Yes, Really...

This is an actual, honest-to-goodness family portrait (circa 1970s) sent in by a reader of The LG Report.  Truth be told, she didn't submit it for publication (although she admits to knowing that the risk existed), but, rather, she offered it up as proof of some point or other.  LG can't remember the exact issue at the moment.  Looking at this photo tends to wipe out all other thoughts in one's mind.   She may have been trying to prove that a man could pose for a photo with a gunshot wound through his suit while wearing eyeglasses purchased from the Estate of Buddy Holly and still maintain a smile.  No, wait, that wasn't it.  

LG was taught as a child that if he has nothing good to say about someone, he shouldn't say anything at all.   In keeping with that principle of life, we'll end the post here.  See you back again soon!

PS Print this photo and keep it around to remind yourself, on bad hair days, that it could be worse!  

89° Allen Walker - Entrée 2010

Classement 2010 - 89°

Tom Friedman’s Tea Kettle and the Mandarin Delusion

by Michael Kaplan


A defective Martha Stewart Everyday Brand Tea Kettle. A metaphor for Tom Friedman?

I’ve long been an admirer of Tom Friedman, the New York Times award-winning foreign affairs columnist. I’ve spent many days happily absorbed in his articles and books, which often inspired my own thinking on world issues. Friedman’s analysis of the realms of politics, culture, economics, and religion was incisive, penetrating beneath the surface of events, bringing historical perspective to current conflicts. Whether discussing Middle Eastern politics, global capitalism, or America’s place in the world, Friedman connected the dots with grace, elegance, and humor. Several years ago, when I taught at Yeshiva University, some students asked me how I could like both Tom Friedman and Rush Limbaugh. I replied that I don’t march in lock step with anyone and I’ll take my wisdom from wherever I can find it.

How disappointing it is to find that Friedman’s analytical and expository power, that allows him to get to the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict or explain globalization, fails him when he turns to his own country. Friedman is frustrated with democracy, at least in its two-party incarnation. The sad truth is that Tom Friedman, like so many other liberal pundits, does not understand Jacksonian America. I really shouldn’t be so surprised. Friedman was never a Jacksonian, but unlike many liberal progressives he is an American nationalist. In his writings Friedman usually tries to strike a balance between American nationalism and liberal internationalism, which is not an easy task. Friedman’s nationalism likewise tends to balance the patriotism of affirmation with the patriotism of dissent. No matter how critical he may be of America’s dysfunctions as he sees them, whenever he returns home from one of his globe trotting adventures, Friedman metaphorically kisses the ground and says “God bless America!”

A pensive Tom Friedman. Trapped in the mandarin delusion?

But getting to the point. As I said Friedman is frustrated with American democracy in its current two-party duopoly. Since at least 2005 Freidman’s writings have been dominated by three themes: the urgent need to develop green technologies and a green economy even if it has to be forced on a recalcitrant American public by governing elites who know better; the hijacking of American politics by the ideological far right and far left and the disintegration of the political center; China as the model of an enlightened autocracy where wise mandarin elites can impose reform on society unhampered by the dysfunctions of democracy (the mandarin delusion). Friedman really wants a third party, a party of “the radical center,” that can bring together the majority of Americans who are center right or center left (New York Times, October 3, 2010). Such a coalition, Friedman believes, can bring needed reforms to address America’s urgent social and economic problems and restore democracy to health. A new centrist party would, in Friedman’s view, see the wisdom in the policies that the liberal progressive elite want to impose on the nation, some of which have already been implemented by the Obama administration. I believe Friedman is mistaken in this. The center right is just as opposed to the progressive green agenda as the far right is, as indicated by the level of popular support for the Tea Party. And America is a center right (not a center left) nation. As Democratic pollster Pat Caddell told Monica Crowley on her WABC radio show (October 9, 2010), the Tea Party is “the tip of the spear” of a much larger Jacksonian populist revolt against the liberal progressive agenda.

In another recent column (September 29, 2010) Friedman dismisses the Tea Party movement as a “Tea Kettle movement.” This is because in Friedman’s considered judgment the Tea Party is all steam and no engine or substance. Tea Partiers are just a bunch of whiners and complainers who have no ideas and offer no solutions to America’s pressing problems.

The Tea Kettle movement can’t have a positive impact on the country because it has both misdiagnosed America’s main problem and hasn’t even offered a credible solution for the problem it has identified. How can you take a movement seriously that says it wants to cut government spending by billions of dollars but won’t identify the specific defense programs, Social Security, Medicare or other services it’s ready to cut — let alone explain how this will make us more competitive and grow the economy?

Friedman then accuses the Tea Party of hypocrisy for not opposing George W. Bush when he engaged in an orgy of spending on two wars, new entitlements, and irresponsible tax cuts. Never mind that Friedman himself was a supporter of those wars in their early stages (Friedman did see the necessity of crushing Islamic jihadism back then), but turned against them when things did not go as smoothly as planned. Also forget that the Tea Party did not emerge until the spring of 2009, after Bush had left office. In fact the Jacksonian populist conservatives who would become the Tea Party did oppose Bush’s domestic entitlement spending, which is why so many of them sat out the 2006 and 2008 elections. This is a point made by Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters and Drew M. at The New Ledger. But by doing this they made Nancy Pelosi speaker and Barack Obama president, not perhaps what they wanted, but it did lead to a needed shake up of the Republican establishment. The future Tea Partiers for the most part did, and do, support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the costs, for Jacksonian reasons of defending national security and national honor.

