...I first stumbled onto NPR's "Morning Edition" in 1980, fishing around the dial for something to listen to on my commute to work in a new land where the radio listening choices were still unfamiliar to me. Over the next 24 years of moving around from one small Pacific Northwest town to another where my job might take me, an important consideration has always been whether or not there was sufficient reception of an NPR affiliate to provide me with connection to some of my favorite shows: All Things Considered, A Prairie Home Companion, and - most of all - Morning Edition. For longer than my children have been alive, for longer than I have been married, I have been perching a portable radio near the shower in the morning and listening to Bob Edwards tell me what was happening in the world. Now I find that all that appears to be coming to an end.

I am, quite simply, an NPR junkie. When work and personal circumstances allow, I listen to NPR for at least 10 hours every weekday and have been known on lazy Saturdays to listen pretty much nonstop from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. (in fact, "Afropop" is playing on the radio over my left shoulder as I type this). Shows have come and gone over time, but Bob Edwards and Morning Edition have become so much a part of my morning that to miss the show is the equivalent of forgetting to get dressed before I head out the door. Now I find that NPR has decided that, in an effort to "update their programming" - whatever the hell that means - Edwards will be moved to a position of "Senior Correspondent" - whatever the hell that means - and a new host will be named at some unspecified later date. Various news sources characterize the move as a 'dumping' of Edwards; signals are certainly mixed. Nina Totenberg is quoted as saying "he needs a break" after a quarter century of 1 a.m. alarm clocks, but Edwards - in a letter posted on NPR's website - doesn't exactly sound like he was exactly looking for one and nothing in the reporting suggests that this was his idea. Suffice it to say, a campaign has been launched to try to convince NPR to keep Bob Edwards at the mike. While we're not talking about Clear Channel here, the fact is that we are dealing with a media bureaucracy that isn't likely to be deflected from it's desired path by the obstacles raised by energized listeners.

So many things come immediately to mind: That blaring intro music at 5 a.m. when Edwards hits a few high-point headlines of the day, maybe lets you know about some newsmaking event that will be happening during the day, announces a few birthdays, and says what day and date it is; the not-terribly-hard-hitting but usually informative interviews on major issues; the puckish interviews with the mayor of some small town that intends to construct a world-record Belgian Waffle using construction equipment and vast flaming pits of cordwood; the subject interviews with Feinstein or Roberts or Totenberg or some other observer of American life. His Friday visits with baseball broadcasting legend Red Barber were fascinating classics and his memorial essay at Barber's passing made me cry (not the sort of thing we outdoorsy mountain-man types like to admit, so don't tell anybody, ok?).

Oregon Public Broadcasting doesn't know it yet, because I haven't had the time to e-mail them, but this change bothers me...a lot. Change is inevitable; change can be good. However, as I approach my 50th year, some change just grows wearisome because of it's apparent meaninglessness. With the Morning Edition audience having grown 41 % over the last 9 years, I wonder at the need for a change and further wonder in what manner this change will manifest itself. To their (probably minor) regret, OPB will find that I have grown tired of seemingly meaningless change and will be severing my 20-year affiliation as a contributing member of the public radio community. I'll still listen, but now I'll be doing it for free (joining, oddly enough, the vast majority of public radio listeners at whom I previously muttered insults from behind my fine hefty fire-cast porcelain public radio coffee mug received in return for my 'generous' contribution) until such time as the world of public radio demonstrates that this was a change for the better...

...ok, I suppose that, right up front, I really shouldn't care about the opinion of some rich surgeon who gained the majority of his wealth through his family's for-profit hospital chain (which I consider to be a pejorative statement in its own right), especially one who found the strength to adopt animal shelter cats in his medical school days so he could have a satisfactory - to him - number of subjects for vivisection studies; I mean, come on, I myself have a degree in a particular field of biological sciences and have played my own role in controlling the populations of frogs, fish, turtles, and cute little white lab rats, but I have to wonder how often this guy thought he had to peer inside cats to satisfy his medical needs beyond the opportunities offered by the medical school. Sadly, however, it is necessary to care what this guy says to a certain extent because he is, after all, the current Majority Leader of the United States Senate...

...so when Bill Frist, from the Senate floor, decided to directly challenge the character, professionalism, and capabilities of Richard Clarke and to call for the declassification of Mr. Clarke's testimony of a couple years ago to prove what a filthy, stinking, partisan, greedy, money-grubbing, book-shilling liar he is, I certainly took notice. Given that Mr. Frist wasn't on the Congressional committee that took Mr. Clarke's testimony, I have to confess that I heartily agreed with his call and that of house Majority Leader "Spongebob" Hastert to declassify the transcripts, especially given that while they weren't personnaly privy to the actual hearings, Sen. Bob Graham and Representative Nancy Pelosi were at the hearings and were willing to publicly state for the record that they heard nothing in the 9/11 commission hearings that were inconsistent with his testimony before the congressional committee......it is truely unfortunate that my family had to assume the role of innocent bystander in the rant that I launched into over this latest smear campaign by the Bush thugs, but - as we were in the car returning from a Spring Break week on the Oregon Coast - they had few options except to studiously ignore me, focusing powerful attention on the soggy passing landscape, until I wound down...

...John Kerry has taken the point, however, and I'm thrilled to see it. Once again, Gee Dub's gang of sleaze-heads have seen fit not to address issues head on but instead to enter into personal character assassination. It happened to Paul O'Neill after he was hurled out the front door, it happened again recently to Medicare specialist Richard Foster over the blatant lies Bush told about the cost of his Medicare "reform" package (which I personally think should be the subject of Moveon.org information ads in every media market from now until election day), it has been the subtext of every oppositional campaign ad they've ever run, and seems to simply be the standard first response to every challenge. In this particular instance that sort of response is particularly telling because they have a position that they could be defending with facts and figures, if they had them; rather that painting a long-term civil servant who served for four administrations as some sort of book-hawking Democratic double agent, an out-of-the-loop nobody, or the actual weak link in this country's anti-terrorism effort (which was one of Frist's main points in his comments from the well of the Senate chamber), they could be spending the majority of their effort demonstrating that they had, in fact, a real plan with real goals and objectives.....but...they...just...can't...do...it. It doesn't help that Colin Powell on Friday praised Clarke as having served his nation "very, very well" and calling him an "expert" in counterterrorism matters, nor did it help that Condoleezza Rice sawed off Dick "I'm not purring because I'm happy to see you, dammit, Frist; that's my Pacemaker" Cheney just below the patella by saying that, rather than being "out of the loop" (Cheney's dismissive characterization of Clarke's role), Richard Clarke was at "every meeting" where terrorism was discussed. One can only assume that if Powell and Rice have cats of which they are fond, they will be making sure that little Fluffy or Boots is safely in the house for the evening long before darkness settles over the dangerous streets of the greater D.C. metropolitan area...

