At dinner with friends last week, one mentioned that if Mitch Daniels runs for president, at least we would have an “adult conversation” about the many issues and crises facing this country. I can’t disagree. In Mitch’s appearance on Meet the Press on Sunday, he did his best to stick to his principled stand on the fiscal issues he cares about. He’s a budget guy; he doesn’t give a damn about the social issues that frame the debate in the far right wing of his party. He readily says, “I don’t know” and refuses to be drawn into the “gotcha.” George Will and David Brooks <3 him.

But the forces of righteousness tilting ever rightward are sucking the entire Republican party into their vortex, a swirling mass of indignation and misinformation against all things progressive… civil rights, environmental protection, safe food,  sensible financial regulation,  sensible gun laws, investments in infrastructure, health care… and on and on and on.

All the Hope we Dems had when the country turned blue for a split second has been dashed by a strange adherence to the same-old same-old. The wars, Gitmo and reauthorization of the so-called “Patriot Act.” Bank bailouts that have fueled the greed on Wall Street and ignored the needs on Main Street. The usurpation by corporations of most major media, elections, federal regulations and government decisions. Unmitigated commercial campaign advertising made inevitable by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling last January.

Can we have an adult conversation? Having worked on campaigns, I think it’s difficult for candidates to remain true to their ideals and stay plain spoken when talking points and sound bites rule the day. Candidates have inhumanly punishing schedules, and unfortunately, they need the professional campaign people who parachute in to run their campaigns. But these same professional campaign folks do the happy dance at every perceived “screw-up-gone-viral” on the opposing side. Scruples be damned so long as votes are secured. One has to look no further than John McCain to see what a political campaign can do to someone who was once viewed as reasonable, sensible and moderate.

Can we have an adult conversation? Not when half the country takes as gospel the rantings of entertainer-pundits Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity and many others. While The New York Times, NPR, the BBC, CNN and a handful of other print and broadcast media outlets have reporters ON THE GROUND covering events unfolding in Japan, Libya, Bahrain, Ivory Coast and everywhere else, these calculating, self-serving, unpatriotic blowhards are whipping up the fear from their cushy New York studios by spreading misinformation. They lie, and people believe them. Says Rush: “These people [the media] are looking for disaster. They want disaster upon disaster. They want the nuclear meltdown. They want the Japanese syndrome, if you will. They want this stuff.”  Dirty. Rotten. Liar.

You can’t have an adult conversation without adults. Here’s more of the aforementioned Rush Limbaugh misinformation campaign:

“The media is liberal, you understand what that means, so in case of somebody like me I’m suspicious of everything they say, ‘cause they’re liberals. …all I needed to know is Obama’s a liberal. It really is that simple. The media is liberal. What do we know about the US media? We know that they are in an unalterable alliance with the American left and the worldwide left. What do we know about the American left and the worldwide left? What do we know that they oppose and what they hate?

It’s very simple: Once you understand who the people are, what their politics are, then you can understand the rubric and the umbrella in which they do their jobs. So you therefore conclude that pretty much every story coming out of Japan from the American media is gonna be anti-nuclear industry, and it’s gonna have not just reporting about what’s going on in Japan. There will be accompanying stories why we never, ever should build another nuclear plant ever anywhere in the world much less the United States, pure and simple — which, of course, has nothing to do with the story in Japan. It has nothing to do with the facts on the ground in Japan.

The media is tweeting things left and right. The AP just tweeted: ‘Japanese Utility Says Fuel Rods at Troubled Quake-Hit Nuclear Reactor Dully Exposed Again.’ Oh, no! The fuel rods are exposed! Ho! Oh! What are we supposed to conclude from this? You have to. There’s a cumulative record from people like this. I’m just trying to help you discern and understand how I observe these things, how I watch it, how I digest it, and how little of it I believe. I believe more of what I see, footage-wise, than what I hear or read being reported. You can’t deny what you’re seeing. It’s when I start reading the stuff that they write accompanying it or so forth that I instinctively begin scratching my head.”

