Deadly Maths

“In war after war, it’s the same gruesome story: crude weapons, dead innocents. In World War II, civilian deaths, as a percentage of total war fatalities, were estimated at 40 to 67 percent. In Korea, they were reckoned at 70 percent. In Vietnam, by some calculations, one civilian died for every two enemy combatants we exterminated. In the Persian Gulf War, despite initial claims of a vast Iraqi death toll, we may have killed only one or two Iraqi soldiers for every dead Iraqi civilian. In Kosovo, a postwar commission found that NATO’s bombing campaign killed about 500 Serbian civilians, almost matching the 600 enemy soldiers who died in action. In Afghanistan, the civilian death toll from 2001 to 2011 has been ballparked at anywhere from 60 to 150 percent of the Taliban body count. In Iraq, more than 120,000 civilians have been killed since the 2003 invasion. That’s more than five times the number of fatalities among insurgents and soldiers of Saddam Hussein’s regime.” ~ slate

So let’s do math:

Ratio of combatants kills to civilians killed

WW2. 1:0.67
Korea. 1:0.70
Vietnam 1:0.50
Persian Gulf. 1:1
Kosovo. 1:0.83
Afghanistan. 1:1.5
Iraq 1:5

One might be tempted to conclude that rather than reduce civilian casualties, armed conflicts since the adoption of the Geneva Protocols have increased the ratio of civilian deaths to combatant deaths.

What To Do With Your Hood-Rat Employee

Acme Glass Company (Hope Not)

People think its not fair that you can get fired for actions outside the workplace. This article is not for those people. This article is for the business owner who comes in on Monday morning only to find that one of her hood-rat employees is on the front page of the newspaper rioting in a company shirt. Not exactly the coverage your company was looking for. Do you fire them? Here’s some things to consider:

1.Is the misconduct illegal and proven in a court of law? No matter how bad it looks, each employee deserves their day in court. Later on in this article, I’ll get to what you can do in the meantime.

2.  Is there a connection between the misconduct outside the workplace and this person’s role in the company? Did they use any company assets to misbehave? Did they damage company property or assault company employees, patrons or vendors?

3. Is there a fundamental effect this misconduct might have on the workplace or working relationship with this employee? Did they burn an effigy of the boss in the town square? Did they engage in violence targeted at a protected group prevalent in your workplace?

4. Is this employee in a position of trust or prominence that is undermined by their misconduct? Did your head cashier get caught shoplifting? Did your head of security get caught stalking? Has your head of IT been identified as “the masked bomber”?

5.  Did they illegitimately present themselves as acting as a representative of the company? Did they wear their company work shirt to the riot?

Here’s what to do if you want to discipline or fire them:

1.  Talk to your HR expert or legal counsel. If none is available, call the agency in charge of applicable labour law. They can at least tell you what part of the law to read, but should not give you advice on what to do.

2.  Follow you internal procedures. If you have a company disciplinary policy, follow it.

3. Carefully consider your actions and their impact on the employee and the company. Compassion is a virtue, but so is consideration for your other employees, who will be watching.

4.  Remember in most jurisdictions and for most non-union jobs, so long as appropriate notice and/or compensation is made, no advance notice of termination is necessary. No reason need be given in many cases, just whatever required paper work and a severance check or other due compensation.

In the meantime, if you have a hood-rat employee you’d rather not have around, but who is an “unindicted co-conspirator” you might consider the following:

1.  Again, refer to your disciplinary policies. Follow them. Again, consult legal counsel or HR if you can.

2. Depending on the employee and how critical they are to the day to day operations of the company, it might be in the best interests of both the employee and company if he/she took a few days off. If they have unused leave, you might encourage them to take it.

3. Depending on how public or widely known within the company the misconduct is, you might want to address it. “Chris has found himself in a situation none of us would wish for ourselves. This company believes in both personal freedom and personal responsibility, and until this situation is judged by the authorities……”

How to deal with the public:

1.  No comment won’t get you very far. Start with “we will not discuss individual personnel matters publicly”. Then try “we will address this matter according to the terms of our employment agreement (or company policies).”

2. Be clear, concise and as transparent as you can be without commenting specifically on your employee or their actions. It is never wise to do so, and particularly so in a situation likely charged with emotion and opinion. You cannot win if you go down that road.