...it would be nice to think that a man selected to be the President of the United States would grow into the job, that he and his administration could step up to the powerful responsibilities that they face. This man and his collection of handlers and fixers and bootlickers have shown, however, that they have managed to take the Presidency and shrink it down to fit their style. As the campaign shifts into a higher gear there is no such thing as standing on a record because there is no meaningful record to stand on, despite some of Gee Dub's bizarre recent campaign comments (did you really buy a home because of his tax cuts?). Americans are no safer at home or abroad because of this gang's efforts since September 11, 2001. Americans are not better off in terms of health care or jobs or the education of their children than they were in January of 2001. The only people who can predictably project the trajectory of their lives are those who somehow got entangled with these clowns and then - once either safely free from that entanglement or as a result of defenestration due to policy disagreements - chose to speak out about their disagreements with this administration; they at least can be confident that a lifetime worth of solid professional work and effort will be dragged through the mud by a bunch of waterheads who have never in the entire expanse of their meaningless priveleged lives actually accomplished much of anything on the strength of personal merit or skill but who still - remarkably and inexplicably - currently have the keys to the car. We all deserve so much better.....

...in the late summer, as the evening light fades, sometimes - if you listen carefully from the back deck - you can hear young male elk down in what my long-estranged Tennessee/Kentucky kinfolk way back on the other side of the continent would call 'the holler' practicing their mating bugle. It's a rough, disjointed sort of noise, missing one or another of the key elements of a fully mature bull's call when he's out and about and looking to take care of business; it stumbles and trips its way through the trees in a peachfuzz-cheeked sort of way, the early staggering effort of youth indicating an eager desire to make the proper noises but lacking a mature understanding of how and why those noises should be made. Yearling elk remind me of College Republicans, and the other way around.

At a small liberal arts school in Rhode Island called Roger Williams University, the local College Republicans have stirred up a hornets' nest by starting a scholarship restricted to white students. As it was done solely to jab a stick in the eye of Affirmative Action, it is a suitably clever ploy at it's most shallow level. However - and given the fact that we're talking about young conservatives just out of high school there is always a "however" - these young folks decided to make one of the application requirements be an essay explaining why the applicant was proud of his/her white heritage (whatever the hell that means) and required a recent photo indicating proof of whiteness...

...after Ed Gillespie had finished cleaning up the mess from spewing a big mouthful of coffee all over the breakfast table, the power tie, the sharp pressed shirt, and the morning's edition of the newspaper turned to the page with this article, he fired off a letter to the College Republicans at Roger Williams College (specifically to Jason Mattera, the young Hispanic leader of Puerto Rican descent who leads this group, but whom we will little discuss because he sounds like one of those politically active young fellows you always run across in college that seems most interested in making a name for himself so we won't mention him again; why be an enabler). In the letter he made sure they understand that A) the Republican Party doesn't accept or represent these values of exclusion (which many many people would no doubt refute and which probably comes as a stunning shock to black voters in Florida), and 2) their right to use the symbols of the Republican Party (cute little flag colored elephants, flags flying over the rubble of the World Trade Center, Gee Dub prancing in flight suits, dingy rat-infested barracks full of wounded National Guardsmen waiting in vain for a shot at military medical treatment...you know, that sort of stuff) was herebye rescinded, revoked, and otherwise denied. In a charming display of youthful innocence, they have replied by accusing the state and national Republican committee's of bowing to political correctness in a craven attempt to attract minority voters with liberal policies, apparently little understanding that the very act of asking for displays of pride in "white heritage" is generally the province of white supremacists like the Aryan Nation or the Ku Klux Klan. Of course, this group in past newsletters have accused a gay-rights group of attempting to indoctrinating students into homosexual sex (and called hate crime laws a restriction of free speech) and criticized Kwanzaa for no apparent productive reason other than to express their objection to a celebration of African history and heritage because....well, just because. It's not yet known whether they will be picketing the school cafeteria demanding ham be served as the only meat course during the upcoming Passover, but there's still time....

...having grown up in a fairly conservative environment in the '60's, I came to an early understanding that the sustenance of a conservative viewpoint generally relies on an insulation from the larger world and I came to understand that there are those who simply don't think deeply about things and tend to maintain a black or white, fair or foul, good or bad life view demarked by bright highly visible lines to show what is in bounds and what is out of bounds. Nuance is generally not a hallmark of conservative thought. It is, however, so very, very gratifying to see young liberal arts college students that are so powerfully encumbered by these limited intellectual processes (hang on, now; let me finish). They represent the raw unciphered viewpoint of what we have come to call the neo-conservatives and, in all their youthful exhuberance, pull back the curtain on the goals and direction the neo-con gripped Republican party that all the well-dressed, stylishly coiffed, sweet-smelling, freshly powdered men in charge would like you to ignore in this election year. These young stumbling new Republicans help us to see a proposed vision of the world that may be a good thing for a white guy like me (as long as I can dramatically increase my net worth) but that probably is not for my wife or my daughter...and maybe not even for my son given that his diabetes requires a certain degree of accomodation on the part of the world in order for him to function successfully...

...so let's hear it for the College Republicans. Like young bull elk, they're out there vocalizing important parts of the message in a haphazard fashion, revealing for the less politically obsessed the direction that party is interested in going, and giving us all fair warning of what is at stake, not only in this election but in every election to come as long as the religious Pharisees and neo-cons are in charge of that party...

...it would be nice to think that, with eight months of non-stop campaigning facing us, the guys and gals we sent to DC to do the peoples' business could maybe take a few days off here during the NCAA mens's basketball tournament. They could just lay low, make a few speeches insulting each other's integrity, slip a few riders into a bill here and there bringing fat sugar-daddy benefits to some major contributor or other, maybe go on a 'fact-finding' trip or two with the spouse or a favored legislative aid to determine the impact on the "WAR AGAINST TERRA" certain exclusive Micronesian resorts, or otherwise keep themselves unobtrusively busy while we attend to the important task of putting the finishing touches on our bracket selections. Sadly, such is not the case. In an effort to demonstrate...well...something, the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives introduced a resolution celebrating the Iraqi people and heralding their ongoing support of American troops in Iraq.

You probably could have guessed this by yourself, but suffice it to say that - being genetically incapable of understanding nuance - the Republican leadership made sure, while hammering out this resolution in a room hermetically sealed to ward off the damaging vapours of any potential Democratic influence, that the document included the statement that the post-invasion world is now a safer place merely a couple of days after the Madrid train bombing. Aside from the fact that people would call you stupid if you made up a story about something like this, that particular resolution item was easily identifiable as A) a Republican campaign talking point that is highly debatable even absent the coincident Spanish equivalent of 9/11, and 2) another effort to waste our tax dollars solely for the purpose of exploiting legimate Democrat concerns in an artificial setting for simple political gain.

