One Thing That Won't Be Tackled on Sunday: Issues

The following article is from the La Times

One Thing That Won't Be Tackled on Sunday: Issues
By Eli Pariser
Campaigns Director, MoveOn.org Voter Fund

When the Super Bowl is beamed into living rooms around the world Sunday, you can expect to see TV spots hyping cars, beer, razor blades, three different erectile dysfunction cures, toilet paper and snack foods.

The ads will be slick and clever, lavishly produced, brilliant in their marketing. Some, no doubt, will be sexually suggestive or violent. Most will cost $2 million to $3 million to produce and broadcast.

But here's what you won't see: a single ad about the big issues that face our country today.

Outrageous as it may sound, CBS has decided that ads selling erectile dysfunction medicines and toilet paper are appropriate for Americans, but serious discussion should be banned. An ad about our country, our war, our president, the state of our schools or the size of our budget deficit? That, in the eyes of CBS officialdom, would be too controversial.

We know, because we tried. We thought that the Super Bowl, with 130 million viewers, would be a great place to get our message out. So we held a contest on the Internet to select the best ad we could possibly run. The ad we selected — from 1,500 submissions — shows children cleaning offices, washing dishes and hauling trash. It ends with the question: "Guess who's going to pay off President Bush's $1-trillion deficit?" (Click the banner link above to view the ad).

But even though we were willing to pony up the $1.6 million to pay for it, CBS refused to sell us the time, citing what it says is a 50-year-old policy prohibiting ads that take stands on controversial public policy issues.

CBS claims its policy is designed to keep the Citibanks and Microsofts of the world from buying time to tell Americans how to think. "It is designed to prevent those with means to produce and purchase network advertising from having undue influence on 'controversial issues of public importance,' " the network said this week.

Sounds fair, doesn't it? But what it really means is that if McDonald's buys an ad promoting its tasty Big Mac, no one can run an ad that says Big Macs are full of fat and unhealthful. Pfizer can run a spot saying it's "helping people in need" get medicine, but we can't air an ad saying that Pfizer lobbied to weaken the new Medicare bill to prop up drug prices. Halliburton has slick ads that stress its role supporting the troops in Iraq. But CBS would reject an ad that pointed to Halliburton's profiteering.

The fewer issue ads run, the more time there is for ads with mud-wrestling women selling beer and leggy models peddling fast cars. CBS execs think Americans love mindless consumerism more than anything else and that it's their duty to pander to this.

But with "fairness" doctrines no longer governing the airwaves and the media more concentrated each day, it's getting harder and harder to engage regular people in political discourse. Even the town square has been replaced, in most communities, by private malls, where politics is not encouraged.

Instead of taking every opportunity to promote civic discussion, commercial broadcasters like CBS shrink away. The airwaves are, more than ever, private enterprises. And for that we pay a price: As public political speech becomes more difficult and infrequent, the public becomes less engaged in the policies, processes and laws that govern us.

"Controversy" isn't the real problem. Network front offices love it when one group or another protests sexy babes in bikinis peddling beer brands, or violent video games in which the highest body count wins. That builds buzz.

The CBS policy represents the triumph of corporate self-interest over the public interest. This is the same CBS, after all, that yanked the Ronald Reagan miniseries recently when Republican bigwigs complained. As Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) noted this week, "These are the same executives at CBS who successfully lobbied this Congress to change the FCC rules on TV station ownership to their corporate advantage." CBS simply would rather not risk offending powerful people in Washington who decide such critical regulatory matters.

But try getting that issue into a 30-second spot for Super Bowl audiences.

Dub Sez

"...while one of us can't do everything to help heal the hurt of America, each of us can do something to help make somebody's life in your community a better place."

—George W. Bush
January 16, 2003

Dub Sez

"With us, as well, is two fine members of the congressional delegation from Pennsylvania."
—George W. Bush
January 16, 2003

Dub Sez

"There was a good news story in Mississippi. I went down there—it wasn't because of me—it was because of the doctors and the citizens understand the cost of a trial system gone array."

