The Inquiring Manatee

Two Nut Cases: Compare and Contrast

    On the face of things, writer J. D. Salinger and doctor-killer Scott Roeder could not be more different. Salinger made great contributions to society. Roeder at best was a competent airport shuttle driver. Salinger had talent. Roeder had nothing but a Sunni suicide bomber's God-smacked obsessions.

    Salinger died Thursday. Roeder was convicted, justly and on his own chilling, matter-of-fact testimony, of first-degree murder in the vicious Kansas church shooting of Dr. George Tiller.

    What Salinger and Roeder had in common was a neurotic refusal to follow the social norms of humanity. Their mental wires were crossed, though in differing ways.

    Salinger, who landed in Normandy with the Army on D-Day, was mentally shaky for years. His extreme reaction to fame and "invasions of privacy" -- withdrawing from the world and writing only for himself after 1965 -- was understandable but deeply unfortunate. Hermitage may have given him some mental peace but was a loss to the rest of us. A thinking writer, which Salinger decidedly was, has a responsibility to share his or her insights with the world. Writing is not a masturbatory exercise. It is sharing or it is nothing. 

     Salinger's family and executors owe it to readers, to literature, to now publish Salinger's hidden works. Apparently he stopped short of burning them. Let us begin seeing them now, for better or worse. Salinger's literary reputation is safe forever.

     Roeder no doubt has a murderous form of mental illness -- delusions of grandeur and a cocksure sense that he is the savior of humanity with his gun of vengeance. His testimony that he had stalked Tiller for years, and had considered cutting off the doctor's hands, was stomach-turning. His moral and mental flaw, however, does not meet the legal definition of insanity. Roeder knew right from wrong. Otherwise, if he were so sure he had done a meritorious act, why would he have fled -- jumped in his car to drive hundreds of miles to escape? Why not drop the gun on the church floor, surrender and wait for the police to arrest him, instead of, as he testified, wrapping the murder weapon in a cloth and burying it in the woods, where it hasn't been found to this day? Roeder was nothing but a coward.

    Roeder, a roadside bomb on legs, was convicted of premeditated murder because he committed one of the most obvious premeditated murders in recent history. The judge validly ruled out the defense attempt to get the jurors to consider voluntary manslaughter. Kansas law defines that lesser degree of homicide as based on an unreasonable but honest belief that killing would prevent "imminent harm" to another. Imminent means right then, on the spot. Tiller was in church on a Sunday. Roeder entered a house of God to kill in the name of God, placing himself above God.

    I have a degree of compassion for functionally insane people, but only up to the point that they harm other people. There is no excuse for premeditated murder. How would anti-abortion zealots like it if abortion-rights supporters could walk up to them in a public place with loaded guns and blow their brains out over a political dispute? (If it's religion that puts voices in people's heads to kill, that is a clinching argument for atheism.)

    Rest in peace, the misguided J. D. Salinger. Do some thinking in prison if you can, Scott Roeder.

   

A Motorized Solution for Obama's Problems

     It's plain to see what President Obama should do to end his problems with extreme Republican partisanship.

     The White House should buy Toyotas as gifts for the GOP leadership. Then the president should tell the Republicans to "step on the gas" to speed improvement of Washington's stuck political process.

Right-Wing Morons Go A Phone Line Too Far

   Swaggering and full of themselves, some young conservatives are acting like Nazi storm troopers. In the spirit of Hitler's beloved "Horst-Wessel-Lied," a martial tune written by a bullyboy Nazi who was killed by left-wingers in a 1930s brawl, right-wingers may soon be playing "The Song of James O'Keefe III, Composed by Himself."

   I am referring to the arrest by federal officers Tuesday of O'Keefe and three allies in the New Orleans federal building housing an office of Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La. O'Keefe gained fame in conservative circles by posing as a pimp and, with a woman named Hannah Giles posing as a prostitute, wheedled some ACORN workers in Eastern offices into giving advice on tax evasion, human smuggling and child prostitution. O'Keefe became celebrated.

