Category: Current Affairs

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Just One Thing About That

And now a word about The Campaign: John McCain has decided that our economy is so strong that he needs to leave the campaign trail to make it stronger. It would be unseemly to put Country Second and indulge in something so vulgar as politics by debating his opponent. Stop for a moment and admire McCain for trying to execute a clever political gambit by trying to haul himself above the muck of politics for a moment. Then consider the election-year crises that the country has come through while candidates carried on their campaigns:

2004: The whole Iraq endeavor coming undone.

1992: Economic recession.

1980: The Iran hostage crisis.

1968: Intensified fighting in Vietnam, assassination of leading national figures.

1964: Nation in turmoil over civil rights campaign in the South.

1952: Korean War.

1944: World War II.

1940: World War II.

1936: The Depression.

1932: The Depression.

1916: World War I.

1864: Civil War.

1860: Slavery/disunion crisis.

1856: National coming apart at seams over slavery.

1812: War with Britain.

Gee, we managed to have an uninterrupted campaign during 1864? When the nation was sufferiing through an appallingly bloody series of battles? You mean Lincoln didn’t try to put a hold on politics while trying to fulfill his duties as commander-in-chief? Neither world wars nor economic calamity put campaigns off the rails? Stunning.

The history shows what an empty gesture McCain’s move is. Obama got it right when he said that this is exactly the moment when the candidates need to be in front of the people.

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The $25,000 Solution

As I’ve made annoyingly clear to most of my friends and acquaintances–the people who stand still long enough to hear me say a full sentence before looking for a safe exit–I have a simple, elegant answer to many of the intractable ills that plague America: poverty, a failing educational system, crime, the illicit drug trade, stagnant inner-city economies, the obesity epidemic.

Here it is: Let’s give $25,000 in cash, no strings attached, to each and every American who lives below the federally set poverty line (and no, I don’t care what your papers say: if you’re here, you’re an American). It’s a yearly payment until you don’t qualify anymore (and no, the payment does not count as income and wouldn’t disqualify you; only earnings independent of the poverty stipend count to get you out of poverty and off the program. We’re talking about cold, hard cash here: no bureaucrats wanted, no social engineers need apply for a grant.

I can hear the peals of outrage: You mean, just give all those poor people all that money? Just GIVE it to them? That’s crazy! They’ll spend it all on crack!

I answer unruffled: It may be nuts. And some of that nicely redesigned cash may be spent unwisely. But what we’re administering is the only weapon that’s proof against all the problems mentioned above. When confronted with difficulty, doubt or obstacles of any sort, the affluent in America utter slogans about values and steadfastness. As their words die on the wind, they wheel in their trusty artillery: the credit accounts and cash reserves. Meantime, we bleed little dribbles of cash into the lives of the poor, and all it does is keep them poor. Their poverty and all that accompanies it, from lousy health care to crappy schools, is tolerated with a wink of concern and a nod to reform, and little, very little, changes. It’s not that we don’t mean to do better. We do. Millions of people far better than me have dedicated their lives to improving life for others. I just think it’s time the rest of us, through our gigantic government ATM machine, got into the act.

Don’t think about the downside for the moment–where in the world will we get all that money?–think about the upside: First of all, an economic stimulus that would have groceries and big-box stores and banks and other services the rest of us take for granted fighting to get into neighborhoods they’ve shunned for generations; that stimulus would also have a far-reaching impact in creating new government revenue. Second, removing the principal motive and driver for most inner-city crime. Third, giving the have-nots some real clout about where they send their kids to school. Fourth, providing resources for community self-improvement projects.

Now about the cash. Spending that kind of dough should give us pause. Some recent statistics show that 37 million Americans live below the federal “poverty line.” Let’s round up to 40 million, since things haven’t gotten any easier in the year and a half since those numbers came out. Now if we gave each of our less fortunate fellow citizens 25 grand apiece–everyone in the family gets a payment, even the kids and the ex-cons who never graduated eighth grade–that comes to $1 trillion.

