Tyrants Start Somewhere

Can we follow them on Twitter and Facebook as they make their way into what Jefferson referred to as a swamp? These un-incumbent mid-term election challengers who say the darndest things and spend lots of money may seem populist enough to get them elected, if voters of conscience take a pass. The answer is you betcha. Tweet this.

There is no surer sign of decay in a country than to see the rites of religion held in contempt.
Niccolo Machiavelli

Sarah Palin posted on Twitter, "Doesn't it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate.” And with that the professional media, blogosphere et al focused on the invented word, a presumable contraction of repudiate and refute. Palin reposted the message, “Peace-seeking Muslims, pls understand. Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. Pls reject it in the interest of healing.” Unanswered is, a provocation for what?

For those who missed the bigotry of her post, replace the word “Muslims” with the word “Catholics” or the word “Jews.” For one thing to notice, her statements are consistent with the rhetoric of the Ku Klux Klan at its height in 1923, infamous for all of its out-and-out bigotry. For another, it satisfies what Osama Bin Laden has sought for Al Qaeda recruitment – a publicly stated contempt for the Muslim religion by a person or persons who appear to represent the will of the US by saying that Muslims are the enemy of America. Palin, appearing to represent people other than herself, delivered. Her words make Muslims victims of the terrorist attacks of September, 2001.

Bin Laden must be pleased.

Why it is that Palin has any interest in a New York City issue may be puzzling to some, but for the conservative evangelizing work of Bill Kristol, who waxed ridiculously about Palin with George Will and Michael Gerson a couple of years back before she got picked to disable the McCain campaign. Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, is probably her muse on the topic since opposition to the Mosque is also a tea party election stance in New York. Palin displayed her bigotry and hid it behind her cute new word. Unnecessary provocation and heart stabbing are superfluities to her rube rhetoric.

One-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.
Robert Kennedy

I have calculated that individual public opinion occupies a space of 334,540,800 cubic inches: 1 mile wide times I mile long times 1 inch deep. Our problem is that the polling data is too much with us. The fact is, there is no huge shift in public opinion. The much touted anger and rage that is reported is exaggerated on purpose and exacerbated on television. The reason is that if the truth be told, the mid-term races are not close. However, if they appear to be close, then more beer, cars and pills to treat erectile dysfunction can be sold.

The non-closeness of the elections, I contend, accounts for the weakness of the Republican candidates from amateurs such as Rand Paul and Carly Fiorina to political hacks like Jan Brewer and Sharron Angle. For example, in California, the Fiorina senate campaign is reported to be statistically close to that of 3 term incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer. Fiorina has $4M. Boxer has $14M. There is a reason: Fiorina is a former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, and after the election she will remain a former CEO either looking for a gig or living off of celebrity. If elected she would have to work with Dianne Feinstein. In such cases, celebrity pays.

Because of my Irish heritage, I am anti-incumbent by nature. I am for term limits on congress. However, I cannot support candidates who have never shown any interest in or participated in public service. By the way, one never hears the Republican/tea party candidates speak about public service, because, to them, the concept is foreign, probably even socialist.

A typical vice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues.
Theodore Roosevelt

The deficit is not a real issue for the mid-term elections, which are state elections. The deficit -- part of the economy -- is an issue of federal elections. Employment, the two wars and immigration are “real issues,” as they were in TR’s time.

With an alarming dearth of policy, the present GOP is content with merely opposing everything and anything that the President does or supports. The argument goes like this: it took the GOP seven years to destroy the US economy and to create the deficit out of a surplus. The Democrats have not fixed it in the first 18 months Obama has been President. It is kind of like saying “We screwed it up. Only we can unscrew it.”

The War in Afghanistan has not ended. The War in Iraq is slow going. They are both products of the Bush Administration. Each is astronomically costly in terms of the 3-Ms – the men, the material and the money. And somehow it is all Obama’s fault. He should have wrapped those two wars up by last Christmas. He is, after all, the Commander-in-Chief.

Immigration to a land of immigrants and the controversy that comes with it is the purview of the Federal government. It was a major KKK issue after WWI, although the Klan had little interest in Latinos except for their tendency to be Catholic, like being a Communist or a homosexual. Somehow, the Obama administration has failed to protect the Arizona border, says the tea party. Their recent Arizona profiling law is in court, where it will end.

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!

Ronald Reagan

Reality does not care. Ronald Reagan, the spiritual head of the GOP, is better known for his quips than anything else. “Honey, I forgot to duck” is one of them. But on the pragmatic matter of bureaucracy, the Gipper was right on. Bureaucrats who suffer a cut in budget have arrived at the terminus of their career. Thus the rhetoric of smaller government can only succeed if the present government is overthrown and replaced.

If only there were books to burn.

