5 Years Later: Pundits Who Were Wrong on Iraq Are Silent

5 Years Later: Pundits Who Were Wrong on Iraq Are Silent

This is a great article on the punditry, particularly David Brooks, that clamored for war and disparaged those who advocated for diplomacy, and how they are now silent. For the most part they do not revisit their war-mongering and distaste for those who prefer dialogue over laser-guided bombs. Iraq is a mess, our soldiers, sailors, and marines are dying and being disabled every day, and many informed opinions exclaim their exasperation at what now looks to become a decades-long occupation.

Generals and Admirals have spoken out; and many of those same patriots have lost their jobs because of it. It's American to have opinions and voice them strongly without fear of redress. Yet those who stir up public anger, xenophobia, and mistrust in an effort to launch a war should not be allowed to forget their mistakes. They should own up to their misguided hubris, admit they were wrong and that their opinions may have helped grease the wheels of the Bush war machine. Hawkish Republicans have bunkered themselves in against the backlash for the war in Iraq. Hawkish pundits have mostly done the same...yet hiding and pretending does not change history or the words that were spoken to shape it.

Contrary to Many an Opinion, the United States Will Not Implode if a Democrat is Elected in 2008

The following is a response I penned regarding the included email about the Gore vs. Bush 2000 election and the dangers of voting Democrat this year. The original email sent to me has been circulating since 2000 in one form or another. The exact text of the email is intact and has a colored, graphic background for clarity.


Not to stir up a hornet's nest, but I felt that I had to respond. Here's a link to an analysis of not only the quotes, but the numbers behind the points presented. I'll include some of the highlights here, but please check out the link for the full explanation. The pieces from the Snopes story are directly below the points in the original email and they are bolded in blue. Also I have included additional research and opinions as an extension to the overall topic of this email. Thanks!

The Snopes article - http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/tyler.asp

LeftoverJoe

Protected Subject: Fwd: Subject: How long does the USA have? How Long Does The USA Have? Just a Reminder. BE VERY CAREFUL WHO YOU VOTE FOR IN 2008 HOW LONG DOES THE USA HAVE? This is the most interesting thing I've read in a long time. The sad thing about it, you can see it coming. I have always heard about this democracy countdown. It is interesting to see it in print. God help us, not that we deserve it. How Long Do We Have? About the time o ur original thirteen states adopted their new constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh , had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier: 'A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government.' ''A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.'' From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result t hat every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.'' 'Th e average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years'' ''During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence: 1. From bondage to spiritual faith; 2.From spiritual faith to great courage; 3. From courage to liberty; 4. From liberty to abundance; 5. From abundance to complacency; 6. From complacency to apathy, 7. From apathy to dependence; 8. From dependence back into bondage' Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of Law,

...Olson said the "research" was attributed to him erroneously. He said it came from a Sheriff Jay Printz in Montana. I e-mailed Sheriff Printz, and guess what? He didn't do the research either, and didn't remember who had e-mailed it to him.

In other words, he got the same legend e-mailed to him and passed it on to Olson without checking it out, and when Olson passed it on, someone thought it sounded better if a law professor had done the research, and so it grew.

Who knows where it originally came from, but it's just not true.

St. Paul, Minnesota, points out some interesting facts concerning the 2000 Presidential election: Number of States won by: Gore: 19 Bush: 29 Square miles of land won by Gore: 580,000 Bush: 2,427,000 Population of counties won by: Gore: 127 million Bush: 143 million Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Gore: 13.2 Bush: 2.1

According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), in the year 2000 the national murder rate was about 5.5 per 100,000 residents. Homicide data by county for 1999 and 2000 can be downloaded from the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NAJCD), and the counties won by Gore and Bush can be identified using the county-by-county election results made available by CNN. (The NACJD provides not only the number of reported murders for each county, but also the population for each.) The average murder rate in the counties won by Gore vs. the rate in the counties won by Bush can be determined from this data.

By calculating the murder rate for each county and then taking the averages, we find a murder rate (defined as number of murders per 100,000 residents) of about 5.2 for the "average" Gore county and 3.3 for the average Bush county. But since people, rather than counties, commit murders, a more appropriate approach is to calculate the total number of murders in the counties won by each candidate and divide that figure by the total number of residents in those counties. This more appropriate method yields the following average murder rates in counties won by each candidate:

# Gore: 6.5

# Bush: 4.1

Professor Olson adds: "In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of this great country. Gore's territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare...

A map of the counties that Bush and Gore won in 2000:


My own personal insight and research: Most of the counties Gore won are from more populous areas than Bush won. Of the top ten cities in terms of population in the country, seven of them were won by Gore...the only three he didn't win were cities in Texas. Bush largely won the rural areas and poorer states. A study was prepared for the Us Health and Human Services Bureau (http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/social-welfare-spending04/summary.htm).

It concluded that "States of less fiscal capacity spent less per capita on social welfare than states with higher per capita incomes. These differences between rich and poor states resulted largely from differences in states’ spending from their own sources of revenue. The distribution of federal funds neither greatly diminished nor greatly increased state differences in spending.

"That is, more federal money went to rich states than to poor states, but poor states relied more heavily on the federal government to support their social programs."

...also...

"Case studies of six states of low fiscal capacity and high social needs indicated that the basic trends in spending found among poor states before 2000 continued after that year. When we examined what happened in the six poor states after 2000 — and through 2003, when the case studies were completed — we found that the trends identified between 1977 and 2000 generally continued. Per capita Medicaid spending increased in most states between federal FYs 2000 and 2003, and the growth was greater among the six poor states in our sample than for all states."

So, despite the poorer, rural voters supporting Bush, and this email claiming that the people that supported Gore were largely welfare leaches and government subsidized to the hilt, more of Bush's supporters relied more heavily on government welfare money.

