortunately, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and much of the allegedly liberal media did buy into at least some of it. As for me, I was against the Iraq misadventure from the very beginning.)

Sadly, Dick Cheney is likely to be dead of heart failure long before it would be possible for him to serve a day in jail. Obama and Eric Holder don't seem to want to push this, and if they don't change their minds, it will go down as another one of those hideous scandals that litter our history. I mentioned the "pacification" of the Philippines after the Spanish-American war. It's estimated that up to 1 million Filipinos died as a result, from fighting, hunger or disease. I learned this from independent reading as an adult. It's not often in history books. We mustn't let this episode of war crime slip into some footnote.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

With Lubbock Vote, Neo-Prohibitionist Movement Seems To Have Finally Passed Out

By Manifesto Joe

Lubbock, Texas, is certainly the biggest "dry" city in Texas (population about 210,000) and perhaps the largest "dry" one in the U.S. If the early returns are accurate, that is about to change. The Associated Press reports that in a local election, Lubbock voters are favoring beer, wine and liquor sales in stores, by 64 percent in early counts.

The city has had a weird system for years. You could get "liquor-by-the-drink" in a bar or restaurant inside the city limits. But there were (and are) no package stores, and you couldn't get a six-pack in a convenience store. The city has the biggest university in that desolate region, Texas Tech, and the students of age there have to go to a "wet" suburb to buy a bottle of wine. (Or a case of beer -- now, doesn't that sound like a bright idea? I'll get to that irony later.)

I grew up in a "dry" town, but one that had smaller towns nearby where miscreants would sell any kind of booze to just about anybody, even 16-year-olds. I don't recall that those in-town conditions stopped anyone from drinking.

My family was religious and generally teetotaling; I recall being about 11 and taking a ride home with a Little League teammate of mine, and seeing an astonishing thing. My buddy's dad, home from his job as an offshore oil-rig roughneck, was behind the wheel and taking swigs of whiskey out of a "fifth" bottle. Little Buddy-roo and I were in the back seat, watching the spectacle of old Ken as he passed this rather large bottle to his bud in the front passenger seat. I'm not sure, but I think they were also chasing with beer.

I was too young to realize that these older dudes were actually risking the lives of little J.T. and me in the back seat. But there wasn't much traffic on small-town streets and semirural roads, and this seemed to be something intrinsic to the local culture. Because liquor couldn't be had just anywhere, these men (and quite a few women) would drive long distances to get it. And, in doing so, they didn't seem to think much about the consequences of driving while consuming, except to evade the local gendarmes. My recollection is that this wasn't hard to do.

Attitudes have changed for the better since 1967, even in Gothic regions like where I grew up. But this drove home a point: Prohibition actually, ironically, encourages binge drinking, and also drunken driving.

On a long-ago vacation, I remember passing through a flat, dry West Texas hamlet on the way to New Mexico. This place had a reported population of about 400; but this was Saturday night, and it looked like some kind of mini-Vegas. Looking around at the local commerce, it wasn't hard to figure out what the attraction was.

They might as well have changed the name of this little place to "Beer." For population, they might as well have put on there: Weekdays, 400. Weekends, 10,000.

A certainty is that these genuine and drugstore cowboys, who had come to town that night in their F-2000 pickup trucks, were unlikely to drive 40 or more miles back home without having had a few brewskis. And just maybe, more than a few. And maybe that was just a chaser for some hard liquor. Being a native of this region, I can tell you, there aren't very many Merlot-sipping men living outside of Highland Park.

I actually saw stranger, more opposite things in New Mexico, like package stores adjoining bars. There, a feller can git half-swacked in the bar, then finish the job by picking up a bottle for a nightcap on the way home! Again, one little blessing is that a lot of roads in this part of the world are straight and not well-traveled.

In Arizona, I saw strange, opposite things as well. You can buy hard liquor in a 7-Eleven until wee hours. It's nearly like that in Louisiana, too. And California is far more lenient than Texas, in some ways.

Then, there are the serious Puritans. I've never been to Utah, but I know someone who lived there. The Mormons are surprisingly tolerant of liquor-drinking miscreants. They just require their liquor stores to look like mini-Leavenworths. They want to make certain that their Jack Mormons feel like sleazy reprobates.

