I can’t think of a time when I’ve ever agreed with Cal Thomas.  I confess I don’t seek him out, but when I see him on an occasional Op-Ed page I’ll read him just to see what he’s going to say that’s going to infuriate me.  I’m rarely disappointed.

So as he sat on a panel at this year’s CPAC and said what he said about Rachel Maddow, I wasn’t shocked.  He was at CPAC with his own peeps. It was cool.

From the Huffington Post:

During a panel at the conference, a clip of Maddow’s appearance on Sunday’s “Meet the Press” was played. In it, Maddow said that Republicans are “waging war on contraception.”
“I’m really glad…that you played the Rachel Maddow clip,” Thomas said after the audience booed a bit, “because I think that she is the best argument in favor of her parents using contraception.” As the audience cheered, he continued, “I would be all for that and all the rest of the crowd at MSNBC too for that matter.”

It did seem a little odd for a Pro-Life guy to be sort of wishing someone hadn’t been born, but he was at CPAC, and it appears to be a whole different world in there.  But, as one might expect, it created a bit of a flap.  It didn’t seem like such a much to me.  All kinds of goofy things came out of CPAC 2012 and were being reported hour by hour.  This was actually one of the milder ones.  But it took a new turn when fellow Conservative Greta van Susteren said publicly that Thomas owed Maddow an apology.  (Her commenters obviously didn’t agree. Oy. And vey.)

Then last week Rachel announced that Cal Thomas had called her to apologize.  She told her audience, “I completely believe his apology.  I completely accept his apology.”  Good.  Classy.

And that was that.  Until today, when I saw a column by Cal Thomas on the Op-Ed page with the headline, “Rachel Maddow and Civility“.  I fully expected a diatribe against Rachel, even after his apology to her, but what I read may be the most sincere abject apology I’ve ever seen in my life.  That it came from a man who some people, including me, considered a tight-assed Right Wing hack, made it all the more amazing. [Note:  The full title of Thomas's piece is "Rachel maddow and my lesson in Civility" but our paper shortened the title to "Rachel Maddow and Civility" so that it could be read as something entirely different.]

He talked about that day when he sat on the panel and watched a projection of a Rachel Maddow Show clip as she talked about the Catholic contraception controversy.  He did not and cannot deny that he said what he said: “I think she’s the best argument in favor of her parents using contraception.”

In his column he wrote, “I was asked to be on a panel before what looked like a crowd of about 1,000 conservatives, hungry for “red meat.”  He wrote that he “stupidly” said what he said “before thinking”.

I’m reading between the lines here but what I’m getting is that a man like Cal Thomas, who began his column with, “When one writes about moral convictions, it’s probably a good idea to consistently live up to them,” could kick himself for ever getting involved with that CPAC crowd in the first place.  (It’ll be interesting to see where he goes from here.)

He writes that since the flap he has watched a couple of Rachel’s shows:

“Without engaging in any qualifiers, she is a strong and competent advocate for her position.  Why do so many of us only watch programs that reinforce what we already believe?  Where is the growth in that?  Whatever else she may or may not be, she is my fellow American.

I have many liberal friends acquired over the years.  They are impossible to avoid in the media, but I don’t wish to avoid them.  They became my friends because I stopped seeing them as labels and began seeing them as persons with innate worth.  That is what I failed to do in my first response to Rachel Maddow. . .

. . .I expect to like Rachel Maddow because my instinct is to separate the value of a person from his or her political position.  For some strange reason (demon possession, perhaps) I failed to do that at CPAC.”

Bravo, Mr. Thomas.  You will lose friends and followers over this, and it will be no comfort to you that I, as a liberal, completely believe your apology and appreciate what you’ve done here.  But none of that is important.  What is important is that the next morning you felt bad about what you had done and you “called Ms. Maddow to apologize. It wasn’t one of those meaningless ‘if I’ve offended anyone…’ apologies; it was hearfelt.”

And by doing that and writing about it publicly you’ve opened the doors for all of us to remember something we so easily forget when we’re in the midst of doing battle with the people on “the other side”:  Whatever else we may or may not be, we are fellow Americans.

(Cross-posted at Ramona’s Voices)

Effective August 1, thanks to a provision in the Affordable Care Act, most working women will have their contraceptives fully paid for, without a co-pay. That’s the good news. The bad news (you knew there had to be bad news, right?) is that the unenlightened among us see it as nothing more than an unconscionable threat against virile manhood.  Especially Catholic virile manhood.

The U.S Conference of Catholic Bishops, all male at last count, have decided amongst themselves that they will not be pushed into reversing their age-old hoo-haw laws forcing Catholic women to have as many babies as their wholly-owned bodies can produce. (The laugh’s on them:  Most Catholic women use artificial birth control. ( The Guttmacher Institute says it’s as high as 98%.)  When was the last time you heard a Catholic woman talking about the rhythm method, except to marvel at how crazy that whole notion was?

Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, president of the USCCB, sharply criticized the decision by the Obama administration in which it “ordered almost every employer and insurer in the country to provide sterilization and contraceptives, including some abortion-inducing drugs, in their health plans….Never before has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience. This shouldn’t happen in a land where free exercise of religion ranks first in the Bill of Rights.”

We’re talking about birth control here.  We’re talking about a woman’s right to choose when the time is right to carry and bear a child.  This is not baby-killing, it’s responsibly managing an event as life-changing as it’s ever going to get.  It’s the smart, sane way of controlling the use of our own bodies and, oh, by the way, preventing the birth of unwanted children.

We’re talking about birth control products already approved and already a part of most insurance policies. The only mandate is that insurance providers will now be required to provide those products without additional cost to all women who want to use them.  The mandate isn’t for the use, it’s for the availability and the cost.

This is a manufactured Right wing controversy designed to kill yet another positive outcome of “Obamacare”, and the Catholic Bishops are more than happy to become the spark that creates yet another phony firestorm.

Mitt Romney, Republican candidate for President and a Mormon who, until now, apparently had no problem with that particular provision in the Affordable Care Act, has jumped on the bandwagon and is now on the side of the Catholic Bishops, taking this grand opportunity to rail against his opponent, Barack Obama. about an issue he clearly doesn’t even begin to understand:

“I’m just distressed as I watch our president try and infringe upon our rights, the First Amendment of the Constitution provides the right to worship in the way of our own choice,” Romney said to nearly 3,000 people gathered in the gymnasium of Arapahoe High School, in Arapahoe County, an area known as a so-called “swing county” that Obama won in 2008.

“This same administration said that the churches and the institutions they run, such as schools and let’s say adoption agencies, hospitals, that they have to provide for their employees free of charge, contraceptives, morning after pills, in other words abortive pills, and the like at no cost,” Romney said. “Think what that does to people in faiths that do not share those views. This is a violation of conscience.

“We must have a president who is willing to protect America’s first right, our right to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience,” he said.

In addition to Romney, two other manly men candidates for Obama’s job, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, are outraged that women should be able to get free birth control. (It only adds to their outrage that women should have the audacity to think they can control their own bodies):

Andrea Saul, a spokeswoman for Mitt Romney, said in an e-mail that he regarded the administration’s rule requiring religious employers to furnish birth control as wrong. “This is a direct attack on religious liberty and will not stand in a Romney presidency,” she said. Mr. Romney has also pledged to end a federal program, Title X, that provides family planning services to millions of women.

Mr. Santorum has taken the position that health insurance plans should not be required to cover birth control. He also favors allowing states to decide whether to ban birth control. He and Mr. Gingrich both support “personhood” initiatives that would legally declare fertilized eggs to be persons, effectively banning not just all abortions but also certain contraceptives, including IUDs and some types of birth control pills.

Mr. Gingrich wants to withdraw government money from Planned Parenthood because it performs abortions in addition to providing contraceptives, though the federal money cannot be used for abortion.

A lie dressed in Pink

I wonder how they feel about Viagra and other male enhancement “medications”? Say there was a group who believed with their whole entire hearts that workplace insurance coverage of male sex tool enhancement was not only outside any notion of “health care”, it was maybe even “unconscionable”.  Should that group be exempt from providing it?

