2009Thu03Dec

Bernanke: Cut Social Security and Medicare to Respond to Financial Problems

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In testimony before the Senate Banking Committee today, Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve and nominee for a second term, called for cutbacks in entitlement spending such as Social Security and Medicare. In his best imitation of Willie Sutton, Bernanke said, “That’s were the money is.”

Interestingly enough, the Defense Department’s budget, along with the recent announcement by President Obama’s decision to send 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan was not mentioned as an equally large bank of money.

In addition to the $660 billion dollar budget

"Take the money from entitlements!"

"Take the money from entitlements!"

that the DoD and the Global War on Terror receive each year, we have fought two wars at a cost of $944 billion dollars over the past 8 years.

Bernanke is mistaken. Entitlement programs are not where the money is. The real money in America is not in helping people, but rather in killing them. We’ve had 8 months of debate over spending $800 billion over the next decade to provide health insurance to all of America. How much debate has occurred over spending more in a shorter time when we’re funding our multiple wars? We have to end these wars.

Posted by Russell December 3, 2009 at 3:47 pm
2009Wed02Dec

“Have Your Cake, and We’ll Eat You Too”

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Happy Birthday, MrEd!

Happy Birthday, MrEd!

Posted by Russell December 2, 2009 at 10:07 pm
2009Tue01Dec

A Horrifically Bad Idea

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Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times

Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times

Where’s the “Mission Accomplished” banner, Mr. President?

The President addressed the cadets at West Point tonight taking a play out of his predecessor’s playbook: surround yourself with troops, and appeal (six times) to 9/11:

To address these important issues, it’s important to recall why America and our allies were compelled to fight a war in Afghanistan in the first place. We did not ask for this fight. On September 11, 2001, 19 men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3,000 people. They struck at our military and economic nerve centers. They took the lives of innocent men, women, and children without regard to their faith or race or station. Were it not for the heroic actions of passengers onboard one of those flights, they could have also struck at one of the great symbols of our democracy in Washington, and killed many more.

He states himself that al Qaeda is no longer in Afghanistan:

As we know, these men belonged to al Qaeda — a group of extremists who have distorted and defiled Islam, one of the world’s great religions, to justify the slaughter of innocents. Al Qaeda’s base of operations was in Afghanistan, where they were harbored by the Taliban — a ruthless, repressive and radical movement that seized control of that country after it was ravaged by years of Soviet occupation and civil war, and after the attention of America and our friends had turned elsewhere.

It’s also nice to be reminded just how horrible those Taliban are: “ruthless, repressive and radical.” Nice alteration, Mr. President. Excellent work on painting the enemy as less than human.

So the occupation that has lasted for the past eight years will continue for at least another 19 months. We’re barely two years shy of the total occupation that the Soviets managed (and that we condemned while we funded and armed the opposition) during the 80′s. But this shouldn’t be viewed as a new Vietnam:

First, there are those who suggest that Afghanistan is another Vietnam. They argue that it cannot be stabilized, and we’re better off cutting our losses and rapidly withdrawing. I believe this argument depends on a false reading of history. Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations that recognizes the legitimacy of our action. Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency. And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan, and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border. To abandon this area now — and to rely only on efforts against al Qaeda from a distance — would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on al Qaeda, and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies.

The United States officially had soldiers in Vietnam from 1965-1975.  This is not like that at all.

Mr. President, on September 23, 2001 I stood in a pulpit and spoke to a people who were afraid and angry. I read Romans 12:20-21:

“If your enemy is hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

What I said then is true today: We cannot defeat terror by being more terrifying. It was true for President Bush. It’s still true for President Obama. This increase of soldiers in Afghanistan is a horrifically bad idea.

Posted by Russell December 1, 2009 at 11:40 pm
2009Thu26Nov

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!

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"Dogs and Cats, Living Together!"

"Dogs and Cats, Living Together!"

Posted by Russell November 26, 2009 at 4:39 pm
2009Sun22Nov

Lord of the Flies

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LordFlies

A thousand times a day, I have a reason to hate autism. When he’s bouncing on the trampoline, laughter peeling from his small frame, and the laughter turns to shrieks in between bounces for no apparent reason; I hate autism. When I try taking him into a store, and he starts pounding his head with his fists; I hate autism. When I want to talk to him about why he loves the Tigger Movie so much, I hate autism. When he’s carrying on a conversation in a language that I can’t understand, I hate autism. When he cries at night, and I can’t ask him about his nightmare; I hate autism. When his sister asks me when he will talk, and all I can say is “soon, baby, soon;” I hate autism. When another boy his age asks me to throw him a ball, while he bounces alone in his own world, I hate autism.

