Category Archives: Politics

Politics, Retirement, Travel

Canadians: “Build a Damn Fence!”

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Samhain                                            Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

From The Manitoba Herald

by Clive Runnels

Canadians: “Build a Damn Fence!”

The flood of American liberals sneaking across the border into Canada has intensified in the past week, sparking calls for increased patrols to stop the illegal immigration. The recent actions of the Tea Party are prompting an exodus among left-leaning citizens who fear they’ll soon be required to hunt, pray, and to agree with Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck.

Canadian border farmers say it’s not uncommon to see dozens of sociology professors, animal-rights activists and Unitarians crossing their fields at night. “I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a Hollywood producer huddled in the barn,” said Manitoba farmer Red Greenfield, whose acreage borders North Dakota. The producer was cold, exhausted and hungry. He asked me if I could spare a latte and some free-range chicken.

When I said I didn’t have any, he left before I even got a chance to show him my screenplay, eh?”

In an effort to stop the illegal aliens, Greenfield erected higher fences, but the liberals scaled them. He then installed loudspeakers that blared Rush Limbaugh across the fields.

“Not real effective,” he said. “The liberals still got through and Rush annoyed the cows so much that they wouldn’t give any milk.”

Officials are particularly concerned about smugglers who meet liberals near the Canadian border, pack them into Volvo station wagons and drive them across the border where they are simply left to fend for themselves.”  A lot of these people are not prepared for our rugged conditions,” an Ontario border patrolman said. “I found one carload without a single bottle of imported drinking water. They did have a nice little Napa Valley Cabernet, though.”

When liberals are caught, they’re sent back across the border, often wailing loudly that they fear retribution from conservatives. Rumors have been circulating about plans being made to build re-education camps where liberals will be forced to drink domestic beer and watch NASCAR races.

In recent days, liberals have turned to ingenious ways of crossing the border. Some have been disguised as senior citizens taking a bus trip to buy cheap Canadian prescription drugs. After catching a half-dozen young vegans in powdered wig disguises, Canadian immigration authorities began stopping buses and quizzing the supposed senior citizens about Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney to prove that they were alive in the ’50s. “If they can’t identify the accordion player on The Lawrence Welk Show, we become very suspicious about their age” an official said.

Canadian citizens have complained that the illegal immigrants are creating an organic-broccoli shortage and are renting all the Michael Moore movies. “I really feel sorry for American liberals, but the Canadian economy just can’t support them.” an Ottawa resident said. “How many art-history majors does one country need?”

Great Work, Politics

Coping With Change

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Samhain                                            Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

A meeting with lobbyists and politically minded folks this morning, trying to suss out the impact of the Republican wins in the elections.  The energy in the room was good, nothing energizes political folks like a solid enemy.  enemy

I did not get a ticket this time.  My patience was at guru on the mountain top level, except for that one s.o.b.  The road passed underneath me as a calm ribbon of stability in a changing world, something strange like that.

I still don’t know these folks well enough to participate much and my knowledge level about the ins and outs of state legislative and administrative politics confines me, too.  Won’t last forever.

Aging, Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, GeekWorld, Humanities, Politics, Retirement

Gadget Obsessed? Moi?

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Samhain                                                          New (Thanksgiving) Moon

To call me gadget obsessed might take reality a tad too far, but not much.  I saved up some money and bought a TIVO.  It took me this afternoon to get it set up and working, putting the cables in the right places, getting the codes right, creating a few channels on Pandora, wondering at the limited Netflix options when the full menu is available on my new Play Station 3, (OK, maybe it’s not quite far enough.) and deciding whether or not to ditch the cable tv subscription from Comcast, my least favorite company of the week.

In spite of myself it looks like keeping the cable subscription is still the best way to get the most out of the TV.  I’m gonna keep checking though since new ways to watch movies and broadcast shows keep popping up.  Most of what’s on tv is low culture, but often compelling anyhow and even the stuff I like that’s not compelling entertains me. With streaming movies the content available at home on demand has increased a hundred fold.

As a general rule, I don’t watch tv to get educated and I’m rarely disappointed.

Even with the increased quality and options though, nothing on the tube–that phrase dates me like saying icebox–compares to the live music, open studios and visiting with friends at Art Attack last night.  Remember Alvin Toffler?  The futurist from a long time ago.  He talked about high tech, high touch and I’ve found him right on that score.  I use the internet, the facility of cable tv combined with the internet and software like WordPress and Microsoft Word to make me much more productive in the work I choose to do, but going in to the MIA and seeing my docent friends or over to Paul’s house for a Woolly meeting, a Sierra Club meeting on Franklin Avenue are equally important to me.  Without them I would be a hermit.