And if those bishops had wombs would they be open to letting someone else tell them what they could do with them?  (It’s a rhetorical question.  No, they wouldn’t be open to letting someone else tell them anything.)

Addendum: Catholic hospitals and universities already provide contraceptive coverage:  Here it is. What’s their excuse now?

(Cross-p0sted at Ramona’s Voices)

We progressive types are working overtime these days marching, rallying, sitting, petitioning.  We place ourselves prominently on Twitter (with our #p2, #OWS, and #CTL hashtags) and on Facebook.  More and more of us have taken to writing political blogs.  Our blogrolls feature other bloggers, other writers who work as hard or harder than we do in trying to sort out the truths behind America’s astonishing decline and the Rightward drift that led us here.  Our job is to route out the bad guys, to expose them and make sure justice take its course.  Some days we actually think we’re winning.

Silly us.

This is not David and Goliath, with the little guy getting a chance at saving the day through luck and pluck.  Not anymore.  This is Goliath stomping David into the ground. There’s David, bleeding and broken–but look!  He’s still breathing!  David’s crowd takes that as a sign of victory and moves on. The next time they’ll try peashooters.

In the 21st century–a century only slightly over a decade old and already the leading contender for “modern century most likely to return to the Dark Ages”–we the people are millions of little Davids and Big Business is one huge Goliath.  We wee Davids actually thought if we worked hard and built up our troops and used truth as a weapon, we might some day be able to take Goliath down.  We thought we might be able to survive and maybe even thrive without too much breakage or damage to our dignity.  We thought we could do it not by might (because we aren’t the mighty ones, they are) but by using corny throwbacks like common sense and good will and solidarity.

Boy, were we wrong!

I’ll give you one small example of Goliath’s power and why we don’t stand a chance:

Ever been in a Books-a-Million store?  I hadn’t either until I came south, and I went in innocently enough, as anyone would.  It’s a bookstore, after all, and I do love bookstores.  But I didn’t have to spend much time there before I began to see a trend:  I am the kind of person they hate.  I am the enemy, fagawdssake!  I realize I’m in the south and the south is hostile to avowed liberals, but come on — let me at least get to the humor section before the attacks begin.

This is what I encountered mere feet inside the door the other day:

At Books-a-Million, Myrtle Beach 1/25/12

This is an end cap in the main aisle.  The titles change periodically, but the lean to the right never goes away.  (I apologize for the poor photos.  I took them with my kindergarten grade cell-phone camera, quickly so nobody would notice, because I was, after all, standing in plain view, because that’s where these hostile books can best be seen.)

There is another Books-A-Million outside a huge mall a few miles from this smaller mall.  They have an all-rightie-all-the-time end cap in their main aisle, too, so this is not just some Bubba manager’s idea of fun, it’s store policy.  (In case you’re wondering, I’ve looked all over for the liberal end caps.  They’re not there.)

So then it came to me that if I buy something in a BAM! store (that’s their nickname), I’m aiding the enemy.  So I don’t.  Now I plan my trips to Books-a-Million as one would a reconnaissance mission, a stealth activity: Let’s see what rotten propaganda they’re pushing now.

Once I get past that ugly end cap, I spend some minutes rearranging books on the shelves so that the few liberal or even moderate books cover some of that junk. (Pathetic, I know, but it’s the best I can do ever since I took that stand against vandalism.)

Then I grab something to read and sit at a table in their Joe Muggs Cafe (My own little sit-in I calls it, since I read their books and magazines and never buy anything, but so far no one seems to notice.)  I should mention that BAM! publishes a monthly Book Page magazine highlighting their latest books.   Mark R. Levin, a Right Wing radio personality and “the #1 bestselling author of Liberty and Tyranny and regular Fox News contributor” is on January’s cover.  (Last month it was Glenn Beck).  Levin has a new book out called, “Ameritopia, The Unmaking of America”.   Before I saw that cover, I confess I had never heard of Mark R. Levin.  (Go ahead and strip me of my Rotten Persons Investigator badge–I know now that his new book, “Ameritopia” is at the top, the very tip-top,  of this week’s New York Times non-fiction bestseller list! )

So I took a look at the new book by this guy who–my god! NYT Best Seller!–I really should have heard of by now.  I turned page after page and, okay, as a new Mark R. Levin reader who is also a liberal, I’m as biased as biased can be.  But even I am shocked at how badly this book stinks!

Let me tell you, he’s no Glenn Beck.

From the Introduction:

In Ameritopia I explain that the heart of the problem is, in fact, utopianism, a term I discuss in great detail throughout the book.  Utopianism is the idealogical and doctrinal foundation for statism. While utopianism or statism or utopian or statist are often used interchangeably, the undertaking here is to probe more dceply into what motivates and animates the tyranny of statism.  Indeed the modern arguments about necessities and virtues of governmental control over the individual are but malign echoes of utopian prescriptions through the ages, which attempted to define subjugation as the most transcendent state of man.

And the first lines of the first chapter, “The Tyranny of Utopia”:

Tyranny, broadly defined, is the use of power to dehumanize the individual and delegitimize his nature.  Political utopianism is tyranny disguised as a desirable, workable and even paradisiacal governing ideology.  There are, of course, unlimited utopian constructs, for the mind is capable of infinite fantasies.  But there are common themes.  The fantasies take the form of grand social plans or experiments, the impracticality and impossibility of which, in small ways and large, leads to the individual’s subjugation.

And it goes on.  This book, I remind you, is NUMBER ONE ON THE NEW YORK TIMES NON-FICTION BEST SELLER LIST.  The book came out on January 17–less than two weeks ago–and already over 1200 people have reviewed it on Amazon, 876 of them giving it Five Stars.

It’s a runaway best seller and from where I’m sitting (In BAM!s Joe Muggs cafe) I’m concluding that something besides this book is stinking to high heaven.

Consider this:

After the closing of Borders Books in 2011, Books-a-Million became the second largest bookseller in the United States, behind Barnes and Noble.   They operate some 200 stores in the south, the northeast and in the midwest.  They’ve now taken over dozens of empty Borders stores and opened Books-A-Millions in their space.

And they sell millions of books on their website.  If you go on their site and click on the “Political Science” category, as I did yesterday,  on the very first page you’ll find a mess of right wing and conservative books, from the current to the moldy old.  Glenn Beck is prominent, as is that guy, Mark R. Levin.  Laura Ingraham is there; so is Sarah Palin.  So is Bill O’Reilly, not for his most recent book about Lincoln, but for his memoir, published way back in 2008.

Bill Clinton and Zbigniew Brzezinski are there, too, but from what I can tell, they’re mere tokens.  (Unless maybe they said something bad about Obama. . .)  But I have to wonder why old books by the Righties, some more than three years old, are at the top of their list when so many other, newer  books might better deserve to be there.

Mark R. Levin’s “Ameritopia” is his second book for Threshold Publishing, a Simon and Schuster imprint that exclusively publishes “conservative” books, many of which rise to the top of the NYT best seller list.  Levin’s book, “Liberty and Tyranny” (There’s that word again) also hit the top of the NYT bestseller list, and now he, along with Glenn Beck, is Threshold’s star.  Mary Matalin is its Editor-in-Chief.  (I looked hard for a liberal arm of Simon and Schuster (a CBS company), or any other publishing company, and–no surprise–there are none.)

In a telling article about Threshold in Politico, July 21, 2009, it’s clear that any liberal expecting to write a best-seller might better stick to fiction:

Adam Bellow, executive editor at HarperCollins, noted that conservative publishing first took off in the 1990s, with the New York houses initially resistant — until the possible payoff became obvious for books taking shots at liberals. (Bellow edited Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” for Doubleday.) Now, going forward, he notes there are challenges ahead for upstart imprints like Threshold.

“If you’re setting up an imprint, you’re taking on a real financial challenge,” Bellow said. “You have to have screaming commercial best-sellers. You have to keep delivering them year after year. The success at Threshold, which took a while to find its legs, has been largely to do with Glenn Beck and Mark Levin. And the success of those books is that these authors have enormous media platforms.”

