Distraction #1, the beautiful natural world: How to Keep from being Depressed by Today's News

Fall color in the White Mountains

This morning I got on the Internet as I do every morning to read the latest news. As too often, the news is troubling. I've learned that as his campaign collapses, Donald Trump reveals himself to be a poor loser: he's commanding his followers to watch their local polls for "certain" people who may commit voter fraud. This, despite that in-person voter fraud is practically non-existent. Our voting process seems more likely to be hacked by Russians, who seem to want Donald Trump to win the election.  I also read that the Trump campaign got a cousin of one of the women who has accused Trump of sexual assault to release a statement accusing the woman of lying "just for attention." This is what happens when women speak openly of sexual assault: they are immediately attacked, not infrequently by friends and relatives who refuse to believe the personal experience for any number of reasons. (#WhyWomenDontReport) And it seems that Donald Trump is looking to set up a television network that will likely be an outlet for his many conspiracy theories as well as for the alt-right crowd, led by Steve Bannon and Breitbart.com. 

And that's a short list of the news that threatened to throw shade on my day.

What do I do when crappy news or unhappy circumstances beckon the black dog? Well, here I begin a series of posts on what brings me joy when circumstances don't.

• Looking at the big picture, which is a lot bigger than we once thought

Here in Apache County, Arizona, the Milky Way is still visible, and to do my part in reducing light pollution, I try to keep our outdoor lights off unless we're planning to return home after dark. In July, we set up a telescope and got a good look at the rings of Saturn. But then I turned my binoculars to the Milky Way and was blown away by the millions of stars that are totally invisible in most parts of the country. It turns out that there are even more galaxies in the "observable" universe than we thought: "Hubble Reveals Observable Universe Contains 10 Times More Galaxies Than Previously Thought." Nothing makes one's worries seem more inconsequential than to put them in perspective of a galaxy or a universe. I like to think that there are other worlds out there where sentient inhabitants are doing a better job at being stewards of their worlds and each other than we are.

If the night sky is overcast, the moon too bright, or the lights of the area too bright, one can always go to the NASA website to look at images taken by the Hubble telescope:  https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/multimedia/index.html

• Paying attention to my own backyard

Immersing oneself in the details can also help distract one from all the worries in the world.  While living in Abita Springs, Louisiana, I began paying attention to all the tiny creatures that lived in or visited my yard and gardens. There are worlds almost unknown to us a step or two from our back doors, with dramas enacted every day. I have watched tiny predators stalk their prey, and I have identified insects I did not know existed until I started prowling around my yard with a camera. Our yard here in Arizona has plenty to interest me, too. Birds come to the feeders and the birdbath I created out of a stump and a large, shallow bowl I purchased at a thrift store. Occasionally, a skunk will wander nocturnally through the yard, and deer will jump the fence, leaving hoof prints in the muddy ground or bare bark on trees they have rubbed against. Rabbits burrow nests in our greenhouse and under roots of trees. Pollinators visit the flowers, and I am learning to identify bees and wildflowers here in my Arizona yard. 

• Enjoying the changing seasons 

Yesterday Tom and I drove through the mountains while running errands and took a short detour on a national forest road just to look at the aspens in their fall color. A deer crossed the washboard road ahead of us and into a glen covered in golden aspen leaves. We stopped a little later to take photos of a landscape which will be covered in snow in a couple of months. 

Last weekend we hiked a forest trail where we thought we would have a good chance of hearing elk bugling. We were not disappointed. 

Elk cows follow the large-racked male that we got just a glimpse of through the trees.

Since we moved here in March of 2015, we've taken advantage of the beautiful natural areas, hiking on forest trails, along rivers, or up to the top of cinder cones.  Beautiful wildflowers bloom here in the monsoon season, as a hike along the South Fork of the Little Colorado River last summer demonstrated.

Wild bergamot and goldenrod along the South Fork Trail of the Little Colorado River

Coneflowers along the South Fork Trail of the Little Colorado River

more flowers along the South Fork Trail of the Little Colorado River

Nothing lifts the spirits, I think, than being out in nature on a beautiful day--and research seems to prove it. In one study at Stanford University, "volunteers who walked briefly through a lush, green portion of the Stanford campus were more attentive and happier than volunteers who strolled for the same amount of time near heavy traffic." Other studies have shown that walking in green areas can have a measured neurological and physiological effect on people. 

And those days when the weather is not conducive to a walk in the woods, writing about those walks and looking at the beautiful photos I've taken on those walks are pretty good substitutes.