—George W. Bush
January 16, 2003
Scranton Pennsylvania

Dub Sez

"And... it's gettin' worse. That's what people have gotta understand up there in Washington, or over there in Washington, down there in Washington, wherever—thought I was in Crawford for a minute."
—George W. Bush

January 16, 2003
Speaking in Scranton, Pennsylvania (north and slight east of Washington D. C.)

Even Robert McNamara Thinks Iraq is Wrong

In an exclusive interview, repentant Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara breaks his silence on Iraq: The United States, he says, is making the same mistakes all over again. Read about it here.

Here are the 11 mistakes we made in the Vietnam era according to McNamara. Read them as if they are about Iraq now. The similarity is striking.

Republican Cheating

What is it with Republicans? Can't they win an election fair and square. In 1972, five burglars were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel and office complex in Washington, D.C. Media and government investigation of the break-in revealed that the burglars were associated with the campaign to re-elect Nixon.

In 2000, five conservative Supreme court justices selected George W. Bush as president, thereby disenfranchising thousands of Florida voters.

In 2003, "Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe." Read about it here.

Yet another example of the culture of cheating that needs to be acknowledged.

Lies and Hypocrisy

Cheney is lying again. He is claiming that there is "overwhelming evidence" of connections between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime. This despite the fact that Colin Powell said in an interview that he had not seen, "smoking-gun, concrete evidence" of any such connections. It can't be both at the same time. Cheney also said, "We've found a couple of semi-trailers at this point which we believe were in fact part of [a WMD] program" and "I would deem that conclusive evidence, if you will, that he did in fact have programs for weapons of mass destruction." Pretty strong claim especially in view of what Weapon's inspector David Kay said in his report. "We have not yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile [biological weapons] production effort." Not even the rest of Bush's own administration makes claims in such strong terms. I look forward to the Democratic vice-presidential candidate calling Cheney to task on his lies in the debates.

Many Americans don't care that they were lied too or at least that their aren't any WMD's in Iraq because they think it was a good thing to get Saddam Hussein out of power. So now suddenly we invade country solely for humanitarian reasons. If this is going to be our policy, we need to invade Azerbaijan.

The elections confirmed Ilham Aliev as the nation's new ruler. He is the son of Heidar Aliev, a former top KGB official and Kremlin adviser, who became president two years after Azerbaijan became independent in 1991. The elder Aliev died last month while receiving medical treatment in the United States.

"Azerbaijan is experiencing its gravest human rights crisis of the past ten years," said Rachel Denber, acting director of HRW's Europe and Central Asia Division. "The government must take immediate steps to end the repression."

Rumsfeld is up to his old ways.

It also accused the U.S. and other western governments of responding to the elections and the crackdown that followed them by sending muted and contradictory messages, capped by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's visit last month. Rumsfeld personally congratulated the younger Aliev on his election victory, but otherwise refused to make any comment on the political situation.

Well it looks like Rumsfeld and Co. didn't learn the lesson the first time with Saddam and now they are supporting a new monster.

Dub Sez

Reporter:"Mr. President, is Secretary Powell going to provide the undeniable proof of Iraq's guilt that so many critics are calling for?"
Bush:"Well, all due in modesty, I thought I did a pretty good job myself of making it clear that he's not disarming."

January 31, 2003

The Cheating Culture

There is a moral crisis in this country. The cheating culture needs to be recognized. Please do your part.

Take Back Values

This article can be found on The Nation. It is a very important piece, I strongly urge you to read it in its entirety. Also, John Edwards rhetoric, though not perfect, reflects the ideas in this article better than any other candidate and this is why he is my second pick after Dennis Kucinich.

