Pat Political

Sparrows

I absolutely have to write about my sparrow today, for today is the day that all "mothers" both eagerly await and just as intensely dread. 

For the past two weeks my daughter-in-law Grace and I have been the surrogate mothers for a baby sparrow which Grace and Rama had found in our barn.  She has looked equally to each of us to feed her, but she has been residing in my part of our house because they have cats and I no longer do.  I spend a good part of my day in a chair beside my computer, and she has spent most of hers on my shoulder cuddling against my neck.  She has gone to sleep nesting on my head.  I have left her there until dark when I gently place her on the back of my chair and head for bed myelf.  I have had to go to bed early because she wakes up early and cheeps loudly for my attention.  This morning she surprised me by flying into my bedroom to greet me. 

This is my second try at raising a sparrow.  Back in the days when my eldest son, who is now nearing sixty, was only twelve, I succeeded in rearing another and sending it out into the world.  That little bird I remember especially because it would sit on my son's shoulder while he was practicing his piano.  As long as my son kept playing, the bird would just sit.  But if he stopped, the bird would peck at him until he started playing again...!

This little sparrow has thrived on our care and now is flying really well.  Also within the past two days she is now feeding herself.  This involved a bit of struggle between the sparrow and me.  I could see that her beak was maturing and I was watching for her to start picking at the birdseed I have sprinkled liberally on the floor.  She surprised me by starting to pick at her baby food first.  But as soon as I saw this, I refused to feed her any more.  Ths meant I received quite a few indignant pecks before she finally accepted her new status.

As quickly as I could, I followed her out of the bedroom and opened the door onto the deck.  I have been putting birdseed out there the past two days to attract other sparrows, hoping that they and she will become interested in each other.

And this morning has been the day.  She has just come in again from her second venture out with some of her cousins into the rest of the world.  A the moment she is back on my shoulder, resting up from her forays.  And I am wondering whether her next trip out will be the final one....

Some more odds and ends

Canada is about to bcome the third country in the world to provide equal rights for both homo and hetero sexual unions.  We used to lead the world in generous support for diversity among people.  Now we seem to have slipped to somewhere in the lower ten.  Maybe not quite so low as Pakistan, with its still official sanction of rape as a tool for disciplining women.  But for our women it is still a tool of terror.

Mr. Scrushy was acquited on all counts of fraud by a smpathetic jury.  It may be just as well that he seems to be launched on a new career of religious broadcasting.  If I were a member of the board for a company seeking a new CEO, I wouldn't choose one who stated as his defense that his financial people were all rogues who deceived him.  A good CEO, I thought, is one who knows his people and the operations of his company thoroughly.

On Terry Gross's radio show for Tuesday, June 28th, her guest was Richard Ellis talking about the history of the Pledge of Allegiance To The Flag he has written.  This is very worth listening to.  I tried linking you with it, but wasn't successful this time.  You can find it at npr.org/programs.  Go down the list to Fresh Air and click on.

In all the debates over the Ten Commandment monuments I have never heard mention of the two Great Commandments.  If these monuments claim to be Christian, why are not these two Commandments on the monuments.  Check out Mark 12, verses 29-31.  The verses end with the words "There is no other commandment more important than these two." 

Bush's Tuesday Speech

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President Bush has a major marketing speech to make on Tuesday

Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois did not owe an apology to the county for his remarks about Guantanamo. The Senator was speaking for people like me. There is no one who does not support our young people who are doing the actual fighting. What I cannot support is how the Republican leadership is waging this war and expending more and more of their lives. There were too few troops used in the initial invasion and now we are facing the high cost of maintaining our troops because of Rumsfeld’s expensive privatizations of traditional army functions. But what is perhaps worse than the botching of the invasion is how we are labeling and treating combatants.

It is Senator McCain who owes the apology both to Senator Durbin and to every disturbed and upset American like myself. And I am deeply ashamed for him that he has found it necessary, he a veteran himself, to follow the Bush Republican line of attack, to be just like Carl Rove.

The President will no doubt say that our enemies are targeting innocent civilians and that this is against the rules of war.

Regrettably this is not true.

WWI was the last modern war fought mainly as army against army. In WWII modern war became directed primarily against ‘innocent civilians’. Although the Germans began this change in warfare with their bombing of London early in the war, it was our country which really finalized it with our fire bombing of Dresden and Berlin and later with the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Neither Japanese city had any sort of military target to justify these bombs, only millions of ‘innocent civilians’. The number of people who died in the attack on the World Trade Towers is not even 1$ of the number of civilians we consigned to death with the atom bombs. The Germans have apologized for their atrocities, but we have never apologized to Japan for ours.