A thousand times a day.

And then comes a new day like yesterday at the park.

Matthew’s exploring. Here’s a stick; here’s a piece of bark. Together they open new words for him. I only wish I could see them as he does, but then we never get to do that, do we?

I look for Emma. She’s running with some kids and having fun. It’s a nice day. I’m not loving autism; I’ll never go there. But for some reason neither is it in the fore of my thoughts right now. Which in itself is strange. I usually notice it more at the park but not today. Today he’s happy. Today she’s happy. It’s beautiful, and I don’t think about it.

She’s wondered off out of the circle, so I go to look. Matthew has decided to climb the slide. Once I spot her, I turn back to him. He’s standing at the base of the slide, talking to the stick and the bark; ignoring the child standing behind him–throwing bark at his head.

Lord of the Files is not a good book to read when you have young children. Having kids brings you in close proximity the playground: the most vicious place on earth; unless of course there’s a deserted island somewhere near. There once was a time when 1984 held place of priority for the most realistically frightening novel ever. In college, I could see Big Brother everywhere. Having returned to the playground later in life, I’m convinced that Jack and his hunters are far more terrifying.

The child bent to pick up another piece of bark to throw when he heard me approaching, and like Jack on the beach when the sailors arrived, he looked to see if I would stop him. All it took was a look and the bark hit the ground, but it didn’t end there.

I pick up my boy off the slide, and put him on the ground. As soon as I do, I see that he’s heading straight towards a florescent green softball that an older child has dropped. As I move to explain to him that the ball isn’t his, the older child says, “he can play with it.” I’m grateful for the Ralphs of the world. They’re not perfect, but they do exist, and sometimes they do the right thing.

“Thanks buddy. I’ll make sure you get it back.”

My boy bounces it on the sidewalk liking the sound it makes. Up and down, he’s happier than he’s been all day. Until Jack sees him having fun.

Drop, bounce, bounce, bounce. Drop, bounce, bounce, bounce. And Jack attacks. He rushes past my boy on the next drop, and kicks the softball into the parking lot. My boy stands and looks at it rolling away.

I go retrieve the ball from the lot and give it back to my boy. He picks up where he left off, and Jack gets warmed up to kick it again when his mother calls him down for it, “Matthew! Stop!”

He doesn’t stop, and the ball goes back into parking lot. And my Matthew watches it go before bending over to pick up a new stick and a new piece of bark. Bouncing into his own world.

There are times, they are few but they do happen, when autism isn’t the worse thing in the world.

The terrifying thing about Lord of the Flies is that we’re all Piggy. We’re all Ralph. We’re all Jack. We’re all floundering between the two Matthews. And Simon the innocent is punished for our sins.

Posted by Russell November 22, 2009 at 6:16 pm
2009Tue17Nov

The World is Going to Hell in a Hand-basket!

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I posted recently on the combination of Twitter and 24/7 news adding to the feeling of desperation in the world.  A wise commenter posted that it isn’t that the world is getting worse, we’re just hearing about it all the time.  I couldn’t agree more.  And I have an example to prove the point.

Ask the random moderately educated person what is the worst school massacre in America is, and they will tell you one of a couple of things. Depending on their age, they are most likely to say Columbine or Virginia Tech.  A few might pull out the Texas Sniper.  Others will think of some incident they might have been involved in, however remotely.  They would all be wrong.

The reality is that the worst school killings isn’t ingrained on the public psyche because it happened in a time prior to world wide news coverage.  It happened on May 18th, 1927 in the little town of Bath, MI.  And there is a good chance you’ve never heard of it, unless you’ve heard me ramble about it.

Andrew Kehoe was upset about new taxes.  So to get even, he blew up the school in Bath.  He killed 44 people in two explosions during the school day.  He planned the attack for months, getting hired on as the schools janitor and spent 8 months wiring up the school with explosives.  An entire wing of the school failed to explode, or the death toll would have been much higher.  Kehoe also killed himself in the final explosion.  In addition to the deaths, Kehoe destroyed the majority of the school building and town leadership.  The last explosion, done via a car bomb just like in Iraq so even those things aren’t new, killed much of the leadership of the town.

