Republican Strategy - A Reminder

Lest we forget the Republican strategy established many years ago: "Let's hand the next President an economy in free fall, a corrupt and collapsing financial system, a trillion dollar annual budget deficit, and two failing wars. Then we'll fight everything he does to try to fix the total catastrophe we created, weaken every effort made to fix the shattered economy, attack everything about him and his policies, rewrite history, and just make sh** up. Better yet, we'll create a phony grass roots group organized and paid for by the Koch brothers and their corporations and bus them around and have them wear goofy clothes. No matter what the President wants to do we'll call it 'socialist' or 'liberal' or 'big government.' Then when the next campaign comes along, we'll complain that he hasn't done enough. People have such short memories, they might just put us back in office. Okay, that's our plan. We'll promise to do all the things that got us into this mess in the first place - voters won't even notice. Let's go do it."

Questions Andy Rooney Might Have Asked

Here are a few questions that Andy Rooney might have asked on a day like today:

Why is it that the same people who demand organized prayer in their public schools oppose mosques in their neighborhoods?

Why is it that the same crowd who went Constitutional ape-sh** crazy about having to purchase health insurance voted 525 to 10 to imprison American citizens arrested in America, indefinitely and without charges, in military prisons or even rendition them to foreign countries?

Why is it that Republicans will make you have the baby, but not require you buy health insurance for her?

Why is it that the same people who are making it more difficult for people to vote in state after state are complaining about how hard it is to get on the Republican ballot in Virginia?

Why is it that anti abortionists want to prevent the use any tax dollars from funding abortion anywhere. but they still want me to pay taxes to fund executions?

Why is it that the same bunch of people who claim to worship our Constitution want to radically change it?

Why is it that the same people who want to get government out of our lives want the government to ban birth control, regulate marital sex, and annul gay marriages?

Why is that the same people who used to proclaim LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT to the protestors I was in the middle of are now the ones I think LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT about?





Bud C

;-) The Life and Times of the Semicolon

In my review of the use of the semicolon the other day, possibly the most misused punctuation mark in our day, I discovered its tumultuous history, its passion producing power, and its unique place in our punctuation paradigm.Semicolons are both chosen and eschewed and desired and disdained. It has technical utility: it may be used to separate items in a series which contain internal commas, for example. It is used between independent clauses when the writer wishes to show a close, but undefined, relationship between the clauses. And , of course, in front of a conjunctive adverb, such as therefore or however. The most familiar usage, I suspect, these days is the use of the semicolon as the sideways winkie smiley face emoticon thingie -- ;-).

My mother instilled in me a strong sense of grammatic rightness and wrongness and the correct use of all of our punctuation marks; and my current reading of The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of 'Proper' English, from Shakespeare to South Park, has provided me many enjoyable insights into our language. I have thought of myself, though, as an open-minded liberal descriptivist, but I am becoming more aware of my many latent conservative prescriptivist tendencies. I can't quite get used to "on accident" in place of "by accident" or "acidentally," for example. I am fairly convinced, however, that unless you are a computer programmer or a mathematician, one can have lived a happy, fruitful, and contented life without ever having used a semicolon.

As Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and others have pointed out, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, P.G. Wodehouse, George Orwell, Umberto Eco, Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut, and Stephen King have either entirely disdained or used only sparingly the semicolon. As Vonnegut in A Man Without a Country (2005) stated: "Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."

Kurt Vonnegut's political incorrectness to our transvestite hermaphrodite brothers and/or sisters aside, the semicolon did and does have its modern proponents. George Bernard Shaw in a communication to T E Lawrence criticizing his Seven Pillars of Wisdom. "You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life." Gertrude Stein said: "They are more powerful more imposing more pretentious than a comma but they are a comma all the same. They really have within them deeply within them fundamentally within them the comma nature." And Will Self, British novelist and short story writer said about semicolons, "I like them — they are a three-quarter beat to the half and full beats of commas and full stops. Prose has its own musicality, and the more notation the better. I like dashes, double-dashes, comashes and double comashes just as much. The colon is an umlaut waiting to jump; the colon dash is teasingly precipitous." Apparently Shakespeare used comashes, a comma followed by a dash: ,-. They are certainly not very common. If I ever see student essays with comashes, I'll at least know where they came from. Oscar Wilde regularly used the semicolon: "Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much. My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people’s. To be poor and not complain is difficult; to be rich and not complain is easy."