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
Thomas Jefferson

Once non-incumbents are elected, they become junior members of governing elite and are obliged go to knife-and-fork school to be trained in their new positions. They have no influence. They do as instructed if they want to return. They are obliged to work for their constituency by making deals, especially with others of their state. This was all new in Jefferson’s time because there was no incumbency.

But tyranny was not new. Tyrants start somewhere and they are characterized by their bigotry. Silence in November would be the electorate, Jefferson's “people of good conscience,” taking a pass on their right to vote and letting Robert Kennedy’s 20% of the people “against everything all the time” have their sway. That is where tyranny begins.

McChrystal and Steele: Please Fire Me

The tendency of the professional press has been to focus on the content of speech rather than its context. I refer to the Stanley McChrystal and Michael Steele speeches – the General’s in a Rolling Stone story by Michael Hastings and the Chairman’s on amateur video. While quite different in the content of what each man said, the speeches have much in common. Taken in the context of what each man meant, each man effectively pleads “Please, fire me.”

It takes tremendous ego to hold jobs such as there’s. General McChrystal’s job was taking the fight to our enemies in hot pursuit with overwhelming firepower. Chairman Steele’s job was to conduct overwhelming fundraising for national campaigning. Egos notwithstanding, insubordinate opinion made public compromised their competence in each of their positions. The issue is not the content of what each man said. The issue is competence in their positions.

US Army Commanding Generals have command staffs. One of those command staff positions, G5 or S5, is called a Civil Affairs Officer, who is in charge of public or civil information. General McChrystal’s Civil Affairs Officer failed to keep his commander’s private opinions private. Additionally, McChrystal knew that generals get fired for insubordination, like General Douglas MacArthur did sixty years ago. That is incompetent command. Given what Stanley McChrystal has been through as a professional military bad-ass, his comments may be understandable. But it is the kind of behavior, as reported in the Hastings article, that one sees when witnessing burn-out. The General left the President no option but to relieve him of his command and replace him in that position.

The conduct of the War in Afghanistan, started under President Bush and inherited by President Obama, is now in the hands of General David Petraeus. As Tim Egan writes in the NY Times, General Petraeus is “perhaps the only public figure to emerge from the Bush years with his reputation for competence intact.” He took command over the 4th of July holiday, saying “we are in this to win.” That is something he is obliged to say. He has staff to see that he does.

The issue of having interviews and stories approved comes up from time to time, as it did when the US Army invaded Grenada and again in the first Gulf War. It will not under Petraeus. His boss, Secretary of Defense Gates says so. Besides, Petraeus knows how to successfully utilize command staff. For example his Civil Affairs Officer will not hesitate to step on an interview with his commander, like start coughing loudly or getting between the reporter and his boss. Reporters will hear the magic words, “That is all the time the General has for you” and the interview is over.

The Army is all about organization and structure. Not surprisingly, there is nothing magical about how things are to be conducted. There are field manuals like FM 41-10 that includes the topic of press relations in peace and in war times. There are rules and service schools that teach those rules. The Defense Information School (DINFOS) is where Public Affairs Officers are taught how to perform in their G5/S5 staff positions.

The Republican National Committee has an organizational structure that is headed by a Chairperson. Not unlike a CEO to a board of directors, the Chairperson serves at the pleasure of committee and is responsible to it for increasing the value of the RNC. The committee is responsible to registered Republican voters nationally for getting Republican candidates elected. Donations have decreased significantly under Mr. Steele’s chairmanship, a decrease in value. CBS News reports that “donors who were once reliable RNC fundraising sources are now looking elsewhere, prompted by fears that Steele will not effectively manage their contributions.” While his contrary and inaccurate public opinions are interesting, devaluing the RNC is the result of poor stewardship. Mr. Steele has demonstrated that he is incompetent in that position.

The committee should have no choice. For Steele to remain as Chairperson is an example of the elite hypocrisy the committee has allowed. It is also quite cynical because it sets up Mr. Steele to take the fall for the results of the upcoming November elections. It is not the case that he cannot be touched because he is black. Affirmative action notwithstanding, incompetence knows no race, color, creed, gender or sexual orientation distinction. Incompetence is equal opportunity.

If being a party of business is supposed to mean something, the committee needs to behave like a business. Steele’s chairmanship demonstrates that the RNC has or is an incompetent board of directors who are not looking out after the best interest of their stock-holders, the registered voters I mentioned. To allow for Steele’s lack of competence in his position reflects poor governance. As such, the board needs to be replaced as well.

The November elections feature a cast of candidates endorsed by the tea party and Sarah Palin. They all denounce the President and blame the Obama administration for Bush administration failures. Many are as incompetent as Mr. Steele, like California millionaires Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman. Some are crackpots, like Nevada’s Sharron Angle and Kentucky’s Rand Paul. They all appear to rally around Arizona’s Jan Brewer and pander to the white-right wing of the Republican Party over the immigration issue.

