Category Archives: Politics

Bees, Garden, Politics, Weather +Climate

A Quieter Period of Time

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Beltane                                            Waning Flower Moon

We had a light frost last night.  Many flowers are now gone, tulips mostly, and a few leaves have that sickly green color that comes from burst cells in the stem.  The weather service has predictions of 29 tonight, that means I’ll for sure have to cover the sensitive plants this evening.

A really busy week last week with several trips in and out of the cities, meetings or events at various times of day and three days in a row at the MIA.  It’s nice to have a few days where I can organize my time on my own.  Not like there’s nothing to do, of course.  My three bee colonies each will need inspection today or tomorrow and there’s weeding and other gardening chores.  Latin, chapter 14 in Wheelock, will put me half-way through this text, usually used for a year long college level course.  Then I’ll tackle my next four verses in Ovid.  There is also a tour to prepare.

This is supposed to be the last or next to last week of the legislative session, but the Minnesota Supreme court’s ruling on Pawlenty’s unallotments of last fall has thrown the whole situation into a big mess.  We may end up with a special session, in which case the legislative committee’s work is not yet done.  You may have seen that the Minnesota House voted to lift the moratorium on nuclear energy though with some important provisions.  Until such legislation is also passed in the Senate, worked out in conference committee, then signed by the Governor, it is not law.

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Health, Politics

Living and Dying

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Spring                                                    Full Flower Moon

Death comes calling whenever it wants,  not worrying about the season or the weather or the inclinations of the living.  Kate’s colleague, Dick, suffering from multiple myeloma has gone on hospice care after two years of often brutal treatment regimens.  Bill Schmidt’s brother, who has prostate cancer, also chose hospice care recently to ease the pain of complications.

Tonight I was on my first Political Committee call of the year, a Sierra Club committee that deals in endorsements and retail politics.  The dogs were making noise so I quick ran upstairs to shoo them inside.  Emma didn’t come inside.  She lay under the cedar tree.  I’ve watched a lot of dogs die over the last 20 years and when I went to her side, she looked up at me, but had the stare that looks beyond, out a thousand yards, or is it infinity?  Her body was cold and she did not rise.

Vega, the big puppy, came outside and poked at Emma with her paw, sat down and nuzzled her.  Vega loves Emma, has since she was a little puppy.  I called Kate to let her know I thought Emma was dying.  Emma’s fourteen, our oldest dog right now, and our oldest dog ever with the possible exception of Iris.  At fourteen her time is near, perhaps it will come yet tonight.  Right now she’s on the couch, wrapped in a blue blanket, her head on her favorite pillow.

She seems a bit more alert now and Kate says her heartbeat is regular.  She may have had an arrhythmia and converted it, that is, brought herself back into normal rhythm.  Hard to say.  As Kate said, she appears to have the dwindles.

When I compared the call, about politics, and Emma lying outside, I realized Emma was more important to me than the call, so I stayed with her awhile, brought her inside and made her comfortable on the couch.  Then I returned to the call.

Aging, Bees, Family, Politics

Cyber Demons At Play

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Spring                                         Waxing Flower Moon

Parts of my website have disappeared over the last couple of weeks or so.  All of the liberal faith parent page got eaten by cyber demons, some I may have called myself.  The handy moon widget I had right next to the latest blog entry also went missing.  I have been unable to restore either one though I have not made a concerted effort.

Sunny but cool today.  Closer to normal.  Tomorrow is Gabe’s second birthday and Grandma flies out on Friday to celebrate.  Grandma levitates literally and figuratively when she has a chance to see the grandkids.

She had a hip injection yesterday and though the full benefit of it has not yet appeared, she got enough relief to convince her and the doctor who manages her pain that a hip procedure would help a lot.  That’s good news.  She’s also exploring a more rare procedure in which the bursa over her left hip would be removed.  No consensus on that one yet.

