Veterans' Day 2012

What follows is a re-post of something I originally put up in June 2008. Since 2009, I have posted it every Veterans' Day. I regard it as an at least useful if not necessary counterpoint to the annual hyped praise of all things veteran, which too easily slides over into praise of all things military. A good example of the hype this year was nominal liberal Rachel Maddow going on about veterans volunteering to help out in New York in the wake of Sandy in a way that clearly suggested that veterans doing it was somehow more noble, more praiseworthy, than all the other people doing the same damn things. Which it isn't.

The first paragraph below was added in 2009. The rest of the post is the original text as first appeared in June 2008.

November 11 has become so well-known as Veterans' Day that not many people remember that it was originally called Armistice Day. It was intended to commemorate those who died in World War I by an observation of the end of the war, which ended, at least on the Western front, on "the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month." But after World War II, the US changed its day to Veterans' Day and over time it's become not a commemoration of those who have died in war but a celebration of anyone who's ever been in the military. It has slid from a commemoration of the dead and of peace to a promotion of militarism, to the "nobility of sacrifice" of "true" - and apparently the only true, as they are given due unavailable to the rest of us - "patriots."

I've tried various ways to start this, wanting to make sure that I say what I mean and only what I mean. But I've come to realize that there is no way that will not be misunderstood, either accidentally or deliberately, by some. So I gave up trying to do anything other than say it outright.

I am deeply disturbed by the increasing tendency among "progressives" to adulate all things military, and particularly disturbed by the practice of referring to soldiers routinely as "our heroes" or some similar formulation. Let me be clear here: Soldiers are not "heroes." A "hero" is by definition someone who is in some way extraordinary, remarkable, worthy of emulation. It is at best a risky business to define someone as "extraordinary" simply by virtue of wearing a uniform and in fact it is potentially dangerous as it makes it too easy to slip into the militaristic attitude that what soldiers do goes beyond "necessary evil" or just necessary, beyond even honorable, to admirable, to something to celebrate, an attitude that makes it all to easy to promote additional enlistments, additional weapons, and even additional wars.

The root of this, I'm convinced, is that after years of the constant drumbeat from the right that those on the left are "soft" on "national security," that we aren't "tough enough," not ready enough to "do what's necessary" to "protect our way of life," we increasingly have decided to, if you will, fight on those terms; that is, we have absorbed the idea that we have to prove ourselves on "security" issues by proving that we're "tough."

Our means of doing this, a means that first appeared during the Gulf War, was to declare loudly that "We support the troops!" That was our way into the national security debate, a way to (supposedly) oppose the war while, we declared, supporting the men and women sent to fight it. We would prove that we were as committed to the military and national security as the right, just, well, in a sorta different way.

One less important but still revealing example came on Monday during Jon Stewart's interview with Senator Jim Webb. Most of that interview was a discussion about Webb's bill to expand veteran educational benefits, under which, in return for three years in the military, soldiers would receive four years' tuition at their best state college plus the cost of books, plus a monthly stipend. At one point, when Webb said that the least we can do for our soldiers is give them the chance for "a first-class future," the audience burst into loud applause.

And I thought then, as I have before when this bill was being discussed, would there be any chance, any chance at all, of that same sort of reaction if the same proposal was made on behalf of any other group? What if someone proposed paying for four years of college for, say, firefighters? Or cops? How about volunteers in VISTA (now AmeriCorps VISTA)? Or the Peace Corps? The latter two provide some educational benefits for those who put in their time, but nothing vaguely approaching four fully-paid years of college.

What about publicly-funded continuing education for doctors and nurses? Such continuing education is not only a good idea for health care professionals, it's often a requirement for maintaining their licenses to practice. And certainly having doctors and nurses who are up to date on the best knowledge and practice is beneficial to the public. So why not have public financing of that continuing education?

When it comes down to it, why not have public education, tuition-free, taxpayer-supported public education, right up through four years of college for anyone who can show themselves capable of meeting the educational standards for a college degree? Can you seriously imagine a studio audience bursting into spontaneous, enthusiastic applause for someone seriously proposing such an idea?

Why only soldiers? What does it say about us that the idea of paying soldiers' way through college gets ovations while the idea of anyone else getting the same benefit gets at best quizzical stares if not overt sneering rejections? It says that we regard the work of soldiering as inherently more important, inherently more deserving of praise and reward, than the work of others - and the lives of soldiers as inherently more valuable than the lives of the rest of us. That is the attitude we are buying into.

But if it was only things like veterans' benefits, it might not seem particularly important. I say that despite the fact that the amount of money involved in such benefits is not trivial and Webb's argument that his bill just provides the equivalent of educational benefits given to veterans of World War II is quite misleading: For one thing, many of those soldiers had been drafted "for the duration," so it wasn't automatically a matter of three years and out. For another, the avowed purpose of those World War II benefits was to make up for what those soldiers had lost in regard to their civilian careers as compared to those who had not been in the military. That is, they were to insure that soldiers did not wind up being penalized for having been soldiers. They were not intended to give soldiers a leg up over others (or "a first class future") and they most definitely were not presented as being a reward for military service. But that's what they have become over the years and that's how Webb's bill treats them.

I also want to make abundantly clear in case it's not or is willfully ignored that the benefits being questioned here do not include such as medical care, rehabilitation, and counseling for vets wounded either physically or psychologically. But, yes, veterans benefits are too generous to the extent that they become a reward for being in the military. So I am against Webb's bill and I don't give a damn whether it will affect retention rates or not. I am opposed to it so long as soldiers get singled out for an opportunity for higher education that is becoming increasingly financially impossible for many people.

Even so, again, if that's all there was to it, it might not seem like a great big huge deal. But that's not all there is to it, not when we are trying to lay claim to national security chops by out troop-supporting the right, insisting that we're the ones who really support the troops, we're the ones who really support their brave courageous efforts and we prove it by undaunted adulation, blandly treating, with no hint of hesitation, the phrase "have a lot of courage" and the word "soldier" as synonymous.

So we were the ones who loudly decried the lack of body armor and the lack of reinforced plating on military vehicles, accusing the right of "not supporting the troops" as much as we do because of that failure. But as Mark Twain pointed out in "The War Prayer,"

[i]f you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

In war, in combat, as long as the soldiers are there, there is an unavoidable trade-off: The more you wish for them to remain safe, the more you are wishing for them to kill others. That is what safety in combat means. The more you wish for them to return safely, the more you are wishing for Iraqis not to. The more you wish life for them, the more you are wishing death for others. The more you wish that American mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, sisters, brothers, daughters, sons, don't suffer the loss of a family member, the more you are wishing that Iraqi mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, sisters, brothers, daughters, sons, do.

So when we express "support for the troops" by demanding we "give them the equipment to do the job" and "then come home safely" rather than simply and solely saying "get them the hell out," we are offering a tacit - and sometimes not so tacit - endorsement of the killing. For the sake of the blessing of safety and life for our soldiers, we are calling down the curse of risk and death on Iraqis. When we declare support in terms of equipment rather than withdrawal, that is what we are endorsing. In war, there is no other way.

Undoubtedly, there are those who are prepared to declare American lives are worth more than Iraqi lives. I am not among them.

The emotional embrace of "our heroes" as some sort of disembodied ideal has policy implications beyond the immediate ones. Within that embrace, and the effects can already be seen in various interviews and commentaries, it becomes easy to absorb, absorb so deeply that one is unaware of it, the idea that a veteran's take on the Iraq war - and by extension, all things military - is inherently more valuable than that of others not by virtue of knowledge or logic or informed comment but simply by virtue of being a veteran. We regarded it (correctly) as a scandal when media outlets used retired generals who were actually Pentagon-trained PR flacks as "experts" on military and foreign policy questions in the runup to the Iraq War - but an overlooked point is that the reason retired generals were so prominent in that number was that their status as military people gave them added credibility in the eyes of many viewers and listeners. In our pursuit of "support the troops," we have fallen prey to that same attitude, one that regards the statements of Iraq War veterans as more valuable, more telling, than those of non-veterans. It even has become fairly common to hear dismissive references to those who "never saw combat." At first, that was a legitimate argument, directed as it was against chickenhawks, those rightwingers who were eager for fights, ready for wars, provided they did not have to take part in them. But increasingly it has been used as an all-purpose putdown, even against those on the left who have criticized soldiers - as, I imagine, it would be directed against me (a non-veteran and a Vietnam-era draft resister) were my voice loud enough to attract the attention.

But the real danger is that as the attitude persists, it distorts our way of thinking, drops a magnet on our moral compass. In a bizarre mirror image of the fanatical right, we refuse to blame soldiers who commit atrocities, or, more exactly, we refuse to acknowledge them. We refuse to blame those who shoot civilians even when the attacks are clearly acts of vengeance; we downplay the war crimes and the routine cruelties; we make excuses for those who shoot the wounded or torture prisoners; even when official Pentagon reports casually mention how a US soldier summarily executed a wounded fighter and shot another wounded, unresisting fighter twice in the back, we pay little notice - and if we do, it's usually to brush off complaints with that all-purpose "you've never been in combat" defense. "These things happen in war," we say.