The problem is that they offer nothing in the way of platform and divide the GOP. As the Michael Douglas says in lines from The American President, “We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them.” With two substitutions the next line says, “And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, [the Republican candidates are] not the least bit interested in solving it. [They are] interested in two things and two things only: making you afraid of it and telling you who's to blame for it.”

The mid-term elections will not be the referendum on the Obama presidency that the GOP proclaims for just that reason. The electorates who show up to vote want solutions, not platitudes. If there is a referendum, it will be on bigotry and hopefully the bigots will lose.

As to the future for the General and the Chairman, they will both be welcomed and probably quite competent as highly paid network television commentators. McChrystal is will be a retired General who may or may not keep his fourth star. Now he can eat more than one meal a day and get some therapy for the post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) he likely suffers. After reviewing the “War of Obama’s choosing” tape, Mr. Steele is well suited to be successful with a multi-level marketing company (MLM) such as Amway or Pre-Paid Legal Services. Imagine the down line he could create.

# # #

About the author: I am a graduate of the Defense Information School. My last active Army duty assignment stationed me at Hunter Army Airfield in the Public Affairs Office of the 24th Infantry Division under the command of (then) Major General Norman Schwarzkopf.

# # #

POST SCRIPT: General McChrystal has retired after 34 years of service. According to AP, "The White House is allowing McChrystal to keep his four stars in retirement, even though Army rules would have required him to serve another two years at that rank." (July 24, 2010)

Oooah-oooah!

A New Republican Brand

The “O” in GOP stands for “Old.” So does the Republican brand. I recommend retiring the GOP brand and the absurd Elephant logo. Put them both on display either in the Smithsonian in D.C. or in every Applebee’s nationwide. I can venerate the GOP for what it once was in my father’s time. But today the brand is as old time religion, significant to a former time, just not this time. It is in this vacuum created by a paucity of morality, principle and credible spokespeople that neo-bigotism grows as the political celebrities vie for money.

The mission is to create a Republican brand for this century. By the way, it’s going to cost a lot of money, so much money that when Forbes reports it, even Democrats will blush. But I digress. Here is the short version of what the Republican Party has to grip in order to contend and win.

This is the best of times to be a Republican.

As the removed-from-power party, they have the luxury of time. Besides, there is a presidential precedent. It took Richard Nixon six years to reinvent the Nixon brand that worked for his presidential quest. Having said that, which is as far as I want to go with Nixon, here are a few things that require immediate attention.

Replace Michael Steele with a real executive the caliber of a Timothy Geithner.

For Steele to remain is an example of the elite hypocrisy the old brand allowed. It is the same kind of sleaze that spent money on porno websites to advertise McCain-Palin in the 2008 campaign. It is not the case that he cannot be touched because he is black. Incompetence knows no race, color, creed, gender or orientation. If being a party of business means something, the party needs to behave like a business. Steele’s chairmanship demonstrates that the party has an incompetent board of directors who are not looking out after the best interest of its stock holders. To allow for Steele’s lack of competence in his position reflects poor governance. So while we are at it, the board needs to be replaced as well.

Co-opt progressivism by reclaiming it as a Republican platform piece.

Then the party can hearken to Theodore Roosevelt, a progressive and environmentalist. Conservation of energy and air and water benefits society but more importantly gives the renewed Republican brand at least a patina of respectable care taking responsibility. It will take practice and courage.

Distance the new brand from Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh.

They are unelected, thus unofficial, as is anything associated with the Tea Party. Decry those people as the seditious bigots that they are. They may have reach and audience, but as spokespeople they lack substance. It must be hard to be both phony and shallow. They are highly paid political celebrities who are famous for being famous and that is all there is. They do not stand for anything. They represent only themselves. An audience is not a constituency.

Deride the theme of “take the country back.”

That piece of rube rhetoric can have more than one connotation. Does it mean taking the country back to another time, such as before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as floated by Rand Paul? I ask because there is not anyone or anything from which to take the country back. Neither the Congress nor President is a foreign occupier of our government. Tell the country of the the Tea Party, “We understand that you’re pissed off because you and your folks lost the most important election of our time big time. It must suck to be you.” And, oh by the way, “No, you are not prepared to die for your country.” Dress up in a military uniform all you want. It does not make you a soldier.

Distance the new brand from the Bush administration.

Dick Cheney and Karl Rove in particular ruined the GOP brand at home and abroad. To some extent getting over Bush et al will be kind of like going through a rehab-program -- admitting powerlessness over stupidity and greed and then making amends to everyone you hurt, like the American people. Seeking some forgiveness is no longer an option. Repudiation is in order, such as bringing criminal charges against Bush, Cheney and Rove. Charge them with the treason, high crimes and misdemeanors that could have been brought to impeachment.

