The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country by Howard Fineman
Random House, 320 pp.

Americans love to argue. In fact, we would not be Americans if we didn’t.

So says journalist Howard Fineman in his new book, The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates that Define and Inspire Our Country. Arguing, Fineman says, is what we do and who we are. “We are the arguing country, born in and born to debate,” he writes. “We are an endless argument.”

Fineman is Newsweek’s senior Washington correspondent and columnist, and he’s a news analyst for NBC and MSNBC. By his own description, he has covered every presidential campaign and major candidate since 1983.

In The Thirteen American Arguments, Fineman taps into his decades of experience to find perspective on the American experiment. He looks not at petty partisan bickering and political posturing but rather at the larger, fundamental questions Americans have wrestled over since the country’s founding.

“To understand our nature, and to sustain it, we need to appreciate the lucky mix of accident and intention that made us who we are,” he writes. “We have been debating our very identity from the first days of our existence. Was this to be a Christian New Jerusalem, a Dutch speculation, or an English shire?” Those competing views in many ways still jockey for dominance, he says, but the most important thing is the tug-of-war balance that has resulted.

In that same way, America has defined itself through thirteen ongoing arguments that, in various combinations, pit the State, Church, Tribe, Market, and Academy against one another—with individuals caught in the middle. The tug-of-war balance that results from the arguments themselves “define, inspire, and ultimately unite us by bestowing legitimacy on hard-fought deals,” Fineman says. “Arguing keep us moving fitfully forward.”

Fineman arranges his arguments into what he calls “concentric circles” that ripple out from the individual to the world itself and, finally, to the abstract ideal.

For instance, who is a person, who is an American, and what responsibilities do Americans have toward each other? What can Americans be told to believe in matters of faith?

As a country, how do we define money and manage debt? How do we balance centralized versus decentralized government? What is the relative strength of the president “in a federal scheme dedicated to find the midpoint between monarch and mob”?

What is our place in the world and what is out relationship with other countries? What role do trade, diplomacy, and war play in those relationships?

Does the environment belong to the current generation to use and exploit or is the environment something we hold in trust for future generations?

And what does it mean to have—and what do we have to do to achieve—that “more perfect Union” our Founding Fathers envisioned?

Don’t expect to find the arguments articulated in a civics book. As packaged neatly here in a convenient and catchy list of thirteen, they are Fineman’s creations, but the debates themselves are certainly as old and as vital as Fineman suggests.

Fineman explores each question from historical as well as modern perspectives, taking great care to first ground each question by drawing on contemporary events. As he explores “Who is a person,” for instance, he starts on the steps of the Illinois state capital as Barack Obama launched his presidential bid. Fineman draws parallels between Obama and Lincoln, “the Great Emancipator,” and from there examines a number of facets to the question of personhood.

He looks at the old debate over slavery (were slaves people or property), the current debate over abortion (when does a fetus qualify for “personhood”) and the not-too-distant questions that will arise in the future over genetic experimentation.

If Fineman had his way, Americans would argue more. “Rather than argue too much, which is the conventional wisdom’s critique, we in fact do not argue enough about the fundamentals,” he says. The Thirteen American Arguments, he hopes, is one more way to encourage continued dialogue—a dialogue in which everyone has a role. 

“If arguing is our saving grace, everyone must feel they have a voice and a chance to be heard,” he writes. “Do they?”

And the argument goes on.

I’m not sure I understand exactly what it is in us that responds so powerfully to illusion - maybe it’s that the day-to-day world is so mundane and bereft of hope that we’re automatically drawn to even the most subliminal suggestion that there could be more to life than meets the eye.

In any case, there are people out there doing stuff that’s just … he did what?! The two biggest names these days are Criss Angel and, of course, David Blaine, who’s hands-down the craziest bastard alive. So for today’s edition of SVR, let’s kick back and enjoy being hoodwinked for a few minutes, shall we?

Up first, Criss Angel and his famous coin trick. Not only do I not know how he does this, I don’t know why.

Next, the aforementioned David Blaine, who has inflicted some of the most horrific torments on himself that we’ve ever seen. He’s also a demon with card tricks. But here’s my favorite - levitation.

Finally, I’m not sure what’s going on with Derren Brown here, exactly - this is less about magic and more about fast-talking, but if this is actual man-in-the-street stuff, it’s a little scary.

Of course, I’m easily baffled, I guess. To me, a toaster is magic. In any case, it’s a mysterious world out there, so always keep a can of skeptical spray in your purse.

Happy Saturday.

Every news show needs a producer like that if you ask me.

Thanks to CollegeHumor.com for the clip and to JS O’Brien for passing this along.

Hhaing The Yu, 29, in rain falling on the ruins of his home, in a township outside Yangon, Myanmar.

This is not about politics; it is about saving people’s lives. There is absolutely no more time to lose.

— United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, pressing the military junta in Myanmar to accept international assistance as hundreds of thousands of its citizens reel from the effects of a devastating cyclone earlier this month; May 14.

• Oppose those relying on external elements, acting as stooges, holding negative views
• Oppose those trying to jeopardize stability of the State and progress of the nation
• Oppose foreign nations interfering in internal affairs of the State
• Crush all internal and external destructive elements as the common enemy

— text under the page 2 headline “People’s Desire” in the May 13 edition of Myanmar’s state newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar.

So many of the loans made were irresponsible — for the borrowers and for the lenders. Lenders have an interest in painting themselves as responsible, even caring entities. They want to cast blame for the sub-prime meltdown as much as possible on their borrowers.

— Kurt Eggert, an expert on predatory lending at Chapman University Law School in Anaheim, Calif.; May 10.

This listing will not stop global climate change or prevent any sea ice from melting. At no time was there ever a suggestion that this was not my decision.

— Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne on the Bush administration’s decision to declare the polar bear a threatened species because of the decline in Arctic sea ice from global warming; an April 29 court order forced the Interior Department to act by May 15; May 14.

If all the members of the House would go out onto the steps and clap our hands three times and say, ‘Down prices, down prices,’ that would have as much impact as passing this bill.

— Rep. Joe L. Barton of Texas, the senior Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, on Congress’s vote to order the Bush administration to halt stockpiling 70,000 barrels of oil a day in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve; May 14.

It is not surprising, then, that many elected officials with input or voting power in the process of the appropriation of the Pentagon budget find themselves in the pocket of defense contractors. Neither is it surprising that these dubious relationships should serve as breeding grounds for the near legendary levels of waste, inefficiency, and corruption that surround the military-industrial-congressional complex.

Two major conclusions follow from this discussion. The first is that, as pointed out earlier, war and political instability in the Middle East are the major driving forces behind the soaring price of oil; and that, therefore, to contain or reverse the rising trend of energy prices requires bringing US troops home. The second conclusion is that achievement of this goal, the goal of ending US wars of aggression, is possible only if (a) money or profits are taken out of war, and (b) money is taken out of elections.

.
— from a Middle East Online commentary by Drake University economics professor Ismael Hossein-zadeh, author of “The Political Economy of US Militarism”; May 14.

What we see at the gasoline pump is increasingly driven by what is happening elsewhere in the global economy.

— Daniel Yergin, the chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a consulting firm, in a New York Times story that reports gasoline “refiners are caught in a double bind. The price of their raw material, oil, is rising because of strong global demand. At the same time, consumption of gasoline in the United States is falling as a result of slower economic growth and consumer efforts to conserve”; May 14.

We regulate the trading of onions much more closely than the trading of oil.

— Mark Cooper, research director for the Consumer Federation of America, a nonprofit advocacy group, calling for regulation of oil speculation; May 15.

Dubbed the “California,” this concept Ferrari is a V8-powered two-seater intended to cope with ever-rising gas prices and environmental concerns. Among a laundry list of Ferrari firsts, the California features a retractable convertible hardtop and a newly designed, 7-speed, dual clutch gearbox. The slick new gearbox, when coupled with the California’s 460 hp, 4.3 liter engine makes for quicker shift times and acceleration from zero to 60 mph in about four seconds.

— lede to a BusinessWeek story headlined “Ferrari’s Smaller Prancing Pony”; emphasis added.

I propose that we begin a program in education to ensure every American child the fullest development of his mind and skills.

I propose that we begin a massive attack on crippling and killing diseases.

