November Week 1, 2005

Don't knock the weather. If it didn't change once in a while, nine out of ten people couldn't start a conversation.

I bought a sweater in Colville last week... a nice 'Cat' sweater, a real extravagance for me... I like it, it will probably last longer than I will. Mike took it without asking me and rode around all night with a bunch of kids that smoke... it reeks... He doesn't understand why I am upset...

Mike is a bully, bullies don't understand property rights. They live in a world of intimidation and have a hedonistic sense of autonomy that permits them to take what they want when ever they want. Mike can twist the significance of what he does into his own twisted sense of reality. He steals stuff but to him that's OK because he 'needs' it. If I need it it's not stealing, It is OK to take stuff if I think you will say "No. you can't borrow/have/take it." If I don't hide it from sight it's not stealing, it's borrowing. If you left it unprotected and I pick it up, it's not stealing. If I like it more than I have deemed you to like it I deserve it more than you do. If it looks better on me than it looks on you than I should have it, it's not stealing. I can also take your stuff if you are a "dick" or if you don't like me or if you are ugly or if mine is old and yours is new, or simply because I can. at no time though have I ever stolen anything... I am not a thief.

It is now 1800, it has been dark for 2 hours... I am so sleepy I can't keep my eyes open. I managed to empty some more boxes tonight, it is now 1030 and I am pretty out of it.

Talked to Christy tonight. The car has been repaired and Hugh's remains are ready so they [Christy, Sabine, Bonnie and Ann] will be leaving for California in the AM.

When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

Graffiti seen on a hand drier in a public restroom:
PUSH BUTTON FOR A MESSAGE FROM YOUR PRESIDENT

The Brit's spell HONOR with a 'U'... Honour... Americans took it out for some reason... it's about time we put the U back in honour don't ya think?
Trash day today, the "Refuse Transfer Station" (It's not a dump) is open from 0800 to 1600 on Wednesday and Saturday... I got there when it opened and got rid of this weeks trash... I have got to find a trash compacter.

One of the rugs we ordered last week arrived via UPS... and the kids bedroom furniture arrived too... I put Calie's bed together and helped Cindy and Monica clean their room...

I got a call from Sharon Marsonett, an old friend from the 70's, she lives in Laclede, near Spirit Lake... about 60 or 70 miles from here... I also got a call from Bill Bohte... blew me away.

Christy arrived in Lancaster at about 0800... 22 hours is a pretty good time to make that trip.

Monica is on the basketball team, her first night of practice was tonight and she twisted her ankle... poor baby... the coach is impressed with her. Monica is a pretty good player.

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.
Robert Frost

Boy, aint that the truth... I have a hard time arguing with people because I and usually relate to both sides of an argument... it seems to me that if you have any respect for the other person at all then you have to give them credit for basing their beliefs on something. even if their argument consists of "...because Rush Limbaugh says so." Just because it makes no sense to you doesn't mean it's wrong...

We got our package from SBC on Medical... we have the choice of United Health Care on Net and United Health Care Off Net... whoopie...

Christy is in the Antelope Valley, Hugh's service will be in the afternoon tomorrow... I got her tickets on a flight out of Burbank on Monday...

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another, and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.

I guess Hugh's funeral was an emotional affair... he was just a year older than Christy

"The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups."

I watched the Eagles play without Tyrell Owens... they lost but they were playing a real good team and they put on a good show... T.O. To quote a friend and New England Patriot fanatic; "If ever a good player needed his ass kicked from here to Shanghai - that's him!"

He's an arrogant bully, a self promoter who believes his own jive, a legend in his own mind who thinks we should all genuflect and bow our heads in his presence... as far as I am concerned he's not worth spit as a human being. What he and the other jokers like him fail to realize is that they are entertainers, they are just a peg above the monkeys that organ-grinders keep on a chain to lure suckers to put money in the cup. I think that their arrogance comes from the suppressed knowledge that their contribution to humanity is about as significant as that of the fastest raindrop down a window pane and they are scared to death that the world will figure out their scam and quit paying them all that money.