Remember, W has an MBA.

The failure of the GOP brand allows for the candidacies of people who are woefully ill-equipped to perform any useful legislating. California millionaires Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina are examples. A Chief Executive Officer (CEO) is responsible to a Board of Directors for the Return on Investment (ROI) to the stockholders. As business people, neither Whitman nor Fiorina performed well as a CEO because under their stewardships each company lost significant value. They invest in running for public office because they cannot get hired in a private office as a CEO anywhere else. Nevada’s Sharron Angle at least has 6 years legislative experience as a Republican member of the Nevada Assembly. While that barely qualifies her candidacy, her policy positions are preposterous.

Get some serious policy.

Griping about everything the president does or doesn’t do is no substitute for a lack of policy on issues such as civil rights, ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and immigration reform. The Rovians drove Hispanics and Blacks from the party to appeal to the white Christian right. To redefine the Republican constituency will require courage and conciliation. It will have to for the new brand to become inclusionary, to end obstructionism and to become a loyal opposition.

Don’t scrimp.

Hire a top dollar advertising agency for a new logo. The party will have to live with it for a century or so.

A Jack, a Hack, and a Quack

Getting lost in the spin-coverage of Sarah Palin, Jan Brewer and Rand Paul is the essence of what they allegedly stand for.

In common, they espouse theme positions that at best do not make sense and at worst are hateful and bigoted. Two of those themes are “the outsider” and “anti-establishment”. Before I get to specifics, let me ask a few questions for clarity. Please, pardon my pronouns.

What is this being “an outsider” supposed to mean other than you have not been elected yet? How does being an outsider benefit your constituency that elects you to office? What is in it for them? How are you going to get what your constituents elected you to get? Do you work well with others? Can you collaborate and negotiate on your constituents’ behalf, especially since that will be with the “insiders” – you know the people who actually run things?

What is this anti-establishment “no more politics as usual” rhetoric supposed to mean? Does that include anarchy? Does that mean other than usual or abnormal politics? Isn’t normal politics as usual really what voters elect a person to do in the first place? Isn’t the conduct of legislating so that the electorate does not have to what normal politics is about? How is being different from other people who successfully do politics for a living a valid qualifier to hold an elected position?

The Tea Party backed son of big-time insider, the rookie Rand Paul’s opinion on the Civil Rights Act did not get the coverage it deserved. The deniable plausibility defense that his comments were taken out of context is a cover-up story. The story is the Tea Party connection and an unconscionable position that supports invalidating parts of the Civil Rights Act. And even if Paul did not mean it, it is tooth paste out of the tube – hard to get back.

His dad called to coverage “unfair,” as if fairness is a high priority to establishment Republicans and their Libertarian cousins like Ron Paul. That Pops Paul is incumbent is because he plays well with others and has for years deserve noting. His official website proclaims that he is “America's leading voice for” among other things “. . . a return to sound monetary policies.” It does not say when such sound monetary policies existed, although presumably it was sometime before the Civil Rights Act, you know like the “I Like Ike” era. I digress.

Both Paul and Palin espouse positions on off-shore drilling that get incomplete or disconnected coverage. Sarah Palin says she remains a "big supporter of offshore drilling" despite the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, according to AP. She says it’s safer to dig in Alaska. Of the oil spill Paul says that “. . . sometimes accidents happen.” Each excuses the environmental catastrophe BP created. The Tea Party likes drilling. Never mind the pesky environment or conservation.

Meanwhile, Arizona’s governor has new propaganda that is both evocative and shallow. Jan Brewer is Rosie the Riveter, “Doing the Job the Feds won’t do.” That used to be called codswallop. The Feds are the only ones who can do anything about immigration. Arizona’s racial profiling law is being taken to court by no less than the NAACP and is also a matter of presidential inquiry by the Justice Department. Palin’s contribution is the Tea Party connection.

Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act in 1921. President Warren G. Harding signed the law which established national quotas for immigrants, although Latin Americans are not mentioned. It became the Immigration Act of 1924 and lasted until 1965, when it was replaced by Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. After President Lyndon B. Johnson signed that law it went into effect in 1968 and is pretty much at the core of US immigration law today.

Johnson said of Immigartion Act of 1924, "This system violates the basic principle of American democracy, the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man. It has been un-American in the highest sense, because it has been untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores even before we were a country." LBJ signed the Civil Right Act. He was not a lawyer.

Neither Palin or Brewer or Paul is a lawyer so they might not recognize that while their speech may produce resonance with populist sentiment, it espouses segregation. They might not know that the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson endorsed "separate but equal" racial segregation. It might be unclear that the law remained until the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka renounced it 58 years later. They are not lawyers, alright..