Perhaps Drew M. gets it right when he comments, “By ‘misdiagnosed America’s main problem’ he means, ‘No, all you people are wrong. I, Thomas Friedman, will now tell you what you actually should think.’” Friedman shows in these columns a discomfort with and an elite disdain for democracy’s populist politics that has become more pronounced in his writings. Friedman fails to grasp what Jacksonian populism is all about when he lambastes the Tea Party for failing to present detailed position papers. Drew M. again sums it up: “Campaigns in the democratic world (unlike Friedman’s mythical China) aren’t about detailed policy and legislation, they are about themes. Once candidates take over they are expected to act within a broad framework of the concepts they were elected on and not simply to carry with them a specific set of policies plans that they must stick to.” Elections are just the first step in the democratic process of policy making and governing. It involves many steps of debate, negotiation, and compromise. “Turning these themes (values really) into actual policy is the purpose of the legislative process.” Friedman is thinking like an elite policy wonk, which is not the way to comprehend a populist movement mobilizing public support for the defense of liberty.

The Jacksonians of the Tea Party movement are not looking to government for the answers to America’s challenges. They don’t want the government to lay out the detailed plans that Friedman wants to micromanage the economy and business. For the most part they want to reduce burdensome taxes and government regulations that are hamstringing the economy and preventing individuals and the private sector from creating jobs and wealth. The answers to America’s challenges will come not from government but from the American people. In this the Tea Party agrees with Ronald Reagan:

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.

These days Friedman does not hold Reagan in high regard, though he did in the 1990s when he wrote The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Calling Reagan “the most overrated president in U.S. history,” Friedman attributes his success, despite his administration’s huge budget deficits, to the good fortune of having the Soviet Union decline on his watch. But Reagan remains a hero to Jacksonians who still believe that the American people can govern their society and remain in charge of their own destinies. They will not pay the price to remake society in the image that will satisfy Friedman and other elite progressives.

Jacksonians reject solutions imposed by elites from above. Friedman’s call for progressive elites to use the power of government to impose a green lifestyle on Americans—which he elaborates in many columns over the past few years and in his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded—is one example. Jacksonian reaction against the Green movement in the 21st century is as intense as Jacksonian reaction against the Temperance movement was in the 19th century—another attempt by progressive elites to impose their cultural values on Jacksonian America.

Speaking of the Temperance movement, Captain Isaiah Rynders, leader of the Empire Club, a political gang in antebellum New York City, expressed the Jacksonian belief in a republican liberty that rejected progressive elite impositions in terms similar to those used by the Tea Party today. Rallying his followers at Tammany Hall, Rynders denounced the 1855 New York state prohibition law as a tyrannical ploy by an evangelical elite to impose its cultural values on and regulate the lives of New York’s hard-drinking working class. “I . . . drink what I like when I can get it,” Rynders declared to the cheers of New York’s Jacksonian b’hoys. “I thank God I have hitherto had what I want to eat, and as much as I needed to drink.” While proposing to “meet law with law,” the Captain insisted that when “our social rights are infringed upon . . . the law does not always give us our rights.” (New York Tribune, April 28, 1855). Like today’s Tea Partiers, Rynders was willing to use political protest and the ballot box to address popular grievances. Unlike today’s Tea Partiers, Rynders was ready to use violence, politics-out-of-doors, if legitimate politics did not get him what he wanted. Jacksonians today have no intention of allowing the government, or Green crusaders like Tom Friedman or singer Sheryl Crow (who I love—musically, not politically), tell them which light bulb they must screw in or how much toilet paper they can use to wipe their . . . need I say it? Even Walter Russell Mead, who admires Friedman, called his plan for a crippling gas tax to encourage a program to build electric cars a red herring that can never get off the ground. Unlike Friedman, Mead understands that Jacksonian America will not be bullied into the Green utopia.

Sheryl Crow, crusader against toilet paper.

Actually the tea kettle may be a more apt metaphor for Friedman’s thinking on these matters than it is for the Jacksonian Tea Party movement. Tea is Chinese in origin and China was the first nation to mass cultivate and trade this heavenly brew. Many tea kettles are made out of fine china. And Friedman now looks to China as a better model for modern governance than America. Friedman reveals this central point of his argument when he quotes pollster Stan Greenberg on his focus group’s findings. “People think the country is in trouble and that countries like China have a strategy for success and we don’t. They will follow someone who convinces them that they have a plan to make America great again. That is what they want to hear. It cuts across Republicans and Democrats.”

Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. Friedman's philosopher king?

Friedman suffers from what I call the “mandarin delusion.” The mandarin delusion is the belief that authoritarian state capitalism, of which China is the most successful model, can be a viable alternative to democratic free-market capitalism. The mandarin delusion is the idea that the post-Mao China of Deng Xiaoping and his successors is governed by a wise, far-seeing, elite of engineers, technocrats, and bureaucrats, heirs to China’s 2500 year tradition of rule by a mandarin intellectual elite. This elite, not hamstrung by the messy give and take and political accountability of democracy, can simply impose the policies it knows are right for their nation. Individuals who object to such policies, or who are just inconvenient and in the way, can simply be squashed. There are no Tea Parties in China. China’s Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, an engineer by training (as are most of China’s current government officials), is no doubt Friedman’s model of an enlightened leader for the 21st century, perhaps even a philosopher king. Friedman told David Gregory on Meet the Press back on May 23:

I have fantasized—don't get me wrong—but that what if we could just be China for a day? I mean, just, just, just one day. You know, I mean, where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions, and I do think there is a sense of that, on, on everything from the economy to environment. I don't want to be China for a second, OK, I want my democracy to work with the same authority, focus and stick-to-itiveness. But right now we have a system that can only produce suboptimal solutions.

