Jim Manis on Most Anything

Jim Manis can formulate an opinion about a good many things, including those about which he has little knowledge. (And some dude named "Lazlo.") Visit The MagicFactory.

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Double Take:

On the one hand, the Bush administration has claimed it has the right to arrest and spirit away anyone on the planet and do with them what they will without so much as a "thank you, ma'am" to anyone, simply by declaring them (us) "enemy combatants." (Have you read The Count of Monte Christo ?).

On the other hand, yesterday's New York Times reports that
State Department investigators offered Blackwater USA security guards immunity during an inquiry into last month’s deadly shooting of 17 Iraqis in Baghdad — a potentially serious investigative misstep that could complicate efforts to prosecute the company’s employees involved in the episode.
Keep in mind that Blackwater USA is a government contractor employed by the State Department. In other words, the Bush administration has rigged the outcome of any investigation against its private (Praetorian Guard) security firm.


Death Penalty Status:

The death penalty—a central ingredient of politicians' attempts to demonstrate they have the proper level of testosterone to intimidate the weak minded—has been placed on hold by the Supreme Court, that bastion of conservative ideology, of all places.

Linda Greenhouse reports on the issue in today's New York Times. The issue focuses on the chemicals used by prisons to kill people for the sake of garnering votes for prosecutors who either are or represent elected officials.


Throw More Money at It:

The Republican party has claimed throughout most of its history that "you can't fix problems by throwing more money at them." Mostly they've practiced this ideology when the problems were the sort that affected predominantly Democratic voters. When it comes to the military, for instance, the last Republican to show any restraint was Eisenhower. He was a guy, you might remember, who thought you could replace much of the traditional military with lots of cheap nuclear bombs. (That worked out well!)

Today's New York Times reports on the cost of spying in an article by Mark Mazzetti, who states that congress has authorized "spending $43.5 bilion over the past year to operate spy satellites, remote surveillance stations and C.I.A. outposts overseas."

The White House will tell you that the money has been well spent, that they have thwarted (fill in any number you choose here) terrorist attacks. Naturally, they won't be able to tell you anything about those alleged attacks. They were, after all, thwarted. (Did I tell you about the rain dance I did in my back yard before the last rain storm?)

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Saturday, October 27, 2007

Huge Paydays for Poor Performance:

Sometime in this coming baseball off season, the fabled A-Rod, stalwart third baseman currently for the New York Yankees will likely sign a ten-year contract for $300 million. Folks like my father will shake their heads in disbelief that a guy can be paid that kind of money to play a game.

But how about those business executives who receive hundreds of millions of dollars to do nothing? I'm talking about the huge payouts given to CEOs as exit pay when poor performance is rendered:

Merrill Lynch's E. Stanly O'Neal will reportedly be paid $159 million dollars if he's ousted after losing the company $8.4 billion. (That's right, with a "B.")

Pfizer's Henry A. McKinnell, Jr. collected $200 million to leave his company last year.

Morgan Stanley's Phillip J. Purcell left that company and received $114 million the year before.

In the meantime, the average working stiff has seen her or his income fall throughout the Bush administration's tenure in the White House. (Figures for this entry are from today's New York Times.)

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Friday, October 26, 2007

Once upon a time …

A little boy named Georgie ran out side into a rain storm. His daddy said, "Don't go out there! You'll just get wet. You might trip and fall in the mud. Lightning could strike you!"

Georgie Boy ran out side into the rain storm anyway. "I'm bringing sunshine to the world!" he proclaimed.

Georgie Boy got wet. He got very wet. He fell into the mud, and was very dirty.

Georgie Boy cried out from the mud and rain, "Come save me! I'm bringing sunshine to the world!"

But it was too late. Even his daddy couldn't save him. Georgie Boy had been struck by lightning.

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Sunday, October 21, 2007

Where's the money going?

To date
"America has … 'spent twice as much in inflation-adjusted dollars to rebuild Iraq as it did to rebuild Japan — an industrialized country three times Iraq’s size, two of whose cities had been incinerated by atomic bombs.' (And still Iraq lacks reliable electric power.)," as Frank Rich of The Times points out. Rich comes by his figures from the Vanity Fair article, "Billions over Baghdad," in this month's issue by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele.