   For his next surreptitious "Candid Camera" act, according to an FBI agent's affidavit unsealed Tuesday and reported in the Los Angeles Times, O'Keefe, 25, and three other men entered Landrieu's office posing as telephone repairmen -- wearing hardhats and tool belts, attempting to gain access to the senator's telephone lines and recording the whole amateurish operation on O'Keefe's cellphone. Called out by a suspicious General Services Administration employee, they said they had, um, left their ID in their vehicle. They were arrested. If convicted of entering a federal property under false pretenses to commit a felony, each suspect faces a maximum of 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

    That emotion-crazed rightists have no respect for the federal government is a given. (Precedent: Tim McVeigh, Oklahoma City, 1995.) That they have no respect for any Democratic senator -- Landrieu's apparent crime in their eyes was voting for the Senate's healthcare reform bill -- has been made obvious. But in this case, in my opinion, the apparently publicity-addled O'Keefe may find that the hated United States government -- his own constitutionally formed, democratically elected government -- is no pushover like ACORN. The government at the moment has its guard up. It is properly on the lookout for clean-cut, home-grown terrorists trying to pull off attacks on federal facilities, as McVeigh did. O'Keefe and his feckless friends in effect are accused of acting like just that kind of blustery, cocksure invader -- driven by ideology, intolerance and hatred of political infidels.

    In O'Keefe's case, his worshipful reception from the irrational birther right apparently went to his head. He has damaged the credibility even of his ACORN venture. And his photo is now out there for governmental and nongovernmental organizations to watch out for. His prankish little career has suffered a setback, if it hasn't been ended by his outrageous, contemptuous overreaching.

    As O'Keefe plots his dime-store Watergate capers, I'd like to remind him of another "dirty trickster," Donald Segretti. He did time in prison for his attempts to subvert the political process for Richard Nixon.

    It's true that the right wing has no monopoly on nuts. The left has extremists like the Earth Liberation Front and some animal-rights activists. But that's no excuse for conservatives to run around like Taliban zealots, even if they may think they're acting as agents of God. 

   What I expect next is for the right to spring to O'Keefe's defense and excoriate the federal government for prosecuting him. Of all the nerve: a government defending itself against hopped-up morons, all keyed up over Scott Brown's win in Massachusetts and singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me," who are setting examples for terrorists.

   O'Keefe's father, James O'Keefe, Jr., a Westwood, N.J., engineer, told the Los Angeles Times: "He wants to hound the truth, and he's using different tactics to get out the truth."

    What "truth"? What does "hound the truth" mean? And do "different tactics" include illegal wiretapping and running rampant over the constitutional civil rights of a United States senator to do her job free of thuggish bullying? Let's ask 12 jurors to find out.

    This is one case I hope the government prosecutes to the fullest, disregarding the screams from the rightists in defense of their brash and immature favorite son. I'll be watching to learn just what O'Keefe thought he was doing as he "hounded the truth."

Japanese Porn Site Comments on my Blog

   I get relatively few comments on my blog, so it's particularly gratifying to know that apparently I'm being read in Japan. The other day, whether through automation or great misguidance, a Japanese porn website featuring photos of naked women posted as a comment on this blog no message except a number of links to some of its garish and less than steamy pages.

    There are lots of English-language porn sites that are much better. If you want to know of one, just e-mail me at mkasindorf@aol.com and I'll reply with a recommendation. I have a lot of spare time to explore this sort of thing.

    But I'm grateful to these Japanese entrepreneurs for the courtesy of thinking of the Manatee. This blog needs all the friends it can get. Especially if they're cute Japanese women.

No Saab Story After All

     Saab apparently will be sticking around for a while, courtesy of an impending deal between General Motors and impoverished but ambitious little Dutch carmaker Spyker. Is this a good thing? I have mixed feelings about Saabs. I've owned only one: a 1987 900T turbo convertible. It remains the fastest car I've ever had. On the other hand, it was not well made at all; little parts kept falling off, especially the fog lights that hung below the bumper and were always hitting the driveway. I was being 400-dollared to death, to the point where I finally got rid of the car. Still, I miss it. It had a lot more pizzazz than the Mercedes sedan I've driven since 1996.

   I confess having warmed myself with the thought that with the death of the brand, a certain bad guy in the Buffalo area -- a guy I despise -- who drives an ancient Saab two-door would no longer be able to get parts for it. It would inconvenience him, forcing him to junk his junker and buy another one. It would serve him right. And I no longer would have to automatically think of that bastard, shuddering every time I heard the word "Saab" or saw one of the Swedish machines.

    Anyhow, Saab seems to have gained another lease on life. Who knows how long it will last in its reincarnation? I fail to see how spunky little Spyker will have enough money to innovate, to improve the engines and the so-so fuel economy, to keep Saab up to date (which it certainly wasn't) in an increasingly competitive auto market. Still, for now the reported deal is good news for Sweden's economy, good news for Saab's workers and dealers and owners of its cars.

