According to the Gallup polling outfit, most people haven't been distracted from the nation's real problems by Republicans (and dumber Dems) demanding that the government cut the deficit rather than get to work to fix the economy. Not only did the deficit not break 10 percent concern among national problems, neither did "immigration" or "family decline." I could wish people had been more concerned about our wasteful wars, but overall the people seem to have their eyes on the ball. Now where are the politicians?
***
And today the President showed he has his eye on the ball as well, assuring the country in his weekly address that
One thing we can’t afford to do though is privatize Social Security – an ill-conceived idea that would add trillions of dollars to our budget deficit while tying your benefits to the whims of Wall Street traders and the ups and downs of the stock market.
I sure hope this is one of Obama's promises that he'll keep, unlike his record on restoration of civil liberties.
And here's my tale. I plugged in the address where I am vacationing and received a bright red message: 2--Car Dependent. Now there's no arguing with that. The nearest store is nearly 2 miles away; most other facilities of modern life are further. In the language of Walkscore: "Almost all errands require a car."
After trying this cyber experiment, I launched off for a more than 10 mile run, less than a mile of which was on an asphalt road. The balance was wooded hills and trails. It would be hard to imagine a better setting for that form of pedestrian activity.
Later I plugged my home address into Walkscore and got "98--Walker's Paradise". I know what they mean. There's hardly anything I can't get or do on foot in my San Francisco Mission neighborhood. Hardly anything except run, that is. I don't run on pavement -- too broken down for that. So at home I drive from my Walker's Paradise to find running room. Contradictions abound.
***
Though I'm away from the Mission for a few weeks, it's been great to read that my 'hood is included in the SFpark pilot project zone. By installing smart meters, traffic management technicians hope to reduce the endless urban chase for elusive parking spots by adjusting the cost of parking to fill vacancies and encourage turnover. Sound complicated? Not really so bad. Here's an explanatory video.
I'm already benefiting from this program because a couple of weeks ago I bought one of its parking cards. No more hunting for quarters for the meter; I can stick in my prepaid card and bingo, I'm set. Now other jurisdictions (like for example "no there there" Oakland) let you do this with an ordinary credit card rather than something you have to order from a special San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. But hey, this is progress.
Meter fixes though probably won't do much for the times that I find myself driving around the Mission trying to find parking. I don't do this a lot; years of experience have made me very aware of where I can usually find a vacancy. But if I time a car trip wrongly and return in the early evening, I can count on an influx of community college students filling most of the street spots. That's after meter hours end at 6 pm. They'll leave later in the evening.
The other time I (and most everyone) has trouble is when we need to get our cars out of the path of the street sweepers, squeezing about 2/3 of the resident cars into 1/2 the spots. Are there technical answers to that problem, or is it simply a cost of urban life?
Observance of the holy month of Ramadan began this week for Muslims throughout the world. During Ramadan, Muslims attend to God and community by fasting during the day, praying, and sharing communal meals after sunset. The special contemplative month ends on September 9.
In the United States, this Ramadan is marred by right wing politicians trying to score hate points by attacking our Muslim neighbors. Not only have the likes of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich stirred up a storm against a plan for a New York City Islamic community center, but their antics encourage attacks on every expression of Muslim faith.
For people of other faiths, the next 30 days would be a good time to express our solidarity with the rights of our Muslim neighbors to exercise their religion. We can be mindful that any observant Muslims we know are not eating during the day -- and that there is nothing more strange about that than there is about the Christian practice of going to church late on the night of December 24.
In the La Canada (California) Valley Sun, Levent Akbarut suggests that non-Muslims take advantage of this month to get to know our neighbors better:
No special treatment or accommodations are expected. Do satisfy your natural curiosity, ask questions and learn about the Ramadan fast in your social conversations. This is particularly important today to combat the prevailing misperceptions about Islam and to promote interfaith understanding and fellowship.