As expected, Democrats objected to the wording and the partisan origin and tone of the resolution. Interestingly, some of the strongest opposition came from conservative Democrats who supported sending troops to Iraq. For example, Tom Lantos (D-CA), who could be seen last year all over the cable talk show ecosystem promising that the Iraqi people would be flinging flower petals at the feet of conquering American troops as they marched into Baghdad:

"You on your side have neither a monopoly on wisdom, nor a monopoly on patriotism. You should have come to the Democrats, craft a resolution honoring our troops which would have passed this body unanimously. You have created divisiveness at a time when we need cohesion and unity."

Imagine, if you will, the Labour party introducing a resolution in the House of Commons saluting the Iraqi people and brave British Troops and declaring the world to now be a safer place because of the stalwart effort of Tony Blair and his party and passing it within a hundred hours of a terrorist attack in...oh, say, Boston...that left 1200 dead and over 6000 injured. That is the equivalent hypothetical comparison to what the House Republicans did yesterday. It was a simple partisan exercise designed to give neither comfort to the Iraqi people nor actual tangible support to the troops (you know, things like sufficient body armor or humvee armor or - in some instances - decent garrison facilities to make their one-year deployment somewhat more bearable), but instead geared to fostering Republican electoral prospects.

In the end the resolution passed, generating much smoke and heat but doing nothing to benefit those it attempts to recognize or this country; the partisan gulf in Congress is a little bit wider, people are still dying daily in Iraq, the troops that have been rotating in and out of Afghanistan for the last two years of the real war on terrorism remain as forgotten as ever, and the only solid ground on the planet remaining unaffected by the Iraq invasion is Antartica....and knowing penquins would no doubt contest whether it's safer there, given that our Iraqi incursion has had approximately the same effect on the leopard seal population as it has on Al Qaeda....

...now if the House would like to sink their teeth into an issue that has some real meat on it's bones, here's a little something they can debate over during the election season: a presidential censure!

"Our message to Congress today is clear: spare us the platitudes, the pious rhetoric, the empty slogans. Give us the truth. Do your job and hold those accountable who have denied us the truth..."

...couldn't have said it better myself....

...way back in January when I posted on the subject of off-shore outsourcing of high-wage white collar jobs (just before it became a big-time front-page story, IF. I. MAY. TOOT. MY. OWN. HORN.), one of the primary questions arising from the subsequent discussion was "OK, if this is all part of that great wonderful world of the global economy, then where will all those new jobs come from that this vibrant U.S. economy is supposed to be producing with all that freed-up capital". Well, GOOD NEWS, faithful reader; those new jobs for the next decade have been found and, as long as you subscribe to the observation by Greg Mankiw, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, that the assembly of fast food sandwiches is a form of manufacturing, many of these new jobs will be in the manufacturing sector....

...on the other hand, unless you can become a registered nurse, a "general manager", or a college instructor, you shouldn't make detailed plans for all of the disposable income you will be accruing from your new job. Aside from these three occupations and the field of customer service, the majority of the 10 fastest growing career fields over the next decade, according to the new Occupational Outlook Handbook produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, will come with median salaries of less than $20,000 per year and are found under the general category of what is referred to as "the service industry". On the other hand (and I bet you could have guessed this without my help), the top 10 job losers projected over the next 10 years include 7 that have median salaries of over $25,000 per year. Yes, once upon a time you used to joke that some of those classes back in college seemed so useless that you have no recollection of how to apply them to your current life; well, now you can in many cases say that about all of your classes...

...�Some communities and regions are more challenging than others, but there is never a lack of quality folks knocking on the door and coming in, particularly after the late �90s when the labor force was very constricted.....We didn�t have those kinds of excess staff to select from.�

Paul Avery, Outback Steak House

...well, thank God for that, is all I have to say. Your $70k-a-year loss is his - and all of our - gain....and he doesn't have to jack up beer prices or live on the knife edge of profitability trying to attract highly qualified employees like he did back in those pesky late '90's when most folks had jobs. This was most emphatically NOT, if I may beg your indulgence, the movie playing in my mind as I listened to all those professing to be smarter than me on this subject as they explained that the freeing of labor pools and capital in the U.S. by sending white collar jobs overseas would allow for the lightning-brilliant miracle of the American entrepenurial spirit to create a new workers' utopia of newer, better high-paying jobs springing from the cutting edge of technology for which we Americans are so richly famous. This is, however, just about what I expected...

...so we all know that George W. Bush is in the process of amassing a campaign warchest of almost unimaginable proportions with the goal of capturing the White House on the basis of pure exposure and overwhelming media-driven lies about his opponent, as opposed to relying on his record of achievement and popularity with us common middle class folks - who are beginning to wonder what the hell happened to that extra $1500 tax cut we were supposed to be getting - in order to win votes. He has even foresworn Federal financing in order to avoid those pesky limitations that would, to put it another way, only allow him to collect enough cash to build around 1,300 Habitat for Humanity homes instead of a sum suitable to put up about 2,800 HH units. Now, aside from the fact that I don't even have any idea how one goes about storing that kind of money (banks? When my financial institution was bought out by another financial behemoth, account numbers were messed up in the transfer and some folks couldn't access their accounts for weeks....wouldn't that be funny!), the whole idea of spending your way to electoral victory does bring to mind former Texas Senator Phil Graham and just how well that worked out for him back in 2000, but that's another story...

...and we also know that the Democratic party and John Kerry have amassed sufficient campaign funds to perhaps buy the lunches for a work group at a Habitat for Humanity houseraising, but not much more than that. This is where a number of groups, known in campaign vernacular as "527's" in reference to the IRS code under which they are formed, have begun to gain visibility. Two prominent organizations, America Votes and American Comes Together, are 527's created as umbrellas by progressive organizations looking to combine resources and organizational skills. Having both a Democratic persuasion and relatively healthy bankrolls, these groups have begun to establish state organizations, voter contact plans, state-by-state advertising buys, and many of the other vestiges of what is being called a "parallel campaign", lacking only a candidate to complete the picture. What has captured the immediate attention of the Republican National Comittee, sending them running to the Federal Election Commission, is the first series of broadcast advertisements being run by some of these groups. The RNC claims that these groups, using an organizaton called the Media Fund as their principle advertising vehicle, are using unlimited "soft money" contributions (largely unregulated and unreported money from groups and businesses) to fund these ads in an effort to defeat a specific candidate, which would be a violation under the McCain-Feingold Act. There is apparently, however, a regulatory loophole in that the use of a combination of soft and "hard" money (legally limited personal contributions with more rigorous disclosure requirements) is currently allowed but otherwise not quantified or spoken to. The RNC, anxious to control the electoral discourse through the advantage of its huge money advantage ('cause that 'record of accomplishment" thing just isn't working too well), wants the use of soft money in advertising clarified...as in 0, zip, zero...and clarified right now so these nasty little ads pointing out the discrepancies between Gee Dub's actions and the actual welfare of the American people will disappear from the airwaves. Let the Democrats reach out to working class America for those $2000 per person campaign contributions just like we did, says the RNC, apparently based on the premise that corporate executives go to work every day just like the rest of us and therefore must be part of the working class, right?