But where there’s a will, there’s a way. Over the last five or six years, we’ve been reminded of that repeatedly, especially when it comes to the government and money. Iraq: $550 billion and counting (that amounts to a $25,000 payment to every Iraqi–even the ones who don’t love us). The negative economic impact over the next generation is forecast to be as much as $3 trillion. Bush tax cuts: the total number is so high it will make your nose bleed, but the yearly cost if they’re made permanent is expected to be $400 billion. Then there’s the Year of the Bailout. It’s getting hard to keep track, but off the top of my head: $30 billion for Bear Stearns; Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac: $200 billion; Great Bailout of Ought-Eight: at least $700 billion. I feel like I’m forgetting a couple hundred billion somewhere.

Now, the architects of our tax cuts, wars, and financial mega-rescues say roughly the same thing in defending their handiwork: it’s all necessary for our prosperity, well-being, and national survival. I’ll make the same claim for my $25,000 Solution: It’s a prescription for the economic and social ailments that beset not only the 40 million people who live in poverty, but for the entire society that has failed in its efforts to address those ailments.

And really, after the Bush years, what could it hurt to try?

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Go Cubs Go

Walking the dog this morning, we encountered a younger couple pushing a kid in a stroller. The guy had a Cubs T-shirt on. “They’re gonna clinch today, right?” I said. “Oh–you never know. They could still lose it.” Technically, it was true, but I thought it was an overly cautious, self-consciously Cubsy thing to say. As it happened, the Cubs did win this afternoon. They won the National League Central Division title. We’ll see what the next step is. While we let the suspense simmer, we can consider some of the team’s musical history

Growing up in the Chicago area–the far south suburbs, in my case–baseball was a summer fixture on WGN. The station had a heavy schedule of both Cubs and White Sox game. Back then, WGN didn’t have an ownership connection with either team (that would come in 1981, when WGN’s owner, the Tribune Company, bought the Cubs from the Wrigley chewing gum dynasty). The fact you could count on seeing 150 or 160 games a year, including all those weekday afternoon games from lightless Wrigley Field, had something to do with creating a pretty avid fan population that followed both teams. At least I know I and most of my friends did. Eventually, the Sox went to WFLD, on Channel 32. Their games were fun to watch because Harry Caray, who had alienated his bosses in St. Louis and Oakland, took up residence on the Sox airwaves. Many commercial breaks featured Harry and Falstaff beer, and Harry delighted the fans at Comiskey Park by doing his play by play from the barren bleachers in center field, his booth perched about 500 feet from home plate. On hot days, the Sox set up an open-air shower out there for fans to cool off.

When the Sox left WGN (Channel 9 in Chicago), the station responded by adding Cubs games to its broadcast schedule–more than 150 a season. Maybe that was part of developing more of a Cubs-centric fan base. More important was that the long-comatose franchise woke up and started a run of about seven seasons or so in which the team went from a horrifying 10th place finish in 1966 to challenging for firstt in ’67; the following seasons ranged from very good but heart rending (1969) to decent and unembarrassing (1973, when the Cubs and several division foes wallowed around the .500 mark until the final week of the season). Needless to say, the notion that the Cubs could make what was never back then called “the post-season” was a theory we never saw proved.

I did mention music up there. WGN’s telecasts in the late ’60s featured Mitch Miller-like choral numbers that a music salesman in a plaid blazer might have pushed as “peppy.” One had a line that went “Hey, hey, holy mackerel, no doubt about it/The Cubs are on their way.” “Hey, hey” was WGN announcer Jack Brickhouse’s signature home-run call; it’s now enshrined on the Wrigley Field foul poles. In due course, that sappy number was supplanted by a mindlessly cheerful ditty that started out, “It’s a beautiful day for a ballgame, for a ballgame today.”

Eventually, I moved away from Chicago, well beyond the reach of WGN’s signal and then, when it became a national “superstation,” into austere Berkeley households with no cable TV. In 1984, the Cubs did what they had never done in my lifetime and played well enough long enough to get into the playoffs. No need to go into how that turned out. By that time, though, Steve Goodman had written the best Cubs song ever: “The Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request.” That’s wrong, actually. It’s the best baseball fan song, ever–unique for its combination of humor, poetry, and rueful but affectionate disdain for the home team.

Goodman died a few days before the Cubs clinched their playoff spot in ’84. But by then, he had already composed and recorded the song that the team now uses as an anthem after a home win: “Go Cubs Go.” A year ago, Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn wrote a great piece about how the song came to be written. The best part is that some of the team’s execs disliked Goodman because of “The Dying Cub Fan.” I don’t know where any of those guys are now. But today, when the Cubs won, Goodman’s voice was ringing out over Wrigley Field, and it sounded like every fan in the place was singing “Go Cubs Go.”