People die unexpectedly in large numbers all over the world every day. The current flooding in Pakistan has killed at least 1600 people so far; Moscow's heat and smoke emergency is killing an excess of 350 people a day this summer; nearly 1500 people have been killed by landslides and flooding in China recently. Deaths in war are more expected: at least 318 US and NATO soldiers died in Afghanistan in the first six months of this year; some 1300 Afghan civilians also died, mostly in bombings. All these awful, untimely, frequently unnecessary deaths don't turn our world upside down unless we happen to find ourselves in direct proximity to them. But the 3000 killed in the 9/11 attacks did, as the cliche goes, "change everything."
Obviously the attacks on New York and Washington shocked us because we were stunned to be hit so dramatically, as if we'd stumbled into a made-for-TV movie, right in our own country. But an additional element of our stunned shock arose from the tactics of the terrorists: they were willing to kill not only a lot of other people, but also themselves, by flying those planes into buildings.
I remember struggling to imagine what could motivate a person to be willing to die in this gruesome fashion. Soldiers risk death but hope to survive; suicide terrorists use their own death as a weapon. That's very different. In the years since we've seen more suicide terrorism (mixed in with lots of more conventional guerilla "insurgencies" in the arenas where we've gone to war) so the practice has lost some of its shock. But that initial shock in 2001 was appropriate -- there was something happening that needed unpacking. Instead, as journalist Saul Friedman wisely reminded us the other day:
...the U.S. reaction was like an irrational spasm, a great temper tantrum. Instead of treating [the attacks] as an horrible crime, the U.S. declared war on a nation. Instead of using our intelligence sources to go after the criminal perpetrators, the richest nation on earth sent bombs and missiles against the poorest of nations and its innocents. We and they are still dying ...
Saul adds "for no reason." I concur but that is not my subject today.
In 2004, Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, tried to provide a data-driven answer to the conundrum of suicide terrorism in his book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Pape asked some sensible questions:
First, what is the strategic logic of suicide terrorism? That is, why does suicide attack make political sense from the perspective of a terrorist organization? If terrorist organizations did not believe that suicide attack would advance their political goals, they would not do it.
Second, what is the social logic of suicide terrorism? Why does suicide attack receive mass support in some societies and not others? Without social support from the terrorists' national community, suicide terrorist campaigns could not be sustained.
Third, what is the individual logic of suicide terrorism? What makes particular people willing to give up their lives to carry out terrorist attacks? Without a ready supply of willing attackers, suicide terrorist campaigns would be much more limited in scope than they are. ...
There's little evidence that Washington, under Republicans or later Democrats, ever asked these sensible questions. The Bush-Cheney set treated understanding what we were up against as symptom of weakness -- and sadly, President Obama seems trapped by the logic of their war.
Pape's study of 315 incidents of suicide terrorism between 1980 and 2003 convinced him that we have to understand that those who use the tactic are pursuing, from their point of view, a rational course:
Suicide terrorism is an extreme strategy for national liberation.
But we might object, the U.S. is not a colonial power ... Pape says that's taking the wrong angle of vision:
For the purpose of understanding suicide terrorism, it is imperative to view occupation from the perspective of the resistance movement (e.g., terrorists, revolutionaries), because it is the behavior of the local actors, not the foreign power, that determines whether suicide terrorism occurs. Whether the foreign power regards itself as a "stabilizing" ally rather than an "occupying" power is not relevant.
It may seem wacky to us that troops based in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War should create such a sense of insult, but many local people do see U.S. troops based anywhere in the Middle East as occupiers. Since 9/11, we've massively magnified the insult.
Pape argues that a religious difference between occupied and occupier is not a sufficient condition for suicide terrorism to attract adherents -- but the difference does serve as a sort of recruiting multiplier:
Religious difference lends greater credibility to extremist groups who seek to use the language of martyrdom to legitimate their violence. ... It reduces the degree of manipulation necessary to re-define acts of suicide and murder as acts of martyrdom for the defense of the community....
Pape insists that al-Qaeda's successes have come from nimbly exploiting a mix of warped religion with nationalism:
Overall, analysis of al-Qaeda's suicide terrorists shows that its most lethal forces are best understood as a coalition of nationalist groups seeking to achieve a local change in their home countries, not as a truly transnational movement seeking to spread Islam or any other ideology to non-Islamic populations. Religion matters, but mainly in the context of national resistance. ...