    Those $400 parts will continue to be made. And Saab owners will continue to need them, unless Spyker can improve the quality of an overrated car. My one bit of advice to Spyker: Keep making those turbo-powered convertibles. I may break down and buy another one, one of these days.

   What's Dutch for "don't hold a grudge, except against one particular loser who drives a black Saab?"

  

The Supreme Court, Corporations and Us

As if Bush v. Gore were not enough, the United States Supreme Court revealed again last week that its five-justice conservative majority has turned that constitutional body into a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party. It's the Fox News Channel in black robes. The court's 5-4 decision in the Citizens United Case overturned 103 years of practice and precedent, allowing corporations to buy ads touting candidates in federal elections (not that they're likely to do so openly, risking alienating half their customers; instead, they'll give from their corporate treasuries to front groups).

    Ostensibly the decision was a victory for free speech under the First Amendment -- but whose speech? The Court displayed a reverence for corporations as if they are people. The Court saw them as "associations of citizens." In fact, a corporation is a legal fiction, chartered by American states. The justices might as well have given robots full First Amendment rights.

    When a corporation influences a political campaign, as many now will do with bucketloads of money, it's not the mass of shareholders speaking. It's the powerful and outrageously overcompensated management, either effectively uncontrolled by shareholders or doing the bidding of a dominant shareholder such as News Corporation's Rupert Murdoch. (It's no accident that Murdoch's Fox News brainwashes viewers into supporting policies that allow Murdoch and his friends to make as much money as possible with as little government regulation as possible.)

    And what happens to American politics and government -- indeed, to our national security and independence -- when the government of China or Russia gains control of an American corporation? "Association of citizens," indeed. Citizens of where?

    The Citizens United case is a landmark victory for giant corporations that already dominate America's economy and its social and civic culture. Oriented naturally to Republicans who say government should play little or no role in regulating business, corporations can now do even more to enshrine their pet philosophy in law and policy and preserve themselves from government oversight. As things were, government had fallen down on the regulatory job in letting the private financial sector plunge the nation and the world into this recession. Now government will be even weaker structurally or through lax enforcement of existing laws, as under George W. Bush. Count on it.

    Karl Rove envisioned with W's Supreme Court-bestowed "win" in 2000 at least 30 resulting years of GOP triumph, akin to the era of Mark Hanna and Bill McKinley. The Republicans blew it, losing congressional majorities in 2006 and 2008 and the White House in 2008. The Supreme Court has restored Rove's vision. The nation is bound to be under Republican rule for the foreseeable future.

    Democrats can do two things to try to mitigate this disaster. They could resolve to tap their adherents for enough money to overcome the Republican advantage, though achieving this is unlikely. And the Democratic (for now) Congress could mandate immediate and meaningful disclosure of corporate contributions, piercing the veil of "independent" groups (such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) to link the candidate who is the end beneficiary of groups' expenditures with the corporate giver.

   Lots of luck on this point, as well. As soon as the Republicans take back Congress and the White House-- now likely as early as November 2012 -- they could repeal any such transparency laws. 

    What a gift the Supreme Court has given the GOP -- a gift that will keep on giving for decades.

The Meaning of Massachusetts

  What messages do we take away from what's aptly being called the Boston Massacre? How do we read what the voters of Massachusetts, led by the independents who make up a majority of that electorate, were saying on Tuesday?

  It's possible to read the victory of Scott Brown narrowly, crediting it to two local factors -- as some Democrats are doing today. One factor: The miserable performance of Martha Coakley, contrasted with the greater personal appeal of the hard-driving and much more passionate Brown. All the king's horses and all the king's men -- and the king, Barack Obama, too -- were not enough to put the Humpty Dumpty of Ted Kennedy's Senate seat together again in the limited time since the White House and Harry Reid finally realized that the stupidly coasting Coakley was letting a sure-thing win slip away.

    The other factor involves the national issue of healthcare, but with a unique local twist marking Massachusetts as unrepresentative of the nation as a whole.

   Massachusetts already has its own statewide system of mandatory health insurance for all -- passed under Gov. Mitt Romney, with support from Brown (who got away with his inconsistency, just as he successfully soft-pedaled his right-wing views on abortion and other issues, and even his party affiliation). It's a relatively new health insurance system that remains popular.

    Bay State residents validly felt they didn't need anything from the feds, and, not so validly, were led to fear that they would lose by having to switch to another system that Republicans loudly and falsely described as cutting benefits, threatening Medicare, raising taxes and adding to worrisome federal deficits.

    So you could read this special election as nothing much for Democrats to worry about nationally for November, as long as their candidates were less clueless than Coakley. You could do that, but, as Dick Nixon might say, it would be wrong.