A hundred years from now, Georgie Boy, historians will mark your administration as the most corrupt in history.

Tempest in Teapot:


Trying to brew something up as his numbers slip behind the front runner in the bid to become the Democratic party's presidential candidate, Barack Obama has called for the resignation of John Tanner, the chief of the Justice Department's civil rights division. According to The New York Times,

In a speech to a Latino group earlier this month in Los Angeles, Mr. Tanner said that a disproportionate share of elderly minority voters did not have identification, but added that it was not a widespread problem because of their life expectancy.

“Creating problems for elderly persons just is not good under any circumstance,” Mr. Tanner told the National Latino Congreso, according to a video posted on YouTube. “Of course, that also ties into the racial aspect because our society is such that minorities don’t become elderly the way white people do. They die first.”

It's reasonably clear that Tanner was being a bit insensitive in his language, but not completely off the mark. Senator Obama should focus his attention on the more relevant issue: call for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. Unfortunately, only one Democratic candidate has the guts to do that.


A Rose by Any Other Name:

Okay, New York Times, you got me today. So I'm looking at the headlines and this one grabs me: "Not All Are Pleased at Plan to Offer Birth Control at Maine Middle School." Middle school! What's up with this? Where I'm from—in fact everywhere I've been from—"middle school" means grades 4 - 6. Girls in middle school are between the ages of 8 and 12 or 13 at the most. What's going on in Maine? Has pedophilia been legalized?

It turns out that "middle school" in Maine is actually junior high. The girls there who have become sexually active are still too young, but somehow 13 to 15-year-olds seems a bit less preposterous to contemplate as sexually active than the aforementioned group. After all, it's not unheard of for fourteen-year-old girls to marry, although certainly not the recommended mode of behavior in the twenty-first century. There are plenty of health issues to consider.

Nevertheless, the use of the term "middle school" in this instant amounted to cheap journalism. I certainly wouldn't have placed as much importance on the story if the school level had been properly labeled. Knowing how many people only half hear the issues being discussed, I'd guess the right wing is eating this one up. I can just see the pictures on Fox News.

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Saturday, October 20, 2007

On the state of literature:

William Boyd in writing a review of William Trevor's Cheating at Canasta has this to say:

The essence of the Chekhovian story, and of the Chekhovian worldview, is that, as he himself once wrote to a friend: “It is time writers, especially those who are artists, recognized that there is no making out anything in this world.” Chekhov refuses to judge, refuses to explain, refuses to celebrate, refuses to “make out” anything — he simply depicts life as he sees it in all its banality and tragicomedy.
Boyd explains that "Trevor is frequently cited as a type of Irish Chekhov: the dark, worldly, bleak nature of his stories is believed to be akin to the dark, worldly, bleak nature of Chekhov’s short fiction."

Chekhov, Boyd points out, is the preeminent influence on letters over the past 100 years, and he is probably correct. Joyce may have captivated the critics, but it is Chekhov to whom young writers inevitably turn if they are serious in pursuing literature as art.

And this may explain why the reading of literature has fallen to an all time low. Reading is a habit that must be developed in youth, and it is rare that a young person will be captivated by a vision of the world that is Chekhovian.

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Sunday, October 14, 2007

Boot Camp for Cons — They Don't Work:

Yesterday's Washington Post reports on a good idea gone bad, boot camp for prisoners. The idea is that if you send a young, first time offender to what amounts to military style basic training, he'll come out with a new sense of responsibility and a strong disciplinary ethic. Unfortunately, the statistics don't back up the belief.

Recidivism for boot camp prisoners compared to other prison populations is — guess what — identical. That's right, all of that let's work the kid into shape stuff doesn't pay off. According to The Post, " Francis Cullen, a distinguished research professor in criminal justice at the University of Cincinnati, says their popularity was based on 'conventional quackery.' In the absence of scientific proof, the boot camps just seemed like a good idea."

It's interesting to note that the first boot camp opened in 1983, while that darling of the conservatives, Ronny Reagan, was president. The practice was part of that side of our personality that likes the notion of slapping bad boys around after they screw up. We just really like the idea of putting a but up somebody's backside, especially if we can do it vicariously, like at the movies or by hiring people to run boot camps.

