And Now...the Kill List

What others say:

• First, the New York Times story: "Secret 'Kill List' Proves a Test of Obama's Principles and Will," 29 May 2012.
• Then Ta-Nehisi Coates: "The Kill List," posted 31 May 2012.
• Conor Friedersdorf weighs in: "Hey, Voters, The Kill List is What Matters," posted 31 May 2012.
• Joan Walsh at Salon speaks: "The Politico-Breitbart Mind Meld," posted 31 May 2012.
• David Sirota creates a petition against the Kill List: "Please, Don't Kill Me, Obama," posted on Salon, 31 May 2012.
• Glenn Glenwald on normalizing extremism: "How Extremism is Normalized," posted 30 May 2012.
• William Saletan goes "Beyond the Kill List," on Slate, posted 30 May 2012.

These voices of criticism, except for one or two, come from the those who lean left. What does the right have to say? Here's one: Marc Thiessen, "The Obama-Bush Doctrine," in The Washington Post.

What Others Are Saying

Another hot day is warming up in South Louisiana, and we have a guest arriving this evening, providing he can get a flight on student standby, so this morning, I'm just linking to some posts and articles that caught my attention:

• Margaret Talbot opines about the Catholic Church's suing the Obama Administration over insurance coverage for birth control, in "Why is the Catholic Church Going to Court?," on The New Yorker website.  Bottom line:

  No one is challenging the rights of those Catholics who object to birth control to eschew it themselves, and to denounce it in public. But the lawsuit proposes something different: namely, that religious freedom means they can deny access to birth control to people who don’t share their faith or that article of it. It doesn’t.

• Heather Digby Parton, guest blogging for Kevin Drum, reflects my own cynicism about the lack of political will of our politicians in reigning in the power of Wall Street. (And now that the Supreme Court has added to the problem with its decision of Citizen's United, what little spine was left in our politicians has been, perhaps, permanently removed.) Adding to my depression about how Wall Street's trade in toxic derivatives screwed millions of Americans while the perpetrators of that financial disaster seem to have become even more politically powerful are these posts to which Parton links: Thomas Edsall's May 26th opinion piece in The New York Times and Mark Taibbi's article "How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform," in Rolling Stone. Here's a lovely quote from Taibbi's article:

  The fate of Dodd-Frank over the past two years is an object lesson in the government's inability to institute even the simplest and most obvious reforms, especially if those reforms happen to clash with powerful financial interests. From the moment it was signed into law, lobbyists and lawyers have fought regulators over every line in the rulemaking process. Congressmen and presidents may be able to get a law passed once in a while – but they can no longer make sure it stays passed. You win the modern financial-regulation game by filing the most motions, attending the most hearings, giving the most money to the most politicians and, above all, by keeping at it, day after day, year after fiscal year, until stealing is legal again.

• A recent study suggests that exercise may actually hurt some folks with heart risks, as Gina Kolata reports in her New York Time's article, "For Some, Exercise May Increase Heart Risk," 30 May 2012. Oh, well. We know we all are going to die, anyway, right? No sweat.
  
  
  
• I'll end with this great Pig at the Trough homage to a Ronald Reagan ad (and a poke at Wall Street) that James Fallows shares this morning on his blog: "The Bear vs. the Pig: A Great Reagan Ad Updated."
  
  ....things to do.....
 

oh, and "oink, oink": "Honeywell CEO Says the Corporate Tax Rate Should be Zero"

Yes, It's Hot Outside

zinnia in my garden

One of my goals when living in the South--and except for the almost three years my family and I lived in northern Minnesota, that would be my entire life--is to make it through May without turning on the central air. Most of the homes my husband and I have purchased in our thirty-four years of marriage (we married young!), have been older homes with lots of windows, so my goal is not impossible.  Had we an attic fan in addition to all those windows, the goal of being comfortable without central air would be even more possible. But this year I didn't come close to meeting my goal. I set the thermostat to 78° F the first week of May. The house can be comfortable with the thermostat set at 80°F if we're in one room, sedentary, with a fan circulating the air. We do live in south Louisiana, where the humidity is almost as high as the thermometer reading.

Our last home before moving to Louisiana (again, after 24 years), was near Atlanta. The average temperatures between Atlanta and New Orleans are just a few degrees difference, but those few degrees feel a lot greater when humidity is factored in. My husband moved to south Louisiana nine months before I did, and the first time my daughter and I drove south to visit him, we were staggered by the heat and humidity of a late June evening. After a year, I am acclimatized, but yesterday's heat (in the low 90s) was still brutal as I worked outside in the afternoon, edging my flower, herb, and vegetable beds and mowing the yard around them.

According to climate scientists, the weather is going to get even more brutal. This spring has been the warmest since 1895, when the first national weather data was collected on a regular basis. The previous national record for warmest spring was set in the spring of 1910. We've broken that record this year. In 1910, most of the country's temperatures were below average--tremendous heat in the West brought the national temperature up to that record-breaking high. But this year, nearly all of the country's temperatures have been above average. You can view these comparisons at Capital Climate's website: "Fat Lady Preparing to Sing: Crushing Warmest Spring Record," posted 28 May 2012.

Last summer, the PBS NewsHour created a new widget that tracks record-breaking high temperatures across the United States. I've added that widget to my blog in the upper left-hand corner.