And yet...I've enjoyed reading this exchange

on James Fallows' blog:"Is there any 'Reasoned' defense of the Atlas Shrugged Guy?"

Hearing both sides of an argument (even though most of the responses have been overwhelmingly on the progressive side) has encouraged me to re-examine my own assumptions about business owners and taxes.

The discussion began on November 5th with this installment: "What if the GOP Loses? 'Atlas Shrugged' vs. 'The Fire Next Time."  James Fallows then posted responses to the 'Atlas Shrugged' business owner, "No Love for the 'Atlas Shrugged' Guy." The 'Atlas Shrugged' business owner re-entered the fray here, "The 'Atlas Shrugged' Guy Pushes Back!" And Fallows provided a wrap-up here, "By Popular Demand: One Last Immersion in the World of the 'Atlas Shrugged' Guy," but then continued the discussion here, "Let's Get Back to the Atlas Shrugged Guy."

Quote for the Day, Ta-Nehisi Coates

"...I can only stop talking about racism, when it ceases to be a significant force in our politics. When the mere act of being white gives Obama's opponent "a home-state advantage nationally," I can't stop. It would be deeply wrong to stop." Ta-Nehisi Coates, "Toward a Politically Correct Conservatism, cont.," posted online at The Atlantic, 20 June 2012.

Will there always be fish in the sea?

....not if there are no small fish for bigger fish to eat,
 not if one industry dominates a fishing culture,
not if politicians reject regulations and refuse to recognize the science that demonstrates the interconnectedness of life in the sea and the consequences of ignoring that interconnectedness.

In her article "A Fish Story: How an Angler and Two Government Bureaucrats May have Saved the Atlantic Ocean," Alison Fairbrother charts the decline of menhaden in the Chesapeake Bay and demonstrates how one tiny fish can have a tremendous impact on recreational fishing, industry, conservation, and politics. Her "fish story" also reminds us how one or two engaged and focused individuals can start a chain of events that could result in remedying careless and unprincipled predation.

Like so many of the creatures we take for granted, menhaden were abundant when European colonists first stepped ashore in the New World. Fairbrother writes that: "early pioneers described [menhaden] as swimming in schools twenty-five miles long or more, packing themselves into bays and estuaries where they came to feed on dense schools of phytoplankton...," and in 1608, John Smith described the menhaden in Chesapeake Bay as "'lying so thick with their heads above the water, as for want of nets we attempted to catch them with a frying pan.'"

I'm envious of those early descriptions of the teaming flora and fauna early explorers described: the millions of bison thundering across the Great Plains; the prairie grasses that grew as high as a horse's belly as far as the eye could see, undulating in the wind like a mighty ocean; the great number of whales that came so close to shore that early pioneers of Nantucket could kill all they needed without going out of sight of land. That abundance is gone forever. Instead, we have fish stories such as Alison Fairbrother's,  in which we learn that "80 percent of the menhaden netted from the Atlantic are the property of a single company" (my emphasis).

In this fish story, the corporation is Omega Protein. Go to the corporation's website, and you can read how the company cares a lot about sustainability, about how the Atlantic menhaden are not overfished, and about how the company is "certified sustainable by Friend of the Sea, an organization dedicated to the preservation of marine resources." You can also read how the company takes those small, unassuming fish and turns them into products for

• animal nutrition ("for the nutritional needs of all animal species"),
• human nutrition (The product here is OmegaPure, which is "a highly refined, long-chain omega-3 fish oil specifically formulated as a food ingredient." The fish are extensively processed to be used as supplements or additives in various foods: dairy products, baked goods, margarines and spreads, etc.)
• plant nutrition (fertilizer)
• industrial applications (rust inhibitors, water repellant, additive to paint)

Wow! Menhaden--the Fish that Lay the Golden Roe!

Only the story doesn't end there....and the story isn't all that golden.

Alison Fairbrother describes how the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), a part-time board of regulators, had been using a seriously flawed formula to determine safe fish stock levels.  She shows how interest groups have manipulated that "science" to achieve the outcomes they want. And she demonstrates the short-sightedness of a computer formula that doesn't take into account all the species that depend upon menhaden for sustainability. Instead,

[T]he agency is guided by an older and more utilitarian doctrine that is commonly characterized as “single-species management,” in which the primary concern is to determine how much of a particular species can be removed from the ocean without undermining that species’s ability to reproduce.

The ASMFC has a complicated formula and computer model that takes into account the amount of fish that Omega captains have caught and are required to record, the number of eggs that menhaden historically spawn, an estimated number of menhaden that are killed by fishermen and predators, an estimate of the current spawning potential of the fish, among other variables.