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Saturday, October 13, 2007

On Public Speech and the inequities thereof:

Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature a few days ago, and in today's New York Times she addresses the issue of "political correctness" after having been criticized by the Yale professor and literary critic Harold Bloom of having received the award because granting it to her was "the politically correct thing to do."

Lessing has some interesting things to say on the subject, while avoiding Bloom's usual bombast. (Was there ever a more pompous ass in literature?) One cannot help but consider the current state of racial affairs her in the States in light of the recent less than politically correct behavior of many of our young people and the recent arrests, charges, and so forth concerning nooses and abusive language.

Being politically correct, of course, means that one ought not to say hurtful things about one's neighbors, but it has come to be both a bullying tactic and perhaps even worse a mask, a thin veneer under which a strong undertow of bigotry is allowed to continue.

For many of our young people, being politically correct has come to mean nothing more than to live with one's head buried in the sand, if not in some region of our anatomy too nefarious to mention here.

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Friday, October 12, 2007

Abortion, Legal and Otherwise:

Today's New York Times reports on a collaborative study between scientists from the World Health Organization and the Guttmacher Institute, indicating that the legality of abortion has little effect world-wide on whether women choose to have abortions or not. The big difference appears to be that in countries where the procedure is legal women seem to have a much better chance of surviving the procedure.

In addition, the report indicates that in countries where contraception is widely available the rate of abortions is dramatically lower.

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Gore Awarded Nobel Peace Prize:

The Nobel committee has just released its announcement for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, and Al Gore has won it for his work in bringing attention to global warming.

Speculation about a Gore run for the presidency in 2008 continues. Reportedly, former president Jimmy Carter has been pressing Gore to run, and Gore has asked him to stop calling. However, Gore has not stated emphatically that he would not run, causing a certain New York senator to sweat bullets.

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Sunday, October 07, 2007

The Voluntary Tax:

Today's New York Times reports on the state of state lotteries and the lies politicians tell us about just what they're good for. It's always amazed me that folks who claim to hate taxes and will vote down any increase will flock to their local lottery outlet and happily fritter away their meager weekly budgets on scams like these, but they do. Well, not all of them do. Rich folks almost never buy lottery tickets. The lottery is a government scam to exploit the poorest and least educated among us.

Most of the 42 states that have lotteries claim that some percentage of the money gambled will become part of the state educational budget. But it turns out that very little of the money is used for these purposes. The vendors get a big chunk of it, and the media which serves as the the advertising outlet also get a large share. Some of it is paid out to a tiny fraction of people who "play" it. (Your chances of winning are better in Vegas or Atlantic City.)

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Saturday, October 06, 2007

Where Are They Now:

Twenty years ago, the guy who turned faith healing, televangelist Oral Roberts, into a megabucks empire told his gullible followers that he needed millions are God was going to kill him. The faithful came forward and coughed up most of the money, and God, or whoever Oral is in league with, left him here on earth, still alive and kicking. So where is he now that he is no longer laying on hands? In California, soaking up the glorious sun, naturally.

Salon.com has an excellent story on the status of the Oral Roberts' empire and what happens when the next generation comes along. Click here to read it. At least this dude never ran for president or used his television station to tell the country that its president ought to murder people, like some other pseudo religious leaders have done.


How English Courts Are Helping Fund Jihad:

Maybe they are and maybe they aren't, but it seems as much as Americans have come to fear their courts, they might want to consider what's happening in England. This week's New York Times Book Review has an essay by Rachel Donadio explaining how libel is being abused in the English court system, in order to silence critics. It's worth a look.


"When We Torture People, It Ain't Torture:

It's only torture when the other guys do it. Heck fire, we got some good stuff out of those guys!" It's been all over the news late this week. Georgie Boy has been offering up his Cheneyesque excuses for subjecting "people of interest" to various forms of violent physical abuse.

This should be a wonderful lesson to every public school teacher. Got somebody doing something wrong in the classroom, on the playground, in the restroom? Just enlist the school bully to interrogate any likely suspect. Have the bully beat the crap out of the smallest kid and that child will surely squeal on whoever is causing the trouble, provided it's not the bully, of course.

We've met this enemy before, Pogo.

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