Get us out of this pickle factory

Leap I lightly, with the grace of a gazelle, over such mundane news items as indictments at the White House and Supreme Court nominations. All the better to continue my crusade to focus attention not on what’s wrong, but on how to fix it.

Forget, for a carefree and frivolous moment, the manifold failings of the only president we’ve got. Instead, let’s see if we can figure out how to get out of this pickle. More than one pickle, I grant you — this administration is a pickle factory. Thinking helmets on, team.

Before we even begin with some useful lists of “Let’s stop doing this and try doing that, instead,” we should salute the Values Crowd with the sincerest form of flattery. I suppose we could have a giant Values Debate, with Bill Bennett on one side and Bill Moyers on the other, but even values have fallen into the partisan pit these days. We need to go at our problems in some way that doesn’t immediately set hackles up so that the only point of the exercise becomes to beat the other side.

How about, instead of a Contract With America, we see if we can get some agreement on what kind of country we would like to see America become.

Here’s a starter: I would like America to be a country where we spend more money on educating people than we do on the military.

On a panel in New Haven, Conn., the other night, Ray Suarez of PBS answered the “How do we fix it?” question with the proposal that we make K-12 our top priority. He suggests this would have so many unexpected side effects — ranging from science to race relations — it would effectively be a revolution.

I’m not asking you to endorse that idea, but do consider the astonishing magnitude of such a shift. It’s difficult to get a compete grasp on how much we spend on the military, since not all of it is under the Department of Defense. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, pays for much of the “war on terror.” But basically, the Pentagon is now getting about $500 billion a year, or 52 percent of the discretionary federal budget — according to the Center for Budget Priorities.

(“Discretionary” basically means what Congress and the president have any say over. The rest of the budget goes to stuff we have already committed to and can’t get out of, like paying interest on the national debt.)

Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, whose purpose is to educate the public on how the federal government spends our money and what priorities are, suggests cutting 15 percent from the military budget and redirecting it. The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation says we now spend more on our military than the rest of the world combined spends on theirs. There is no country that could conceivably defeat us militarily, though we certainly do manage to get ourselves stuck in some unpleasant places. Anyone who has watched the poor National Guard getting called back to Iraq again and again can figure out quite a bit of this money is not being well spent.

Just for starters, is there anyone — anyone — who thinks we need more than 1,000 nuclear warheads in order to have a credible nuclear deterrent at this time? By cutting back to 1,000, we can save $13 billion right there.

Another $26 billion would be saved by scaling back or stopping the research, development and construction of weapons that are useless to deal with modern threats. Many of the weapons involved, like the F/A-22 fighter jet and the Virginia Class submarine, were designed to fight the defunct Soviet Union. All of this is according to Lawrence Korb, whose credentials are endless — senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, senior adviser to the Center for Defense Information, former vice president of Raytheon, etc. The $26 billion does not include the old Star Wars program, now called missile defense, which could be cut back to basic research for a saving of $7 billion.

I’m trying to give you some sense of scale here. According to Korb’s research, we could take $60 billion out of the defense budget, 15 percent of the total, without remotely affecting military readiness. Any think tank, left or right, can come up with a similar scenario for cutting military spending without harm to security — the details may differ, but you will find a surprising degree of overlap, as well.

OK, so we could shift $60 billion into education without even breathing hard. Then, how would we continue toward of a goal of putting more into education than on stuff to kill people? For starters, we could try having fewer enemies in the world. Then we wouldn’t need so many ways to kill them, eh? And how do we get there?

Nothing simple about this effort — anyone who thinks international relations and diplomacy are simple, straightforward subjects has not been paying attention. This how-do-we-fix-it series is a conversation, not a lecture, and all suggestions are welcome. You can e-mail your suggestions to me at ideasformolly@creators.com.