I propose that we launch a national effort to make the American city a better and a more stimulating place to live.

I propose that we increase the beauty of America and end the poisoning of our rivers and the air that we breathe.

I propose that we carry out a new program to develop regions of our country that are now suffering from distress and depression.

I propose that we make new efforts to control and prevent crime and delinquency.

I propose that we eliminate every remaining obstacle to the right and the opportunity to vote.

I propose that we honor and support the achievements of thought and the creations of art.

I propose that we make an all-out campaign against waste and inefficiency.

— President Lyndon B. Johnson, State of the Union address, Jan. 4, 1965.

I believe that we now have the opportunity to say to America that this is a farm bill that truly does assure that we continue to have the safest, most affordable, most abundant food supply in the world. We have addressed the needs of America’s farmers and ranchers.

— Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte of Virginia, the senior Republican on the Agriculture Committee, after the House approved a five-year, $307 billion farm bill that President Bush has adamantly said he would veto; May 15; emphasis added.

Where’s the beef? Where’s the real reform?

— Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wisc., “standing in the House floor next to a poster showing sharp increases in commodity prices — 126 percent for wheat, 57 percent for soybeans, 45 percent for corn” during debate on the farm bill; May 15.

In my zeal to oppose anti-Semitism and bigotry in all its ugly forms, I have often emphasized the darkest chapters in the history of Catholic and Protestant relations with the Jews. In the process, I may have contributed to the mistaken impression that the anti-Jewish violence of the Crusades and the Inquisition defines the Catholic Church. It does not.

— from a letter of apology by Rev. John C. Hagee, “whose anti-Catholic remarks created a controversy when Senator John McCain received his endorsement for the Republican presidential nomination with fanfare,” to William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights; Mr. Donohue’s response: “Well, miracles do happen. If I wasn’t a believer before, I sure am now”; May 14.

This is bullshit, this is malarkey. This is outrageous, for the president of the United States to go to a foreign country, to sit in the Knesset … and make this kind of ridiculous statement. … He has increased the number of terrorists in the world. It is his policies that have produced this vulnerability that the U.S. has. It’s his [own] intelligence community [that] has pointed this out, not me.

— Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., responding to President Bush’s address to the Israeli parliament in which Democrats believe he accused presidential candidate of spreading the “false comfort of appeasement”; May 15.

Juveniles and former child soldiers should be treated first and foremost as candidates for rehabilitation and reintegration into society, not subjected to further victimization.

— Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU’s human rights program, on reports that “[t]he United States has detained approximately 2,500 people younger than 18 as illegal enemy combatants in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay since 2002 …”; May 15.

BAGHDAD, May 14 — A youthful suicide bomber killed at least 23 people Wednesday in an attack against relatives of Col. Faisal Ismail al-Zobaie, a U.S.-backed police chief and former insurgent who has turned against his onetime comrades.

— lede of a Washington Post story detailing how a boy of about 12 slipped into a funeral and detonated his explosives; May 14.

Q: Any reaction to a poll that shows that Americans are more pessimistic about the economy than since —
MS. PERINO: This is the same question ABC asked me yesterday.
Q: I’m sorry, I wasn’t here yesterday.
MS. PERINO: And then I gave the answer and ABC didn’t use it. (Laughter.)
Q: I withdraw the question.

— exchange between reporter and press secretary Dana Perino at a White House press briefing; May 13.

The three panels of Francis Bacon’s “Triptych, 1976.”

Recession? What recession?

— Barbara Gladstone, a Chelsea dealer, after a “1976 triptych by Francis Bacon brought $86.3 million on Wednesday night at Sotheby’s, becoming the most expensive work of contemporary art ever sold at auction and a retort to doomsayers who had predicted that the art market would falter seriously this season because of broad economic anxieties”; May 15.

Cindy Crawford, Christie Brinkley, Stephanie Seymour; I really like the [classic] American supermodels. [But] how do you pick? There’s so many gorgeous girls.

— Marisa Miller, 29, who “landed the coveted Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue cover in February, [is] going into her seventh year as a Victoria’s Secret model, and now [is] the first to debut at No. 1 on the Maxim Hot 100 List”; May 13.

Because of her, I am somebody.

— Carlos Rodriguez, coach of Belgian tennis player Justine Henin, 25, who abruptly retired this week, holding seven Grand Slam titles and the world’s No. 1 ranking; May 14.

Oh my goodness, if we put a drilling rig out there, it may destroy our caribou. We heard the same thing back some years back, that if we put a pipeline through some of this area up north it was going to kill off the last 27 head of caribou. You know what happened? The pipeline went in, that oil is warm going through that pipeline, and what happened is it makes the caribou amorous. Now when caribou want to go on a date, they invite each other to go over to the pipeline.

— Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, speaking on the House floor against putting a drilling rig in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; May 12; emphasis added.

photo credits:
Hhaing The Yu: Rapport, for The New York Times
polar bears: Alexander Kutskiy, Business Wire
gasoline pump readout: David J. Phillip, Associated Press
Ferrari California: BusinessWeek
President Johnson: Bob Daugherty, The Associated Press
Bacon’s “Triptych, 1976″: Sotheby’s via The Associated Press

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

If he hadn’t been thirsty, the boy might have missed it. He saw it when he raised his canteen. It didn’t seem like much at first, he thought, just a black speck curling through the blue Utah sky. But he kept looking, curious. He squinted at the distant mystery, his thirst temporarily forgotten.

“Mr. Seth, is that a bird?”

The old man leaned against a stout but gnarled juniper, thumbs hooked in the shoulder straps of his worn canvas pack. He knew how and when to steal a few seconds’ rest as the minutes and the hours and the days and the life flowed by. He curled his arm around the juniper, letting his palm see and know the tree’s rough bark. He didn’t look up. He didn’t need to.

“It’s a hawk, son.”

“How do you know?”

The old man eased one strap from his shoulders, then the other. In a smooth, practiced motion, he twisted his upper body to the side just so, and the pack fell to his rump, then slid down his right leg to the ground. He sat, crossed his legs, and patted both real and imagined dust from his pants. He pushed a forefinger against the wide brim of his faded brown hat and tilted it up a bit. Curls of mottled gray-and-white hair stuck to his forehead where the hatband had trapped the sweat of the morning-long hike.

“I just know, Billy.”

The boy looked back at the sky. The black dot slowly grew to a dark brown cross as the hawk circled over Vanishing Mesa to the east, away from the midday sun. The boy kept watching as his thirst returned and he drank from the canteen. Water trickled down his hands and forearms onto his shirt. He set the canteen down and wiped his hands on his dungarees.

“What’s he doing, Mr. Seth?”

The old man looked up.

“Remembering.”

The boy shook his head. There were times when he didn’t understand the old man. But the thought drifted away as he looked back at the sky. He watched as the hawk explored the mesa, soaring slowly around the sandstone buttress. Billy could see the white in the trailing feathers of the hawk’s wings, the dusky red in its tail. Now and then he thought he could see a glint of gold, the sun shining on the hawk’s light brown back.

“I wish I had a hawk,” Billy said.

The old man, opening his pack, stopped. He looked at the boy for a moment, then turned back to his pack.

“What would you do with him, Billy?”

The boy thought for a moment, and then his eyes brightened.

“I’d keep him in my room so I could show him to all my friends whenever I wanted to.”

The old man glanced at the boy and rubbed the back of his hand against his chin. He shifted his weight onto his arms and eased himself off the ground until he could kneel on his right knee next to the pack. He pulled a leather patch from the pack and carefully lay it across his left thigh. Several rawhide thongs dangled from the patch. He idly combed them straight with his fingers.

“Why, Billy?”

“What do you mean, Mr. Seth?”

“Why would you want to keep the hawk from his sky?”

Billy looked down at the ground and scuffed the dusty earth with his boot. “Because he’s so beautiful.”

“So you’d keep him in your room.”

“Yes, sir. So I could see him whenever I wanted to.”

The old man awkwardly moved from kneeling to sitting again. He grunted as he did so. He kept his back to the boy. “Think the hawk would like that, Billy?”

“I’d bring him food and water every day, I promise. I’d take real good care of him.”

“Don’t you think he can find his own food and water?”

“But he wouldn’t have to.”

The old man looked over his shoulder at Billy.