The Tea Party and its spotlight-celebrities do like to cheerlead when they play in their ideological theme park -- “limited government, lower taxes, less spending.” If they really want to cut government size, reduce the tax burden and spend less, so much as they say, how come they do not call for ending the Iraq War and bringing our troops home? That would be all three rides in the Tea Party theme park.

The answer is that they are big supporters of the military, never minding that the military is a huge part of the government and is ridiculously expensive. The Tea Party loves guns, the 2nd Amendment and wants to "take the country back." It is anyone's guess how far back they want to take it.

Being the anti-establishment outsider for limited government who gets elected makes a great movie theme, like Frank Capra’s classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But it ends there. The rhetoric is codswallop. The Tea Party connection of Palin the Jack, Brewer the Hack, and Paul the Quack has a segregationist tilt. The essence that is lost due to inadequate coverage is the disingenuousness of the themes being peddled with such Tea Party pandering.

Rube-Rhetoric

It was only a matter of time before Sarah Palin and Jan Brewer united. In solidarity they unveiled a new website and launched the call for a petition against boycotts. Those pesky boycotts by such cities as Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, St. Paul, West Hollywood, Florida, El Paso, and Boulder must smart. Before considering boycotts, however, let me first congratulate Sarah Palin’s producers for giving for giving her the best chant she has had to date.

The “…do your job” bit is great rube-rhetoric. After telling the NRA that president Obama and his administration want to take away their guns and ammo, while they “gut the 2nd Amendment,” last week, she took her pseudo-event show on the road again. “We are all Arizonan” goes perfectly with the show because it’s so easy to say. However, this grandstand is not just a show as it seems.

One understands that this ubiquitous it is serious and on purpose. However, the outcome might not be what Palin and Brewer think it will be, assuming they think anything. What they think they are standing for is contrary to what it really is. Neither of them ever says anything about equal justice under law. American flags and a call for female grizzly bear protectionism cannot disguise what that stand is.

Their stand does two things.

First, it sets back women elected as governors or to other high office to Geraldine Ferraro’s time. Second, it sets civil rights back to the Kennedy Administration’s time. They are not standing for border protection. They are standing for an unconstitutional law and the suspension of habeas corpus. Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, legal segregation existed in the name of protection too.

A boycott is a show no less than the Tea Party Movement, which is show business. If boycotts seem only symbolic it is because they lack show business and aside from San Francisco mayor Newsom, they lack star-power in the articulate spokesperson position. However, unlike the tea folk’s show, the boycott has monetary impact on the red ink state of Arizona as well as its national appearance. NY Daily News reports that “backlash from Arizona's law could also cost the Phoenix area at least $90 million in revenue.”

Palin brings bright lights with her. Whether or not, as the Associated Press insists, she is a potential 2012 candidate for president aside, she has the phrase that pays rube-rhetoric and all. Brewer needs all the help she can get. It just has not dawned on anyone that voters will have these heady moments to look back upon as they recalibrate who their elected officials are going to be. Ask John McCain how that is working out.

The best of Palin's rube-rhetoric goes to blaming the president for the immigration law that Brewer signed. The president was being kind when he called the law “misguided.” In the 1980s Arizona initially rejected officially observing Martin Luther King’s Birthday as a holiday. Boycotts changed that.

Targeting Ethnic Studies

Arizona’s governor is a Republican, a white, and a woman. Keep that in mind even though it is obvious. If you thought that her attack on civil rights was bad form, get ready. Another measure has come before her for signature and the ink is dry. The measure targets an ethnic studies program in Tucson and has been condemned by a United Nations panel. The Associated Press is a little vague on the condemnation part of the story.

"The governor (Brewer) believes ... public school students should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people,” according to a spokesperson. That does not sound like anything that United Nations human rights experts would condemn in a report, but they did. The measure suggests that Arizona students were being taught racial resentment and hatred as well as being taught to devalue individuality. But what do UN experts know about Arizona?

State schools Chief Tom Horne, a Republican running for attorney general, “has been trying to restrict the [Tucson Unified School District Ethnic Studies] program ever since he learned that Hispanic civil rights activist Dolores Huerta in 2006 told students that ‘Republicans hate Latinos.’" That is incorrect. Huerta only personified and personalized the objective of Republican hatred. Republicans do not hate Latinos. Republicans hate truth.

Additionally, the Associated Press reports “The measure prohibits classes . . . that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government.” That suggests that on top of everything else Arizona public school students are taught, they have classes in sedition.

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said of signing an unconstitutional piece of legislation into law a couple of weeks ago that she "firmly believed it represents what is best for Arizona." Evidently that includes invalidating the Civil Rights Act and suspending habeas corpus.

That legislatures and governors cannot elect whether or not their state is part of the Federal Union is just an inconvenience. I would have thought that a Republican white woman governor would know that. But as I say, Republicans hate truth.

