The Census

Ran across some interesting figures today. It seems that the U.S. Census has been tracking threats against census workers. 13 times shots were fired at census workers; 132 times, weapons were pulled on census workers; there were 88 physical assaults; ten times census takers were robbed; there were 101 verbal assaults. Well, I spent six weeks as a census worker, and those numbers are way too low.
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The fact is, most of us never reported incidents because there were just too many of them. To start with, I'm not challenging shots fired, weapons pulled, or robberies. Those numbers I'm sure represent what really went on out there. But 101 verbal assaults? I'd love to know how that term is defined, because I got told off, doors slammed, finger wagged and poked in the chest plenty of times. The big thing was bizarre, right wing political rants about census workers as the vanguard of a leftist plot to take over the country. I wonder where those ideas came from? Right wing insanity spreads, I guess. What other explanation can there be for one rant after another about how government was trying to violate the rights of our citizenry via the census. And what were these dangerous questions. How many people live in a home? Names, birthdays? Ethnicity, race? Rent or own? Telephone? And the weird thing was that beyond the actual count, people were pretty much free to refuse. How intrusive!
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Of course, if a lot of people in the "RED" states like Alabama, Texas, and Utah refuse to answer the census, they'll lose seats in congress and "BLUE" states like New York and California will gain. So right wingers of America, you are right! We census workers are trying to figure out who should go to conservative concentration camps! We are trying to take your guns! Avoid the census!

Two If By Sea

Didn't we fight a revolution so we could ignore these people! It's only been a couple of days, but I'm already tired of listening to the British complain about our less than happy feelings toward British Petroleum. What do they expect? Are we supposed to shrug our shoulders, say stuff happens, and ignore BP's mixture of stupidity and arrogance because lots of Brits own BP stock? Come on! If anything, I wish President Obama would talk less about kicking British ass and spend more time actually dirtying his shoe on Tony Hayward's behind.
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I'm 55, and I can't ever remember a time when the British and the other Europeans haven't been lecturing us. It's always the same; Americans are stupid, Americans are naive, Americans need to shut up and learn from superior Europeans. Well lets look at the historical trend of the last 100 years. The general legacy of European imperialism, especially English imperialism created one problem after another, in every corner of the world. Now I'm not saying that we Americans have always done the right thing, but I would point out that we've spent trillions of dollars, and sacrificed thousands of lives trying to solve those problems. The United States did not conquer the world, rob, steal pillage, rape, loot, and betray Africa, Asia, Australia, Oceania, and any other bit of land they could lay their greedy hands on.