More importantly, however, ASMFC's computer model doesn't take into account all the other fish that depend upon this little fish to maintain their own healthy numbers--the striped bass, the blue fish, the weakfish, and other fish--and fishing birds, such as the osprey. (In Virginia, where osprey feed heavily on menhaden, "[s]urvival of osprey nestlings in Virginia had fallen to its lowest levels since DDT was first introduced to the area," and that decline has been connected to the osprey's diminished diet of menhaden.)

By 2009, science had revealed that "the number of menhaden swimming in the Atlantic had declined by 88 percent since 1983." Research also indicated that "menhaden had been subject to overfishing in thirty-two of the past fifty-four years."

Of course, economics and politics are entwined in this fish story. Although recreational fishing (all those sport fish depend upon menhaden for survival) has a much higher economic impact on Virginia and Maryland, the Omega Protein corporation donates large amounts of money to politicians in those Atlantic states ("almost $60,000 to the current governor [of Virginia], Bob McDonnell") and thus has some pretty powerful allies.

This great fish story reminds me--I don't know about you--about the importance of the smallest creature in the Great Chain of Being. The hierarchy isn't all that evident, though. We're all interconnected and interdependent in ways we have only begun to understand. Too bad our public policies too often fail to reflect that wisdom.

----------------------
Read the entire story here: "A Fish Story." There are other implications to this story, too, such as why menhaden are processed to create fish food for farm-raised salmon, an activity that's pretty much an ecological disaster.

At the End of the Party

Years ago I hosted a party at my home, and as the sun set and our wine glasses emptied and filled again,  the subject turned to politics. Most of my guests were fellow academics with whom I sympathized politically. What bothered me in thinking afterward of the conversation was the condescending certainty with which some of my colleagues pronounced their ideas as if those who differed from them politically were outside their circle of understanding,  It's a danger we all face: to see the opposition as Other, beyond reason, unknowable, scary. When politicians speak of their opposition as "traitors," "evil," "unpatriotic," reducing everything to an either/or scenario, an "us vs. them" situation, my hackles rise just as they did that evening among people with whom I had much in common. And I think of a poem I wrote after that party. I first titled it "At the End of the Party," but later changed it to "The End of Politics." I'm not sure which title fits best.

The End of Politics

At the end of the party the chuck-will's-widow calls

from the edge of the wood

and over the sibilants of patio murmur

a barred owl hoots out its prey.

These are the certainties, like the changing of seasons

or the winter caw of the crow,

or the haunting melody of the white-throated sparrow

in a forest of tag alder and pine.

Listen, I want to say to the others,

the things that matter are these:

a glass of wine at the end of a day,

friendships that stand against time,

and the hand of a child curled trustingly in yours

like the beating heart of a fawn

waiting in the copse while its mother breathes deeply

the breeze from the zoysia lawn.

The words you speak now

you will certainly betray

in a moment you cannot foresee,

of passion or anger or sudden indifference

with the dark smell of blood on your hands.

Ideas are not certain; they are bathed in a light

of neither sun nor stars nor moon,

but of the flickering flames of lived experience

illuminating the walls of a cave.

Another glass of wine? A cigarette, perhaps?

A kiss on your shoulder or lips?

What will you remember in the dawn of some morning

between sleep and rising

and the onsetting dullness of day?

The words you have spoken with such sincerity

or the sharp scent of rosemary crushed 

between finger and thumb?

--Anita

The Stupid, Stupid Scapegoating of Public Employees

So...evidently Mitt Romney has in this evening's debate of Republican presidential candidates claimed that he would "link pay of public employees to that of private-sector workers." However, as the writers at Think Progress point out, such a claim would actually require RAISING the pay of public employees. According to an article in the Washington Post, Saturday, November 5:

The federal government reported Friday that on average, its employees are underpaid by 26.3 percent compared with similar non-federal jobs, a 'pay gap' that increased by about 2 percentage points over last year while federal salary rates were frozen.

Got that, Mitt Romney, and all the other Republican talkingpoint-bots who like to scapegoat public employees? 

It's all just a diversion tactic--to get people to focus on what's NOT important and to forget what IS: the increasing income gap in this country, the over-weaning power of corporations, and unemployment.