Hold your nose and read the full text here.

This morning The New York Times, with reporters at the scene, described the dangers of the fuel rods pooh-poohed by Limbaugh, above. Says the NYT,  “If any of the spent fuel rods in the pools do indeed catch fire, nuclear experts say, the high heat would loft the radiation in clouds that would spread the radioactivity. ‘It’s worse than a meltdown,’ said David A. Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists who worked as an instructor on the kinds of General Electric reactors used in Japan. ‘The reactor is inside thick walls, and the spent fuel of Reactors 1 and 3 is out in the open.’ …”Depending on the freshness of the spent fuel, Mr. Lochbaum said, the water in an uncooled pool would start to boil in anywhere from days to a week. The water would boil off to a dangerous level in another week or two. Once most of the fuel is exposed, he said, it can catch fire. If the spent fuel is a few months old, most of the iodine 131 — one of the most dangerous radioactive byproducts in spent fuel — will have decayed into harmless forms. But the cesium 137 in the spent fuel has a half-life of 30 years, meaning it would take about two centuries to diminish its levels of radioactivity down to 1 percent. It is cesium 137 that still contaminates much land in Ukraine around the Chernobyl reactor, which suffered a meltdown in 1986.” Read the full story here and learn the science of a nuclear reactor meltdown here.

I’m not optimistic that we can have an adult conversation as long as there are greedy people whose aim is to undermine the truth to achieve their self-serving ends. So in that sense, I don’t believe it matters one whit who runs for president. It’s calming to think that a Mitch v. Barack contest would be all about the issues that matter to Americans, and that everyone would be honest, intelligent and true to his values. As tempting as it is to hope for a clownish, unelectable candidate on the Republican side — Palin, Bachman, Huckabee – or a bloodless cold fish you want to stick a fork in, like Mitt Romney, even I’m not that cynical.

I think we should attempt the adult conversation, even when the swirling forces of unreason are upon us. It may be the only way to prevent Rome from burning.

Gawd. Working at home means being witness to the trainwreck that is daytime TV. As respite to the 24/7 Japan nuclear reactor meltdown coverage on CNN — (hoo-rah to them, by the way, for covering the news vs. Charlie Sheen) — I turned the channel to CBS’s “The Talk” where — lo and behold – is Priscilla Presley, nary a wrinkle on her porcelain face to be seen, perfectly shiny and straight hair covering her neck like Venetian blinds. No matter what botox and collagen do for your face, the neck is the dead giveaway that we don’t look 25 anymore. The icky part of this show is the way the younger hosts patronize their guests with their “Oooh, you look so perfect!” commentary. The last time I saw this show, Christie Brinkley was the guest, and everyone held their breath when she walked on stage, letting out a collective sigh of relief when it was confirmed that she looked nearly identical to her Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition supermodel self, thanks, no doubt, to all forms of surgical enhancement.

OK. Back to work. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, sorry for the prolonged absence. Please leave a comment so I can have some decent dialog here, and not just spammy messages from people trying to sell penis enlargement pills.

Have a good day!

Why do governments invest in companies? I read an article yesterday about a solar panel manufacturer that received $43 million from the state of Massachusetts to set up shop in 2008, but now is pulling out and moving its manufacturing plant to China.

Often you hear about governments making their states or cities more attractive to companies through all kinds of special deals that certainly cost taxpayers millions. Yet what are we investing in? In the case of the solar panel manufacturer, 800 people had jobs at that plant. Now they don’t.

And now I’m generalizing, but when businesses are built and workers are hired, housing units, schools, shopping centers, hospitals, roads and a host of other services must be built around them. Then the business pulls out, and all that supporting infrastructure is left behind with nothing to sustain it.