A lot in the hermit’s solitude appeals to me, so I’m happy Kate and I have created a place here where we can be alone and creative, just the two of us, but I need face to face time with others, too.

Aging, Art and Culture, Great Work, Politics

Good Pharma

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Samhain                                             New (Thanksgiving) Moon

When I walked into the Northrup King building last night, I had to pause a moment to let another time in my life, also spent there, sink in, too.

The period was not unlike the current one with high unemployment and plant closings dominating the news.  This was the mid 1970’s, the era when the contraction of the American automobile industry began in earnest and my hometown went from Smalltown, USA to Shutteredtown, USA.  No longer at home, I had lived in Minnesota for five years at the time, involved in anti-war work and organizing for labor unions and local neighborhoods.

In 1975 ripples went out through the activist community in Minneapolis that Sandoz, the pharmaceutical giant, had plans to purchase the Northrup-King seed plant and close it down.  Many of us rallied to the workers there and began a campaign to stop the plant closing and save the jobs.  As our research proceeded, we learned an important and, to me at least, sobering truth: pharmaceutical companies were buying up seed companies; Northrup-King was far from the only one.  Why?  Because the pharmaceutical companies had the perspective and vision to see the imminent emergence of biotechnology.

They realized that future profit streams could require as many patents as possible on genetic material; germplasm would be the new precious metals, the oil fields of tomorrow.  And they wanted to control as much of it as they could.  Seed companies like Northrup-King already had patents on many of the cultivars of wheat, corn and soybeans, foodstuffs necessary to humanity’s most basic survival needs, add to them patents on specific chemical combinations and plant-based medicines already held by Big Pharma and the potential for mischief, if not downright evil seemed self-evident.  This was before the big push to patent parts of the human genome, now well underway.

We fought hard, working regulatory, legislative and union channels, organizing street protests and trying to raise the visibility of these issues, but we lost.  As did most plant closing campaigns.

After this sifted through my memory banks and into present experience, I walked up the iron steps onto a former loading dock, walking into a studio filled with brightly painted flowers and novel re-uses of older technology.  Art Attack! was a good anti-dote, good pharma.

Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Politics

An Unwelcome Thought

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Samhain                                               New (Thanksgiving) Moon

Spent two hours in the Southeast Asian galleries talking to docs who came through during the Fairview Southdale corporate event.  A group of four wanted information about Cambodia.  One guy had lived in Thailand for a year and a half, “a long time ago.”  Another man, maybe Pakistani, and I talked about the Buddha.  “A peaceful religion.  Right?”  “Yes, in principle.  But look at the Thai.  They’re Buddhists and they’re killing each other.”  “Yes,”  he shook his head, “I’m a Muslim and we’re doing the same.”  It was a weary observation.

On the way home I stopped at the Holy Land restaurant for a to-go order of gyro.  While in there, I experienced a fleeting moment of “OMG.  What if these people are here to kill us.”  I squelched it both as an unwelcome and an unworthy thought, but it was there anyhow.  The other side of me, the side that delights in difference, wandered looking at hookahs, mounted recreations of Quran pages, elaborate mounted photos of the the dome of the rock.  All the middle eastern foodstuffs, female staff in headscarves.   There were, too, a Chinese couple, a Caucasian couple and African couple eating at tables alongside several middle-easterners.

Now, even here in Minnesota where the skin color is almost the same as winter, diversity has begun to seep in.  Thank god.  No matter what I thought earlier.  Thanks god.

Politics

The Politics of Scumbags: Recount Redux

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Samhain                                                      New (Thanksgiving) Moon

Though I’ve adopted patience and perseverance as my attitude to this election, here’s an item from Politics in Minnesota that makes my hair stand on end:

“Recount II: This time we win!

Nine thousand votes is a very tough nut to crack, and most Republicans realize they’re unlikely to prevail in the looming gubernatorial recount. (my emphasis) But there are other fish to fry here, as there were in the Coleman/Franken recount: to undermine the legitimacy of a Dayton administration from the start, and to delay the installation of a DFL governor who figures to block most GOP legislative initiatives. Already many Republicans are exulting, and Democrats cringing, at the thought of a few months’ worth of Gov. Tim Pawlenty paired with a conservative Legislature.