Take Back Values

by DAVID CALLAHAN

[from the February 9, 2004 issue]

There is much talk about "values" on this year's presidential campaign trail. Senator John Edwards rages that "George Bush's values are not America's values." Senator Joe Lieberman barely utters a sentence that doesn't mention values. Representative Dick Gephardt complains that people have "lost a sense of right and wrong." Top Democrats apparently have internalized the lesson taught by Bill Clinton--that the party must overcome its crippling lag on values issues. A 2000 poll by the Democracy Corps, a liberal polling group, showed that voters had vastly more trust in Republicans than Democrats on such moral basics as personal responsibility, discipline and knowing right from wrong. A more recent poll, by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, shows a Democratic candidate getting slaughtered in the 2004 election among voters who regularly attend religious services.

The problem is that few Democrats--on the campaign trail or off--have done well at moving beyond the Clinton strategy of playing defense on values. Democrats tend to operate in a debate defined by the right. They are good at mentioning their long marriages or their belief in personal responsibility. They slip in references to God and the Bible. And more Democrats now frame issues such as healthcare through a "family" lens, reflecting advice from pollster Stanley Greenberg and others.

Some Democrats, notably John Edwards, have attempted to move the values debate onto home turf by couching the liberal ideals of fairness and opportunity in strong moral language. These efforts are laudable, but lack the bite of the values discourse pioneered by the right. Some thirty years ago, conservatives moved aggressively to establish a moral monopoly amid what Francis Fukuyama has called "the Great Disruption," namely the breakdown of the traditional family and rise of feminism and individualism. The Great Disruption played out in very personal ways for Americans, and was experienced by many--especially white men--as a full-blown social crisis. Conservatives were brilliant at leveraging the crisis to entomb liberalism. They separated working-class voters with traditional values from a Democratic Party that, in Spiro Agnew's words, favored "acid, amnesty and abortion." And, in a broader assault, they convinced large swaths of the public that just about any government program was apt to spawn social pathology. The harsh discipline of the free market was offered by conservatives as more than just a path toward greater prosperity. It was presented as a savior of America's moral character.

Today, progressives have a chance to emulate the conservative success on values by highlighting a new moral crisis. This crisis infects nearly every part of American society, from education to sports to business to a myriad of professions. It often plays out in intensely personal ways and it deeply troubles Americans. The crisis is the rise of a "cheating culture" in the United States.

Cheating is up. Cheating is everywhere. By cheating I mean breaking the rules to get ahead academically, professionally or financially. Some of this cheating involves violating the law, some does not. Either way, most of it is by people who, on the whole, view themselves as upstanding members of society.

Cheating is intended to go undetected, and trends in unethical behavior can be hard to document. Still, what evidence is available suggests that cheating increased in the 1980s and '90s, at least in comparison to the middle decades of the twentieth century. Many studies confirm that cheating by high school and college students has increased substantially. In a 2002 survey by the Josephson Institute of Ethics, a Los Angeles-based group, three-quarters of high school students admitted they had cheated in the previous year. The IRS reports that tax evasion has soared since the early 1980s. It now costs the Treasury at least $250 billion annually, and probably much more. Routine workplace theft totals an estimated $600 billion a year, or 6 percent of GDP, and rose sharply in some areas during the 1990s. Cable television companies report widespread theft of services, while insurance companies say fraud is up. An orgy of music piracy has recently been followed by a surge in the piracy of movies.

Professional ethics are in terrible shape, too. Overbilling is common in just about any trade where there is billing, from nonprofit consulting to advertising to law. Conflict-of-interest problems are pervasive in medicine. Many doctors, for example, are unethically accepting payments from pharmaceutical companies--a problem highlighted by major government probes recently of Pfizer and AstraZeneca. In sports, steroids and other performance enhancing drugs have penetrated into more areas of competition, notably baseball. Barry Bonds, who recently testified in a grand jury steroids investigation, is among the superstars whose athletic accomplishments have been called into question.

