Archive for December, 2008
Reverend Rick and the Day “Everything Changed”
Tonight, I’d like to comment briefly on a relatively new item and a relatively old one.
The Rick Warren Controversy
Frankly, I don’t get it. While I personally support gay marriage, I am confused by the outrage shown by the GLBT community concerning Rick Warren’s planned inclusion in the 2009 Obama Inauguration festivities. First one has to accept the premise that an “invocation” has any place in an inauguration at all. Seems to me we play with separation of church and state when we have official prayers at a governmental ceremony. I won’t pursue that argument any further as I believe congressional sessions are sometimes started with a prayer and like it or not, we regularly accept a tacit Christian oriented skew to our government. So let’s get past that initial objection.
This brings the argument to how we reconcile being gay with organized religion. Unless this is a perverse interpretation, as I understand it, the Bible considers homosexuality an abomination. As I’ve said in several previous blog entries, I don’t subscribe to the salad bar approach to religion. Either you believe the precepts or your don’t. As far as I’m concerned, gays wanting into organized religion makes no more sense than Blacks wanting into the KKK. OK, perhaps that’s a bit extreme. But it seems reasonably clear to me that gay folks are not going to get “validated” by standard organized religion. This is a futile battle for them.
Now let’s get specific about the two central players in this drama, Warren and Obama. I’m not overly familiar with Rick Warren but as far as I can tell he is no Jerry Falwell. I think it’s fair to say he represents the intellectual arm of the Christian church. I think he demonstrated his intellectual curiosity when he hosted Obama and McCain at Saddleback Church earlier in the campaign season. This is what I believe attracts Barack Obama to him. My guess is that Obama finds Warren a reasonable man with whom to debate and with whom to form an alliance. I also think Warren’s practicality was demonstrated when he had his church remove some anti-gay rhetoric from his web site in the immediate aftermath of the brouhaha.
As for Obama, did the GLBT community bother to listen to Obama before they voted for him? I know that to some extent Obama represented an empty vessel into which many Americans poured their hopes and aspirations but Obama’s position on gay marriage could not have been clearer. He was and is against it. (He favors civil unions.) While I don’t think Obama would actively support an initiative like Proposition 8 in California, I also don’t think he would hold such support against the likes of Rick Warren. The simple fact is that when it comes to gay marriage, Warren and Obama agree.
Why the gay community needed a reality check in this area escapes me. The Christian stance on homosexuality is unambiguous and the Obama stance on gay marriage is equally unambiguous. So in what way did Obama let down his gay supporters?
September 11, 2001, “The Day Everything Changed”
Baloney! Over the weekend, First Lady Laura Bush was interviewed by Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday”. Mrs. Bush said that she and the President never expected to be party to a “wartime presidency”. Then on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” today, the host quoted Mrs. Bush and nodded in agreement saying “that day [9/11] everything changed”. I’m sorry folks but the idea that Bush should not have expected to be a wartime President and that everything changed on 9/11 is simply the myopic view of a very selfish nation.
Let’s talk about this war we’ve been fighting. It’s the war on terror, right? Did that war begin on September 11, 2001? Certainly not. International terrorism was a well established problem before that. The war on terrorism that needed to happen well before 9/11 didn’t much interest us until WE got hit. (It’s actually quite similar to WWII where we stood by and watched the world go to hell in a hand-basket until we got hit in Pearl Harbor.) Absolutely nothing changed on September 11, 2001 except that the hell that people all over the world were suffering finally came to our shores.
While I have not been a fan of the Iraq war (because it’s not the enemy we should have been fighting), it does seem reasonable to me that if we’d sent troops to Afghanistan and other terrorist harboring nations before 9/11, then 9/11 would never have happened. The war was already being waged. We simply chose to not actively pursue it.
The time has come for us to realize that isolationism no longer works for us socially, politically or economically. When we see some other country getting their ass kicked by a terrorist attack, we should jump into action to send a clear message that it’s unacceptable. The message should be that any faction that terrorizes our neighbor (and not just a Western hemisphere neighbor) could potentially terrorize us so we will proactively stamp them out before they do more harm. That essential piece of the Bush Doctrine got invoked one day too late in my view. We didn’t really care until we lost 3000 of our citizens.