Yes, they do. And "our heroes" are doing them. Which is, even as the deniers seem incapable of recognizing it, the point. Just as the right tries to blame the individuals and exonerate the hierarchy, we want to blame the hierarchy and exonerate the individuals, to remove all their responsibility for their own actions. That is an idea we were supposed to have rejected nearly 60 years ago; apparently, we haven't.

Soldiers are not heroes. They can be heroes, they can act heroically, they can do heroic things - but the act of putting on a uniform and agreeing to put your conscience in a lockbox for the next so many years does not make your life more important than others, it does not make your opinions and insights more worthy of respect than others, it does not exempt you from moral judgment. It does not make you a hero.

And we should not fall prey to hero-worship.

Left Side of the Aisle #81 - Part 6

Sandy and global warming

So why should I indulge myself by spilling my memories all over you? I justify it by referring to the question that has been raised by some as to if there is a connection between global warming and Sandy.

Don't be idiot: Of course there is.

Now, no, it's true we can't as scientific fact say that global warming aka climate changed "caused" Sandy. In point of fact, global warming never "causes" any storm, local atmospheric conditions do. Still, the question is, could there have been a Sandy even without any global warming. Yes, yes, of course it's hypothetically possible. But to question a link between global warming and storms like Sandy, to say "can't prove one, can't claim any," is exactly - and I mean precisely - like those who tried to deny a link between cigarette smoking and disease on the grounds that you couldn't prove that a particular individual case of cancer was caused by smoking.

But to deny that link is nonsense as everyone now agrees. There is a clear statistical relationship between smoking and cancer, heart disease, and emphysema and if you smoke you are more likely to get at least one of those and the longer and the more you smoke the more likely that is.

So can we prove that global warming "caused" Sandy? No. But we can say this: Global warming makes storms like Sandy a hell of a lot more likely to happen.

We can say that because we know that a warming climate puts more energy into storms and yes, the climate is warming:

The first graph shows the temperature records produced over the last 30-plus years from five different sources. There are some minor variations, as you can see, but they all show a dramatic increase; they all tell the same story.

And just to deal in advance with anyone who says "Who are these people," I'll tell you. "GISS" is the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. It's part of NASA. "NCDC" is the National Climatic Data Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. "CRU" is the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK. "RSS" is Remote Sensing Systems, a private corporation in Santa Rosa, California, that gathers satellite data. And "UAH" is the Global Hydrology and Climate Center at the University of Alabama - Huntsville.

So we have two government agencies, two universities (one of them in the UK), and a private corporation, all saying the same thing.

Want more? The second graph includes three of the same sources plus the Berkeley Group. It covers a wider range of time, but you can still see the clear upward trend, especially in the past few decades. Interestingly, the Berkeley Group was established because its founder didn't believe the results of the other agencies and set out to find the "real" figures. But instead of challenging the previous work, the group wound up confirming it.

So yes, the climate is warming.

And we know, to get back to the point, that a warming climate puts more energy into storms, including hurricanes. They will have more rain and stronger winds, which will pushing more of a storm surge. That storm surge is doubly enhanced because as the oceans warm, they expand, so sea levels are rising - so the higher surge is riding on a higher sea level.

Put simply, we know that climate change makes storms like Sandy more likely to happen and when they do, they are more likely to be more severe.

The blunt fact is, the increase in extreme weather we’ve seen over the past few years is exactly what we’d expect to see as a result of global warming and exactly what the models predict. Remember, it’s not just Sandy: The US is on track for 2012 to be the hottest year in the continental US ever recorded in weather records, which go back more than a century. In fact, in August a nuclear power plant in Connecticut had to be shut dowen for over two weeks because the water it drew from Long Island sound was too warm to be used to cool the reactor.

We have also seen one of the worst droughts in over 50 years and one of the worst years for wildfires ever, while other parts of the country were unusually wet.

Last year, when Hurricane Irene hit the United States, meteorologists called it “unprecedented.” It was part of a year in which the United States broke a record for the most billion dollar weather disasters in one year: There were fourteen, with damage totaling $47 billion. Sandy, with damage estimates of $50 billion, by itself has already outpaced that figure.

And it's not just us: Worldwide, the decade 2001-10 was the warmest on record. It beat the record set by the '90s, which beat the record set by the '80s. Worldwide, the years 2010 and 2005 are tied for the warmest ever.

So bottom line: Does Sandy "prove" global warming? No. No single case can. But it is evidence of global warming, is in in keeping with predictions of global warming, does it show the predicted effects of global warming? Yes!

So is denying global warming, is denying a connection between storms like Sandy and global warming, the same as denying a connection between smoking and disease? Yes!

Which also means, and this is the sad truth it's time to face, it's no longer possible to "avoid" or "head off" the effects of global warming. It is no longer possible to "prevent" global warming and the damage it will cause. The damage is happening; the damage will happen. It will get worse. It's too late to prevent it. The best we can do now is limit the damage and keep it from getting even worse than it already will.

Sources:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/11/06/1145021/yes-climate-change-contributed-to-sandy/
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/conn-nuclear-plant-unit-reopens-cooler-water
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-rt-us-climate-temperaturesbre8a5100-20121106,0,206844.story

Left Side of the Aisle #81 - Part 5

Sandy: memories of home

The rest of the show is going to be a little more personal than I usually get. I was away for a week at a conference, so last week's show, number 80, was recorded before I went away. So Sandy happened while I was gone, so I couldn't talk about it then. So I'm going to talk about it now.

For my wife and me, Sandy proved to be a hassle but little more. We were sort of stranded for two days, unable to get home, but were otherwise okay. We got home two days late and rather lighter in the wallet but otherwise unscathed. There was no damage to speak of here, a couple of branches down, a neighbor lost a little siding off their house, the power was out but only for a few hours. We lucked out again.

Other places didn't. After Sandy raked across the Caribbean and went up the east coast, the big news of course, if only because it was what was unusual, was the damage to the New York metropolitan area. I have family in down in New Jersey. Some of them reported they had flooding in their houses and some lost vehicles in the flood. My brother, who lives in north Jersey, was without power for over a week. You know about the flooding, the 14-foot storm surge that hit lower Manhattan. You probably heard about how the storm caused fire in the Breezy Point section of Queens and how the wind whipped that fire through the neighborhood and the entire neighborhood burned to the ground. You know about the millions without power or gasoline or heat. You heard about the people stranded, some of them running short of food. People on Staten Island were hit that way.

And you may have heard about how that was followed up with a blizzard a few days later, with areas getting three to six inches of snow.

But part of the devastation of Sandy - and with over 100 people dead and estimates of damage at $50 billion, devastation does seem to be the word - part of the devastation struck me in personal, a more visceral if you will, way. I grew up on Jersey shore. I was born there. I lived a long time there. The Jersey shore was home - in a lot of ways, it still feels like home: It's the place where my memories lie. Seeing some of the coverage was hard.

This is Ocean Grove, New Jersey:



I've walked the length of that boardwalk. I know exactly where those houses are. I know how far it is from there to the nearest frozen custard stand.

This bridge, this is Mantaloking:



I've been over that bridge. It was a very pretty bridge. Mantaloking, which you see there, lies on a long barrier beach that's separated from the mainland by an inlet. That bridge went over that inlet, linking Mantaloking to the mainland.

A little further down that barrier beach, the family of a friend in college had a summer cottage in Ortley Beach. We used to cruise this section of Route 35:



We were just, like John Cougar said, suckin' on chili dogs and shooting the summer breeze. It was somewhere around here, a little north of here I think, where we were stopped by a local cop because we had long hair and were essentially told to get out of town. It was all part of the Great Ortley Beach Massacree, which if anyone is interested in some old guy's memories, I'll tell you about sometime.

Then there was Seaside Heights. Come summer, this was the second summer home even for a lot of us who lived at the shore. There were boardwalks and rides and games all along the shore, but unless you wanted to go all the way to Wildwood, Seaside Heights was the big one. If you really wanted to drown yourself in cotton candy and candy apples, if you wanted to be surrounded by the blare of boom boxes and the glare of flashing yellow and red neon lights, if you wanted to hear and the clickety noise of game wheels and the whoosh of tilt-a-whirls, this is where you went. And this is it now.



It's estimated that 90% of structures in Seaside Heights are either destroyed or damaged, some of the latter beyond repair. And I have to add that what you see in the middle background is this:



I've ridden on that roller coaster. But the pier that it sat on is now gone.

