May Week 4, 2006

1. Employees are the most valuable asset.
2. I have an open-door policy.
3. You could earn more money under the new plan.
4. We're re-organizing to better serve our customers.
5. The future is bright.
6. We reward risk-takers.
7. Performance will be rewarded.
8. We don't shoot the messenger.
9. Training is a high priority.
10. I haven't heard any rumors.
11. We'll review your performance in six months.
12. Our people are the best.
13. Your input is important to us

I took Christian to Colville for his Drivers Ed class. They do as much driving in Colville as possible because it has stop lights and one way street, it even has a turning circle... Colville is in Stevens County, we live in Pend Orielle County, there is one stop light in the entire county and that is 59 miles south in Newport... I think that is a very cool fact. Christian drove, both ways... the drive back in the rain, a real gully washer, he used every ounce of concentration he had and did a good, though a bit overly cautious, job and we got home safely.

I went to see M. I. III not bad, as silly as the first two but it was a respectable diversion... Tom Cruise needs to find another character... he has gotten a little formulaic... predictable. I am getting really turned off by that well practiced grin of his... it is so perfect and... premeditated that the sincerity he is presuming to project comes off as acting... like a salesman's smile meant to be disarming but instead it's a bit threatening.

Christy has an infection [stye] under her left eyelid, it's swollen... she went to the Dr. today he gave her some antibiotics... she has a rash on her chest but she didn't tell him about that... she says it's going away.

I need [want] to buy a new camera... almost did, the one I wanted was out of stock.

A nation's true values can be measured in how it treats the poor, the weak, the damaged, the unconnected. For more than 30 years, the answer of the American power structure has been clear: you lock them up, you shut them up, you grind them down – and make big bucks in the process.

1 out of every 140 citizens in America are in prison, more than any other country in the world... either by sheer numbers or by percentage of population we are the 'leader'... think about that... we are ahead of those bastions of freedom, China, Russia... Iraq... makes ya proud don't it... what is wrong with this country, is the whole damn place delusional?

I took Christian into Colville for his dental appointment... and then came home and went to the park to help Autumn's class clean up... the river has come over the banks there and it's a real mess but the kids did a good job...

Picture is of Autumn [pulling wagon with some assistance] and some of her classmates, note that the river is up to the road, it is supposed to be down about six feet...

Colville again... expensive... We got the windshield replaced and we went to get grandpa's ears checked... they weren't in... gone till the end of May... damn... went to to breakfast, picked up the van, grandpa and grandma drove it home and Christy and I went to Wal-Mart and to the Nursery to buy some trees and bushes... like I said... expensive day

Life's disappointments are harder to take when you don't know any swear words.
- Calvin & Hobbes. by Bill Watterson.

I worked on cleaning up my shop again today... the difference between today and all the other days I have been down there is that today is the first time I can actually see that I accomplished something. I have a steel workbench that I can't move by myself so I hooked up pulley's and ropes and managed to lift it using the truck... worked fine. It actually looks like a place a person could actually work.

I took Calie to the bus this morning, she is on her way to Yakima for a baseball tournament... she will play tomorrow and, win or lose, play two games on Saturday, if she wins one of them she will play again on Sunday...

People persist in believing that they 'know' things, when in truth all they know is that they believe their opinion is fact. To have an opinion is one thing but to actually know something is something else again. I listened to the codgers tonight saying that the government is going to pass a law saying that all immigrants will have three years to learn English and then they will either pass some sort of test or go back where they came from... they all agreed that that was a good thing... I think the English Only Bill is Politics at it's nastiest, to me it is just senseless meanness. It's bullying, its insensitive, and it's un-American. We have German, Russian, French, Basque, and Italian speaking communities all over the country and no one gives a damn, but because they are told by some media and most politicians to be threatened by Mexicans they want to get all Pentecostal and make speeches condemning the poor bastards just because they want to make a buck and get a better life... pisses me off... a lot...

The Dixie Chicks new CD is really good, a little bitter about how they were treated in a few songs but even that one is good. I hope they sell a billion copies... I bought mine yesterday... If you get a chance, read the article on them in Time magazine, I love the subtitle. It's a little too noncommittal and missed dome of the subtleties, the Chicks didn't turn their backs on their Fans, their fans sere behind them 100%, they turned their back on the Country/Corporate pinheads who dropped their contracts and kicked them off the Country top 40 programs and the low-brow Redneck contingent that threatened to kill them...