T. S. Eliot used semicolons in The Wasteland: 'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; 'They called me the hyacinth girl.' And Robert Frost: "My sorrow, when she's here with me,/Thinks these dark days of autumn rain/Are beautiful as days can be;/She loves the hare, the withered tree;/She walks the sodden pasture lane." But a quick read of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl For Carl Solomon" shows about a thousand commas and exclamation points and just one period. Not a single semicolon among those 2956 elegiac tumbling frantic words. And that single period is not even at the end. A quick scan of a couple dozen Emily Dickinson poems showed a fair number of periods and a generous dose of exclamation points and dashes. But not a single semicolon. Fully expecting a Romantic disdain for semicolons in Walt Whitman, I found plenty of exclamations and dashes and appropriately placed periods; Whitman does give those ubiquitous exclamation points and dashes an exuberant workout. But I did find the occasional semicolon.

And while Mark Twain has plenty, Norman Mailer's "the White Negro Superficial Reflections on the Hipster" has only a few. A glance at George Santayana and John Crowe Ransom reveals a reasonable application of the semicolon while Carl Sandburg's "Chicago" has two. And Hemingway's "A Clean Well-Lighted Place" appears to eschew semicolons entirely and only begrudgingly uses commas and even then primarily for speech tags only. "'Another brandy,' he said, pointing to his glass." I found a few in William Faulkner's The Old Man. But only a few. A glance at Joseph Heller's God Knows found this: "Although I never actually walked with God, I did talk with Him a lot and got along with Him in perfect rapport until I offended Him the first time; then He offended me, and later we offended each other." And of David's admiration for Abishag, "The girl is heaven-sent; I cannot avoid the feeling that perhaps I am entertaining an angel unawares."

Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Saul Bellow are clearly aware that there exists such a punctuation mark, but aren't obsessed with its usage. I expected to find, and indeed did find, a judicious use of the semicolon in Henry James'"The Art of Fiction": "A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life; that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression." And "The successful application of any art is a delightful spectacle, but the theory too is interesting; and though there is a great deal of the latter without the former I suspect there has never been a genuine success that has not had a latent core of conviction."

A national controversy erupted in France in 2008 regarding the declining use of the point-virgule. Jon Henley in The Guardian in 2008 reports that the French blame the English and Americans for its declining usage. "To listen to France's small but growing army of semicolon fans, the full-frontal assault on the semicolon launched by uncultured modern writers and journalists and spearheaded by those idiot Anglo-Saxons is, sadly, just another symptom of the present-day malaise of French language and culture. As the great early 20th-century Gallic novelist, essayist, playwright and Academician Henry Marie Joseph Frédéric Expedite Millon de Montherlant so succinctly put it in his Carnets: 'One immediately recognises a man of judgment by the use he makes of the semicolon.'" But the usage of the semicolon in France also has a disputatious history. As Paul Collins, Portland State University, points out in his 2009 article in Slate, "Has Modern Life Killed the Semicolon?", two University of Paris professors dueled in 1837 over the disputed use of a semicolon: 'The one who contended that the passage in question ought to be concluded by a semicolon was wounded in the arm,' noted the Times of London.'His adversary maintained that it should be a colon.'"

According to a popular online encyclopedia, in 1494 "the Italian printer Aldus Manutius established the practice of using the semicolon to separate words of opposed meaning and to indicate interdependent statements." The semicolon was first generally used in English print by Ben Jonson. Shakespeare did not use semicolons in his manuscripts, but the printed versions do contain the occasional semicolon thought to have been inserted by his contemporary radical modernist transcribers. Collins notes that Samuel Taylor Coleridge mused that "the semicolon is far more common in the elder English Classics. It was perhaps used in excess by them; but the disuse seems a worse evil." As Coleridge hints, says Collins, "semicolons hit a speed bump with Romanticism's craze for dashes, for words that practically spasmed off the page. Take this sample from the 1814 poem The Orphans: 'Dead—dead—quite dead—and pale—oh!—oh!'" Collins also points us to Edgar A. Poe's 1848 "Marginalia" in which Poe declared himself "mortified" that printers were once again using too many semicolons.