...while the FEC (made up of 3 Republicans and 3 Democrats) limited soft money expenditures by 527's by ruling in February that, while soft money alone couldn't be used in anti-candidate ads, a mix of hard and soft money would be permissable. One little problem that the RNC faces in it's effort to make political discourse primarily the realm of the guy with the fattest wallet is that Ellen Weintraub, the Democratic commissioner providing the swing vote approving the February decision, has made it quite clear that she doesn't find it appropriate to further change or clarify rules this summer in the middle of the election process, which suggests a deadlock in any effort to change the rules (unless the Republican members lock the Democrats out of the room, like that sort of thing would ever happen in a democracy, eh?). One of the members of the so-called "shadow campaign", Moveon.org, has said for its part "the hell with you, pal; we have millions of dollars in individual campaign contributions along with our soft money and we're gonna spend it all together"....

...it is, of course, a tough situation for the RNC. Having grown comfortable with the idea that they can throw up that patented Republican tough-guy front, couple it with a few well-placed gruffly-delivered lies, and put back in its place a simpering Democratic party, they are now faced with a hoard of angry and extremely motivated partisans who find no need in acceding any point to the party in power and who have no vested interest in the failed Democratic policy of "go-along, get-along" accomodation of the last couple of years. These are groups that would thoroughly enjoy spending every dime they could lay their hands on engaging in a national television dialogue with the American people spelling out in exquisite detail every lurid moment of the Gee Dub presidency, including the actions of his appointed minions, and analyse how each of these has had an impact on those of us who can't quite come up with that $2000-a-head ante to get a seat at the big table. Not to fear, however, the RNC has a plan...

...what they've decided to do is to write to television stations, on official RNC stationary, telling them that they would be complicit in illegal behavior to the risk of their broadcast licenses if they broadcast Moveon.org ads because those ads were paid for illegally with soft money. The implicit threat of the Republican National Committee speaking with the Republican chair of the FCC who is the son of the Republican Secretary of State and who both work for the Republican President undoubtedly would not be lost on any station executive of average intelligence; why they left out demands for protection money to guard against angry mobs of bused-in Congressional staffers putting stations to the torch for broadcasting those Moveon ads remains a mystery. Unfortunately, as careful readers will have noted, this is - at best - an unfortunate misstatement (hey, we're trying to improve the civility of discourse here). As previously mentioned, Moveon.org has millions in hard money, and there is no current prohibition on spending a mix of hard and soft money on ads. It would be easy to be outraged by this sort of heavy-handed tactic were it not for the fact that we've seen this sort of thing so often that we'd kind of worry about 'em if they didn't pull some kind of stunt like this...

...so the RNC keeps plugging away, fighting on both the legal front and through implicitly threatening letters to silence the opposition that threatens to usurp its domination via walls of words and images rather than policies. It's far easier to focus your attention to engineering the sorts of smears laid on McCain in 2000 and Cleland in 2002 when you don't have to worry about a motivated and funded opposition pointing out some of the unpleasant realities of your own candidate. Sadly, however, and despite their best efforts, the Republicans apparently won't have the stage to themselves like they had hoped....

...on the surface it seems like such a silly news story. An Amish man travels to Canada to visit his ailing father only to find, on his arrival at the border on his way home, that his entry is denied. He is a Canadian citizen married to an American Amish woman. He has no picture identification and therefore no green card, because to do so would be to violate biblical codes proscribing graven images. It appears that First Amendment rights interpreted by the courts (again and again and again) to allow for the free practice of religion can be trumped - at least at one US border crossing - by Homeland Security regulations, which as with all federal regulations are the lowest lifeform in the legal ecosystem...

...THIS is what I have been worrying about all along during the great debates over legal intrusion into private lives that may be authorized under the fiat of "Homeland" security. I have never been concerned that secretive squads of jackboots from the Homeland Security Directorate would be pawing through my library records, my bank transactions, or my garbage seeking evidence of some wrong-doing or collecting data to fill out some empty fields in my burgeoning personal database. My greater concern has been that in the larger corners of life, overzealous bureaucrats (and believe me, I have intensely personal knowledge about burearcrats and the astonishing variability in their capability and behavior) could, through a relatively simple misapplication or misinterpretation of the rules, cause a great deal of personal trouble to otherwise innocent citizens. This is just such an example; it's not about the government delving into one's personal life in unacceptable ways, it's about the government, through one of it's agents, creating a direct public interference in someone's life with no apparent recourse to extricate oneself from the experience. These stories just keep coming up; from the standpoint of being an unnecessary personal trial, this bears little difference from the stories of legal foreign nationals being snatched up for deportation at a port of entry solely on the basis of some long ago trangression. It's all about the inflexible application of regulations with no consideration being given to the human toll exacted on law-abiding citizens day after day after day. A friend of mine, an infrequent air traveler, apparently is destined to spend the remainder of the War on Terra facing a virtual strip-search prior to any flight, apparently on the basis of a suspicion that middle-aged Scandanavian-looking native-born American citizens pose a clear and present threat to national security....

...if I were the President, I would have already been on the phone to Tom Ridge cordially inviting him to have his agency pull its collective head out of its posterior and get this guy back into the country. If I were running against the current President, this would become another item in the list of issues that directly prove that this administration is paying nothing but lip service to the entire concept of national security....

...so here I sit in a swanky two-room hotel suite on the outskirts of Portland, Orygun, wallowing in the guilty pleasure of $9.95 per day high speed internet service (which has the same performance relationship to my dial up service back home in the wilderness as the new Ford GT-40 has to my wife's beloved econobox work car) and a window full of green coniferous Portland West hills scenery hiding the underlying suburbia more artfully than any metropolitan area in the western United States, when suddenly - like some large ungainly bird confused by the massive reflective glass of this elegant Hilton property - the cultural issue of the day comes crashing through the window into my room...

...tomorrow (as of this writing), on Wednesday, March 3, Multnomah County (which basically represents the core of the greater Portland metropolitan area) will begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. No warning; no pre-announcement chatter; no preamble. Just a bolt out of the blue, announced just prior to the 5 pm local news broadcasts in the same manner that one might expect a county announcement regarding changes in dog-licensing requirements, except that in this case the announcement would be including the note that large angry dogs with a prediliction for launching spontaneous yet violent attacks against neo-con Republicans are exempt from both the annual dog license fee and any county leash laws....