...bin Laden's principal organizational innovation has been to reorient various local resistance movements away from their local grievances in the short term so as to bring an accumulation of violence against their common enemy, the United States. Because there is a religious difference between the United States and all these groups, and because none are militarily strong enough to stand up to American power on their own, al-Qaeda leaders can portray the United States as a religiously motivated aggressor, posing a common threat to occupy and transform their societies, and can appeal for collective martyrdom operations as the only means of protecting the self-determination of the threatened communities. ...
Establishing that the United States is on a Christian crusade to remake the Muslim world enables bin Laden to claim that American foreign and military policies in a variety of countries are part of a coherent plan, that American behavior will become aggressive over time, that national groups in those target countries have a common basis to work together, and that those who die can easily be defined as martyrs for Islam.
Because in our society we think of suicide as evidence of individual instability (even when it is recent war vets who are doing the dying), we look for individual pathologies to understand recruits who join suicide terrorism campaigns. But as many have marveled, many suicide terrorists seem very ordinary. Pape takes this observation further:
Suicide Terrorism Is Not Overwhelmingly Egoistic: ... Altruistic motives are significant in the individual logic of suicide terrorism. Many suicide attackers may also wish to escape personal problems, but the egoistic motives that account for ordinary suicides are insufficient, on their own, to explain why many individuals voluntarily carry out suicide terrorist attacks. ... Suicide terrorist organizations are not socially isolated groups with socially unacceptable goals, but go to great lengths to embed themselves in their surrounding communities and to pursue socially acceptable political objectives. Although this social construction of altruistic martyrdom does not create altruistic individuals, it does produce the circumstances under which an individual who wishes to sacrifice for the community can be confident that the act is understood in this way. As a result, the altruistic motive is often a necessary if not sufficient condition for suicide terrorism.
...In general, suicide attackers are rarely socially isolated, clinically insane, or economically destitute individuals, but are most often educated socially integrated, and highly capable people who could be expected to have a good future.
Pape shows the information is there for a far smarter, more effective response to the reality that there are people around the world who would like to kill people in the United States. But no -- we get airport security theater, protests about mosques, and wars aplenty. Something is rotten in this empire ...
Like many homes used mostly by vacationers, the lovely house where we're staying has accumulated a nice collection of older books. One I ran across might be thought obsolete: Calvin Trillin's little 2004 volume, Obliviously On He Sails: The Bush Administration in Rhyme. But on opening it, I ran across some little gems. Not as much has changed as we'd like as Congress considers whether to extend the Bush tax cuts for the rich.
THE REPUBLICAN PLAN TO STIMULATE THE ECONOMY
It's very hard to estimate Just what it takes to stimulate A corporation, but we know These people need a lot of dough. And so, if no one else objects, We'll cut them some humongous checks. But stimulating them is tough. A billion may not be enough To spur a corporation while It keeps its CEO in style. It's possible we should explore Some way that we can give them more. We may just give them all we've got: It takes a lot to keep them hot. --Dec. 3, 2001
***
A REPUBLICAN DISCUSSES TAXES
Because they pay too much in taxes -- To feed the poor and fight the axis -- The rich are truly discommoded. It spoils the fun of being loaded. So we should tax the poor instead -- A tax on alms, or day-old bread. -- Feb. 3, 2003
On Sunday night over 100 people packed the Community Center in Chilmark, Mass. (on Martha's Vineyard island) to participate in a forum labeled by the sponsors, an outfit named POINT, "The Islands' Future: Blowin' in the Wind." POINT describes itself as "an environmental group dedicated to promoting conservation, education and sound choices for a sustainable environment."
Under this map showing where wind turbines will be situated off the islands, several speakers described a history of state and federal government failure to consult with locals in the planning, permitting, siting and design of proposed ocean wind farms. Notably:
Former 20-year member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives Eric Turkington described a legislative process that enabled a remote state commission to designate the state water areas that would be used for commercial energy without local input. He warned that a similar bill enabling land-based commercial wind turbine farms might very well move forward at any time.
A West Tisbury selectman, Richard Knabel, described the refusal of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick to meet with a delegation from all six island town governments. He described the current plan as involving "brute force tactics," "a blunderbuss approach," "massive arrogance." and above all as a failure of process.
