Opposition.

Click image to enlarge.

It is spreading to unlikely places. This is an AP photo taken outside St. Vincent Archabbey last month, a group protests the school’s decision to invite President Bush to deliver the commencement address. The southwestern Pennsylvania school’s president is the former head of Bush’s faith-based initiative. "Blessed are the peacemakers."

Mad TV and iRACK

My friend Steve offers this funny YouTube send-up of Steve Jobs and the Bush administration all in one. Just in time for a Saturday afternoon break.

Stop the War!

What an exhilarating photo. I didn't make it to this protest, as I have for dozens of others. This march on Saturday, the Anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war, turned out thousands in Washington and in major cities across America.

I didn't see much coverage. So I am showing the protesters here marching. Free people. Free country. Free speech. As our rights have been eroded by this administration (Bill Maher pointed out recently, that all we have left of the Bill of Rights are "...handguns, religion and they can't make us quarter a British soldier"), I look to events like this as the reminder of the constitutional foundations of our country. However, even the right to protest has been circumscribed by designating "Free Speech Zones" at sensitive events, such as political conventions! Good grief!! Shouldn't a party convention be the ground zero of free speech!?

Right now this administration searches our phone records, credit cards, mail, and Internet communications. The protection of privacy has been given up. So has search and seizure, warrants, self-incrimination, trial by jury and cruel and unusual punishment. Bush/Rove/Cheney know that we do not understand these civil rights, much less care about them.

The best line from Bill Maher is this: "George Bush asked us to sacrifice things he knew we wouldn't miss---privacy and morality. He let us keep the money." Cynical? You bet. So take a good look at the picture above, because these actions could go the same way our other civil rights have gone. This kind of free speech may become the next "quaint" thing to disappear.

Mendacious Policy

I was thinking today of my sense of the current administration's shocking incompetence. I ask myself how it can be so, so incompetent. We see it in everything it touches from the new VA scandal, to the US Attorney scandal, to the Katrina scandal, to the no Child Left Behind failures, right up to the mother lode, Iraq and the War on Terror. But I think referring to these results as incompetence is a mistake. It creates a kind of bumbling, benign sense of the administration.

Actually, it is not incompetence, it is policy. To underfund, to privatize, to "drag governement into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub," as Grover Norquist likes to say, is policy. To suggest that there is sound policy, but it is just incompetently executed frees the policy makers from the responsibility for their policy. The policy might be all right, but just badly executed by the blunder heads. The policy just gets to go on. We need to keep linking the disasters to the policy. Otherwise, the policies aren't examined for the wreakage they create. Instead, incompetence gets the attention. The policies go unexposed and unexamined, because we're calling it incompetence.

The administration creates a disaster through its policy and it is called incompetence. The admnistration then gets a weird kind of oh-the-poor-guy sympathy! "Gosh, they just don't seem to get a fair break do they Harriet?"

The policy of underfunding and privatizing the VA went as planned and was skillfully executed---no incompetence there. Administrators were following policy. It is the persistence of the Bush policy, the mendacity of it, and its superb execution that is the real story. Let's nail this one on their foreheads because it is a slippery but essential distinction.

Deep Poverty

I often wonder when this thing called the United States is going to go totally haywire. It is our national myth that we are not susceptable to break down and chaos. However, I think a democracy is a very fragile system that depends on numerous factors. One of them is some equality of wealth and its implied sister, opportunity. The McClatchy Washington Bureau has completed a new study that reveals startling growth of the little discussed group of American people, the severly poor. Even those doing the research were shocked by their findings.

"A McClatchy Newspapers analysis of 2005 census figures, the latest available, found that nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty. A family of four with two children and an annual income of less than $9,903 - half the federal poverty line - was considered severely poor in 2005. So were individuals who made less than $5,080 a year.

The McClatchy analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That's 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period. McClatchy's review also found statistically significant increases in the percentage of the population in severe poverty in 65 of 215 large U.S. counties, and similar increases in 28 states. The review also suggested that the rise in severely poor residents isn't confined to large urban counties but extends to suburban and rural areas."

16 million people. Signs like this keep appearing. As a people we should be shattered by this information. This news, to my knowledge, did not make one front page of any newspaper. I haven't seen it anywhere on the internet, except as a note on OneGoodMove. We have got to get Bush/Republicans out of office. The damage is just too great. We cannot bare this kind of "compassion."