I lived in Oklahoma for a short time, and the package stores there look like low-rent warehouses, with very minimal advertising. You can't buy cold 5 percent beer anywhere in the state legally -- the real stuff has to come from a package store, and you have to chill it yourself. In 7-Eleven, they offer a relic of Prohibition, 3.2 percent beer. (They have that stuff in Colorado, too, but not with as many
other restrictions.) I recall a Lawton, Oklahoma, store clerk giving me a stern moral lecture when I was surprised that I couldn't get real beer in a corner store there -- "You gotta keep yore nose real clean up hyere, Tex ..."

And yet, living in Oklahoma, while I was jogging on residential streets, I don't remember anywhere else where I saw as many empty pint bottles of Wild Turkey littering the gutters. Obviously people were riding around in cars drinking hard liquor, then tossing their empties.

The point is that Prohibition measures, even partial ones, clearly do not work. They just make people drink furtively, and actually encourage them to drive far pieces to get it.

Similar arguments can be framed regarding marijuana, but I'll save that for another post.

Anyway, my hat's off to the folks out in Lubbock, for finally seeing reason. I don't own a real cowboy hat -- I like fedoras and a few variations -- but I'll take those off to the good folks of Lubbock. I might have gone to Texas Tech, but I went to a small Lutheran college instead. Lutherans don't have major problems with beer.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Hey, Right-Wing Machos -- The Manassa Mauler Was A New Deal Democrat

I'm really sick of right-wingers acting like they're the ones who invented toughness. Some of the toughest people on this Earth have seen or have been in a lot of fights with hired toughs -- the kind of people they were up against don't usually have to do their own fighting, they can rent it out. Here's an example of one of the world's toughest dudes ever, who was a progressive, pro-union liberal!

On June 24, 1895, the day Jack Dempsey was born, during Grover Cleveland's second term as president, America was still discovering itself. Colorado, which had become the 38th state in 1876, lurched into an uproar of mining booms and busts, miners' strikes and mine owners' brutal and casual slaughters. Photographs survive of private armies maintained supposedly to keep order, and in practice employed to gun down union men. "Three dollars a day," the mine barons said in effect, "for ten hours or twelve. You'll live in our houses, buy in our stores, and do what you're told. If you don't like it, ten immigrants back East are ready to take your job." Touring one deep gold mine, Ulysses S. Grant said, "This is as close to hell as I ever hope to find myself."

Miners who protested for shorter hours, better pay, and safer conditions underground risked their lives up top. One typical private army, the Silver Queen Guards -- employed by the owners of the Silver Queen mines in Georgetown, thirty miles west of Denver -- was better uniformed than the U.S. infantry, and at least as formidably armed. Massacres of union men bloody the pages of history. Dempsey's later populism and passion for social programs such as Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal persisted after he became a multimillionaire. He said he never forgot, nor did he want to forget, the ferocity with which the mining barons treated working men and their wives and children.

-- From A Flame of Pure Fire: Jack Dempsey and the Roaring '20s, by Roger Kahn -- MJ

With Specter Switch, It's Official: Modern Conservative Movement All But Dead

By Manifesto Joe

I was born, but it wasn't yesterday. Arlen Specter's decision to switch parties from Republican to Democrat has almost everything to do with political expediency and almost nothing to do with any change in the Pennsylvania senator's thinking.

Remember, this is the guy who, as a young lawyer, sold the Warren Commission on the single-bullet theory of the JFK assassination. That ought to speak volumes about his intellectual honesty. But in politics, you take it where you can get it. President Barack Obama, a relatively inexperienced but precocious politician, quickly welcomed Specter to the Democratic Party.

Perhaps most significant is what this signals for the modern conservative movement. Not that Specter was ever a conservative -- his voting record has been consistently independent and centrist.

But it wasn't that long ago (1995) that Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado, whose voting record was similar to Specter's, switched from Democrat to Republican.

In a nutshell, the conservative movement is now officially all but dead. And, if the Republican Party doesn't change soon, it may again become a minority party for 40 years.

Specter cited the movement of the GOP to the far right, and the number of Pennsylvanians who are registering as Democrats. Republicans, moving to the far right? Ya think? Specter was first elected in 1980 as part of the "Reagan Revolution," so it's hard to see how he could have missed that over the years.

What has changed is that a lot of Americans, especially younger ones, now see the very real and calamitous consequences of what passed for "conservative" governance for most of the past 28 years.