Now I think I'll get a little earlier start on the yard work today, beginning with eliminating as many as I can of the nymphs and adult forms of the Leaf-Footed (Stink) Bug that are attacking our Creole tomatoes.

nymph of Leaf-Footed Stink Bug on my creole tomatoes this a.m.

adult Leaf-Footed Stink bug on my tomatoes this morning

A Morning Paddle and a Lesson in Marsh Preservation

cooling off in the shade in Big Branch Marsh

Yesterday morning my husband, daughter, and I headed out to Big Branch Marsh National Wildlife Refuge, where we unloaded our kayaks at an unmotorized boat ramp and paddled down a canal and out into the marsh. At 8 o'clock in the morning, temperatures were already rising. This was our first time out on the canal that leads from the ramp to Lake Pontchartrain; we usually paddle Bayou Cane, where we always look forward to sighting the osprey nesting in a tall dead tree at the edge of the bayou. But yesterday in this area of Big Branch Marsh we didn't see a lot of wildlife: a couple of small alligators cooling off in the water, lots of red-winged blackbirds, several Great Egrets fishing in the shallow waters, an eastern kingbird, and a couple of wood ducks flying up, startled, from the great swathes of bullrushes and cane, and, of course, the ubiquitous dragonflies that pose in silhouette on tall grasses, sedges, and half-submerged limbs of dead trees.

canal in Big Branch Marsh

Our plan was to paddle around in the marsh for two to three hours, and that's what we did, stopping for second breakfast on a berm in the marsh. There we saw piles of raccoon waste full of tiny seashells, clues to that animal's breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  We were satisfied with bananas, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and water.

Along the way, we had noted the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's attempts to restore the marsh. Anyone who knows anything about this area knows how important wetlands are to the livelihood of local people and of local and migrating plants and animals. The American alligator was on the endangered species list when I was growing up on the Texas Gulf Coast and was finally removed from that list in 1987. Bald eagles, too, find refuge in the swamps of Louisiana, along with other animals coming back from the brink of extinction, such as the brown pelican. The vast marshes of Louisiana also protect the coast from the destruction of hurricanes. Over the years, the draining of swampland to provide living space for the inhabitants of New Orleans and other towns nearby, the building of levees along the Mississippi River, the unrestrained logging of cypress trees in the 1930s, the dredging for navigation canals and pipelines through the swamps by the oil and gas industries, and the importing of the South American nutria in the 1940s have devastated this natural protection (more here).  The small area of the vast network of swamp that we paddled around in for three hours yesterday is "disappearing at the rate of more than 25 square miles a year."

The U.S. Geological Survey provides these statistics:

Coastal Louisiana has lost a wetland area the size of Delaware, equaling 1,883 square miles, over the past 78 years, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey National Wetlands Research Center study. 

Twenty-five percent of the wetland area present in 1932 was lost by 2010. If this trend were to continue, Louisiana would lose a wetland area larger than the size of the island of Manhattan every year. [See "How Are Louisiana Wetlands Changing?," USGS news release, 2 June 2011]

Add the marsh loss caused by the poor decisions of people and the marsh loss caused by hurricanes and other storms--you can see why we have a coastline in crisis:

When the hurricanes of 2005 and 2008 are factored in, the trend increased the amount of land lost to 16.57 square miles per year from 1985 to 2010. If this loss were to occur at a constant rate, it would equate to losing more than a football field every hour. The combined loss from the storms of 2005 and 2008 equal a land area the size of Chicago. [See "How Are Louisiana Wetlands Changing?," on the USGS website]

As we stood on that berm in Big Branch Marsh, my husband waved his hand toward the open water behind us. "Hurricane Katrina tore big swatches of marsh out of this area, leaving behind open water like that," he said. Then he pointed to the south side of the berm where we were standing. "That area, now covered with sedges, bull rushes, and other marsh plants, was once open water. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service built this berm, pumped in sediment behind it, and then planted this area; see how the marsh has been reclaimed here."

open water in Big Branch Marsh

berm in Big Branch Marsh

reclaimed marsh in Big Branch Marsh

Earlier in our paddle we had also come across another marsh reclamation project, brush fences of Christmas trees built to direct the flow of water in the marsh, allowing sediment to build and plants to root.  A wooden fence, sort of like a cattle chute, is built in shallow waters, and then recycled Christmas trees are placed within the structure.  We wondered if these structures worked, and then, later in our paddle, we saw where sediment had evidently deposited along one side of a fence, for marsh plants had established a solid foothold there, obscuring part of the fence.

brush fence in Big Branch Marsh

close-up of recycled Christmas trees in brush fence

plants growing along brush fence in Big Branch Marsh

When I see such reclamation projects, evidence of the hard work of government employees, volunteers, and employees of participating non-profit organizations, I am reminded of what government can do. Every time some member of Congress insists on mandatory lay-offs of government employees and great spending cuts in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other such worthwhile government services, I think of the marshlands of Louisiana and other areas of the country that would suffer without the work and protection of such services.