Last Frontier of Sedition

One of the drawbacks liberals face is the fact that although we may find the words of such rousers as Sarah Palin distasteful, we will still defend her right to say those words. What we need to remember, however, is that our defense of the right to free speech does not extend to seditious speech. Palin and the Tea Party have entered sedition’s last frontier.

The recent pseudo-event with Sarah Palin headlining the Tea Party Express' Showdown in Searchlight, she addressed a throng of 9-thousand and attempted to sell a negative message to the disenfranchised of that crowd. Her disingenuous rhetoric aside, Sam Adams would have been proud of her. Sam knew a thing or two about pseudo-events and inciting a crowd. He headlined the original Boston Tea Party and proved that when you win a war, your thugs become patriots. Sedition is what gets things going.

Here is the short version. Sedition is “any act, writing, speech, etc., directed unlawfully against state authority, the government, or constitution, or calculated to bring it into contempt or to incite others to hostility, ill will or disaffection; it does not amount to treason and therefore is not a capital offense.”

After Palin posted the rifle scope cross hair target map on her Facebook page, she entered the frontier of sedition using Twitter. “Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!” And on national television, in U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s hometown of Searchlight, Nevada, Palin proclaimed to the crowd that the big-government, big-debt spending spree of the Senate majority leader, Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is over. “You’re fired!” she said.

The Donald Trump tag line is from the hit TV show "The Apprentice,” produced by Mark Burnett who also produces “Survivor.” Burnett is about to produce “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.” The Learning Channel is said to be paying more than $1 million per episode for that Palin business. We will see what other words are loaded to her lips. Having loaded lips will be an audience pleaser since Palin gets $100 thousand per appearance.

Sarah Palin is like Anna Nicole Smith with glasses – known for being known and not standing for anything. It is fine to be a celebrity of a rally circuit in tertiary US metro-markets. It seems a bit much for the 6 figures pay for her to declare to the multitude “We're not going to sit down and shut up. Thank you for standing up." You’re welcome, but what are we supposed to do now that we are standing? In the frontier of sedition, this is where they pass out hoods for us to wear.

Palin Scopes Targets

I expect the Associated Press writing to be plagiaristic. Take the story headlined “Palin, Tea Party Take On Reid, Health Reform. “ Referring to a Tea Party rally in Arizona “that's been called a conservative Woodstock” is an example. Who called it that? The Woodstock comparison was first articulated on PBS Frontline about Karl Rove and it pertained to the Republican Convention of 1964 that nominated Barry Goldwater for President. But who needs editors when there is spell-check?

The “Tea Party movement” and Sarah Palin deserve lots of derision. The codswallop that they perpetrate is infectious to bigots. Using the posting graphics of rifle scope cross-hairs of a map to “target” Democrats up for re-election on her Facebook page and sending the tweet “Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!" pander a demographic with disingenuous rhetoric pretending to be rogue conservativism. Barry Goldwater must be turning.

When a pop star backs a cause or a purpose, it is self-aggrandizement. Representing oneself is what pop stars do best. As a political pop-star, Palin is a Twitter natural. What better way to disseducate people than with Twitter, where one can use non-words to say virtually nothing of any import to everyone all the time. Pop stars have staffs of people and lots of fans to create image and manage media. The Betcha-Gotcha Palin staff appears to have hateful people on it who must be really irked by having to play nice with the Retiree-To-Be McCain staff and especially Cindy McCain.

The Boston Tea Party is one of those historical tales that has long lost its integrity. We never hear about Sam Adams and his bully boys, as they’ve been called. When you win a revolution, your thugs become known as patriots. The name Tea Party looks and sounds better than Loose Coalition of Conservative Groups Opposed to Anything Democratic.” Actually, the name Loose Cannons is more to the point.

It must be galling for John McCain to face a re-election bid so tough that his staff had to get with the Palin staff to bring the two electoral and popular vote losers together for a maverick reunion for camera lenses. George W. Bush’s staff doubtless said “Not at this time. We’re doing a presidential makeover with the Big Dog (Bill Clinton).”

Truly, a political off-season -- not being an elected official -- can be fickle. McCain is a handful of votes from having his off-season. Palin will make it so. Remember what Palin did for the last McCain campaign? Imagine what she can do for the GOP, the country for that matter.

Fourth Estate: Take Out the Paper

When the United States began, the press meant newspapers -- the venerable Fourth Estate. Attributed to British politician Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797), that synonym for newspapers has been broadened to include all of the mass media. The press is protected by law from Congress, but it is not protected from business or technology. Despite pundits’ predictions to the contrary, radio failed to kill newspapers and television failed to kill radio. Neither is the Internet killing its media cousins. As newspapers across the country fail or fold, bad business practice in the present bleak economy threatens all of the Fourth Estate, and this in turn threatens the country.