There's a revived awareness that the public interest matters more than self-interest, and that is a great antidote to the poisonous ideas that have often been at the core of modern conservatism. There is some diversity among Republicans -- their ranks range from Ayn Rand atheists to the Religious Right. But the nexus that held them together for 28 years was the idea that an economy can prosper through the unintended consequences of everybody rapaciously pursuing their own pot of gold.

Who needs planning? Who needs regulation? Who needs to pay taxes, for that matter?

We do. America does. And our rich friends in the gated communities are going to have to ante up as well. The old "tax and spend" and "class warfare" mantras of conservatives have become cliches that twentysomething Americans grew up hearing but don't buy anymore.

Specter, again, is no conservative. But his switch signals that centrists no longer believe that they have a place in the Republican Party. Our economy's future looks less like the Adam Smith model and more like that of John Maynard Keynes.

America has seen two distinct philosophies battling for hearts and minds for over a century. The Specter switch is, I think, one more big indicator of which side is ultimately going to win.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Governor Goodhair Redux: Texas Becomes Laughingstock Of D.C.

By Manifesto Joe

I promised more on Governor Goodhair. It seems that in our nation's capital, people are still, two weeks later, talking about Gov. Rick Perry's veiled threat of Texas secession. It's become the most popular joke on Capitol Hill.

It's been no secret to many of us here, for years, that we have a nice-looking cretin for a governor. I suppose that's a marginal improvement over an anthropoid-looking cretin. I refer here to Perry's predecessor, the one they call W., who recently left the White House. (Also known as Chimpy, and here as Il Doofus.)

But a cretin is still a cretin. In a state that once produced the likes of LBJ, Sam Rayburn, Olin Teague, Ralph Yarborough and others, it's frustrating to watch the procession of Republican half-wits in high office. Hell, I'd settle for Jim Wright, or even DINO Lloyd Bentsen.

Texas Democrats seized the day on this one. There's a T-shirt in circulation with Perry's face on it, with something like, "Republican Class of '09 -- most likely to secede."

The national comedians didn't miss this. Jay Leno, I thought, had the best line: He hoped that Texas really would secede from the Union "so we can invade them for their oil."

In Washington, McClatchy Newspapers reported this:

Rep. Charlie Gonzalez, D- San Antonio, said dryly, "It has been a topic of conversation. We have been the butt of many jokes." His favorite suggestion: "that Charlie Gonzalez be ambassador to the U.S. from Texas."

"I’m bilingual; I speak English and Texan," he said.

But on a more serious note, he said: "I think the governor got carried away. You see posturing in preparation for the Republican primary. It serves no useful purpose."

Perry is all but certain to be challenged by U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in the 2010 GOP primary, and political analysts say the governor is playing to the party’s conservative base with his anti-government stance. Perry is one of a handful of GOP governors who have refused part of the federal stimulus money, specifically, $555 million for Texas in additional unemployment funds.

But the secession suggestion isn’t playing well with one Texas conservative: Republican U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a former state Supreme Court judge.

"Well, I don’t think it’s particularly useful," he told reporters during his weekly interview. "The legal response is 'you can’t do it.’ We fought a Civil War. You can’t do it."

For the entire McClatchy story, here's the link.

This is clearly a gamble by Perry for the redneck vote, which is considerable in this state. But the sheer ignorance of this won't be lost on everybody -- apparently it wasn't lost even on the likes of Sen. John "Cornhole" Cornyn. And it may not be lost on all those unemployed people who will be denied benefits because of Governor Goodhair's grandstanding.

Not that Kay the Breck Girl (R.I.P. Molly Ivins) would be much of an improvement, but my money's on ol' Kay Bailey for next year's GOP gubernatorial nomination. We have it on authority as high as Kelly Clarkson that Kay has great taste in fragrances. And she was a UT cheerleader, while Perry was a "yell" leader at A&M.

Well, marginal improvements are better than none.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Why Does Governor Goodhair Hate America?

By Manifesto Joe

By now I suppose that everybody who follows matters political knows that the governor of my state, Rick Perry, made a statement at a tax day "Tea Party" gathering that strongly suggested that Texas might, under great duress, want to secede from the Union.

