Bush's America:
1. Cut taxes for the rich;
2. Cut Medicaid;
3. Cut taxes for the rich;
4. Cut food stamps;
5. Cut taxes for the rich;
6. Cut funding for education;
7. Cut taxes for the rich;
8. Cut funding for transportation;
9. Cut taxes for the rich;
10. Cut health care for veterans;
11. Cut taxes for the rich;
12. Cut funding for law inforcement;
13. Cut taxes for the rich;
14. Cut funding for medical research;
15. Cut taxes for the rich;
16. Cut funding for safety inspections for food and drugs;
17. And cut taxes for the rich.

Things just keep getting better! Keep a good thought—wealth is trickling down (while it's flooding upward, can both things occur?)

Terri Schiavo
Michael Jackson
steroids in baseball
Bread and circuses
but the bread is growing meager and
more than a bit stale.

The Lexicon: According to Erin McKean, editor of the Oxford American Dictionary, the term "information superhighway" has fallen into disuse. If we use it any more, according to our lexiconographer, it is in a derisive way. It certainly didn't take long for this road to develop some massive potholes.

According the The American Heritage Dictionary, a "pothole" in Western U.S. usage is "A place filled with mud or quicksand." Sound familiar?

Fanning the Fires: The New York Times quoted Peter Roby, director of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University in Boston, today as saying, "I think people would be devastated to think that 1998 is not what we thought it was, that it was in some way a fabrication of the truth." The Times of course was referring to the allegations that Mark McGwire had used steroids to achieve his massive musculature in such a short period of time.

Who, one must wonder, are the "people" Roby is referring to? Six-year-olds? Did anyone ever NOT THINK that any of these players were doing everything they possibly could to build the bodies that allow them to earn the collosal sums of money they are paid. Senator Ted Kennedy called McGwire and Sosa "working class heroes" at the end of the 1998 season. And maybe they were. Working class people know you do what you gotta do to get ahead and stay there.

NOTE: Baseball may be a working class sport for people who play it, but if you've bought a ticket lately, you know it isn't a working class sport for the fans. By the way, have you been to the sporting goods store lately to buy a bat or glove? Not to mention officially sanctioned major league memorabilia. Talk about your credit card debt!

If congress is really concerned about looking into steroid use, they should take a gander at high school programs around the nation.

Forty Years Ago Today: President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress and asked for new legislation to guarantee the right to vote for everyone. Today's neo conmen will tell you they want to roll back history to void free love, drugs, and anti-war protestors. Get real! It's the civil liberties, free speech, and democracy movements they are really opposed to.

The anti-war folks hated LBJ, but he was the last liberal president this country had.

Tom DeLay's Defense Fund Growing: The Texas Republican's defense fund to help him fight prosecution for undermining democracy in Bush's adopted state has grown to over a reported $250,000. To date no charges have been filed. The investigation into his coharts' activities continues. The likelihood of a prosecution against DeLay seems, at least in Delay's mind, to be highly likely. Who'da thunk it?

Faith: It's what makes the world go 'round. Various folks on the left of our dearly beloved president are fond of mocking his notion of "faith," but without faith our world would collapse. Of course faith is a factor in many areas, perhaps all, of our lives other than a faith in a personal relationship with a supreme being.

Without faith our economic system would collapse quicker than a Neo Con can switch the topic of conversation when "no WMDs in Iraq" comes up. Since the Enron (read major Bush backers) scandel, ethics has been introduced into the business studies classroom. Students often respond by saying, "Oh, yeah, we have to talk about that because of Enron," but ethicical behavior is the gold standard in business.

Without trust, nothing would get done. It is part of every aspect of economics. Workers must trust that employers will pay them an agreed upon wage. Capitalists trust that the banks will function in their advertised manner. And the list goes on. It is no accident that almost all of the top business stories in the past two years have been about the failure of eithical standards in American business.

At times it seems we've entered an era when the ethical standard has become that of a used car salesman: talk really fast, smile a lot, and get away with what ever you are capable of.

Is there a connection between the increased lack of ethical behavior and the twenty-year practice of hiring super star, charismatic CEOs? The resent trend has been to dismiss these sorts.