I’m about to leave for the city to have a meeting with Margaret Levin and Justin Fay, evaluating this year’s legislative work and getting ready for next year.  Gotta pick up my sunglasses at the UofM (I left’em at Brenda’s class last Tuesday.), buy some mochi for the grandkids and pick up some leeks.  Legcom call tonight.  Busy beaver for a few days here.

My hand has deflated and has returned mostly to normal.  Not quite, but almost.  That’s good because I get a package of bees this Saturday and I may have to start this whole process over again.

Cinema and Television, Politics

Movin’ On

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Spring                                    Awakening Moon

Kate and I watched Precious tonight.  Kate found it an uplifting story.  I found it tragic.  Whichever view you take, this is a fine movie, capturing the fantasy that can keep us alive, the brutality physical and emotional that can keep us down and the complex network that captures each one of us, shapes us and spits us out whole. This was a bitter, intimate, too close look at a world so many do not even know exists.  It is a strange celebration of the often maligned networks that buttress our countries most neglected and abused.  A social worker looks good here.  A halfway house has a positive impact as does an alternative school and a teacher in it.

Precious gets up, falls down, gets kicked, kicked again, yet keeps moving forward.  That’s the positive note, the uplifting part.  The tragic part is the vast sea of girls and boys in similar circumstances who stop moving forward, who never get past the street, the labyrinth.

Kate works tomorrow, as a Jew she tries to work the Christian holydays.  I plan to dig into the declutter project yet one more time.  Again.  Still more to do, more places to clear.  Also, some Latin.  Maybe a bit of outside time.  Maybe a bit more on Romanticism.  We’ll see after the decluttering.

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Memories, Politics, US History

Poison Fruit

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Spring                                        Waxing Awakening Moon

Spring has sprung, then it sprang back.  23 today.  Not prime gardening weather yet.

The conservative embrace of right wing populists has begun to bear poisoned fruit again.  They referred to Obama and African-American congressmen as niggers, Barney Frank as a faggot and phoned in death threat to several members of the House who switched their votes on health care reform.  The great irony of the moral majority, Christian right, tea-party tea bags is that by all normal political calculation they should vote Democrat.  They are, in the large part, blue collar folks, some living on minimum wage, many no doubt eligible for the health insurance provisions just passed by Congress, but conservative strategists have intentionally chosen to underwrite their social prejudices against people of color, homosexuals and folks with a college education in order to collect them into the party’s ranks.

This is not a deal with the devil; it is the devil making a deal.

I know these folks because I grew up with them in Indiana.  They first came to national notice in Indiana when 30% of the Hoosier electorate voted for George Wallace for President.  They were first and second generation folks from Appalachia, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama and Tennessee and worked in the automobile and other heavy manufacturing centers in the Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio area, the area long since identified as the rust belt.  Union workers in the 1950’s and 1960’s, these constituencies voted a straight Democratic party ticket in line with their economic self-interest.

After LBJ and the passage of the Civil Rights Act, George Wallace made an independent run for the Presidency aiming himself squarely at southern Democrats, the diaspora of southerners working in the north and those other bigots nationally willing to sign up.  This came to the attention of Kevin Phillips, then a strategist for Richard Nixon.  He conceived of the moral majority, corralling the Wallace voters and conservative Christians, sometimes the same group into a winning base for conservative Republican politics.  This was the time of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robinson.

Right wing populism has a long and unsavory history in the US.  The KKK, anti-semite, homophobes, anti-Darwinists and love it or leave it patriots are just a few examples.  The Southern Poverty Law Center has made a career for Morris Dees and his compatriots filing suit against various organizational expressions of these folks.  When economic insecurity marries the all-too human propensity for discrimination, a violent firestorm will result.  It is no different now than it was in the post-Reconstruction days, the days during the Great Depression or the years after passage of the Civil Rights act.

True conservatives should be ashamed.

Politics

The Grout Doctor Has Left the House

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Spring                                                Waxing Awakening Moon

The grout doctor has sealed the grout and left the house.  His van has a license plate that reads, The  Doc.  After he finished, Byron from Dorglass came.  He installed the new door for the steam bath.  Now there’s new, clean grout and properly sealed door.  I still have to wait until tomorrow morning to use it, but the process has gone full circle.  There’s something about having strangers in the  house, even if you like them and even if they’re doing something you requested.  It jars the sense of sanctuary.