Chilmark selectman Warren Doty who is also president of the Martha's Vineyard/ Duke's County Fishermen's Association (MV/DCFA) described that group's frustration with the lack of answers fishermen are getting about what large wind farm installations will mean. How much fishing will be inhibited or prohibited? Federal estimates of loss of catch have seemed laughable to these locals. Doty pointed out that the power companies want to build their hundreds of towers in these areas because they have relatively shallow bottoms; that same shallow depth serves as a good environment for fish, so naturally the commercial boats want to be able to work in them. The MV/DCFA has sued for answers to these questions about the Cape Wind site that the Federal government has already approved.
There was much more, including a speaker from the Wampanoag nation, a federally acknowledged tribe whose trust lands are located in the Vineyard town of Gay Head, just opposite one of the wind farm sites.
What did not happen was a broadly multi-party gubernatorial candidate accountability session such as the organizers had evidently hoped to put on. Incumbent Democrat Deval Patrick has put his administration on the side of commercial development of ocean wind farms; he sent no representative. Independent challenger Tim Cahill did not show, so Republican Charlie Baker had the floor to himself. (I can't report his remarks since we left early.)
I went into the forum a supporter of wind farms -- and came out the same way. But I learned a great deal. Some thoughts and some conundrums:
It's not good enough to dismiss these wind farm opponents as privileged NIMBYs. These are people who have worked for sensible sustainable environmental policies for a long time. In order to preserve the land and seas they live on, they are willing to study the science and search for solutions. And talk, and talk, and talk. They naturally want to adhere to the precautionary principle: when we don't know what bad impacts may arise from new developments, proponents should be held to a high standard of proof of harmlessness.
Industrial scale wind farms are still new technology. We've just seen how that worked with impossibly deep, unknowably risky, oil drilling in the the Gulf. And the supervising agency for the wind projects was the notorious Minerals Management Service, since the BP gusher rechristened as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement. Let's hope this is more than a name change.
Corporate developers confidently will spend millions pushing aside local concerns when some of the technical kinks have been worked out and visions of big profits dangle invitingly before them. The Massachusetts wind farms bring this energy technology to a scale not yet attempted on this continent. There will be costs as well as benefits. The corporations that will make money on wind energy expect society to absorb these unknown (though possibly predictable) costs and let them have the cash gains.
Wind farms built at the scale the federal and Massachusetts governments have accepted will turn over what has been a commons, a public resource, the seas, to private enterprise with very little expectation of mitigation of harms. This development is of a piece with more and more privatization and exploitation of the oceans as the sheer number of human demands on them rise. To the (relative) little guys, that suggests some caution.
Islanders may be reaping corporate blowback from the nine year Cape Cod fight (that included Kennedys) against the Cape Wind project now approved in federal waters. Energy companies figured out they needed pre-emptive legal action from state bodies that were more insulated from local concerns than local governments -- so they put their lobbying into getting favorable state laws to take smaller jurisdictions out of the picture. This strategy seems to be prevailing.
The discussion of the wind farms throws a fascinating light on the class contradictions on Martha's Vineyard. In the winter there are some 15000 residents, (mostly) scratching out a living as small town professionals serving each other, as farmers, and as seafarers. In the summer months there are some 100,000 people vacationing here, many very well off indeed, including both recent Democratic presidents. It's the year-round residents (mostly) who are trying to rein in the wind farms; they know that part of what makes this place work is its authentic culture of relatively small fishing and farming that delights the annual infusion of beach-going tourists. Besides, they like their way of life, thank you very much. And they are New Englanders, accustomed to a participatory form of local government by town meeting, the antithesis of state and federal interference. By the way, for all their crustiness, these folks seem to be mostly liberal or libertarian Democrats.
As I said, I was not talked out of thinking wind energy captured over the oceans has to be part of our post-carbon-fuels future. But last night's forum gave the issues involved a texture that had been missing from this outlander's thinking. Thanks POINT.
Wind power is not a novelty. This small scale windmill produces some amount of electricity on a farm in Chilmark. The Vineyard fight over wind energy is about scale and democratic local governance.