Private enterprise cannot take up the slack here, for private enterprise focuses first on profit, and the worth of a wetland cannot be measured by corporate profit. Without these wetlands, 30% or more of the nation's seafood would disappear from restaurant menus and from seafood markets; oil platforms and gas pipelines protected by swamp would soon be in open sea, vulnerable to storms; coastal people would be homeless and jobless; endangered species would become extinct; American citizens looking for hunting and fishing recreation would have many fewer--and ever more dwindling--options.

This is why government services such as the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service need our support. We all profit.

 

note:

See discussion of U.S. budget proposals at the American Trails website: Federal Budget Proposals: funding issues for trails".  Quote: "U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would receive a 21% cut: $1.2 billion budget is $315 million below last year’s level." Republicans pushing these cuts refuse to let the Bush tax cuts expire as planned and refuse to compromise on taxes and other revenue options.

another quote:

Dan Ashe, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, tells it like it is concerning the fierce budget cuts some in Congress are aiming at fish and wildlife conservation programs: "This is not deficit reduction. These are policy and political objectives dressed up as deficit reduction by those who seek to get those pesky fish and wildlife agencies -- federal and state -- out of the way of development. Never mind that America's outdoor recreation economy generates 8.4 million, nonexportable U.S. jobs, most in rural areas, generating over $100 billion annually in federal, state and local taxes." Ashe also pointed out: "Now the legacy of a century of conservation -- indeed the future of the North American model of wildlife conservation -- is threatened by the prospect of draconian cuts to conservation programs. These programs, though only a sliver of a percentage of the federal budget and largely inconsequential for deficit reduction, have been disproportionately singled out by some in Congress and their supporters." from NOLA online, 23 October 2011

 other sources:
The Izaak Walton League of America, "Conservation Funding Cuts"

What the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service does, here: AllGov: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

editorial by Shawn Perich, on Northern Wilds website: "Points North: Don't Destroy Fish and Wildlife Conservation to Balance the Budget"

'The Rise and Disappearance of Southeast Louisiana," an interactive graphic for The Times-Picayune by Dan Swenson.

Sane Republican Quote for the Day

“For heaven’s sake, you have Grover Norquist wandering the earth in his white robes saying that if you raise taxes one penny, he’ll defeat you.... He can’t murder you. He can’t burn your house. The only thing he can do to you, as an elected official, is defeat you for reelection. And if that means more to you than your country when we need patriots to come out in a situation when we’re in extremity, you shouldn’t even be in Congress.” Former GOP Senator Alan Simpson (R-Wyoming) on Republicans' refusal to raise any taxes

more here.

Some Reflections on Separation of Church and State, Southern Baptists, and the Rise of Religious Fundamentalism

Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of The Interfaith Alliance

Last night, my husband, our college-aged daughter, and I attended a meeting at a local town hall where Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of The Interfaith Alliance, gave a well-received speech on the separation of church and state. Of course, he was preaching to the choir. Most of us, if not all of us, tend to vote the Democratic ticket, and the majority of us were over the age of fifty. Our daughter and a couple of other kids accompanying their parents were the only ones under the age of twenty-five.

Many of us were probably at one time or another allied with a church that had scrupulously practiced separation of church and state back in the day when people knew what that meant. Some of those religious organizations have since abandoned that traditional/Constitutional view of separation of church and state, causing an exodus of members who refuse to bow to a politically-minded religious fundamentalism. I speak here most specifically of myself and my husband. I was reared in the Southern Baptist Church, but I left the organization after years of questioning its increasing fundamentalism. (I've written about some of that experience here). Reverend Gaddy is one of those folks, too, only he had a place quite a bit more elevated on the Southern Baptist organizational ladder than the likes of me. Before the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, Dr. Gaddy served on many leadership committees, including the Executive Committee (1980-1984) and Director of Christian Citizenship Development of the Christian Life Commission (1973-1977). (see bio from which I found this information here).

In the 1970s, there was a concerted effort, led by Paige Patterson and Texas judge Paul Pressler, to transform the Southern Baptist Convention, to get the convention to abandon its traditional stand on "priesthood of the believer" (members were free to interpret the Bible as they felt God leading them, so there was a diversity of belief, and local churches had some freedom in their expression of those beliefs) and to promote a fundamentalist view on inerrancy of the scripture and an uncompromising creed.  My husband knew Paul Pressler in the early 1970s when he was a teenager and was living in Houston with his parents.  He and his family attended Bethel Independent Presbyterian Church, where Judge Pressler and his wife, Nancy, were leaders of the youth group that Tom attended.  (Tom remembers some particularly "interesting" advice this couple gave the group about dating.)

As with many such wranglings over national church leadership, Paul Pressler's struggle for power seems to have begun locally, in the Second Baptist Church of Houston, where he and his wife had been members and Sunday School teachers. Pressler and another member of that church, John Baugh, have differering views of that time, but evidently the Presslers were removed as Sunday School teachers. According to John Baugh, one of the reasons for that removal was that "the Presslers were working with a small Presbyterian church and taking students from Second Baptist." That would have been the years the Presslers were leading that youth group at Bethel Independent Presbyterian Church which Tom attended.