Think of all those big rusty blue GM plants overgrown with weeds, like in Danville in Vermillion County. Think United Airlines… the Indianapolis Maintenance Center shuttered in 2003, which less than a decade earlier had courted 90 different venues before making a deal in Hendricks County to receive nearly $300 million in federal, state and local “incentives.” The folks I met on the 2008 campaign trail from Connersville in Fayette County were still smarting over the loss of nearly 900 jobs with the 2007 bankruptcy of Ford auto parts supplier Visteon.

What if we took all those millions in corporate subsidies, and instead of bribing corporations to relocate or build in our communities, we developed the kind of communities that companies would find irresistible?

What if we invested that public money in infrastructure (roads, water systems, bridges and dams); transportation; public health/safety; schools; green spaces; clean environment and the arts? What if our communities provided solutions to the problems of working parents, such as quality child care, easy access to healthy food, low-stress commutes and ubiquitous wireless Internet connectivity?

There has to be more to living the modern life than neighborhoods of identical plastic houses with supporting strip malls, fast-food chains and big box stores on their outskirts. We can live that way practically everywhere. In order to stand out and truly be a place where people want to live and build a business, we ought to do something unique.

I’m just saying, if 5,000 birds fell on Indianapolis, I’d be pretty freaked out. It would look a little like Doomsday if 100,000 fish washed up on the banks of the White River. And if 40,000 putrid deceased crabs were stinking up my front yard, it would seem a lot apocalyptic.

So what to make of these and other animal deaths all over the world in recent days?

• Little Rock, Arkansas: 100,000 drum fish.
• Beebe, Arkansas: 5,000 red-winged blackbirds.
• Baton Rouge, Louisiana: 500 red-winged blackbirds, brown-headed cowbirds, grackles and starlings.
• Sweden: 100 jackdaw birds.
• Kentucky: several hundred grackles, red wing blackbirds, robins and starlings.
• New Zealand: hundreds of snapper fish.
• Kent, England: 40,000 devil crabs.
• Chesapeake Bay, Maryland: 2 million spot and croaker fish.
• Brazil: 100 tons of sardine, croaker and catfish.
• Port Orange, Florida: hundreds of dead mullet, ladyfish and catfish.
• East Texas, hundreds of coot birds.

Also rumors of turtle doves in Italy falling from the sky. Add to that the honeybees suffering Colony Collapse Disorder, frogs “leaping to extinction” from chytrid virus and a million bats dead from white-nose syndrome, and we’re not even to the end of the week.

If you read all these stories, there are a couple of themes. “Experts” are dismissing them with some sort of semi-plausible explanation, such as that fireworks have caused the bird deaths. Hello? If that is the case, why don’t we have mass bird deaths every Fourth of July? But what do I know. Then, of course, there are rumors of the end-times, for which (apparently) many people are waiting because, hey! we trashed the Earth and won’t have anywhere left to go.

I’m speculating that the rapidity of gathering news may have something to do with so many people being freaked out about all this. Pre-Google, we’d have no idea there were so many similar incidents going on all over the world, so no one would have been worried about it. Now, we can google the search term “bird deaths” and get Realtime info on that topic and related stories from news organizations, blogs and tweets. The links above are from presumably credible news organizations (in my book, those that have editors).

I wonder, however, why these animal deaths aren’t a top story on every newscast and above the fold of every newspaper. The top three stories aggregated on Google News when I got home from work this evening were all about U.S. politics. So John Boehner has a bigger gavel than Nancy Pelosi, and the Right Wing-Nuts are lying to the American people AGAIN about healthcare. We live in a truly screwed up world that pays more attention to this bullshit than to the delicate fabric of our ecosystem, on which we all depend for our very lives.

God help the birds, fish, frogs, bats and bees. And God help us.

You first encounter the montage of photos on a wide pillar, around which you walk, slowly scanning captions and pausing to reflect on the emotions the art suggests. Only after you’ve come clear around do you notice the larger prints of these same photos that line the walls of the adjacent gallery.

Kevin Carter for The New York Times, March 26, 1993.

Of all these Pulitzer Prize winning photographs, one kicks you squarely in the gut. A starving child crouched in the dirt with a vulture waiting nearby for the inevitable to occur.