The story of the failing San Francisco Chronicle is just one example of a major metro-area newspaper having been managed into the dinosaur museum of media. It took the paper’s losing $50 million last year for management to make a remarkable grasp of the obvious. Its last-ditch solution is to slash expenses and purge the payroll. "Our current situation dictates that we accomplish these cost savings quickly," Chronicle Publisher Frank Vega wrote in a memo to the staff. "Business as usual is no longer an option."

The New York-based Hearst Corporation bought the Chronicle in 2000 in a $660 million deal and has been losing money ever since. The paper is the largest daily in northern California with a paid weekday circulation of 340-thousand and a work force of about 1500 people. According to the Wall Street Journal, Hearst said it will seek "critical cost-saving measures," including a steep reduction in the Chronicle's staff. If it can't reach its cost-saving target "within weeks," Hearst said it will seek a new owner for the Chronicle. If it cannot find a buyer, Hearst said it will close the paper. Bankers say there are no likely buyers for the Chronicle.

The list of new exhibits to the dinosaur museum of media includes other inductees such as the Seattle Post Intelligencer and the Miami Herald. After 150 years Denver’s Rocky Mountain News is history. Tribune Company, parent to the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, has filed for bankruptcy. So has Philadelphia Newspapers which publishes the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily Journal. In fact, 33 newspapers have filed for bankruptcy protection. The American Society of Newspaper Editors has cancelled its annual convention for 2009.

Mike Hoyt is the Columbia Journalism Review Executive Editor. He says such losses are sad because newspapers are very tied in with their community. “When a city only has one paper,” Hoyt said, "you lose competition, and you lose the edge, and you lose energy. Competition is good. It sharpens the news gathering, and the investigative reporting." Reflecting on Denver and San Francisco, Hoyt said, "The daily newspaper in a major metropolitan market is the voice of a city. It provides a civic forum that everyone can relate to and come together to talk about. And it can take on complicated problems, and be a watchdog for the community . . . You need big institutions to cover big problems and big situations."

In 1787 Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Jefferson regarded a free press as absolutely essential to investigate and criticize the government. It bit him. The press vilified Jefferson during his presidency. Nor would he be the last.

A hundred-fifty years after Jefferson’s presidency, Harry Truman joined a long line of presidents who worked the press. “Once a week the President of the United States faces the free press and endures a barrage of questions,” wrote Anthony Leviero in the New York Times in 1949. “It is the biggest show in Washington. It is also a great institution, uniquely American. It has become a factor in our checks-and-balances system of government.”

Then there was President Nixon who, after two years of bitter public debate over the Watergate scandals, bowed to pressures from the public and the press to become the first President in American history to resign the presidency. “We saw a president toppled by a couple of reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, who inspired thousands of young people to take up investigative journalism,” wrote the late author and activist Peter McWilliams. “Then, after Woodward and Bernstein were portrayed in the movies by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, tens of thousands applied to journalism schools.”

The peril of our free press is that it costs a lot of money and there is not much of that to support it. “Journalists are the watchdogs, and being able to shine a spotlight on corruption or scandal is vital to our democracy," wrote Mike Hoyt. However, the impact of the recession on newspapers ad-based bottom lines has to do with business and not journalism. It is just that there will be less journalism.

The worst advertising climate in decades killed the print version of the Baltimore Examiner free newspaper on February 15, less than three years after its debut. "This is very disappointing for all of us. Obviously, this is not what we envisioned when we launched the newspaper," ownership’s CEO Ryan McKibben wrote to Examiner staff. The company will now concentrate resources on an Internet venture where it plans to add space, new columnists and Web editors.

Maybe that is an example of good business management. What about the journalism?

“Half-truths, obfuscations and apparent deceit -- these are the wages of a world in which newspapers, their staffs eviscerated, no longer battle at the frontiers of public information,” wrote David Simon in the Washington Post about his experience as a newspaperman in Baltimore. “And in a city where officials routinely plead with citizens to trust the police, where witnesses have for years been vulnerable to retaliatory violence, we now have a once-proud department's officers hiding behind anonymity that is not only arguably illegal under existing public information laws, but hypocritical as well.”

Rather than solutions, there are modifications to the newspaper business failure. The Duluth News Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press, for example, will work with the University of Minnesota's School of Journalism and Mass Communication on a half-million dollar project. The idea of folding newspapers into endowment projects or university systems is being floated. There is my dinosaur media museum. In the end, business is business – enterprise has a market to support it.

Unfortunately, business being business, markets contract and companies cease to be viable. GM is a looming example of a failed corporation and yet some of its brands will continue to be be produced. I suspect journalism likewise will survive the fall of the big corporations as a hybrid form of credentialed web-print production, such as blogging with a hard copy back end. I will not be convinced that blogging is journalism, however, until I see a White House Blog Corps.