3. Cite your company’s core beliefs and fairness in dealing with all employees. Express sympathy and compassion to those effected. Lay no blame, condemn no one.

Wildcard situations:

1.  Each employee and each situation is different. Be flexible.

2. Respond to safety concerns. If there is a threat to public or workplace safety if this person is on the job, or not promptly dealt with internally, then immediate action is critical.

3. Keystone support is critical. If you are at risk to lose a key staffer, vendor, or customer; act faster than perhaps you might otherwise.

4. Stay abreast of your legal responsibilities. If you have a situation that requires notification of the authorities, or regulatory issues, by all means, take care of that first.

Above all, act with appropriate force. Make sure your response is proportional to the misconduct and effect on the company.

You have an opportunity to act with fairness and wisdom, make good use of that opportunity.

Something My Daddy Taught Me

I spent most of my life in and around Chicago. I thought about it the other day and realized that 90% of my life has been spend within 100 miles of The Loop.  It was, if not my hometown, the touchstone for my youth, the place to which everything was compared.

And Chicago is a tough city.

As a kid, I may at times have fallen in with a bad crowd, or made some bad decisions regarding my friends. It was at one of these times that my father gave me a piece of advice.

Miraculously, I seemed to have paid attention and taken it to heart.

Now I’ll share it with you, because it goes to the heart of my attitude about the punishment of the rioters in Vancouver.

Dad said, “When there’s trouble on the block, and the police come rolling up on you and your friends on the corner, they’re not going to care that you weren’t the one in the group causing trouble, you’re going downtown. If you were there, you are responsible. If you did nothing, you are responsible. If you didn’t stop it, you are responsible.  When the trouble comes down, you have two choices: get out or stop it. Otherwise you are responsible.”

A simple solution, and one that has served me well.  Subtle? No. Nuanced? No. Effective? Yes.

Some of my friends ended up in prison. Some are dead.

Me? I’m not brave and I claim no moral high ground. But my Dad’s advice has served me very well on many occasions.

The best way to avoid trouble is to not be there when it comes-a-knockin’.

And I do believe that my father was passing on wisdom from his father, who saw first-hand what happens when good men do nothing in the face of evil:  If you see a wrong being committed and do nothing, you are just as guilty as those who did the deed.

My grandfather had a right to live in a black and white world. For him, you either fought evil or were consumed by it.

There were no innocent bystanders in my grandfather’s world. Just villians, victims, and the righteous.
In my grandfather’s world there was only one choice when trouble came – fight.

For my dad, there were two options – fight or flight. Still not innocent bystanders, but at least he allowed for witnesses to flee.

And in my generation, I’m not prepared to add “pose for picture” to the list of choices. There will be no terror tourists in my family, no vandal videographers, no poseur protesters.

As for me and mine: If you see wrong being done you have two choices: try and stop it; or GTFO.

A Defense of Crowdsourced Surveillance

In Canada there is no crime of misprision, that is the failure to report a crime of which you have witnessed. With certain exceptions, there is no affirmative duty to report a criminal to police.  However, in the aftermath of crimes against an individual and crimes against property many (including me) have called for active efforts by the online community to identify and report criminals to police.

I’ve dubbed such a group a “tweetgang”, which I define as any group organized by twitter for real world action. As such, a “tweetgang” could also be used to describe a group organized to clean up a park. In the case of the Vancouver riots however, it is invoked as an online group encouraged to assist police in the identification of criminals responsible for the destruction caused by the riots.

Alexandra Samuel in the Harvard Business Review was quite eloquent in her warning against what she called citizen surveillance: “After a Loss in Vancouver, Troubling Signals of Citizen Surveillance“

“But it’s one thing to take pictures as part of the process of telling your story, or as part of your (paid or unpaid) work as a citizen journalist. It’s another thing entirely to take and post pictures and videos with the explicit intention of identifying illegal (or potentially illegal) activity. At that moment you are no longer engaging in citizen journalism; you’re engaging in citizen surveillance.”

I don’t think the type of reporting that is going on can be considered “citizen surveillance” for the following reasons:

Surveillance implies stealth, infiltration, coercion or the passive-aggressive force of the state channeled through informants, applied against a person or group acting in a private, rights-protected, subversive, or criminal manner.