Now the calm has returned.  Well, almost.  A fan blows to circulate the noxious fumes from the caulk out of doors and I have the patio door open with the screen.  Smells like spring and like an oil refinery.  As  you drive into Denver, Colorado from the east on Highway 70 you pass through a town named Commercial City.  It consists of oil refineries, warehouses, train depots, all manner of smudgy grimy.  Each time I pass it I wonder if the original purpose was to stick all that stuff in one municipality where they wouldn’t be bothered by residential zoning.

The legislative updates and requests to sign on or shout no various things has increased, a symphony of participation that will not reach its full crescendo until the adjournment sine die in May.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Politics

Fall Out?

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Spring                                             Waxing Awakening Moon

The awakening moon has a quarter lit up tonight (though it’s half of the side we always see).  Orion rests below it, sinking down below the horizon earlier and earlier now that spring has come.  He’s a winter time friend, the opposite of a snow bird.  I hope you’ve had a chance to consider the thinks in your life that need a little extra nudge as they grow, parts of you that need encouragement to awaken.  Maybe it’s that painting you’ve always wanted to start.  Buy some canvas.  A garden?  Get a shovel and a seed catalog.  Meditating?  Clear out a comfortable spot and buy a comfortable chair or big pillow.  Whatever it is spring and the awakening moon will push you along.

In my life it’s Latin, the novel, the Sierra Club’s legislative agenda and the new gardening year plus, of course, the bees.

This health care vote will not lose the Democratic party congress or the Whitehouse for the next two generations.  I’ve heard people make comparisons to LBJ’s famous observation about passage of the Civil Rights Act.  He was right.  Passing the Civil Rights Act upended the solid South and kick started the rise of the moral majority.  The result was 40 years of conservative politics from which it will take us a long time to recover.

(The Democrats will not need a fallout shelter.  The party of no will.)

Health care is in no way similar.  The opposition to it is smoke, driven by the disinformation and fear mongering of right wing shock jocks and the little old lady from Stillwater with the big hair and the desire to smooch the Bushmaster.  There is no comparable bloc of votes lost by providing health care to all in the richest country in the world.  Are there mad people, some foaming at the mouth, tea drooling out of every orifice?  Yes, I guess there such people.  They are the party of no we can’t.  Now, at least for this brief shining moment, the Democrats have awakened (see what I mean?) to the principles that used to inform Democratic platforms, principles that demanded a fair shake for the poorest of the poor and made sure that workers got fair wages and decent benefits.

Aging, Politics

OH, Yeah!

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Spring                                    Waxing Awakening Moon

You’re traveling through another dimension — a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s a signpost up ahead: your next stop: deciphering Medicare!  I’m not kidding here.  Kate and I have given this day to determining a post retirement budget and one of the most difficult things to understand is not the cost of medicare, but just what goes with what.  If the explanatory booklet that simplifies Medicare, from a local senior citizen organization, is any indication of what health care reform promises, God help us.

On the other hand this is an exciting time for both of us, investigating life when Kate no longer has work demands, figuring out the wonders of budgeting when such terms as dissaving begin to make sense.  Dissaving is, you guessed it, spending money you’ve saved.  That’s the basic idea in retirement unless you’re stuck behind the counter at Mac and Don’s with a silly hat and the smell of grease in your gray hair.

After a while we gave up and went to lunch.  Then a nap.  Now we’re refreshed and ready to get back at the budget process.

Say, did I mention that I’m proud of the Democrats?  Damn.  Gutsy politics.  The last time we had truly historic reform came under a former senator, Lyndon Baines Johnson who gave us Model Cities and Civil Rights.  Remember the Great Society?  I do.  Except for that pesky war in Vietnam Johnson was a great one.