Respectfully,
Rutherford
Obama Video Address: December 24, 2008
This week, President-elect Barack Obama reminds us that many face hardship this holiday season, from the soldier in a strange land to his or her family that must celebrate in his or her absence to many of our fellow Americans who face financial troubles. He reminds us to find ways to help one another during this difficult time.
And now, the President-elect:
Respectfully,
Rutherford
Hope is Our Most Valuable Currency
I am not a religious man. I don’t call myself an atheist because I don’t consider myself smart enough to know whether or not there is a God or how the universe was created or where we go after we die. With that said, I am not comfortable with any of the popular belief systems that describe God’s role in our lives. I consider much of it allegory and superstition. I think for all the good organized religion has caused, there has been great harm done in the name of just about everyone’s version of God. I say all this as a disclaimer for what is about to follow.
After dinner, Thursday night, Christmas night, the radio was tuned to a station playing Christmas music non-stop. I’ve heard so many of the songs so often that they go in one ear and out the other. I like some and I dislike others. This particular night I heard a song with a haunting piano introduction that so enthralled me that I had to find out what the song was and who was playing it. I discovered the song was a re-arrangement of “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” by a contemporary Christian band called Casting Crowns. Apparently, this was a standard Christmas song going way back that I had simply never heard before. Even if I had heard it, I would not have recognized it by Casting Crowns’ rendition. They gave it a complete and compelling face lift. I located a video of the song that included the lyrics and I found myself drawn in even deeper.
As I did more research I discovered that the song drew most of its lyrics from a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called “Christmas Bells”. Longfellow wrote the poem in the waning days of the Civil War before the war’s outcome was predictable. He had just gotten news of his son being wounded in battle. In the poem he tries to reconcile the fact of so much violence and bloodshed with the knowledge that peace is attainable. The two closing stanzas particularly struck me:
And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said;
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”
While I have no concept of God with which I am comfortable, these words resonated with me. For the first time, I realized that I believe that mankind has a momentum towards “good” or “right”. Call it God, call it karma, call it whatever you like. I think that for all the evil that surrounds us, mankind strives to do the right thing. People are fundamentally good the world over. I thought, if I just replace the word God with “hope”, then I’ve pinpointed my primary emotion. Hope is not dead, it does not sleep, the wrong shall fail and right will prevail. As we look at small pockets of history, this might be hard to swallow but when taking the long view, right does prevail. If you limited your view of life to WWII Nazi Germany, then you might be tempted to lose hope, but the suffering did end. Many of the guilty were brought to justice. All decent men and women learned lessons they would never forget and they made sure future generations would not forget either.
If you limited your view to the antebellum South, it would be easy to lose hope. The long view proves that the evil of slavery was defeated and many many years later, the presence of racism in American society is substantially less destructive. A couple of nights ago when I was watching a review of major political events of 2008, I saw the celebrants in Grant Park on election day. I thought I was done crying over Barack Obama’s election but my eyes welled up again. You see with Barack, we got a “twofer”. On the one hand we had the incredible symbolism that the old spiritual “We Shall Overcome” had some substance to it. A man who could just as easily have been lynched in the 1930′s South would be leader of our country and the free world. But we got more than symbolism. Over the past two months, Obama has spoken and acted in ways that give us hope in this economically despairing time. The man who would have been lynched in some parts of this country when we had our last major economic crisis is now our source of comfort. Obama has not said it will be easy but he has said repeatedly that we will get through this. “The wrong shall fail, the right prevail.”
Sometimes when the chips are down, hope is our most valuable currency. Yes, positive change takes hard work but the work is buoyed by optimism, by never giving up hope that we, as a species, gravitate toward good outcomes. “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” has become my favorite holiday song because it reminds me that no matter how much sadness and despair surrounds us, by never giving up hope we get to a better day. We can overcome.