Anyway, John Baugh became associated with moderate Baptists and Paul Pressler with fundamentalist Baptists. Eventually, moderate Baptists were forced out of leadership positions in the Southern Baptist Convention, and pastors such as Dr. Gaddy united to form the moderate Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

The climax of the struggle between moderate and fundamentalist Baptists was happening during the years when Tom and I lived in College Station, Texas, where we attended Texas A&M University and were members of a Baptist church that was moderate and that accepted members with a diversity of views. So, as we listened to Dr. Gaddy last night, we had all this background history which gave us, perhaps, a different view of the presentation than some of the folks in the audience. (As Tom said later, we'd heard all the preacher jokes before.)

Dr. Gaddy is an interesting and thoughtful speaker; he has a sense of humor and a smile that just makes you want to trust him, good pastoral characteristics. He began with references to some of the mean-spirited things being advocated from pulpits today, noting two particularly hateful speeches, though he didn't name the men responsible. However, I had heard excerpts from these particular sermons, so I knew he was referring to Louisiana pastor Dennis Terry, of Greenwell Springs Baptist Church, and to either Charles Worley, of Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, North Carolina or Sean Harris, senior pastor of Berean Baptist Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

But the focus of Gaddy's speech, titled "But God Told Me I could be President--Religion and the 2012 Election," was about the separation of church and state and how that separation is being undermined by political and religious leaders. Political leaders are using religion cynically to garner votes, and religious leaders are using religion to gain political power, that is, power to change legislation that will impact all Americans. He referred specifically to the Affordable Health Care Act and how its attempts to cover all Americans is being unhelpfully and uncompassionately undermined by religious groups that erroneously claim the act tramples on their religious freedom. Gaddy reminds us that your religious freedom stops where the other person's religious freedom begins, that a secular government has the responsibility to respond to the needs of ALL its citizens and that a woman's right to make choices about her own body should not be determined by one religious group. Of course, he believes strongly that individuals have the right to act on their own religious faith, just not that they should expect others to defer to that faith in the arena of governmental legislation.

Compassion and humility seem to be two important words to Dr. Gaddy, compassion for others different from us and humility about our own self-importance and self-righteousness. I like how he concluded his speech with a reminder that we all need humility, the willingness to accept that we might be wrong. He administered some stern injunctions with that very kind smile of his, sweetening the sting of some of his words, for he had some criticisms of the Obama administration as well.


other links:
Editorial by Todd Dorman, "Entangling Religion and Politics Diminishes Both," in The Cedar Rapids Gazette, 1 December 2011.

State of Belief with Rev. Welton Gaddy--radio show production of The Interfaith Alliance Foundation

Jumping Ship

Once a month I attend a local meeting of Democrats who gather to talk, to drink, and to eat, finding fellowship (as the Baptists would say) with like-minded folks in a parish dominated by Republicans and the far-right. During the course of our conversations, several of us have confessed to having voted for a Republican president at least once; others have confessed that they were once fiscal Republicans. Now they sound like--and are--Democrats, concerned about public education, the rights of women, the economy, unemployment, the widening gap between the rich and the rest of us, corporate domination of politics, the environment, climate change. It's not that these folks have changed that much--it's that the Republican party has changed significantly. Once, I think, we could have counted on both parties at least to do the best they could to steer the ship of state; they might differ in exactly to what degree to turn the wheel, but there was a balance of power that held the ship on a fairly reasonable course (not that there weren't mistakes).

That's no longer the case, and  Republicans who are publicly and loudly jumping ship indicate just how far right the Republican party has turned.

The latest conservative to publish a screed against the far-right turn of the party is Michael Fumento, who writes in Salon that

Apart from gaining fame and fortune for a select few, all the new right is accomplishing is turning Bismarck’s words upside down, making politics the art of the impossible. It demonizes the opposition even as it brutally enforces “team loyalty.” So nothing gets done, and bad trends just get worse. ["My break with the extreme right," posted 24 May 2012.]

Fumento joins the ranks of David Frum , who writes that he is "haunted" by his experience in the Bush administration. Frum is no liberal, no Democrat; he penned the phrase "axis of evil" that the Bush administration used so well in its march toward war with Iraq.  But here is what he writes about Fox News and Talk Radio:

Extremism and conflict make for bad politics but great TV. Over the past two decades, conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment. An industry has grown up to serve that segment—and its stars have become the true thought leaders of the conservative world. The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly in the Obama era. As journalism, not so much. As a tool of political mobilization, it backfires, by inciting followers to the point at which they force leaders into confrontations where everybody loses, like the summertime showdown over the debt ceiling...[snip]...We used to say “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.” Now we are all entitled to our own facts, and conservative media use this right to immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information. ["When Did the GOP Lose Touch with Reality?," in New York Magazine, 20 November 2011.]

Another conservative who has jumped the ship of extremism is Michael Lofgren, who retired after 28 years as a Republican Congressional staffer last year and publicly let loose his inner frustrations over the far-right turn of his political party:

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy. [in "Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative who Left the Cult," Truthout,  3 September 2011]

Lofgren does not pull any punches; he has plenty to say about Democrats, too, and notes that he is not a supporter of Obama, but that when Barack Obama won the presidency, he wanted Obama to succeed because he wanted his country to succeed. But his harshest criticism is leveled at his own party:

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant...[snip]...Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

The number of such apostate Republicans is growing. Before Lofgren, Frum, and Fumento, there was Bruce Bartlett, President Reagan's domestic policy advisor and a critic of his own contribution to Reaganomics [The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward]. Bartlett, an old-time fiscal conservative, makes no friends with today's Republican extremists with his criticisms of Republican fiscal irresponsibility. On Hardball with Chris Matthews, Bartlett reminds us that "[t]the Obama plan, the Affordable Health Care Act, was essentially the same thing that Republicans had been pushing themselves only a few years earlier"  and that higher taxes in the 80s and 90s actually led to a booming economy rather than to recession that Republicans had predicted. "I think the dirty secret," Bartlett says, "is actually that Obama is a moderate conservative, and if I were a liberal Democrat I would be pretty upset" [segment posted on Raw Replay, titled "Bruce Bartlett: Chunk of GOP either stupid, crazy, ignorant, or craven cowards," 28 July 2011].