Sick of Politics

In mid-September, my husband and I left for a two-week vacation, with Nova Scotia as our end destination. It was a great trip, in which we saw fossils of ancient trees in the cliffs near Joggins and the Bay of Fundy, watched humpback whales and porpoises up close, drove foggy roads along the Bay of Fundy, hiked in the rain, and viewed the land that my original Acadian ancestor farmed. What would my life be like now, I wondered, if the British hadn't ethnically cleansed the Annapolis Valley and the shores of the Bay of Fundy of French Acadians? What if Abraham Dugas' grandsons had remained instead of finding refuge in the swamps of Louisiana and then, later, the marshes of Anahuac and the Old and Lost Rivers of southeast Texas (where "Dugas" became "Dugat")? What would it be like to be Canadian now instead of American?

During our trip, I tried to stay away from the internet and the nastiness of our political discourse, but then one morning, a Canadian asked us at breakfast a question about our politics, and soon other people at the bed and breakfast were voicing their opinions, especially an ex-patriate from West Texas who had married a Canadian. Our hosts, however, were visibly silent; they were trying to sell their bed and breakfast so that they could spend their winters in Florida and their summers in Nova Scotia, untroubled by testy customers who wanted better views.

I was sick of politics. I just wanted a better view, not from my window but from my heart, a better view of humanity. History was not the place to find it, however. Abraham Dugas had never been compensated for the land confiscated to build a fort at what was then known as Annapolis Royal; his grandchildren were deprived of their cattle, the farmland they had improved, and their homes were burned; his descendants were transported to British colonies where many had to beg and where their daughters were taken away to work in the big houses of Protestants, where their language and their Catholicism were scorned.

Just the politics of kings: the strong taking from the weak. But how is that different from today?

It was the greediness of Wall Street--of banks and CEOs of corporations and financiers and politicians-- that brought our economy and the economy of the world to the brink of disaster, yet corporations continue to profit while laying off workers, politicians continue to cut deals, the banks are bigger, the CEOs who led those bloated financial institutions are not in jail but making more money than ever. So that's not the smoke of burning homes in the distance or of people loaded into ships with only the belongings they can carry, but, really, how different is it?

Mitt Romney can run for the highest office in the land of a democratic republic and tell voters that foreclosures should just be allowed to run their course. So what that people lost their jobs because Wall Street sold toxic derivatives and over-leveraged. So what that those people now can't keep up with their mortgages while looking for other jobs. Let those with money buy up those homes at rock-bottom prices and rent them out.  In other words, let the rich make more money off the losses and grief of the working and middle class. That's Romney's message to the people.

Or how about making federal employees scape goats for the economy? Mitt Romney, whom it is estimated to be worth up to $250 million, shows up at a steel fabrication plant, dressed in jeans and a plaid work shirt,  and tells the workers that government employees are "making a lot more money than we are." I'm married to a government employee, and, with a Ph.d., he still makes less as a government employee than he did working for a private non-profit and less (counting inflation) than he did working for a corporation over ten years ago. I bet you he makes less than some of those working in the steel fabrication plant.

Who does Mitt Romney think he's fooling? This is a man who made his fortune buying sinking corporations, laying off the workers, and re-selling what remained. And he's likely to be the Republican nominee for President of the United States.

What a joke. On us. The middle-class, the working class.

 Our houses are burning, our wealth confiscated, our voices silenced in a sea of political bullshit.

Antidotes for Angst and Despair

For days, weeks even, I have been thinking of trying to address as honestly and straightforwardly as I can why I usually support liberal causes over conservative causes and why I have become increasingly cynical about politics and the possibilities of change in the way we are governed.  I envisioned a series of such exploratory posts, and yesterday I wrote the first one, addressing my changing perspective on religion. And then I lost the entire post because I was using the updated Blogger interface, which evidently doesn't save drafts automatically as the older interface does. Or perhaps the loss of the post was due to some error of my own. Whatever the cause,  nothing I could do resulted in my being able to retrieve the lost essay. So I surrendered to the capriciousness of technology and took a walk instead. Later I recorded some details of that walk with photos and a post that turned out quite differently than I had originally intended.

I have found, however, that experiencing--and recalling--details of the natural world helps me maintain perspective when confronted with political landscapes where alliances are constantly shifting, where people say what they don't believe, don't believe what they say, say they believe what facts and figures can't support, or massage facts and figures to conclude what they wish from them, or just make up stuff and hope that saying it over and over will convince people of its veracity. (Unfortunately, research shows that this last strategy works.)

So a day when I get online and read that even a career Republican Congressional staffer thinks that the Republican party is now "full of lunatics" or that "the average voter spends only 5 minutes thinking about for whom to vote for Congress," I know that's a day I need to leave despair at the keyboard and get outside.