(Lyrics after the jump.)

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Continue reading “Go Cubs Go”

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‘Well Done, Good and Faithful Servants’

Seeing this headline–“Administration is Seeking $700 Billion for Wall Street Bailout“–and this one–“At Least 40 Are Killed in Blast at Pakistan Hotel“–I reflected briefly on how we got here. My quest took me to Bush II’s first State of the Union address, in 2001. The new president talked about a nation at peace, a government that enjoyed a sizable budget surplus, and how he would go about fixing all that. His stirring conclusion:

“We all came here for a reason. We all have things we want to accomplish and promises to keep. Juntos podemos — together we can.

“We can make Americans proud of their government. Together we can share in the credit of making our country more prosperous and generous and just, and earn from our conscience and from our fellow citizens the highest possible praise: Well done, good and faithful servants.”

Well done, indeed, Mr. President.

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Miscellany

A couple small things, perhaps random and unconnected:

My favorite online find this week (and maybe ever): The Boston Globe’s “The Big Picture” blog. It publishes several topical photo essays each week. I happened across it while looking for space pictures of Hurricane Ike. What I found instead was a gallery of hurricane pictures shot from the International Space Station and various shuttle missions. From far above, the storms are ethereal in their beauty. All the other collections I’ve seen on The Big Picture are absorbing, too. Check out the current show, on the worldwide observance of Ramadan.

Words still matter: Attempting to justify my long-term New Yorker subscription by actually reading the thing, I picked up the September 15 issue yesterday. It fell open to a story called “A Cloud of Smoke,” about disputed findings of post-mortem examinations of a former New York police officer who may have died from the after-effects of working on the World Trade Center pile after September 11, 2001. It’s a good piece of journalism, but I was captivated by the opening of this paragraph:

“The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has the unrenovated pallor of a forgotten city agency. Dimmed by a concrete overbite, the street entrance manages to look at once ominous and shabby—a homely approach to an agency that houses one of the largest and busiest forensic labs in the country. Even by the standards of other big cities, New York has a prolific capacity to produce dead bodies, and, as Chief Medical Examiner, Charles Hirsch is responsible for the processing of some twenty-five thousand fatalities a year—nearly half the city’s annual total. Roughly fifty-five hundred of those cases require autopsy, including all deaths that are violent, sudden, mysterious, or in some way related to public or consumer safety. …”

“Unrenovated pallor.” “Dimmed by a concrete overbite.” “At once ominous and shabby.” I felt like I was standing in the building when I read that.

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So Long, Ike; Next Up: Hurricane Nutjob

Ikenasa091208

We continue with more exclusive coverage of the coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. The image above is the storm as it looked last Wednesday from the International Space Station, which was at an altitude of 220 miles. (For comparison’s sake, the GOES satellites that provide most of the views we see of Earth weather are parked in geosynchronous orbits with an altitude of 22,300 miles. The Terra and Aqua earth observatory satellites that regularly provide stunning images of wildfires and other events work at an altitude of about 430 miles.) NASA has posted a gallery of ISS shots of Ike. And if you like these ethereal views of killer storms, see a wonderful collection published last week on the Boston Globe’s The Big Picture blog.

Enough fawning over pictures. Now to the serious business at hand: If you think those photographs merely depict awesome natural forces at work, you’re sadly mistaken. No. Just like Katrina before it, those who see world weather as a giant conspiracy have declared that Hurricane Ike was a storm on behalf of (someone’s) scheme for global domination.

First, there’s this: An alert from Kevin Martin, a self-described meteorologist in Southern California, that “chemtrails” (a type of evil aircraft condensation trail) were detected last week in areas of the United States along Ike’s forecast path. Whoa. If you’re not sold on the forecaster’s credentials after reading that, check out his public plea for letters of recommendation so that he could be admitted Mississippi State’s online course for would-be TV weathercasters. (There’s more to Kevin’s story, too: one of his inspirations, it turns out, is that he was once struck by lightning.)