“That’s what he lives for, Billy. Take that away, and you’ll break him. He doesn’t need your help. He does just fine on his own.”

The boy, still a few years shy of shaving, turned away. He shaded his eyes with his hands and watched the hawk. Seth shook his head. He rolled up his left sleeve and wrapped the leather patch around his forearm. He tied it securely in place, pulling the knots tight with his teeth and right hand. The dry, dusty thongs left grains of sand on his tongue, and he spat the grittiness into the desert air. He poked at the cracked leather gently. With a fingernail he worried one of the dozens of small cuts and scars in the patch. Still serviceable, he judged. He closed his eyes and squeezed the patch with this fingers. He, too, was remembering.

Overhead, the hawk’s spiral tightened as it descended. Billy could see the bird clearly now, the wire-like yellow hook on its beak, the black trim of its tail, the rusty brown of its underside. The hawk craned its head to one side, an unblinking eye trained on the old man.

Seth pulled off his hat and tossed it aside. He stood and walked away from the juniper. Billy started to follow but Seth motioned him away. The hawk neared the ground, flapping its wings and crying kree-kree-kree as it circled Seth. He stood quietly, his arm held out, and waited.

The hawk screeched. And Seth smiled. The hawk darted over Billy’s head, startling him. It headed for Seth, beating its wings harshly and slowing almost to a hover. Seth did not move. The hawk landed, its powerful talons penetrating the leather patch. It held its wings aloft pensively, fluttering them for a moment, then carefully folded them.

Still Seth did not move. The hawk’s head swiveled several times as it scanned the barren clearing around the old man. Its pale yellow eyes settled on Seth. He waited a few more minutes, then slowly walked over to the boy.

Billy backed away.

“He won’t hurt you, son.”

Billy hesitated, then cautiously moved nearer the hawk. Seth smoothed the hawk’s breast feathers with the back of his free hand.

“You can touch him, Billy. Just move slowly.”

The boy gingerly touched the hawk’s breast and quickly drew his hand away. “He’s so soft,” Billy said.

Encouraged, he tried to touch the hawk again. But he moved too fast and the hawk nipped him, scratching his hand.

“Hey!”

Seth grinned. “You were careless, Billy. He won’t let you touch him again unless you show him respect. You’ve got to approach him honestly.”

Billy’s eyes suddenly widened. “Do you think he could hear me up there, talking about catching him and keeping him in my room?”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“But he can’t talk!”

“He can if you know the right language.”

Seth waited quietly. He continued to stroke the hawk’s breast. Its eyes, though, never left Billy.

After several minutes, the boy walked very slowly towards the hawk and stopped a respectful distance from that sharp, hooked beak. He held his hands out and turned them palms up.

“I’m sorry I was so eager,” Billy said. “And if you heard me talking about keeping you in my room, I didn’t mean it. Really. But I hope you’ll come and visit me. I’ll put a perch and some water in the yard where you can come and rest when you’re tired of hunting. And if you want to talk, I’ll listen. If you don’t, well, that’s okay, too. It’d be real nice just having you there whenever you want to come.”

Billy, his eyes squinting from a flinch-to-be, gently put his hands on the hawk’s breast and touched the soft, downy feathers of its underside. He let his hands rest there for a minute, then he slowly stepped back.

“Do you think he likes me?”

“I don’t know, son. Guess that’s between you and him.”

Seth walked away from the boy and faced the sun. He held his laden arm in front of him. The hawk looked back at Billy, then at the old man. Seth nodded to the hawk. Then he lowered his arm slightly and raised it forcefully. The hawk leapt into the air crying kree-kree-kree, its wings beating strongly as it hugged the ground to gain airspeed.

Soon the hawk had transformed itself into a black speck against the blue Utah sky again, a speck growing smaller still as it soared high above Vanishing Mesa.

Seth looked away, removed the leather patch and stowed it in his pack. When Billy could no longer see the hawk, he turned to the old man and asked:

“Why did he come here?”

“He and I go back aways, Billy.”

“What do you mean?”

“A long time ago, I wanted to keep him, too. I set a snare and waited. And watched him. After I’d watched him enough, I didn’t want to trap him anymore. So I threw away the snare. He saw that. And that’s when he came to me.”

“Does he keep coming back like this?”

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“Because he knows he’ll always be free to leave.”

photo credit: Rich Reid, National Geographic.com

In some respects, this interview was probably pointless. Extraterrestrial bacteria, never mind intelligent organisms, have yet to be discovered even within our own solar system, never mind outside it. So who cares, right?

The problem is that scientists continue to launch powerful instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope and its eventual successor, the James Webb Space Telescope. The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is systematically scanning the sky, looking for unusual patterns in the background that might indicate intelligent life. The Kepler mission will search for Earth-sized planets orbiting 100,000 of the Sun’s nearest neighbor stars (Disclosure: - my employer, Ball Aerospace, is responsible for some parts of both James Webb and Kepler). And with yet more Mars missions planned, including at least a few intended to return samples to the Earth and to do biological assays on the Martian surface itself, the chance that we’ll discover that life evolved somewhere else in the universe is going up, up, up.

And billions of people will not handle well the fact that Earth-evolved life is not unique in the universe. Massive numbers of people (55% of the population of the U.S. according to a Gallup poll in 2007) disbelieve in evolution even though the scientific evidence for it is overwhelming. And this because the supposed inerrancy of a book or five written 1400 to 4000 years ago when humanity lacked the knowledge and ability to understand the facts of how the universe functions. Imagine what would probably happen if tomorrow we suddenly discovered, with nearly complete certainty, that life had evolved independently of Earth somewhere else in the universe. To quote Agent Kay from the Men In Black movie:

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.

Or, to put it another way, if people are offended by the idea that they might be related to chimpanzees and poo-throwing monkeys, imagine how offended they’d be to find out that their God created bacteria or rotationally-symmetric trilateral intelligent beings somewhere else in the universe. Care to guess how would that sit with the whole “created in God’s image” thing?

That’s why this admission by the Jesuit in charge of the Vatican Observatory is so important. It points that at least one of the major religious powers on the planet is thinking about the theological ramifications of extraterrestrial life instead of doing the theological equivalent of closing your eyes, sticking your fingers in your ears, and shouting “la la la la la” at the top of your lungs. And if the Roman Catholic Church is thinking about this, then there’s a good chance that they’ll be able to help keep their collective flock under control when extraterrestrial life is discovered.

I can only hope that other, more conservative (Southern Baptist), less centralized (Judaism and Islam), and less authoritarian (Buddhism) faiths are doing the same.

Thanks to Mike Pecaut for pointing this one out.

Person defined. As used in sections 3, 6, and 25 of Article II of the state constitution, the terms “person” or “persons” shall include any human being from the moment of fertilization.

Our own Dr. Slammy brought up this issue in a post (Every sperm is sacred) three months ago, and the ramifications of this range from the absurd, awful, and terrifying all the way to downright misogynistic. And yes, you read that right.

Think about it for a moment. If a zygote (fertilized egg) is equivalent to a human being, then anything that happens to the egg afterward is the mother’s responsibility. If the prospective mother inadvertently causes a miscarriage because she didn’t realize she was pregnant and drank to excess, that’s manslaughter - murder if she drinks to excess knowing that she was pregnant. And it’s child abuse if the child turns out to be developmentally stunted as a result of fetal alcohol syndrome.

But that’s not the worst part of this. The worst part is that declaring a zygote a person means that a everything the potential mother does that could prevent implantation in her uterus is attempted murder. The pill goes from a contraceptive method to a murder weapon. Intra-uterine devices are similarly treated. And let’s not even talk about an actual abortion.

Actually, lets. Abortion is murder, at least according to these people. Well, if 50.0000000000001% of the “enlightened” population of Colorado votes “yes” on this amendment, that statement will go from a statement of pious opinion to legal reality. And abortion providers and patients will become first degree murderers and accessories to the crime.

And what’s the upshot of all of this? The woman and potential mother becomes enslaved to her offspring. Literally - she can do nothing that will injure the zygote, blastocyst, embryo, or fetus without running the risk of being accused of a felony. According to the Mirriam-Webster online dictionary, this is the definition of “slavery”:

slavery, noun

1. drudgery, toil

2. submission to a dominating influence

3. a: the state of a person who is a chattel of another b: the practice of slaveholding

The dominating influence, the person making the woman its “chattel” in this case? The “person” the woman is being forced to carry to term against her will.