The nerds aren't doing much better than the jocks. Publishing and journalism have seen an unprecedented string of scandals, embroiling leading historians like Stephen Ambrose, but also destroying the careers of ambitious young reporters like Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass. And, as highlighted in a new book by Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace, the integrity of scientific research in academia is increasingly compromised by conflicts of interest among researchers receiving corporate money.

Last but far from least are the corporate scandals. The past two decades will be remembered as the most corrupt period in business since the Robber Baron era a century ago: insider trading, $400 hammers, S&L looting, massive healthcare scams and then the widespread lying about earnings by companies like WorldCom, Enron and HealthSouth. Beneath these headline scandals lies a vast swamp of smaller crimes by a business community that has turned ever more predatory in recent years.

Add up all the various forms of ethical and legal misconduct and you have a moral crisis of serious dimensions--one that underscores the poverty of today's values debate. America's crisis of ethics is no accidental phenomenon. It is organic to the way of life proselytized by the right. As free-market ideology has triumphed both economically and culturally since the late 1970s, such quintessential American values as fair play and honesty have sunk into decline.

Competition is an unquestioned virtue within market ideology and has been a prime mantra of conservatives for thirty years. It is seen as the foundation not just of maximum prosperity but also of individual greatness. Freedom, in the conservative worldview, is a state of pure competition where there are no checks on individual striving. Taken too far, though, competition is poisonous to people's ethics. And lately, America has taken competition too far.

Americans are under intense pressure to do well academically and professionally, starting at a very young age. High school students believe they must go to a good college if they want to survive in an economy where the best jobs are hard to get and even harder to keep. In a legal profession transformed since the 1970s by a narrow focus on profits, overbilling by lawyers has increased. HMO doctors are easy prey for pharmaceutical companies that offer cash and perks to promote drugs for off-label uses or to push patients into clinical drug trials for which they may be unsuited. Workplace theft has risen at the same time that more businesses cut benefits and job security for their employees. Many companies now rank all their employees once or twice a year; some automatically fire those who fall in the bottom 10 percent. At the very top of the heap, CEOs face competitive pressures that didn't exist thirty years ago--most notably, the imperative to hit quarterly earnings projections and avoid stock market losses.

The growing income gap in America is also harmful to the nation's moral health. While many Americans struggle just to make ends meet, today's winners win bigger than ever before. Sluggers like Alex Rodriguez take home vastly larger paychecks now than they did a decade ago, CEO pay has skyrocketed, partners in law firms make more money than ever and so on. Large inequities within professions have emerged at the same time as broad inequality trends have increased the stakes of getting an education and landing a skilled job. In 1975 workers with advanced degrees earned 1.8 times as much as high school graduates. This gap increased to 2.6 times in 1999.

Market ideology holds that inequality is actually a good thing, motivating people to work harder. Conservatives have seen no reason to respond to rising income gaps over the past quarter-century. "If you drive a Mercedes and I have to walk, that's a radical difference in lifestyle," comments Dinesh D'Souza of the Hoover Institution. "But is it a big deal if you drive a Mercedes and I drive a Hyundai?"

In fact, inequality is an obvious moral corrosive. As the economist Robert Frank and others have pointed out, people tend to judge their well-being in relative rather than absolute terms. There is no reason that a .285 hitter making $700,000 a year should be dissatisfied and turn to risky steroids to hit better-- except, perhaps, that he has to work with guys making ten times as much money. Conservatives are right in saying that even the poor in America are pretty well off compared with people in the Third World. The problem is that Americans don't compare themselves with Bengalis. They compare themselves with other Americans.

The new inequality has made envy among the most dominant emotions in American life. The celebrity-obsessed media pump this toxin around the clock, as does a $250 billion advertising industry that portrays six-figure lifestyles as the norm. You don't need to read the Bible to know that all this is a recipe for bad behavior. Nor does it require a sociology degree to predict that a society ever more stratified along economic lines will be one where people trust each other less and may be more likely to live by the commandment "Do unto others before they do unto you."