I had hoped Governor Goodhair meant that we Texans could all just get out of the Teamsters or the United Auto Workers en masse. There ain't very many of us who is members of them there union outfits anyway, so there would be no change that anyone outside Texas urban areas would notice.

But unfortunately, I don't think that's quite what Governor Goodhair meant. He was probably pandering to the rubes, the people who don't quite get it -- that the reason they drive on paved streets, can cross bridges without crashing into the river, can get their elderly parents on Social Security, that their children can construct English sentences even if they haven't gone to Yale, is because taxes are collected.

There are a couple of things to remember about the governor's statement. One is that he's facing a potentially tough campaign for re-election, even though he's already been the state's longest-serving governor. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, appears to be tired of Washington and seems to want a swell job back home. She sort of looks like a moderate Republican by Texas standards, so Perry may be setting up early to line up the right-wing yahoo base.

Then there's the matter of intellect. Rick Perry has a great head of dark hair, and from all the female accounts that I've heard, he is the closest thing to a Ken doll we've ever had in high office in this state. But, as the late Molly Ivins often pointed out, Governor Goodhair ain't the sharpest pencil in the box. He's a grad of Texas A&M -- not a place known for high academic distinction -- and he majored in animal husbandry. His grade-point average was 2.3. Oh, by the way, he was an Aggie cheerleader.

This would explain why he's not quite up to the legal and civics questions here, i.e., that it actually would be quite illegal for Texas to quit the Union. The bozos actually did it along with several other Southern states back in 1861, and the sad result was 600,000 Americans killed on the battlefield. I guess they don't teach much about the Civil War in Animal Husbandry 101.

But I don't think Goodhair's lack of cultural literacy is to blame here. He's looking ahead to 14 years in the Governor's Mansion, and CNBC's Chris Matthews tells me that 31% of Texans who responded to a poll actually think that Texas has a legal right to secede from the Union. He's cynically betting that the ignorant rubes in this state are numerous enough to get him past Kay Bailey in a nasty 2010 Republican primary.

To read the latest on this, here's a link to the Houston Chronicle's online edition. Also, there will be more about our illustrious Governor Goodhair in subsequent posts.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

A Belated Tribute To Utah Phillips (1935-2008)

There's a good bio on Wikipedia. -- MJ

Politically Incorrect Thoughts: Would No Nukes Lead To More Kooks?

By Manifesto Joe

This is from a book by Roger Kahn:

Late in April 1915, as spring came to Flanders, the German army introduced poison gas -- greenish iridescent chlorine, choking, vomiting, lung-searing chlorine -- into trenches near the village of Ypres. In 1916 the German navy began unrestricted submarine warfare -- sinking cargo ships and passenger vessels without warning. ...

This was war, not marbles. The British army introduced its own weapon of terror, the armored tank, spitting machine-gun and cannon fire, crushing flowers, flesh, bone, everything in its path, the dreaded mythic juggernaut turned real. U.S. reporters applauded "Tommy Atkins' new toy." The German soldiers who found themselves facing the first tanks on September 18, 1916, reacted in an understandable way. They panicked and ran.

This passage came from an unlikely source, A Pure Flame of Fire: Jack Dempsey and the Roaring '20s. Kahn's 1999 sports biography shrewdly works in the ambiance of the times rather than just sticking to the details of legendary boxing champ Dempsey's tempestuous, colorful life.

While recovering from a prolonged illness, I was seeking something "light" to read, and found Kahn's work, surprisingly, somewhere in the middle. At the same time, I read accounts of President Barack Obama's idealistic call for a nuclear-free world.

The connection? Kahn pointed out briefly but eloquently what kind of enormities warring humans are capable of in a non-nuclear time. We've certainly seen plenty of carnage since the U.S. first used atomic bombs in 1945. But we've also seen circumspection and restraint that we might not have seen otherwise.

The main thing that kept the Cold War "cold" for 45 years was what came to be known as "mutual assured destruction" or by that most appropriate acronym "MAD." Looming large over nasty local conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua and Afghanistan was always the prospect of tens of millions dead, on both sides -- and untold horrors for the "survivors."

And, with "no nukes," can it be imagined what a conventional war between U.S.-NATO forces and a Soviet-Chinese alliance would have been like?

Let's suppose that a "Star Wars" ICBM interception system could be made to work, with virtual certainty. Suppose there were no exceptions -- U.S. cities and strategic bases would be protected from attack by bomber-delivered devices, and from low-flying cruise missiles launched from submarines.