The development of the telegraph, an early form of texting, and the high cost of messages is credibly thought to have discouraged the use of the semicolon in the mid 1800's. Twentieth century action fiction is also a historical suspect in the ebb part of the ebb and flow of semicolon usage according to the Times in 1943: "The semicolon is the enemy of action; it is the agent of reflection and meditation."

Consider the advice of British writer on grammar Lynne Truss: "They are old-fashioned," "They are middle-class," "They are optional" "They are mysteriously connected to pausing," "They are dangerously addictive (vide Virginia Woolf)," and "The difference between them is too negligible to be grasped by the brain of man."

So where does that leave us? I say if you are going to use semicolons, use them sparingly and correctly; remember that one can have lived a happy, fruitful, and contented life never having used a semicolon. Now, about that Oxford comma.....;-)

Read My Lips - No New Texans

Michele Bachmann won the Iowa Circus Freak Show, er, I mean the Republican Straw Poll at the Iowa State Fair, narrowly edging out Ron Paul. Why this straw poll is even covered is a bit of a mystery. Michele bought 6,000 tickets and distributed them to her supporters to attend and vote for her and ended up with 4800+ votes. She continues to mangle history and stare strangely into space. Joe Scarborough said Bachmann voters were "not fit to run Slurpee machines...." When now ex-candidate Tim Pawlenty asked her to name her accomplishments in Congress, she said, "I introduced the light bulb freedom of choice act." A bit of a short list. Ron Paul continues to be quirky and strange, and ideology always trumps knowledge and facts.

Michele Bachmann's campaign theme song could be based on Sam Cooke's old classic: "Don't Know Much About History" - Don't know much about history, don't know much about biology, don't know much about algebra, don't know much about trigonometry, don't know much about economics, don't know much about other countries, don't know much about sociology, don't know much about psychology, don't know much about science, don't know much about theology, don't know much about the arts, don't know much about epistemology, don't know much about geography, don't know much about geology, don't know much about, criminal justice, don't know much about much............

Meanwhile, Governor Rick Perry, "maybe we'll secede from the union," announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for President and is simultaneously running away from his record and continuing to say crazy stuff like Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke is "treasonous." We'll see how this goes, but he may be "Hair today, gone tomorrow." He has some strange connections with a dark version of Christian apocalyptists and dominionists....I hope the lamestream media doesn't give him a pass on his strange vision. His claims of the Texas miracle seem to hinge on three things: Texas sits on oil the price of which has skyrocketed, Texas has huge numbers of Mexican immigrants, and Perry took Obama's stimulus funds to balance his state's budget. Perry has been described as not as "cerebral" as George W. Bush. Now, that's going some.

Read My Lips - No New Texans.

Former half-term Governor and losing vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin even drove her bus to Iowa to hang out. I'm guessing she sold a few books.

Mitt Romney finally made some news with his "Corporations are people, my friend" comment. Even if constitutionally true, it makes for a bad sound bite sure to appear later if he is the party's nomination.

Goethe said, "There's nothing worse than the active pursuit of ignorance." Ideology always trumps knowledge and facts. If that doesn't describe the above cast of characters, I don't know what does.

John Boehner's Real Message Last Night

Let's keep one thing in mind as we debate these votes on the debt ceiling: Congress is voting on whether to pay for stuff it's already passed during the George W. Bush administration - tax cuts for the rich, two wars, and a Medicare prescription plan. Republicans didn't pay for any of this in the Bush years when we were in control of the government, and we're sure as hell not going to pay for them now with a Democrat in the White House!