I love the Dixie Chicks, I am even trying to like their music.... I do like most of their music, my only complaint is that occasionally they act as though they have found the perfect note and can sound a bit repetitive.

I saw this quote two days ago... it is something I know and something I have written about several times (Using far too many words). I am convinced that one of the main problems with the world today is that we don't know one another... except for family and a close circle of friends the world consists of us and them. It's to easy to throw a label on someone and dismiss them without ever knowing what makes them unique. I do it, we all do it... something as insignificant as a word or a gesture or a silly T-Shirt can box a person in your mind forever... how sad.

I heard a fella call a couple Mexicans down at the Mini Mart 'Chili Peppers' and a few other things that got my hackles up but I said nothing, weird isn't it, I was afraid to speak up and find out where he's coming from because I don't want to be labeled the 'Town Liberal', Instead. I just put him in a box and dismissed him as a bigot... I think I may have been unwilling to spend the time too find out if he really is a jerk or just giving a real good impersonation of one.

Metaline Falls, Metaline and Ione are the three towns that comprise the Selkirk School District. It is nine miles from Ione to to Metaline and one more mile to 'The Falls'.

Small towns, someone needs help they ask for it, someone gets sick and you send food, someone dies and it affects you personally. We lost two young women in one week... one, Katherine Maupin, to cancer and another, Malinda Spain in an automobile accident. A town this size can't assimilate that kind of tragedy easily. Everyone takes it personally... we are new here so it is difficult to know what to say, both women grew up here and have a history with the town and all the people... I can feel their shock and sadness but I can't feel the depth of the pain. I didn't have an opportunity to know them at all, I had met them both though... one helped us at the bank when we first came here and the other was the Step-mom of Monica's best friend...

Since September it's just gotten colder and colder. There's less daylight now, I've noticed too. This can only mean one thing - the sun is going out. In a few more months the Earth will be a dark and lifeless ball of ice. Dad says the sun isn't going out. He says its colder because the earth's orbit is taking us farther from the sun. He says winter will be here soon. -Isn't it sad how some people's grip on their lives is so precarious that they'll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?

Memorial day is a big deal in this town, very solemn and well attended... the stream of cars and trucks coming out Cemetery Road was impressive... the 21 gun salute was more impressive... I didn't know there was anything going on. The cemetery was decked out

in flowers and especially well groomed.

The river is up even higher, the road that Autumn was the wagon on last Tuesday is under about a foot of water

Calie is back from 'State' They won two and lost two and were presented with sweatshirts that they had to pay $52.00 for... it was worth it... I am very proud of her. I never earned a memento like that... neither have any of the other kids. It gives me a little fatherly thrill to see the name DAGGETT printed on the back... I think my father would have been proud of her too.

Back in 2000, candidate George W. Bush described himself as "a uniter, not a divider." If we didn't all remember that, you'd think I'd made it up. Now Bush has dubbed himself "the decider."

Well, things change, people change, and our perceptions of them change; but with Bush, everything has changed, and in the most startling way, beginning with his election. The electoral vote was so close that it came down to a single state where the popular vote was virtually even -- and the governor of that state was Bush's brother!

This set the tone for what I can only call the most improbable presidency in American history. Today the country is so bitterly divided, and Bush's poll ratings are so abysmal, that it takes an effort to recall how successfully he did, at times, unite the voters. After the 9/11 attacks his popularity approached unanimity. He had a lock on patriotism. Support for his War on Terror, wherever he might choose to take it, was so impressive that one usually skeptical liberal pundit, Michael Kinsley, pronounced him "a great leader."

Then, during the 2004 campaign, the polls strongly indicated that America was evenly divided again. It looked as if the Bush-Kerry vote might be as close as the Bush-Gore vote had been. But then Bush won a decisive victory, leading a Republican triumph and boasting of his "political capital." Only a few months after his second inauguration, that capital was exhausted. As the war in Iraq went bad, he committed blunder after blunder. Gaffes like (to name just one) his nomination of the pitiful Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court made him look ludicrously incompetent.