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on the news, Health, Politics, US History

President Shoots the Moon

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Spring                                                 Waxing Awakening Moon

Moon viewing.  We don’t do it much here, except as a casual thing, a walk outside, look up, oh a nice moon tonight or shine on harvest moon for me and my gal then on to the drive in or what’s on your play list dude? In Japan they take the moon viewing a step further, ok, a whole nighttime stroll longer.  They build moon viewing platforms, have parties, and produce some wonderful art that features the moon.  Tonight the waxing awakening moon hung just above the trees in the west, behind a scrim of clouds, a faint glow surrounding the upturned crescent.  It is a moon to remember.

This crescent awakening moon will now memorialize for me the day the Democratic party got some balls.  Obama wanted to pass health care reform.  I saw a representative, I don’t know his name, with silver hair, looked about my age, get up and say, “Before we were born, reform of the health care system was begun, just waiting for this day.”

This is not a victory for Democrats, however, it is a victory for the American people, a victory for those who have lived their lives in fear of a cough, a broken leg, a child’s fever.  In this country, which can bail out billionaires and support subsidies to bank robbers, that is, banks that rob, to have 32 million people with no health insurance has been a crime of long standing, a crime that has produced serial deaths over and over with no fear of prosecution.

It is my hope that Republicans will understand that many of the folks who swallow the tea party line are the very people who will wake up some time soon with health insurance, health insurance they have never had. If you don’t believe me, just look at the Gallup map below and consider it with an overlay of the Bush and McCain presidential votes.

Obama has won a victory here, a hard fought victory and he should get his props.  He should also get more credit for calming the Great Recession and ushering in a period of up ticking economic news.  I imagine we will see more such substantive wins for him as his presidency continues.

Hurray for the red, white and blue!

Now a moment on partisan politics and post-partisan politics, the so-called third way.  Yes, our politics have become so polarized that it is difficult to recall the times when it wasn’t.  Yes, there is acrimony and ill will and yes, it does make governance more difficult than it needs to be.  Here’s the thing, though.  In the end it is politics.  This clumsy, broken, dysfunctional process is the way we have chosen, and keep choosing, to mediate our substantive differences.  I read a very compelling argument for changing the system of representation in the Senate where 10% of the states have 90% of the population, but have only a tenth of the votes.  The author of the argument went on to say that fixing this dysfunction was not possible and that we needed to work with the system we have.

It’s not ideal, but there is no system for managing the affairs of human societies that is and ours is better than most.  This vote proves it.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Politics

Working In the Head

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Imbolc                                 Waxing Awakening Moon

A day with my head in the books, The Future of Liberalism by Alan Wolfe, for the most part.  I’ve also reviewed notes from my first research for Liberal I:  roots and branches.  My goal in liberal II is to tease out the social and inner context in which liberalism makes a difference, focused this time more on the inner life of the person in the liberal faith tradition and the political liberal in the outside world.  In addition I want to say a few words about the future of the liberal idea as modernity warps and changes, yet remains, in its social dynamics, much the same.

Let me open that up just a bit.  Alan Wolfe makes the point that liberalism has been and is the perfect vehicle for managing modernism, but that modernism itself created the world in which liberal ideas can flourish.  Modernism grew from the enlightenment emphasis on reason pushed into the political arena first by the American and then the French Revolutions.  Their mutual synergy with the Industrial Revolution created a political climate in which different political and social concepts had to sort out their differences.  Liberal democracy, of the sort enshrined in the American constitution and somewhat later changes in Europe and Great Britain, was and is the best vehicle for doing so. Liberal procedural law takes into account differences by its very design.  Consider how an authoritarian regime would handle substantial differences in citizen’s beliefs.

The same holds true for civil societies with multiple strains of religious belief.  In this case, too, the liberal temperament’s willingness to be flexible, to change and adapt has the best hope of creating a culture in which differences breed debate and discussion rather than suppression and violence.

Technological and scientific advances also create turmoil in the culture as does a dominant capitalist economy.  Here again the liberal core values of individual liberty, freedom and equality shave off the roughest edges of this chaotic change so a culture can sustain itself intact.