“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” — Casting Crowns Live (notice there are no bells in the song, but rather the sounds of a children’s choir, the children’s voices reminding us that there is a future worth hoping for):
“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” — Casting Crowns studio version (with lyrics):
Respectfully,
Rutherford
Obama Video Address: December 20, 2008
In this week’s address, President-elect Barack Obama announced his science and technology team. Yes, you heard it right, after eight years of the dumbing down of America, science and technology now gets presidential attention. His chief advisor on science and technology will be John Holdren, a Harvard physicist. Holdren will co-chair the PCAST (President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology) with Harold Varmus, a cancer researcher and former director of the National Institutes of Health and MIT human genome researcher Eric Lander. Rounding out the science leadership team is Jane Lubchenco as Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
What is striking in this announcement is Obama’s acknowledgement of the far reaching influence of science in our society. His team will be tasked with advising on military matters (including biological warfare, no doubt), fighting disease, creating jobs through technology and preserving the planet. In fact, Obama indirectly tips his hat to former Vice President Al Gore, with his reference to the importance of listening to scientists even when they tell us inconvenient truths. Science must be respected outside of any ideological agenda.
Once again, Obama expresses a vision that gives hope that America will come out of its malaise to once again be a world leader.
And now, the President-elect:
Respectfully,
Rutherford
Bush Narrowly Escapes AssasSHOEnation While Secret Service Sleeps
On his “farewell tour” of Iraq and Afghanistan, President George W. Bush encountered an outraged shoe wielding journalist. Considering that Gerald R. Ford had two women shoot two real guns at him in as many weeks, this attack was relatively benign. Culturally, while we find the episode humorously bizarre, it is considered a supreme insult in Iraq, probably the equivalent of spitting at someone here.
But what I noticed and what really troubled me despite the levity of this entry’s title, was the action, or apparent inaction of the Secret Service. Let me see, in Secret Service school are you taught how to quickly discern a shoe flying through the air from some other more dangerous object? One would think that after the President adroitly ducked the first shoe, that Secret Service would have sprung into action to step in front of Bush until his safety had been assured. On the contrary, Bush was defended by no one but Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki as he reached up to try and catch the second incoming projectile.
If I were Barack Obama, I’d be damn nervous after watching this incident. In fact, I’d fire the whole crew and start with a fresh one in January.
Rule number 1: You see anything flying through the air in my direction, tackle my ass to the ground until you know what is going on.
Respectfully,
Rutherford
Obama Video Address: December 13, 2008
In this week’s address, the President-elect oddly ignores the elephant in the room. What is on most people’s minds right now is the recently defeated effort to rescue the Big 3 automakers. The sticking point appeared to be the UAW’s refusal to take immediate pay cuts in order to get the 14 billion bailout. The Republicans in the Senate have been accused of union busting. At first, I was disappointed that the UAW stuck to its guns on this until I was reminded that no where in the proposed bailout plan is an immediate requirement for executive pay cuts or even better, executive resignations.
As I have said before, no matter how this goes down, the blue collar worker is the one who will get shafted. If the GM and Chrysler (Ford finally said “we don’t need your money”) don’t get the money heads will roll. If they get the money and re-tool their business, heads will roll. It really does not matter. I still stick to the principle that in a capitalist society, companies that cannot succeed, deserve to fail.
Here is the solution that I have not heard from anyone. The Fed and the Governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm should sit down with Toyota, and Volkwagen, to name two good companies, and work out a plan where these companies would receive government subsidies to purchase and operate all of the GM and Chrysler plants. They would agree, at least for a period of time, to take over the brands made famous by GM and Chrysler (Cheverolet, etc.). Essentially, GM and Chrysler would sell themselves to these companies who are doing quite nicely, thank you, down in Alabama and other Southern states.
Many have said “America cannot afford to not have an auto industry.” Nonsense. America cannot afford to have millions unemployed. The notion of an American company is passe. We live in a global market and where a particular company’s headquarters resides has little relevance to international economic health. What we are talking about here is nationalistic pride and in this case, pride goeth before the fall. We need to save jobs not companies.
As for Barack Obama’s address, while he did not discuss our most pressing problem, he did discuss his plans for one of our other very distressing problems, namely the housing crisis. He announced today the appointment of the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Shaun Donovan, a former HUD employee from the Clinton administration who has most recently done outstanding work under Mike Bloomberg in New York City.