Small government is another laissez-faire virtue that doesn't go well with strong ethics. Conservatives like to caricature government as an enemy of prosperity and as a breeder of social pathology. "I believe that government has played a big role in allowing values to erode," wrote Ben Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute in his 1995 book, Values Matter Most. The rap against big government put out by Wattenberg and others is that it has usurped the role of civil society institutions like religion and promoted a "something for nothing" ethos.

Yet these days it is weak government that should concern moralists of every ideological stripe. Two decades of downsizing and demeaning government have unleashed a flood of wrongdoing by people who judge, correctly, that they can get away with it. Tax cheats go unpunished because the IRS has been starved of resources over the past decade, even as the quantity and complexity of tax returns has risen dramatically. Investors in the stock market have been repeatedly deceived and ripped off in recent years as the Securities and Exchange Commission--politically sabotaged over two decades--did nothing. Elsewhere, in law and medicine, lax government oversight of licensing has made a mockery of disciplinary safeguards designed to root out professionals who abuse the trust of clients and patients.

Thanks to weak government, a great many Americans are living in a temptation nation. When watchdogs sleep, it is all too easy to follow our worst instincts--whether to cheat on taxes or overbill clients or rent out a firetrap apartment in the attic.

Many Americans already understand that a culture obsessed with money and saturated with envy is a morally perilous place. We understand that people will behave badly in an economy that rewards cutthroat competition and where no one enforces the rules. We fear for our own moral well-being, and even more so for that of our children.What is needed now is a political message that addresses these anxieties and links them to a public policy agenda. Boiled down to its essence, such a message should be about the broken social contract in America. Too many people who play by the rules end up as losers--or feel compelled to become cheaters just to stay afloat. Too many people who break the rules end up as winners--and learn that crime pays. Two core pillars of the American idea, optimism and egalitarianism, are being eroded. Taking their place is the cynicism of an Anxious Class that believes, rightly, that the rules aren't fair; and the hubris of a Winning Class that lives by its own rules.

America's busted social contract is already being discussed on the presidential campaign trail, most notably by Howard Dean, who gave a major policy speech on December 18 on this theme. But Dean barely mentioned the word "values" as he outlined his New Social Contract. America's crisis of ethics offers a way to preach a social contract message that is centered more heavily on virtue, now a Republican-owned franchise with a great many customers in the US electorate. Progressives must offer both a compelling story of moral decline and the way to redemption.

Beyond this, the actual policy agenda for fixing a broken social contract is hardly extraordinary. First, there must be new investments in education, healthcare, childcare and other things to insure that ordinary people who play by the rules can succeed with integrity in a postindustrial economy. Second, we need to beef up the government agencies that enforce the rules of fair play in economic life and stop indulging cheaters in the Winning Class. Third, it's long past time we declared a cease-fire in "the war against the poor," as part of a broader effort to insure that rule-breakers across all income groups stand as equals before the law. Fourth, we need major reforms to open up the democratic system to insure that more Americans have a genuine say in how society's rules are made. And fifth, there must be new initiatives to reduce income inequality and foster greater trust across the chasms of class, race and geography.

That extreme capitalism fosters moral corrosion is not a new message. Teddy Roosevelt said as much a century ago. But, packaged right--as a defense of the American way, not an attack on it--this is a message that could redefine the values debate in US politics and change the electoral map for decades to come.

Dub Sez

"Policies that stimulate growth ought to be the centerplace of public policy." —George W. Bush

January 29, 2003
Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Dub Sez

"You've stood with us against a deadly threat. And we will stand with you, to help bring an end to the terrible regional conflicts that brings so much suffering to innocent Africans—from Congro, to Sudan, to the Ivory Coast." —George W. Bush January 15, 2003

My Second Choice

Given Kucinich's chances, I would like to give my second choice. I will still be voting for Kucinich in the Utah Primary.