That wouldn’t happen in the course of a normal recount, which should be completed a few weeks ahead of Inauguration Day. But it’s entirely plausible in the event of a court battle following the recount. Both sides are amply lawyered up: Tony Trimble and Michael Toner for Emmer, David Lillehaug and Charlie Nauen for Dayton. All but Toner are veterans of the Coleman/Franken recount. But Toner strikes us as the telling figure here: He has a gleaming national GOP resume — the Bush II-appointed chair of the Federal Election Commission, before that chief counsel to the Republican National Committee, and before that the lead attorney for the Bush-Cheney 2000 transition team — and his inclusion gives Team Emmer a pipeline to top national GOP election counsel and a rainmaker to help fill its legal coffers. You don’t hang a legal gun like that over the mantel in Act I if you aren’t prepared to fire it.”

Politics

A Changed Political Terrain

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Samhain                                      Waning Harvest Moon

So.  Election day is over; the rascals have been thrown out and the new rascals will soon take their places in the halls of Congress and the Minnesota Legislature.  This is an opportunity to develop the bipartisan nature of environmental issues, since preservation and conservation are not, intrinsically, related to party.  Theodore Roosevelt, the ur-conservationist from a political perspective, was a Republican.  Economic justice issues will become more sharply defined and the outlines of a new liberal majority still remains a mystery.  Politics has one guarantee, change.

( bloodletting in politics is not new.)

I choose not  to  feel dejected, rejected or powerless in light of these results, instead those issues in which I believe need us more than ever.

On a brighter note, today I’m back to translating Ovid.  I’m 30 verses in to what I believe is about 15,000.  Almost there.

Politics

Sigh.

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Samhain                                        Waning Harvest Moon

First the Vikings, now the Democrats.  Geez.

As I said a while back, the political scene, long a part of my life, a passionate part, has begun to recede for me.  I see this by-election as a cyclical matter, not a rejection of Obama and progressive ideas, but a cry of pain from people injured the great recession.  An angry elephant has stomped through the polls this November election day, an elephant moving with great feeling, a powerful force in politics.  Yes, this will slow down Obama’s progressive agenda.  He will have to work in a more measured, less dramatic way, but, as I’ve read more than one place, that may well be to his advantage in 2012.

(I’d be happier if I watched the election returns on Ka’anapali beach.)

It is not so much a time to wonder what went wrong from a Democratic perspective, as it is a time to reconsider how communicating the gains of the past two years has fallen so far short.  It is a time to consider how to pursue the great issues yet unaddressed, like climate change and immigration, in the small ways that will lay the base for further work in the 2012 Congress.  I went into this election proud of my leftist politics and I remain so.  Over time movements toward greater equality erode the opposition, witness the number of conservative women running in this election.  Over time matters of mutual care and compassion like Social Security, Medicare and now the National Health Care legislation become new bricks in a solid foundation for all Americans, rich and poor.  The economy will right itself and the timing of recovery matters more politically than it should, because the tools used to massage the economy are gross and work only over time.

So, we’ll have to learn how to work with a whole new legislative alignment.  That’s the nature of politics.  This is still a center/right country, so we have to be glad when we have the chance to make progress, philosophical when we can’t.

Aging, Commentary on the news, Politics, US History

It’s Here! It’s Here! It’s Finally Here!

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Samhain                                    Waning Harvest Moon

Election day.  Or, as I prefer to think of it, extinguish those politicoporn commercials day.

The constant negative drone, the contention that the other person has committed some perfidy totally unexpected of a human being, let alone a politician, gets on my nerves, so, for the most part, I shut it out.  But that’s not what I mean.

What I mean is the amount of hard cash required for designing, shooting and airing political commercials.   Along with other technological expenses in the modern campaign the dollar amounts required make it inevitable that each politician, each one, Republican and Democrat, spend their incubency focusing not on policy or the politics of the day, but on fund raising.  Fund raising in amounts so large that often times they go back to the same well not just twice, but thrice.  This places every politician in Congress squarely in the sites of those who have wealth or who have become adept at bundling wealth from others for political purposes.  This is not only bad form; it is also a bad way to create a government.

Add the constant fund raising to the incessant drum beat of lobbyists and it’s no wonder our democracy–for which we want to make the whole world safe–has twitches and contortions that make professional gymnasts look clumsy and out of practice.  We are a people proud of our democracy, often hubristically so, and yet it has become a clogged artery, a broken limb, a part of our body politic that needs strong medicine and tough therapy to heal.