And now, the President-elect:
Respectfully,
Rutherford
The One Who Denied It Supplied It
Among little boys obsessed with flatulence there is an old saying, “the one who denied it supplied it” meaning that the first one who said he didn’t just drop a stink-bomb is indeed the one who did the deed. (There is a corollary that goes “the one who smelt [sic] it dealt it” but I digress.)
A month ago, Obama adviser David Axelrod said that the President-elect had been in touch with Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich to discuss who might fill his Senate seat. There was also some scuttlebutt that Valerie Jarrett, a key Obama adviser, was being promoted by Obama for the Senate seat.
Since then, Jarrett has been given a role in the Obama administration and Blagojevich has been caught with his pants down big time. Apparently Rod was in the process of “selling” the Senate seat to the highest bidder. In an article in Politico, Jarrett is identified as a “candidate” for consideration provided certain favors were granted to Blagojevich. When the quid-pro-quo was not granted, Jarrett was rejected.
What bothers me right now is Obama’s assertion that he has had no contact with the Governor. I’m sorry folks, I love Obama but I just don’t believe this. I watched a clip of Axelrod from a month ago, and his statement was “I know [Barack has] talked to the governor and there are a whole range of names many of which have surfaced, and I think he has a fondness for a lot of them.” Now Axelrod says he was mistaken when he made the earlier claim. I find this very hard to swallow. Axelrod is one of the most disciplined political players in recent history. When he says “I know…” I take him at his word that he knows.
I’m not suggesting that President-elect Obama is in any way connected to this Senate seat for sale scandal which is why I am all the more frustrated that he now claims never to have talked to Blagojevich. Obama could just as easily say that there were high level discussions of appropriate candidates and that was the end of it. Instead he makes a claim that based on prior testimony and common sense, does not stand up well to scrutiny.
Obama’s denial of any interaction with Blagojevich only serves to cast more attention on him instead of less. Obviously Barack did not remember the lesson from his junior high school days. Most people think that the one who denied it supplied it.
Respectfully,
Rutherford
Obama Video Address: December 6, 2008
In today’s video address, President-elect Barack Obama outlined a four point plan for economic stimulation.
1. Energy Efficient Public Buildings
2. Infrastructure Upgrade — States will have a certain amount of time to use the funds or they will lose them — a deterrent to progress getting bogged down in bureaucracy
3. School building upgrades
4. Expansion of broadband access — schools, health care systems
The goal is to ultimately create or save 2.5 million jobs.
Today’s address comes after some shocking job loss reports. More than a million jobs lost this year. Let’s not forget that for almost every job loss there is a family impacted. I personally believe that things are so bad that Barack will receive bipartisan support for his plans and we will see more action out of our federal government than we have seen in years.
And now, the President-elect:
Respectfully,
Rutherford
A Tale of Two Bailouts and I Got Punk’d — NOT
A Tale of Two Bailouts
The other night I watched documentarian Michael Moore on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” discuss the potential government bailout of the Big 3 auto makers. I agree with Moore’s opposition to the bailout but I got taken in by another comment of his that I then had to back up and reevaluate. Moore touched on the notion that the auto bailout involves some sort of class warfare. He made similar remarks in the Huffington Post:
Two weeks ago, the CEOs of the Big 3 were tarred and feathered before a Congressional committee who sneered at them in a way far different than when the heads of the financial industry showed up two months earlier. At that time, the politicians tripped over each other in their swoon for Wall Street and its Ponzi schemers who had concocted Byzantine ways to bet other people’s money on unregulated credit default swaps, known in the common vernacular as unicorns and fairies.
But the Detroit boys were from the Midwest, the Rust (yuk!) Belt, where they made real things that consumers needed and could touch and buy, and that continually recycled money into the economy (shocking!), produced unions that created the middle class, and fixed my teeth for free when I was ten.
The other way it has been put is if you shower before you go to work you get a bailout. If you shower when you get home from work, you don’t.