If enslaving a woman to a zygote isn’t misogyny, I don’t know what is.

I wouldn’t wish this on any woman, not even the piously brainwashed 20-year old founder of Colorado for Equal Rights, Kristi Burton.

There’s a slight chance that this won’t make it. The Secretary of State (a Republican) might rule that nearly half of the signatures are invalid. But I doubt it. There’s a chance that it won’t be voted in, but since our state legislature steadfastly refuses to be prudent and raise the bar for amending the state Constitution, I don’t hold out much hope for that either.

I’d held off publicizing this issue by blogging about it here on S&R in hopes that lack of publicity would make it go away. It didn’t. So now it’s time to let slip the dogs of war on these people.

Some things are so immoral as to be evil. Legally enshrining women as chattel is one of those things.

Sweet fancy Jesus, does this braying jackass even know what state he lives in? The staff at The Onion are probably sitting around right now wondering how they’re going to top this one.

We need a change, all right. Specifically, we need to change to a candidate who can find Colorado on a map. Meanwhile, Alaska, you’re welcome to him.

UPDATE: Anchorage mayor Mark Begich, himself a US Senate candidate, responds here:

“While Alaskans can understand why Bob Schaffer would promote our beautiful mountain, I hope he doesn’t expect Alaska to cede North America’s highest peak to the State of Colorado.”

Tell you what - we’ll trade you Colorado Springs for it.

UPDATE 2: The ad has, not surprisingly, been removed from YouTube.

Thanks to Larry Huynh, Politics West, Mark Liddell and Weldon Kennedy.

Energy efficiency is tricky. You might think that increasing energy efficiency would be a no-brainer, since it usually pays for itself, improves the reliability of electrical transmission systems, reduces the number of power plants that need to be built, and reduces greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. You’d be wrong. And last week, The Economist had a great overview as to why improving energy efficiency is so difficult. And according to the article, the reasons that energy efficiency gains aren’t metaphorically exploding all over the place come down to the intersections of these three areas: prices, markets, and governments.

Price affects energy efficiency in at least two ways. The first is that energy efficient products almost always cost more to purchase, and so the up-front costs that consumers see cause “sticker shock”. This is obvious when you compare the price of a compact florescent lightbulb to that of an incandescent - the CFL costs a lot more even though it saves energy over the lifetime of the bulb, so consumers are less likely to purchase the CFL. Similarly, the article points out that energy efficient appliances and residential efficiency improvements are expected to be extremely high and fast:

[H]omeowners, as Lord Stern pointed out in his climate-change report, tend to demand exorbitant rates of return on investments in energy efficiency—of around 30%. They generally want new boilers or extra insulation to pay for themselves within two or three years, says Mark Hopkins, of the United Nations Foundation, an NGO.

This is part of the reason that energy efficiency companies tend to target commercial and industrial customers instead of residential - homeowners are more demanding and are, amazingly enough, dramatically less sensitive to the bottom-line economics of energy efficiency.

Markets augment this price problem in a few unfortunate ways. One way is that homebuilders have no reason to invest in energy efficiency and every reason to cut corners on it. Energy efficient insulation, double or triple-glazed windows, motion-sensing lights, zoned climate control systems, residential geothermal heat pumps, solar cells with battery storage, etc. all increase the cost of the home, making it harder to sell. And the builder gets no financial benefit from adding all those efficiency improvements, since it’s the owner’s long-term energy bills that are reduced in the process. Similarly, most utilities have no interest in reducing the energy consumption of their customers, since utilities usually make profits off the consumption of energy, not the savings of energy. And the Economist has this to say about the financing of these systems:

Financing energy-efficiency investments can also be difficult. In the developing world, capital can be scarce. In rich countries, the savings from making individual homes more efficient are too small and the overheads involved too high to be of much interest to most banks.

Governments have tried to address these various failures of both price and market in a number of ways, some of which have been successful, some not. According to the Economist, national and state regulators are decoupling profit from consumption in order to guarantee a certain profit to the utilities - excess profits are passed back to the consumer as rebates, insufficient profits are extracted from consumers as price increases. And governments are requiring utilities to improve their energy efficiency through a number of methods:

Australia has proposed banning incandescent light-bulbs outright. Many have adopted building codes and appliance standards that dictate minimum levels of efficiency. Several tighten the standards regularly, to foster constant improvement. Japan’s Top Runner scheme, for example, identifies the most efficient appliances on the market in different categories, and then requires all competing brands to improve on them within four to six years. Those that fail face fines….

The 13,000 factories in Japan with the highest energy use are required to improve their efficiency by 1% a year. Those that fail to do so are fined. China’s central government has followed suit, setting energy-efficiency targets for the country’s 1,000 biggest firms.

But some governments, like that of the U.S., have little (and perhaps insufficient) interest in top-down government regulations. So it’s at the intersections, where a market can be created to address a government failing or a price change can be made to correct a market distortion, that the truly interesting ideas come up. The Weekly Carboholic reported on one such plan in Berkeley, California last week, and the Economist reports on couple more:

Typically, an [energy-service company (ESCo)] designs a scheme to reduce a building’s energy bill, borrows money to pay for the kit it needs, and installs and maintains it over a fixed period. Clients do not need to provide any cash up front: the ESCo’s reward comes from retaining most of the savings—out of which it must repay the loan….

The Clinton Climate Initiative, a charity set up by the former American president, is thinking along the same lines. It has persuaded the local authorities in 40 big cities around the world to co-ordinate their investments in energy efficiency.

Energy efficiency is too important to be left to just government. Or just markets. Or to rely on rising prices alone. We’ll need every tool we’ve got, and many we have yet to develop, to improve our energy efficiency enough to have a significant impact on global GHG emissions.

———-

According to the Albany TimesUnion, a new facility in New York will use flywheels to store energy that can be used to smooth out the supply and load on New York’s electrical grid. This new facility will use, or supply, up to 20 megawatts of electrical power and, in the process of load balancing, will reduce carbon emissions from existing electricity sources by 12,000 tons per year. It’s not a lot, but given that this savings is incidental to the goal of improving the reliability of the electrical grid, it serves as an example of how reducing GHG emissions can go hand-in-hand with other changes.

Flywheels store energy in the physical inertia of a rapidly spinning device. Think of an extra heavy top spinning inside a chamber with electrical wiring on it and that’s the basic idea. The bigger, heavier, and faster you can spin the wheel, the more energy it can store. In this case, the TimesUnion says that the flywheels will be 7 feet across, spin 16,000 times per minute [corrected - used to be 16,000 times per second], and be spun in a vacuum wit magnetic bearings to reduce friction. And the flywheels will be buried in the ground for noise suppression (and likely for safety reasons too).

Interesting technology. I hope it works well - our electrical transmission infrastructure is in such disarray (as with most of our national infrastructure) that anything that could improve reliability is worth considering, and if it reduces GHG emissions at the same time, so much the better.

———-

Carbon sequestration is plagued by a couple of major problems. The first “well, duh” problem is that there is precisely one commercial power plant that uses carbon sequestration, and how well the technology can be made universal and scaled up to tens of thousands of coal and natural gas plants that need to have their carbon dioxide (CO₂) sequestered is unknown. But another problem is that scientists are worried that gaseous CO₂ will leak out. There are places, like where the geology of the region kept natural gas contained until it was extracted, where we can reasonably assume that CO₂ will stay put. But most of the planet isn’t like that. To this end, Reuters reported on scientists looking into the possibility of liquefying or calcifying CO₂ into a solid that could be pumped or buried easily, and would be much less likely to re-gasify and leak back into the atmosphere.

Of course, the costs would be high for either option. But given that many fossil fuel power plants are a long way from suitable geologic formations, liquefying or calcifying the CO₂ may be the only option, high cost or not. This does, however, assume that we cannot get away from fossil fuels faster than we can bring wide-scale carbon sequestration on-line. Whether that assumption is a good one or not remains to be seen.

In the preface, Hurowitz explains the frustrations he encountered while working for various state and national environmental organizations. It soon became clear that the main obstacle preventing Democrats from voting their conscience was fear.