Edwards has shown he can win a southern state. If he were able to carry all the same states Gore did and add one or two southern states Bush goes down. He is much more progressive than Dean and he is a better campaigner than Kerry. I am not sure what to think of Clark. I am not convinced of his progressive credentials. Since I can't have Kucinich, I would like to see an Edwards/Kerry ticket.

Dub Sez

"We expect Saddam Hussein, for the sake of peace, to disarm. That's the question." —George W. Bush January 14, 2003

Happy MLK Jr. Day

My home state of Utah has the ignominious distinction of being the last state in the union to recognized Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as an official holliday. This solidly Republican state will plump for Bush in 2004. Speaking of Bush, Rev. Raphael Allen had this to say about Bush's visit to MLK's grave. "His administration has never supported anything to help the poor, education, or children. It's all about isolationism and greed for the upper class. That's not promoting the legacy of Dr. King."

Dub Sez

"We're here for have a substantive talk on a lot of issues." —George W. Bush January 14, 2003

Dub Sez

"Today we got Pamela Hedrick with us today." — George W. Bush January 14, 2003

CBS Shirks its Duty to Public Service

"U.S. football fans will not see ads featuring scantily clad vegetarians or a political attack on President Bush during February's Super Bowl after CBS said on Thursday that advocacy advertisements were out of bounds on professional football's biggest day."

This comes from a Reuters article today. CBS is a public broadcaster. This means they use the public airwaves to broadcast their shows including the Superbowl. CBS and its parent Corporation Viacom Entertainment will make enormous amounts of money using the public's airwaves. In exchange it is CBS' duty to provide some air time for the benefit of the public. What could be more important than a chance for people and organizations to speak out on issues of political importance? Why should CBS get the benefit of using the public airwaves when they provide nothing in return?

Write CBS and remind them of their duty to the public. The feedback link is at the bottom of the page.

Dub Sez

"One year ago today the time for excuse-making has come to an end." —George W. Bush January 8, 2003

Speaking at the White House on the one-year anniversary of the signing of the "No Child Left Behind Act."

A little trouble with tense here for dub.

How Do You Spell Relief?

What are Republicans talking about when they say they want to give Americans "Tax Relief"? It seems to me they want to relieve our troops of the equipment they need. They want to relieve our children of their education. They want to relieve our elderly of their social security benefits. They want to relieve corporations and the wealthy of their duty to pay their fair share. They want to relieve us of the very things that nurture our society and help America grow. I'll tell you the kind of relief we need. We need deficit relief. We need relief for the poor. We need health insurance relief. We need War relief. We need regime relief. We need to relieve ourselves of the Republican excrement in our government. That's how I spell relief.

Dub Sez

"Parents and educators will not be bystandards in education reform." —George W. Bush January 8, 2003

Speaking before a gathering in the White House on the "No Child Left Behind Act."

Its always amusing when dub talks about education, when he so badly needs it.

Dub Sez

Barbara Walters: "Isn't it all—so much of it—about oil? Shouldn't we be changing our energy policy?"
Bush: "The war on terror has nothing to do about oil."

George W. Bush December 12, 2002
Speaking to Barbara Walters of ABC News during a White House interview.

It's the Economy Stupid

One of the revelations we get from former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill via Ron Suskind's new book The Price of Loyalty is that Alan Greenspan thought that Bush's tax cuts were fiscally irresponsible.

In May 2001 Mr. Greenspan gloomily told Mr. O'Neill that because the first Bush tax cut didn't include triggers — it went forward regardless of how the budget turned out — it was "irresponsible fiscal policy." This was a time when critics of the tax cut were ridiculed for saying exactly the same thing.

The economic policies of a rogue nation are threatening the financial stability of the world. So says the International Monetary Fund, an organization not easily given to overstated warnings. But it is not some far away currency crisis in Latin America, that is causing distress for the financial wizards of the IMF, it is the current economic policy of the United States.