While those of us meeting once a month at a local restaurant to discuss Democratic policies and the ship of state may feel vindicated by these criticisms aimed at the Republican party, how can we derive real comfort from our united concerns? They just reinforce our own fears that the ship may soon crash on the shoals of extremism.

One Project Completed, Several More to Go

front of The Staring Owl, designed and hand-crafted by me

back of The Staring Owl quilt, recycled cotton clothing

In January of 2009, I began felting second-hand sweaters and creating items from the felted wool. Never one to begin small, I first turned a sweater into a one-button jacket. The jacket fit my daughter, but she didn't like the style, so it still hangs in a closet.  Then I made the requisite felt pouches. My biggest projects, however, were two folk art quilts that I designed and handsewed for my son and daughter. These took me over a year to complete. Then I turned my hand to smaller projects as my life became more complicated--my daughter, and last child at home, headed off to university, and we moved to another state. However, I wanted to make another folk art quilt, so one of my New Year's resolutions this year was to complete two more such quilts. Hurrah! I've met half of that resolution: I just finished a much smaller folk art quilt than the ones I made my children; it's the size of a baby quilt, 45 inches X 45 inches. I've titled the work The Staring Owl because a phrase from William Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost inspired the design: "Then nightly sings the staring owl, tu-whit, tu-who, a merry note."

Because I usually have two or three projects going at once, I've already started on the second folk art quilt of my New Year's resolution, and I've drawn the design for another. The second folk art quilt will be made entirely of squares cut from felted cashmere sweaters, though there may be a few squares of merino wool in there to make up the size of the quilt. This one will probably be lap-sized--or baby-quilt sized--too.

first squares for a cashmere quilt

Each of the pink cashmere squares has a crocheted flower (with leaves) sewn to it. I envision scattering these pink squares among green and blue squares of cashmere--a stylized lily pond. Oh, and each square has a cashmere backing, too.

The third idea for which I've already drawn a design will be a more traditional quilt, with real hand quilting instead of applique-embellished squares connected with crochet. I'm keeping that design secret, however, until I finish the quilt, for with it I am embarking on another first for me, and I want to see if the experiment is successful before I publish the result.

I'm hoping that I can finish both of these quilts before the end of the year...and maybe even add another large project at the end. We'll see.

Reflections on Gulf Sea Life, Ocean Trash, and Oil

heart-shaped oil deposit we found on the beach at Grand Isle, LA

This past weekend my husband and I spent a couple of nights on Grand Isle, Louisiana, where we walked the beach and the mosquito-infested trail in Grand Isle State Park and toasted our 34th wedding anniversary over a dinner of shrimp and flounder. (The shrimp was so-so, my husband's flounder the better choice.) Except for the occasional balls of oil we found on the beach and the oil platforms we could see from the beach, nothing much reminded us of the huge BP oil spill of two years ago.

Every morning the public beach is mechanically swept clean, and a person in a motorized cart picks up the larger pieces of trash that might otherwise clutter the sweep of sand where folks set out their towels and beach chairs and unfurl their umbrellas and aluminum-poled sunshades. And BP is doing its part to lure tourists to the Gulf states, assuring us all that everything is just wonderful on the coast.

On the surface, things don't look so bad. A closer look provides a more disturbing view.

On strolls behind the mechanically-swept beach, we noticed hundreds of small pieces of plastic and swaths of the terribly invasive water hyacinth that clogs bayous, rivers, and lakes, and, when washed out to sea, dies in the salt water that then deposits the stuff on beaches. In the state park one morning, we watched some guy on a tractor disk the beach and pile the water hyacinth in drifts of sand behind the reach of surf and tide, and on the public beach, we watched plastic water bottles, Styrofoam, and a huge plastic bag wash up in the surf in a matter of minutes. In the debris behind wind-deposited sand, we noted hundreds of colorful plastic bottle caps, faded by salt and sun, and occasional tar balls.

On the beach in the state park, Tom and I were glad to see dolphins cavorting in the surf just beyond the rock jetties. But then I spied something large, gray, and fleshy protruding from the shallow water between the beach and the rock jetties, near where people were setting up their fishing lines. A closer look with binoculars indicated a dead sea mammal, probably a dolphin.

In March of this year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report that describes "'unprecedented' harm to dolphins in the area of the 2010 spill, a vast stretch of the Gulf south of the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama coasts and the Florida panhandle," according to an article on the environment in National Journal. The article provides some of the horrifying statistical details:

Carcasses of 675 dolphins were recovered in the region between February 2010 and February 2012, or roughly 337 each year, the report said; the average number of “strandings” annually in the northern Gulf from 2002 to 2009 was 74.  And the 159 carcasses recovered in Louisiana waters after the spill was eight times higher than the historical average, the NOAA scientists reported.