Molly Ivins: America needs to win back old friends

By Molly Ivins
Published 2:15 am PST Thursday, November 3, 2005

In the days and weeks following Sept. 11, the United States enjoyed global sympathy and goodwill. All our old enemies sent regrets and offers of help. The most important newspaper in France headlined, "We Are All Americans Now." The most touching gestures and offers rolled in, wave and after wave -- nations offered their teams of rescue dogs to search for bodies; special collections were taken up by D-Day survivors in Normandy; all over the world, American embassies were surrounded by long lines of people coming to offer sympathy, write notes, leave flowers.

You recall that George W. went on to make a series of unpleasant statements. "You're either with us or with the terrorists" may have sounded like a great macho moment, but no one likes to be verbally shoved against a wall and given no choice. There was the whole world asking, "What can we do to help?" and our response was, "Our side or else." Why? Why coercion, rather than invitation?

Bush's State of the Union speech in January 2002 remains a monument to gracelessness. None of the language is worth remembering, but it contained a great deal of crowing about our defeat of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. As Barry Bearak of The New York Times observed before that war, if you wanted to bomb Afghanistan back to the Stone Age, you didn't have far to go.

The trouble with Bush's graceless provincialism on that occasion is that the invasion of Afghanistan was an international effort -- NATO, for the first time in its history, responded under its "an attack on one is an attack on all" clause. French, Germans and Canadians not only served in Afghanistan, but continue to do so. And, as we noticed increasingly is important, they shared the cost, as well.

You see, one beauty of building an international coalition is that you don't have to pay for the whole thing by yourself. Bush the Elder built a coalition for the Gulf War in 1990 that covered about 90 percent of the cost. By contrast, the financial burden of the Iraq War continues to be almost entirely ours -- with special thanks again to the British.

The colossal ineptitude of Bush's diplomacy, if it can be called that, leading up to the Iraq war was somewhere between ludicrous and nuts. Bullying, bribing, threatening -- and these were our allies. The insanity of our approach to Turkey, one of America's oldest democratic allies in the Middle East, is textbook -- to be studied in international relations schools for years. In the name of bringing democracy to Iraq (actually, at the time we never mentioned that as a reason), we threatened to end it in Turkey. Good grief.

The administration's open contempt for the United Nations did us incalculable damage. It wasn't just the ugly, clumsy pre-war "diplomacy," but the petty, vindictive attempts at revenge afterward against those who were right all along. Trying to get Mohammad ElBaradei fired as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency -- how small and wrong. Making John Bolton ambassador to the United Nations -- oh, please.

So, a lot of cleanup is needed. Cards and letters (well, OK, e-mails) have rolled in from the Beloved Readers. We are getting gems daily. People are full of dandy ideas about how to fix this mess -- any and all parts of this mess -- but the foreign policy suggestions are especially interesting.

What the people seem to grasp that the Bush administration doesn't is the link between the Middle East, energy policy, defense policy, the environment and the economy. Again and again, readers point out that oil is at the root of the knot of problems and we can give ourselves much more flexibility to deal with the Middle East if we are not so dependent on it for oil. Ergo, we need an energy policy that emphasizes conservation and alternative energy sources.

The geopolitical problems that stem from our dependence on fossil fuel are the most difficult part of our relations with the rest of the world right now, and they look ever more ominous in the future. Reader Jim Schmitz observes that oil is a limited resource -- if you accept the idea that we've already hit peak production and have nowhere to go but down -- and we're addicted to it. If we kick the oil habit, we not only solve huge chunks of our biggest national security problem, we are also positioned to take part in the incredible boom in the alternate energy industry.

The beauty of thinking long-term is that when you look at a problem like illegal immigration, your first thought is not building a fence on the border, it's helping economic development in Central and South America. This not only makes us more friends, it's a much better solution to the problem. Lots of folks have dandy ideas on how to have more friends and fewer enemies -- for example, convert the money we spend in this hemisphere on the drug war to economic development. We should set up clean drinking water systems in all Third World countries -- that suggestion comes from a reader who thinks the total cost would be less than we spend in Iraq in a month.

Get us out of this pickle factory

Molly Ivins: America needs to win back old friends

By Molly Ivins Published 2:15 am PST Thursday, November 3, 2005

By Molly Ivins
Published 2:15 am PST Thursday, November 3, 2005