About a month ago, a friend pointed me to Nicholas von Hoffman's essay 7 Lessons Saul Alinsky Would Give Progressives Today in the hope that it would cheer me up about the disappointments I express about the Obama administration. It didn't do that job, but it is an interesting enough essay to merit some commentary.
Unlike the contemporary U.S. right wing, I don't believe Saul Alinsky was the most dangerous populist shit disturber of recent times. So to read von Hoffman echoing Alinsky's claim to be "a radical" (in contradistinction to contemporary "liberals" and "progressives") rubs me the wrong way. Alinsky was a guy who figured out how to mobilize popular discontents in an era (1930s through 1950s) when the other force that might have done the same work was the Communist Party. Now probably it was a good thing that dogma-besotted Communists didn't end up leading populist eruptions in this country -- most were too beholden to Moscow and too organizationally inflexible to have been able to deliver much for needy people. But analytically, they were the "radicals" of the time, correctly proclaiming that capitalism could not and would not deliver an economy in which most people got their fair share.
If Alinsky was "a radical," it was a stance assumed to upstage Communists who were telling a lot of home truths about how rotten things were, while Alinsky peddled ideologically unmoored "community organizing." Without ideological underpinnings that seek to explain why conditions are so bad and so hard to fix, organizing becomes a petty enterprise of small winnable fights and a series of campaigns for stop signs. It's a lot harder, but if we want to accomplish big changes, we have to believe that people can understand big concepts and envision life-altering changes. Now that's radical -- that's what has driven social movements for Black freedom, for women's liberation, for LGBT rights -- and uprisings against corporate-led globalization. And that is the kind of stuff Alinsky-inspired organizations watch in wonder, usually from the sidelines.
So don't hold up Saul Alinsky as a representative radical. We need something tougher, braver and smarter.
***
All that said, there were bits of von Hoffman's essay I didn't mind. Contemporary progressives DO need to understand we'll get out of Obama mostly only what we can extort by popular pressure -- not because he's a bad guy, but because he is President of the United States. The job is compromised because the country isn't what it ought to be. That's our problem and project. So I don't mind this:
Enough complaining, criticizing and attacking Obama, Alinsky would say -- not out of besotted loyalty to the president but out of hard-nosed political analysis. He would ask, do you have another person who would be better for the job who has any remote possibility of being elected two years from now? Unless you're nuts, the answer has to be no. Then why, Alinsky would ask, are you moaning, groaning and attacking him? ...
I was interested in von Hoffman's suggestion that Alinsky would have used the predictable antics of right wing media to inflate the perceived power of his own side.
Fox News ought to be a godsend for people with practical, political agility. Properly used, a denunciation from Fox depicting you as a menace to God and country spreads the idea that you are dangerous because you are powerful. People and organizations considered to be dangerous and powerful can spread fear in the hearts of their opponents. Fear makes people do dumb things which you can leap on and use to your advantage. Used correctly, Fox is the answer to a liberal's prayer. ...
That rings true. Isn't that what a relative handful of over-hyped Tea Baggers are doing in the opposite direction?
When it comes to using media, I think we progressives need to look at what Van Jones is doing since he was driven out of an Obama administration environmental job by right wing smears. Jones is back in the media, using his notoriety to speak truths. We have to leverage our opportunities more boldly and agilely.
Perhaps the best bit of the von Hoffman's article was this:
Before you do something, Alinsky would say, ask yourself: if you do it and it succeeds as you hope it will, what have you got? If the answer is ego satisfaction, Alinsky would say it's a waste of time.
That's always true. I think Alinsky would, in reality, have been a lot more interested in using the opportunities the netroots creates than von Hoffman credits him for being. But von Hoffman is right that we can't afford to let ourselves be mesmerized by the excitement of each cool new techtool to the detriment of the strategic planning, tactical imagination, and sheer daily drudgery that organizing requires.
Tony Judt died Friday. For the last year he was afflicted with the appalling A.L.S. -- amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s disease. His New York Times obituary is here; my reaction to Postwar, his masterful history of Europe since 1945 appears here.