Today Republicans are afraid to be associated with him, and the Democrats are murmuring hopefully about impeachment. Even his hard core is shrinking, as conservatives belatedly notice that Bush is, to say the least, a very odd sort of conservative. Under his rule, big government is bigger than ever, and is committed to even more explosive growth in years to come.

Another liberal pundit, E.J. Dionne Jr., rejoices that the country is reacting against "the failure of conservative policies and the declining appeal of conservative rhetoric." Really? And just which "conservative" policies would those be?

Bush's policies have in fact been so confusingly miscellaneous that it's hard to know just what to call them. He has given us monstrous increases in government power with heavy doses of conservative rhetoric. The rhetoric, until recently, has assured conservatives that he is "one of us" at heart, which is the way Republicans usually snare conservative hearts.

Conservatives also rally to any politician who can make liberals hate him, as Bush has done more successfully than any pol since Richard Nixon. Like Nixon, Bush has a way of enraging liberals even while trying to appease them. On top of that, he must hold the record for irritating mannerisms, from smirks to swaggers to defiantly inept English.

Seldom has one man gotten on so many people's nerves for so many different reasons. Some think he's a war criminal, others think he's just a boor. He's miscellaneously annoying, like an unusually smug ax murderer with bad breath who can't tell a joke and attends a weird church. When you try to put your exasperation into words, you hardly know where to start.

Some of the credit must go to Bush's supporting cast, starting with his vice president. Dick Cheney is another source of miscellaneous irritations. John Nance Garner, one of Franklin Roosevelt's veeps, once said the vice presidency "isn't worth a pitcher of warm spit"
(though he actually named another bodily fluid), but Cheney seems to think that if you have a pitcher of warm spit, you should make lemonade. If Garner had a lesbian daughter, she kept it to herself and didn't do books and interviews about it. I'm not sure what the moral is here, but I do know this: the Bush era makes even less sense than the Clinton era did.

It's a crazy time, when the old verities don't seem to apply anymore, except that Kennedys are still being arrested. Bush and his people have only aggravated the situation. One small consolation is that the Bushes are unlikely to have airports, schools, and stadiums named after them. It looks as if their place in history is already secure.

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Read this column on-line at "http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060509.shtml".

Milquetoast Mussolini

"If I were the president of Iran, if I were Osama bin Laden or any of the terrorist organizers and I could have my wish list totally," stated milquetoast music icon and political commentator wannabe Pat Boone in a recent interview, "I couldn't ask for anything better than for America's entertainers to bash their president, denigrate him, make him seem like an idiot and a self-serving fool, and then have the media go along with it and promote it like crazy and try to undermine the whole war effort."

So by Boone's calculations, "America's entertainers" are the key strategic resource in the "War on Terror," and nothing – nothing! – is more important to the "Islamo-Fascists" than having our singers of songs and professional pretenders (also known as "actors") criticize the president.

The occasional intemperate comment from an actor or musician has greater throw-weight than a suitcase nuke, and a deadlier capacity for contagion than a bio-weapon, according to Boone's expert assessment. That reckoning, I suspect, has a lot to do with professional narcissism: as an entertainer, Boone is inclined to see his profession as the center of the universe.

Mr. Boone's strategic insights were offered as a rebuke to Natalie Maines, lead singer for the Dixie Chicks, who famously denounced President Bush on the eve of the unnecessary war in Iraq in 2003. The Chicks' new album features a track entitled "Not Ready to Make Nice," which hurls defiance at those who attempted to boycott the group in the wake of Maines' comment. And Maines herself has retracted an apology she had made for the remark, quite sensibly saying "I don't feel he is owed any respect whatsoever."

"We are at war," insists Boone, "and you don't tell even a quarterback in a football game that he's nuts and you don't respect him. You try to pull for a win, and that's what we should be trying to do.... You can disagree. You can express your disagreement, but don't attack the man who is your elected leader and say he's not owed any respect at all."

Where do we begin in dealing with this large, reeking pile of used food?

First of all:

War isn't a football game. It is the calculated destruction of irreplaceable lives and, often, entire societies. Modern war often inflicts nearly as much damage on the "victor" as on the vanquished.