To be fair, Friedman is well aware of the shortcomings of China’s authoritarian system. He doesn’t really want America to be China. But he does envy the ability of China’s mandarin technocrats to implement change by fiat. Explaining his thinking in Hot, Flat, and Crowded (pp. 430-431), Friedman writes:

As far as I am concerned, China’s system of government is inferior to ours in every respect—except one. That is the ability of China’s current generation of leaders—if they want—to cut through all their legacy industries, all the pleading special interests, all the bureaucratic obstacles, all the worries of a voter backlash, and simply order top-down the sweeping changes in prices, regulations, standards, education, and infrastructure that reflect China’s long-term strategic national interests—changes that would normally take Western democracies years or decades to debate and implement. That is such an asset when it comes to trying to engineer a sweeping change, like the green revolution, where you are competing against deeply embedded, well-funded, entrenched interests, and where you have to motivate the public to accept certain short-term sacrifices, including higher energy prices, for long-term gain. For Washington to be able to order all the right changes and set up the ideal market conditions for innovation, and then get out of the way and let the natural energy of the American capitalist system work—that would be a dream.

A dream for Friedman and America’s mandarin wannabes, perhaps. But for Jacksonians, including the Tea Party, this would be their worst nightmare: the government deciding who would be the winners and losers in the economy going forward. “What would be so bad? China? Just for one short day?” For Americans who love liberty, quite a lot would be bad.

Friedman may still believe in American democracy but he is frustrated with democracy’s messiness and lack of focus. He’s frustrated with the checks and balances in our political system that can lead to partisan gridlock. So he yearns for the authoritarian Chinese system where the government can implement change on command. He thinks that the challenges we face are so urgent that in his heart he doesn’t think democracy is up to meeting them. Like Alexander Hamilton, Friedman fears that active engagement by the American people in politics in the form of the Tea Party movement throws a monkey wrench into the machinery of government.

In a revealing interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel published the day before Barack Obama was inaugurated, Friedman made it quite clear that he thinks America is in crisis, that “we have lost our groove as a country” and that democratic government is dysfunctional and not up to the challenges of the 21st century. Government is unable to harness the innovation coming out of the private sector, especially in what he calls “ET”—green energy technology. But unlike conservatives who argue that government should just get out of the way and let the private sector develop new technologies, Friedman believes that government has to guide and focus the creative energy of the private sector to get the new technologies off the ground. Obama won the election, Friedman insists “because he understood that what Americans wanted most was nation building at home, not nation building in Iraq, not nation building in Afghanistan. America needs rebooting.” Friedman then dropped a bomb on his interviewer, claiming it was less important that Obama have experience than it was for him to absorb the radicalism of . . . Bill Ayers! “Experience is important, judgment is important, but most of all we need a president who is ready to take radical departures from business as usual—and be able to bring the country along with him. That is why I say, I hope he has been hanging around with Bill Ayers, because he needs to be as radical as this moment.”

Radical change, a radical departure from the past, seems to be Friedman’s top priority when he thinks about where America needs to go. “This is a radical moment for America, and the time has come where a radical is needed. If Obama is not as radical as the present moment requires, our country will be in trouble.” Well Jacksonian conservatives in the Tea Party certainly think Obama is more than radical enough. That is why they oppose him. But he’s not radical enough for Friedman. Here is Friedman’s idea of the type of radicalism that’s needed in the present crisis: “It would be radical if we were going to send two wise men away for six months, they would come back with a national energy policy, and we were going to bring it before Congress with an up or down vote. No amendments, no earmarks, no nothing. Just vote for the right policy or shut up.” This statement is breathtaking in its rejection of democracy, of the process of negotiation and compromise, of checks and balances. This is the mandarin delusion. Friedman is looking for a deus ex machina in the form of two wise mandarin technocrats to blast away the messy sausage making of democracy and lay down the law from on high, the will of the people be damned. China for a day indeed.

For several years now Friedman has been calling for “nation building” in America. But he appears willing to sacrifice liberty on the altar of doing whatever it takes to force his vision of “opitmal solutions” on Americans. He should have more confidence and faith in the American people; in their good sense and capacity for self-government, and in their ability to devise their own “opitmal solutions” to meet this generation’s challenges as did generations past. Americans really don’t need mandarins to tell them what to do to get their nation back on track. If Friedman is serious about his vision of “nation building” in America, he is going to have to persuade and convince the Jacksonian public that the “opitmal solutions” of the progressive green agenda is in their interests. He cannot indulge in fantasies that an all-knowing mandarin technocratic elite can impose his vision on a Jacksonian America that rejects it.

Friedman’s mandarin delusion has darker implications too. Jacksonians exaggerate the danger European-style social democracy poses to liberty. This comes with the Jacksonian tradition of hyper-vigilance to identify and expose any potential challenge to liberty before it can get off the ground. But a more ominous and dire threat to liberty looms on the horizon. Democratic capitalism, whether of the American laissez-faire or the European social democratic model, now faces a serious challenge from the authoritarian state capitalisms of China (that Friedman seems to admire), Russia, and other emerging nations. Both the American and European capitalist models are based on the concept that private-sector business exists to create wealth and raise living standards for all citizens while the government supervises, regulates, and intervenes to ensure that the game isn’t rigged and the rules are obeyed. Americans and Europeans may disagree on where, when, and how often the government should intervene in the economy, but both agree that the system’s goal is the prosperity, happiness, and liberty of the people.