But it wasn't this volume that introduced me to the New York University professor. It was his Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, a collection of essays that demanded that I look again at what I thought I knew about intellectual and political currents in my own time. It's not easy to shake up how a mature person sees what she lived. But Judt forced me to make quite a number of -- yes -- reappraisals. He reminded me that Central Europe was once that continent's intellectual heart, that actual existing Communism was both a hideous and petty human failure, and, like all responsible thinkers, that telling the truth matters. I didn't always agree with his conclusions, but I have read few contemporaries who I have admired as much.
On January 14, 2010, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the hands of its symbolic Doomsday Clock back to six minutes before midnight.
It only took Eleanor Roosevelt two days after the bombing of Hiroshima to enunciate realities we still haven't taken to heart. In her August 8, 1945 newspaper column, she wrote:
The only safe counter weapon to this new power is the firm decision of mankind that it shall be used for constructive purposes only. This discovery must spell the end of war. We have been paying an ever increasing price for indulging ourselves in this uncivilized way of settling our difficulties. We can no longer indulge in the slaughter of our young men. The price will be too high and will be paid not just by young men, but by whole populations.
In the past we have given lip service to the desire for peace. Now we meet the test of really working to achieve something basically new in the world. ...an absolute need exists for facing a non-escapable situation. This new discovery cannot be ignored. We have only two alternative choices: destruction and death -- or construction and life! If we desire our civilization to survive, then we must accept the responsibility of constructive work and of the wise use of a knowledge greater than any ever achieved by man before.
***
Realist international relations commentator Professor Stephen Walt recently described the paradox that nuclear weapons states do not act as if having the bomb makes them secure -- in fact the United States, Russia, China, Israel, Pakistan and India seem ever more urgently intent on building up their conventional military power. Walt concludes:
The lesson I draw from this is that nuclear weapons have very limited value. A handful of survivable weapons makes it very unlikely that another state will attack you directly or try to invade and take over your country. That's about it. And states certainly don't need thousands of warheads in order to obtain these effects. In short, if we're going to keep spending a lot of money on conventional forces and conducting geopolitics much as we did before 1945, we might as well save some money and move to a "minimum deterrence" posture.... And by acknowledging that nuclear weapons are neither the be-all and end-all of international security or a potent talisman of great power status, we might make it easier for potential entrants into the nuclear club to decide that it's not worth the trouble or the cost.
***
Like most people on the left side of things, I find President Obama's administration frequently disappointing. But I have to give the guy credit for understanding and announcing the urgent necessity of reducing the danger of nuclear war. Not only does not he not indulge in testosterone-poisoned cowboy posturing, but he has actually insisted that we need to work for a nuclear weapons-free world. And in his usual deliberate, measured (half-baked?) way, he's signed a new START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) with Russia, though Republicans will probably stall the agreement in the Senate. (By Constitutional mandate, treaties require a two-thirds vote there, probably rendering any international agreement impossible.)
Obama's attention to tamping down the danger of nuclear war is certainly one good reason to work to keep the other guys out of the majority in November.
One pillar of Judge Walker's ruling overturning the ban on gay marriage, according to Atlantic columnist Marc Ambinder:
California has no interest in reducing the number of gays and lesbians in its population.
That is the crux of the matter. I know he is using a technical legal term ("interest") there, but I think it is true in the the plain sense of words as well.
This was not always the case, even ten years ago. But it probably is now. I think Walker got it right: most Californians no longer want to erase LGBT people from their state. They may not want us next door, but they can imagine co-existing. Yeah for that!
Throughout the political scene, this is what many controversies boil down to. Arizona asserts an interest in reducing the number of brown people in its population. The Feds say no you don't; we are charged with making an immigration policy.
Some politicians, mostly from elsewhere, say we don't want Muslims in New York (or really anywhere in the country). New Yorkers say, get over yourselves; Muslims are here, New Yorkers as much as we are.
Birthers carry the desire to reduce the numbers of some people to fantastical lengths. They don't want the dark child of an African visitor and a citizen mother, born in oh-so-foreign Hawaii no less, as President, so they believe he can't be a citizen, born here and so with every right they have. They don't want such Americans. Too bad. Their country has changed.