Second:

When a quarterback is stinking up the field, he can expect rough treatment from his coach, the team owner, and the fans – all of whom generally won't restrict themselves to decorously phrased critical comments like those Maines made about Bush, who shamelessly lied our nation into a needless and disastrous war. A quarterback who consistently throws interceptions or gets sacked for losses isn't entitled to respect, and won't last long in the starting lineup.

Third:

When our nation launches an unnecessary aggressive war – one not prosecuted in the fashion the Constitution prescribes – that proves to be a strategic and moral disaster, Americans should not "pull for a win." Yes, to revert to Boone's favored idiom, we should "root, root, root for the home team." But when our government launches an aggressive war against a distant nation that hasn't attacked or threatened us, we are not the home team.

The only way for the American people, as opposed to the corrupt criminals who rule us, to "win" the Iraq war is to end it immediately.

Fourth:

The President of the United States is not our "leader." He is our agent, our employee. He is not some numinous being who embodies our national will, as peddlers of Fuhrerprinzip would have us believe. Unless they are active-duty members of the military, Americans have no Commander-in-Chief, and unless war is declared by Congress that occasional function of the presidency isn't operative.

In trying to isolate the most foolish thing Boone said in that brief interview, one is confronted with an embarrassment of riches. But from my point of view, the booby prize goes to Boone's apparent belief that the thing Osama bin Laden and his ilk would covet more than anything else would be public criticism of George W. Bush.

Any rational assessment of Bush's foreign policy would lead one to conclude that Osama (citing him as the figurative head of the radical Islamic movement) has no better or more reliable ally than Bush. Osama's announced intention is to bleed our economy dry – something the Bush administration is eagerly doing, with the dutiful help of the Republican Congress.

Bush is a similarly valuable ally to Iran's President Ahmadinejad. Iran is the chief strategic beneficiary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which removed Teheran's chief Persian Gulf region rival and installed an Iran-friendly Shi'ite regime.

As Pat Boone's comments nicely illustrate, most celebrities are no wiser or better informed than the rest of us. He should take the advice famously tendered by Bushbot talk show host Laura Ingraham to left-leaning celebrities: Just shut up and sing.

Amid the Respectables in the Heartland

[This writers encounter exactly recounts my experience trying to talk, about what I believe, to my brothers in law and others... in spite of all the evidence pointing to the current administrations ineptitude and arrogance and outright lies they still are following blindly. they truly believe that America Right or Wrong is a commendable stance and that the President should be followed blindly (unless he is a Democrat)... Arrrrggggh... exasperating]

In a recent post titled "Investing in Tyranny," Butler Shaffer noted that the Germans who lived under Hitler's regime had thought they were free and that, likewise, on a recently broadcast TV show, "with one notable exception [Wayne Rogers]," the participants "found nothing objectionable in what the NSA was doing" in its spying on millions of Americans. Like the Germans of 1933–45, the Americans of today, for the most part, believe they are free.

I recently had a personal experience with this kind of thinking. I went to St. Louis to give a talk to a group of people who gather occasionally to discuss economic and political subjects. I had been told that most participants in this group are conservatives. When I arrived, I found them to be nearly all affluent, white, middle-aged and elderly people – a perfect aggregation of what I have long categorized as the "respectable" people.

I admit that my categorization is not simply a reflection of how I believe these sorts of people view themselves; it is also colored by my own experiences in life. In my youth, I belonged to a group that certainly did not qualify for membership in the respectable crowd, not even in the rural and small-town world in which I lived. We were too poor, too ill-educated, too deeply engaged in manual labor in earning our living. We had come to central California from a backwoods part of the country (Oklahoma and Texas), and we attended highly suspect churches (of Pentecostal and other fundamentalist Protestant sects). The world of my youth was not a sharply hierarchical one – all children attended the same government schools, for example, for no other schools existed, and in those days nobody considered home-schooling – yet in my group we knew perfectly well that the upper-crust people looked down on us. I did not have the feeling that any of us was consumed by resentment of this condescension. We did not so much embrace it as we merely accepted that by virtue of being "working people," we occupied a lower rung on the social ladder. Although it seemed an accomplished social fact that some people were seen as "better" than we were, we did not believe that they really were: at bottom, they just had more money than we had.