Definition: "Shill": a former news reporter who participates in spreading "covert propaganda" for the government. Congress's own Government Accountability Office has labeled the Bush administration's stream of faus news segments as inappropriate (unethical). Interesting behavior for a group that came into office as a result of a backlash against inappropriate behavior on the part of leaders in the previous administration.

For Those Too Young to Remember: Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968 on a platform of his having a plan to extricate America from the Vietnam War. Tricky Dick resigned in 1974 without the war having ended. Afterward his resignation, we proclaimed victory and left. Perhaps that was the secret Brother Dick was talking about in the '68 campaign.

Acts of Desperation: In Chicago, a man breaks into a judge's home and kills her mother and husband. In Atlanta, a prisoner in a courtroom shoots his guard, kills a judge and a court reporter, then a second guard. He car jacks a number of autos, shoots two more people, killing one, and kidnaps a woman, before surrendering to police. The next day a third man opens fire at a church service and kills seven innocent persons before killing himself.

It's as if the first person has granted permission to the others to commit these terrible acts of desperation, acts that result only in death and misery for all concerned.

This isn't new. These violent behavior seems to come in bunches. Let's hope that the current rash of such incidents has run it's course.

Congress, Baseball, and Steroids: Tell all Jose Conseco is asking for imunity from prosecution when he testifies before congress on the steroids issue. Congress, it is theorized, is likely to give it to him, possibly because he's promised to show members how to safely administer them? Sure, you think that's just a bad joke!

Pundits have asked the question, "Why just baseball players, why not football and basketball players?" Well, there's a new team in Washington, and the congressmen want to get in on the excitement. Politicians have no interest in "cleaning up the game." They're after the press, folks. This is photo op time supremo. Now they can get on the sports news, and there is always an election coming up. Think what Tom DeLay can do with hardcore Bush supporter Curt Schilling. Better than a New York fireman anytime, but especially in the spring. Oh, yes, the millionaire boys of summer are coming to town, providing lots of distraction—it's circus time in D.C.

The other two major sports: Basketball just ain't the same without MJ., even with a winning team in the capitol; and football is about the furthest thing from our minds now that the Superbowl lacked a culturally rich bit of costume malfunction. Let's face it: you remember Boston's heroic World Series drive better than the Superbowl game, even though the winning team was from the same state.

Taxes and the Federal Budget: Those of you who have been worried about the federal government going bankrupt should stop worrying. You'll be pleased to know that middle-income Americans will be replinishing government coffers with record deposits of tax money soon enough.

The Stealth Tax (Alternative Minimum Tax) is about to take a major bite out of your income. Increasing millions of American tax payers (people too poor to hide their money in offshore tax shelters and the like) will be kicking in lots more money. The Bush administration has been keeping quiet on this one. Why not? They and their ilk, the super rich, will remain virtually unaffected. Only about 35 percent of millionaires will be affected at all by the Stealth Tax.

What Is Power? The processing power in your kid's X-Box has 17,000 times more power than the processing power used on the lunar module that landed men on the moon in 1969. Is the X-Box a greater achievement than landing on the moon? Of course not. That's apples to oranges, you say. But the comparison is a typical one made by Wall Street, journalists, and politicians, as if a toy is somehow equivelant to that of placing humans on the moon (not to mention safely returning them).

The state of Mississippi like many others is having trouble with Medicaid. They're broke, and the Republicans who run the state don't want to raise the taxes needed to take care of the sick who live in poverty. The liberal answer is to place a fifty-cent per pack tax on cigarettes. Let's see, only one out of four adults now smoke, and they are predominantly poor and uneducated folks who, far the most part, don't vote. Sounds like a safe tax to impose, and since there is no real effort being made to get people to quit smoking on the part of the government, why not tax these folks?

Mississippi isn't the only state trying to raise taxes on tobacco in order to cover their lack of revenue. However, Mississippi is one of the few states who used their wind fall tax benefit that came after the massive tobacco settlement in the late nineties. You'll remember that a number of state prosecutors sued the tobacco companies back then and gained billions in a settlement that purportedly would allow the states to recoup lost tax revenues. The real truth is that the states were always complicit with the tobacco industry and that it was a safe way to fill their coffers. Tobacco, by the way, has earned record profits ever since.