Bellow, who’s editing Sarah Palin’s much-anticipated memoir, said he expects that at least through Obama’s presidency, publishing houses will stay committed to churning out conservative books for at least one reason sure to keep publishing executives — whether right, left or in between — pleased. “Feeding that market will continue, because it’s going to be profitable,” he said.

So here’s what I’m thinking:  What’s to stop BAM! from manipulating the market?  (They also own a book distribution company.) What’s to stop Threshold?  What’s to stop any of the Right Wing top guns–the Koch Brothers, say– the people with all the money?  What’s to stop them from buying up tens or even hundreds of thousands of these books and sitting on them?  (It’s been done on a smaller scale.  Remember the fuss about Newt Gingrich during the congressional hearings just before they gave him a big, fat noogie?  Seems he got some Big Guys to put up $150,000 to promote and/or buy up his book, Window of Opportunity to make it look like people were actually reading it.)  And what’s to stop 800+ stooges from churning out magnificent reviews for a book that nobody in their right mind would actually read through to the end?

Does anybody really believe that the average reader is clamoring for more of the same from Mark R. Levin?  (That same Mark R. Levin who gushes his thanks to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity in his Ameritopia acknowledgements?)  Unless you’re hopelessly in love with the words “utopianism”, “statism” and “tyranny”, there’s nothing juicy in there, no matter how hard you look.  It’s one dry, endless paragraph after another.

Just as radio and TV stations can promote their own and manipulate their viewership into believing that their way is the way it is, the way it should be, and ever will be, so can book stores, simply by advertising and placement.  But this appears to be beyond simply leading a horse to water.  I’m guessing somebody is buying up and pushing those books, and I’m guessing it ain’t the general public.

But to be fair, in that same BAM! store I managed to find a slim volume called “What it means to be a Democrat”,  written by George McGovern and published this past November by Blue Rider Press, a new imprint from Penguin.

Sen. McGovern’s book was one of first on Blue Rider’s list to make it to the bookstores.  It’s a tribute to publisher David Rosenthal (fired by Simon and Schuster after 13 years), who chose a book so important in its own way, but with virtually no chance at bestsellerdom.  That little book, so honest and true, so meaningful to those of us who work to make the Senator proud by living by his ideals, will never reach the top of the NYT best-seller list.  And what a crying shame that is.

Above all, being a Democrat means having compassion for others.  It means putting government to work to help the people who need it.

It means using all available tools to provide good health care and education, job opportunities, safe neighborhoods, a healthy environment, a promising future.

It means standing up for people who have been kept down, whether they are native Americans or African Americans, women, immigrants, or the homeless.

It means taking care of the mentally ill, of seniors, of vulnerable children, of veterans–and making sure all people are treated with respect and dignity.

Introduction to “What it Means to be a Democrat” by George McGovern.

(If you want to join me in purchasing Sen. McGovern’s book, I’ve made it easy for you.  You can click on the Amazon link on my website sidebar.  It’s at the very top of my list.   I thank you and I know George thanks you, too.)

January 20, 2012.  Today marks the beginning of Barack Obama’s fourth year as president.  Three years ago today he stood out in the cold and said, “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and begin again the work of remaking America.”  He promised “an open government” and “a new beginning.”   I’ve been around for many televised inaugurations, starting with JFK’s when I was but a mere child/adult and, for me,  this one equaled or might have even surpassed that one for good, old-fashioned stirring moments.

In most circles this has probably gone unnoticed, but today is my anniversary, too.  Three years ago, on this exact day, because Barack Obama stirred my soul and gave me hope, I began writing this blog.  I didn’t even think about actually doing it until around mid-morning, when it suddenly came to me that this was one of those portentous days that I shouldn’t let go by unnoticed.

I was heady with joy but understandably reluctant to go whole hog predicting the end to all our troubles.  We were not anointing a savior, even though eight years of hell seemed finally to be at an end.  I was trying to remain calm; trying to keep in mind all of the promises made by politicians over the years that had never been kept, either because there had never been any intention or because they didn’t know what the hell they were getting themselves into.

I started it this way:

Today is January 20, 2009. Inauguration day for Barack Obama, and it can’t have come soon enough. It’s true that he’s been de facto president since November, 2008, when George W. Bush unofficially, without fanfare or hesitation, turned the job over to him, but today it became official. What a day it’s been! They’re estimating the crowds at 2 million strong, a sight unseen on any Presidential First Day in modern history.

And ended it like this:

I have no grand illusions about a rapid return to health for this country, just as I have no illusions about the impact my words will make in the overall scheme of things.  I’ll admit that I’m  overwhelmed right now with the events of the day.  I’m feeling more than a little inarticulate and possibly even shy about expressing how it feels to have our country back.   It may not be the best day to start a blog after all.  But start it I have, and now I’ll give this day over to the Inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama, America’s new president.  The bands are playing, the sun is setting and all’s right with the world.   For now.

On January 20, 2010, in the blog marking our mutual first anniversary, I wrote this about last year’s blog:

Oh, the joy in my heart as I wrote those words.  Take THAT, you lousy, bloated, insufferable faux-Capitalists.  The Sheriff’s saddling up and the posse’s not far behind.  We’re off to save the ranches!  Widows and orphans, help is on the way!

But lest you think I was totally naive, I also wrote:  ‘I have no grand illusions about a rapid return to health for this country.’   No, I had no grand illusions, but I did have dreams…[Ed: About the repetition of those words "grand illusions":  I didn't even notice until now that I had repeated them in two blogs a year apart. I must have seriously meant it.]

…I keep reminding myself that the Good Man took on what amounted to a national nightmare.  There were no easy fixes, and nobody pretended there would be.  But I would have slept better this past year if only I had been able to see the president as a ‘people person’.   Was he ever that?  I don’t know.  We might have made him into our own images, taking much needed comfort in an illusion of our own making.  Maybe he is what he is.  But what is he?  After a full year of hosting him in The People’s House we’re no closer to knowing where he stands, or, more importantly, where he’s going.

Last year, on January 20, 2011, I wrote this:

I knew this anniversary day was coming and that I would want to write about it, but what would I say as I stood beside Obama saying farewell to Year Two, heading into Year Three?  That all of my wishes came true?  That all of my fears were justified?  That nothing much has changed?  That I now know what kind of man my president is?

I can’t say any of those things.   I am at times proud of my president, disappointed in him, enraged by his actions or inaction, fearful of the direction he is taking us.

I’m impatient and feeling increasingly impotent as I’m forced to watch more and more jobless citizens give up, more and more home-owners become homeless, more and more of the sick and dying having to give over their lives to insurance company paper-pushers.  I want the wars to end.  I want the corporate giants to finally understand the consequences and do something about their destructive practices.  I want the GOP and certain members of the Democratic Party to fulfill their obligations to the citizenry–the entire citizenry–in a time of unparalleled crisis, and act like a responsible governing body.  I want our president to be a leader of the people.

Are you sensing a trend here?  Are you thinking that my enthusiasm is taking a downhill slide and that this year should be the one where I finally admit I was wrong about the whole thing?  Well, think again.  After watching the clown shows known at the GOP debates over the past few months, I’m more determined than ever to help make this current president the next president of the United States.

My God, did you see that mess last night?  Have you been watching the remaining Four Horsemen in action?  Is there a serious contender among them?  Would you really, sincerely want any one of them leading this country?  (If you can answer “yes” with a light heart and a straight face, I think you’re in the wrong place.  I would point you to the right place, but I don’t think there is one.)

I’m still disappointed.  I’m still impatient.  The slow pace of change is maddening.  But there is no denying there is change in the air, either because of President Obama, in spite of him, or because of forces having nothing to do with him–take your pick–and I’m hanging in there for the long haul.  Finally, the people are awakening.  Our people.  We’re on the move and we’re not turning back.