But the picture that I think got me the most was this one:



That is the main street of Sea Bright, New Jersey. I have driven on that street more times than I can remember. When I took my wife down to the shore because she wanted to see where I grew up, this is one of the places I took her. Sea Bright is easy to find on a map; it's where Sandy Hook joins the mainland. It's a thin strip of land between the ocean and an inlet that opens into two rivers.

In this picture, you're looking north. Just a little further up, just beyond frame of the picture, is a bridge that goes over that inlet, while the street that you're on, Ocean Avenue, continues on toward Sandy Hook.

If you go past that bridge, a little ways up on the right is a sea wall - a big stone and concrete structure about twelve to fifteen feet high. On other side, there is ocean. There is no beach, it's all washed away. One of the things to do is if we had a good nor'easter was go to Sea Bright and watch the waves wash over sea wall and onto the road.

And where there isn't sea wall, along that strip and to the right and the south of where you are in the picture, where there is beach, there are beach clubs.

So I knew Sea Bright was in trouble. That sand from those beach clubs is no longer on the beach.



The woman in picture - who by the way is the mayor of Sea Bright - is not walking on sand dunes. She is walking down Ocean Avenue. The beach from Sea Bright has been moved into the middle of town.

I show this - I started to say not out of nostalgia, but suppose it is to some degree. The real purpose, though, is that I wanted to say a kind of RIP for the home of my memories.

Someone wrote just the other day that the Jersey shore is not just a physical location, not just a resort area. The Jersey shore is a brand, it's a lifestyle, it's a way of thinking, a way of being. Which by the way has absolutely nothing to do with that idiotic TV show. I don't know of a single person who actually grew up on the shore that does not despise that show. But the Jersey shore is an attitude, it is what it is - it's a way of being.

And now it's gone. It's gone. The Jersey shore I knew is gone.

Oh, it'll be rebuilt. There's no question it'll be rebuilt. There will be houses that go back up, there will be amusement things that go back up - but it won't be the same. It'll be new, it'll be shiny, it'll be glitzy, it'll probably be upscale.

The Jersey shore will be there - but it won't be the Jersey shore any more. The home of my memories is gone and I just wanted to have the chance to say RIP.

Left Side of the Aisle #81 - Part 4

Clown Award: PA judge won't block misleading voter ID ads

The Clown Award, given for meritorious stupidity.

Earlier this year, Pennsylvania passed a voter photo ID law. It was a rather strict law; in fact, it was one of the strictest in the country. I've talked about this before. There was a suit filed, but the law was approved by a Pennsylvania judge. Fortunately, a higher state court ordered a reconsideration in language that required that judge to enjoin the law, that is, to block its implementation, until after the election when a full hearing could be held.

But the state of Pennsylvania, in the wake of this order, failed to inform voters of the change. Officials delayed sending out corrected information. Instead of correcting its now-false ads telling people a photo ID was required to vote, the state released new and still-misleading ads, like the one shown below.

This ad - and I repeat, this was issued after the order blocking the law from going into effect - this ad features a big image of a photo ID with little type that says “This election day, if you have it,” and then in great big, huge type, the all-caps phrase “Show it.”

Voting advocacy groups went to court to ask that Pennsylvania officals be ordered to stop sending out these clearly misleading ads. On the Friday before election day, a Pennsylvania judge refused to issue that order, allowing the misleading ads to stay.

The judge who did that was Commonwealth Judge Robert Simpson. This is the same judge who originally approved of this law and, as again I've told you before, after being ordered to enjoin it, went out of his way to limit the scope of that order as much as possible and specifically allowed the state of Pennsylvania to continue producing and releasing misleading ads. And then refused to tell the state of stop misleading voters.

Commonwealth Judge Robert Simpson: You are a clown.

Sources:
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/11/03/1133891/pennsylvania-judge-wont-ban-misleading-photo-id-ads/

Left Side of the Aisle #81 - Part 3

Outrage of the Week: our election system

The Outrage of Week grew out of the election and the days and weeks leading up to it. It is something that appears to have reached some sort of critical mass among the punditocracy and politicos, which you can tell because it has been a topic of comment even beyond election night. (Even the Great Mr. O made reference to it.) And that is very much to the good.

However, before I get into it, I'm going to take a moment to feed my own ego by noting that much of what follows below consists of quoting myself from something I posted here four years ago, after the last presidential election. So to all those pundits, I say welcome and better late than never.

The Outrage itself is easy enough to describe. It is the absurd, the ethically offensive, burdens put on people who are trying to exercise their right to vote. However, this is truly a case where a picture is worth a thousands words, because it's even easier to picture that Outrage.

It is this:



And this:



And this:



And more and more and more.

It has been said any number of times but it merits repeating: If the US were a "third world" nation, we would condemn our election system as a travesty, as awful, as incapable of producing a fair and reliable outcome.

Our election system is a disgrace. An utter, shameful, disgrace. And this doesn't have a damn thing to do with who you want to win or whether you are content with two parties (I'm not) or urge support of third, fourth, fifth parties to keep the ideas flowing (I do). It has nothing to do with pulling the lever or filling in the oval or whatever for Barack Obama or Witless Romney or Jill Stein or whoever.

Having to stand in line for five, six, even eight hours in order to vote is a disgrace. It is unacceptable. And these pictures are not even of election day, these are pictures of early voting, of the process that was supposed to make it easier to vote, that was supposed to cut down on those lines - and this is what is produced. I heard last night that some people in Florida were standing in line until nearly 2AM local time trying to vote.

This is more than merely unacceptable: It is a threat to the very concept of being able to vote. There are physical limits to how long people can stand in line. Again, this has nothing to do with being capitalist or socialist, blue or red or Green. It has to do with having a functioning republic.

And I'm not even talking about the bogus voter fraud claims or the idiot "voter ID" laws being passed or the new restrictions on registering or any of the rest of the voter suppression - although the proportion of black faces in those incredibly long lines might give you a hint as to why those lines are allowed to exist. But no, I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about the normal functioning of the system, one riddled with administrative errors, poor record-keeping, varying and changing standards and regulations, problems with absentee ballots, registration backlogs, and wrongly calibrated voting machines, and perhaps worst or all, people being wrongfully and illegally denied provisional ballots when problems do arise because all too often, election officials don't actually know the laws they are there to enforce and administer.

What's the answer to this? For one thing, a standardized registration process that does not impose unfair and unnecessary burdens on the poor and elderly. For another, get more goddam voting machines! That would cut down on those lines. Obviously there is more to it that that, but frankly "get more machines" is such an obvious and direct response that I can only wonder why it doesn't seem to get implemented.

Actually, I don't wonder, not entirely, because I refer you back to the preponderance black faces in those long lines. Some people figure it is to their political benefit or their selfish benefit - or, for some others, a reflection of their own inflated sense of their social importance - to limit the right to vote and the ability of people to act on that right. And here I have to be honest and say that this is an area where one of the major political parties - the GOPpers, who think they do better with smaller turnouts - is far more guilty than the other - the Dimcrats, who think they do better with bigger turnouts.

But even ignoring all that, going down to the basic system, our basic election system, and the fact remains that our entire system from registration to actually being able to vote and to have it counted is a chaotic mess. It should be a major source of embarrassment to us as a people. It is an outrage.

Sources:
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2008/11/this-is-not-way-to-start-day.html

Left Side of the Aisle #81 - Part 2

Some good election news

There was some good actual good news to be had in the election, mostly revolving around the fact that the real wackos had a bad night: Todd Akin lost. Allen West lost. Joe Walsh lost. Michele Bachmann barely survived despite outspending her opponent by 12-1, so even though she's still in Congress, I suspect that at least we won't have to be hearing from her; I suspect she'll be hunkering down, concentrating on her own district, at least for a while. On the other hand, Alan Grayson won.

Locally, here in Massachusetts, Questions 1 and 3 won*, which I was glad to see. I wish Question 2* had passed as well, but it didn't, but the margin was smaller than I expected it to be, so I think that bodes well for the future. And again on a personal feeling, I'm kind of glad Elizabeth Warren won. It's not usual for me to be able to vote for a major party candidate with some feeling of comfort, so I'm glad she won.

There was another area of good news, one where, as I've said before, it seems much of our good news comes these days: same-sex marriage. It was a clean sweep for marriage equality.

Maine had a ballot question to overturn a 2009 referendum and legalize same-sex marriage. It won by a solid six points, 53% - 47%.

A ballot question in Maryland asked if voters would approve of a state law passed earlier this year to allow for same-sex marriages. The answer was "Yes" by a margin of 52-48.

Washington state voters did the same, approving a bill passed earlier by the legislature, and did it by the same margin, 52-48.

Finally, in Minnesota there was a proposal to amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage. It lost by 51-47. So while same-sex marriage still is not recognized in Minnesota, the voters refused to ban it, which it a good sign for things to come.