Then there’s this: Scott Stevens, formerly of Pocatello, Idaho, TV weatherman fame, announced before Ike’s landfall that “this entire storm is manufactured.” Scott, like Kevin, also saw dark doings overhead in the Midwest before the remnants of Ike got there. Faceless Global Dominators were manipulating weather to fill all the region’s rivers and streams before the moisture-laden ex-hurricane arrived. The motive behind the storm and associated “tweaking,” apparently, is economic chaos. As if we need any more help.

My one and only question to the World Weather Conspiracy folks would be: In olden times, before the advent of high technology–or maybe I should say human high technology, because the Faceless Dominators could be extraterrestrials or Greek or Norse gods unhappy in their retirement–who was responsible for all the floods, droughts, hail storms, heat waves, cold snaps and other weather catastrophes that beset us?

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Lipstick & Dipsticks

Lipstick091308

Dipstick091308

Exclusive coverage of media coverage of Hurricane Ike’s rampage in Texas. While so-called serious journalists continue to document our looming presidential disaster, here’s a little video editor humor for you: At midday today, CNN showed a montage of storm damage in the Galveston area. They flashed some shots of downed power lines in the parking lot of a business called Lipstick; upon further perusal, the sign on the building reads Lipstick Gentlemen’s Club. There is a “topless entertainment” establishment on Texas Highway 146, listed variously as in Kemah or Bacliff, just outside Galveston (Google street view here).

OK — no worries. Even lap-dance palaces can be terrorized by rampaging storms like Ike.

But the very next shot in the montage showed a big sign saying Dipsticks. I can’t place it exactly, but it looks like it could belong to an automotive shop about 100 miles north of where the first shot was taken. Just a hunch, but I’d guess some CNN editor got hold of the tape, saw the Lipstick and Dipsticks, and couldn’t resist splicing them together. It’s one of my storm coverage highlights.

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‘Urgent Fundraising Appeal’

Here’s an email I found in my spam-infested inbox this morning. The subject line reads “CA High Speed Trains – URGENT FUNDRAISING APPEAL” (the all-caps are in the original):

“Dear Dan Brekke,

You are being sent this email because you have been identified as a business leader in your community of BERKELEY by Californians for High Speed Trains. If you would not like to receive future emails please click the link at the bottom of this email.

Please go to our website to view the latest newsletter.

http://www.californiahighspeedtrains.com/newsletter/?mail=302004&email_id=2

Thank you!

The message came from a Gmail account, yesonprop1a@gmail.com.

To start at the beginning, we have a $10 billion bond measure on the November ballot to help fund a high-speed rail service between Northern and Southern California. This email purports to be a fundraising appeal for the yes side.

But right off the top–the email address, the subject line, the lack of detailed information in the note, and the absurd reference to me as a business leader in Berkeley–this looks and sounds like a scam. After checking the whois record for californiahighspeedtrains.com, which shows the domain was registered in May through a third party in Arizona, I checked out the newsletter the mail pointed me to.

The newsletter also raises alarms: the name of the mayor of San Francisco is misspelled. And the site contains this use of experimental English: “Californians Have A History of Supporting Project Like High Speed Rail. From their initial support of the Transcontinental Railroad to Their support of the troops during WWII.” At the very least, the newsletter was slapped together in a hurry.

I looked at the “donate” link in the newsletter. It does indeed send you to a donation page on a site called Californians for High-Speed Trains.” The page contains blanks for all your personal data, including credit card number. But get this: It’s not encrypted. So visitors are being invited to send their information unsecured and in the clear.

I checked the California Secretary of State websites, and there is in fact a group called Californians for High-Speed Trains. Their official site appears to be the same one mentioned in the email. The head of the group is listed as a Robert Pence of Sacramento, and looking him up shows that he has served as a staffer to the state Legislature and has been in the “communications” business for the last four years. He’s been listed as a principal supporter or opponent of other state initiative campaigns before this one.

The Secretary of State’s Cal-Access site has a listing for the group. The organization claims to have had $67,000 in donations from since January 1 to June 30 and to have racked up $111,000 in expenses between April and June. Of the early donations, $53,000 came from a predecessor group, Californians for a Safe and Reliable High-Speed Rail, which appears to have shut down and turned over its bank account to the new outfit. The other 15 grand in early contributions came from a handful of small donations, including $3,000 each from Hewlett-Packard and Oracle. (Just yesterday, the group filed a report saying it had gotten $30,000 from New York engineering and construction firm Parsons Brinckerhoff. What in the world could their interest in the initiative be?)