- If you are present at a crime, you are not conducting surveillance, you are a witness.
- There was no infiltration of the criminal element, witnesses happened to be in the area, or arrived during the crime, drawn by curiosity.
- There was no coercion by the witnesses of the criminals involved. The witnesses were bystanders.
- There was no application of the state monopoly on violence via these witnesses. The criminals were clearly not intimidated.
- To seek out and obtain evidence of a crime and forward it to police is not operating as an informant unless there is some           personal gain.

A witness reporting a crime or a crowd pointing out a criminal is not surveillance and not informing – it is citizenship.

The Canadian Oath of Citizenship states in part:
… that I will faithfully
observe the laws of Canada
and fulfil my duties as a Canadian citizen.

According to the Canadian government, those duties include:
- understanding and obeying Canadian laws
- helping others in the community
- eliminating discrimination and injustice
I’d say being able to identify when a crime is being committed is “understanding Canadian laws”, that identifying the criminals would directly “help others in the community” who suffered at the hands of those criminals, and reporting this information to the police might go pretty far in “eliminating discrimination and injustice”.

Samuel then goes on to list some specific actions she would hate to see:

“I am much less comfortable when I think about other ways that crowdsourced surveillance has been or might be put to use: By pro-life demonstrators posting photos of women going into clinics that provide abortions. By informants in authoritarian states tracking posts and tweets critical of the government. By employers that scan Facebook to see which of their employees have been tagged in photos on Pride Day or 4/20.“

All these are good examples of potentially dubious uses of social media, but Samuel overlooks some things and attempts to create an Avalon of purity for social media that simply does not, never did, and cannot exist.

Pro-life demonstrators already post photos of women going into clinics. While this is dubious, it is not the posting of the photo that is problematic, but the inciting of violence towards those pictured which is unacceptable.

It is a false analogy to compare informants of a repressive government trolling the social media sphere or online communications on behalf of the state and the witnessing of a public crime against persons or property.

And as for employers scanning Facebook looking for Pride Day or 4/20 celebrants; Samuel is deluded if she thinks this does not currently occur.  This is a good analogy to the abortion clinic, except that the celebrants most likely posted their information to share online.  And so long as the employer takes no action contrary to labor law, there is nothing illegal in the act of seeing what your employees are up to in their free time.

Bosses get bored on Facebook late at night too, to suggest that their employees online profiles are off-limits seems to me to be overly pro-active in the area of privacy protection.

One could also argue that despite the poor history of providing security to their customers, Facebook and other online sites do provide opportunities for a person to shield a good deal of their public actions from unwanted review. I’d suggest, finally, if you don’t want your boss to see your picture at Pride Day or 4/20, take care not to post any photos of yourself, and take reasonable precautions against others doing so.

Samuel’s extensive writing may in fact provide you with ample direction in these areas.

Moreover, Samuel appears to desire a fencing off of social media for the uses already ascribed to all other forms of media, namely the dissemination of information and opinion accessible to both public (government) and private (individual) use. Would she suggest that in the 1920′s the new technology of radio not be monitored by the police, or that they not read websites and blogs for indications of criminal activity?  Why not then Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube?

I see great comparison between the use of social media and previous means of communication within and between communities in warning of, sharing information about, and identifying criminals at work in the area.  Is it OK for me to call my friends, but not OK to use twitter to tell them to help catch a vandal? Is it OK for me to walk door to door to ask for assistance in finding the thieves breaking into houses, but not OK to post such a request on Facebook?

Samuel goes on to imply that users of social media hold a special place as citizens, a community apart it seems:

Social media users need to decide whether surveillance is going to be part of our collective mission and culture online. We need to distinguish between the opportunity (and perhaps even responsibility) that comes with widespread ownership of camera phones, and the decision to post what we snap or film… 

But passing along the odd photo isn’t the same as turning yourself into a security camera. And it’s certainly not the same as tweeting, Facebooking or blogging your way to a comprehensive portfolio of public crimes and misdemeanours.

So does she think that as users of social media that we form a collective, more so than say, readers of the local paper, or users of the telephone?  And while certainly there is an ethical, legal and moral decision that must be made to distinguish between what is possible to capture and what is possible to share publicly or with authorities, I don’t think that it is the same decision as that which leads one to serve as an agent of the state.