Definition: "Tobacco Settlement": a means by which government conspires with big tobacco to further milk poor people.

Quiet! We are busy fighting a war for freedom—abroad. You must give up your freedom here at home (unless you are currently in power).

More than two million people are behind bars in America. The U.S. currently ranks number one in terms of the ratio of its citizens incarcerated per population. There's a lot of "justice" in the good old U.S. of A. Or a lot of criminals. Maybe we just have too many laws to keep track of. Anyway, it costs us more than $60 billion to keep the nasties locked up. The good news: they get the worst health care of any group in our society. There goes that theory about coddling our criminals. That's okay, though, because these bad boys and girls got caught and convicted of breaking our laws, even though some of them didn't actually do the deed that they got sent to prison for. Tough, somebody has to make sacrifices for this country to be great. Just as long as it ain't me and mine.

Oh, yeah, states are cutting health care to prisoners. "In as much as you do this unto the least …"

The War on Terror: In the past decade more than 300 linguists were forced out of the military because they were gay. In the meantime, terrorists are buying guns right here in the U.S., legally. It's good to know we have our priorities in order. We can't get good info in the Mid-East because we don't have enough people who speak Arabic or Farsi, but our guys in uniform are safe from contamination from gay guys. And our gun dealers are safe from unfair regs that might actually prevent them from selling weapons to thugs, murderers, and terrorists.

The Second Front against the Working Class: Congress is about to pass a bill to curtail working people's abilities to protect themselves, by limitting our chances of being able to escape credit card debt by declaring bankruptcy.

Most of the bankruptcy cases initiated to escape credit card debt are the result of medical emergencies, job loss, and divorce, catastrophic events in real people's lives. The banks would have us believe that wastrel consumers are running amuk in the malls, or perhaps downloading tons of porn.

Don't feel sorry for the banks/credit card companies. They are awash in cash, so much so that they make the cash rich oil companies look like pikers. A quarter of a century later (that's 25 years), we're still waiting for that "trickle down economy" thing to kick in.

The ownership society: Both of my grandfathers worked in the coal mines in the good old days. That was an ownership society. Workers were private contractors, forced to purchase all their own tools and goods, including food, from the company owned store. They were perpetually in debt and unable to extract themselves from their jobs with the mine owners.

In the south, sharecroppers were in the same situation. You contracted with a large landowner to raise crops on his land. He got rich off your labor while your debt to him grew in perpetuity. The landowner was assured of cheap labor forever without any responsibilty for his workforce. The forces at play here are the same as in that "by-gone day."

And you say you don't believe in vampires. (Insert incredulous facial expression here.)

What's Wrong with College: They are changing the SATs again. The major change under consideration is adding an essay portion to the exam. This is good news for someone, probably many someones. The SATs themselves are being questioned with regard to their relevancy. That's bad news for the industry that creates them and for the folks who sell materials and services meant to prepare students to score highly on them. So they need to be changed.

Let's not panic folks. No one who graduates from high school is going to be denied a college education because of low SAT scores. The sole relative factor here is money. The cost of education continues to far outpace inflation, and it was already expensive to start with.

Decades ago when I graduated from high school, the financial concern facing young people was the loss of income over the four-year period during which one earned a bachelor's degree. No one thought much about tuition, fees and books, unless they were headed for an Ivy League school. Nowadays attending your neighboring state college will require a second mortgage on the old plantation.

In the good old days, the hard sell pitch came in the form of demonstrating to young people just how much more money they'd earn over the course of their lives with that college diploma in hand. Today the argument is about why it is okay to start off one's career with a debt load equivalent to that of having purchased a home.

New SAT old SAT, neither makes much difference to the real issues at hand.

Poetry: "A poem that communicates something that's already known … is not really communicating anything." – John Ashbery, referring not just to content but to voice and tone.

This is a purely American vision. The rest of the world, with the possible exception of Australia, measures itself through its historical context, and poetry is no exception. In England Shakespeare is revered for having done better what others did ; in American The Bard is honored for having invented the modern/psycological man. In England Hamlet is a better Hamlet than all the other Hamlets who have gone before; in America Hamlet is the new Hamlet, shaped from whole cloth, sprung like Athena from the brow of genius.