...what is most interesting is that, unlike the case of New Paltz, NY, the legal council for the county rendered the legal decision to make this possible and is highly unlikely to file charges for violation of any statute or Constitutional proscription. Oregon and it's residents are a rather contrary lot, not only being the home of physican-assisted suicide and a haven for the medicinal use of marijuana to the eduring anguish of John Ashcroft, but also being a state that still celebrates the long-ago image of former Governor Tom McCall and his invitation to outsiders to come and visit as many times as they like but under no conceivable circumstances consider staying (sign on the Idaho border: "Welcome to Oregon/The Tick Fever State")...so - on the one hand - this late-day announcement comes as a bit of a surprise because of the unnecessarily positive image it may project to some outsiders, but - on the other hand - it just reeks of being the classically Oregonian sort of thing to do...

...and, most interestingly of all, the announcement comes on Super Tuesday, when John Kerry has apparently clinched the Democratic nomination. Depending on which pundit with which you choose to cast your lot, the same-sex marriage debate could either hurt Kerry or Gee Dub. Plenty of punditry ammunition has been expended pontificating over whether it was a good idea to let this particular issue dominate the news when issues of the economy or national security or that vexing little problem of the apparent lack of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction presented such a pressing personal threat that we had no recourse but to attack. In the near term, at least, same-sex marriage isn't going to be an issue that the candidates need to wonder whether they'll run across out there on that high, wild political landscape. It appears that this issue is going to go ahead and ride out to meet them...

....and so on Friday the Bush Administration dismissed two members of the Council on Bioethics, an advisory group created in 2001 to "advise" Gee Dub on bioethical issues largely as an outcome of battles over stem cell research. The two dismissed members - Elizabeth Blackburn, a reknowned biologist at University of California - San Francisco and William May, professor emeritus of eithics at Southern Methodist University - have both expressed views on embryonic research and other issues of biotechnology that ran counter to those of Chairman Leon Kass, an eithicist at the University of Chicago and an ardent opponent to embryonic stem cell research. Although the terms of all council members had expired, only these two holders of a minority viewpoint supporting such things as embryonic stem cell research were replaced. Three new members have been named who hold opinions more in line with those of the Chairman.

Once again we come face to face with behavior by an administration so unburdened by the challenging demands of integrity that it can't even be bothered to concoct some suitable lie to cover its tracks. As the parent - like our esteemed hostess Lisa English - of a chid afflicted with type I (insulin-dependent) diabetes, the issue of stem cell research is one that is close to my heart because of the promise it holds for curing my son's disease. The singular fact that this Council was stacked from the outset with a majority of members opposed to the most promising means of developing stem cell lines in sufficient quantities to conduct meaningful research solely in order to provide Gee Dub with the cover necessary to make a political decision to appease his Pharisee base was enough to plunge me into a funk that lasted for weeks...

...but it also leads to a bigger issue, that of an administration that continually cooks the books when it comes to science. It has long been an article of faith for those of us who professionally engage in scientific endeavors that the Republican definition of "junk science" is "science that we find to be an inconvenient impediment to the achievement of our goals". This current group of clowns, however, has elevated the whole concept to a high art. They have taken the Dave Barry joke about Tobacco Institute scientists and incarnated it as policy. The Union of Concerned Scientists recently issued a report documenting numerous occasions where Gee Dub's gang has disbanded expert panels that didn't provide the "right" answers or stacked the deck, as in the case of the Bioethics Council, in order to provide that "right" answer to a degree never before seen. In a report prepared for Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) entitled "Politics and Science in the Bush Administration", the House Committee on Government Reform's Minority Staff Special Investigations Division found that the "administration stacks the advisory committees created to look into industry practices and possible public health and safely concerns with industry consultants. The administration also rejects experts for review panels who oppose rules and policies it supports." The list is breathtaking and covers just about every aspect of human living conditions in the United States. The point is to roll back or eliminate regulations and requirements that serve as an impediment to somebody makin' a buck, regardless the health or environmental consequences. This most recent resculpting of an advisory council on bioethics, although it catches my attention for profound personal reasons, is just another example, and - given that the subject has been decided and is at best a moot point until at least next Jan. 20 or so (if you know what I mean) - it's a relatively minor issue of two pro-research members being replaced by three nameless hacks whose worth primarily resides in their holding views that benefit the Administration politically.

This goes way, way beyond the typical "winner gets the spoils" aspect of presidential politics. Anyone who has been around the process for any period of time (and I date back to the first Nixon administration) understands that people installed in positions of power in any administration are going to come from those power centers that support the president; it was not any sort of surprise, for example, that the Assistant Secretary of Agriculture responsible for the US Forest Service was formerly a lobbyist for the timber industry any more than it was to have people with pro-environment views in charge during the Clinton Administration. This is different. The behavior of this administration represents a calculated subversion of science and the scientific process. Rather than representing a policy taken boldly after a review of all available science, it represents instead the repudiation of that process and the establishment of a one-sided viewpoint to support the pro-business decision du jour.

With all of the hot-button issues that are dominating the news these days, this issue struggles to even make it into section A of the daily newpaper (and you sure won't be hearing it over the airwaves). This is a shame because this subject matters as much to the welfare of the American people as do issues of war, terrorism, or the economy. Hopefully the efforts of Congressman Waxman and others (oh, say, for example, people writing to their federal legislators and their local papers) can elevate this issue as another charge against an administration that has yet, except in empty words, offered any sort of attention to the vast majority of citizens suggesting they actually care about them....

...and to think we were ready to storm the walls when a Republican adminstration decided to call katsup a vegetable in order to cut school lunch program costs....boy, those were the days...

...Japanese Fair Trade Commission officials raided the Tokyo headquarters of Microsoft on Thursday, based on suspicions of violations of Japan's anti-monopoly laws. Under "customary condition of anonymity" (isn't that a great phrase), an official indicated that there are suspicions that Microsoft-Japan has been requiring Japanese computer makers to agree to improperly restrictive conditions in order to enter into licensing agreements to install Microsoft software on their computers (stop me if you think you may have heard this story told somewhere before). Rumors that Bill Gates has holed up in the state-of-the-art IMAX multimedia entertainment complex on his palatial Lake Washington estate to watch endless digitally remastered reruns of "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" have so far remained unsubstantiated...