In addition, nearly all of the 32 live dolphins captured and studied in Barataria Bay, one of Louisiana’s hardest-hit areas during the spill, were underweight, anemic, and suffered from liver or kidney disease, and half had abnormally low levels of hormones, the study said. The symptoms “are consistent with those seen in other mammals exposed to oil,” the scientists said.

Other damages to sea life have been observed, as well, including "horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp," according to an investigative piece on Al Jazeera's website.  We're being told, of course, that Gulf seafood is safe to eat, but the impact of BP's Gulf oil spill of April 2010 won't be fully known for years. For instance, scientists have also found higher concentrations of heavy metals in oysters, but they "don't yet know how trace metals like those found in the oysters move through food chains, or what effects they could have on high-level consumers, including people."

Tom loves oysters, and I know he will be unhappy to learn that other threats beside oil spills may be taking oysters off the menu. We focus on local and regional threats such as the BP Gulf oil spill, but that oil spill is just one horrific drop in the ocean. Climate change is affecting ocean acidification and threatening oyster reproduction, coral reefs, and other kinds of ocean life.

Our throw-away lifestyle threatens ocean life, as well. I am currently reading Moby Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them," which is full of astounding bits of information, such as the following:

Depending on where they sample, oceanographers have found that between 60 and 95 percent of today's marine debris--the preferred bureaucratic term for flotsam and jetsam--is made of plastic. Despite the Ocean Dumping Reform Act, according to a 2004 EPA report, the United States still releases more than 850 billion gallons of untreated sewage and storm runoff every year, and in that sewage are what the Environmental Protection Agency charmingly calls "floatables"--buoyant, synthetic things: Q-tips, condoms, dental floss, tampon applicators. [I spied two pieces of pink plastic tampon applicator pieces on the beach at Grand Isle.]

and

Globally, we are currently producing 300 million tons of plastic every year, and no known organism can digest a single molecule of the stuff, though plenty of organisms try.

When Tom and I toasted our 34 years of marriage at The Lighthouse on Grand Isle, I added a hopeful wish for 34 more years of married life. I wonder what a stroll on the beach will be like in 34 years. Will there still be a beach at Grand Isle? Will oysters be on the menu?

other links:

"'Hug the Monster: Downplaying the Climate Threat Won't Work as a Survival Strategy," by Joseph Romm, at grist.org, 7 May 2012.

"Afloat in the Ocean: Expanding Islands of Trash." by Lindsey Hoshaw, for The New York Times, 9 November 2009.

"Fish Consumption Advisories," for the state of Louisiana, on the website of Louisiana's Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

Why Support Crazy?

So I've been thinking and writing about why not to vote Republican, and at the top of my list today is that voting Republican seems to be voting for crazy. Here are some examples:

• Top of the list--the birther nonsense. Really. The Iowa GOP platform "calls for presidential candidates to 'show proof of being a ‘natural born citizen’ of the United States'" because there are many really unbelievably idiotic people who think Barack Obama is not a 'natural born' citizen. [h/t, "Political Animal.] There is ol' Sheriff Joe Arpaio sending his posse to Hawaii to take a gander at the President's official birth certificate. (But since one of the "posse" members is writing a birther conspiracy book with birther conspiracist Jerome Corsi, you can bet he won't believe what he sees. Otherwise, he won't be able to sell that book, huh?) And then there's Arizona's secretary of state blustering about keeping President Obama off Arizona's ballot in November unless Hawaiian officials send him some more proof of Obama's citizenship. Um....Hawaiian officials have already verified Barack Obama's birth certificate, idiot. Of course, Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett is also a Republican and Mitt Romney's Arizona co-chair, so he has a vested interest in the birther histrionics.
• Then there's the rejection of science, which I had meant to address in a stand-along post, but I just don't have the energy to write about how stupid I think Republicans are for their know-nothingness. Recent example? The House Republican vote to eliminate the American Community Survey, a survey that "has been around in some form since 1850, either as a longer version of or a richer supplement to the basic decennial census" and that serves as the "country’s primary check for determining how well the government is doing — and in fact what the government will be doing." According to The New York Times, "[i]t is the largest (and only) data set of its kind and is used across the federal government in formulas that determine how much funding states and communities get for things like education and public health." The article describes other important uses of this survey, too. And here are the stupid comments by one Republican house member, Daniel Webster, "a first-term Republican congressman from Florida who sponsored the relevant legislation":

  “This is a program that intrudes on people’s lives, just like the Environmental Protection Agency or the bank regulators..... “We’re spending $70 per person to fill this out. That’s just not cost effective,” he continued, “especially since in the end this is not a scientific survey. It’s a random survey.”

  Let's parse crazy: programs that intrude on peoples' lives--Really. Does anyone remember acid rain? Love Canal? lead poisoning? mercury poisoning? If you don't, look up those phrases in Wikipedia. Yes, the EPA affects people's lives, idiot man. Oh, and bank regulators? Have we so easily forgotten the last financial crisis which exploded during the Bush administration and the aftereffects with which we are still coping? 
  not a scientific survey, but a random survey--Really. A random survey IS a scientific survey. Who is voting for people like this?
  