*Question 1 had to do with allowing/enabling cars under warranty to be repaired at places other than dealerships. Question 2 was a pro-"death with dignity" measure. Question 3 allowed for medical marijuana.


Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/07/gay-marriage-victory_n_2085900.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/07/senate-election-2012-results_n_2039116.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/07/maryland-question-6-results-2012_n_2050830.html
http://www.wptv.com/dpp/news/world/allen-west-patrick-murphy-district-18-race-results-murphy-declares-himself-the-winner
http://www.examiner.com/article/joe-walsh-loses-decisively-to-tammy-duckworth-and-frankly-won-t-be-missed
http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/11/07/14991266-tea-party-favorite-michele-bachmann-wins-tight-race-in-minnesota?lite

Left Side of the Aisle #81 - Part 1

Some thoughts about the election

So let me start this week by talking some about the election, some general observations from my perspective.

On the presidential level, of course, Barack Obama won, It wasn't even as close as had been predicted, which I found interesting. Of the nine so-called "battleground" states, which I think would be better described as tossup states, Obama won eight of them; in seven of those cases he won by margins of two to six points.

Unfortunately, he then followed up that victory with what may well have been the most self-centered victory speech I have ever heard. He barely mentioned his supporters among national figures who campaigned for him and all the people who did the grunt work, all the on-the-ground-workers, got little more than a passing nod. He didn't say anything about gains made by his own party in the House and even more in the Senate, a body where the GOPpers had hoped to become the majority but instead actually lost seats. No, the whole speech was about his victory, about his success; it was all about people believing in him.

The liberal pundits almost universally slavered praise on the speech, describing it as anything from "moving" to "great." I actually found it a little creepy.

Now, the fact is, and I have to say this, is that while I did not want Obama to win, I did want Romney to lose - because if nothing else, I wanted to know there was some level of lying, some level of blatant lying, which even our electorate will not tolerate. I mean, the thing about Romney is that not only is he a liar, but - unlike Obama - he's not even a good liar. He's a terrible liar.

A couple of weeks ago I gave you the reasons why I would not vote for Obama. I stand by all of those reasons and we are still going to be facing those same issues in a second term for PHC*.

There is one other thing to mention about this, one other point I want to make here: Obama won the popular vote by something over two percent. That's a clear enough victory; it wasn't a razor-thin margin as some have been. But it is also a clear enough indication of two important things: The obvious one (emphasized by the fact that the "undecided" vote never was very large; people made their minds up quickly) is that we are still a very divided nation and we have to face that and we have to deal with that. The other, subtler, one is that it raises the question of how much of that reflects a conviction that the choices are too narrow.

*PHC = President Hopey-Changey

Left Side of the Aisle #81

Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of November 8-14, 2012

This week:

Some thoughts about the election

Some good election news
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/07/gay-marriage-victory_n_2085900.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/07/senate-election-2012-results_n_2039116.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/07/maryland-question-6-results-2012_n_2050830.html
http://www.wptv.com/dpp/news/world/allen-west-patrick-murphy-district-18-race-results-murphy-declares-himself-the-winner
http://www.examiner.com/article/joe-walsh-loses-decisively-to-tammy-duckworth-and-frankly-won-t-be-missed
http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/11/07/14991266-tea-party-favorite-michele-bachmann-wins-tight-race-in-minnesota?lite

Outrage of the Week: our election system
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2008/11/this-is-not-way-to-start-day.html

Clown Award: PA judge won't block misleading voter ID ads
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/11/03/1133891/pennsylvania-judge-wont-ban-misleading-photo-id-ads/

Sandy: memories of home

Sandy and global warming
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/11/06/1145021/yes-climate-change-contributed-to-sandy/
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/conn-nuclear-plant-unit-reopens-cooler-water
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-rt-us-climate-temperaturesbre8a5100-20121106,0,206844.story

Left Side of the Aisle #80 - Part 7

And Another Thing 5: Possible organic material in dinosaur fossils

If this pans out, this could be really exciting.

Twenty years ago, a paleontologist named Mary Schweitzer made what seemed to be a remarkable discovery. She was looking through a microscope at a slice of dinosaur bone and she noticed what looked for all the world like red blood cells. She thought this can't be right, because organic material is not supposed to survive fossilization - but test after test indicated that they were indeed blood cells from a 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex.

In the years that followed, she and her colleagues discovered other apparent soft tissues, including what seem to be blood vessels and feather fibers.

Obviously, these findings were controversial. A lot of people dismissed them; one of the big argument, one of the big claims, was that what appeared to be organic tissues were actually what's called biofilm, which is slime formed by microbes that invaded the fossilized bone later on.

Schweitzer and her colleagues continued to amass support for their arguments. The latest evidence comes from a molecular analysis of what look to be bone cells from two different sorts of dinosaurs. The researchers isolated the cells and subjected them to several tests, which again seemed to indicate that all this was organic material.

The investigators also claim to have found amino acid sequences of proteins in extracts of the dinosaur bone that matched sequences from certain proteins that are present in the cells of all animals - and while some of these proteins are also found in bacteria that might have invaded the fossils, some of them aren't.

Schweitzer and her collaborators have detailed their latest findings in a paper released online October 16 and in a talk on October 17 at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

As part of her presentation, she showed a slide of what she said was all the evidence they had found that this material is really bioslime. The slide was blank.

Like I said, if this pans out, and it is still a real if, but if it does, we might be looking at dinosaur DNA. It wouldn't be Jurassic Park - but it would be damn cool.

Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/20/dinosaur-cells-discovery-t-rex-fossil_n_1988988.html

Left Side of the Aisle #80 - Part 6

And Another Thing 4: 5500 year old tomb found in Sweden

Archaeologists have found a 5,500-year-old tomb possibly belonging to a Stone Age chieftain. They found it at a megalithic monument known as Ales Stenar, or Ale's Stones. It has 59 massive boulders which are arranged in the shape of a 220-foot-long ship. The site has sometimes been called the Swedish Stonehenge.

The thing is, the Ale's Stones site is only about  1400 years old and so likely dates from the end of Sweden's Iron Age. But cut marks on the stones are strikingly similar to ones found in Stone Age technology. So researchers thought for a long time that these stones were actually taken from some other monument.

Now they believe they have found it - a little over 40 yards away. Imprints of large boulders that apparently had been removed marked the site of what appears to have been a neolithic burial chamber called a dolmen, which consists of several upright stones with a horizontal boulder on top in which a body would be placed.

Based on the layout, the dolmen may be up to 5,500 years old - which, if it's confirmed, could make the source of the Swedish Stonehenge older than the actual Stonehenge.


Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/swedish-stonehenge-tomb-ales-stenar-chieftan_n_2000936.html

Left Side of the Aisle #80 - Part 5

And Another Thing 3: Picture of galaxies colliding

This really cool picture could be a picture of our future. Our very, very far distant future, but our future nonetheless.

This is a picture of two galaxies colliding. "Colliding" may not be quite the right word because this process has been going on for eons, but the result is that the two have almost merged, so much so that they share a single name, the decidedly unromantic but decidedly astronomically-precise NGC 2623.

The two galaxies that now form NGC 2623 were likely both once spiral galaxies, ones roughly the same mass as the Milky Way. And our own galaxy is on a collision course with the Andromeda Galaxy, which is also a spiral galaxy and just somewhat bigger than the Milky Way. So that collision - which will take place in about 3.75 billion years, so don't bother buying film - may well at the end of things produce something like what we can see here. Since it's unlikely we'll be around in 3.75 billion years, this is our best chance to check the view.

By the way, those blue streaks swirling out? They are massive dust clouds where new, young, hot - that is, blue - stars are being born. Cosmic nurseries, if you will.

Sources:
http://io9.com/5953573/a-pair-of-milky-ways-smash-into-each-other-300-million-light+years-away

Left Side of the Aisle #80 - Part 4

And Another Thing 2: Earth's magnetic field changing

One of the other things Curiosity has found is that water once flowed on Mars. There is just absolutely no question: Features on the surface of Mars exactly match features produced on rocks on sand by flowing water on Earth.

So looking at Mars today, knowing that Mars was more Earth-like in the past, looking at Mars today could give us some sense of what might be in our future.

Now, one of the things - it's not the only thing, but it's one of the big things - that protects, that allows for, life on Earth is that the planet is surrounded by a magnetic field. That field helps shield us from the solar wind and blocks some of the more intense cosmic radiation from deep space. It also helps existing life: For example, it helps birds migrate, with many species navigating along lines of magnetic force.

However, the magnetic field of the Earth is getting weaker: Its strength has declined by 10% over the past 150 years and scientists say that in as little as 500 years it could disappear entirely.