And I wonder, since Samuel seems uncomfortable with the use of social media to create a “comprehensive portfolio of public crimes and misdemeanours” how she feels about those same tools being put to use to uncover crimes of far greater significance, or those committed by the state itself.  Is she equally uncomfortable with Kris Krug’s efforts to document the crimes and misdemeanors related to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, or my efforts to document the crime of human trafficking on my own (separate) site?

Samuel closes with a statement I mostly agree with:

What social media is for — or what it can be for, if we use it to its fullest potential — is to create community. And there is nothing that will erode community faster, both online and off, than creating a society of mutual surveillance.

I might argue that a community will be eroded faster by discrimination and injustice, but what I think Samuelson unfairly equates are the actions of citizens to maintain their community using the newest means of communication, and the cold hand of a state security apparatus to which these new technologies have shown in recent history to be remarkably resistant.

Popular Local Blogger Rebecca Bollwitt (Miss604) repeated the call from authorities to assist in the identification of rioters:

How To Help

I encourage you to embrace this call to citizenship in action and maintain your community both online and in real life by using the technology you have available to you to identify and report the criminals responsible for the June 15th riots in Vancouver.

UPDATE:  A fantastic article by Christopher on Technology, Thoughts, and Trinkets “Vancouver’s Human Flesh Search Engine” adds great nuance to this conversation and it worth a read.  I disagree, but have more things to think about based on his excellent points.

Prosser vs. Kloppenburg Prediction

Kloppenburg could win, statistically speaking.  Here’s why:

1.  Take the number of votes cast so far by a county
2.  Divide by the number of precincts reporting for that county
3.  This gives you avg. number of votes per precinct for that county

I know this is flawed, stay with me.

4.  Take number of outstanding precincts for that county
5.  Multiply by  the avg. number of votes per precinct for that county
6.  This gives you potential outstanding votes to be counted

I know this is flawed, stay with me.

7.  Take percentage of vote gained by each candidate in that county and multiply by outstanding votes
8.  Add those to the votes already counted for that county.

I know this is flawed, stay with me, we’re almost done.

9.  Add them all up again.
10.  Admit your flaws:

A.  avg. number of votes per county is not good estimate of actual outstanding votes of uncounted precincts
B.  outstanding votes don’t take into account absentee ballots
C.  Percentage of votes captured in counted precincts may not be good predictor of uncounted precinct splits

So what?  There’s hope if you are a Kloppenburg supporter

Kloppenburg 811,510     Prosser 790,698

[Winner:   Kloppenburg by 20,812 votes or 1.3%]

That’s the best I can offer with my Frankenstein election analysis.  I’ve shown my work below.