I’m with my party and my president and if I have to slap them upside the head once in a while to get their attention, there’s a far better chance at success with them than with that other bunch.  (You know that bunch is trouble when the moderates in their party are ostracized and/or banished for thinking even slightly good thoughts; when the ones that remain feel the need to make it clear they’re only going after the job as leader of this fair land to make it easier for the marauders to take over completely.)

So that’s where I am on this, our third anniversary.  Sure, I was hoping the honeymoon would never end and the gifts would keep on coming, but there it is.  Reality strikes.  It hasn’t been all roses, but it hasn’t been all thorns, either.  Progress has been made.  I’m looking forward to the year ahead, and I’m going to work hard to get Barack Obama re-elected.

That’s where I’m headed. Just so you know.
__________________

In other news: FactCheck looks at the truthiness of the GOP debate last night.  It’s here.

And I found this on their sidebar:

Q: Does Obama plan to deny emergency brain surgery for patients over 70?

A: No. A man claiming on a radio talk show to be a brain surgeon lied about that, and about a meeting of two associations of neurological surgeons, those associations say.

See what we’re up against?

(Cross-posted at Ramona’s Voices)

Georgetown, South Carolina is a mill town; one of the few left in the United States where goods are actually produced and not just assembled.  It is the home of International Paper and ArcelorMittal Steel, and the sounds and smells generating from the sites are an actual comfort, not just to the townspeople but to anyone who detests the thought of factory shutdowns and an idle workforce.

Harbor – Georgetown, SC

At first glance, Georgetown looks like almost any other town across the country–a main drag dotted with fast foods and box stores and gas stations, neighborhoods rich and poor and somewhere in between (The happy surprise in Georgetown, if you venture off the highway, is its carefully preserved historic district  and beautiful harbor)–but since Mitt Romney’s run for the presidency and the revelations of the destructive, worker-eating practices of Bain Capital, the company he once headed, you might see Georgetown in a different light.  You might see it as yet another poster child showing the effects of bullying outside influences with voracious appetites fed largely by avarice and greed.

ArcelorMittal Steel Mill, Georgetown, SC

The Georgetown steel mill, it turns out, was one of Bain Capital’s victims.  Who knew?  Not middle managers. Not the union leaders. Not the laid-off workers.  Not even, apparently, anyone who reported the stories of bankruptcies and shutdowns throughout the years, essentially blaming the problems on the Chinese and the tumult of the times.

During the upheaval of American labor over the past few decades, Georgetown’s mill took several direct hits.  China was in fact, producing cheaper (albeit lower quality) steel.  Jobs were, in fact, being sent by ruthless Americans to cheaper markets overseas.  Domestic car sales had declined and so had the need for the particular steel products coming out of Georgetown. No one saw the need to dig further to find a deeper, underlying reason for the failures.  On the surface, there were plenty.

This isn’t the first time the press has descended on Georgetown.  I went to the union headquarters yesterday and met with the Steelworkers local president, James Sanderson. (Who told me just minutes into our introduction, “I’m going to be on Ed Schultz tonight!”  And he was:  http://video.msnbc.msn.com/the-ed-show/46018158#46018158)

Sanderson said when the Democrats came to nearby Myrtle Beach for a debate in 2008, the candidates got wind of a shutdown at the mill. They all rushed to Georgetown so they could each stand in front of the forlorn, shuttered factory and make promises to the hundreds of unemployed potential voters there was never a chance in hell they would be able to keep.

Nobody knew then what role Bain Capital had played in the inevitable failure of Georgetown Steel.  They bought it and gutted it and profited from their own piracy and nobody knew it had even happened that way until Mitt Romney decided to run for president and the digging began.

As David Wren reports in the Sun-News article:

Less than a year after taking a controlling interest in the Georgetown plant, Bain Capital cut the employees’ profit-sharing plan twice – lowering the plan’s hourly rate from $5.60 an hour to $1.25 per hour. Most of the workers didn’t learn about the cuts until they received their paychecks. The profit-sharing checks eventually disappeared altogether.

Sanderson, in a September 2000 report in The Sun News, called Bain Capital anti-labor and said “they’ve forced a labor dispute at every location” during contract negotiations.  Sanderson agrees that China’s cheap steel imports on the American marketplace hurt the Georgetown mill’s production and profitability.

“But if they [Bain Capital] had only invested in the mill instead of taking everything from it, we would have been able to sustain that [dumping] like we had in the past,” he said.

John Ethridge, a retired Georgetown Steel worker, said Bain Capital “treated us like dirt.”

“They brought a bunch of people in here who thought they knew how to do our job, but they had no idea what they were doing,” Ethridge said, adding that needed equipment and plant upgrades were often delayed or ignored.

Ethridge, who worked at the Georgetown mill for 35 years, said Bain Capital was more interested in how much money it could take from the plant rather than investing anything into it.

By the time GS Industries filed for bankruptcy protection, the number of employees worldwide had been cut by more than half.

After decades of  uncertainty, of lay-offs and down-sizing, of bankruptcies and shut-downs, of revolving-door ownerships, the American company formerly known as Georgetown Steel, now the foreign owned ArcelorMittal, is up and running again. On a smaller scale, but running nonetheless.

ArcelorMittal scrapyard – Georgetown

The union is still in place and James Sanderson is still union president.  Their four-year contract, equitable by any industry standards, is up in September.  It’s anybody’s guess about where they’ll be heading, in light of the stepped-up efforts by South Carolina’s Governor Nikki Haley to make sure South Carolina remains a Right-to-Work state. (Precipitated by the actions of the National Labor Relations Board when it went after Washington state-based Boeing for moving one of their units to South Carolina, allegedly to get out from under unions. The action was dropped in December, but I’m guessing Gov. Haley isn’t going to forget it.)

In South Carolina the sun shines bright on Romney and Bain Capital these days and I know at least a few people who are basking in it, trying to make the most of it (James Sanderson, for one; his boss Leo Gerard for another,  his activist son Jamie for another; and me).  But from afar comes Robert Reich, also speaking on The Ed Show, not about Georgetown but about the troubles at Steel Dynamics, an Indiana steel mill taken over and victimized by Bain Capital.

He explains in pure Reich-style what Bain Capitalism really is:

Bain Capitalism is not product capitalism, it’s financial capitalism.  It’s moving money.  It’s getting as much money from the public sector as possible.

Financial capitalism is not real capitalism.  It doesn’t create new jobs, it doesn’t put people to work, it actually ends up reducing the number of jobs.  it displaces people, it puts risks on average working people, it lowers wages.  Financial capitalism is what we’ve had in this country for the last two or three decades and it’s all centered on Wall Street.  It’s not about making good jobs with good wages and making things.

Last night during the Republican debate in Myrtle Beach, Gov. Nikki Haley was seen smiling and nodding vigorously when Rick Perry jawed on about “South Carolina’s war with the federal government”, as if it was 1865 all over again.  How does Rick the Wretched think we got to this place?  Wasn’t he the one who coined the term, “vulture capitalism”?  Can you run for president or governor without understanding the necessary symbiosis between the Fed and the states in order to combat and destroy the Bains of the world and save your cities, your states, your country?

Well, yes, you can run but should you win?  In a sane world, you shouldn’t.  In a sane world you couldn’t.  (Quick reminder: Mitt Romney, the founder of Bain Capital, is about to be anointed top nominee for president by the Republicans.)  That’s our national nightmare these days, that total disregard by our leaders of a pervasive evil forced on us via the private sector despite absolute, indisputable proof that Bain Capital is just one among hundreds of companies whose only reason for existing is to destroy the fabric of America for profit .  That malignant neglect is the reason the fight goes on and the bad guys keep getting away.

In a free market economy as defined by this new bunch of “patriots”, the only bad guys are the good guys.  Apparently that’s us and we’re toast.

Shack and water tower in the shadow of the mill – Georgetown, SC

Yesterday morning,  after watching “Up with Chris Hayes” (My never-miss-if-I-can-help-it, hands-down favorite political show on TV maybe ever — except for “The West Wing” and Rachel Maddow), I was aimlessly flipping channels, looking for something equally smart and fun (as IF!) when I got to what I thought should be C-Span but realized it couldn’t be because I thought I saw a wizard.