When Democrats voted against us, it was rare to hear them say they disagreed with us on the merits. Instead, they’d tell us they were afraid: afraid that their constituents wouldn’t support a pro-environment position; afraid of defying President Bush and the Republican noise machine; or they’d even admit they were afraid of angering this or that corporate lobby and losing campaign contributions to the Republicans.

Hurowitz goes on to explain nearly all electoral problems faced by Democrats as symptoms of a deeper problem: a severe lack of courage.

In the chapters that follow he takes many Democratic standard-bearers to task, excoriating them for their lack of convictions. He explains how having the courage to take a principled stand against Republicans would have not only been the right thing to do, but also would have lead to greater success at the ballot box. This theme, the central idea of his book, is shown from the another perspective as well. By profiling a politician and an organization, Paul Wellstone and Move On, who did tend to display political courage, Hurowitz shows that there is hope for the Democratic party after all, if only they’d stop being so afraid.

Among those taken to task for falling into the trap of the politics of fear, few key figures in the Democratic party are left unexamined. There are sections devoted to Al Gore, Tom Daschle, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The heap of his critique, however, is aimed at Bill Clinton.

The chapter on President Clinton, which is particularly brutal, describes him as the gutless wonder. Here is an excerpt:

Even evaluated on his own terms, his accomodationist strategy was a disaster. His constant shifts and capitulations played right into the Republican caricature of him: that he would do anything to get elected. It was a portrait that damaged him inordinately on independent voters’ critical judgement of whether or not he was a strong leader.

Of former Democratic Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, Hurowitz concludes, “He looked craven, he looked cowardly, and in the end, he just looked ridiculous.”

Want further evidence of the salience of Hurowitz’ argument? Look no further than the March special election in IL-14, in which Democrat Bill Foster won in a very red seat by being bold and courageous. Further evidence of the fact that Hurowitz’ point was ahead of the curve is demonstrated by the fact that Matthew Yglesias and Eric Alterman both released books after Hurowitz which touch on similar arguments about the electoral strategy Democrats often pursue.

If you haven’t yet, the time has come to read Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party. It is likely to change the way you look at both electoral politics, and the Democratic party.

You can read more about the book at the official website, http://www.dcourage.com.

According to an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation called Fortune 535, Rep. Harman’s net worth in 2006 may have been $409,426,887, up from $241,334,326 in 2000. (Sunlight bills itself as “a catalyst to create greater political transparency and to foster more openness and accountability in government.”)

The site allows inspection of each member of Congress in terms of net worth. Tabs lead to “Wealthiest,” “Greatest Change,” “Started with $0 or less,” and “Ended 2006 with $0 or less.”

It’s great fun. But Fortune 535’s worth is not its revelation of congressional wealth; rather, it demonstrates the weaknesses in the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 that requires financial disclosures by members of Congress. That’s why “may” is the operative word regarding Rep. Harman’s wealth.

According to Fortune 535, members must:

… disclose information on their personal finances, including their assets, sources of income, transactions and debts. (However, lawmakers are not required to report everything they own, including the value of their personal residences, nor their related mortgages.) They report the value of their and their spouses’ assets, the amount of income – both earned and unearned – and the extent of indebtedness in broad ranges, making the forms a very inaccurate tool for measuring wealth. For example, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reported in 2007 that she and her husband have a net worth somewhere between $86 million and negative $9 million. Whether the Speaker of the House is extremely wealthy or on the verge of declaring bankruptcy (or somewhere in between) cannot be determined from her financial disclosure form. [emphasis added]

That’s the problem — the “ranges” of disclosure. It allows members to discreetly hide their holdings. In an e-mail announcing Fortune 535’s launch, Sunlight’s Paul Blumenthal says this about presidential candidate John McCain:

John McCain jumped from an average net worth of $8.8 million in 1995 to $36.4 million in 2006.

Two things, rules applying to financial disclosures allow a member of Congress to omit the assets and liabilities held by a spouse if the spouse’s assets and liabilities are held separately and the member has no knowledge of what the spouse holds. It appears as though McCain listed more of Cindy’s assets in later filings than in earlier ones.

Most importantly, John McCain files deceptive personal financial disclosure forms. From 1995 to the present the highest value range that a member can check is $50,000,001+. Prior to 1995, the highest range was $1,000,0001+. McCain still to this day checks $1,000,0001+ for a number of his assets despite having the option of checking the more accurate ranges of $1 million-$5 million, $5 million-$25 million, or the $50 million+. McCain is the only member I have observed who still does this.

Sunlight staff, creating Fortune 535 in part with data from the Center for Responsive Politics, found some members’ disclosure forms illegible. No member has answered requests for legible forms. But the ethics act does not, it seems, cover the issue of legibility. Bad handwriting becomes a form of deceit.

So wander through Fortune 535. Have a gander at the net worth of your favorite rep. But keep in mind that this congressionally protected “range” game degrades any attempt to fully understand the financial condition of a member of Congress, let alone any meaningful analysis of what an increase (or decrease) in net worth might mean in terms of the public’s interest.

CORRECTION: This post was edited May 14 to reflect that the site’s name is Fortune 535, not 435 as first posted. Mea culpa.

I’m not a big fan of groups that slavishly imitate their influences, but I do love bands with a sense of history and a desire to explore older styles in search of new angles. This obviously establishes a tricky standard - be true to the masters, but not … too true. It’s equally tricky for me as a listener and armchair critic, as well - I might like a contemporary band for the same reasons I liked the bands they’re riffing on, but is there enough in the way of originality going on? As I’ve noted before, the CDs I like and those I think are great aren’t always the same ones.

Which brings me around to today’s TunesDay topic - the recent explosion of artists and bands taking their cues from ’60s acts, especially girlpop groups. I have to admit that I didn’t see this coming. Musical trends will cycle, but the period is usually closer to 20-25 years than 40-45. In any case, there are a lot of fun bands out there who clearly love the likes of The Supremes, The Ronettes and Dusty Springfield. So let’s listen to a few of them. As we do, the question before the class is whether the artist is critically worthy or merely fun.

Let’s start with everybody’s favorite trainwreck, Amy Winehouse. I’m not sure if she’s in jail, in rehab, on trial or running loose this week, but it’s hard to ignore her success as an artist. I’m impressed by how she’s made something fresh out of the old sounds, but you may disagree. Here she is performing the title track of her smash CD, Back to Black.

Another artist hammering at the buzz machine these days is Duffy, who I frankly don’t know much about. There’s something pretty soulful about “Mercy,” though.

I have to be honest about this next one - Nicole Atkins’ voice just blows me away. I was hooked the first time I heard “Just the Way it Is,” and nothing I’ve heard since has done anything but confirm that first impression. There’s an intermittently torchy quality to some of her work that lends it a little more in the way of depth and darkness than we see with some of her neo-contemporaries. This is “Maybe Tonight” in all its joyous innocence. Wow.

One of the absolute coolest bands on the road today is Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings. Some criticize them for essentially being an unreconstructed tribute to an age gone by, and it’s true that they’re not looking to invent anything new. But they’re so damned good at their brand of Brooklyn neo-soul that they force you to ask how important originality really is. In an era where there really isn’t as much innovation as there has been in the past, is it good enough to simply knock people’s socks off? Here’s the band in the studio working on “Answer Me.”

My most recent wayback discovery is London’s Lucky Soul, a band that comes off like The Ronettes meet The Supremes, filtered through Saint Etienne’s less trippy moments. And in spots, there’s even a touch of something that reminds me of Heather Nova. The Saint Etienne influence is especially important - Ali Howard owes a lot to Sarah Cracknell, and plays the blonde ingenue role just about as well as does the divine Sarah on the band’s fantastic Good Humor CD. Since I’m loving these guys a lot at the moment, I’m going to give you a couple vids to reflect on. First, “Lips Are Unhappy.”

Finally, this one goes out to all those folks in the Carolinas dreaming of Myrtle Beach. Ask your DJ to insert “Add Your Light To Mine, Baby” into the shagging rotation, if you would.

I like them all. But … what matters to you?

Whores no more.

On the job, the key for many of us is adapting by adopting — an alternate personality, that is. But some jobs arouse emotions and sensations that are too overwhelming for the conscious mind. In the process called splitting, we shunt those off to a kind of branch line of our consciousness.