To contemplate the gravity of that moment you sit a bit outside the gallery before continuing to explore the rest of the Newseum in Washington, D.C. But that picture never leaves you, and you wonder from time to time how you can ever again feel right about a world in which famine and vultures exist.

The photographer, 33 year-old Kevin Carter, could not feel right after years of chronicling the horrors in Africa. In his suicide note, he revealed he was “haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners….”

Pity the limits of mere words to portray a story like a powerful photograph. Today’s “The Year in Pictures” in the Week in Review section of The New York Times illustrates the human struggles in Pakistan, Haiti, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Some pictures I remember seeing when they were originally published, like the one of bloodied babies being wheeled on a hospital cart following a bombing in Pakistan. And another of a woman last March outside her ruined house in the aftermath of the Chilean earthquake, which captures the exact moment of her breaking heart. I clipped that one to remind myself I’m never really having a bad day, NOT EVER, REALLY, compared with so many people. [photo]

One powerful picture in today’s NYT — not part of the year-end picture collection — is a photograph of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, which spreads over 8 columns and covers two-thirds of pages A26-27.

 You can view the picture  here online, but it won’t have the same effect as holding that fire right there in your hands.

Photo credit: U.S. Coast Guard

UPDATED: Requirement to register has been removed due to technical difficulties. Comments on this blog will still be “held for moderation” and require administrator approval before they go live. So rules of the road are: no cursing and name calling, and especially, keep it relevant to the discussion.

Fox 59 12-10-2010

Fox 59 12-8-2010

Fox 59 12-9-2010

Soon after my Nov. 24 post on “Racist Soap” went viral and was picked up locally by WXIN Fox 59’s Kim King, WTHR Channel 13’s Mary Milz and Robert Annis at The Indianapolis Star, it began to receive comments. Like Fox 59’s Facebook page and the “conversation” pages of the three news outlets, the comments were mostly inflammatory, just like the topic I covered in the original blog post.

Faceless “someones” were calling me a “fat hooker,” “f***ing slut” and “f***ing crybaby bitch” for standing up against racism and exercising my First Amendment rights to voice my opinion. And since this is my blog and I can write what I want, I could have shot back about what a bunch of p***ies they are. But that’s not what this blog is about.

Besides, there’s no point getting into a pissing contest with a bunch of white supremacists who worship David Duke (“white pride, worldwide!”). It’s not as though they’re equipped with rational arguments and informed opinions. For example, one theme from these commenters is that racist behavior is okay because of “black on white crime.” Sigh.

Sadly, the commentariat apparently is comprised of people who never learned good manners, much less fair play. In their verbal sandbox that makes up the online space, they spew ad hominem for lack of anything substantive to say.

When they do attempt substance, the commentariat play fast and loose with the facts. I was amazed to see that the “Just Cookies” incident has been attributed to me, among other fiction, along with probably the financial meltdown and global warming (except that they probably believe global warming doesn’t exist.)

This whole episode has made me reflect on the comment feature of this blog. I began the blog in early November after a blogging hiatus of more than a year. My previous blog was hosted on Yahoo! 360, a discontinued service that required commenters to be registered users and generated few comments. Initially on this blog, I left commenting open to anyone who supplied a username and email address; however, I’ve modified that to require commenters to register.

The nasty comments I’ve received are way beyond anything I received by email in the 10 years I wrote commentary for The Star. I’m continually amazed at how brazen people will be when anonymity releases them from accountability. Say what you will about my opinion, but I’ve been willing, for more than a decade, to put my name, face and email with what I believe.

So, two more things regarding comments on this blog. At first I was so happy to receive a comment (any comment!) that I approved some spammy SEO stuff that seemed harmless. No more. Unless the comment adds to the conversation, consider it forever “in moderation.” That goes for anything inflammatory or nasty, as well.