A camera can be distracting if I am constantly snapping photos so that the initial experience is distanced and delayed to later viewing. But having a camera in hand can also help me to focus on sights I might otherwise overlook: the mushroom covered in tiny brown fibers that look like furry hair, the fly with red eyes perched on an autumn-blooming flower, the photography-worthy gate to one's neighbor's yard, slender green limbs heavy with purple beauty berry, a dragonfly posing patiently on a blue-black salvia bloom. Just small moments of awe and beauty can help restore my equilibrium.

However, I'm afraid that all my antidotes to angst and despair--immersing myself in the natural world, gardening, crafting things, writing--have limited efficacy and must be administered frequently. The next news cycle requires another dose.

 For an enlarged view of the dragonfly I photographed today on my patio, click on the photo.

Quotes for the Week (Lest We Forget)

Dick Cheney
Dick Cheney is trying to polish his image as he gets oh-so-gently interviewed on television about his new book. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, has this to say about Dick Cheney:

• "He wanted desperately to be president of the United States... he knew the Texas governor was not steeped in anything but baseball, so he knew he was going to be president and I think he got his dream. He was president for all practical purposes for the first term of the Bush administration."
  
  
• "He's developed an angst and almost a protective cover, and now he fears being tried as a war criminal so he uses such terminology as 'exploding heads all over Washington' because that's the way someone who's decided he's not going to be prosecuted acts: boldly, let's get out in front of everybody, let's act like we are not concerned and so forth when in fact they are covering up their own fear that somebody will Pinochet him." Both quotes quoted by Elspeth Reeve for The Atlantic Wire, Powell Aide: Cheney was President 'For All Practical Purposes'," posted 30 Aug. 2011.

Dahlia Lithwick reminds us that "until there are legal consequences for those who order or engage in torture, we will only be pretending. Cheney is the beneficiary of that artifice." And that's the tragedy:

Most of us do not want warrantless surveillance, secret prisons, or war against every dictator who looks at us funny. We may be bloodthirsty, but we aren't morons. On his most combative and truly lawless positions, Cheney still stands largely alone.

The tragedy is that it doesn't matter if we are all Cheneyites now. That there is even one Cheney is enough. He understands and benefits from the fact that the law is still all on his side; that there is only heated rhetoric on ours. As John Adams famously put it, the United States was intended to be a government of laws, not of men. Dick Cheney is living proof that if we are not brave enough to enforce our laws, we will forever be at the mercy of a handful of men.

And Conor Friedersdorf reminds us why Americans loathe Cheney (except those, perhaps, who frequented the cocktail circuit with him in Washington, D.C.; amazing how close proximity to power blunts the moral nerve endings--my observation, not Friedersdorf's). Friedersdorf's blog post titled "Remembering Why Americans Loathe Dick Cheney" is based on the investigative reporting and writing of several people, including Wil S. Hylton, Barton Gellman, Jane Mayer, Charlie Savage, and Jack Balkin. Friedersdorf ends his numerical march down memory lane with this gem:

Dick Cheney was a self-aggrandizing criminal who used his knowledge as a Washington insider to subvert both informed public debate about matters of war and peace and to manipulate presidential decisionmaking, sometimes in ways that angered even George W. Bush.

After his early years of public service, he capitalized on connections he made while being paid by taxpayers to earn tens of millions of dollars presiding over Halliburton. While there, he did business with corrupt Arab autocrats, including some in countries that were enemies of the United States. Upon returning to government, he advanced a theory of the executive that is at odds with the intentions of the founders, successfully encouraged the federal government to illegally spy on innocent Americans, passed on to the public false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and became directly complicit in a regime of torture for which he should be in jail. Thus his unpopularity circa 2008, when he left office.

Good riddance.

[my emphasis]

Protecting the Rich and Powerful

This morning, I read on Salon's website an article titled "The Rich Aren't Like You and Me," by Michael Winship. Winship describes how the rich are getting richer and richer and the poor, poorer and poorer. CEO pay and compensation continues to grow while workers' salaries stagnate. Of 438 companies analyzed:

[a]t 158 of the companies, more was paid to those in charge than was shelled out for outside audit fees. And 32 of them paid more in top salaries than they paid in corporate income taxes. The pay of 2591 executives was up 13.9 percent in 2010. Total, before taxes: $14.3 billion, almost equal to the GDP of Tajikistan, population: more than seven million.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (See also, here) was passed in 2010, in response to the financial crisis, but interested parties have been chipping away at its regulatory power. One of the requirements of the Dodd-Frank would have made transparent the difference between CEO compensation and worker compensation of publicly traded companies: "The Dodd-Frank Act requires publicly traded companies to disclose the median annual total compensation of all employees of the company, the annual total compensation of the CEO, and the ratio comparing those two numbers."