Now, that could be bad news, because the lack of a magnetic field on Mars is one of the reasons why there appears to be no life (or if there is, it is hidden). Losing the magnetic field, which happened on Mars billions of years ago, allows the solar wind - which is basically the flow of charged particles coming from the Sun - to blow away the atmosphere and what atmosphere is left is no protection against the cosmic rays so any life, if it did exist, would either have been wiped out or driven underground.

That's not likely to happen to Earth, because this business of the magnetic field weakening has happened before. What happens is that the field weakens, it almost disappears, and then it flips so that north and south reverse directions. It's happened several times in the Earth's history; in fact, it's happened about every 250,000 years according to the geological record - but which also means that, with the last event being some 800,000 years ago, we are really overdue for one of these flips.

The effects are hard to predict, but it's unlikely to cause any severe damage to life on Earth because the field will not completely disappear - but it could have a real impact on migrating birds, for example, which will have to learn other means of keeping track of their path, otherwise they might find it hard to do things like reproduce.

Something else that could occur is disruptions to electronic equipment and communications. Satellites could be disrupted (which means GPS gets disrupted), radio communications could be disrupted because a weaker magnetic field allows more of the solar wind and more cosmic radiation to penetrate. So while this might not affect our life, it might affect our technology.

The other thing is that when the poles flip, it's not just a matter of the south and north poles sort of rotating around the Earth until they have swapped positions. No, what happens is that as the field diminishes, you start getting all these little poles, north and south poles, popping up all over the planet. Which means a compass would be completely useless and any system or technology that relies on a compass would also be completely useless.

The European Space Agency is taking this seriously enough to be planning to launch three satellites next month to improve what is now our rather hazy understanding of what's called the magnetosphere, which is the name for that magnetic field that surrounds the Earth.


Sources:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/03/us-science-earth-magneticfield-idUSBRE8920X620121003?feedName=OutloudFeed&feedType=RSS

Left Side of the Aisle #80 - Part 3

And Another Thing 1: "Shiny" things found on Mars

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has found some bright stuff on the Red Planet, scientists say.

Curiosity had been taking some scoops of Martian soil and dumping them out - this was to clean the scoop of anything that might have been carried from Earth before they started to analyze anything with it - and the scientists stopped at one point because they saw something on the ground that turned out to be a piece of plastic that had broken off the lander on landing. So they dumped out what was in the scoop because they saw this shiny stuff in there and thought it might be other debris from the lander.

Turns out, it's not. There are little bright things that are actually part of the Martian soil. The scientists don't quite know what they are yet. So that's probably one of the first things that they're actually going to be examining. Since they've decided this is of Martian origin they're going to take a scoop of this stuff and dump it on a plate that's going to be taken inside the rover to be chemically analyzed. And they they're going to take another scoop for a different sort of analysis.

So Curiosity's mission has barely started and the scientists are already finding things we didn't know were there.

Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/18/mars-shiny-particles-curiosity_n_1981298.html

Left Side of the Aisle #80 - Part 2

Outrage of the Week and Clown Award (combined): Italian court sentences scientists to prison for failing to predict an earthquake

On April 6, 2009, a 6.3-magnitude earthquake struck the town of L'Aquila in the Apennine region of central Italy. Over 300 people in and around the town were killed. The historic center of the town was devastated and is still largely deserted.

On October 22, an Italian court convicted seven scientists and experts of manslaughter and sentenced each to six years in prison - for failing to predict the earthquake. They are also ordered to pay court costs and damages of $10.2 million and were barred from even again holding public office.

This would be hilarious - this would be like a Marx Brothers movie - if it weren't for real. There is no currently known method of predicting earthquakes. Period. Scientists - seismologists - have gotten much better at determining the regions in which quakes are more likely to occur, even better at suggesting time frames, but predicting when they will happen is beyond human capability and even those time frames can be measured in decades. "You're likely to have an earthquake sometime in the next 50 years."

Alexandra Petri at the Washington Post got it right: Her blog post on the case was titled "Italian scientists found guilty of manslaughter for failure to perform magic."

My gosh, this is getting frightening. It's not only an outrage, it's utterly clownish. Here, we have ignorant twits like Rep. Paul Broun, the man who recently declared that ”All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell,” serving on the House Science Committee. Over in the Senate, we have Sen. James Inhofe, who says global warming is a hoax because the Bible says so, as the ranking GOPper on the Committee on Environment and Public Works.

And now, in Italy, they're putting people in jail for failing to predict earthquakes. So here, the thought is scientists are liars or stupid; there, the thought is they know everything. In both cases, science gets trashed and scientific progress gets undermined.

Broun is a clown. Inhofe is a clown. And the prosecutors and the judge of L'Aquila, along with the people who praised the verdict - they are all scientifically-ignorant clowns.

Sources:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gsa6N0iwCl1gOiqwsm_2zo87D-9Q?docId=ec399c68073f4f428aaad7a53e2b80ac
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20025626
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/23/world/europe/italy-convicts-7-for-failure-to-warn-of-quake.html?_r=0
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/post/italian-scientists-found-guilty-of-manslaughter-for-failure-to-perform-magic/2012/10/22/8f52e872-1c6d-11e2-9cd5-b55c38388962_blog.html
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/08/least_scientific_members_of_the_house_science_committee/
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/03/09/441515/inhofe-god-says-global-warming-is-a-hoax/

Left Side of the Aisle #80 - Part 1

Classism

I've mentioned a few times recently what I and a number of others have come to call classism. This is a form of bigotry, one that could be defined very broadly as regarding yourself as superior to those who are of a lower economic class than you - but which really refers to bigotry against the poor.

This is what lay at the heart of Witless Romney's deservedly infamous "47 percent" blather. Just in case you've been living on the Moon the past several weeks, this is what he said at a private fundraiser on May 17:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. ... These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. ... And so my job is not to worry about those people - I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

A lot of the attention went to his reference to saying that people who pay no federal income tax "are dependent upon government" and "believe that they are victims." We Americans like to think of ourselves as very independent, self-reliant people and it's a real insult to say to someone "you think you're a victim." What's more, there have also been a good number of smackdowns of the specifics of his claims, pointing out that federal income tax is just one form of tax; that over 60% of those who don't pay that tax are employed and so pay federal payroll taxes; that the rest are essentially all either retired or disabled or on active military duty; that people also pay sales taxes and excise taxes, pay state and local taxes, pay property taxes and so on. And it was rather pointedly mentioned by the Tax Policy Center that an estimated 4,000 households with incomes over $1 million and 14,000 more with incomes between $500,000 and $1 million paid no federal income tax in 2011.

For my part, I said on this show when the video came out that, yes, those folks are entitled to health care, to food, to housing - because we all are, every one of us, just by being human beings. And I noted that the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which the US is a signatory, says that in so many words.

But there's a line in Romney's little rant that has gotten less attention but which I think goes to the heart of it, to the heart of Romney's attitude, one that he felt so comfortable expressing among his fat cat friends: "I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

That's it. That's the core: People are poor, people need help, people are hungry, people are cold, people have no health care, all because they won't "take personal responsibility." It is the age-old - and it is age-old - notion among those who have food to eat and warm beds to sleep in and doctors and nurses and hospitals for when they are sick, the notion among those who are not afflicted that those who are deserve their fate, deserve their condition - because they are lazy, there are indolent, they are shiftless malingerers with no self-control, they will not "take personal responsibility."

Here's an example from last year. Newt Grinch was in one of those hundreds of GOPper primary debates last November and he proposed putting an end to child labor laws. Why? Because then poor children could be in the labor force and learn responsibility! Just like the good old days!

At the debate, he lauded the idea of 5-year-olds working.

If you take one half of the New York janitors, you could give lots of poor kids a work experience in the cafeteria, in the school library, in the front office, in a lot of different things. I'll stand by the idea young people ought to learn how to work.

With that, the Republican audience erupted with applause.

So why was the idea of revoking "stupid" child labor laws so popular among GOP primary voters? Because of the adjective which they clearly heard but which has been overlooked in most commentary on the event: "poor." They're not applauding the idea of children working, they're not applauding the idea of five year-old children working, specifically not their dear sweet little things working, oh, no - they're applauding the idea of five year-old poor children working.

The next month, Grinch made it explicit:

Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day, they have no habit of I do this and you give me cash unless it's illegal.

Poor people don't work - unless it's criminal.

And note that he specifically referred to New York. You think that when he talked about "young people" learning "how to work" that folks in the audience were conjuring up images of the children of some white dirt farmer in Appalachia or Mississippi? Or even some down-on-their-luck white family in Indianapolis? You know damn well they weren't.

Because, y'see, it's them. It's those people. Those other people. The "not us." You know who we mean. They have no work ethic. They don't know how to work like we do. They are all shiftless, lazy. And so their kids are the same.