This all gets rather depressing, in a sense. There aren't a great many things that folks in the Pacific Northwest can turn to and embrace as being quintesentially their own, a part of their regional identity. In the absence of other cultural iconography, corporations born and raised in the region become a part of that, but these prove to be a sandy foundation indeed: Microsoft has been accused more than once of heavy-handed business practices; Nike gets hammered on a continual basis over their foreign labor practices (just the fact that they have foreign labor practices has caused problems in some quarters); Starbucks went from a little coffee shop to one of the first targets the anarchists go looking for during your average World Trade Organization conference riot; Boeing, founded in Seattle in 1916, decided to move its corporate headquarters to Chicago, apparently because of the increasing availability of Starbucks outlets in the Windy City (or maybe the head honchos missed having "real" winters with snow and such; it's gotta be something like this because the stated reason for the move didn't make much sense)...

...and so, here we go again. Rumored allegations (as yet unfounded) against a corporation sired and raised in the Pacific Northwest, this time on an international level; mysterious office raids with nobody talking to the press for attribution and steadfast denials of wrongdoing. Yup, them's our boys....but that's ok; we're still the filbert and pea/lentil capital of the world (and don't forget those Washington apples!).

...speaking of the inspectors, I wonder if they found any of the documents that disappeared when my old operating system used to crash; those buggers went somewhere...

The husband's Princeton Alumni Weekly arrived the other day, and Mark F. Bernstein's cover story, Tough Times - When the Axe Falls, caught my working class eye. It seems that some among the alum of Old Nassau are now admitting to economic problems on that side of paradise.

In his piece, Bernstein shares with us the stories of four Princetonians, including Jack Moore, Class of '62, who figured his ivy league education would take him to prosperous places. But now, out of work, or underemployed in George Bush's America, these guys have started to sweat.

Granted, Moore - whose stay-at-home wife is unemployed by choice - doesn't face the degree of hardship that so many in this nation face, but his experience and concern is instructive. It's a sure sign that the bubbling despair of America's working class has boiled over onto a group that's not used to worrying about issues like health care or "retirement."

The truth for folks like Moore is that they now have to worry. Alot. They're facing a life where the old paradigm of retiring the workaday for a leisurely life on the links is just plain broken. The new paradigm features a birth to death existence of working till their last breath - all the while hoping and praying that when they do finally expire, that it happens while still employed, behind the desk, with health care and a roof over their heads. In other words, the American dream has become something of a nightmare for even those who formerly held clout: the nation's professional class. They've joined the rest of the disenchanted.

Which gets me to thinking about Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and his comments yesterday before Congress. I wonder what folks like Jack Moore think of Greenspan's answer to the quandry that is the bankrupt Bush economy...

Were Greenspan to rule the world - and some suggest he already does - Americans would simply face up to the sacrifices we now have to make.

In practical terms, we'd begin by increasing the amount we sock away each week into our personal retirement savings. Plan for that uncertain future. The one without a safety net.

After having had your job outsourced or downsized, you've got extra money to sock away, don't you?

Probably not.

Oh, yes...and the chairman is also suggesting that we prepare ourselves for cuts in Social Security benefits, because after all, those gargantuan checks - the ones that barely put bread and butter on the table - the ones cut monthly to the nation's seniors, well they're frankly a burdensome expense this nation can no longer afford.

Not while we're funding FlyBoy's wars and all those tax cuts to the interest-income class. Not while the beneficiaries of hefty estates are banking on making those tax cuts permanent.

Here's the interesting thing, and maybe within we can find some reason to hope...

Greenspan and his ilk might have once been able to prescribe these bitter pills to a patient America. But nowadays, it's not just the working class who are anxious and being asked to swallow this unfair medicine. It's also people like Jack Moore, who never expected their future to be diagnosed fatal.

Something tells me that folks like Moore will soon be demanding of our government a different kind of cure from the ones suggested by Greenspan and Bush.

Like maybe a cure that features job security, health care, and another dream to replace the one that died?

Let's just hope they realize that this sure as hell is not about to happen under a George W. Bush presidency.

Dave Farber reports that he's seen a neat new worm:
begin worm payload
From: <smashdj@feuerwerk-homepage.de>
To: <qmail@redswoosh.com>
Sent: Saturday, February 21, 2004 3:25 AM
Subject: Your IP was logged

Ladies and Gentlemen,
Downloading of Movies, MP3s and Software is illegal and punishable by law.

We hereby inform you that your computer was scanned under the IP
214.43.44.77 .
The contents of your computer were confiscated as an evidence, and you will
be indicated.

In the next days you will receive the charge in writing.
In the Reference code: #17977, are all files, that we found on your computer.

The sender address of this mail was masked, to protect us against mail bombs.

- You get more detailed information by the Federal Bureau of Investigation
-FBI-
- Department for "Illegal Internet Downloads", Room 7350
- 935 Pennsylvania Avenue
- Washington, DC 20535, USA
- (202) 324-3000
end worm payload

This follows on the week before last's your-bank-account-appears-to-be-used-to-further-terrorism scam, which asked for account access and last week's resubmit-your-paypal-account-info scam. Two out of three of these marketing activities were co-branded with John Ashcroft's DoJ, and I suspect they have higher conversion rates ("click-through") than the Nigerian 419 fetches these days.

Julius Streicher, the radical Nazi antisemitic publisher of "Der Stuermer" (The Attacker), was successfully prosecuted at Nuremberg, not for any specific act, but for inciting acts. John Ashcroft's drunken pursuit of "terror" incites 419 attacks, co-branded "FBI" and "terror" rather than "the heirs of Sonny Abacha".

Note Well: I do not like Howard Dean. Really.

I also do not like non-seriousness. Really.

In today's NYTimes Nagourney and Wilgoren write that [Dean] refused to answer a routine question about whether he would have authorized the use of nuclear weapons were he in the shoes of Harry S. Truman, his favorite president, explaining, "I just don't feel like it."

Second guessing Truman is one of the cottage industries for fools and poltroons who clutter the nuclear landscape. There are much, much hotter fish to fry, much, much closer to the present.

Under Bush, the US has embarked upon a new nuclear weapons program, the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator program, is switching from gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment to centrifuge processing enrichment (which I wrote about here earlier this year link, and you need to write "centrifuge processing enrichment" on a small scrap of paper and put it in your breast pocket, where your hand goes during the Pledge, you'll need it again soon), and ... oh, yeah, there are the existing arsenals and their launch platforms and an immodest amount of radioactive contamination in some regions.

In the Russian Federation and the former Soviet Union an unknown number of weapons in unknown condition (try "lots" and "unstable") are as close to the open market as the former Blue Angles jet carcass currently at bid on eBay, fissile materials are, well, performing random walks in the para-statial economy, and oh, yeah, there are the existing arsenals and their launch platforms and an immodest amount of radioactive contamination in some regions.