Authoritarian state capitalism, in sharp contrast, works to enhance the power of the state and the elites that control it. Access to political and government elites—cronyism—determines who will get the opportunity to start a business and create wealth. In fact many businesses in Russia and China are state owned, or owned by members of the government. And the wealth created by these politically sanctioned enterprises is used for the financial support of the ruling elites. This is precisely the situation that Old Hickory warned against in his Bank Veto Message.

The New Authoritarian Challenge. Wen Jiabao and Vladimir Putin.

Authoritarian elites, the mandarins that Friedman wants to turn America over to for a day, fear political and economic liberty. They believe that the creative destruction central to free-market capitalism will lead to social and economic upheaval beyond the capacity of their political systems to absorb. As Ian Bremmer observes, China’s Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, and their elite circles all “know that if they leave it entirely to market forces to decide winners and losers from economic growth, they risk enabling those who might use that wealth to challenge their political power.” The mandarins and the oligarchs are “using markets to create wealth that can be directed as officials see fit. The ultimate motive is not economic but political: to maximise the state’s control of development and the leadership’s chance of survival.” And the people in countries ranging from Russia and China to Iran and Venezuela fear social and political chaos as much as their masters. The relative economic prosperity and political stability provided by authoritarian state capitalism is an acceptable trade-off in societies that value security over liberty. David Brooks, Friedman’s fellow columnist at the New York Times, writes that “state capitalism may be the only viable system in low-trust societies, in places where decentralized power devolves into gangsterism. . . . State capitalism taps into deep nationalist passions and offers psychic security for people who detest the hurly-burly of modern capitalism.”

In 2005 Friedman offered this tongue-in-cheek prayer asking the Lord’s forgiveness for his mandarin delusion:

Dear God in Heaven: Forgive me my sins, for I have been to China and I have had bad thoughts. Forgive me, Heavenly Father, for I have cast an envious eye on the authoritarian Chinese political system, where leaders can, and do, just order that problems be solved. . . . I cannot help but feel a tinge of jealousy at China’s ability to be serious about its problems and actually do things that are tough and require taking things away from people. Dear Lord, please accept my expression of remorse for harboring such feelings. Amen.

It is truly unfortunate Friedman does not seem serious about his remorse. The mandarin delusion he promotes is real and dangerous. State capitalism poses, I believe, the greatest challenge to the liberal democracy since the fall of communism, even greater than radical Islam. While the jihad has zero attraction outside the Dar al-Islam, state capitalism presents a potential alternative to democratic capitalism that much of the world would like: economic development disconnected from liberal democratic politics and the rule of law; prosperity without liberty. Francis Fukuyama was wrong. The appeal of state capitalism shows that we have not yet reached the end of history. Liberty loving Americans ignore these developments at their peril.

But in the end the mandarin delusion is just that: a mirage and a delusion. There are no shortcuts to sustained mass prosperity through policies imposed on the people without their consent by a mandarin elite. Not in the long term. Prosperity and liberty are ultimately inseparable. Democracy can be messy. It can appear to lack focus. But it is only through the democratic process of give and take, of building support for policies among popular constituencies, that an advanced modern society can create wealth, sustain legitimacy, and promote liberty and happiness. For all its undoubted achievements in raising millions of people out of poverty and building a modern economy, China is still a brutal autocracy, no matter how deceptively attractive its façade. Just ask China’s imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo (if you can find him somewhere the the bowels of the Chinese gulag). Here in America the Tea Party is, to quote Pat Caddell again, “the tip of the iceberg” of the much larger Jacksonian public’s sentiment. While it may not win the approval of Tom Friedman, the Tea Party is the current embodiment of the American democratic spirit, the spirit of Jacksonian America. Friedman, as a journalist, thinker, and American who loves his country, should get serious again about standing up for liberty and American democracy, analyze and not demonize the Tea Party, dispose of his defective tea kettle, and free himself from the mandarin delusion.

© 2010 Michael Kaplan

90° Matthew Davis - Entrée 2010

Classement 2010 - 90°

Starz Might Re-Cast Andy Whitfield In ‘Spartacus: Blood And Sand’; Cancellation Possible?

Posted by The Movie God  |  September 28th, 2010 at 4:50 pm  |  Trackback

Nothing about this story sounds like good news for fans of the hit Starz show, Spartacus: Blood and Sand.

It’s being reported that the network has begun reaching out to various casting directors in an attempt to see if they can find someone that could replace star Andy Whitfield on the show.

Whitfield, for those who don’t yet know, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma a while back, which delayed production on season 2, understandably. While waiting for their star to make a full recovery, Starz decided to make a 6-part prequel series this past summer, in which Whitfield, who seemed to be on the path to recovery, was set to make a small appearance. The prequel series is set to air in January, but it’s unclear whether said small appearance was still included or not.

Sadly, Mr. Whitfield has had an unexpected turn for the worst, and now requires a second aggressive treatment for his sickness, meaning even more of a delay. As much as every cast, crew, and executive involved in this show wants the actor to return, it’s also understandable that this is a business and the longer the delay is, the more damage it could do to the popularity of this, one of the network’s most successful series.

Whitfield himself is even said to be behind getting the show moving again, even if it requires re-casting his character. And if this difficult decision is made, Starz has already made it very clear that they intend to keep Whitfield employed with them and have him working on the show in some aspect.