In such a world, the dreams of Ronald Reagan, Edward Teller and the other 1980s "Star Wars" proponents would have all come true. I doubt that is quite what Barack Obama has in mind, but in such a scenario, nuclear weapons have been, for all practical purposes, eradicated from Earth.

If human history is the basis from which to forecast, the slaughter that might result would suffice to make a Joseph Mengele or Pol Pot queasy.

Humans have a vast history of being boundlessly greedy, paranoid and savagely unconcerned about the lives of others when they are not restrained by moral values, prison bars, higher reasoning, fear of damnation or anything else that can impose and enforce ethics. I do not know if this depravity is innate, but it has surely been witnessed by all but naive and sheltered people.

Nations behave in much the same way as individuals. If not bound by economic weakness, moral admonitions or fear of destruction, they are most certainly capable of enormities.

The "MAD" acronym has a ring of truth. Since 1945, we have spawned generations of closet neurotics. The neurosis has reared its head in forms as diverse as yippies and Lyndon LaRouche supporters. An estimated 19 percent of Americans are mentally ill and in need of treatment, some psychiatrists say. Drug abuse and alcoholism are common. We escape reality in elaborate worlds of frivolity created by the blind poets of our age, TV scriptwriters.

Approaching my 53rd birthday, I cannot recall a time in which nuclear weapons did not exist. As a small child mesmerized by TV, I saw an animated microcosm of the Cold War, a 1950s minimalist depiction of a human figure fleeing radioactive fallout. Public-service announcements about where to find shelter from radiation have long vanished from the little screen, but the image still haunts me.

All that considered, I would rather live in an age of anxiety than be killed or maimed in an age of greater carnage. War is far from obsolete -- but across much of the globe, unlimited warfare is of necessity a thing of the past -- for now. With all the terror that nuclear weapons present for humanity, arguably the world is now, in a grotesque way, a somewhat safer place in which to live.

I urge the unconvinced to dredge up history lessons and ponder the events of the decades before the use of the A-bomb on Hiroshima.

When Ronald Reagan was a preschooler, the colonial powers of Europe began a war. The U.S. was later lured into this war to "make the world safe for democracy."

Hundreds of thousands were killed in single battles, like at the Somme in 1916. The doomed were, like cattle, prodded headlong into ritual killing at the command of "over the top." Many more lost limbs, faces, lungs, minds.

That was supposed to be "the war to end all wars," but it wasn't. Fighting broke out during the 1930s in Spain, China and Ethiopia. Sometimes this was rivaled or exceeded by the organized slaughter and starvation orchestrated in the Soviet Union during those dark years.

After 1939 the world was immersed in a struggle of previously inconceivable proportions, in holocausts unrivaled in history, in a crimson, six-year nightmare -- until a warm, clear day in August, when the human race got a sobering glimpse of what the end might look like.

(An aside -- while hindsight is always 20/20, I think Harry Truman made a serious moral mistake in August 1945. He should have had the first A-bomb dropped just outside Tokyo Bay, as a demonstration, then sent a message to the imperial Japanese government: "Any questions?")

Barbarism certainly hasn't vanished since then, but its onslaught seems to have slowed. Holocausts seem to occur in remote areas like Sudan -- and, notably, in areas where there really are "no nukes." Carefully measured wars sometimes kill no more soldiers than U.S. highways kill motorists in the course of a year. (The civilians lost as "collateral damage" are, of course, often another question.)

Life now has a profound uneasiness. But it is life, as opposed to the very permanent alternative.

Where would I, an American male born in 1956, be now if nuclear weapons had never been invented, and the threat of their use did not exist? I suspect I would have been killed in battle long ago, or disfigured by sophisticated conventional weapons, fighting a war against communists that neither side would have been likely to "win."

Yet I find myself urged by my president, a manifestly brilliant and good man, to in some sense open the Pandora's box, to eliminate the nuclear threat, to potentially turn the conventional might of nations loose in the world once more.

I find myself looking back with neurotic nostalgia to the "MAD" theory. It may have kept me alive for nearly 53 years.

Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.

Yes, I'm Still Alive ...

... But recovering from a prolonged illness. I will be posting within the next couple of days. -- MJ