There was also a change in our country’s attitudes toward combatants which began during WWII.

Almost none of us disagreed with the characterization of Hitler as “evil”. And later it was also easy to call the Communism of Stalin “evil.” You will recall it was during the Cold War of the fifties that it seemed important to add the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance to point out that we felt ourselves to be on the side of God.

And so it has been fairly easy for us to allow President Bush to call every single person or country which is against us in any way as “evil” or “terrorist”. No one can make peace with “evil”. This must mean that President Bush sees us locked in an endless struggle, perhaps with a still another as yet undesignated “evil” enemy.

And anyone who is ‘evil’ or ’terrorist’ is sub-human, does not have to be treated with any sort of decency or rule of law. You will recall that Pvt Graner stated during Lyndie England’s trial he did know he was doing anything that was against the law. We ought to have learned from our ugly history of slavery not to treat anybody, no matter how terrible the crime, as less than human.

No doubt the President will be urging us forward in our mission to bring democracy to Iraq. This has been the one selling point for the war which has not been proven false. It is the ugliness of his designation of all who oppose us as sub-human that the President will have to work hardest to justify.

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Iranian election

The Iranian election result which was announced today is as much a vote against the USA as it was for the so-called hardliner.

What we don’t want to see is that it is American business which is so disliked, not only by the Muslim world generally but by many in Europe as well.

And what’s to like about it. Business our style operates without any sense of responsibility either to the community from which it makes its money or to its employees.

If we really want to win the ’war against terror’, we will force American business to stop thinking of itself as a community separate from the rest of us and make it become part of every community in which it operates, sharing in the cost of community infrastructure-- health and education and water, sewers, roads, etc.

Affirmative action and Bush

Olin Robison has just uttered the best commentary I have yet heard on VPR and has given me my smile for the day.

Olin reminded us that affirmative action has come to mean people will be chosen by colleges for something other than academic excellence-- ethnicity, gender, economic condition, etc.

We all know that President Bush has spoken out against affirmative action.

And, yet, Olin told us, both he and President Bush got into college on affirmative action.

Olin confessed that he learned his graduate appointment in England many years ago was based on the deciding professors feeling that it would be interesting to have a Texan as a student.

How did President Bush get into Yale? Certainly not on the basis of his high school grades. His father and grandfather both graduated from Yale, and this fact got him his place.

Absolutely, Olin, our good President got into college on affirmative action principles, and I thank you for this reminder....

A Fleet Alex

Horse genes are definitely part of me. I came north to Vermont for grandchildren, winter, and horses. And in my early years here I delighted in the horse barn work, the mucking out of stalls, bringing horses out to pasture in the morning and bringing them back in at evening. I did more riding here than I had managed in the previous fifty years and even was able to keep riding until a year and a half ago when my crippled condition made it too difficult to continue.

This year watching the three classic horse races, the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont, was a priority. It was during the early coverage of the Derby that I learned about Alice and the colt named in her honor, A Fleet Alex. Alice had a childhood cancer and in the last years of her young life established a lemonade stand the proceeds of which were devoted to research into childhood cancers and the support of other afflicted children. Her example has inspired many other lemonade stands. (I am quoting what I remember hearing. I attempted to verify this with a Google search, but apparently Alice’s lemonade stand does not rate a Google entry.)

And of course I who love both children and horses immediately became a passionate backer of A Fleet Alex, both for himself and for Alice.

When he came in third, a long shot, at the Derby. I was more than satisfied. But then came the Preakness with his unbelievable recovery from so near a fall to win that race. Even people who are not horse people responded to that one. And then I was nearly ecstatic when at Belmont he came from well behind the leading horses to gallop down the finish length well out in front of every other horse.

Moments like this are an antidote for me to the grimness of Iraq and my constant anger and dismay at the attacks of the Bush Republicans on the well-being of our country...!

More Odds and Ends

How very nice that Citi Cards is allowing me to help compensate those good people who lost their money in the Enron debacle! My credit card interest rate has increased to a whopping 24.990% annually within the past two months.

And how nice that Vice President Cheney thinks that the Democrats shouldn’t want someone like Howard Dean representing them. Howard’s plain and clear attacks on Republicans are the Democrats’ only hope to defeat Republicans in the next elections. If he keeps up, he may even lure me back to my intention to vote Democratic when he was still a Presidential candidate. Cheney, of course, prefers the Centrist Democrats, like Clinton, Lieberman, Kerry, and Edwards, who all are the ‘closet Republicans’ of the Democratic party with their strong ties to the same business-oriented philosophy of the Bush Republicans.