At the moment, it looks like Starz has a few options here as well. It would be risky, but they could decide to cast someone in a different role, to become another central figure to build the show around. Then there’s the worst case scenario option: cancel Spartacus: Blood and Sand all together and not risk re-casting. Lastly, they could just decide to wait as long as it takes to get Whitfield healthy and back in action. Sources say that a decision is expected to be made in the next eight weeks.

As a huge fan of the show, I really don’t like the idea of re-casting. Whitfield was too good and too pivotal to find a completely different person to step into the role. If I had a vote in the matter, I’d say wait as long as they need to wait for the actor to be given his clean bill of health, and then move forward. Unfortunately, a lot of workers are involved here, and it’s really hard for them to accept new jobs while unsure of the future of Spartacus.

I do also like the idea of bringing in a new actor as an important character and build something around them. But instead of turning it into the main storyline, maybe do an entire season dedicated to this character as a side storyline. By the time that’s completed, hopefully, Andy Whitfield would be healthy as ever and then they could jump into season 3, merging the storylines of their first two seasons together. If the delay is as long as it seems to be looking, this idea makes the most sense, but I’m not familiar with the outlines they have in place and the current state of the production, and this might not be something that’s doable for them.

Obviously, the most important thing here is that Whitfield makes a full recovery. Anything other than that is not important in comparison. Nevertheless, Starz has some hard decisions to make, and I for one really hope that whatever they do, the actor will be able to return when he’s well enough to.

If you’re a fan of the show, what would you like to see happen? Would you be willing to wait as long as it takes, or are you so itchy for more Spartacus that you’d be okay with a new actor in the role? Is there another option you think would work best?

http://geeksofdoom.com/2010/09/28/starz-might-re-cast-andy-whitfield-in-spartacus-blood-and-sand-cancellation-possible/

4 Ugly Truths About Air Travel in 2010

LG just returned to NYC on a cross-country flight from San Francisco.  Here are five ugly (and we mean Rosie O'Donnell Ugly) truths about air travel in 2010. 

You may already know them, but, nonetheless, a reminder is always helpful:

No. 1 - That weirdo who you've taken particular note of two or three times in the terminal (at the newsstand, in the rest room, etc.) will, without a doubt, be sitting next to you on the plane.  That's him on the right.  He doesn't shower, as you'd guess, but he spits a lot.  Into a cup.  Which he holds on his lap and is always in danger of spilling on you.   

No. 2 - You will be paying additional fees.  In fact, you will soon be paying an "Additional Fee Fee" which will be assessed on top of any additional fee that you're charged for other stuff.  This will cover the cost of actually charging and collecting the original additional fee.  The good news:  The "Additional Fee Fee Fee" won't come about until Congress approves it in a few years.  That's your money flying away from you on the right.  At least it always departs on time, unlike you.  

No. 3 -  The flight attendant is always having a bad day and hates you for a variety of reasons.  You lack exact change for the headset.  Your big elbow is in the aisle. You requested a beverage which isn't on the cart but, rather, way in the back of the plane, behind that fat woman waiting to shoe-horn herself into the bathroom. You don't pass your used service items to the end of the row when requested.  You don't put down your reading material and face front, as ordered, when the oxygen mask presentation is made. You are a bad person and a bad traveler but you'll get yours:  When the plane hits Six Flags-style turbulence and your oxygen mask drops down in front of your contorted and gasping face, you'll see this sign:  "Please swipe credit card before attempting to use oxygen mask.  First 30 seconds of oxygen are free, $5 for each additional minute." 

You'll pass out trying to enter the card's security code and the flight attendant will have to reach over your limp body to get your used service items into her garbage bag.    



This is how far away from your face the flight attendant will hold the oxygen mask until you pay the oxygen fee.



No. 4 - The TSA people are always having a bad day and hate you for a variety of reasons.  You don't hand over your boarding pass properly.  Your license is facing the wrong way.  You forgot to take off your belt.  You took off your shoes too soon and smelled up the joint.   You say your bag doesn't contain a laptop but they don't believe you.  You're preventing them from going on break.  You should just stay home and mail your money into the airlines so that the TSA people could still be paid. 



The odor of your feet as depicted visually



So there you have it folks.  Until next time, keep your feet on the ground and keeping reaching for the remote...







91° Timothy Olyphant - Entrée 2010

Classement 2010 - 91°

Old News: The USA Has Been A Police State Since 1787

Last week the FBI raided the homes of anti-war activists in multiple states simultaneously, prompting Paul Craig Roberts to write a searing column called "It Is Official: The US Is A Police State".

I caught excerpts from Roberts and comments on his work from Chris Floyd, in "Domestic Disturbance: FBI Raids Bring the Terror War Home".

I don't disagree with anything Roberts or Floyd wrote about this story, and I would recommend both columns. But neither of these very fine writers approached the idea that struck me hardest when I saw Roberts' headline.

What's new about the USA being a police state? Why is it suddenly official now?

That the USA is a police state has been, if not officially official, then at least totally bloody obvious, for my entire life -- and the same is true of Roberts, and Floyd, and you (dear reader), and your parents, and their parents. For all our lives, we have lived in a police state that calls itself a democracy, and the cover story has been so effective that even some of our leading dissident writers are now just discovering the truth behind it.

Lest we forget: Forty years ago, in the midst of another generation's undeclared, unjustified, unwinnable and unpopular war, unarmed anti-war protesters were gunned down in broad daylight in public, and not one of the shooters who committed the crime was even tried.