At St. Louis, I gave my talk, and the assembled persons listened respectfully, as respectable people generally do. When the Q-and-A was opened up, however, the onslaught began. Only a few of the people in attendance were not palpably hostile to what I had said. One of those few sympathetic listeners, a guest attending the group's discussions for the first time, wrote me a few days later, "When you first stated your position, and I saw the outburst from the audience, I thought they might string you up from the light fixtures!" I tried to answer each question calmly, with reason and evidence, but my efforts proved unavailing. The respectables, it seemed, considered my position as tantamount to treason.

What exactly had I said to trigger such an enraged response? Although much of my talk pertained to earlier episodes of national emergency and the growth of government in the twentieth century, the brief remarks I made about the present crisis were what struck the raw nerves of these conservative respectables. My expressions of disapproval in regard to the government's recent invasions of liberties, in particular, elicited expressions of stunned disbelief. I had said that the government's announced claim is that the president may, at his sole pleasure, arrest, incarcerate, and punish, even put to death, anyone he describes as a terrorist, wholly denying due process of law to the accused terrorist. One lady adamantly insisted that I say exactly whose rights had actually been so violated. When I replied that the leading case concerns a U.S. citizen named Jose Padilla, I thought she might expire from apoplexy. No sooner had I uttered Padilla's name than she half shouted, half sputtered indignantly "a terrorist!" "How do we know," I replied, "if he does not receive due process of law? Are we to accept the government's claims solely on its officials' say-so?" Well, for this lady and for most of the others in the room, of course, we were to accept all such claims on the government's say-so. These respectables are simply incapable of imagining that the government they so blindly and enthusiastically support might do anything to harm THEM or, by extension, any other similarly respectable persons in the United States – clearly, the only people who matter.

Some members of the crowd seemed wholly indifferent not only to the fate of the people of Afghanistan and Iraq and to the fate of the men caged at Guantanamo, but also to the fate of any noncitizen anywhere. They have somehow adsorbed the quaint notion that the U.S. Constitution does not apply to noncitizens, even though the Bill of Rights makes no mention of anyone's citizenship status. Thus, for example, the Fifth Amendment states "No person shall be held to answer . . . , nor shall any person be subject . . . ," and the Sixth Amendment refers only to "the accused." My audience seemed taken aback by these aspects of the Constitution and seemed to regard them as the Founders' mistakes, provisions that no longer need be honored. Typical conservative reverence for their blessed Constitution: these ignoramuses have no idea even of what that document says!

One elderly gentleman, a retired attorney perhaps, insisted on putting the same question to me four times in a row, insisting that I give him a yes-or-no answer to a question about how long it would take before a certain outcome occurred, even though I had already answered in a substantive way by saying that I did not believe that the event he had described would ever occur. He seemed to take great delight in my finally answering a question about some future contingency by saying "I don't know," as if he had publicly tripped me up and exposed me as someone who didn't know what he was talking about. Such childishness seemed out of place for a man in his seventies.

Another gentleman dismissed my account of the classic crisis-response process evident in the events since 9/11 by saying that mere criticism has no value; he insisted that I say "what would YOU have done?" I replied that most important was what I would NOT have done: in particular, I would not have unleashed a U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, whose government and people had not been shown to have had anything to do with the attacks of 9/11 or to pose a substantial threat to the United States. This statement nearly brought the house down on me. "But what WOULD you have done?" my interrogator insisted. I replied that I would have treated the attacks as a crime and therefore would have undertaken the appropriate measures, in cooperation with police forces in other countries, to find out who committed or served as accomplices in the commission of the crime and to bring those persons to justice. This response only provoked greater crowd fury, because I would not admit that "we are at war" against a vast network of terrorists bent (only because of their twisted minds) on our utter destruction and therefore that all warlike actions whatsoever – bombing, invading, and occupying other countries, causing unlimited "collateral damage," taking prisoners who have no rights, and so forth – are appropriate measures for responding to 9/11.

My sympathetic correspondent later wrote, "When I saw, in the eyes of the audience, the anger to your statement that 9/11 should be considered a police action, I realized that these people had no critical thinking skills." Further, "I also realized by the anger shown, that they felt you were trying to attack their belief system. You were not trying to attack their belief system, only [to] state your own. Though that is, at this present time, still your right, I don't think THEY believe it is your right. I think in their eyes you were a traitor of some sort."