The expenditures are interesting: $88,000 of the $111,000 spent has gone to half a dozen separate campaign consultants in Sacramento; the biggest amount, $35,000, went to the firm of Townsend, Raimundo, Besler & Usher. The expenditure report also lists $15,000 owed to a political web services firm called Campaign Advantage, part of a company based in Bethesda, Maryland.

I’ve got some calls out about where that mail came from and am trying to find out why the campaign would have created an unencrypted donations page. I’ll post whatever answers I get. The bottom line, for now, is that Californians for High-Speed Trains sure looks like Full Employment for Consultants Inc. For an issue that has a lot of high-profile official support, including that of our governor, this campaign committee seems to be nothing more than a cottage industry for a bunch of Sacramento hangers-on.

[Update 11:26 a.m.: I just got hold of Robert Pence, the head of Californians for High-Speed Trains. He confirmed the campaign sent out the email and said he believes that the email was the work of Campaign Advantage. He said he doesn’t know about the unencrypted donations page. He promised the campaign’s media person, Greg Larson, would be in touch. More soon.]

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‘Este Poderoso y Peligroso Huracán’

Cubagustav

Hurricane Gustav turned out to non-calamitous to the United States. Its greatest fury was focused on western Cuba; the storm was a Category 4 hurricane, with sustained winds up to 150 mph, when it hit the island. A few days before the storm, I overheard a colleague who has been to Cuba more than once say that the government doesn’t mess around there when it comes to getting people out of harm’s way of a lethal-looking storm. An evacuation is ordered, and that’s it.

That doesn’t do much about property damage, though, and Gustav devastated the areas it struck. A country as rich and principled as ours can’t be caught aiding people ruled by a dictator, so the only help the United States has offered has been a relative pittance, $100,000, to be transmitted to aid groups rather than the Cuban government. Cuba’s answer: thanks but no thanks–if you really want to help, lift restrictions on travel and trade so we can buy what we need. (Yes–both the offer and response were political. But you have to wince a little when you read that the vast and boundlessly prosperous nation of East Timor kicked in $500,000 to help the Cuban recovery effort. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t have strong principles like ours.)

Cuba’s facing worse now: Another Category 4 storm, Hurricane Ike, is nearing. If it follows the forecast track, it may travel much of the length of the island (here’s something I didn’t know: Cuba is 700 miles long from Guantanamo in the east to Pinar del Rio, the province most heavily damaged by Hurricane Gustav, to the west; the greatest north-south width is about 100 miles; its area is 42,803 square miles, virtually identical to the state of Virginia. But I digress). The official word on Ike, quoted in the post title, is that it’s a powerful and dangerous hurricane.

Ike is expected make landfall in Guantanamo Province (but not in the immediate vicinity of our navy and detention base there), then spend 48 hours crossing from the northern to the southern coast, then curving back to the northwest and out over the Gulf of Mexico. With a path like that, it’s easy to imagine that it will affect virtually all of the island’s 11.4 million people.

I didn’t start out to write a plea for aid to Cuba–or for Haiti or the other islands and nations devastated by the recent storms–but how can one avoid it after you start to look at what’s going on. Donating to the agencies that might help is not as straightforward as going to the American Red Cross. But there are options:

The Canadian Red Cross, for one, is active in providing relief to Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean. It takes donations from us Yanks.

I also did come across a current list of U.S.-based agencies that take donations and operate in Cuba (see message 17 in the thread). Without having done any homework, they all sound reputable.

More later. (Oh, and that picture at the top: It’s a NASA image of Cuba after Hurricane Gustav passed. If you click on the image to look at the larger version(s), you can see the Isle of Youth off the southern coast, which was devastated by the storm. The milky turquoise color along the southern shoreline is sand stirred up the hurricane’s passage.)

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Ike and the Stormettes

Storms

That’s a National Hurricane Center image of currently active tropical-type storms: Tropical Depression Gustav is parked over Texarkana. Out in the Caribbean and Atlantic, Tropical Storms Hanna, Ike, and Josephine (from west to east) are conga-lining toward the North America neighborhood. Those latter three storms are all expected to reach hurricane status before making landfall … somewhere.

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