Some folks, however, think that gathering this information is just "too burdensome" for companies and that the money spent gathering that information would best be spent on hiring workers. (Really, how difficult would it be for a company to publish that information in its annual report?) So Rep. Nan Hayworth (R-NY) has sponsored a bill--which has passed in the Committee on Financial Services--to do away with this "burdensome" requirement. Companies, of course, have a vested interest in not making this kind of information easily available to the public--and their own workers. Nan Hayworth also has a vested interest. As Michael Winship points out, Nan Hayworth's official biography

cites 'reducing regulatory burdens on businesses' as one of her top priorities. Among her leading 2010 campaign contributors: leveraged buyout specialists Vestar Capital Partners, distressed debt investors Elliott Management and financial services giant Credit Suisse. Not to mention the anti-taxation Club for Growth.

Businesses, of course, are making profits once again in our stressed economy; workers, however, are not seeing their pay rise accordingly.

So I was curious to see who co-sponsored this bill to lift such a "burdensome" requirement, as outlined in H.R. 1062: Burdensome Data Collection Relief Act. Here are the names: Judy Biggert (R-IL), Francisco Canseco (R-TX), Bob Dold (R-IL), Scott Garrett (R-NJ), Michael Grimm (R-NY), Peter King (R-NY), Bill Posey (R-FL).

As Peter Whoriskey reports in his article in the Washington Post, "Business Group: Public Companies Shouldn't have to Compare CEO and Worker Pay":

The committee vote was largely along partisan lines: Twenty-nine Republicans and four Democrats supported repeal; 21 Democrats opposed it.

As income disparity grows in this country, it's interesting to see just who forms alliances to hide that disparity and to protect the rich.

And so it goes.

Additional information:
members of the Committee on Financial Services

Register opposition or support: popvox

Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

The Awl has an interesting post on how Michele Bachman's supporters will use negative criticism to inflame her base--those nasty lefty bloggers, you know--much as Sarah Palin has used negative criticism to make the case that her critics are mean and unfair. But what really caught my attention was the discussion of how local Minnesotans who have been following Bachman's career and catching her out on lies and craziness don't get the credit for their work. Instead, big-name writers such as Matt Taibbi, of Rolling Stone, grab information from those local sites and often don't credit the source. Shame on Rolling Stone! A second criticism of writers of large media publications  is the tendency to condescend to folks who live in those towns from which Bachman and Palin hail: Stillwater, Minnesota; Wasilla, Alaska. It's easy to jet into a place, sniff out some local color, and draw quick conclusions that don't stand up in the light of real analysis--or conclusions that, while not untrue, are simplistic. This is another reason folks hate the media.

Anyway, giving credit where credit is due:  Karl Bremer of Stillwater, Minnesota, has been following Michele Bachman's career from a front-row seat. So check out his blog: Ripple in Stillwater. Also, check out these other sources that did not receive credit for information used by Matt Taibbi in writing for Rolling Stone: Minneapolis City Pages and The Dump Bachman Blog.

The Proliferation of Dubious Information

I guess that I was lucky in that when the Internet began to blossom, I was teaching at a university. Those born in the Internet Age won't understand this, but when one of my students described in a senior research paper in the late 1980s the possibilities of hyper-links, I was amazed. In 1994, my husband and I noted that when we searched the World Wide Web, we often found links that led to nowhere, to internet parking spaces for future development. By 1997, when I was teaching at a university in Georgia, those parking spaces had become shopping malls. I spent the summer finding information on the web that I could incorporate in my freshman English classes, as part of the university's mandate to help our students become Internet savvy. Every semester, I designed a workshop to demonstrate to my students the need to view their internet sources with a critical eye. We looked at websites that were parodies of official government web sites. We looked at websites with a political agenda; we looked at websites that seemed authoritative yet which provided no proof to support their authority. In educating my students, I was educating myself.

And so I look with a jaundiced eye at what I read online. When I write, I try to support any facts or figures or quotes with a trusted source. This morning, I experienced another lesson in the importance of this practice. I was looking for statements that politicians had said publicly about the unemployed. I remembered reading in the news some rather negative statements that Speaker of the House John Boehner had made about the unemployed in the government battle to extend or not to extend unemployment benefits during the worst economic slump since the 1930s. To find those quotes, I used Google's search engine, and I came across a blog with a very disturbing quote attributed to Boehner--but the language of the quote made me pause. Can this be for real? I wondered.