Well, I got out of St. Louis with my skin. I have received no death threats since giving my talk. Time will tell whether the people who invited me will send the honorarium and expense reimbursement they promised. Coming away from the event, my overwhelming impression was that the government has absolutely nothing to worry about. All the powers that be are fully on its side: the people with the money, the social standing, the education, the connections – in short, the respectable people.

Meanwhile, I find myself still where I was when I first came onto the scene in this curiously torn and conflicted country more than sixty-two years ago, still fenced away from the green, manicured gardens of the respectables, still among the "wretched refuse yearning to breathe free." Frankly, I'd rather be here than there.

Our government has to protect us, and how it does so is none of our business.

But now we luckily learn how the huge but shadowy National Security Agency does it, thanks to USA TODAY, which has done a bit of countersnooping in our behalf.
Without informing us, and with the cooperation of three telecommunications giants, the NSA has secretly collected records of billions of our phone calls. And it's still building its database.

Nobody's rights have been violated, President Disastro assures us, acknowledging that yes, he authorized the secret program. For our own good, of course. Don't worry, it's all compatible with the laws, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the UN Charter, and all that stuff. Just the way Thomas Jefferson would have wanted it.

I rarely chat with terrorists, and I'm not particularly afraid of being singled out for the Bush administration's special attention, but it's the principle of the thing. Once again this gang has been caught red-handed being underhanded.

This is how we live now. Self-government doesn't mean we have to know everything our rulers are up to, does it? It's hard enough keeping track of agencies like the Department of Agriculture. There are so many of them, protecting us from so many things. And the rules, which are countless, are always on their side.

This is the greatest, freest country on earth? Well, in some ways maybe, no thanks to Bush and his team. If some of our legal traditions still survive, albeit severely curtailed, it's in spite of these madmen, not because of them. The present system -- a huge, hideous, monstrous distortion of the government originally prescribed in that Constitution -- suits them just fine.

Clever idea, the Constitution. Too bad it didn't work. By now we should stop congratulating ourselves on it. The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments pretty well destroyed what was left of it, and with all due credit to Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, the ovine electorate allowed Franklin Roosevelt and his successors to finish the job.

The incumbent is just adding a few twists of his own. Lincoln set precedents for executive arrogance by suspending habeas corpus, free speech, and press, arresting elected officials, and invading the states.
Wilson and Roosevelt followed suit with other wartime persecutions and usurpations. Since all three enjoy the ultimate benison of liberalism -- these were "great"
presidents -- it seems churlish of liberals to spurn Bush, the "conservative" they've brought on themselves.

To their credit, liberals have become more skeptical than conservatives about "national security" as a pretext for overweening executive power. They prefer other rationales for violations of our liberty -- "social justice," and so forth.

But in the end, both sides get along very well, accepting each other's gains and seldom threatening to repeal any power that has been established. The iron law they both respect is that the state must grow. Its powers can't be repealed, it can't be cut back to its previous scale, its ambitions can't be reduced. "You can't turn back the clock," as they say.

Now, at last, a president may be bringing the system to a final crisis with more promises and debts than it can sustain. He has no sense of limits or proportion, or of what his subjects will tolerate. For all their excesses, the "great" presidents knew there were some lines they mustn't cross. They lied with finesse. Some of their lies are still believed, chiseled on the marble monuments we call "our heritage."

But Bush lies without finesse. One of his chief weaknesses is that he is fatally gauche. Even simple people realize that he has deceived them and that he's now just insulting their intelligence. Conservative intellectuals have argued that his embarrassing awkwardness is a mark of his "authenticity," when it's really a sign of his insincerity. He repeats himself like a dumb criminal repeating a formulaic alibi he's afraid to risk putting into fresh words, lest an inconsistency betray him.

Having used up all his chances with more than two years to go as president, Bush now faces historical infamy. The rest of us face the continued horror and humiliation of being ruled by him, and it isn't likely to get any better before January 2009. But even if a calamitous collapse can be delayed until then, there may be no way his successor can avoid it.

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Read this column on-line at "http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060511.shtml".