So yes, there is a great deal of racism in classism - but there is also an overlay of contempt for the poor no matter their race. It's not just poor blacks: it's "white trash," it's "trailer trash," it's "the great unwashed," the "riff-raff," the whatever we can call them to make it clear we are above, we are better than, them.

I recall some years ago having an argument with my in-laws - I never really understood how my wife at the time came out of that background as the gentle, loving, clear-headed soul she is - but I remember having this argument in which they insisted that "people on welfare" - and they were very insistent that, even though they imagined that most people on welfare are black, that they meant all people on welfare - that people on welfare are "laughing at us" because we work. When I said that I didn't see much to laugh about in living on a welfare budget and suggested that if folks on welfare had it so good, my in-laws might want to change places with them, the answer I got was "Oh, no, we'd hate it. But they don't know any better."

That contempt is classism, and the bigotry, that socioeconomic bigotry, that bigotry that denies the poor their humanity, that reduces them to a mostly undifferentiated mass marked for the most part as shiftless, greedy, moochers and at best as humble supplicants, shuffling their feet and tugging at their forelocks, gazing down while we decide if we will deign to condescend to throw a nickel at them, that bigotry distorts our politics and twists our morals. It denies what is best in us - compassion, understanding - and embraces the lowest, the basest, the lizard brain of our worst natures.

And what's worse is that I believe classism is growing. I believe it's getting worse. In some ways, that's not surprising: Long periods of economic retrenchment, long periods of economic stress, can often lead people into a defensive, "me-and-mine" posture. And there certainly has been enough of that sort of stress and I don't mean just the past couple of years, I mean the past 30-plus years, a time over which real median family income has gone more or less nowhere despite more two-income households and more hours worked. For decades, we have been working harder and longer just to stay where we are and have gotten paid for it in shrinking futures and reduced job security. In a race, it's always easier to resent those coming up from behind rather than those in front even if they are pulling away - because it's those coming up from behind who are a threat to your position. In the same way, it's easier to resent the poor who are, you imagine, lazing about on your tax dollars than it is to question the rich who daily enrich themselves further by sucking the life out of your economic hopes and draining off the economic gains your more work has produced.

So yes, it may not be at all surprising that classism is growing. If you want another measure, ask yourself how many times in the entire presidential campaign was the word "poverty" mentioned? Other than Newt Grinch waxing nostalgic for the days of child labor, how many times were the poor mentioned? Instead of concern for the poor, we got calling Obama the "Food Stamp president" as a supposedly debilitating slammer, as saying that the fact that there were a lot more poor people wasn't the problem, the fact that they were actually getting help was.

You know, my blog is called Lotus - Surviving a Dark Time. I called it that because I hold out hope that we will survive this dark time, the dark time of the past couple of decades, that at some point we will recover our morality, that we will rediscover - and again be shocked by - the persistence of poverty, of hunger, of homelessness, in our nation. But even as I wrote that in preparation for today's show, I recalled writing much the same thing even in much the same words over 20 years ago. That rediscovery has not yet happened. The Occupy movement, with its focus on the right target - the one percent - came close, but it has not yet happened. Sometimes I despair of it ever happening - but for reasons I can't explain I still maintain the hope.

Sources:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/full-transcript-mitt-romney-secret-video#47percent
http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/18/pf/taxes/romney-income-taxes-millionaires/index.html
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/12/some-stuff-i-didnt-have-time-for-2.html
http://prospect.org/article/gingrichs-profound-insight-poverty
http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/108817/anatomy-the-47-percent#

Left Side of the Aisle #80

Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of October 25-31, 2012

Classism
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/full-transcript-mitt-romney-secret-video#47percent
http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/18/pf/taxes/romney-income-taxes-millionaires/index.html http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2011/12/some-stuff-i-didnt-have-time-for-2.html
http://prospect.org/article/gingrichs-profound-insight-poverty
http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/108817/anatomy-the-47-percent#

Outrage of the Week and Clown Award (combined): Italian court sentences scientists to prison for failing to predict an earthquake
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gsa6N0iwCl1gOiqwsm_2zo87D-9Q?docId=ec399c68073f4f428aaad7a53e2b80ac
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20025626
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/23/world/europe/italy-convicts-7-for-failure-to-warn-of-quake.html?_r=0
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/post/italian-scientists-found-guilty-of-manslaughter-for-failure-to-perform-magic/2012/10/22/8f52e872-1c6d-11e2-9cd5-b55c38388962_blog.html
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/08/least_scientific_members_of_the_house_science_committee/
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/03/09/441515/inhofe-god-says-global-warming-is-a-hoax/

And Another Thing 1: "Shiny" things found on Mars
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/18/mars-shiny-particles-curiosity_n_1981298.html

And Another Thing 2: Earth's magnetic field changing
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/03/us-science-earth-magneticfield-idUSBRE8920X620121003?feedName=OutloudFeed&feedType=RSS

And Another Thing 3: Picture of galaxies colliding
http://io9.com/5953573/a-pair-of-milky-ways-smash-into-each-other-300-million-light+years-away

And Another Thing 4: 5500 year old tomb found in Sweden
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/swedish-stonehenge-tomb-ales-stenar-chieftan_n_2000936.html

And Another Thing 5: Possible organic material in dinosaur fossils
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/20/dinosaur-cells-discovery-t-rex-fossil_n_1988988.html

Left Side of the Aisle #79 - Part 5

RIP George McGovern

George McGovern, former member of Congress, former Senator, 1972 Democratic candidate for president, and long-time advocate for peace and against hunger, died this past weekend at the age of 90.

George McGovern was the first presidential candidate I voted for. I can safely say that he is the only major-party presidential candidate for who I voted without a mountain of reservations. That doesn't mean I agreed with everything he said, of course, but it does mean that I felt confident that I could trust in his basic sense of decency, of honesty, and in his commitment to justice. Now, 40 years later, I have no reason to change that assessment.

I found it disappointing but hardly surprising that most every bit of coverage of his death, even the obituary, started with his loss to Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential campaign - and a fair amount never got past that. Yes, Nixon ran up the biggest electoral college margin ever, yes, that needed to be mentioned, but why did so many act like the 1972 campaign was all there was to the man? Just a moment or two ago I mentioned the media covering elections like sporting events. Was that part of what drove this? Was this just a way of dismissing those, like McGovern in 1972, dismissing those who focus on facts as opposed to fantasies, issues as opposed to image, a way of dismissing one of those who strike our modern, blase, sneering media elites as latter-day Don Quixotes adopting a chivalry, a nobility, that no longer exists?

McGovern, by his own admission, failed to recognize how important image was even by 1972. This son of the prairie of South Dakota was pegged as some kind of hippie by the Republicans, something his campaign never really challenged. I doubt more than a fraction of the voters were aware that McGovern had flown 35 combat mission in World War II as the pilot of a B-24 and had received the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal.

But leave that aside and rather than ask what people then might not have known, ask what people now reading the coverage of his death still wouldn't know. They might know that he was an early and vigorous opponent of the Vietnam War and they might know that in 1969 he introduced the first legislative attempt to end that war. They might know that, if only because it got connected to reasons that he lost so badly in 1972. (Interestingly, I didn't see Watergate mentioned once.) So yes, they might know that.

But they wouldn't know that he wrote or co-wrote 14 books, the last of them in 2011. They wouldn't know that his concern for Native American rights was sufficient that the Oglala Sioux dubbed him "the Great White Eagle." They wouldn't know that he and Bob Dole were the co-sponsors of the Senate bill that created the Food Stamp program as we came to know it.

They wouldn't know that even more than Vietnam, hunger was the issue that drove him. He was the first director of the Food for Peace program and helped establish the UN's World Food Program. He was the first chair of the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. Later, after leaving the Senate, he became the US Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture. He created, working again with Bob Dole, the International Food for Education and Nutrition Program. In 2001, he was named the first UN Global Ambassador on World Hunger by the World Food Program, the program he helped create.

No, people would not have know any of this - because the media was too busy trying to reinforce the image of the hippie loser.

But the fact is, he was neither. I would have thought it nice if he was more of the former, but be that as it may, he was by no means the latter.

During the floor debate on that first bill he introduced to end the Vietnam war, in 1969, he said this:

Every Senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every Senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across our land — young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces or hopes. There are not very many of these blasted and broken boys who think this war is a glorious adventure. Do not talk to them about bugging out, or national honor or courage. It does not take any courage at all for a congressman, or a senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed. But we are responsible for those young men and their lives and their hopes. And if we do not end this damnable war those young men will some day curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the Executive carry the burden that the Constitution places on us.

That's the George McGovern I remember, the George McGovern I voted for: the man who knew the meaning of the word conscience and never sold his.

History, it's often and rightly said, is written by the winners. But for that very reason, history often is about winners and losers and most of the time fails to address what endures. Conscience endures.

RIP George McGovern.

