Fish for Friday

This column serves up fish caught by casting our hook into the waters of recent correspondence—fish that we think will be good for you, either for information or for provocation to think about something new, or about something old but from a different perspective.

Four people were already in the hot tub at my local gym when I arrived there yesterday. "Mind if I join your group?" I said to no one of them in particular.

An older lady (she might have been my age ) said, "Of course, the more the merrier."

She was very friendly. She said, "We all need the hot tub after working in the yard," which I guess is what she'd been doing earlier.

I said I hadn't done anything as strenuous as that, just picked up some dog poop and fed the birds.

She thought I meant birds in a cage, but I straightened her out and we went on to talk for several minutes about birds. She didn't know that some birds lay their eggs in other birds' nests.

"Oh, yes," I said. "Non-human animals can cheat, just as human animals can. Get someone else to do the work for you."

This made her stop for a moment. The others had just gotten out of the hot tub, and she had started to follow them.

"That reminds me of our federal entitlement programs!" she said. "Boy, they really get me mad!"

I said, "You mean, like the loopholes that our wealthy Congressmen have made into law so that the rich can legally hide their money off-shore and avoid paying income taxes?"

If looks could kill, Morris, I'd be a dead man.

She stomped out of the hot tub and headed for the exit. [personal communication]

I am not so naive that I do not know some people use the system. However, I do not criticize anyone that welfare helps, because neither am I so naive that I do not know that because of circumstances beyond my control, I too could be added to their list. None of us knows what tomorrow holds. We might be OK today, but could very well stand in need tomorrow. [from a letter to a local newspaper]

I just heard on NPR an excerpt from a Romney speech in North Carolina yesterday where he went on and on about all the damage the liberals have done around the world and "even in the great state of California." As I recall, the major changes that had the most impact in California weren't from the "liberals" but from folks like Ronald Reagan and the corrupt Republican industrialists in Texas who used Enron to take the state of California hostage over its power bills and ultimately bring Arnold Schwarzenegger to power. [personal communication]

Paul Ryan is a fly-weight next to Rob Portman. But fly-weights are often VPs, and this one would likely do the bidding of a Romney.

The debates should be entertaining.

The underlying politics is not. [personal correspondence, from someone who had predicted Romney would pick Rob Portman]

Paul Ryan is the author of the most extreme right-wing budget ever proposed in Congress. He wants to dismantle Medicare, privatize Social Security, and cut taxes for millionaires while raising taxes on the middle class.

Ryan isn't just an extremist—he's young, smart, and charming. The media constantly describe him as looking like "the boy next door." He's the ultimate wolf in sheep's clothing. [from MoveOn.org Political Action]

If you want to see  where corporatization is taking us, look for the documentary Bitter Seeds, by Micha X. Peled.  This is where the policies of the Republican/Tea Party are heading.

They showed it at the Boulder International Film Festival. Basically, it is the story of how Monsanto convinced farmers in India to grow genetically modified cotton which did not reseed, so they had to buy new seed every year from Monsanto, requiring them to take out loans that they then could not repay. Short term profits trump long-term economic and environmental health. [personal correspondence; I’ve added a link to a description of and a trailer for Bitter Seeds]

Morris, I recommend that you read Leonard Pitts’s recent column in The Miami Herald on domestic terrorism ("Demanding an honest accounting on homegrown terrorism"). He lists a number of terrorist events in America over the last twenty years, then comments:

These incidents and dozens more comprise a list maintained by the Southern Poverty Law Center. What they all have in common is that they spring from motivations (i.e., opposition to taxation, government, immigrants, blacks, gays, abortion, and Muslims) that more or less define modern, mainstream, conservatism. So yes, it is time to say the obvious thing no one seems to be saying:

America is under attack by right-wing terrorists.

He hastens to add that his point is not that conservatism equals terrorism; his point is that

the perpetrators of these crimes are overwhelmingly white Christian men and thus, invisible in a nation where danger is routinely defined as Them, not Us. Maybe it’s because media have become cowed and self-censoring, reflexively flinching from that which might bring accusations of anti-conservative bias.

[personal communication]