With its rising budget deficits and its burgeoning trade imbalance, the U.S. debt is swelling to unmanageable proportions and threatening to upset global financial stability. So says the IMF and so says Robert Rubin, President Clinton's former Treasury Secretary. We'll talk with the man who slew the deficit, about the economic balance sheet of the Bush Administration, and America's financial future.

If Bush is re-selected this year in the election, we very well may see a global depression after the end of his presidency. Irresponsible tax cuts for the wealthy and un-necessary war justified by lies have led to record deficits. We are now in the era of big-government conservatism. Its about time people give up the phrase tax-and-spend Democrat and start using the phrase borrow-and-spend Republican.

Dub Sez

"Perhaps the biggest problem is that we have passed children from grade to grade, year after year, and those child haven't learned the basics of reading and math." —George W. Bush January 8, 2003

Dub Sez

"These are the far most reaching reforms of American business since Franklin Roosevelt was the President." —George W. Bush December 10, 2002

During the swearing-in ceremony of SEC's new director William Donaldson

Saddam's Ouster Planned in '01

We have known this for a long time, but it is nice to see as a story in the mainstream press.

Dub Sez

First of all, I appreciate the wisdom of Chairman Greenspan. He uses the word, 'soft spot'.I use the word, 'bumpin along'." —George W. Bush November 13 2002

The Plame Game

I just finished reading some interesting guesses about what's going on with the Valerie Plame investigation by John Dean at Salon. Toward the end of the article he suggests that if a good case can be made against a senior adminstration official or officials, the Bush administration would rather have that happen sooner rather than later to avoid embarrasment.

If the leaker is Karl Rove, then Bush is in a real hard spot. If the case comes out soon, then Rove would presumably have to resign and Bush would lose his best campaign manager early in the election season. If the case happens later, then it will be near the election. This looks like a hopeful situation if you don't like Bush.

Dub Sez

"Matter of fact, there haven't been a morning that haven't gone by that I haven't saw—seen—or read threats..." —George W. Bush November 12, 2002

Remarks by the President at the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Operations Center, Washington, D.C.

Dub Sez

"You've go to have certainty in the system that requires risk." —George W. Bush November 7, 2002

Discussing making tax cuts permanent at a press conference.

Dub Sez

"The goals for this country are peace in the world. And the goals for this country are a compassionate American for every single citizen."—George W. Bush December 19, 2002 Washington D.C.

Puzzling

Here is a fun A. A. Troitsky study taken from Mig Greengards excellent weekly chess newsletter ChessNinja . White to play and win.

Hint: Why DOESN'T 1. c2-c3 followed by 2. g2-g3 win for White?

If you would like the solution email me.

Dub Sez

"Border relations between Canada and Mexico have never been better."—George W. Bush September 24, 2001

Iowa Debate

This gave me a laugh during the Iowa debate.

Panelist David Yepsen: "I talked to a lot of Democrats who say they really like what you have to say, but they don't think you're electable." Kucinich: "Well, you know, I'm electable if you vote for me."

Nader's 2000 Lesson

Its been a hobby of few Democrats such as Salon's Charles Taylor to justify abandoning progressive principles to vote for Gore who was part of an administration that went on to sign the 1996 Telecommunications Act which created the monster known as Clear Channel and the Welfare Reform Act. Clinton always was a luke-warm Democrat. He is certainly not from the Democratic wing of the Democrat party. Until recently Gore was the same.

So why all this spleen from Taylor and his ilk. Because in hindsite we know that it helped George W. Bush get into the White House. Nobody, including Taylor new that Dubya would be so dishonest and so right-wing. His rhetoric made him sound moderate and it really did look like there wasn't much difference between him and Gore.