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote http://www.policymic.com/articles/16946/george-mcgovern-near-death-how-great-white-eagle-fought-to-end-world-hunger http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/im-a-mcgovern-democrat-do_b_1980240.html http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/truthdigger_of_the_week_george_mcgovern_20121020/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2012/10/21/george-mcgovern-obituary/1641975/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2012/10/21/mcgovern-appreciation/1637259/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_McGovern

Left Side of the Aisle - Part 4

Update on Voter ID

I've got two brief updates on Voter ID laws.

Something else I told you about two weeks ago was that we'd finally found some voter fraud, accusations of supposed voter fraud being the excuse the right wing is using to suppress voting rights among liberal-leaning constituencies like minorities and the poor. Unfortunately for the right wing, the voter fraud that was uncovered in Florida was committed by an outfit hired by the Republican National Committee to do voter registration.

Well, now we have more bad news for the wingnuts.

On Friday, October 19, a man working for the Virginia Republican party was charged with 13 counts of destruction of voter registration forms, disclosure of voter registration information, and obstruction of justice.

His name is Colin Small and he was caught throwing out voter registration forms because he did it in the wrong place. He threw a bag of them in a dumpster reserved for the private use of a local company. An employee saw Small do it, got annoyed because he wasn't supposed to be throwing stuff in there, and investigated.

The local Sheriff's office said there was "no indication that this activity was widespread in our jurisdiction," but as others have noted, there really is no way to tell how many additional registrations forms may have been dumped there or elsewhere in the state. Maybe none, maybe hundreds. The Virginia GOPpers all, of course, were just shocked - shocked - to discover this going on in their state, even though they had already fired the outfit that was caught filing false forms in Florida. (Small, by the way, worked for that company before being hired by the Virginia GOPpers.)

Something to add here is that this is much worse than filing false registrations because, as I noted two weeks ago, unreal people living at unreal addresses are not going to show up at the polls to vote. In this sort of case, real people at real addresses who really thought they had registered would find themselves unable to vote. Which also makes it several orders of magnitude worse than the all-but-nonexistent crime of in-person voter fraud.

The second update is that a while back I told you that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had overturned a decision by a lower court judge that allowed the state's photo ID law, one of the most restrictive in the nation, to go into effect. The court sent the case back to that lower court with instructions for reconsideration that essentially required that judge, one Robert Simpson, to enjoin - that is, block - implementation of the law until after election day. Simpson, given no choice, did that the beginning of October, which is of course good news.

But that news is heavily tainted by what I haven't told you: In that new ruling, Simpson said he was going to let what he called "the good parts" of the bill stand. As a result, you do not need a photo ID to vote in the November elections in Pennsylvania, and you will vote with a regular ballot, not a provisional one. However, you will still be asked for ID. Even though you don't need it. What's more, and this is what is so offensive about Simpson's ruling, it not only allowed you to be asked for ID, it also allowed the state to continue its advertising campaign which specifically told people they needed to show photo ID to vote. The ad starts with people saying "If you care about the election," about making a difference and so on, followed by a series of visuals of those same people flashing photo IDs with the line "Show it!" It was weeks before the state changed those commercials, and all it did was add the line "You will be asked, but not required, to show an acceptable photo ID on election day" at the end.

In short, both Judge Simpson and the state of Pennsylvania have out of their way to do, to affect the law, as little as possible. They have done as much as they can get away with to still hint, to suggest, to give people the idea that "no ID equals no vote." This idea is still so much in circulation that on October 18, a newspaper in the state published an article saying photo ID is required and the week before, thousands of Pennsylvania seniors received a mailing from a program administered by the state Department of Aging that stated that photo ID is required to vote. It's bad enough and the state's response has been sluggish enough that at the end of last week - we're talking about two and a-half weeks before election day - the ACLU filed a motion asking the state courts to order the state to stop distributing false information.

I know I've been talking about voter ID stuff a lot, but I really think it's important and I don't understand why there is not more outrage over all this. I don't understand why we as a nation have moved so easily, so quickly, from the question "How can we encourage people to vote" to "How can we restrict people from voting." Can it be that so many people just take the idea of the right to vote that lightly? Or is it that they hear right wing horror stories, listen the the fairy tales and fables of "voter fraud," and go "sure, why not have voter ID" because, after all, they themselves already have the ID and so it doesn't affect them and they just don't care how it affects anyone else?

This will not end with the election. It will remain an issue. The right wing knows that it's best chance to gain and maintain political power - that is, to not just influence government through its economic power and social position but to actually hold the reins of government - its best chance is to as much as possible limit voting the the elite. There was a time in this country when to vote you had to be a white male property-holder. I don't see any real chance of reverting to that - although I can envision the right wing arguing that you have to own property in order to vote because only property owners have "a real stake in the community" - but I can see a real chance, particularly with the growth of classism, which I will talk a little about next week, of becoming a society where those who most need society's support - the elderly but even more the poor and minorities - are not only as a practical matter but also as a legal matter the least able to gain that society's attention. That must not be allowed to happen.

One of the supposed ethical principles of our justice system is that, as phrased most famously but not originally by William Blackstone, it's "better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." Better ten guilty people be acquitted than one innocent person be wrongly convicted. Don't get hung up, as I have seem some do, on the ratio: The base principle is that one guilty person escaping and one innocent person being punished are not moral equivalents; the latter is far worse than the former.

Here we have the same sort of principle, but the ratios are more than reversed: Cases of in-person voter fraud, the only kind possibly affected by the new photo ID laws, are miniscule; a recent study turned up only 10 proven such cases nationwide since 2000. Even alleged cases, never mind proven, just alleged cases, count in no more than the hundreds over that same time. By contrast, recently-passed voting restrictions - some of which have been shot down or temporarily blocked by the courts - could have disenfranchised something over 5 million eligible voters. So the ratio here is better one person get away with in-person voter fraud than 500,000 eligible voters be blocked from voting.

Sources:
http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/10/02/pennsylvania-voter-id-halted-but-in-very-narrow-fashion/
http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/state/appeals-judge-set-to-rule-on-legitimacy-of-pas-new-voter-id-law-655226/
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/02/us-usa-campaign-pennsylvania-idUSBRE8900LA20121002
http://articles.philly.com/2012-10-20/news/34585536_1_regular-ballot-penndot-locations-voter
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/pennsylvania-newspaper-mount-pleasant-journal-falsely-claims-id-required-to-vote_n_2001373.html
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/local-govt-politics/questionable-palm-beach-county-voter-registration-/nSL5Y/
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57535950/man-charged-after-tossing-voter-registration-forms-in-virginia/
http://votingrights.news21.com/article/election-fraud-explainer/
http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/voting_law_changes_in_2012

Left Side of the Aisle #79 - Part 3

Clown Award: Rep. Steve King

The Clown Award, given for meritorious stupidity.

This week's dishonoree is Iowa congressman Steve King, one of those people that in a sane world would not so much be laughed off the public stage as be gently removed and put somewhere where he could do no harm to the general level of public intelligence - and who, by the same token, makes you despair for the future when you remember that people actually vote for this steaming mass of putrefaction.

Consider, for example, that in July he said that President Barack Obama's mother "might've announced his birth by telegram from Kenya" to Hawaii, this being the birthers' explanation of how, if Obama was born in Kenya, his birth announcement appeared at the time in two papers in Hawaii.

In August he declared that "liberals" had so "devalued life" that, he said, a man can rape a young girl, kidnap her, force her to undergo an abortion across state lines, and then “drop her off at the swingset ... and that’s not against the law in the United States of America.”

Later in August, he was one of the few GOPpers who publicly supported Todd Akin, the nitwit who said that women can't get pregnant from rape because if it's "legitimate" rape, the woman's body "has ways of shutting that whole thing down." Not one to be out-stupided, King went further and denied ever hearing about anyone getting pregnant from statutory rape or incest, either.

But give him this: He is fully prepared to totally embrace his wacko wingnuttery. In an interview on Sunday, October 21 with local station WHO-TV, he went right for it.

He repeated his comparison of immigrants to dogs, saying immigration policy should be like a dog buyer choosing "the pick of the litter." He even insisted that was a compliment and the people who objected knew it was a compliment but are just "professional hyperventilators." He dodged his earlier birther statement, claiming he was just expressing the concerns of others, but then added that he "doesn't know" where Obama was born.

He doubled down on claims that Huma Abedin, a senior advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, calling that "the objective truth." He urged an investigation and hinted that this supposed Islamic influence could have had something to do with the administration's policy in Libya.

Finally, he also said has no position on whether states should be allowed to ban the sale of contraceptives - not to ban abortion, but to ban the sale of contraceptives, while suggesting that Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 SCOTUS decision that established a right to privacy as a Constitutional principle, was wrongly decided.

And at that interview, he did all this in literally just four minutes. Truly a tour-de-force of clownishness.