But I did!  I did see a wizard!  This particular wizard (on C-Span) looked like a bearded Harry Shearer and talked suspiciously like Harry Shearer would talk if he were playing a bearded wizard pretending he was running for president in the foremost state of New Hampshire.

This wizard was wearing a wide-shouldered mustard-colored, oddly flecked jacket and a very very very tall black wizard’s hat with what looked like a boot sticking out of the top of it.  He was seated on a dais along with five other white guys who claimed to be Democrats and who all had managed to get their names on the primary ballot in that all-important-if-you-want-to-be-president state of New Hampshire.

(NOTE:  It doesn’t take much to file for POTUS candidacy in the Granite state.  You have to be 35 years old and have lived in the U.S for 14 years.  You have to be able to put up a $1,000 fee, unless you’re indigent and can prove it, in which case the fee is waived. And you have to be able to convince two other people to serve as your delegate and alternate at the convention.)

This wizard’s name is Vermin Supreme and let me tell you, he’s no Harry Potter.  Not unless you think Randall Terry is Voldemort and he deserved what he got at the end of this vital forum, so important for all those white guys, Republicans and Democrats alike, who can’t get on the debate stage with the Big White Guys in order to tell the country why they should be president.  Of the United States.

But I’ll get to that.

So. What I had caught on C-Span three days before Tuesday’s first primary election in the entire country  was the last few minutes of a re-broadcast of a two-hour program called “Lesser-Known Candidates in New Hampshire Presidential Primaries”.  There are 44 candidates for president on the 2012 ballot in the crucial state of New Hampshire and in order to be fair to all of them, 32 of the least known (those who were not a part of a national debate) were invited to hold forth in the auditorium of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at St. Anselm College in Manchester on December 19, 2011.

The Republicans held the first hour and the Democrats the second.  (A smart move on the part of the planners who no doubt remembered Vermin Supreme from when he ran before, in 2008, in the exquisitely positioned state of New Hampshire.   Who wouldn’t want to make sure he was the last thing anyone would see before the cameras turned off, hoping against hope that everyone will have left by then, anyway?)

There were 10 Republican presidential candidates on the stage, pristine in their whitebreadness and raring to go.  The first, Bear Betzler, started things off by announcing that he’s “not that into politics”, but he did believe that the most important thing this country needs to do — the very most important thing — is balance the budget.

Timothy Brewer is running on the “Afterlife is possible, everyone lives forever, you can’t be destroyed” platform.  Mr. Brewer announced that something big is going to happen on December 21, 2012 and if you elect him president he’ll be in a position to fix it.

Dr. Hugh Cort is a famous counter-terrorism researcher and his message to the people is that Iran is planning a nuclear attack in the near future–16 months or less–and if you want to know more about it you can Google “Hugh Cort American Hiroshima”.  The end.

Randy Crow posted over 600 articles on his website before he himself brought it down. . .
. . .planes were flown into the World Trade Center by remote-control bombs. . . something, something.

John Davis told the audience that a couple of years ago God spoke to his heart to run for president.  He (John) wanted to do something nobody had ever done before so he decided to visit every county in the United States.  So far he has visit 1712 of them and the message he’s getting from the people he’s been speaking to is that people aren’t happy.  He’s “pro-God, pro-family and country, pro-second amendment, pro-doing the right thing.”  Oh, and “We can’t have God’s blessing when we kill a million babies and take prayer out of schools.”

Christopher Hill was next and talk about a duck out of water!  He’s working for “people in the middle class that are watching it disappear and homeless people that need our help.”  In a broken voice he said, “We’re called the lesser-known candidates.  Well, tonight we stand for the lesser-known Americans”, and my heart went out to him.  Someone needs to tell this good man that if he wants to be president and a Republican both, he’s going to have to stifle that kind of talk.

Jeff Lawman (aptly named, as he will tell you) says he follows the “traditional Republican platform” which, to him, means “the role of the capable is to assist the needy.”  He’s running a zero-dollar grass roots campaign.  (Oh, Jeff.  Jeff, Jeff, Jeff.  See last sentence in above paragraph.)

Benjamin Linn:  “The reason why I’m running is because America is in a big mess right now.”  He’s pro-life and pro-family and pro-marriage between a man and a woman because “marriage between a man and a man or a woman and a woman is not normal.”

Michael Meehan: “I am not a politician, I’m a real estate broker and there’s no work so, uh, let’s go into politics, right?”  He’s been traveling the country and what he’s finding is that “yes, people are scared but I’ll let you in on a little secret.  People are nervous.”  He asks questions, and, “They don’t answer me stupid.  They think about it before they say it.”

And then there’s Joe Story:  “The 10 Commandments served as the basis of our common law when America was born as a nation.  Christian principals defined our existence.  The supreme court affirmed that we’re a Christian nation with liberty of conscience to all man, yet today America is in trouble.  We’ve failed to hold our elected officials accountable and we’ve become spoiled by the benefits that a government with unlimited funds have provided to us.  We have to take control and pray.”

And that, wrong-headed as it may have been, was the closest anyone on the stage came to remembering why they were on the ballot in the Number One State of New Hampshire.

So then came the second hour and it was the Democrats’ turn.

Ed Cowan (edcowan2012.com) is a writer-thinker who has been published on three continents.  Go to his website to see what he stands for.

Bob Greene:  “I have a Ph.D in Physics.  I have some very good news for you.  I’m here to tell you about thorium, an overlooked energy alternative.  A lifetime supply for a single person is about the size of a golf ball.  Go to greeneforoffice.org to learn all about it.”

John Haywood, Durham, NC, is for replacing for-profit health care with a public plan modeled on the British health care system.  Their system is run on about 42% of our cost and what we would be looking at is a savings of over a trillion dollars a year.  John is totally sincere, and I’m with John, of course.  Really nice meeting you, John.  John??

Edward O’Donnell followed John and I was finally beginning to think there was something real going on here.  Ed said, “We need love, kindness, tolerance, friendliness, forgiveness, second chances, and old-fashioned kindness.”  Ed is so passionate about this he says no guns, ever, anywhere.  Not even for hunting.  And while we’re at it, how about a non-violent foreign policy?   That was sweet and so refreshing.  So long, Ed.

So now we come to Vermin Supreme, the bearded guy with that impossible wizard’s hat. His opening statement started like this:  “Gingivitis has been eroding the gum line of this great nation long enough and must be stopped.  For too long this country has been suffering a moral and oral decay in spirit and incisors.  Our country’s future depends on its ability to bite back.  We can no longer be a nation indentured.  Our very salivation is at stake.  Together we must brace ourselves as we cross over the bridgework to the 23rd century.” (For full Vermin coverage, see video here.)

Vermin happened to be seated next to conservative Right Wing “Democrat”, Randall Terry, who warmed up the audience even more by saying, “I just want to know what did I do wrong, God, that I have to be on after that!” and then went on to attempt to answer his own question:  “Barack Hussein Obama may well go down as the worst president we have ever had.  The worst.  He is at war with life, liberty and justice. . . (something here about an unelected oligarchy). . .We’ve come to the insane place as a nation where we have killed over 52 million of our own children by abortion and that blood, like the blood of the slave, is crying out to God for judgment.  We will nevverrr restore the greatness of this nation while we are killing our own offspring.”

Poor John Wolfe (Chattanooga, TN) came next and I admit I was still dazzled by those other two and didn’t pay much attention.  I did catch that he believes our policies “are favorable to Wall Street and not to Main Street”, and “We need a progressive.”  Well, yes we do, John, and more power to you for getting it.  Too bad about the wizard and the wacko and your placement on the stage.  It’s the luck of the draw.  It’s how it goes.

And so it went.  Until we came to the Grand Finale, where Vermin the Wizard glitter-bombed Randall Terry after singing a campaign song to the tune of The Chicken Dance, thereby proving once and for all (or until 2016, whichever comes first)  just how very important  these First-In-The-Nation New Hampshire primaries really are.