I say baloney! The two bailout scenarios are in one way fundamentally different and in one way fundamentally identical in such a way as to make the class warfare cries absurd. First the TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) designed to bailout the financials was implemented to stop a cross-industry international disaster. The goal was to prevent a complete financial meltdown which would effect virtually every citizen. On the other hand, the bailout of the “auto industry” is an attempt to rescue three poorly run companies who deserve to suffer the same death as every unsuccessful company in a capitalist society. Will the failure of these companies cause ripples outside the auto industry? Of course, but the ripples will not go out nearly as far as the tsunami created by a complete financial meltdown. This fundamental difference means the solution to the two problems should not be identical. It’s not class warfare, it’s capitalism.
Second, there is a fundamental similarity to the two bailouts that makes the class warfare complaint a non-starter. There is this misconception that while the TARP bailed out rich fat-cats, the auto bailout gives relief to the blue collar working man. Sorry folks, the auto bailout will give relief to the white collar, multi-million dollar salaried executives who ran their companies into the ditch. Guess what each company plans to do after they get the government money? They plan to layoff thousands of workers. This bailout will save the CEO’s asses, none of whom have volunteered to resign if their companies get the money. The blue collar, salt-of-the-earth, shower-after-work guys are still going to get royally screwed.
Interestingly, for all his populist talk, I think Moore ultimately understands this. He knows the problem with the Big 3 is corporate mismanagement and that, not class-ism is the reason the government should not give them a red cent.
I Got Punk’d — NOT
Dead set on not being played a fool like Sarah Palin, Florida Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen hung up on President-elect Barack Obama not once but twice.
Obama called her cell phone to congratulate her on her recent election win despite the fact that she is a Republican who supported John McCain. Ros-Lehtinen was convinced that in no political reality that she had ever experienced could such a thing happen. So she assumed it was a prank call from a local radio disc jockey, much like the fake-Sarkozy call that Sarah Palin fell for over a month ago. As Obama introduced himself, Ileana interrupted him, told him she wasn’t going to fall for the prank and then hung up on him.
Obama’s choice for Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel then called her. With Emanuel and Obama both on the line, Ileana was not buying it and she hung up again. Finally, her colleague Howard Berman called her to clear up the matter and she made him answer a question that only he could answer before she even believed he was legit. This lady is hard core! Once Berman convinced her that she had indeed been called by Obama, she asked that the President-elect call her one more time. They had a good laugh and no permanent harm was done. Reportedly, Ros-Lehtinen told Obama,
“You are either very gracious to reach out in such a bipartisan manner or had run out of folks to call if you are truly calling me and Saturday Night Live could use a good Obama impersonator like you,”
Apparently, Obama’s truly bipartisan style was change that the Congresswoman simply could not believe in!
Respectfully,
Rutherford
Why I Love Rod
Sorry folks but how can you not love the Governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich? The man has at least three things going for him:
1. Soprano like charisma: The day before his arrest, when asked about the cloud hanging over him, Blago said “I’ve got nothing but sunshine hanging over me.”
2. Spectacular delusions of grandeur: According to the complaint filed against him, Rod thought he might get a cabinet position or an ambassadorship as “payment” for selecting Obama’s replacement in the Senate.
3. Sheer chutzpah: Despite the fact that he knew the Illinois Secretary of State, Jesse White would not validate any senatorial appointment and that the Senate itself would block such an appointment, Blago fulfilled his legal duties today and appointed Roland Burris to Barack Obama’s vacant seat. At the close of his press conference announcing the appointment, Blagojevich said, “Feel free to castigate the appointer but don’t lynch the appointer. I am not guilty of any criminal wrongdoing!”
It’s a shame that old Rod is not a Republican. As entertaining as Sarah Palin was, Blago would have been ten times more fun as McCain’s running mate! I personally cannot wait for the next chapter to play out in this saga of dirty Chicago politics. Whatever happens, as long as Rod gets a turn at the microphone, I’ll be a happy man. You can’t write characters like this one. The man is priceless!
Respectfully,
Rutherford
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December 30, 2008 at 9:55 pm Rutherford 4 comments