Iowa congressman Steve King, recognized by the Southern Poverty Law Center as one of the 15 most extremist candidates for public office in the US in 2012, Seven King: clown.

Sources:
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/21/rep_steve_king_on_goes_wingnut_roll/
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/21/fourteen_most_extremist_candidates/?source=newsletter
http://www.splcenter.org/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/21/steve-king-immigrants-dogs_n_1998007.html
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/08/01/622881/steve-king-responds-dogfighting/
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/08/21/721321/rep-steve-king-says-hes-never-heard-of-a-rape-induced-pregnancy/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut

Left Side of the Aisle #79 - Part 2

Outrage of the Week: More bosses say "Vote for Romney or get fired"

Two weeks ago, I told you about David Siegel, the CEO of Westgate resorts, who sent an email to his employees essentially telling them that they'd better vote for Romney because if Obama wins, he'd have "no choice" but to "downsize" - that is, fire people. Exactly why he'd have "no choice" was never made clear, but that's hardly surprising. I ended up by saying that this sort of transparent manipulation, this obvious bullying and threats against employees is hardly unknown or unprecedented - but it's still an outrage.

I'm returning to that point this week because, indeed, Siegel was hardly alone in openly threatening his employees with losing their jobs if they don't vote the corporate line.

On September 30, Arthur Allen, the CEO of a Florida-based software firm called ASG Software Solutions, emailed his over 1,000 employees telling them their jobs are at stake and Romney had better win. The body of the email, which bore the subject line "Will the presidential election directly affect your job at ASG?" said that if Obama wins, ASG's chances of avoiding being bought out by a bigger company are "slim to none" - again and naturally, why that is true is never explained; threats work best when they are not really explained. Allen adds that "When we buy a company, we eliminate about 60 percent of the salaries of the employees of that company." So, he says, "the same thing would happen to ASG’s employees." That  is, vote for Romney or 60% of you get the ax! And if that happens "I don’t want to hear any complaints regarding the fallout."

But Allen didn't stop there. A subsequent email actually urged employees to contribute "as much as you can" to Romney's campaign, right up to the legal maximum, in order to "help ASG and yourself."

And you probably won't be surprised to hear that the Koch brothers are at the same game. Earlier in October, all 45,000 employees of Georgia Pacific, which is a subsidiary of Koch Industries, received a packet in the mail about the election, a packet which included a list of Koch-endorsed candidates - all GOPpers - and a cover letter that said that if the wrong people win, then "many of our more than 50,000 U.S. employees and contractors may suffer the consequences."

As a sidebar, in response to the revelation, Koch Industries released a statement that said in part:

[T]he information is purely intended to be considered among all the other information employees may be reading or receiving as an informed voter. We make it clear that any decision about which candidates to support belongs solely to our employees based on the factors that are most important to them, and this is in no way an attempt to “intimidate” employees.

Which struck me like the gunman who says "Your money or your life" and then says "I'm not trying to intimidate you; you are free to choose based on what's important to you."

Again, the idea of employers trying to pressure or threaten employees into voting the corporate line is not unprecedented, but why this year has it become so blatant? Beyond the obvious answer of corporations figuring, "hey we're now powerful enough so we can do what we damn please," there is the fact that this idea was openly espoused, openly encouraged, by then-candidate for the GOPper nomination Witless Romney. Back on June 6, in a conference call with the anti-union National Federation of Independent Business, he said

I hope you make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections.

So yeah, that's another reason it's happening: Your guy told you to.

Witless assured his listening acolytes that this is all legal:

Nothing illegal about you talking to your employees about what you believe is best for the business, because I think that will figure into their election decision, their voting decision.

That is, yes, this "vote the corporate line or get fired" is precisely intended to "figure into their voting decisions." That is the conscious, deliberate purpose.

To top it all off, to, in an old phrase I happen to like, cap the climax, why is this legal? Because of Citizens United. That abomination of a Supreme Court decision which opened the floodgates to huge amounts of corporate money flooding into elections also overturned Federal Election Commission regulations that prohibited employers from political campaigning among employees, a prohibition that was in effect because of the potential for exactly this sort of intimidation.

So it's another reason to despise the Citizens United decision, another reason to regard Witless Romney as, like most of the other members of his class, self-serving scum, another reason to recognize corporate America as propelled by nothing but eternally-unsatisfied greed. Another outrage.

Sources:
http://gawker.com/5950189/the-ceo-who-built-himself-americas-largest-house-just-threatened-to-fire-his-employees-if-obamas-elected
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/09/david-siegel-email_n_1951801.html
http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/10/14/exclusive-ceo-suggests-employees-jobs-may-be-at-stake-if-romney-doesnt-win/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/20/arthur-allen_n_1992370.html
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/14017/koch_industries_sends_45000_employees_pro_romney_mailing/
http://www.nfib.com/advocacy/item?msid=58241
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/14046/romney_instructed_employers_to_tell_employees_how_to_vote_in_conference_cal/

Left Side of the Aisle #79 - Part 1

Good news: WI labor law rejected

After seizing control of the state government in Wisconsin in 2010, Gov. Scott Walkalloveryou and his right wing cronies in the legislature slammed through a number of good-for-the-rich-but-lousy-for-the-middle-class measures, including one that stripped most unionized public workers of almost all their rights to collective bargaining. That law sparked a furious reaction, including weeks of demonstrations and sit-ins at the state capitol, three GOPper state legislators being recalled, and the Democrats regaining control of the state Senate - and it nearly resulted in the recall of Gov. Walkalloveryou himself.

Well, in September, Dane County District Judge Juan Colas smacked down most parts of that law, ruling that it violates the rights to free speech, free association, and equal protection held by the affected workers.

The state asked him to stay his ruling while the state appealed - during which time, including all the appeals which could take years, of course, the state could act as if the law was in effect and pretty much rip up existing union contracts and refuse collective bargaining.

The good news is that on Monday, October 22, Colas refused to issue that stay. The law remains on the trash pile.

The state attorney general says he's going to ask the Court of Appeals for the stay. Logically, he shouldn't get it because of the clear harm to the interests of the unionized workers that such a stay would entail, while the harm to the state from the lack of a stay is purely hypothetical.

But since when did logic have anything to do with the law. So this may yet prove to be a temporary victory ans temporary good news - but at least for now, it is.

Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/wisconsin-union-law_n_2003612.html

Left Side of the Aisle #79

Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of October 18-24, 2012

Good news: WI labor law rejected
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/wisconsin-union-law_n_2003612.html

Outrage of the Week: More bosses say "Vote for Romney or get fired"
http://gawker.com/5950189/the-ceo-who-built-himself-americas-largest-house-just-threatened-to-fire-his-employees-if-obamas-elected
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/09/david-siegel-email_n_1951801.html
http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/10/14/exclusive-ceo-suggests-employees-jobs-may-be-at-stake-if-romney-doesnt-win/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/20/arthur-allen_n_1992370.html
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/14017/koch_industries_sends_45000_employees_pro_romney_mailing/
http://www.nfib.com/advocacy/item?msid=58241
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/14046/romney_instructed_employers_to_tell_employees_how_to_vote_in_conference_cal/

Clown Award: Rep. Steve King
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/21/rep_steve_king_on_goes_wingnut_roll/
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/21/fourteen_most_extremist_candidates/?source=newsletter
http://www.splcenter.org/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/21/steve-king-immigrants-dogs_n_1998007.html
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/08/01/622881/steve-king-responds-dogfighting/
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/08/21/721321/rep-steve-king-says-hes-never-heard-of-a-rape-induced-pregnancy/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut

Update on Voter ID
http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/10/02/pennsylvania-voter-id-halted-but-in-very-narrow-fashion/
http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/state/appeals-judge-set-to-rule-on-legitimacy-of-pas-new-voter-id-law-655226/
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/02/us-usa-campaign-pennsylvania-idUSBRE8900LA20121002
http://articles.philly.com/2012-10-20/news/34585536_1_regular-ballot-penndot-locations-voter
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/22/pennsylvania-newspaper-mount-pleasant-journal-falsely-claims-id-required-to-vote_n_2001373.html
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/local-govt-politics/questionable-palm-beach-county-voter-registration-/nSL5Y/
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57535950/man-charged-after-tossing-voter-registration-forms-in-virginia/
http://votingrights.news21.com/article/election-fraud-explainer/
http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/voting_law_changes_in_2012

RIP George McGovern
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote
http://www.policymic.com/articles/16946/george-mcgovern-near-death-how-great-white-eagle-fought-to-end-world-hunger
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/im-a-mcgovern-democrat-do_b_1980240.html
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/truthdigger_of_the_week_george_mcgovern_20121020/
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2012/10/21/george-mcgovern-obituary/1641975/
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2012/10/21/mcgovern-appreciation/1637259/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_McGovern