The problem with the Democratic Senators in our state legislature and health care for Vermonters is that too many of them are also Centrist Democrats, and are arguing health care in Republican terms. They have not been willing to join the House Democrats in boldly striking out against Douglas’s approach. They have not been willing to state that health care is a Community responsibility and in no way should be a business expense. The net result of their lack of action is that they are helping to re-elect Douglas and will thereby lose everything the House Democrats have gained for Vermonters and health care.

As the trial in Philadelphia Mississippi for the murder of the three civil rights activists begins, I am reminded of Condaleeza Rice’s vague and ambivalent reply to one Senator’s query about her family’s support of Martin Luther King’s civil rights struggle. I would like to hear more. I am left wondering whether her father was one of the ardent activists who joined with King or whether her minister father was one who counseled moderation, holding back, less activism. If she grew up in such a family, then her great success as a black woman has been piggy-backed on the many black and white activists who gave even their lives to this cause. My admiration for her achievements would be much diminished and my understanding of her devotion to the Bush Republicans much enhanced.

Our private armies

A lot of attention is being given lately to the private security armies in Iraq and the high degree of privatization of army functions generally. I have actually heard it stated on NPR news that private organizations were responsible for interrogations at Abu Ghraib. Here is clearly the reason that no one higher than a Specialist has been charged with crimes against detainees.

Why not?

Because the Congress of the United States has no authority over any of these private organizations.

Only the owner businesses have any control.

Anyone who believes that the Second Amendment is important ought to be running scared about this.

Another point is that the use of private firms to perform what used to be army functions is that this is making our army much more expensive for us taxpayers than it used to be. And we don’t want to forget that fully 25% of the money allocated for rebuilding Iraq is going to support these private security armies.

We need to restore the citizen based army we have had until Donald Rumsfeld worked to change it.

We also need to face the fact that if we are at war-- and I have not heard President Bush state otherwise-- we need to start up the Draft.

Now I know that the Draft became very unpopular during the Viet Nam years. But this was another “bad” war in which we should not have become embroiled. I go back to WWII when the Draft provided an equal opportunity for all to participate in the defense of our country. Right now who is being pursued as a candidate for our volunteer army is someone with strong financial need. Why should not the Bush twins or any young people attached to our Federal Congress be given the equal incentive to become part of our active defense.

Odds and Ends

Heard on BBC World news this morning a comment from a British Lord that while he has great faith in the American people he finds the country to be strangely governed. So do I, my lord!

The stock market, I note, is giving its usual response to any talk about job loss. GM will be eliminating some 25,000 jobs, and its stock value has risen.

For those of you who enjoy as I do a satirical commentary on the news I recommend Harry Shearer’s Le Show. He does one a week, and posts it on the web on Tuesday. I just finished listening to his most recent show, June 5th, and it is delightful. Click on his past performances button and find the May 29th show in which he reduces to garbage-can-only President Bush’s answer to a reporter who asked him whether we were winning the war on terrorism.

The decision against Medical Marijuana by the Supreme Court did not surprise me. But that federal regulation of homegrown marijuana as interstate commerce should be the basis of the Court’s decision does. Can one appeal a Supreme Court decision? If so, the obvious appeal lies in the fact that marijuana grown by individual users for medical purposes is not being offered on the market and so no commercial law should regulate it.

This is a moment for action by those of us who care about this issue. First we need to contact our three federal representatives to urge them at once to join with representatives of the other states which have also legalized marijuana for medical use to initiate the necessary Congressional legislation. Second we need to urge Attorney General Sorrel to sue either the Court or the Administration, or both, on the grounds that our Ninth and Tenth amendment rights to regulate for the benefit of our citizens’ health are being violated by the Supreme Court’s decision.

Brian on his Burlington news blog posted an article last week about a specialty credit card the Democratic National Committee is sponsoring by a form letter signed by Howard Dean. I commented on it the other day. Howard Dean has reverted to his position as a Centrist Democrat when he was Governor. Gone is the firebrand who made me ready to vote for him to be President, the man who actually talked about the Declaration of Independence, who told us that we had the power, and who garnered so many $5 and $10 donations from other hopefuls like myself.

But at least the Republican party is profiting from this earlier Howard. The Times Argus gave us a story on June 6th about a New Jersey Republican candidate Bret Schundler who took a photo of Howard in front of a crowd of cheering supporters, had Howard’s face removed, and replaced it with his own!

Finally, speaking about Republicans, our Governor delivered a most unpleasant diatribe in his closing remarks about the past legislative session. I hope that some of our died-in-the-wool old time Vermont Republicans will begin to look more closely at what Governor Douglas really stands for.