Sex work is such a job. Its laborers often find the only way to survive is by putting as much distance as possible between their real and work selves. The lack of self-respect inherent in these evasion tactics is magnified by the need to hide the nature of their work from loved ones.

If only because of the contortions into which many are forced to twist their psyches, sex workers deserve as much respect as those tilling any field. Granting them the legal right to organize and providing them with protection under labor and employment laws would be a start.

Is that likely to happen anytime soon? It’s tough to say. But, due to its prevalence on the Internet, porn has begun to gain acceptance with segments of society hitherto unacquainted with it. Such as teenage girls, some of whom not only dress, but undress, like porn stars, after which they seem to have no qualms about being videotaped.

Others, less bold, avoid condemning porn out of fear that boys will think a girl is a buzzkill. It’s the reverse of the way girls were slimed as sluts in previous generations. But the effect is the same.

Second, we all know how the opportunity to make big money confers status on any enterprise. If gangster rap, spawned, in part, by the crack culture, can find a home on MTV, why can’t porn break through?

In a May 15 Rolling Stone article, “The Sex Queen of L.A.” (not available online), Vanessa Gregoriadis chronicles how a California madam named Michelle “Nici” Braun was sought out by Turkish billionaire Hakan Uzan.

“The money and word-of-mouth business that Nici received from Uzan enabled her to do what no madam had done before: create a new high end of the escort industry. . . . Prominent athletes, TV stars and Fortune 500 CEOs. . . flocked to Nici for access to her elite clientele. . . the pinnacle of L.A. beauty. . . models for Maxim and FHM, big-name porn stars and Playmates. . . a Survivor: China contestant and [a] WWE star.”

The magazine models and Survivor contestant may have had no other immediate prospects. Along with the WWE star, though, the porn stars had careers, however short-term. But it seems a porn career isn’t what it was.

“There is no real money to be made anymore,” Gregoriadis writes. There are too many “girls willing to show the world their nakedness, no matter how hot they are. . . . willing to be ogled [on the Web]for next to nothing.”

They’ve been replaced at the strip clubs they used to tour for extra money by women at least as attractive willing to work for less money. “For Playmates and porn stars,” Georgiadis writes, “there’s only one way left to supplement their income: meeting fans in private settings.”

In fact, porn-industry journalist Luke Ford told Georgiadis, “Almost every porn star is an escort now.”

It’s not just in pornography where the stars are doing the mountain-comes-to-Mohammed act. In the music industry, file-sharing is not only eviscerating the sales of CDs, but cutting into those of MP3 files as well. Except for top acts, recorded music is now viewed as a promotional tool to draw fans to performances, where the real money is made.

Both fields are also paralleled by the lecture circuit, where people are making more money speaking than on whatever made them famous in the first place.

It’s true that the Internet has depressed the music and sex industries. But at least it’s yielded a nugget of irony. Musicians spending more time on the road than ever and porn stars making social calls runs counter to the Internet’s reputation for facilitating isolation, whether it’s in the form of cocooning or agoraphobia. Consumers and providers are face to face again.

Meanwhile, will escort services every be unconditionally accepted in the mainstream of American life? Give a madam her own reality show and we’ll see what shakes out.

Iraq got you down? Plummeting real estate values? Bad credit? Soaring fuel prices? Impending recession? Fear not. Your six-hundred dollar or so tax rebate check is on its way. Time to pay off the bogus internet charges on your cell phone bill. Time to finish decorating the trailer. Time to get that Fender Strat out of hock. Don’t spend it all in one pawn shop.

Six big ones will keep us in our overleveraged homes for weeks and our kids in college for days. It may even cover a lab fee or two, which will come in handy when you and Junior open that crystal meth factory you’ve been dreaming about.

Six hundred dollars will get you a few minutes with Ashley Alexandra Dupree. And not even prime minutes. Speaking of which, Eliot Spitzer never got full credit for his own stimulus package. A new independent study says idle hookers are bad for the economy.

Unfortunately, however, the entire six hundred will be in dollars. I asked for mine in Euros, but the Treasury Department Web site says I’ll have to make the conversion on my own. In the time it takes for the check to travel from the Beltway to my mailbox, the dollar will have fallen another three percent against the ruble.

We may have won the Cold War, but we’re losing the lukewarm one–the one that requires intelligent long-term planning, wise use of natural resources, efficient application of emerging technologies, sound fiscal policy, and voluntary self-control of consumer spending. Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent at this time.

Let’s hear it for noblesse oblige and an economic stimulus package that doles out less than the cost of the reflective coating on the front end of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Bushies always feel better about themselves after leaving a nice tip. Ask W what Jenna’s wedding gown set him back. Six hundred wouldn’t cover the veil.

As for me, I’ll need a separate stimulus just to pull my check out of the mail slot. My idea of a stimulus package is a hit of Ecstasy and a Girls Gone Wild DVD. I slipped a note in with my 1040 asking the IRS to send my check straight to ExxonMobil. The fact is, a superfluous, ill-conceived, pandering, half-assed, drop-in-the-bucket tax rebate just doesn’t go as far as it used to.

The 2008 tax rebate brings back memories of when as a man in my early twenties struggling with my first job and first apartment, Grandma gave me a check for five dollars and asked me what I was going to spend it on. I could never bring myself to tell her it was going into a general fund from which I paid my outstanding parking tickets.

But go ahead, enjoy your rebate and try not to dwell on how your six hundred dollars was borrowed in full from the People’s Republic of China. If you’ve ever dealt with the Asian mob, you know they’ll want it back with points. A few other words of advice. In the coming days, look closely at the return address before throwing out any envelope with the rest of the junk mail. Steer clear of the inevitable national debate over whether illegal immigrants should get the tax rebate too. And most important of all, wait till the check clears.
____________
Rich Herschlag is the author of a new book, Before the Glory: 20 Baseball Heroes Talk About Growing Up and Turning Hard Times Into Home Runs (HCI, 2007). His other books include Lay Low and Don’t Make the Big Mistake (Simon & Schuster, 1997) and Women Are From Manhattan, Men Are From Brooklyn (Black Maverick, 2002).

All’s well, eh? Perhaps for this bridge in this city. But nationwide, all is not well. Road, bridge and other important public-works infrastructure continue to age and deteriorate as Congress dithers elsewhere. Only disasters move our representatives to act — and in an election year, even those actions seem spotty at best and disingenuous at worst.

The United States has much more than failing bridges to find, fund and fix. The proposals of the remaining presidential candidates do little to inspire faith that they understand the breadth of the problem or have the political skill, will and courage to address it forthrightly.

In December, a commission established by Congress in 2005 under the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act—A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU) provided the sobering statistics. The United States needs to spend $225 billion annually — more than twice what it does now — for the next 50 years. That’s more than $11 trillion worth of fix-ups on surface transportation systems alone.

But at the moment, the only bill of significance floating through Congress is the National Infrastructure Bank Act written by Sens. Chris Dodd and Chuck Hagel. It’s backed by the American Society of Civil Engineers because it “would establish an independent entity of the federal government to evaluate and finance ‘capacity-building’ infrastructure projects of substantial regional and national significance [emphasis added] …” The word “local” is absent from the bill, so those potholes ruining your car’s suspension will just have to wait. (The bill has other problems as well.)

And what about the nation’s dams, most of which are non-federal? According to the American Society of Civil Engineers newsletter, “ASCE’s 2005 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure conferred a grade of D on the nation’s dams, the same grade as that for U.S. infrastructure as a whole.”

According to the Association of State Dam Safety Officials:

• There are more than 87,000 dams currently under state regulation
• 10,127 have been classified as high hazard, meaning they pose a serious threat to human life if they should fail
• Of those high hazard dams, 1,333 have been identified as structurally deficient or unsafe
• The average dam inspector in the US is responsible for more than 400 dams. The ASDSO recommends that each inspector is responsible for fewer than 50 dams.

The Dam Rehabilitation and Repair Act has passed the House and now has been parked in the Senate’s Committee on Environment and Public Works since October. But the bill only provides a total of $200 million through 2012.

Erosion on a levee by the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet

And when the levee breaks? New Orleans is not the only political entity concerned with failures of levees, as happened during Hurricane Katrina. And hurricanes are not the only threat to levee systems.