Face on a Milk Carton

The UK dumped a boadload of WE177 Type C (600lb, Estimated yield - 10Kt. Variable yield fission weapon) free fall bombs (see photo) somewhere off the Falklands. Early in December Le Monde reported: Londres avait envoy� des armes nucl�aires aux Malouines

Translated into Anglo-American, the government of Margret Thatcher sent tactical nuclear weapons (free-fall bombs, the WE177) with the invasion force, and shuffled them about, causing seven weapons containers to become damaged under unstated circumstances, and leaving open the possibility that one or more weapons containers were lost when the destroyer Sheffield was sunk after being engaged by an Exocet (surface-to-surface) missile.

Translated into Policy-Wonk, the government of Margret Thatcher affirmed the thesis that nuclear weapons may be used in military conflicts along with conventional weapons. The alternative thesis (there really are only two) is that nukes are a means of dissuasion, the end-game.

Background: In 1982 the Agentine military regime attempted to recover by force the Falkland Islands, occupied by Britian since 1833. The war lasted 74 days. Argentina suffered 648 lives lost, the UK 255. The defeat of the military regime in Buenos Aires lead to the fall of the dictatorship in the following year. The victory of the tory regime in London lead to the crushing defeat of the miner's union the following year, and privitization as public policy. [I lived in London in 1983/84].

This is the first time London has gone on record that it intended to use nuclear weapons in the Falkland Islands War. There should be diplomatic fall-out world-wide, but Nagourney and Wilgoren, tasked with the first-use brief in the journal of record ... want to play the "August, 1945 War's End" board game.

I'm sure I could write something about France and China having weapons, but after the top three precarious inverted pyramids, there's Waring States in Western and Southern Asia -- Israel, Pakistan, and India. It is so dangerous it makes my toes curl just trying not to think about it, and just to make life a little more precarious, the happy band of idiots doing policy at K Street are now going on about ... you may reach into your breast pocket now and retreive, open and read that little scrap of paper you dutifully noted "centrifuge processing enrichment" earlier in this reading ... commercial uranium enrichment by centrifuge processing as definitive proof that Iran is pursuing a weapons program.

I've been keeping a series on wampum on domestic electoral politics in Iran, which I suppose I should plug.

Nagourney and Wilgoren were lucky that Dean didn't discredit them, but it is time that the Truman "should I use the bomb today" game joins the Lincoln "should I go to the theatre tonight" game, on the shelf. There are serious issues to be addressed, and Nagourney and Wilgoren weren't serious.

I still do not like Howard Dean. Really.

I like the fact that he refused to pretend the question posed was serious.

In all the excitement over the most important issue of the day, which is whether Janet Jackson should be allowed to perform at gay and lesbian weddings in Massachusetts or San Francisco if Jason Timberlake is anywhere in the same time zone....wait...that�s not the most important issue; maybe it was the thing about John Kerry taking an intern to the Daytona 500 to get some of that NASCAR Dad vote...nope, that wasn�t it...I get so confused sometimes....

...anyway, one issue that has slipped off the front page just a little bit is the whole deal about Diebold and their superbly accurate and reliable magical voting machines. Yesterday Professor David Dill of Stanford University told an audience at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that millions of Americans will be casting votes on voting machines that are incapable of verifying the votes that are actually cast on them.

"The system is in crisis," Professor Dill said. "A quarter of the American public are voting on machines where there's very little protection of their votes. I don't think there's any reason to trust these machines."

Just a few items:

1. In an election for a seat in the Florida house of representatives last month, touch-screen machines recorded 127 blank ballots. The race was won by 12 votes. No recount was possible because there was nothing to recount. (The Guardian)

2. In an election in Indiana last year, an electronic system recorded more than 144,000 votes in an election with fewer than 19,000 registered voters. (The Guardian)

3. Maryland's 16,000 machines all had identical locks for two sensitive mechanisms. The hackers found that they would have been able to have copies of the keys for these locks cut at a locksmith, although ultimately they found it easier simply to pick the locks. It reportedly took less than 10 seconds. (blackboxvoting.com)

4. The (Florida) Department of State has notified elections supervisors that touchscreen ballots don't have to be included during manual recounts because there is no question about how voters intended to vote. (blackboxvoting.com)

5. Other "stunning flaws" Rubin said the team found in Diebold's source code included voter smart cards that could be manipulated to cast more than one vote, software that could be reconfigured by malicious company workers or election officials to alter voters' ballot choices without their knowledge and machines that could be electronically broken into through remote access.
"The people who wrote this code didn't have very good security training," Rubin said. "They didn't use encryption." (Wired.com)

6. WEST PALM BEACH -- A congressman's lawsuit seeking to require electronic voting machines to produce a paper trail was dismissed Wednesday when a Palm Beach County judge ruled he did not have the standing to sue. (theledger.com)

The rather casual manner with which this subject is being treated by some local and state officials is as scary as it is outrageous. Despite the viewpoint of the Republican administration of the state of Florida (and - historically - some Chicago ward bosses) the right to have your vote properly counted should be so important as to outweigh any other consideration. Time in this election season is running out for fixing this problem; it�s time to say to local and state officials to either provide a paper trail or send out an absentee ballot. It�s time to let state and federal legislators understand that we are serious when we say we don�t want our votes to be cast unverifiably on equipment manufactured by major fundraisers of either party. In Oregon, we generally vote by mail, creating a paper document verifying our choices; perhaps it�s time, in other states, to start a huge absentee ballot movement, inundating local election officials with a massive, terrifying, and unexpected wave of paper and make these waterheads, so enthralled with this potentially compromised new technology as they are, to count every friggin� one of our thousands of paper ballots into the wee hours of the morning, letting them know when they�ve finally recovered that this is the way it is going to be until they fix this misguided and potentially treacherous electronic voting system...

...and, if you haven't been, be sure to visit blackboxvoting.com on a regular basis to keep up on this subject...

Over the last several months, supertanker-sized quantities of ink have been sprayed over vast clear-cut timbered acres of paper about the hot new �gotta have it� demographic group that�s said to be in play this political season. We�re talking here about the �NASCAR Dad� demo, a large amorphous - and largely white - group that has supplanted Soccer Mom�s in the hearts and minds of political operatives and pundits. At first glance I was, to say the least, gratified that someone just like me, a middle-aged white guy with a family, mortgage, pets, car payments, issues, and a passion for motor sports, was finally being singled out as the type of person that politicians really cared about. There�s a problem, though....

...seems as though, just as with the �Soccer Mom� group, a certain...um...image is associated with the �NASCAR Dad� label. It seems as though the image shorthand for this group is that of socially conservative white males with little better than a high school education, �beer-bellied, pick-up-truck driving males who�ll scream with delight every time their favorite driver sends another driver into the wall in the Daytona 500 on Sunday�. Well....gee...all we�re lacking here is Howard Dean stopping by to throw in the part about the Confederate Flag bumper sticker and the dog in back. Why the other stuff about the chewing tobacco, body odor, and plumber�s crack got left out is certainly a mystery to me.