The picture is of two Argentinian gentlemen who got married in their country last October. Governator Arnold responded to Walker's decision by reminding Californians of "our history of leading the way to the future." Yes, but a whole lot of places are ahead of the Golden State on this one.
That notorious decision of the Roberts Supreme Court allows corporations to throw money into electing whoever they want. No limits for big bucks contributors in the new regime ...
Target, the big box retailer, threw down $150000 to advance the campaign of Republican Tom Emmer for Governor of Minnesota. Emmer has a history of connections to anti-gay politics.
Target ran straight into Randi Reitan, who loves her gay son, and doesn't think much of Target's political bigotry. So she paid the store a visit. [2:58]
Looks like a harmless suburbanite, doesn't she? But Target is not smart to get on the wrong side of this mother. Reitan is a faithful Lutheran Christian who told the story of coming to terms with her son's sexual orientation in the film For the Bible Tells Me So. She's been arrested for supporting gay rights. People get distressed when their loved ones are treated badly.
Corporations are likely to find they risk a lot if their new political power is used for bigotry.
UPDATE: Target was in apology mode over this donation yesterday.
Now the true vacation part of my summer starts -- not the frenetic activity rushing from people I yearn to visit to mountains I delight to climb, Rather, the next week or so will be, relatively, down-time, time not defined by what needs to be done, however pleasant, but by the lack of obligation to do much at all.
Eleanor Roosevelt wrote about such days in her column My Day in 1937. Being the First Lady was a big job; she was thoughtful about how family obligations (or simple awareness of tasks needing attention) might fall more heavily on women.
At the last of the two teas yesterday afternoon, the couple who came through last paused a minute and the lady said: "Wouldn't it be very pleasant, Mrs. Roosevelt, to have a day without any hours in which you had to do prearranged things?" At the moment I was thinking how grateful I was that I had shaken hands with about five hundred-odd people and really didn't feel very tired, but the question started me thinking.
Of course, we all of us want days when we can wake up in the morning and say: "I can do just as I like this whole day through." There are, however, comparatively few people in the world who have the chance to do this except for short snatches of time, part of a day here and there. Men have been able to do it more often than women because when they cast off business cares they may perhaps also cast off family cares, but women, many of them at least, when they have families dependent upon them, whether they are the daughters or the mothers, can very rarely lay aside their business cares and not be confronted with a constant succession of adjustments to the wants and pleasures of others.
Of course, there are families in which the father takes as much responsibility as the mother but the fact remains that if he must have a rest, or feels that he must, the family won't fall to pieces as long as the mother or the responsible daughter is still on the spot.
So as so many of us seem to worry through life, at least a great many years of it, without having many of these "do as we please" days, perhaps the lesson to learn therefrom is that you would really miss not having the responsibilities; that having them you can look with longing at the days of freedom, and if you get one now and then, you enjoy it because of its contrast, but without a contrast it would really have no value.
Driving across Maine, it looks as if every town was hit up by an American flag salesman. As you slow to enter the town center, flags wave from every electric pole. Occasionally there is a American Legion post with civil war cannons and more flags.
But what's this across the street?
Oh yes, there's a war or two going on. Citizens of Blue Hill remember the dead -- even the civilians.
When the dead soldier was from Maine, there's an additional flag.
This rather conventional Tea-Bagger tableau trumpets its message in the upper Connecticut Valley. The farmer wants to be sure we know his views.
It's more disturbing when he gets more specific. I asked friends about how general this sentiment might be. They doubt the feeling is general for two reasons:
Post 9/11, Vermont has had a chance to experience being a border state (with Canada). The interstate was littered with security checkpoints for awhile; nobody liked being stopped, especially by Border Patrolmen "from away."
Besides, if the Feds cut off the migrant labor stream, who is going to harvest the corn and pick the veggies? Despite the serous poverty of the area, no one except migrant Mexicans is doing this work.
This one, a little overgrown, is the most disturbing of the hay bale signs. "Stop the pork -- shoot the pig". One wonders ...