  
  And don't get me started on the whole climate change denial of the Republican party. That craziness alone deserves a separate blog post. I'm just not sure I've got the patience to go there.
  
  
  These are not people I want leading my country in tough times. But evidently a lot of people think crazy is just hunky-dory.
  
  

  links

  "President Obama's Long Form Birth Certificate", at www.whitehouse.gov

  
  

  "Zombie Birtherism: The Conspiracy that doesn't Know It's Dead," Eric Lach, TPMMuckraker

  
  

  "Hawaii verifies Obama's Birth For Arizona Secretary of State"

  
  

  Left Action's Mitt Romney is a Unicorn petition
  
  "Time to Wean the Birthers"

In the Garden of My Dreams

Garden area, central Texas 2006

I was born in Texas, a sixth-generation Texan. As an adult, I have lived in Louisiana, Minnesota, and Georgia (twice). Now I am back in Louisiana. In all of those places, the activity that tied me to place more than professional work (which was teaching at colleges and universities) was gardening. In the year since I've moved back to Louisiana, Tom and I have added five 8ft.X8ft beds in our backyard for flowers and herbs, a long, wide bed running the length of the back of our house for flowers and herbs, a 20ft.X20ft. garden for vegetables (with a 20X20ft. area under tarp now to kill the grass for expanding the garden), and smaller beds around the yard. We have begun clearing a brushy lot next to our house for a woodland garden and bird habitat, where we are primarily removing invasive species and will be planting native bushes. Tom has started clearing the brush that runs the length of the old wire fence around our property, again, removing invasive species and allowing sunshine and space for flowering shrubs we want to maintain.

native flowers blooming at our house in central Texas (2007)

Every garden is my dream garden, but that dream changes, depending on location and my own interests. First, every place I've lived has brought with it shadowy suggestions of the gardening dreams of previous owners, and I watch over a growing season to identify what of those  dreams I can incorporate into the Garden of My Dreams: the rudbeckia and lilies a woman planted at our first home in Georgia, the roses in Texas, the peonies in Minnesota, the azaleas, gardenias, amaryllis, and hydrangeas here in Louisiana. Yet I do not hesitate to pull out what I think does not belong in the Garden of my Dreams. Here I have pulled by the armloads miniature gladiolas that were overpowering other plants, their orange blooms also too strident for the quieter colors of the pink hydrangeas, though I left a few patches. I also am moving plants to place them in more appropriate areas where they can receive the attention they deserve or where they will act as foils to other plants. The dwarf daylilies growing in a shady area at the front of the house are destined to be placed in a sunny spot in a partially-shaded bed at the entrance to our driveway; their yellow-green blooms will bring out the color of the variegated hostas a previous owner planted there. But first, I have to amend that bed with compost, re-position the hostas, and add some darker-leaved hostas and oak-leaf hydrangeas to serve as a backdrop.

Rudbeckia blooming in my garden in Decatur, GA (2009)

thymes growing in my herb garden in Georgia (2009)

We've lived in places with vastly different climates and soil type, so I've had to learn to adjust to the land and what it could provide. The Garden of My Dreams is a garden that requires not only love but hard work, curiosity, persistence. And the ability to get over the ick-factor of crushing a few pestilent worms between one's fingers.

I walk around our place and note areas for future flower beds: there between three pine trees and a pecan tree, I'll dig a flower bed for perennials and add compost; I've started a composted pile of kitchen scraps and grass trimmings which I will dig under perhaps this fall. My husband has already planted a trumpet vine at the edge of that area, where it can clamber up one of the pine trees. Here I will transplant violets and low-growing plants to surround a bench. There I would like an arch covered with flowering vines, to serve as a magical entrance between the shady front yard and a sunny side yard.

garden spot in our yard in Georgia (2009)

tomatoes growing in a raised bed in Louisiana (2012)

The benefits I receive from the Garden of my Dreams are many: healthy exercise, beautiful blooms, and fresh food. But most of all, planning and envisioning the Garden of my Dreams gives me hope, something to look forward to, to work toward. The day's news might include the latest nasty political attack or disaster. I could be overcome with rage over the latest stupid pronouncement of some politician. Instead, I go walking in the Garden of My Dreams. And I don't really have to leave my desk. It's there. Always evolving. Rooted in the past, reaching toward the future. In my head. In my heart.

sunflowers growing in Louisiana (2012)

lizard among the morning glories (2012)

Liberal Media?

Over and over again, Republicans call into question the "fairness" of journalists; they can't refer to the media without their favorite pejorative adjective "liberal"--the "liberal" media. In sticking to the claim that journalists cannot be trusted, they have successfully convinced millions of Americans that Republicans are the victims of a liberal media.  A tally of the guests on Sunday talk shows, however, indicates that Republicans are guests on those shows more than Democrats. According to Roll Call (24 January 2012),

"GOP lawmakers appeared on the Sunday shows nearly twice as often as Democratic lawmakers in 2011, a dominance far greater than the prior two years, according to a Roll Call database of Members' television appearances....[snip] the GOP lawmakers captured 64 percent of the Congressional appearances on the five shows that Roll Call tracks, and every network featured more Republican lawmakers than Democrats. Of 330 Congressional appearances tallied by Roll Call last year, 210 went to Republicans and only 120 went to Democrats — fewer if you subtract the eight appearances made by Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut Independent who caucuses with Democrats."