As for comments on the “Racist Soap” post, I’m going to approve all but the extremely nasty ones, just for the sake of “the conversation.” I hope any intelligent life out there, if it exists, will counter-post this garbage. There are a lot of not-so-nice people in the world, many of them standing up for a very uncuddly Archie Bunker archetype who believes “This country was founded on racism.” Heaven help us, as we march into 2011, that these attitudes still exist.

TOMS

This is the time of year for lists, and mine is not so much about things I want as it is about things I already appreciate! In alpha-ish order…

The Big Bang Theory
A sitcom about nerds! This little television gem shows how cool nerdy can be. Nonstop smart dialog makes you keep your thinking cap on. Thursday evenings at 8 on CBS.

Cupcakes at The Flying Cupcake
Located across the street from the Illinois Street Food Emporium at 56th Street in an adorable little space, this bakery is the perfect place to drop in for a treat that’s a little naughty and a lot delicious.

Eggs Benedict at Tulip Noir
Who knew Hollandaise sauce could be so nuanced? The eggs, too, are Phil’s from Whole Foods Market, with wholesome, golden yolks. Great coffee, ginger mint tea and hot chocolate go with a nontraditional, delicious breakfast menu.

Green Goodness
A fruit smoothie from Bolthouse Farms that’s loaded with fruits, veggies, minerals and natural sweetness. Don’t let the spinach hue play mind games with you. It tastes great!

The Good Wife
My favorite television drama, for the strong female lead, Juliana Margulies, and the smart dialog and political theme. Tuesday evenings at 10 on CBS.

The Monon Trail
Go a little way or a long, long way depending on time, weather and mood. People watching recommended. Take your reusable shopping bag if planning a stop in Broad Ripple or other points along the way.

My Toms
Buy a pair, they’ll donate a pair to a child in need. You’ll do good, and feel less guilty about buying another pair of shoes. And what’s great is that you’ll reach for your comfy Toms instead of all those cruel shoes you own.

Rosebud salve
Saving lips from chapping since 1892, this so-called “cult favorite” from Rosebud Perfume Company can be purchased where Sephora products are sold, last I saw at the Fashion Mall and J.C. Penney. Stays on all night, too.

TCM
Turner Classic Movies, because I LOVE old movies and obscure classics, and following actors or directors through a body of work. Note to Ted about the apps I’m waiting for: a tool to populate my Outlook calendar with upcoming showtimes AND TCM on-demand.

Tyler Automotive
Honest guys, good work, fair prices. What more could you want in car maintenance and repair? Near Glendale Mall.

Surprise! Age 20, wearing the robe, greeting trick-or-treaters at my barracks at Osan Air Base, Korea.

Hail to the writer’s prompt! From the National Federation of Press Women via the Woman’s Press Club of Indiana:

“December is a traditional month of gift-giving. What has been your most favorite/memorable gift you ever received at this time and why? Please include your name, when you received the gift, from who, and the age you were when you received it.”

A Mother’s Love

Our Scotch pine dripping “icicles” and old handmade ornaments was not the fanciest tree in the neighborhood. Nor were our gifts the coolest. It was true that four doors down, those kids scored a basketball goal AND a ping-pong table AND brand-new alarm clocks AND clothes, records, perfume and stockings filled with knick-knacks on that Christmas morning, 1976.

Me? I don’t remember what I got. What I do remember is that my mother received an envelope containing a hundred dollars. Real money, a gift from my dad.

My mom was very fond of “after-Christmas sales.” After Christmas, she used to say, was the best time to buy bedding and winter clothes. And in our chilly Northern Virginia household with four kids, somebody always needed something to wear.

That winter, apparently, the deficient child was me. I was 16 years old, and I lacked a robe. So my mother, who had never before received a gift of cash on Christmas, took her money and bought me a robe.

The robe’s royal blue velveteen fabric hung clear to the floor and a red sash ran around the middle. I had never been so warm.

But the real gift was my mom’s love. Because even though there must have been a hundred things she wanted for herself, she put my needs first. She gave me a robe, but it was the warmth of her love I felt that Christmas, and still feel today.