Nader's 2000 lesson wasn't that you should abandon your progressive principles and vote pragmatically just to keep Bush out. It was that you can't expect to win an election when you alienate your base. Harley Sorenson dismantles the the Wolves in Democrats Clothing's (the DLC) idea that McGovern lost in 1968 and Mondale lost in 1984 because they were too liberal. They were bad campaigners. Howard Dean is demonstrating this year that a combination of good campaign strategy (see Meetups and Weblogs) and enough principled progressive ideas to excite the Democratic Party's base is both right and smart.

As Much as I like Kucinich, Sharpton, or Mosely-Braun I think that a combination of some lack of campaign skills and a whole lot of media bias is going to make one of them too much to ask for this year. Nevertheless, I will vote for Kucinich because I think he's right. You never know, a surprise early in the primary might go some way to destroy the media bias, and Kucinich will certainly keep the base.

The DLC and their whelp Lieberman should shut up before they cost us another 4 years of Bush.

Dub Sez

"We're working on what's called 10-plus-10-over-10... to help Russia securitize the dismantling—the dismantled nucular warheads."—George W. Bush May 23, 2002 Berlin, Germany.

Words are the Constellations

"To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world. The sculptor of language was not so modest as to believe that he was only giving things designations, he conceived rather that with words he was expressing supreme knowledge of things... A great deal later - only now - it dawns on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a tremendous error." Friedrich Nietzsche Balse, Germany 1878

124 years later...

Apparently simpler still would be the simple recognition of a single entity, as when we look at a cup of coffee and perceive the cup of coffee. As neuroscience has shown, the many aspects of the cup of coffee—the color of the cup, the shape of the opening, the topology of the handle, the smell of the coffee, the texture of the surface of the cup, the dividing line between the coffee and the cup, the taste of the coffee, the heavy feel of the cup in the hand, the reaching for the cup, and so on and so on—are apprehended and processed differently in anatomically different locations, and there is no single site in the brain where these various apprehensions are brought together. How can the coffee cup, so obviously a single thing for us at the conscious level, be so many different things and operations for the neuroscientist looking at the unconscious level? Somehow, the combination of three billion years of evolution and several months of early training have resulted in the apprehension of unities in consciousness, but neuroscience does not know the details of that unification. How we apprehend one thing as one thing has come to be regarded as a central problem of cognitive neuroscience, called the "binding problem." We do not ask ourselves how we can see one thing as one thing because we assume that the unity comes from the thing itself, not from our mental work...

The unity of things comes not from the things in themselves, but from our brains. Language does not give us "supreme knowledge" of things. Words are designations for unities created by our brains. If reality is the night sky, then words are the constellations.

Dub Sez

"This country has no designs on Cuba's soverty; we have no designs on the soverty of Cuba." —George W. Bush May 20, 2002 Miami, Florida

Dub Sez

I am going to start a new feature on my page. A Bushism for nearly everyday. Some are more subtle than others.

"Clear Skies legislation, when passed by Congress, will significantly reduce smog and mercury admissions, as well as stop acid rain." —George W. Bush April 22, 2002 Wilmington, New York.

It's not Pretty, It's not Comforting

"Truth" could be ugly. It is self-deception to think the true and the beautiful are always one and the same. Look how people shop for religion in this consumerist age. They look for the religion that makes the least demands and tells the prettiest story. Why is it that modern religions assume God would be perfectly benevolent? Why do they assume he would be perfect? Perhaps God is pernicious. But no. We cannot think that. It's not pretty, its not comforting.

Relativism is rejected because then there is no foundation to ground our most cherished beliefs. Supposing there is no eternal truth... But no. We cannot think that. It's not pretty, its not comforting.

There are perhaps as many people who believe in fate as there are who do not. The very same people divide up into optimists and pessimists. Optimists often believe in fate because they believe their's is good. Pessimist often do not believe in fate because they believe their's would be bad. Supposing there is fate and yours is bad... But no. We cannot think that. It's not pretty, its not comforting.