One of those popular media guests from the American Enterprise Institute, Norman Ornstein, has observed that his appearances on those Sunday news shows have plummeted since he and Thomas Mann, congressional scholar and senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, published a book that's created a great deal of interest--It's Even Worse than it Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism.

Greg Sargent, of The Washington Post asked Ornstein about the media reaction to their book, in which Ornstein and Mann lay most of the fault of government gridlock at the feet of Republicans. Sargent writes (Washington Post, 14 May 2012) that Ornstein:

confirmed that the book’s publicity people had tried to get the authors booked on the Sunday shows, with no success.

“Not a single one of the Sunday shows has indicated an interest, and I do find it curious,” Ornstein told me, adding that the Op ed [published in the Washington Post 27 April 2012] had well over 200,000 Facebook recommends and has been viral for weeks. “This is a level of attention for a book that we haven’t received before. You would think it would attract some attention from the Sunday shows.’

Ornstein also noted another interesting point. Their thesis takes on the media for falling into a false equivalence mindset and maintaining the pretense that both sides are equally to blame. Yet despite the frequent self-obsession of the media, even that angle has failed to generate any interest. What’s more, some reporters have privately indicated their frustration with their editorial overlords’ apparent deafness to this idea. [h/t, Kevin Drum]

So take that 'liberal media bias' meme with a huge container of salt. Republicans have little difficulty getting their views taken seriously in the news media and having oppositional views muted.

The Haircut

One of the initiation rituals at the small rural high school I attended in Texas in the 1970s was for the senior boys to cut the hair of the freshman boys. As for as I was concerned, it was a stupid ritual, but I was far outnumbered by fellow classmates who thought the ritual was just dandy and a fun thing in which to participate, whether they were seniors or freshmen. The hazing rituals toward freshman girls were less violent--freshman girls were expected to do whatever a senior girl asked them to do, which usually was something servile such as carrying a senior girl's lunch tray. I refused to participate, mainly because I hated being coerced into anything, a trait that I never outgrew, and I really didn't admire the girls who took their power for granted.

 My father, who had also attended the same high school (but I don't think the haircut hazing was in effect there in the late 1940s and early 1950s), was wise in that he knew the activity could lead to unintended and perhaps even tragic consequences. So when my younger-by-six-years brother was an incoming freshman, my father laid down the law: if my brother wanted to have his hair cut by a bunch of marauding senior boys, fine, but the seniors would have to come to our house to do the deed. And so they did, chasing my brother across our property before holding him down for the haircut. The usual plan was to cut part of the hair and leave some of the hair, creating a mohawk or other lopsided design.

There is always an element of meanness to such activities even when done in a so-called spirit of camaraderie, and some of those hazed are going to be treated more roughly than others. Conversely, if you were so beneath contempt that you weren't included in the hazing, that marked you as a loser, too.

Hazing sends a message of power and powerlessness. That's what bullying does, too, and the effects can be lasting. I still remember the names of boys in my class and a grade or two above me who were bullies. I suspect that they are still blustery and bullying types though I hope they are nicer adults than they were teenagers. I also remember the names of the boys who were often the recipients of the bullying, and I hope that their experiences in the small-minded atmosphere of our school have not affected them unduly as adults. But I bet they still remember those bullies' names, too.

When I first read the story of Mitt Romney's leading a group of prep school boys in cutting the hair of a 'nonconformist' classmate, all those high-school memories returned. I certainly believe that our high-school selves reveal something about the person we are to become, but I also believe that people can change. If the hair-cutting incident was an isolated event, then I would just mark it up to the kind of stupid act anyone could do and later regret. We've all done things we regret. And, I, for one, have not forgotten those actions I've regretted.

Mitt Romney, however, whose classmates remember his teasing another "closeted gay student," yelling "Atta girl" when the kid spoke up in class, remembers nothing of these events that other classmates remember well.

Does it matter?

What matters to me is what the man has become, and there is enough to trouble me in the adult Romney than to be worried unduly by the prep school Romney.

What I do know is that if a couple of the guys whom I remember as bullies in high school were running for office, I sure as hell wouldn't vote for them--yeah, thirty-eight years later, the memories retain a residue of bitterness that would require quite a bit of persuasion to overcome.

Today's Blooms

morning glory

nasturtium bud

Our peas and okra have sprouted in a garden we put in last week, and the herbs, flowers, and vegetables we planted early in the season and last year, in smaller 8 ft. X 8 ft. raised gardens in our backyard, are flourishing, with a few setbacks from some caterpillars we're trying to control with Bt and the old-fashioned way of locating the caterpillars and crushing them. I don't know if the much above average temperatures we've experienced this year have influenced an increase and diversity of garden pests, but I wouldn't be surprised if climate change is affecting our gardening experience. But our flowers are blooming, and I'm looking forward to later-season blooms, too.

Here are a few photos I took this afternoon during a very light rain.

blanket flower

blanket flower

hydrangea

hydrangea

daylily

daylily

johnny jump-up

 

onion

landscape with cat