In Northern California, “more than 1,100 miles of aging levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and its watersheds … contain the fuel that powers the world’s 6th largest economy – water,” according to the state agency that administers the system. “It has been estimated that the loss to California’s economy could be $30 to $40 billion in the event of massive levee failures caused by a 6.5 magnitude earthquake in the Delta region. … Over the past century, 140 levee failures have been recorded” in the 100-year-old levee system that traverses nearly 6,000 miles.

A National Levee Safety Program Act has been introduced for three successive years but has failed to advance through Congress. Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s Web site only indicates unspecified support for “the Water Resources and Development Act, which will provide funding for modernizing the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers’ system of locks and dams.” President Bush vetoed the bill in November only to be over-ridden by Congress. Still, this falls far short of needed levee and flood-protection system overhauls and repairs nationwide.

Flushed a toilet lately? There’s what a PBS report called “the invisible infrastructure. These are the pipes buried underneath cities and towns that deliver clean water and carry away any waste water.” Sewerage infrastructure alone in the nation’s cities is a half-trillion-dollar problem, the report says, and communities are trapped in a Catch-22: “Federal grants for communities to improve their wastewater treatment infrastructure has dried to a trickle over recent decades. Yet communities are compelled by the Clean Water Act, signed into law in 1972, to treat and purify wastewater.”

Without needed work on deteriorating wastewater plants, count on sewer overflows, polluted water and disease outbreaks to threaten local communities. Now, an underfunded Clean Water Act represents unfunded mandates on the states, which cannot afford the cost.

What’s coming out of the faucet? The population of the United States has grown by about 100 million since the Clean Water Act was passed. Americans dispose of more waterborne waste than ever. Earlier this year, the Associated Press reported “[a] vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans.” But “federal funding for clean water has been on a steady decline. Overall the federal government contribution to total clean water spending has shrunk dramatically — from 78% in 1978 to just 3% today,” according to Food and Water Watch.

The Clean Water Act of 1972, written by Sens. Edmund Muskie and Howard Baker, has provided more than $72 billion over the past 35 years to allow states to fund local and regional water and wastewater treatment facilities. According to Food and Water Watch, a consortium opposed to privatization of water facilities, President Bush has steadily cut funds for the Clean Water State Revolving Fund, which provides direct aid to states:

In 2007, the U.S. House of Representatives took an important step to keep America’s water clean and safe by authorizing $14 billion for the Clean Water State Revolving Fund for the next four years. This state revolving loan fund offers critical funds needed to close the 20-year, $440 billion shortfall between available funds and what is needed to ensure that America’s drinking water and water sources meet minimum standards established by the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act.

But that’s only $3.5 billion a year for four years to resolve a $440 billion problem.

That’s not all. What about refineries, pipelines, mass transit systems, transmission lines for electricity, air traffic control, weather forecasting systems, and aging chemical and nuclear plants?

Failure to address long-standing, critical infrastructure needs is a threat to national security. But the political stances taken by the remaining presidential candidates, as evidenced by issues positions on their Web sites, do not reflect necessary urgency regarding the nation’s infrastructure needs. Their positions are vague, and financial proposals offer a scant percentage of what’s needed.

Take, for example, Sen. Obama’s issues statement under “Keeping Our Drinking Water Safe“: He seeks “$37.5 million over 5 years for drinking water systems to upgrade their monitoring and security efforts [emphasis added].” But the long-term physical viability of those facilities is never mentioned.

To Sen. Obama’s credit, he says he will “pursue a major investment in our utility grid to enable a tremendous increase in renewable generation and accommodate modern energy requirements, such as reliability, smart metering, and distributed storage [emphasis added].” But that investment is unspecified, as most campaign promises of presidential candidates usually are. It is merely a “talking point.”

Sen. Obama does have an issues plank for “transportation.” He seeks “a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank” to be funded by $60 billion over 10 years to supplant current federal spending. Frankly, that’s a pittance, and the senator’s accompanying fact sheet does not explain how it will be funded.

The only references to infrastructure on the issues section of presidential candidate John McCain’s Web site are contained in his agenda on climate change: “A Comprehensive Plan Will Address The Full Range Of Issues: Infrastructure, Ecosystems, Resource Planning, And Emergency Preparation” and in his statement of stewardship of natural resources: “Ensuring clean air, safe and healthy water.”

On Aug. 8, just seven days following the I-35W bridge collapse, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton unveiled her “Rebuild America Plan” in a speech in Rochester, Minn. The plan would:

• establish a $10 billion “emergency repair fund” to address the backlog of critical infrastructure repairs. (That’s spread over 10 years, or only $1 billion a year.)
• provide $250 million in “emergency assessment grants” to the states to conduct immediate safety reviews of their high-priority, high-risk infrastructure assets. (That’s insufficient to deal with 50 states’ needs.)
• appoint a commission to carry out a comprehensive assessment of our engineering review standards so to better prioritize needed repairs on bridges and roads. (More study? Sure. Why not?)

It’s worth wondering if this plan existed prior to Aug. 1. It appears wholly inadequate to begin to address the nation’s infrastructure needs.

Her plan also promises improvements to mass transit, modernization of ports (in partnership with local governments and the private sector) and congestion-reduction actions. Her plan’s cost?

The total cost of Hillary Clinton’s infrastructure agenda is approximately $3 billion per year. Hillary will finance this cost without increasing the deficit by dedicating a portion of the revenue from her efforts to improve the efficiency of our government. These efforts will include implementing the GAO’s recommendations for reducing improper federal payments, which could save up to $4 billion per year [GAO, 2007]; better managing the federal government’s surplus property, which could save $500 million - $1 billion per year [CAGW 2006; GAO 2007]; freezing the federal travel budget, which could save about $1 billion per year [PPI, 2007]; and streamlining the federal vehicle fleet, which could save about $500 million per year [GAO 2007]. [emphasis added]

Improve the efficiency of government? How often have taxpayers and voters been fed that unpalatable pablum?

In the years to come, expect insignificant progress on repair, renovation and renewal of the means by which the nation cleans and distributes water, provides electricity, transports goods and people and protects against the insults of nature.

Why? Pick a reason.

Begin with a press that rarely reports on infrastructure — until disaster happens — and has failed to sufficiently prod candidates on the issue during the plentiful presidential “debates.”

Politicians need to get elected and stay elected, hence their choice of issues that play well in media. They need issues with buzz. Infrastructure has too little.

The cost is too high. Politicians fear taking responsibility for tax hikes.

There’s a war in Iraq, a country in which the United States has sunk about $520 billion to help Iraq make significant progress on repair, renovation and renewal of the means by which Iraq cleans and distributes water, provides electricity, transports goods and people and protects against the insults of nature.

Meanwhile, rust continues accumulate at home.

photo credits:
new bridge segment: David Joles, Star Tribune
collapsed I-35W bridge: Jim Gehrz, Star Tribune
failed Teton Dam: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
Mississippi River Gulf Outlet levee: Tyrone Turner, National Geographic magazine

After the National Intelligence Estimate last November which reported that Iran had no nuclear program since 2003, many of us breathed a sigh of relief. It was official: When it came to attacking Iran, the administration hadn’t a leg to stand on.

But, as with Iraq, it was used to that. Once anointed lame duck, it didn’t skip a beat and continued to stumble forward.

In a recent post at his blog “Early Warning,” Washington Post security analyst William Arkin writes: “Those predicting war with Iran or some Bush-Cheney October surprise attack on Tehran are constantly looking for signs of military preparations.” He cites the unauthorized transfer of nuclear warheads from Minot to Barksdale Air Force bases, extra aircraft carriers sent to the Persian Gulf, and the B-1 that crashed in Qatar last month.

Then Arkin recalls a secret mission conducted last August over Afghanistan. He claims it “tells us everything we need to know about the ability of the U.S. military to conduct a bolt-out-of-the-blue attack in Iran.”

It seems that four F-16CJ fighters completed a mission that won the prestigious Mackay Trophy for the “most meritorious” Air Force fight of the year. They flew from Iraq to Eastern Afghanistan, where they dropping more than a dozen “precision-guided” bombs on Taliban targets. It “was the equivalent of flying from New York to Los Angeles and back,” Arkin explains.