(Oh, by the way, I don’t want to have to watch that two-hour debate again, so if you happen to watch it in its entirety could you count the times anybody mentioned the word “jobs”?  The closest I could come to a count was when the real estate guy said he was out of one.)

(Cross-posted at Ramona’s Voices)

Newt Gingrich is obsessed with the plight of poor kids these days. He’s been all over the place talking about them, and I have to confess, the jollier he gets about his remedies for their plight, the more nervous I become.  It’s an odd turn of events and one rife with suspicion.  It’s Newt we’re talking about.  Newt, who eats mean for breakfast and swallows the seeds.

Newt, who put a contract out on an entire nation, namely ours, and is still fretting over the insistent existence of a labor movement that was scheduled to die circa Reagan.  (He’s got another, bigger contract ready to roll on Day One.  Fair warning.)

Newt, who sings “Only I can make this world seem right. Only I can make the darkness bright.  Only I and I alone can thrill me like I do and fill my heart with love for only me.”

And encores with the stirring, “For what is a man, what has he got? If not himself, then he has naught. To say the things he truly feels and not the words of one who kneels.  The record shows I took the blows and did it my way!”

That Newt.

(Let the record show Newt has so far ignored the first lines of the above tune.  The part where it says, “And now the end is near and so I face the final curtain…”. Yesterday, in fact, Newt told ABC’s Jake Tapper he WILL BE THE NOMINEE.  I guess that means all debates are off now?)

Ordinarily I wouldn’t care about Newt’s $60,000 per speech blabbings about stupid child labor laws and how really poor kids from really shiftless families will resort to stealing unless he steps in and puts them to work, but after some lengthy and intense investigation, I find I have barely an ounce of faith in this current century’s sanity.  That dimpled nasty man could very well be running things come January, 2013.

There are some who defend him by reminding us that there’s nothing wrong with kids doing a little work. The kids feel good about themselves and the upside is that, as Newt says, they can buy their own ice cream someday.  Nice, really, that.  In a sane world we might actually picture our sweet darlings helping out and getting paid a tiny reward, leaving everybody happy, happy, happy.

But that’s not what Newt means and that’s not how he put it.  This is how he put it:

“Start with the following two facts. Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works, so they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’ unless it’s illegal.

I come around to this question. You have a very poor neighborhood. You have kids who are required under law to go to school. They have no money. They have no habit of work. What if you paid them part-time in the afternoon to sit at the clerical office and greet people when they come in? What if you paid them to work as the assistant librarian?  What if they became assistant janitors and their job was to mop the floor and clean the bathroom?”

That’s not helpful, that’s hateful.  And full of hidden meaning.  What does it mean when Newt says, “You have kids who are required under law to go to school”?  Will there be an addendum to Newt’s 2ist Century Contract on America abolishing school attendance for “really poor kids” so they’ll have more time to do all that rewarding work?

When the kids take over as assistant clerks and assistant librarians and assistant janitors, what does that do to the work hours of the real clerks, librarians and janitors?  I’m reading between the lines and seeing part time jobs with no bennies for everyone as part of Newt’s grand plan.  He’s Newt, after all, clearly not Mr. Empathy.  If you’ve followed Newt at all you know how strongly opposed he is to equality of the masses — the kind of thing any signs of empathetic weakness might very well lead to.

Lots of kids work after school and weekends now, even amongst the “really poor”.  It’s what kids do when they get old enough.  They baby-sit, they do paper routes, they cut lawns, they wash cars, they run errands.  What they don’t do any longer is work in sweatshops under conditions that could maim or kill or rot the spirit.

From Utata Tribal Photography:  Lewis Hines, photographer, 1906 “Hines kept detailed notes on the children he photographed, including comments they made as he interviewed them. The twelve year old boy in the [above] photograph was unable to read or write. He’d been employed by a textile mill in Columbia, South Carolina for four years, since the age of eight. He told Hines, ‘Yes, I want to learn, but can’t when I work all the time’.”

Any student of history will tell you the reason we aren’t allowed to work kids like that any more is because the laboring masses organized and put a stop to the exploitation of children by the privileged few.  Newt the Historian seems to have forgotten that.

But on to other things Newt, because, again, there’s a mighty strangeness afoot:  The Great One told Sean Hannity over at Fox, apropos of nothing, that, “I helped lead the effort to defeat communism in the Congress.”

And, okay, I have to ask:  How many communists were there in congress?  Were they as hard on us as the teabaggers in congress today?  Can you give us a few tips on how to get rid of subversives?

For a couple of months now, we on the left have been marking the heady, exhilarating, organic spread of the Occupy Wall Street Movement and getting it that something unstoppable seems to be happening.  Think of it: The dedication, the precision, the impossible successes coming from a movement organized by ordinary hoi polloi. No backing by agenda-driven billionaires, no pseudo-intellectual input from think-tanks, no take-over by shady cabals.  It’s the stuff of miracles.

It’s the kind of citizen-driven wildfire effort we haven’t seen in this country since the days of the Civil Rights Movement.  Just as the march on Selma was the catalyst for a nationwide awakening to the need to end the rampant, blatant, often lethal, civil rights abuses in the South, the occupation of Wall Street woke us up to the possibility that change could come to the poor and middle classes suffering from decades of ruthless economic abuses perpetrated by the power brokers.

As we already know from past history, change of this magnitude takes vast crowds of hopelessly burdened people finally coming to the end of their patience, finally committing to a cause so essential to their well-being the only acceptable outcome is success.  It takes crowds so huge they can’t be ignored.  Crowds, in this case, not just on Wall Street but spread across the country in every city, every town, every public square.

What we couldn’t foresee was that the OWS Movement would move as quickly worldwide.   With that revelation came a clearer sense of responsibility, of stewardship, even in a movement that strives to remain leaderless.  (Remarkable, considering how easy it would have been to give in to egos, to celebrity, to the kind of fame that inevitably drags down instead of lifting up or moving forward.)

When ordinary Wisconsin citizens stormed the State House in Madison in the dead of winter early this year to protest the attempted theft of their bargaining rights, the die was cast.  They overtook the castle and they stayed.  Their occupation of the Peoples’ House opened doors to those in other beleaguered states–Michigan, Indiana, Ohio–and when attention had to be paid, when concessions, however slight, were made; when recalls were threatened and then carried out, it was like manna to a starving nation.  It energized us all.

But there comes a point when every such movement goes from simmer to a rolling boil, requiring an ever-watchful eye in order to prevent it from spilling over and ruining the entire project. With the OWS movement, it was only a matter of time before the cops would get pushy, before the city fathers would lose patience, before the opportunists with agendas of their own would infiltrate.  Past history dictates that much of the purity of any grand movement will be lost to influences beyond the movement’s control.  The ones that succeed are ready for whatever comes and take steps to move past it.  They succeed because they never take their eyes off the prize.

Huge movements like these — Civil Rights, anti-Vietnam War, OWS — begin with and are sustained by a red hot anger.  It takes a hefty resolve on the parts of many to keep the anger laser-beamed to the source without allowing it to resort to the kind of rage that turns violent.  It’s an uphill battle, never made easier by time.  As the days and months go by without some kind of resolution, one side or the other is going to blow.  It happened in Oakland last week after a month-long confrontation with police.  Increasingly, we’re seeing police in riot gear, warranted or not.  Rubber bullets, tear gas and pepper spray are the weapons du jour.

Different factions are losing patience and are disrupting Occupy meetings, even when the organizers are on their side, as happened in Seattle with the “mic check” shout-out.

Winter is coming and the Movement is in danger of losing momentum.   Freezing temperatures will empty parks and squares within weeks and much of the activity will be moving indoors, out of sight.  It can’t come soon enough for a host of mayors, including NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg, who held a presser this AM announcing the plan to get the protesters out of Zuccotti Park so that crews can give it a good cleaning.  He took the opportunity to announce also that, while he’s a big supporter of First Amendment rights, he won’t be allowing overnighters at Zuccotti anymore.  Before the presser, the police were taking box cutters to the tents and arresting protesters who had been lulled into thinking it was okay to just hang around for a while.  A court order, issued soon after Bloomberg spoke, rescinded his actions, giving the use of the park back to the OWS bunch.  Bloomberg’s office says they’ll go back to court.  For now, Zuccotti Park is empty and any clear vision of the First Amendment is muddied once again.