These National Guard troops have laid two miles of protective boxes along Dauphin Island
By way of Craig Newmark (the Craigslist guy), I recently heard about and signed a petition asking Congress to include the time served by National Guard troops cleaning up after BP as counting toward their educational benefits. Apparently, unless Congress acts, their time breathing fumes and handling poisons may not count. You can sign too.
***
I recently had a chance to ask an Iraq war vet who is currently in college how the benefits were working for him. Too often, what is ostensibly on offer from big bureaucracies proves too difficult to obtain to be really useful. This is not this fellow's experience. For him, the system is working. I'm pleased to share some of his explanation.
The new GI bill provides 3 benefits: tuition, housing allowance, and an annual book stipend. Veterans receive these benefits for a period of 36 months (most vets receive benefits for 9 months out of every year, so collect benefits for 4 years). I believe vets have 10 years from their date of discharge to start using these benefits.
Maximum tuition is determined per state. Each state reports its highest in state tuition for a public school. The VA pays this money directly to the school. In the case of private schools, the VA will pay the max tuition, and if the school elects to contribute additional money under a "yellow ribbon scholarship", then the VA will match that money. For instance, if the state tuition cap would only cover 50 percent of a private school's tuition, and the school is willing to contribute 25 percent in yellow ribbon scholarships, then the VA will actually pay 75 percent of the tuition.
Housing allowances are determined by zip code. The housing allowance is the same Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH, paid to soldiers who live in off post apartments or houses) that the military would pay an E-5 grade enlisted soldier. Nationwide, this can range anywhere from $2700 (in Hawaii I think) to $300 (somewhere in Kentucky) per month. I'm not sure how they calculate this figure, but people who live in expensive areas generally pocket more BAH after their rent than people who live in less expensive areas (as I experienced first hand, when I moved from Alaska, where I was getting $1800 per month to pay my $1200 rent, to Louisiana, where I got $800 to pay my $800 rent).
The annual book stipend is a fixed $1000 that student veterans receive in August.
These benefits are conferred to anyone who served one year or more of active duty time after 9/11/2001. So even active duty soldiers who haven't been to Iraq or Afghanistan are eligible. Anyone in the reserves or national guard, who was activated for one year or more after 9/11, are also eligible. Those who were in the reserves or national guard who were activated for less than a year, will receive a percentage of these benefits depending on how much active duty time they served (I think there are 10 percent milestones). [This is what the law the National Guard petition supports would clarify.]
These new benefits took effect on August 1st, 2009 (lucky me, that was the day I got out of the army!). Unfortunately the VA wasn't anticipating the number of applicants, so many applications became so backlogged that about 50 percent of applicants did not receive their benefits on time. ... Some veterans were dropped by their schools, had to take out personal loans to pay their rent, or decided not to attend college at all. At one point in October, the VA actually started issuing $3000 relief checks to student veterans who were still waiting for payments. In addition, some veterans who added or dropped classes mid semester suddenly stopped receiving their housing allowances(!?).
I personally didn't have any trouble with my paperwork, tuition, or housing payments. ... My only complaint is that the BAH is only paid 9 months out of the year. So in between semesters, I have to work full time. I imagine not every vet out there has the ability to find a full time job for only 3 months. Then again, if we were good with our budgets, we'd put enough BAH aside every month to cover our rent during the summer.
Actually I have another complaint. We don't have access to any sort of records regarding our payments. I guess the plus side of this is that our housing allowance isn't reported as income. But the downside, well, I guess I would just feel more comfortable if I got some sort of monthly statement that highlighted everything. Other than those gripes though, the new GI Bill is an amazing opportunity.
The original GI Bill after World War II changed who thought about pursuing higher education in this country by making it possible for millions of vets to attend colleges. It also changed the campuses by mixing in these older, possibly wiser, certainly more worldly, students with the usual young folks.
The current crop of vets taking advantage of educational benefits is a much smaller group, but still will likely have an influence on campuses. By and large, they come from a different class and bring different experiences than young students. They've seen a lot and need to process what, if anything, these wars meant. Their fellow students need a chance to meet folks for whom war is not a video game. And hopefully the campuses will help vet's re-entry into civilian society now that they are home from the wars. In every way, getting these folks into a place where they can reflect is a good thing they deserve and we all need.