Now this made the news.  It dominated headlines around the country for weeks.  But news was slow, pictures rare and unless you picked up the paper, you didn’t read about it.  News was a very passive thing then.  Today, we’d have live footage from helicopters, kids around the country would twitter about it while fifty people who just “felt bad” because of it opened up fan pages on Facebook.  A group in Iowa would set up a website saying that George Bush knew about it and helped plant the bombs.  Another here in Alabama would theorize on their website that it was really a cruise missile fired from the USS Ronald Reagan.

And it’s that difference that makes today’s world seem to be going to Hell in that proverbial hand basket.  It’s the same one we’ve been in for years, and fundamentally it’s a better and more comfortable basket than ever before but the complaint of a single occupant carries far more weight today than ever before.  I mean why make your friends depressed, when you can depress the whole world, right?

Posted by runwolf13 November 17, 2009 at 9:42 am
2009Tue17Nov

Zombie Movies . . .

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Ok.  If we are going to be geeky, let’s get geeky.

My top 10 (ok, 11) Zombie Movies:

  1. Shaun of the Dead
  2. Zombieland (loved it)
  3. Dawn of the Dead (Snyder)
  4. Planet Terror
  5. Dawn of the Dead (Romero)
  6. Night of the Living Dead
  7. Land of the Dead
  8. Dead Alive
  9. Day of the Dead
  10. Return of the Living Dead
  11. Resident Evil (the first one.  I know—video game movie, but it is a cool Zombie flick, you have to admit)

Interesting . . . I couldn’t help but notice that when I put this together, 4 of my top 5 have been within the last few years (all this decade), and looking at upcoming releases, there are some real promising ones on the horizon.  The world is looking up if you’re a Zombie lover (no necrophilia puns intended).  As the Zombie Survival guide warns: never attempt to have sexual relations with the recently re-animated–as they tend to bite.

Gotta give a shout out here to George Romero (well represented on my list).  He defined this genre (though others have far surpassed him in it).  My top four are the Zombie flicks I have the most fun watching.  And while Romero’s may not be as much fun, his are still among my favorites.  Got to love a guy that take a bunch of walking dead and make a smart and relevant political and social commentary out of it.  That was one of my favorite things about Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead: hilarious and gory, yet some of the sharper social criticisms I have seen.  Rule #1: Cardio.  You got to appreciate the little things. Etc.

Zombies are a metaphor for us.  They are us at our most base.  When we battle them, we battle ourselves.  They are harmless (relatively) if you meet one alone.  In a mob, they are truly deadly, almost unstoppable.  None of us are as dumb as all of us.  Zombies feed on human flesh (in some versions, just the brain), and they can be killed by destroying the brain.  When our reason and logic fails us, we are doomed.  We feed on each other’s flesh and brains; we are in constant warfare; we tend to be gluttonous—focused only on ourselves and not the greater good.  Romero uses the zombie to make insightful social comments and criticism.  That is why his films, albeit technically and “narratively” (my spell checker is saying this is not a word, but it should be) inferior, belong in anyone’s list.  They may not be as fun as some of the other zombie flicks, but they are relevant.

Night of the Living Dead dealt with the paranoia surrounding the “space-race” in the fifties and sixties (a meteor was the cause),  Dawn of the Dead with rising commercialism (as represented by the shopping malls—which were popping up all over the place at the time) of the 70’s and early 80’s.  Take a good look at the mall next time you’re there.  To Romero, mall shoppers looked like zombies wandering around, slaves not to a zombie appetite, but to their credit cards.

The 80’s bought with it its own brand of paranoia, the cold war and the impending threat of nuclear holocaust.  Many films in the 80’s dealt with this, but none as directly as Day of the Dead.  C’mon, a bunch of army guys held up in a bunker with hordes of the living dead outside?  It is the paranoid fantasy of the 80’s embodied.  The future we all dreaded.  But what we really dreaded weren’t the bombs, it was ourselves.  Outside.  Wanting to eat us.

Land of the Dead addressed the social elitism of the late nineties and into the 21st century.  You don’t have to be a genius to see Bush in Dennis Hopper’s role there, protecting the wealthy on an island while everyone else is kept out, using others to achieve his own ends.  Even Diary of the Dead (which I haven’t seen yet), deals with our current fascination with reality shows.  We’d rather spend our time watching others live their lives out on TV than live our own.  We can sit for hours on end focused on the tube.  Hmmm . . . sounds like a zombie.

That’s one thing I love about Shaun of the Dead.  It is a real and intelligent comment on social lethargy (and it’s fun as hell).  We get into a routine, we procrastinate; we have jobs we hate, so we escape into alcohol, TV, and video games.  We won’t grow up.  We have a sense of entitlement, yet no will (or means in many cases) to earn the things we feel we should have.  So we finance them, or pretend to have them by focusing our lives around Brad Pitt (who’s a damn fine actor, don’t get me wrong).