In other words, like a 10-K runner logging a hundred miles a week, they might have been training for a strike on Iran, which is just the next country over from Iraq.

Meanwhile, on May 2, Andrew Cockburn (author of a new book, “Muqtada,” called “required reading” in the New York Times Sunday Book Review today) reported on Counterpunch that, six weeks before, President Bush signed a secret directive authorizing a covert offensive against Iran.

Supposedly, it surpasses in scope anything attempted before. Assuming, that is, that you don’t count the CIA’s work to destabilize Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh’s, in 1953.

The directive, Cockburn writes, funds (to the tune of $300 million), “actions across a huge geographic area –- from Lebanon to Afghanistan -– but is also far more sweeping in the type of actions permitted. . . including the assassination of targeted officials.” Presumably by the terrorist MEK, the Iranian anti-Islamic Republic group that, despite its designation as a terrorist group by the State Department, we’re only too glad to make use of.

But, on his blog, Pen and Sword, outspoken Military.com columnist Ken Huber calls Cockburn’s Counterpunch piece “counterproductive.” “Cockburn seems to want us to get excited that this Lebanon-to-Afghanistan offensive may involve assassination,” he writes. But “we’re already assassinating people in Somalia with freaking cruise missiles. We’re doing the same thing in Pakistan with Hellfire missiles fired from pilotless spy planes; the folks who pickle off the missiles are dweebs sitting at consoles in an Air Force base in Nevada.”

Pickle off, indeed. Huber concludes: “The door to this barn has been open for a long, long time. That the horses are gone shouldn’t be news to anybody.”

However, the threat has since been kicked into a higher gear by respected security analyst Philip Giraldi, who was a former CIA officer and is now foreign policy advisor to the Ron Paul campaign.

In his latest blog at the American Conservative, “War With Iran Might Be Closer Than You Think,” he writes: “There is considerable speculation and buzz in Washington today suggesting that the National Security Council has agreed in principle to proceed with plans to attack an Iranian al-Qods-run camp [near Tehran] that is believed to be training Iraqi militants.”

“Secretary of Defense Robert Gates,” he adds, “was the only senior official urging delay. . . . [The decision] is the direct result of concerns [over] the deteriorating situation in Lebanon, where Iranian ally Hezbollah appears to have gained the upper hand against government forces.”

After contacting Iran and reading them the riot act, the White House decided that “some sort of unambiguous signal has to be sent to the Iranian leadership, presumably in the form of cruise missiles.” Unambiguous, thy name is cruise missile. Of course, President Bush “will still have to give the order to launch after all preparations are made.”

PBS has been running a series titled Carrier, about life aboard the USS Nimitz. Imagine Iran retaliating to an air strike by blowing a mega-tub like this, along with its crew of over 5,000 mostly young people, out of the water? Iran’s state-of-the-art Shahab-3 missiles are able to reach parts of the Arabian Sea and even the Mediterranean.

In other words, not only is the Persian Gulf, but total war, a hop, skip and a jump away.

Got hot links if you want ‘em!

In “Mr. Cool’s Intensity” in the Washington Post, David Ignatius writes of Obama’s reluctance to write off Rev. Wright. There’s “an instinctive American fondness for people who don’t rat out their friends, even when their friends are creeps. That’s why a Wright-based strategy may backfire for the Republicans, just as it did for Hillary Clinton.”

The New York Times’s pro-globalization and once pro-Iraq war columnist Tom Friedman seems to have mellowed during the sabbatical from which he recently returned. In “Who Will Tell the People?” he writes: “Much nonsense has been written about how Hillary Clinton is ‘toughening up’ Barack Obama so he’ll be tough enough to withstand Republican attacks. Sorry, we don’t need a president who is tough enough to withstand the lies of his opponents. We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people.”

At Smirking Chimp, Robert Parry writes: “Rev. Wright represented something of a two-fer. As an angry black man, he helped further ‘ghetto-ize’ Obama, but he also reinforced questions about Obama’s patriotism with comments about ‘chickens coming home to roost’ on 9/11 and incendiary rhetoric about ‘God-damn America.’”

Meanwhile, in “The Obama Bubble Agenda” on Counterpunch, Pam Martens writes: “Senator Obama’s premise and credibility of not taking money from federal lobbyists hangs on a carefully crafted distinction: he is taking money, lots of it, from owners and employees of firms registered as federal lobbyists but not the actual individual lobbyists.” It’s not easy to rain on a parade, especially one in which this editor is marching.

In “The Case for Invading Myanmar” on Asia Times Online, Shawn Crispin writes: “A unilateral — and potentially United Nations-approved — US military intervention in the name of humanitarianism could easily turn the tide against [Myanmar's] military leaders, and simultaneously rehabilitate [Bush] legacy.” With the added bonus of distracting Bush & Co. from attacking Iran.

At Huffington Post, famed sociologist Amitai Etzioni also thinks we should bomb — but with rice. If the “authoritarian rulers of [Myanmar] continue to endanger the lives of . . . their people by refusing to accept badly needed food and medicine,” he writes, “then the international community should. . . . provide food and meds by air drops.”

When you have nothing else to show for a war, there’s always body count. In a blockbuster Salon article, “Killing by the numbers,” Mark Benjamin and Christopher Weaver demonstrate. “The pressure from above for more bodies was. . . toxic in Iraq, where the isolated, outnumbered and outgunned snipers of the 1st Battalion had to make split-second life-or-death decisions [that] landed them. . . not the brass [in a military court]. ‘Yes, the chain of command deserves to burn in hell,’ one sniper who served with the unit wrote Salon in an e-mail.”

The Washington Post’s Nir Rosen makes the Iran-Iraq nexus simple at Steve Clemons’s the “Washington Note: “Moreover the dominant parties in the [Iraqi] government and. . . security forces that battled their political rivals in Basra and elsewhere are the ones closest to Iran. The leadership of the Iraqi government regularly consults Iranian officials and is closer to Iran than any other element in Iraq today.” It’s not really that complicated.

In “US trains Pakistani killing machine” at Asia Times Online Syed Saleem Shahzad explains how former patron to the Nicaraguan Contras and present Deputy Secretary of State, John Negroponte, seeks to create “special Pakistani units, trained by the US, to go after key figures. The training by the US of Pakistani special forces is based on Negroponte’s initiatives in Nicaragua [as well as] the Philippines.” I might feel better about this if it weren’t for Negroponte’s pronounced inability to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

In “Springtime in Somalia,” on Military.com Jeff Huber writes: “The New York Times said, ‘at least four Tomahawk cruise missiles. . . had slammed into. . . buildings in Dusa Marreb.’” Its source was an “‘American military official. . . who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the operation.’ Notice how operations these days are ’sensitive’ as opposed to ‘classified’ or ’secret.’ One has to wonder how they arrived at a word like ’sensitive’ to describe things like cruise missile attacks that kill people.”

At Informed Comment: Global Affairs, Barrett Rubin writes about Afghanistan, where we find “Marines Stuck Protecting Poppies in Helmand.” “Yet the Marines are not destroying the plants. In fact, they are reassuring villagers the poppies won’t be touched [to keep from driving] them to take up arms if they eliminated the impoverished Afghans’ only source of income. Many Marines in the field are scratching their heads over the situation.”

In “State Secrets” from the New Yorker, Patrick Radden Keefe writes about the difficulties inherent in defending in court those accused by the government of providing terrorists with funds: “One consideration for prosecutors is that winning convictions on terrorism charges can be difficult.” In one case, “One of the jurors described the governments evidence as ’strung together with macaroni noodles.’”

In “Perhaps 60% of today’s oil price is pure speculation” on Global Research.com, William Engdahl writes: “The price of crude oil today is. . . . controlled by an elaborate financial market system. . . . As much as 60% of today’s crude oil price is pure speculation driven by large trader banks and hedge funds.”

England’s New Statesman is running a whole section on the impact of the year 1968 on both the United States and Europe. “Was it a great beginning . . . or just the final great street festival before the darkness closed in? [Did] the year change everything — or nothing at all.” The likes of Noam Chomsky, Greil Marcus, and Eric Hobsbawm weigh in.

Appendix:

Were she in a position to do so, here’s what Top Chef’s Padma would tell Senator Clinton (an email from R.I.):

“Hillary, please pack up your knives and go.”

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