It was our good fortune that the economy tanked during the last year of President Bush's administration. The near collapse of the entire economy has played right into our hands. It matters not that Congress has voted on debt ceiling increases a hundred times over the years. What matters, in those stirring words of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, is not what we can do to help govern our country, but what we can do to defeat President Obama.

We handed President Obama a huge sack of economic doggie-doo back in 2009 and have fought tirelessly to undermine every attempt by the President and Democrats to bring our country out of the largest recession since the Great Depression. We have fought every attempt to rebuild our infrastructure, save the auto industry, reform the financial markets, care for our senior citizens, and sick children. We are working in every state across this once great and caring nation to weaken unions, degrade public education, and reduce environmental quality and insure that the protection of endangered species applies to venture capitalists and developers, not snails and frogs. We believe higher levels of particulate pollution is not a bad thing, a little mercury won't hurt, we've got enough swamps already, and a little lead is in the back yard soil won't hurt kids that much.

Exploitation of natural resources is what made our country great.

But back to the debt ceiling. We will not pay our bills unless the President agrees to our plans to take money away from senior citizens' social security and medicare, sick kids' medicaid, and the unemployed's insurance so we can give it to the rich. Medicare operates with administrative costs that are just a fraction of the private sector health industry; private health care plans like we envision would create ten times as many administrative jobs to do the same health care. Now, that's job creation. We have the highest medical costs of any country in the world with nowhere near the best outcomes. Our proposal to end Medicare will require us to spend more and more on ineffective administration of health care creating more and more bureaucratic low paying careers with ever more ineffective medical outcomes. What's not to like?

And this is just one example of our program. Our plans to privatize Social Security will result in untold billions of management fees for Wall Street fat cats unlike the current system which utilizes the safety and stability of the United States of America. Our plan to crash the economy of America and the world for political gain appears to be working. Why would we stop now?

Undermining the full faith and credit of the United States will be good for, well, I don't exactly remember who that will be good for, (I think I read that Eric Cantor's stock portfolio could benefit), but we cannot continue to afford to pay for tax breaks for oil companies, and corporate jets, and hedge fund managers, and the richest 400 families who own 60% of the nation's wealth. So something has to give.

And besides, the Tea Party doesn't listen to me anymore anyway.

So good night and good luck.



- Speaker of the House, John Boehner

A Prayer for Norway

We are too often confronted with trying to make sense of the senseless. The bombing and mass murders in Norway are now added to the list of atrocities we must reconcile. In the United States, we have our Timothy McVeigh and Unabomber and the KKK and Jared Loughner and all the civil rights murders and other armed militias with their violent ideologies and conspiracy theories. The Muslim World has its Al Qaeda which attacked New York City and later bombed a mosque in Iraq to incite a civil war for geopolitical purposes in the power vacuum following the removal of Saddam Hussein.

Norway now has its Anders Behring Breivik

These hearts of darkness stun us time after time. The faces of evil, as much as we would like them to look Middle Eastern, most often don't. The look like us. They look like an Omaha teenager. Or a kid from Arizona or Colorado. Or from anywhere, USA. This latest incarnation looks like he should be modeling sweaters in Norway. It's disturbing and frightening and perplexing as we do the psychological postmortems and find the threads of pseudo Christian or racial or Islamic fundamentalism and their accompanying chaos of ideological, economic, and political manifestos.

The immediate reaction of irresponsible media was to blame Muslims for the Norwegian attacks. How wrong that has proven. I'm listening to the Beatles' Norwegian Wood as I write this. It was written by John Lennon who was murdered in 1980. Yoko Ono issued a statement the next day, saying "There is no funeral for John," ending it with the words, "John loved and prayed for the human race. Please pray the same for him." So love and pray for the human race.

That's about the only thing here that makes sense.


Amen.

Money Talks

On the debt ceiling vote - Despite President Obama's inclination to give away the farm, Republicans can't take yes for an answer, and so we are in a continued impasse with Republicans now deciding if they can't get everything we want, then they just might want nothing. Having heard the President offer a 5 to 1 cuts- to- revenues formula, Republicans threw a temper tantrum about taxes on the rich and eliminating subsidies for the 5 largest oil companies in the world and ending tax breaks for corporate jets.