    Massachusetts was voting in a national political environment and context of anger -- an anger that (fed by Fox News and the rest of the very effective conservative noise machine) has mushroomed in the year since Obama's historic and promising inauguration.

    Part of the anger is rational. Unemployment is at 10% and more, and only Wall Street seems to be benefiting from a supposed recovery. Home foreclosures and credit-card defaults are mounting. We're deep into the Great Recession, as most Americans see it. Yet hard-pressed middle-class citizens see government as hung up for months on what seems to them the secondary issue of health insurance. They want more emphasis on jobs.

    But here is where the irrational part comes in. Americans seemingly want politicians to get them jobs -- make a phone call, do something concrete and direct. In fact, the Obama administration instituted an enormous stimulus package for just that purpose, following the classical Keynesian theory that, deficits be damned, it's the job of government during a recession or a depression to spend to pump money into a flagging economy.

    Americans, however, don't see much benefit out of the stimulus package, and accept Republican claims that it has produced few jobs even though the White House claims it has preserved or created 2 million jobs.

    Voters want the politicians to do more for them. At the same time, they are buying Republican cries about "limited government" and federal overspending. They're saying, in effect, that they want the government to do less about the economy. It makes no sense.

    Nevertheless, the Democrats will not prosper by failing to listen to what the voters say they want, rationally or otherwise. And what they don't want, at least for now, is the complicated, hard-to-explain Democratic plans for healthcare reform. The polls show that.

    In a better economy, healthcare reform would be having a much easier time. Even in the economy we have, with millions losing their jobs and health insurance, you'd think that voters would see the need to overhaul the deeply flawed medical system. Instead, voters who said in November 2008 that they wanted change now are deeply worried about changes they can't understand (and that Democrats have not adequately explained).

    The majority of Americans are still employed and still have employer-based healthcare, or, if they're older, Medicare. They are nervous about losing benefits, susceptible to Republican fearmongering. It's "I've got mine, Jack, screw you." The mood out there is not generous. It never is in hard times.

    For the Democrats, it's deja vu -- 1994 all over again. They must stop what they're doing, admit that they have failed again on healthcare and take the next 9 months to build a record on other issues that they can carry to the voters in November. 

    After that, and assuming the economy puts voters in a sunnier mood, the Democrats (if they still have majorities in Congress) should call the Republicans' bluff and go back to the drawing board on healthcare, seeking bipartisan input.

    It's no secret that the Republican "let's start over" talking point is merely code for doing nothing and letting GOP contributors in the health insurance and medical fields continue to profit from an unfair and inefficient status quo. Looking beyond 2010 to 2012, Republicans are going to continue saying no to any Democratic initiative, driven by their rabid-dog base and their own eye for the main chance to deny Obama and the Democrats any credit for any accomplishment, no matter how beneficial it could be to the country. That's the strategy.

    "No" worked in Massachusetts on Tuesday. "No" will remain the GOP strategy for the foreseeable future, or at least until the economy picks up. The meaning of Tuesday for Democrats is that they should admit that their deliberations haven't produced a good healthcare bill, give it up for now, pivot to other issues for November and await an opportunity to make the Republicans put up or shut up on healthcare.

   Of course, it may be that this really is a conservative country, as the right-wingers love to say -- that no meaningful healthcare reform of private-sector medical insurance, much less a public option or single-payer system, will ever pass. That's a gloomy way to read the message of Massachusetts today. But let's give voters another chance to show the better angels of their nature, I say. It may take a few more years, but surely America is bound to catch up to the rest of the civilized world in assuring healthcare for her people.

   

   

   

 

California's Campbell: Too Good for Republicans

I'm tempted to send some money to the newly announced campaign of former Congressman Tom Campbell for the U.S. Senate seat of incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer in the 2010 Republican primary. I have been watching Campbell's career of achievement for years. I interviewed him when he ran unsuccessfully against Sen. Dianne Feinstein in 2000 as the GOP nominee. 

    Campbell was running for the GOP gubernatorial nomination this year until weak fundraising against two billionaires forced him to switch to the Senate race, where he's up against only one billionaire -- fired Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman -- and a far-right conservative, Chuck DeVore. Campbell says he can do better at raising money for a Senate try.

    I find Boxer to be an annoying yenta; I don't like her style, though she is a progressive. So if Campbell became the GOP nominee, I'd be tempted to vote for him. And it's not just because Boxer rubs me the wrong way. There are positive reasons: Campbell is impressively smart, personable, soft-spoken. He represented Silicon Valley in Congress for nine years. He has been in the California Senate, he's been Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's state budget director and he has headed UC Berkeley's business school. Currently he's a law professor at conservative Chapman University in Orange County. It's a fine resume. 