Heaven forbid that a single day should go by without a deep new learning curve about the financial crisis. In today’s New York Times, revelations that the Fed’s intervention with banks, going back to late 2007, was exponentially broader, more global and more expensive than anyone previously knew. (“Fed Documents Breadth of Emergency Measures”)

With so much public screaming going on about “bailouts” and spending, much of it totally uninformed, I decided long ago it was important to me to at least understand the basics of events leading up to the Great Recession, Second Great Depression or (as I’m now thinking of it), the “Greatest Depression.”

What’s been useful, besides reading the newspapers and magazines I regularly consume, are a couple of documentaries. “Inside Job,” a film remarkably now into its third week at Keystone Art Cinema, laid out the relationship in artistically graphic terms between borrowers, lenders and investors. Narrated by Matt Damon, it explains derivatives, credit default swaps, mortgage-backed securities and other instruments and their regulation or lack thereof.

My only criticism of the film is that a real journalist should have conducted the interviews. The film’s producers ought to have ponied up for real talent, such as Vanity Fair editor Bethany McLean, who outed Enron in Fortune Magazine in 2001 and is coauthor of a new book about the financial crisis, “All the Devils Are Here.”

I presume it was Mr. Damon conducting the interviews, which as a result, are often less-than-professional in that they’re poorly edited and overwrought. But overall he gets an A for effort, and the film is definitely worth seeing if you want to understand just how the players on Wall Street cruelly screwed you and me on Main Street.

PBS’s Frontline documentary, “Inside the Meltdown” was also very instructive, in that it laid out the timeline of the financial crisis, from the sale of investment bank Bear Stearns to JP Morgan Chase for $2 a share, to the federal bailouts of mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to the sale of investment bank Merrill Lynch to Bank of America, to the breathtaking bankruptcy of investment bank Lehman Brothers, to the rescue of “big insurance company” AIG. (Best of all, you can watch the entire film online at no charge.)

So after all this personal investment in understanding the financial crisis, today I read the NYT article referenced in the first paragraph above, which says (among much more), “In the first week of the Commercial Paper Funding Facility, the Fed bought more than $225 billion in debt. Companies ranging from Ohio’s Fifth Third Bank to the best-known bank franchises of Europe and Asia, like Royal Bank of Scotland and Sumitomo, were the primary occupants of the new lifeboat, along with the finance arms of the nation’s hard-pressed automakers.”

Good Lord! “The primary occupants of the new lifeboat”??! What’s a “Commercial Paper Funding Facility”? Just tell it to me straight. My brain is already deep-fried.

And, 5/3 Bank? My bank?! That really brings the crisis close to home.

What ticks me off the most is that these banks and other corporations who have been receiving bailouts with OUR MONEY — that’s YOU AND ME, TAXPAYER — are continuing to spend millions buying the votes of lawmakers from sea to shining sea. IN MY HUMBLE OPINION, any institution receiving taxpayer money to keep itself afloat should be prohibited by law from spending money on political action or lobbying of any kind. That includes direct contributions to candidates as well as contributions to the shadowy Political Action Committees (PACs) distributing their vitriol and lies on OUR PUBLIC AIRWAVES. (“Companies That Got Bailout Money Keep Lobbying”)

None of us can afford to be ignorant about the financial crisis, or worse, to form our opinions from hearsay, partisan entertainer-pundits and “loose cannon” bloggers. It’s a steep curve to learn all this mumbo jumbo, but somebody has to do it.

This top cost only $2.20 after discounts were applied!

If you thought pajama tops were just for between the sheets, check out Macy’s cute Alfani Intimates sleepwear tops. These tops can easily stand alone or be worn under sweaters or jackets. They’re rayon/lycra, so they’re easy care and light and comfortable. Best of all, by the time you apply all your discounts, they’re dirt cheap. I got the one pictured for just $2.20, and a couple more for under $6.