It's an ideological fantasy world..........these are the same people who took a $300 billion surplus at the beginning of George W. Bush's first term and turned it into a TRILLION $$$ annual deficit in just eight years. If the Republican supply side theories were true, we would have a roaring economy now that taxes are at the lowest point in five decades. There may have been points in history where lowering marginal rates could generate marginal employment increases, but we've long since passed that point. The Laffer curve is now the Laugher curve among non-ideological economists.

Tea Party/Republican threats on the debt ceiling vote are to default on the debt and plunge the world into a depression unless President Obama and Democrats agree to kill Medicare, privatize Social Security, lay off a million teachers, police officers, firefighters, public utility workers, highway maintenance workers, public hospital nurses, etc., etc., etc., take hundreds of billions if not trillions of $$$ out of the economy, end unemployment insurance, cut children off medicaid, break all the remaining unions, eliminate collective bargaining rights, lower peoples' wages everywhere, increase taxes on the poor and middle-class, throw people off their health insurance plans, and using that money for tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires and tax-payer subsidized corporations making record profits while paying no taxes and out-sourcing work to China or India, and let rich people and corporations own and run everything. Republican Governors across the country are working examples. Their negotiating theory is an all or nothing approach where what's yours is ours and what's mine is mine.

But there are fractures appearing:

The US Chamber of Commerce has sent a letter to Congress stating the obvious - the debt ceiling must be raised. Wall Street is getting a bit tired of the Tea Party antics now that its own profit margins are threatened. As long as the Tea Party charade only hurt other people, it was fine, but now...............not so. Defaulting on US debt includes their money.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell came up with an ingenious solution: we'll cede all Congressional authority to the President on the debt ceiling issue and create a system whereby a only a super-majority vote could overturn the President's raising of the ceiling. Republicans would, of course, retain the right to complain about it later. Talk about cynical.

And the Republican rank and file still are waiting for a good candidate:

Sarah Palin's movie is playing to empty theaters according to news reports now that her few diehard fans have seen it.

Mitt Romney continues to have problems with his past "success." One really was a success - the Massachussetts health insurance program but is now the bane of Republican mostly because Barack Obama adopted it as a model for his own health insurance reform act. The second is Romney's job destruction and the thousands of layoffs he orchestrated working for an equity firm. Not much job creation there.

Michele Bachmann's anti-gay positions and her past church affiliations with their anti Catholic views is beginning to catch up to her. Michele Bachmann's husband is proving a liability right now with his anti-gay Christian counseling clinic which received Medicaid $$$. Now there's a Medicaid practice which could be eliminated. Spouses probably shouldn't be an issue, but she is a partner in the business and should have to answer questions about it. So far, she's refusing to talk about it. She and her husband left their anti-Catholic church days after she announced her run for the presidency.

Herman Cain's anti-Muslim rants are, I hope and pray, starting to lose their appeal.

Tim Pawlenty's role in leaving Minnesota a financial basket case and his remarks that in the event of a default we should pay the Chinese before we pay military salaries is perhaps not the best soundbite to have out there.

Newt Gingrich's "delusional," in the words of a Republican strategist, campaign is hemorrhaging money mostly for private jet transport.

Jon Huntsman or Rick Santorum haven't appeared in press reports for days.

Other Republican candidates have disappeared into the fog and other potential candidates are still sitting on the fence.Governor Rick Perry, George W. Bush's Lieutenant Governor in Texas, is another possible entry. But his weird political philosophy which has included threats of secession from the United States, the dismantling of any semblance of a social welfare net in Texas, along with some right wing Christian affiliations, and Confederate worshiping rhetoric pose problems.

So there you go; I'm predicting that the Chamber of Commerce and Wall Street arm of the Republican Party will force the passage of the debt ceiling increase. After all, they purchased the Republican Party, and it better do what they say. Adolescent Tea Party tantrums and horn blowing aside, money rules.