In the decade leading up to those shootings, four civic and political leaders, all of whom posed threats to the established order, were also gunned down in public. The victims included a sitting President and a US Senator, yet no justice was ever served for any of these murders.

During the same period, countless civil rights activists and anti-war protesters were viciously assaulted, and some of them were also killed. Sometimes the crimes were committed by "law enforcement officials" themselves; at other times the crimes were committed with the silent approval of  "the law".

From the 1930's through the late 1950's, the nation's "law enforcement" officers brutally crushed anyone they could find who had sympathy for communism, socialism, or any other "-ism" that didn't begin with "capital". None of this is secret. None of it is news.

All through our history, Americans whose skin wasn't quite white enough have been hassled, assaulted and ruthlessly murdered, often by the police whose lives depend on the taxes we all pay, and who are supposed to be protecting all of us. Most of the perpetrators of these crimes have never been brought to justice.

This pattern of official injustice -- supported more often than not by the police themselves -- has been going on for as long as you care to look. It runs as deep as American history itself. Though it may be pleasant to forget it, the USA is nation whose history includes -- nay! is a nation that was built upon -- genocide, slavery, lynching, and other forms of public terror, all with the open support of "the authorities".

A careful reading of American history shows that the basic problem here is not the current administration's disregard of the Constitution, nor the disdain for the Constitution shown by previous administrations. As Jerry Fresia points out in "Toward An American Revolution", the problem is the Constitution itself.

The Articles of Confederation, by which the "United States of America" came into being, guaranteed direct democratic representation at the national level, in a government which could be swept from power quite easily when and if the voters of the country were displeased. The most powerful men in the land -- slaveholders, mostly -- found their riches, their status and their privilege in jeopardy, and feared for what they were pleased to call "an excess of democracy".

So they banded together and wrote the Constitution, which set up our current system of "representative" government, under which the President is elected by an Electoral College chosen by the State legislators, rather than directly by the people; under which it takes three election cycles to change the entire Senate; under which countless federal officials -- including every justice on the Supreme Court -- are appointed by the President and approved by the Senate, with nary a word from the House of Representatives, which is, at least in theory, the only part of the federal government over which the voters are meant to have any immediate influence.

Then, through a series of incidents that today would be called "terrorist attacks" (as long as they were perpetrated by Muslims), the authors of the Constitution inflamed enough other powerful men to ensure the ratification of the new Constitution -- quite against the wishes of the "common people" of the day -- setting the course which we now travel, and which the best of us (including Chris Floyd and Paul Craig Roberts) rightfully despise.

Rather than guaranteeing direct democratic representation and fair and equal rights to all citizens, the Constitution set up a federal government with the power to put down "insurrections", and a mandate to protect interstate and international "commerce". In our present-day terms, it empowers a deeply entrenched government running a police state at home to support a commercial empire abroad.

Those who support the Constitution, who pine for a return to "Constitutional law", who rail against one administration after another for taking "un-Constitutional actions" and passing "un-Constitutional laws", have a legitimate point. Life in the United States would certainly be better for a very large number of people if the civil rights granted in the Constitution -- limited tough they may be -- were strictly observed.

But we would still have the same problem. The federal government would still be owned by the most powerful men in the country, and would still be geared to putting down "insurrections" at home while supporting a "commercial" empire abroad.

That was the whole point of the Constitution in the first place. This is why we are where we are today. As Chris Floyd pointed out some time ago, "the purpose of a system is what it does". And what our current system does, its purpose, is still congruent with the wishes of the "Founding Fathers".

I fear that, if our leading dissident writers continue to miss this point, the best we could possibly accomplish -- even if we all stood together against the abomination that is our federal government -- would be a reversion to the root cause of our current problems.

And that's not going to be good enough.

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93° Amaury Nolasco (-14)

Classement 2010 - 93° / Classement 2009 - 79°

Good News, Bad News: My Blog Sucks And Will Continue To Do So

Look at my blog! It really does suck!!

Yes, yes, I know: My blog sucks.

It has sucked -- quite vigorously -- for most of the past two and a half years. Mostly it has sucked because I have been incapacitated, first emotionally by the premeditated murder of a close friend, and then physically by two serious injuries from which I am still struggling to recover, one of which limits my typing considerably.

My physical condition is gradually improving, and lately I have been able to do a small amount of "discretionary typing", but my blog continues to suck, and it will do so for some time to come. Now, however, the reasons are different.

I am continuing to spend a large share of my waking hours doing (painful, boring) rehab, but with my "discretionary" time -- here's the good news -- rather than trying to get my blog rolling again, I've been working on something else.

Why is this good news? Because my new project allows me to work with two (very) old friends, pulling together many of the threads we have been trying to weave in the past, and presenting them in a manner which (though I say it myself) long-time readers and newcomers alike will probably find quite refreshing.

It's a factual-fictional account of a horrible true story, and it starts like this:

On August 23, 2010, Metro Police entered a well-appointed flat at 36 Alderney Street, in the heart of London. In the flat they found an ensuite bathroom, and in the bathtub they found a padlocked bag, and in the bag they found the body of Gareth Williams.

Williams, a brilliant mathematician from Anglesey, Wales, worked in Cheltenham for GQHC, Britain's domestic eavesdropping service. He was living in London on a one-year secondment to MI6, Britiain's Secret Intelligence Service, and the block of flats in which his body was discovered was an MI6 "safe house".