First Bad Bank of the United States

Congress and banking have never been good working partners. Alexander Hamilton conceived the First Bank of the United States to handle the colossal government debt created by the Revolutionary War. Congress drafted and George Washington signed the bank’s charter in 1791. Twenty years later Congress voted to abandon both the charter and the bank. Today the government faces another colossal debt that is being created by the US banking system itself because the system is becoming insolvent. Saving the system may well require Congress to nationalize it. They may draft a charter for Barack Obama to sign creating the First Bad Bank of the United States.

Right now the nation's largest banks are carrying half a trillion dollars in bad debt. According to Nobel Prize Winner Paul Krugman, of the New York Times and Princeton University, the idea of temporary bank nationalization has “moved from the fringe to mainstream acceptance.” Krugman championed the cause for nationalization before the Bush Administration began its bungling government-intervention. "The chances of your being able to do this without nationalizing at least a couple of really troubled banks are not too good," Krugman told ABC.

Nor is he alone in that assessment. Economists Matthew Richardson and Nouriel Roubini may not be names that non-economics types recognize but they are of guru status and in agreement with Krugman that nationalization is the only way out of the out of the current financial crisis. The $1.2 trillion subprime mortgage mess is only the beginning of the problem. “Another $7 trillion -- including commercial real estate loans, consumer credit-card debt and high-yield bonds and leveraged loans -- is at risk of losing much of its value,” Richardson and Roubini wrote in the Washington Post.

How big of a hole are the banks in? It is huge, about $400 billion. This includes losses on loans and the drop in market value of the assets they hold but not the federal bailout funds that they got last fall. Nationalization appears to be the only option that would permit solving the bad asset problem on the banks balance sheets and allow lending to resume.

I use the word bad instead of toxic to describe assets with unknown value. Toxic is a buzz word that pertains to poison. Bad means bad and assets are at the core of this nationalizing business.

Here is the way nationalizing the banks would work. The government takes over running the banks. The bank assets are separated into two piles, good and bad. The good assets would again go private for sale to a buyer or to many buyers through stock offering to the public, such as an IPO. The bad assets would be valued, depressed as that might be, then either sold at their new value to investors or held by the government until the value comes back up to be sold at a profit in the future. In either case, first depositors and then debt-holders would share in the proceeds of the sold assets, with a fee going to the government. The idea is that in time the depositors are paid off and the government breaks even.

Bank nationalization means giving the U.S. government the power to control banks. The government could then choose and install new boards of directors and management as well as set corporate strategy. However, without creating a mega-fund to absorb the bad assets and remove them from the banks’ books, nationalization by itself would do nothing to solve the banking problem.

This is where the Bad Bank comes into the picture. The Bad Bank would be the mega-fund to take a trillion or more dollars of troubled loans and securities off the banks’ books so that credit could get moving again. In other words, the banks could loan money again because they would know what their inventory of money really is. Right now, they do not.

“A bad bank, perhaps run by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., would be a big step toward patching up the financial system,” Michael Mandel wrote in Business Week. “However, a bad bank would not eliminate the toughest choices that need to be made. In particular, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, FDIC head Sheila C. Bair, and other regulators would still have to decide which banks are insolvent and need to be closed, partly nationalized, or completely taken over.”

What about the government running the banks? It would not make much difference, really. The government would not do a bad job at running the banks since clearly no one has done a good job at it. The problem is the borrowing. The federal government already borrows over a trillion dollars a year. Nationalizing our banks would add trillions of dollars more.

It is not that the government is not already in the banking business, either. Last September Uncle Sam stepped in and effectively nationalized two of the largest mortgage buyers in the country. The government placed Fannie May and Freddie Mac into conservatorship. It could because it backed both of those companies, which had federal charters.

It might have been hard to imagine before the election, but even Republicans such as Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) concede that nationalization may be necessary. “To me, banking and housing are the root cause of this problem. I'm very much afraid any program to salvage the banks is going to require the government . . . I would not take off [of the table] the idea of nationalizing the banks."

The president opposes it. "This administration continues to strongly believe that a privately held banking system is the correct way to go, ensuring that they are regulated sufficiently by this government," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said when asked about nationalizing the banks. I am suspicious whenever a White House press secretary says anything because that is how it launches trial balloons.

Lawmakers already semi-nationalized the banking sector after the first rumbles of the credit crisis last fall. The Bush/Paulson treasury forked over $350 billion in government aid to more than 300 institutions in turn for some of those firms’ shares and other securities. Bank nationalization worked in Sweden with its five banks while we have thousands of banks here, but that does not mean nationalization cannot work here. To say “no” to nationalizing US banks because that is not the way we do things in the good old USA does not make much sense. The First Bad Bank of the United States is an idea whose time has come.

Originally published in Blogcritics Magazine, February 10, 2009