Olson believes the United State s is now somewhere between the 'complacency and apathy' phase of Professor Tyler's definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation's population already having reached the 'governmental dependency' phase. If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegal and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years.

Apathy is dangerous no matter who's side in you're on or what you believe. But to the point that is mis-attributed to Olsen in the above paragraph; the middle class is shrinking rapidly, the boomers are retiring making for many more medicare and social security obligations, and the disparity between the wealthiest and the poorest is growing quickly. Here's one example:

Paul Street in his article on the disproportion of wealth in the US (https://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/2077), writes..."Corporate profit margins are higher than they have been in more than half a century, according to Merril Lynch economist David Rosenburg. After tax profits are now equal to 8.5 percent of the GDP - that's more than a trillion dollars - and the highest percent since the end of World War II in 1945. A June 2006 report by the leading investment bank Goldman Sachs aptly summed it up: 'The most important contribution to the higher profit margins over the past five years has been a decline in Labor's share of national income.'"

William Domhoff writes (http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html) "The ratio of CEO pay to factory worker pay rose from 42:1 in 1960 to...411:1 in 2005."

According to another section of the Domhoff article...

Figure 7: CEOs' average pay, production workers' average pay, the S&P 500 Index, corporate profits, and the federal minimum wage, 1990-2005 (all figures adjusted for inflation)

Source: Executive Excess 2006, the 13th Annual CEO Compensation Survey from the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy.


With corporate profits and CEO pay surging, the wealthiest top 2% owning over 50% of the countries wealth, and stagnant working wages despite rising food, fuel, and other costs, it's no wonder that people are growing weary of the system and not participating...they're busy just slogging through life. When our "representatives" are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on election campaigns it's no surprise that the above-claimed 40% are apathetic because there's no evidence that they can make a difference anymore.

Domhoff also notes that in 1998 the share of wealth held by the top 1% of the population was almost 40%, and it's only grown since then. Also, the top 1% receive 20% of the country's income as of 2000.

Also from Domhoff's report..."A key factor behind the high concentration of income, and the likely reason that the concentration has been increasing, can be seen by examining the distribution of what is called "capital income": income from capital gains, dividends, interest, and rents. In 2003, just 1% of all households -- those with after-tax incomes averaging $701,500 -- received 57.5% of all capital income, up from 40% in the early 1990s. On the other hand, the bottom 80% received only 12.6% of capital income, down by nearly half since 1983, when the bottom 80% received 23.5%. Figure 5 and Table 7 provide the details."


So, please consider all of these facts, opinions, and observations. If a Democrat becomes the next President, we're not going to suddenly begin a five-year countdown to the oblivion of the American way of life...it's already happening for a large percentage of the country right now. I'd love to hear your thoughts, questions, concerns about the original email and my responses. Thanks!

Joe

If you are in favor of this then delete this message if you are not then Pass this along to help everyone, realize just how much is at stake, knowing that apathy is the greatest danger to our freedom. Thanks for reading.

For People I Love

I can't make it work. This whole thing is an illusion and it's so hard to keep others out of this...wouldn't want them in even if it was easier. I have hurt people, and I have said stupid things. How many fucking times will I just shut down and shut you all out? I am sorry.

I still love you. That hasn't changed. I am feeling in trouble and the ever-tightening spiral of black, spiky sorrow rips into the soft, spongy gray of my brain. I watch things at work go by like pieces of time through cloudy glass, voices like a skipping record of children laughing...over and over.

The man poised on the tower swivels, slips, and regrets nothing...save the exact manner of his head splashing on the limestone below. He'd have rather landed feet first, in a comical expression of compression, though without the cartoon bounce in the opposite direction.

We fall so fast. We let subtlety clutter our spaces and corrupt our tongues. To be free from it; free from everything; that is heaven.

Insomnia is a Piece of Crap

First the quote - this may explain things...

Sometimes we don't come through,
Sometimes we just get by.
- The Go-Betweens

So much for sleeping. It's like a lost art that I have taken for granted for years, and so now I have forgotten how to do it. It seems simple, but it is anything but. I recently have been experimenting w/ alcohol plus Seroquel to get more than a couple of hours of fitful rest in one night...and even that has failed to produce a full night of sleep. I am reticent to push the dosages of either the alcohol or the Seroquel too much, but it may come to that.

I feel a bit like Edward Norton in Fight Club; pretty soon I'll be beating the shit out of myself in an empty parking lot at two in the morning. Enough on this subject, I think. It is what it is.

fin

Looking Forward to 2008

It's been a long while since I've posted and now that I have graduated I will have much more time on my hands. I have already started to paint again...just finished one up this evening in fact. I have even been doing a bit of sculpting too. I got myself an acoustic guitar for a graduation present, and I am back at lessons. It's fun being able to be creative with my time instead of reading hundreds of pages of dry material every week and having a new paper to write every week or two.

My treatment for manic depression / bi-polar, has been going very well. One thing that sucks is that I have been having some wicked insomnia for almost a year now. I've been trying some different things, and nothing has been the silver bullet yet. I have some prescription meds but they pretty much knock me out and it's hard to wake up at 6:00 in the morning then. I just got some 5-HTP natural supplements. It's supposed to have all kinds of magical stuff in there...we'll see.

I better get back to sketching out some new ideas before I lose them. Cheers.

Is It Wrong to Be Insane?

Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.
- Philip K. Dick

image - Mike Bohatch - The Eyes of Chaos

A Man Said to the Universe...

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist."
"However", replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

stephen crane - War is Kind and Other Lines

I Guess I'm Experiencing Problems

I guess I'm experiencing problems...
It's not so cool to have so many problems.
The Talking Heads