Somewhere between, the truth lies, and therein resides the soul of poetry, as ambiguous as ever.

Oil: Economists are now saying that the price of gasoline will go up by as much as 30 cents a gallon in the coming months. Speculators continue to push the price of crude beyond fifty dollars a barrell, and the economists argue that gas prices are woefully low by comparison. Meanwhile the oil companies and countries are awash in cash. Energy companies are swimming in a sea of money.

Voluntary Taxes: The state of Illinois wants to go on line with its gambling empire that currently generates something like 2 billion dollars a year in voluntary taxes. The governor suspects the state could free up some rich folks' money over the Web, especially from out-of-state folks. Currently, the majority of lotto players are poor folks who frequent the shops where tickets can be purchased in person and where people might have to stand in line.

Definition: "Value Added Tax": A rich man's scheme to increase the amount of taxes working people pay to support the benefits the rich receive as citizens of this country.

Sex in the Postmodern Age: The Kobe Bryant sex case has slipped out of sight, much to the relief of the LA Lakers and no doubt Kobe Bryant. What's the real truth? Did Kobe rape the young woman? Was she just a gold digger out for a big payday? (There's nothing new about this, there have always been a few women willing to stoop to using this method to fleece star athletes.) Was the prosecutor out to make a reputation off the back of a star athlete? (There's nothing new about this either. Most of the death penalty cases that come before criminal courts can be reduced to this behavior.)

The real lesson here is that if you are a celebrity, whether in sports or politics (right, Bill?), is to keep it zipped.

Quote of the year: Ronnie Earle, district attorney of Travis County, Texas, who has been investigating the shenanigans of the PAC set up by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, responded recently to criticism by Delay who accused him of partisanship by saying that having the Leader refer to him in that manner was "like being called ugly by a frog."

DeLay has stated that he has not been paying any attention to the investigation, but reports indicate that he has been soliciting funds to pay for a defense should the investigation lead to an indictment. The Clintons must be smiling.

Supreme Court: In a decision that defies right wing pandering, the Supreme Court today announced that the death penalty for felons who committed their acts prior to the age of eighteen is now considered "cruel and unusual punishment." Conservatives who pander to the eye-for-an-eye citizens among us will respond that the acts these felons have committed are also cruel and unusual, and no doubt they are correct.

Ultimately the question as always comes down to whether we want to have a government that is in the business of murdering our fellow citizens so that the rest of us can feel smug and sanctimonious while continuing to avoid building a society in which acts of violence committed by some members of our society are at the very least reduced by eliminating poverty, improving education, and behaving in a general manner that illustrates our Biblican heritage of being our brother's keeper.

The Space/Time Continuum: Since the end of World War Two, it has become cliche to remark on the Earth as a shrinking planet. Considering the rapidly growing population and the complexity of issues that everyone must face today, perhaps the Earth hasn't shrunk at all. Maybe it's expanding. If so, we'd better hope the growth is sustainable.

Speaking of Complex Places: Bill Gates, the world's richest man and co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, addressed the nation's governors recently and chided them over the collapse of education in America, particularly the floundering morass that we call "high school."

According to Gates, "today only one-third of our students graduate from high school ready for college, work and citizenship." Gates wants us to "design high schools to meet the needs of the 21st century." Gates gave the governors a figure meant to startle, perhaps even terrify them when he reported that China, a country that is yet to meet the standards of a developed nation, is matriculating six (6) times as many engineers as U.S. colleges. Gates places the blame on poorly designed high schools.

In typical CEO fashion, Gates has tossed down the gauntlet, but his sole suggestion for a solution to the problem was "high schools should be smaller." It was good to see someone of Gates' stature take a public stand on this issue. But we must remember that Brother Bill got to be the world's richest man by being the world's most effective salesman. Someone else will have to engineer the right changes in our educational system before the salesman can sell it.

You can read more about Gates' speech in the LA Times. It has also been broadcast on C-SPANN, so you know it'll show up again, repeatedly.