Apparently uninterested in potential national-security angles, the police immediately announced they were looking for clues to Williams' mysterious death in the details of his private life. But they didn't make much headway. A month after his body was found, they still hadn't determined the cause of death, although they had admitted the case was "complex" and "unexplained".

It seemed like a job for Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

Gareth Williams was buried today in Valley, Anglesey, Wales.

Gareth Williams was buried today -- more than a month after his body was discovered.

I grieve for his parents Ian and Ellen, his sister Ceri, his uncle William Hughes, and all his other relatives and friends.

I cannot imagine what happened to him, or what is hampering the police in their investigation, or what his former colleagues at MI6 and GCQH are thinking ...

... unless maybe I can.

Please don't click this link unless you wish to read more:

Sherlock Holmes and the Alderney Street Mystery

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Only in California...

LG is in Lake Tahoe this weekend for The Event Formerly Known as a Bachelor Party (that is, until the bride called off the wedding a few weeks ago... don't get me started...)  Nonetheless, all the invitees agreed to soldier on to support our good friend, so we're all here as planned.  Yes, we're good friends, agreeing to come here to golf, hit the casinos, etc., no need to say it. 

LG encountered this sign while in San Francisco yesterday, and it falls squarely under the heading "Only in California:"

We'd ask that everyone also visualize laughing at The LG Report today.

LG wants to give a special shout out to all of his high school classmates who checked in on The LG Report and left very nice comments.  It was great to see everyone.  These comments are further proof that you should attend your reunions.  Yeah, you, come on, don't be a slouch, get off the couch!

We'd like to ask everyone to visualize themselves enjoying the weekend.  See you back here again soon!

The Tea Party is the Spirit of Jacksonian America

by Michael Kaplan


Daniel Shays (l) and Job Shattuck (r) leaders of Shays's Rebellion

The bloggers at the conservative What Would the Founders Think? posted “We’re ALL Tea Partiers Now” in response to the uproar over the Tea Party victories in the Republican primaries, especially Christine O’Donnell’s victory in Delaware. The Tea Party, they insist, is not a political organization. It is a grassroots awakening of average Americans at kitchen tables and workplaces across the country who are now engaging with politics. The Tea Party is the American people asserting their sovereignty over government.

This is very much a Jacksonian populist movement. Most Americans today, conservative and liberal alike, are mistaken about the commitment of the Founders to popular democracy. The Founders believed in liberty, which they feared could be destroyed by a tyranny of the majority, which is how they looked at democracy. In 1948, Richard Hofstadter observed that “Modern American folklore assumes that democracy and liberty are all but identical, and when democratic writers take the trouble to make the distinction, they usually assume that democracy is necessary to liberty. But the Founding Fathers thought that the liberty with which they were most concerned was menaced by democracy. In their minds liberty was linked not to democracy but to property.” (The American Political Tradition, p. 10). Fareed Zakaria, writing in Foreign Affairs (Nov/Dec 1997, p. 30), commented on the Founders’ concerns: “Constitutional liberalism is about the limitation of power, democracy about its accumulation and use. For this reason, many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberals saw in democracy a force that could undermine liberty. James Madison explained in The Federalist that ‘the danger of oppression’ in a democracy came from ‘the majority of the community.’” Michael Mandelbaum writes in Democracy’s Good Name (pp. 17, 21), that the Founders, looking back to ancient Athens and Rome, were convinced “that the average person lacked the education, the judgment, the temperament, and the commitment to the public good to play a constructive role in public life.” The ignorance and lack of sophistication of the common people made them susceptible to the appeals of demagogues. Such demagogues would cultivate the politics of class envy, so that if a popular majority did gain control of the machinery of government, they would promptly proceed to redistribute property and wealth. This is why the Founders established a representative republic instead of a democracy. Of the major Founders, only Thomas Jefferson took issue with their suspicion of active participation by citizens in politics—and of democracy. The idea that ordinary citizens should be empowered to “take back our government” owes more to Andrew Jackson and the democratic movement of the 1820s that it does to the Founders.

There is one paragraph in the WWTFT post which I find to be an eloquent statement of the ideals of Jacksonian democracy and nationalism:

The Tea Party is us. Don’t let the establishment politicians and media brand us. Don’t let them “identify” us as anything but Americans who believe that we are best governed by ourselves, not a power elite. They are threatened by our belief in liberty. Tyrants always are. Remember that, and vote for people of quality and character regardless of how they are made to look on television. They may not be lawyers or glib performance artists. They may be rough-hewn and not articulate. But vote for those you can trust to go to Washington and do what is right for liberty. Don’t be seduced by the media smoothies. We know all about talkers who promise change but deliver poverty and stagnation; who lie and steal from the public treasuries and our wallets and our children’s futures. We are about reclaiming liberty. That is the battle here. It’s not between Republican and Democrat, or black or white, or Christian or atheist. It’s about the liberty to “be,” to shape our own futures. The branding being done by the Establishment is a distraction, an attempt to dilute and divide us. Don’t let it happen.  Stand for liberty.

Old Hickory could not have said it better himself. Jackson was determined to prevent self-interested elites from using government to promote their own special interests to the detriment of average, hard-working Americans.

A mob of angry taxpayers in Shays's Rebellion

The Founders saw the need to balance liberty with order. The American Revolution unleashed powerful forces of social and political transformation that the Founders wanted to keep contained in stable social and political institutions. The lesson that George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the other framers of the Constitution drew from the 1780s—the period of ineffective central government under the Articles of Confederation—was that too weak a central government was as much a threat to liberty as too strong a central government. Washington was shocked by Shays’s Rebellion, the populist uprising in 1786 by farmers in western Massachusetts against unfair and burdensome taxes. Writing to his old comrade-in-arms, General Henry Knox, Washington confided his pessimism for the future of the republican experiment.