     A fiscal conservative, Campbell is a social moderate -- pro-choice, pro-gay rights. He's hoping that an emphasis on federal deficits and the economy can solve his inherent problems with a rabidly social conservative California GOP primary electorate. I think it's a long shot -- so much so that I probably won't send him money, after all. I think I may wait until California again has an "open primary" allowing voters to cast votes for candidates in any party, giving a leg up to moderates like Campbell and ameliorating the vicious partisanship that has helped paralyze both Sacramento and Washington. The open-primary question may be on the ballot soon. I know Campbell has supported the idea in the past. For his sake, I hope it happens. But 2010 is not looking like Campbell's year.

Oh, Shut Up, Pat Robertson

      Televangelist Pat Robertson, who came damn close (profanity intended) to being the Republican presidential nominee in 1988, has put his well-polished loafer in his mouth again.

     This time, Wednesday on his Christian Broadcasting Network show popular in every double-wide trailer park in the U.S., he attributed the suffering of millions of Haitians in this terrible earthquake to a "pact with the devil" supposedly made in 1791 by Haitian revolutionaries desperate to escape from "under the heel of the French."

   "They got together and swore a pact to the devil," Robertson said. "They said, 'We will serve you if you'll get us free from the French.' True story. And the devil said, 'OK, it's a deal.' Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another."

    Oh, Pat. You jerk.

    First of all, you show as much compassion for the bereaved, injured and homeless Haitians as George W. Bush showed for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Some preacher of God you are. To the extent that you appear to be smugly enjoying the suffering in Haiti, a nation of black people, you run the risk of being characterized as a racist.

    Second, it's doubtful that anybody heard the devil say, "OK, it's a deal."

    Third, way before 1791, Haiti was a cursed, miserable place. The French planters were incredibly cruel to their imported African slaves, used as labor after the native Indians were worked to death. It was God who put Haiti's location smack in the way of hurricanes. Port-au-Prince, the capital, sits right on an earthquake-prone fault. The island of Hispaniola, shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, has few natural resources. Overpopulation has resulted in burning of the forests for fuel. Haiti, with its record of dictators and military coups, has nothing going for it except the saintly forbearance and resilience of its people -- people whom Robertson dismisses out of hand because of some superstitious nonsense about 1791.

    All right, let's just say that a few downtrodden slaves in the 18th Century thought they were making a pact with the devil. It still took the devil more than 12 years and the deaths of thousands of Haitians and French to get rid of the colonials and achieve Haitian independence. And as for whether any curse continues today, Robertson ignores the power of the Bible, which preaches: "Let not the sins of the fathers be visited upon the children."

Google and China

True confessions: I own 30 shares of stock in Google. So I'm taking a hit in the stock's value as a result of Google threatening to pull its Google.cn search site out of China and Google's announcement that the site no longer will censor searches as the Chicoms desire.

    Google's scruples are costing me money, in other words. But Google is doing the right thing. China's government, not content with being kowtowed to by the American Internet giant, went too far in hacking into Google's system to pry into the gmail e-mails of Chinese dissidents.

    China has one of the world's most shamelessly repressive, hard-line governments. The thugs of Iran's equally bloody-minded "revolutionary" regime (the whole country has become a Tiananmen Square of killings and beatings) at least has the fig leaf of an ideology: They're doing it in the name of God. China's thugs no longer have an ideology. In economics, China doesn't even a communist system. It's unbridled capitalism. Beijing's Communist Party clings to power for the sake of power, and refuses to listen to protests from outsiders as it censors the Web and spies on its own Web users.   

Google shouldn't have agreed to self-filter Google.cn in the first place when it opened shop in China in 2006. Better late than never. Of course, China never will agree to an uncensored search site, so Google will have to pull out of China, where it holds a 20% share of the search-engine market behind China's own Baidu. But Chinese searchers still should have access to the worldwide and uncensored Google.com -- at least until China shuts down access to the site, as it does with Facebook and Twitter. 

   The Chinese government may get what it wants in the end, but Google's defiance will mark the first time that a foreign business desiring a foothold in the great emerging Chinese market has said "enough" to the overrreachers in Beijing. Let's hope Google's example inspires others -- and the Chinese people themselves. Meanwhile, I'm holding onto my Google shares, with thanks that the company is following its famous motto: "Don't be evil."