And so I "Googled" a selection from the quote, and lots of links to blogs appeared in which the quote was reproduced. The writer of one blog, however, did mention that the quote was from an interview Matt Taibbi, of Rolling Stone, did with John Boehner, but the author of the blog did not include a link to the interview. Now all the warning sirens were going off in my head. Blogs are often useful sources of information, but accurate blog writers are going to include references or links to news sources to back up their facts and figures.

Of course, some blog authors are journalists who do their own research and who interview their sources. And sometimes, news worthy information may be overlooked by national news outlets, for any number of reasons. And perhaps they've just buried the information in the inside pages. But this is my rule of thumb:

• If a search brings up a long list of blog sources, and particularly blog sources with a political bent or agenda, then, whether or not I agree with that political agenda, I look for additional information from news sources. (If the blogs provide links to such a source, then those blogs have made my search easier and have helped establish their own credibility.)

In this case, I went looking for the purported interview that Matt Taibbi did with John Boehner, and I came across Taibbi's own blog post about this purported interview: It never happened. In a blog post titled "I Did Not Interview John Boehner,", Taibbi writes:

There is a story flying around the internet that purports to contain an excerpt from an interview that I did with John Boehner. This interview is a hoax, and neither I nor Rolling Stone had anything to do with it. There are some seriously bored people out there... if people are going to make up a fantasy activity for me in the future, please, make it a foot massage from Jessica Gomes, not face time with John Boehner.

And, no, I won't reproduce the dubious quote here. But if you want to read what Matt Taibbi actually did write about John Boehner, you can read his article here: "The Crying Shame of John Boehner," in Rolling Stone, 5 January 2011.

It takes a lot of time to make sure that what one is reading can be trusted. Most people don't have that time. But, hey, I'm unemployed and over fifty. What better use can I find for my time? Now I'm going to go plant a garden.

A Right Wing Terrorist A "Great American"?

Here's a thought: If someone stood up in a town-hall meeting and said he was proud to be a left-wing terrorist, what do you think would be the audience's response and the response of mouth-frothing radio talk show hosts?

Well, in Redding, California (that's northern California, far away from the "crazy" Southerners Kevin Drum excoriated in a blog a couple of weeks ago and to which I responded), a citizen stood in such a meeting and said he was proud to be a right-wing terrorist. Instead of repudiating the language and the violence inherent in it, the crowd cheered him. And the Republican congressman present praised him:

“Amen, God bless you,” [Republican Congressman Wally] Herger said with a broad smile. “There is a great American.” (Paul Boerger, "Web extra: Congressman Herger calls Obama plan 'threat to democracy'," Mt. Shasta Area Newspapers, posted Friday, August 21, 2009.)

Ummmm.... Timothy McVeigh was a "right-wing terrorist." Is he a "Great American"? My God, what is happening in our country where people can make these claims and be cheered?

Phil Gingrey Encourages Gun-totin'

When Chris Matthews asked Phil Gingrey (R-GA) if he believed that people should bring guns to town hall meetings where health care is being discussed, Gingrey replied, "I would think that they should exercise their rights under the 2nd Amendment." Gingrey essentially is encouraging people to take guns to town meetings, to meetings where folks have already been worked up into hysterical fear by lying politicians and media faces. Folks who carry guns to those meetings didn't just casually strap on their weapons when they dressed in the morning; they deliberately holstered-up when they prepared to attend a meeting in which they disagreed with the speaker. They are visually communicating the idea that if the speaker says something they don't like, they have force on their side: a deadly weapon. Even if they don't intend to use that weapon, their message is clear. And it's clear to those who might be so fearful or so mentally unstable that they indeed might use deadly force.

People like Phil Gingrey are helping to establish an atmosphere of intimidation and potential violence in public discourse. In a country where four presidents and several popular leaders have been assassinated (and others have faced would-be assassins), it seems insane to me that people are encouraging gun-toting to political rallies. That Gingrey understands the potential violence is revealed in his own words when he laughs and says he has nothing to fear because he gets standing ovations at his town hall meetings:

I've already had five town hall meetings. I have six more planned. I don't plan on wearing a bullet proof vest. In fact, I usually get standing ovations when I come into these meetings, so I have no fear.