My Civic Duty

Well, I did my civic duty; I voted. It's been a day, and I've got to stop being lazy about my political writing, so if nothing else, it's time to throw out a few thoughts on yesterday's elections.
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Of course, it's California that I'm most concerned with. As a Democrat, there wasn't much suspense in who my party would nominate in the two big races. Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer, for all intent and purpose, ran unopposed. Some of the down slate races had names that might be real powers in the future. Most notably the two San Franciscans, Gavin Newsome and Kamala Harris. On the Republican side...well, what can I say. Multi-millionaires, Meg Whitman (A billionaire, actually.) and Carly Fiorina won. It will be fun to see how two candidates who went after the immigrant community (Supporting Arizona's new anti-immigrant law was the new standard for this year's Repugs.) will fare in a state with soooo many Hispanics. Not well, I suspect.
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Both Fiorina and Whitman tout their business backgrounds. I'm not quite sure why Carly does, considering she was fired for running Hewlett Packard into the ground. At least Whitman has been successful at her various corporate gigs. Both ladies love to point out that government doesn't create jobs, private enterprise does. As the big corporations give, so do they taketh away. In the case of Carly, she fired 30,000 American workers and outsourced their jobs to China. Meg wasn't much better. Before she ran eBay, she ran Hasbro. Under her leadership, the children's toy manufacturer also shipped jobs off to China. At least she provided jobs for lots of Chinese children. Such little fingers, so good for making Mr. Potato Heads. Of course, I will say this. The 80 million that Meg spent from her own pocket was an economic shot in the arm for California. At least I think she didn't outsource any campaign jobs.
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As anyone who has ever read either the original (See my first post for an explanation.) or the current version of The New Common Sense knows, I'm not a big fan of the initiative system. We Californians, through the ballot box, have pretty much banned political parties. (Maybe.) Our newly approved top two primary system, where all candidates run on a single non-partisan ballot, followed by a run-off of the top two, doesn't make much sense to me. The whole purpose of having parties is so that people, or coalitions of like minded people, can chose candidates to represent their own political philosophy. The backers of the proposition claim that it will eliminate extreme candidates and give us centrist choices. I don't want centrist choices. I want a supporter of labor unions, single payer health care, a true national pension system, stronger environmental laws, and a strong opponent of unlimited military spending. Oh well, I doubt it will survive court challenges. At least I hope not.
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Just when I thought that we Californians were powerless to resist the siren call of corporate sponsored propositions, we went and rejected prop. 16, sponsored by PG&E, which would have granted the utility near monopoly status, and prop. 17, sponsored by Mercury Insurance that would have royally screwed car owners come insurance renewal time. Small miracles. I guess the outlay of millions of dollars of corporate cash can't buy a victory after all. Carly, Meg, are you listening?
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My two favorite, non-California elections, were in Nevada and South Carolina. In Nevada, Tea Party candidate, Sharon Angle won the Repug primary and the right to oppose Harry Reid for his U.S. Senate seat. Let's see, her ambition is to get rid of Social Security, medicare, the EPA, the Department o Education, and maybe ban the consumption of Alcohol. That will go over big in Vegas. And South Carolina...Democrats are crying foul over the nomination of unknown Alvin Greene to run against ultraconservative, nut case, Jim DeMint. Just because Greene is an unemployed veteran without a college degree, who lives in his parents house, and may be charged with a sex crime at sometime in the near future, they think they've been robbed of the chance to defeat DeMint. The main stream candidate probably wouldn't have beat DeMint, so why not nominate Greene? Who knows, South Carolina is just crazy enough that Greene might have a chance. If nothing else, his unemployed status might win him the unemployed vote, and in South Carolina, that's a lot of people.

Memorial Day

I've always had mixed feelings about Memorial Day. It's hard to imagine just how much worse our world would be if it wasn't for the United States military, Franklin Roosevelt and to a lesser extent, Harry Truman. Unlike most of the people I know who share my left wing political philosophy, I don't have anything against the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think those attacks preferable to an invasion of Japan...and as for those who argue that a negotiated peace, with the Emperor preserved on the throne of Japan, with his imperial powers intact, well they are just plain naive as to the true nature of Japanese militarism.
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But, I also think that our success in World War 2 has left far too many people in the United States thinking that wars are won on the battlefield, that the enemy surrenders to our will, and that all of our actions are true and just. War just isn't that simple. When I was a child, our high school history teacher taught us that in World War 1, our brave soldiers ended, at least for a couple of decades, the threat of German aggression. With age and scepticism, I find World War 1 as the last gasp of European imperialism a far more plausible explanation for that particular conflict. The sad fact is, most wars are far more morally ambiguous than World War 2, and many wars end, not in clear cut victory, but when both sides decide that it really isn't worth it to continue the fight.
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And that's one of the things that I don't like about Memorial Day. It's not just a time of remembrance. We don't just honor those who sacrificed their lives in war. We demand that our war dead did not die in vain. I'm sorry, but since the inception of Memorial Day, almost one million Americans have died in our wars, and many of them have died for nothing. Right now we are fighting two wars. While I realize that there may have been alternatives, I do view the invasion of Afghanistan as a reasonable response to 9/11. The Taliban may not have been aware, specifically, of the attacks before hand, but clearly the Taliban was aware that Al-Qaeda was using their country as a safe base for terrorism. Iraq, on the other hand was a war of choice. Not only have 4,000 plus Americans died in vain, but we've also crippled our economy for decades with the huge financial cost of dealing with a country that was little more than a minor irritant to us. On Memorial Day, it might be wise to remember the obscene stupidity of some of our wars, and not just the sacrifice made by some of our soldiers.