Update:  The park is open but no more camping.  No more tents.  Sometimes you take your victories in smaller doses than you had hoped.  Onward.

So where do the Occupiers go from here?  Protesting in parks and on the sidewalks outside buildings, carrying predictable signs, remaining lawful within established confines — is that all there is?  How long before those efforts become ho-hum and easily ignored?

Is it time now?  Is this the point where the actual revolution begins?  Occupy Wall Street is planning a MASS NON-VIOLENT DIRECT ACTION on Thursday,. November 17.  It’s the next step for them and, as with any step forward in the revolutionary process, it’s not without its risks.

Poster by R Black.

So where will they go from here?  Are there real Anarchists out there?  Infiltrators?  If so, how many?  How are they when it comes to stamina?  Will violence erupt?  Will wiser heads prevail?  Will a clear leader emerge?

What will it take for this Movement to succeed?   Every report of infighting (and there is and always will be infighting), every report of concerted efforts by detractors (and there are and always will be detractors) needs to be offset by reports of solid consequential successes.  Every move needs to be shining a spotlight on the goal.

The goal is to rescue the country from the One Percenters and their enablers so that we can revive it and rebuild it. Anything else is ineffective, unproductive diversion, of no good use to the 99 percent who are finally beginning to see that change they can believe in is not only possible but probable.  What cruelty if, after all this, we veer off and let ourselves down.

(Cross-posted at Ramona’s Voices)

Thursday, April 28 10 PM:  Is anything else going on these days besides the Wedding of the Century, The marriage of Katherine ( Kate) Middleton and William (Will) Mountbatten-Windsor?  (This time the wedding of the century really is the wedding of the century–the century is young and until another big wedding comes along this is it.)

Tonight the Big channels–E!,  MSNBC, CNN, BBC America–have all put together specials on tomorrow’s big day. The background, the real stories, the life histories of both Will and Kate,  as well as interviews with their families and anyone who has ever known them, from class-mates to haberdashers and hairdressers to people they’ve waved to on the street.  Right now BBCA is talking about the wedding of the son of Camilla Parker-Bowles.  Very chi-chi.  High society. Astonishingly irrelevant and even, maybe, just guessing, in really, really bad taste.

10:38:  On CNN’s Anderson Cooper they’re showing footage of Princess Diana being helped out of her carriage while her bridesmaids stand by.  Will it totally spoil the mood if I say that her bridal gown looked as if it had been made for a giantess and then tucked and pinned to fit little Lady Di?  Same with the bridesmaids.  Very odd.  But what do I know?  I’ve heard there were thousands of weddings world-wide where brides happily wore dresses that were near-copies of Diana’s.

(Did you hear about the guy who had pictures of Will and Kate tattooed onto his two front teeth?  It’ll wear off in about three months, depending on how often and how vigorously he brushes his teeth, but until then–they’re there.  It’s all here.)

10:55 PM:  Matt Lauer is excitedly talking about the wedding cake.  It’ll be big and beautiful and it’ll taste heavenly.  It’s a Royal cake so it can’t be anything less.  It just can’t.  (Looks like the mayor of London forgot to comb his hair tonight.  Sure hope he remembers tomorrow.  [Update:  He didn't])

11:00PM:  I’m off to bed.  Coverage starts at 3 AM EST.  I’m not kidding.  (No, I won’t be there, either.)

6:00 AM:  I’m up.   Kate is out of the funny, boxy limo and she’s beautiful and her gown is beautiful, if very similar to gowns I’ve seen on “Bridezilla” or elsewhere.  I’m a little disappointed, frankly.  But the tiara belonged to the Queen Mum and for some reason that makes me quite happy.

Here come William and Harry.  Harry is dressed in regalia that’s much more eye-popping than William’s.  Black and gold, compared to William’s more sedate red with blue banner.  One-upped.  Imagine.

I see Beefeaters lining the Cathedral aisle as Kate and her father make their way to the altar.  They really do look wonderfully Gilbert & Sullivan.  What are Beefeaters anyway?  I’ll look them up later, after the festivities.  [Okay, here it is.]

Yes, those Brits know how to throw a wedding.  Is Westminster Abbey the most gloriously ostentatious building you’ve ever seen in your life?

They’ve all met now at the altar and the sopranos are singing the high notes.  I think it’s about to begin. I’m sorry.  I can’t take my eyes off of Harry.  Is he adorable, or what?

Oh, wait, not yet.  Now the crowd is singing.  There’s Elton John.  And Victoria Beckham and that guy. Does Princess Anne ever smile?

The queen is lovely in Daffodil yellow but can’t seem to muster up much enthusiasm.  Prince Philip is looking peaked.  Lady in large blue hat is looking peaked, too. Come on, people!  It’s the Royal Wedding!  Lots of work went into this!

Okay, singing has stopped and the Archbishop of Canterbury just said “Dearly Beloved”.  Shhh, I need to hear this.

I grabbed this off of my TV.  Hope it’s okay, CNN.

They’ve spoken their vows and got through it without flaw.  Whew!  I won’t mention Diana’s mixing up of Charles’s many names.  No, I won’t.

6:20AM/11:20 AM:  It’s done!  The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have moved to the side of the altar and are now. . .standing there singing along with everybody in the cathedral.    Crowd scene.  Lots of fancy duds.  Camilla, true to form, is wearing a ridiculous hat, but this time she’s not alone.

An outside shot.  Crowds of Royal worshipers are seen but I can’t tell if they’re singing. Lots of happy flag-waving.

Kate’s brother James is reading from the scriptures or something, appealing to everyone to “present your bodies for sacrifice”.  What???   Is he reading the wrong passage?   “Extend hospitality to strangers”.  “Weep for those who weep”.  “Do not be haughty but associate with the lowly.”  “Do not claim to be wiser than anyone.”  What the heck?  Who invited him, anyway?

Long shot of the cathedral.  Took my breath away. I mean it.

Small boys singing in high voices.  (No, I’m not thinking what you’re thinking.)  Now the grown-up choir is joining in.  Lovely.  Simply lovely. I miss the Queen Mum.

St. Catherine of Sienna said “Be all you can be and you’ll set the world on fire”.   Speeches now, while Will and Kate sit obediently listening when I know they’re thinking, “Didn’t we just get married?  Why are they still talking? Aren’t we supposed to be walking up the aisle?  Will this never end?”

Shot of the crowd outside.  They’re getting restless.  Who knows what will happen if these guys don’t wrap it up soon?  Wide shot.  Huge screens out there showing the inside events.  Almost as good as  watching it on TV at home.

Will and Kate are back at the altar, standing alone.  Gorgeous scene.  Just saw the Palace Guard marching to somewhere.  The singing has stopped.  Kate and Will are kneeling now.  “Lord have mercy upon us.”  Now the Lord’s Prayer.  Now more preaching.  What an opportunity.  A captive audience,  inside and out.  It goes on and on, with the newlyweds still on their knees.  Good thing they’re young.

Now “Jerusalem” by William Blake.  Played at every British Rugby game, someone just said.  The Brits know all the words.  Nice song.  The crowd is waving Union Jack flags and cheering. Now the stirring British national anthem, “God Save the Queen”.  Everyone singing but the queen herself.

The Maid of Honor just bent over to lift the bride’s train.  Oh, my!  The cleavage!  They’ve walked behind the altar and are, I presume, leaving the building.  The music is swelling.  Shot of the cathedral from above.  Stunning camerawork.  Really.

Oh, I should have known.  Here come Will and Kate again.  NOW they’re finally walking up the aisle.  Kate is smiling and Will looks somber.  Ah, there’s a little uplift of the left side of his mouth. And now a full blown Diana-like shy grin.  All’s right again.