I feel, my dear Genl. Knox, infinitely more than I can express to you, for the disorders which have arisen in these States. Good God! who besides a tory could have foreseen, or a Briton predicted them! were these people wiser than others, or did they judge of us from the corruption, and depravity of their own hearts? The latter I am persuaded was the case, and that notwithstanding the boasted virtue of America, we are far gone in every thing ignoble and bad.

I do assure you, that even at this moment, when I reflect on the present posture of our affairs, it seems to me to be like the vision of a dream. My mind does not know how to realize it, as a thing in actual existence, so strange, so wonderful does it appear to me! In this, as in most other matter, we are too slow. When this spirit first dawned, probably it might easily have been checked; but it is scarcely within the reach of human ken, at this moment, to say when, where, or how it will end. There are combustibles in every State, which a spark might set fire to.

Knox had implied in his letters “that that the men of reflection, principle and property in New England, feeling the inefficacy of their present government” would support a stronger national government. Washington was in full agreement. In Virginia “a prompt disposition to support, and give energy to the foederal System is discovered.” Only a national government of “energy,” Washington insisted, could save the republic from sinking “into the lowest state of humiliation and contempt.”

Washington wrote to another war comrade, General Henry Lee (father of Robert E.), that the government had to act swiftly and decisively to crush Shays’s Rebellion if it was to maintain its credibility. He dismissed the effectiveness of using “influence” not backed up by force “to appease the present tumults in Massachusetts.” After all, Washington went on, “Influence is no Government. Let us have one by which our lives, liberties and properties will be secured; or let us know the worst at once.” The proper way to deal with violent social conflict was to “Know precisely what the insurgents aim at. If they have real grievances, redress them if possible; or acknowledge the justice of them, and your inability to do it in the present moment. If they have not, employ the force of government against them at once.” But under no circumstances, Washington insisted, could the government allow any challenge to its authority go unpunished. “Let the reins of government then be braced and held with a steady hand, and every violation of the Constitution be reprehended: if defective, let it be amended, but not suffered to be trampled upon whilst it has an existence.” It was one thing to rise up in rebellion against King George III and his illegitimate abuses of power. It was quite another to undermine the republican government of one’s own state and open the door to a social and political anarchy in which liberty and property could be lost. Washington would not abide “mobocracy.”

Shays’s Rebellion was the backdrop for the Constitutional Convention. The framers at Philadelphia wanted to make sure that there would be no encore. Again, Jefferson, from his post in Paris, dissented from this position: “God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. . . . The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.” Neither did the framers want any more Boston Tea Parties. The more radical leaders of the pre-1776 Patriot movement like Samuel Adams, who led the Boston Sons of Liberty in the original Tea Party, or Patrick Henry in Virginia were sidelined by 1787. Adams and Henry would oppose ratification of the Constitution as Antifederalists. Henry, in his June 5, 1788 speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention famously said: “This Constitution is said to have beautiful features; but when I come to examine these features, sir, they appear to me horribly frightful. Among other deformities, it has an awful squinting; it squints towards monarchy; and does not this raise indignation in the breast of every true American?”

The Federalists who championed the Constitution, wanted to limit the role played by the American people in politics. They believed that Americans should be free to create wealth and pursue happiness, while politics and government should be left to the social and political elites—men of property and education who were best qualified to understand what the people needed. The people’s role was to choose between elite candidates for office at the ballot box and then mind their own business, leaving governing and policy making to their elected officials. The Founders in general, and the Federalists in particular, were unprepared for the upsurge of popular political activism set loose by the Revolution. The American people insisted that their voices be heard and be treated with respect by their political leaders. And woe to those leaders who didn’t get the message. It was Thomas Jefferson in the 1790s and Andrew Jackson in the 1820s who would successfully harness this populist energy into their political movements, which would ultimately win them the White House.

Popular historian William Hogeland who has written sympathetically of the Whiskey Rebellion—an early expression of Jacksonian populism—points out the irony that WWTFT, Glenn Beck, and other elite-bashing populist conservatives “in their opposition to what they think of as today’s liberal-elite big government machine, they look back for help to the most elite guys in the world, the guys who invented that government.” George Washington would not have given the time of day to the Tea Partiers. He was ready to use military force to crush the tax-protesting Whiskey Rebels of 1794.

The sheer disgust that any one of the famous founders would have showered on the very people who now constantly invoke their legacies seems like a telling irony to me. Not one of the founders had anything to do with “grass-roots democracy,” a term that would have made all of them, despite their differences, sick. The revulsion unified them. It’s all they had in common, really.

Hogeland does go too far in his critique of the Founders, but the Federalist Party of Washington and Hamilton definitely saw the American people as rambunctious children who needed wise fathers to guide them and keep them out of political mischief. Old Hickory, on the other hand, made faith in the people as adults who could take charge of their destiny the foundation of his political creed. His is the true spirit of the Tea Party and the Tea Party today is the spirit of Jacksonian America.

P.S. Ron Chernow, author of biographies of Hamilton and Washington just published an op-ed in the New York Times [Sept. 24, 2010] on “The Founding Fathers Versus the Tea Party.”

Correction. The second sentence of the second paragraph originally read: “The people at WWTFT are mistaken about the commitment of the Founders to popular democracy.” This has been revised.

© 2010 Michael Kaplan