So my question for Phil Gingrey is this: If you didn't get standing ovations at your town hall meetings and if you were, instead, faced with people shouting angrily at you, would you then fear for your life if you saw those same folks toting guns?

Rachel Maddow addressed the issue of gun-toting at political events in an with interview Joseph Petro, who served for twenty-three years as a special agent and who authored the book, Standing Next to History: An Agent's Life Inside the Secret Service. She asked Petro how the Secret Service deals with ordinary citizens, not police or security officers, who show up armed at a political rally where the president is present. She referred to an AP report about how a dozen such armed folk showed up at a recent event with President Barack Obama. "Well, that's not something the Secret Service often encounters," Petro responded. He went on to say the following:

But I think this is less a Secret Service issue and more an issue for all of us. [What] you said a few days ago that the possibility of American politics turning to violence or to terrorism at the fringes is not all that theoretical. I would argue that the vitriolic political rhetoric we're hearing, some from seemingly responsible people, is stimulating a lot of these foolish stunts, and they're not very helpful. And I think they're dangerous, actually. And I think they're dangerous for two reasons. One is: it's hard enough to protect the president. The Secret Service and the local police are being distracted from that duty, to keep our president safe. And I think the second reason may be even more serious, is the fact that it could incite or encourage one of those individuals at the fringe that you mention from doing something really dangerous and perhaps violent against the president or some other person .... Maybe the politicians should look at lowering some of the rhetoric to try to create a more positive atmosphere. (Joseph Petro, Rachel Maddow Show)

Angry mobs, inflammatory political atmosphere, and gun-toting citizens....even at open events with President Barack Obama. If anything happens to my president, people like Phil Gingrey will have a lot to answer for.

See Also:

David Sirota, "What it Means to Wear a Gun in Public," posted in Salon, 22 Aug 2009.

The Corruption of Power

I've been dropping in on Nico Pitney's blog on Huffington Post for updates on what's happening in Iran. CNN is another news source. Pitney reports news sent him from individuals in Iran as well as from traditional news sources. A couple of items caught by attention as I scanned the blog this morning. The first one was about a letter reported to have been signed by some 40 members of the Assembly of Experts. In this letter, the clerics call for an annulment of the presidential election results and also accuse Supreme Leader Ali Khamenai of working to have his son succeed him as Supreme Leader. According to the letter, Khamenai has lung cancer. Ah, how those in power want to hold onto that power, even in death. The second item that caught my attention was the news from the Wall Street Journal that European technology companies Nokia and Siemens provided the Iranian government "one of the world's most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale." Ah, how those in power want even more power. The seduction of power is not limited to Iran and other authoritarian governments.

Little Stupid Things

Reading the blogs (and the links provided) today, I smirked at the little stupid things that pass as "serious thinking" and "real critiques" these days:

• Mark Krikorian over at National Review gripes about how Sonia Sotomayor (So-toe-my-YORE) pronounces her name; he thinks she and the rest of us should conform to the English pronunciation, putting the emphasis on the first syllable. An article in The New York Times relates Sotomayor's own pride in her name:

  John W. Fried, Sotomayor's first supervisor in the Manhattan prosecutor's office, said she gently corrected him when he mispronounced her name so that it sounded more anglicized.

  
  Well, hell. I grew up with this story in my own rather conservative family: When my father was in the Army in the early 1950s, he insisted that people pronounce the family name the French way, with a silent final "t" (Dugat= "Du-gah"--or with a Texas accent, "Doo-Gaahw"). If someone said "DU-gaT," my father refused to answer, even at roll call. All those Cajuns from south Louisiana (Thibodeaux, Boudreaux, Arceneaux, Benoit, and such) would let the Army butcher their names, but not my dad, descended from Cajuns who moved into Southeast Texas in the early 1800s. This story was a favorite in the family. We still pronounce our surname the Acadian way. I just don't get this far-right obsession with Anglicizing everyone's name.
  
  
• An increasing number of conservatives raise the possibility of Sonia Sotomayor being unduly influenced by her gender and ethnicity. Would they say that about a white, Anglo male? Matthew Yglesias notes with great irony the minority members of the Senate Judiciary Committee--white males, every one. No gender or racial bias there, of course.

Oh, so many, many more little stupid things, but I haven't the heart to list them. Oh, and this morning, I turned on Good Morning America (because I was looking for a local weather report) and saw that Diane Sawyer had dueling guests: James Carville (in the studio) and Ann Coulter (remote). I didn't even turn on the sound; I can't stand to listen to either of these people. Another reason not to watch morning television "news" magazines: no serious news going on here, just a lot of drama.