...Craig Ruff, president of Public Sector Consultants, a Lansing think tank, said this is the stereotype of NASCAR dads that has stuck: "Men with a passion for racing that probably have little college education, if any, who don't know the king's English, who would like to see the same kind of mayhem in the capitol corridors as on a race track...."

...Well, Craig ol� buddy, there may well be some mayhem if we ever actually meet, if you catch my drift. But this points up the dangers inherent in creating a demographic out of whole cloth. The stereotype being applied to literally tens of millions of NASCAR fans relies in large part on the traditional image of the sport as a largely southern endeavor engaged in by slow talkin� good ol� boys with cigarette packs rolled up in their t-shirt sleeves flying around dirt tracks in highly modified sedans that had probably spent the previous evening evading the �rev�nuers� on some twisty dark Carolina mountain road with a big load of moonshine in the trunk. As we wander off into the 21st century, however, this traditional view ill serves the demographic that the political types think they see. The Nextel Cup (formerly Winston Cup) Series that is the focus of this demographic creation is a national sport, staging races in Delaware, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Illinois, Indiana, Arizona, and California as well as at the traditional Southeastern tracks where the series was born. Since 1995, the Winston Cup Series� season champions have included only one driver (my man Dale Jarrett...hey, I'm a NASCAR Dad and by God I cheer for ol' DJ in his number 88 UPS Ford Taurus) who was born and raised in the traditional homeland of the series, with the others hailing from west Texas, California, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Fans span the spectrum of political beliefs and educational levels, coming together at this one point in space and time because they just simply adore the picture of full-bodied 750-horsepower technological wondermobiles bearing a vague resemblance to the family car out in the garage flying around tracks at ungodly terrifyingly high speeds fender to fender in an effort to be the first across the finish line....why horse racing, which employs exactly the same competitive model, is considered �the sport of Kings� while my favorite sport has traditionally been held in the same esteem as mud wrestling is an enduring mystery to me.

...now we find that Gee Dub, never one to let a significant event slip by without attempting to turn it into a cheap political photo-op, was at Daytona for the 500, participating in opening ceremonies to demonstrate a concern for average Americans that he apparently acquired over the last couple of weeks as his poll numbers dropped below the re-electability level (well, he was at the first part; Air Force One was nicely captured soaring into the Florida sky about half way through the race). The fact that he probably won�t appear later in the season in Phoenix or Fontana, California, says all that needs saying about the alleged reality of a so-called NASCAR Dad voting group as some sort of national entity akin to last election�s Soccer Mom. What we�re really talking about is Southern men who have recently been solidly in the Republican camp, but who have grown increasingly concerned about job prospects in this unstable economy (apparently Gee Dub�s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, Gregory Mankiw, who is somewhat unloved in wide circles because of his cheerful support of offshore outsourcing of American jobs, wasn�t able to accompany Gee Dub because the high likelihood that he would be featured as a hood ornament duct-taped to the pole-setter�s car for the duration of the competition). The Democratic should shy away from attempting to develop a message solely tailored to this mystical group; economic concerns is usually the first or second item that people of all stripes tell pollsters is the uppermost issue in their minds. Further, the Democratic candidate needs to think about developing a message that will reach out toward white males, a group with which it has for many years underperformed, in any case. This doesn�t mean �a chicken in every pot and a semiautomatic assault rifle leaned up next to every front door�. It does mean addressing the concerns of NASCAR Dads and NFL Dads and Bowling Dads and....what the heck...even Golf Dads: meaningful strength in national security instead of jingoistic foreign adventures predicated on questionable evidence coupled with under funding of police and fire and port security forces; concrete plans for creating an environment conducive to job creation instead of stock market improvement; meaningful educational reform instead of platitude-laced unfunded monkey wrenching (incurable optimist that I am, I believe that dads care as much as moms whether their kids are getting a decent education); equitable tax policies that do more that throw a few bucks my way while giving those in upper income brackets tax cuts approaching the amount a person working full time at a minimum-wage job takes home in a year.

Forget the demographic labels; reach out to the well-documented concerns of all the people; and lay off the cracks about my pick-up truck (the dog belongs to my wife).......

...Hi there. Jack K. here again filling in for Lisa during her absence. We here at Ruminatethis Central are still sticking to her cover story about pressing family matters keeping her away from the key board, even though there have been some highly unsubstantiated rumors floating aroung the 'net about some close family member about to be outed by a vidictive Bush administration as a deep cover federal agent as a payback for her anti-Bush commentary. Those murky stories about retaliation, the purported Lisa sitings in some seedy dock-side bars around the Pacific Rim involving dark, menacing-looking types with a solid reputation for talent in...shall we delicately say...certain uncivilized and dangerous arts, ALL of this is just simply false....so get over it....

...but back to my original point. Kari Rein is a Norwegian, a resident alien of the US, married to an American citizen, and the mother of two more, all living in a small town in Southern Oregon. In 1993, she and her husband were convicted for growing six marajuana plants and served their sentence of probation and community service. Unbeknownst to them, a 1996 law added over 40 violations, including her crime, to the list of so-called aggravated felonies that qualified a resident alien for immediate deportation. They became all too aware upon return from a trip to her home in Norway a few weeks ago when she was detained in Seattle and frog-marched off to jail in hand and foot restraints, as a result of increased post- 9/11 security leading to routine running of green-card-holders' names through crime databases.

Here we go again, it seems. The little guy with a relatively inconsequential blemish on his or her record has come face to face with an intransigent bureaucracy that, having failed to pull together the threads leading to 9/11, has fallen back on a policy that simply serves to treat all those who come within it's contact equally badly. The INS maintains she has to go and, were it not for the ability of her husband to secure competent legal assistance, she might already be gone after a little-noticed deportation hearing. The Governor, Ted Kulongoski, has suggested the possibility of parole, but couches that hope in all sorts of diffident adjectives that suggest this isn't a done deal, despite the scornfully anti-deportation editorial commentary of virtually every newspaper in Oregon large enough to actually be published daily.

The sense of outrage can almost become overwhelming. Cases like Karin Rein's and others we keep occasionally hearing about just make it build and build. This isn't a Patriot Act issue, but it certainly touches on that legislation. There may or may not be value in writing your Congressperson about this issue directly (can'gt be lookin' weak on National Security, ya know), but there certainly is value in writing said legislator to point out that episodes like this most certainly are sufficient cause for all Americans to fear the application of the Patriot Act and any "Son of..." bills that Gee Dub's administration might want to foist off on us in the name of "Homeland Security" (and why does that phrase make me reflect on "Animal Farm"?). The unyielding blind application of laws affecting non-residents today can easily become the same sort of unyielding blind application of laws affecting all of us tomorrow. Could be that your federal legislators, heading into an election season, might be interested in knowing how you feel about that prospect.....