Our system of checks and balances has devolved into a system of halts and stops where partisan wrangling and/or ideological purity turns each place where a check might happen into a full body check against the boards and puts a thumb on the scales wherever balance must come into play.

While I’m at it, let me point out, too, a problem in our Senate.  No, not the rules, though those do need attention.  No, not Jesse Helms.  He left office.  I’m talking about representation.  Here’s what the point in a brief paragraph from Wikipedia:

“The Constitution stipulates that no constitutional amendment may be created to deprive a state of its equal suffrage in the Senate without that state’s consent. The District of Columbia and all other territories (including territories, protectorates, etc.) are not entitled to representation in either House of the Congress.[12] The United States has had 50 states since 1959, thus the Senate has had 100 senators since 1959.

The disparity between the most and least populous states has grown since the Great Compromise, which granted each state equal representation in the Senate and a minimum of three presidential Electors, regardless of population. In 1787, Virginia had roughly 10 times the population of Rhode Island, whereas today California has roughly 70 times the population of Wyoming, based on the 1790 and 2000 censuses. This means some citizens are effectively an order of magnitude better represented in the senate than than those in other states. Seats in the House of Representatives are approximately proportionate to the population of each state, reducing the disparity of representation.”

And this from a book blurb on Amazon for:  Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation–

“We take it for granted that every state has two representatives in the United States Senate. Apply the “one person, one vote” standard, however, and the Senate is the most malapportioned legislature in the democratic world.

But does it matter that California’s 32 million people have the same number of Senate votes as Wyoming’s 480,000? Frances Lee and Bruce Oppenheimer systematically show that the Senate’s unique apportionment scheme profoundly shapes legislation and representation. The size of a state’s population affects the senator-constituent relationship, fund-raising and elections, strategic behavior within the Senate, and, ultimately, policy decisions. They also show that less populous states consistently receive more federal funding than states with more people. In sum, Lee and Oppenheimer reveal that Senate apportionment leaves no aspect of the institution untouched.

This groundbreaking book raises new questions about one of the key institutions of American government and will interest anyone concerned with issues of representation.”

I mention this intriguing and disturbing analysis to underscore the problems with the amount of money it takes to win a Senate race which is, by definition, a whole state affair.  This means that money sunk into races in smaller population states can have the affect of negating changes in the House of Representatives while increasing the amounts for which the elected Senator is beholden.  This is not a recipe or a chance for corruption; it is a guarantee, a built in consequence of modern elections and an increasingly unequal Senate.

What to do?  We’ll look at that tomorrow, apres deluge.

Politics

Mlid-Term Elections 2010

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Fall                                        Waning Harvest Moon

Politics in Minnesota started its private subscriber newsletter this week with this (to me) sobering paragraph:

“The big news today is last night’s KSTP/SurveyUSA poll showing a virtual tie between Mark Dayton and Tom Emmer heading toward Tuesday’s election. This year partisans of all stripes have had the opportunity to pick and choose among a selection of cheerfully discrepant, mutually contradictory polls; by selectively holding up their internal data, you can “prove” almost anything about the race.”

It would be nice if Minnesota proved an exception to what looks like an otherwise ugly election day, but that remains to be seen.  As always, only a whole lot rides on this election.  In particular, control of this state and many others for the popular political sport called gerrymandering.  That means, in essence, that the big winners of this by-election will have a good shot at creating favorable political districts for themselves for the next decade.  Ouch.

(As last year, myself and comrades will be combing the late night spots and digging up new voters.)

As matters cease to have the one and done significance my younger self ascribed to all elections, I can see this election in a broader pattern.  A new president’s party always, almost always, loses seats in the by-election.  Due to a confluence of factors this one may be worse than others for the Democrats.  There is wide spread anger at the state of the economy as the working class and the soon-to-be-retiring class both find their futures crimped by a stagnant and perhaps deflating economy.  The war in Afghanistan long ago passed all U.S. records for foreign entanglements and Obama seems to have achieved no political credit for closing out troop actions in Iraq.  The passage of the economic stimulus, which will, like the health care legislation, be seen by history as critically important for our nations future have also failed to stick to Obama’s credit.  This means something is wrong with his handlers, but perhaps, too, with this cerebral, even style.   On top of these realities is the Tea Party, a not so new mix of populist politics and ideas created in the heyday of such notable movements as the John Birch Society.

From a legislative perspective in Minnesota the terrain still looks unclear today, four + days before the election, but it will clear up a lot by Wednesday of next week.  Not a fun funny season if you’re on the left edge of the political spectrum as I am.