Zombieland was equally insightful.  Comments on obesity, love of and dependence on materialism, the way we ignore life’s finer fruits in the pursuit of material possessions.  All of these things mean nothing in the face of apocalypse.  That’s what makes the zombie such a relevant metaphor.

That and they’re scary as hell.

Good “Zombie” movies that aren’t technically zombie movies but deserve consideration:

  • Heavy Metal, story “B-17″
  • 28 Days Later (haven’t seen the sequel yet.  28 Months Later is scheduled for release next year.  Not sure about that one))
  • Slither (this one’s a hoot)
  • Evil Dead Trilogy (Evil Dead, Evil Dead two, Army of Darkness)
  • C.H.U.D. (Classic)
  • Night of the Comet (worth seeing is you like bad acting.  Loved it as a kid)
  • Pet Cemetery (a zombie cat?  What’s not to love about that?)

Posted by mred November 17, 2009 at 9:27 am
2009Mon16Nov

Get Out Of The Bedroom

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I read this story at AL.com and, while I’m not surprised, it really upset me.  It is just another example of the state demanding access to the most private aspects of our lives.

Rep. DuWayne Bridges, R

Rep. DuWayne Bridges, R

While I encourage you to go read the story for yourself, the gist of the story is pretty straight forward. It seems Alabama State Representative DuWayne Bridges, R-Valley, wants to pass a law to stop State Universities from offering domestic partnership to same-sex couples.  Bridges has a new bill ready to introduce in the January session of the state legislature.

It seems that what upsets him is that two state schools have either already offered such benefits or plan to very soon.  UAB already has the plan in place, allowing them to compete for highly qualified medical professionals and UAH plans to institute benefits for same sex domestic partnerships in January.  The UAB plan began on October 1, so both schools recently adopted the idea.  (An idea I applaud and wish all the state schools offered.)

To make matters “worse” for Bridges, the UA President Robert Witt told faculty that UA is considering doing the same.  I guess the only “good” school for Bridges is Auburn, which at this time has not considered it.  (Shame on you, War Eagle!)

Rep. Patricia Todd, D

Rep. Patricia Todd, D

Of course our Republican Governor, Bob Riley, supports the Bridges Bill, as does Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim James.  Which makes my pickings for governor slim.  I could only find media reports of one legislator, Representative Patricia Todd, D-Birmingham, who openly opposes the bill.  I’m sure the fact that Todd is self described as “Alabama’s first openly gay legislator” has no effect on her position.

Okay, yes.  That last bit was snarky.  But I’m tired of the only people willing to take a stand for equal rights in this state are the people suffering under unequal laws.  I don’t mean to disparage Todd, I’m glad she’s opposed.  But I, for one, am throwing my straight, married opinion into the fray and saying Bridges is wrong for doing this.  I don’t know what set Bridges off, but if he’d kept quiet, there would have been little outcry over this.  The Universities could have quietly done the right thing and no one would have been upset.

I’m probably being hard on Todd over his actions.  Realistically if Todd hadn’t done it, a Roy Moore or other bible toting politician would have grabbed the headlines come election time.  But I’m tired of moralistic politicians trying to legislate what’s acceptable in people’s private lives, for make no mistake;  this isn’t about benefits, this is purely anti-gay bigotry.

Needless to say, I’ll be watching this.  I’m disappointed and upset that such a move would come, but can’t say I’m surprised seeing Alabama passed an amendment in 2006 to ban same sex marriage.  And while it would be easy to point a finger and cry “Dirty Republicans,” as I’m sure some will, an amendment like that didn’t pass without plenty of Democrats supporting it.  And Bridges bill won’t pass without significant Democratic support.  And frankly, I think it will pass.  And clearly, Riley will sign it.

I honestly don’t think there is a chance the bill will be stopped except through committee action that keeps it from getting a vote.  I’m convinced that if the bill reaches the floor, it will pass.  The same way other moralistic bills continually get passed in this state.  It isn’t the fault of any one party, but of an ignorant population of citizens who think any bill that keeps “others” from enjoying their lives somehow improves their own.

It is a sad state of affairs in Alabama.  I, for one, am depressed over my state’s actions.  And after passing the “Craft Beer” act, I had hope that perhaps Alabama was progressing into a new age of acceptance.  It is sad to learn I was wrong.

Posted by runwolf13 November 16, 2009 at 8:40 am
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