They’re standing in the doorway and the crowds outside are seeing them for the first time.  They’re going wild.  Confetti everywhere.  The bells are clanging.  The red,black and gold Cinderella-like carriage, the very same that carried Charles and Diana so long ago, has pulled up and Will is adjusting his white gloves.  They’re entering the carriage.  The bells are going wild.  Lovely couple.  They’re smiling at each other lovingly.  This could work.

They’re off.  They’ve mastered that Royal side-to-side wave with very little wrist action.  Prancing white horses.  Wide-spread jubilation (according to Piers Morgan, who ought to know).

Piers just reminded us that the sun is shining.  They’re really pleasantly surprised, since it’s England in April and heavy rain was actually predicted.  I seem to remember that the weather cooperated when Charles and Di were married, too.  So much for portents of good things to come.

They’re entering  Buckingham Palace and both Will and Harry have saluted as they enter the gates.  The Royal couple have exited the carriage and won’t be seen again until they appear on the palace balcony.  The queen is arriving behind them.  Prince Philip salutes as they enter the gate.  Charles and Camilla are in a carriage behind the queen.  Aerial view of the crowds.  Pretty impressive.

From now on it’s all talk.  Example:  “We have never seen Prince William kiss Kate.”  They can’t stop talking about the long-awaited first kiss.  They’re actually doing a minute-by-minute countdown until the Big Smooch.

Okay, they’ve kissed.  We’re done here.

(Cross-posted at Ramona’s Voices)

(Cross-posted at Ramona’s Voices here)

Michigan, our wonderful, beautiful jewel of a state–the only state in the union that looks like a mitten reaching up to grab a leaping rabbit, the only state surrounded on three sides by three different really Great Lakes, the only state that can lay claim to both Vernor’s Ginger Ale and Sanders Hot Fudge Sauce, has been in the news a lot lately.

Not because we’ve finally been discovered and people are wondering how they could possibly have overlooked us (Weather Channel, I’m talking to you. Bad weather travels from the northern plains to NEW YORK CITY! via a route through Michigan.  There’s no getting around it), but because on January 1, 2011 Richard Dale Snyder (”Rick”, because, you know, he’s just–aaaw–Rick) was sworn in as Governor.

Nothing unusual about a new governor being sworn in in early January, but this particular brand-new governor raised hackles in some circles (okay, in nearly ALL circles outside the corporate honchos and people still having Tea Parties in the midst of the rubble) by stepping off the podium and almost instantaneously barking orders to annihilate anyone outside his own elite space who thought they might be entitled to a taxpayer-funded public education, or wages beyond the truly laughable, or even a retirement free of toil and strife.

For most people bent on taking over an entire state that might have been enough, but some days later this man Rick found the Holy Grail.  An existing Financial Emergency Manager Law that he and his Republican-led legislature then got to work enhancing and extending until it no longer would only be used in–okay–emergencies, but could be tweaked to kill the unions, take over public education and. . .oh, let’s say. . .fire duly elected officials in cities and towns that may or may not have potentially fatal fiscal wounds but do have too many poor people and thus can’t keep the Gov and his court in the style to which they’ve become accustomed.

Robert Bobb (true name) has been the Emergency Financial Manager for the city of Detroit since 2009.  I don’t know how well he was doing in that job before the EFM act gave him infinite powers, but he’s apparently rubbing his hands in glorious anticipation of being able to do away with 53 Public Schools, either by outright closings or mergings or switching them to charter status.  (Rachel Maddow has been reporting on one of them–The Catherine Ferguson Academy, a school for teen mothers.  After learning their school was targeted for closing, the students staged a quiet sit-in and, for their efforts, were handcuffed and taken away by the police, causing enough commotion (not by the students) to make the story go national. Thank you, Rachel–and everyone else who picked up the story and ran with it.  Everything that happens in Michigan mustn’t–must not–stay in Michigan.  We need to shout it to the mountaintops.  We’re under attack and we can’t pretend it’s all pretend.  It’s not.

As Todd A. Haywood reported in Michigan Messenger yesterday, The Mackinac Center for Public Policy,  home of Michigan’s Randian Tea Party, really is a part of the Vast Right Wing Free Market Think Tank Conspiracy.  They’ve joined up with Sauron in the Dark Tower to seek out and destroy anything resembling entitlement programs, government-sponsored good works, university professors’ emails in support of beleaguered Wisconsin, and more importantly, labor unions.  Their goal is small government and their method is to fire all municipal officials and put an “emergency financial manager”–one person–in their place.  One person will run everything, making every decision without fear of being fired or losing elections.  It’s the Fascist version of “we’re not a Democracy, we’re a Republic”.

This group, State Policy Network, is working at installing a host of compliant soldiers posing as Leaders of the People in all 50 states.  Their purpose:  to guarantee the complete and total privatization of these United States of America.  So far they’ve managed to enlist the governors of Michigan, Wisconsin and Indiana, all of whom are not in the least shy about expressing their fascination with the mission they’ve chosen to accomplish.

In Michigan, Governor Ricky is in direct competition with Wisconsin’s Governor Scotty to see who can take down whose state first.  At first glance you might be inclined to say “boys will be boys”, but you mustn’t forget the Eye of Sauron watching their every move.  (Here I’ll repeat:  Vast Right Wing Conspiracy)

More to chew on:

If two members of the legislature get their way, Michigan’s foster kids will have to get their back-to-school clothing from thrift stores because Michigan could save a lot of money that way.  I loved this part but you have to read the whole thing by Susan G. Demas:

So what’s behind these moves by the Legislature? Well, the two DHS panel chairs both live in relatively homogeneous and very conservative enclaves in the state.

[Bruce] Caswell is a Calvinist who’s never had to deal much with Democrats or people with other views on social issues, taxes or government services. He believes he’s doing the right thing and rooting out inefficiencies in the budget.

[Dave] Agema … well, his general philosophy can be summed up in his solution for overworked welfare caseworkers. Rather than hire more workers or work to speed up paperwork processing times, the goat killer suggested that DHS employees be armed with guns to subdue any unruly welfare queens.

Sen. Coleman Young II (D-Detroit) once flippantly described Republicans’ attitude toward the poor and unemployed as: “Too bad. It sucks to be you.”

Who thinks like this?  What kind of person sits around thinking about poor, dispossessed kids and, instead of wondering what he/she can do to make things better for them, concludes that money could be saved if they wore second-hand Government-issue clothes?  And what kind of person is then surprised when reasonable people say, “Hold it right there. . .”.   And who then would say in response, they probably don’t spend it on clothing anyway, and “I think the hardship is negligible“?

(Newsflash:  They’re rethinking this, after a really soul-satisfying (on my part), all-out blogospheric blast attack against it.  Looky here:

Senator Caswell initially proposed issuing a gift card for the clothing allowance for resale shops in order to ensure the money would actually go toward purchasing clothing. After a suggestion from a constituent, he plans to draft an amendment to the proposal that would direct the state to work with major retailers to create a gift card program that would ensure the clothing allowance money only purchases clothing and shoes at their stores. Furthermore, the amendment will direct DHS to negotiate with the retailers for a discount on those clothing items purchased with the allowance in order to get the best deal for the recipients.

Okay, I’m exhausted.  But one last thing.  You know how Gov. Ricky gave supreme power to one lone Emergency Financial Manager in poorest of the poor Benton Harbor?  Yes?  And how they fired everybody (see links above) and then poured salt in the wounds by demoting them to secretarial duties, like taking minutes at meetings?  Yes? Well, Gov. Ricky will be visiting Benton Harbor on May 7.  No, he won’t be looking around to see how well his plan is working. Or to see what else he can do to lift that poor town out of its misery.  No. He’ll be Grand Marshal of  Blossomtime’s Grand Floral Parade.  The parade route will start in St. Joseph:

And end in Benton Harbor:

This is clueless to the absolute ultimate.  This is Nero fiddling while Rome burns.  This is the New America.

So the way I see it, we either get used to it or we fight like hell to end this onslaught.  I know us. We don’t plan on ever getting used to it.

Michigan Labor Legacy Landmark, “Transcending”