County	Precincts	D. Prosser (i)	J. Kloppenburg	difference	Precincts Pending	avg votes per precinct	pending precints x avg votes per precinct	total projected votes Prosser	total projected votes Kloppenburg
Total	3596/3630	733,074	732,489	585				790,698	811,510
		50%	50%	0	34
Adams	20/20	2,393	2,559	-166				2,393	2,559
		48%	52%	0	0
Ashland	22/28	1,037	2,504	-1,467		161	966	1,317	3,190
		29%	71%	0	6
Barron	36/36	4,707	4,640	67				4,707	4,640
		50%	50%	0	0
Bayfield	28/28	1,904	3,823	-1,919				1,904	3,823
		33%	67%	0	0
Brown	88/88	33,319	27,206	6,113				33,319	27,206
		55%	45%	0	0
Buffalo	23/23	1,684	1,604	80				1,684	1,604
		51%	49%	0	0
Burnett	24/24	1,932	1,675	257				1,932	1,675
		54%	46%	0	0
Calumet	39/39	7,498	4,642	2,856				7,498	4,642
		62%	38%	0	0
Chippewa	46/46	6,856	7,226	-370				6,856	7,226
		49%	51%	0	0
Clark	64/64	4,335	3,101	1,234				4,335	3,101
		58%	42%	0	0
Columbia	39/39	7,302	8,959	-1,657				7,302	8,959
		45%	55%	0	0
Crawford	25/27	1,689	2,428	-739				1,689	2,428
		41%	59%	0	2
Dane	247/248	48,627	133,513	-84,886		8,279	8279	50,862	139,557
		27%	73%	0	1
Dodge	55/55	13,373	8,519	4,854				13,373	8,519
		61%	39%	0	0
Door	32/32	5,183	4,633	550				5,183	4,633
		53%	47%	0	0
Douglas	31/31	3,814	8,674	-4,860				3,814	8,674
		31%	69%	0	0
Dunn	38/40	3,790	4,649	-859		384	767	4,135	5,071
		45%	55%	0	2
Eau Claire	61/61	11,214	15,688	-4,474				11,214	15,688
		42%	58%	0	0
Florence	08-Aug	799	483	316				799	483
		62%	38%	0	0
Fond du Lac	77/77	16,243	10,390	5,853				16,243	10,390
		61%	39%	0	0
Forest	18/18	1,531	1,196	335				1,531	1,196
		56%	44%	0	0
Grant	52/52	4,396	5,697	-1,301				4,396	5,697
		44%	56%	0	0
Green	24/24	4,872	5,845	-973				4,872	5,845
		45%	55%	0	0
Green Lake	16/16	3,778	2,049	1,729				3,778	2,049
		65%	35%	0	0
Iowa	35/35	2,378	3,812	-1,434				2,378	3,812
		38%	62%	0	0
Iron	19/19	760	937	-177				760	937
		45%	55%	0	0
Jackson	30/30	2,224	2,686	-462				2,224	2,686
		45%	55%	0	0
Jefferson	40/41	12,860	9,365	3,495		1,010	1010	13,446	9,789
		58%	42%	0	1
Juneau	28/29	2,337	2,546	-209		222	222	2,444	2,661
		48%	52%	0	1
Kenosha	99/99	13,794	15,803	-2,009				13,794	15,803
		47%	53%	0	0
Kewaunee	14/14	3,331	2,404	927				3,331	2,404
		58%	42%	0	0
La Crosse	42/42	12,114	17,369	-5,255				12,114	17,369
		41%	59%	0	0
Lafayette	32/32	2,034	2,199	-165				2,034	2,199
		48%	52%	0	0
Langlade	27/27	2,668	1,895	773				2,668	1,895
		58%	42%	0	0
Lincoln	25/25	3,575	3,542	33				3,575	3,542
		50%	50%	0	0
Manitowoc	42/42	12,211	7,752	4,459				12,211	7,752
		61%	39%	0	0
Marathon	140/140	17,131	14,823	2,308				17,131	14,823
		54%	46%	0	0
Marinette	30/30	4,980	4,082	898				4,980	4,082
		55%	45%	0	0
Marquette	19/19	2,220	1,726	494				2,220	1,726
		56%	44%	0	0
Menominee	01-Jan	141	241	-100				141	241
		37%	63%	0	0
Milwaukee	474/486	95,129	125,090	-29,961		10,010	120119	146,780	193,558
		43%	57%	0	12
Monroe	34/34	4,511	4,689	-178				4,511	4,689
		49%	51%	0	0
Oconto	29/29	5,199	3,852	1,347				5,199	3,852
		57%	43%	0	0
Oneida	29/29	5,515	5,135	380				5,515	5,135
		52%	48%	0	0
Outagamie	95/95	24,775	18,885	5,890				24,775	18,885
		57%	43%	0	0
Ozaukee	48/48	20,811	8,278	12,533				20,811	8,278
		72%	28%	0	0
Pepin	11-Nov	888	983	-95				888	983
		47%	53%	0	0
Pierce	28/28	4,053	4,905	-852				4,053	4,905
		45%	55%	0	0
Polk	36/36	4,663	4,439	224				4,663	4,439
		51%	49%	0	0
Portage	38/38	8,111	12,039	-3,928				8,111	12,039
		40%	60%	0	0
Price	26/26	2,165	2,025	140				2,165	2,025
		52%	48%	0	0
Racine	63/63	28,204	22,518	5,686				28,204	22,518
		56%	44%	0	0
Richland	33/33	1,803	2,180	-377				1,803	2,180
		45%	55%	0	0
Rock	87/87	14,626	22,145	-7,519				14,626	22,145
		40%	60%	0	0
Rusk	33/33	2,220	1,941	279				2,220	1,941
		53%	47%	0	0
Sauk	31/39	6,166	7,625	-1,459		627	5015	8,423	10,383
		45%	55%	0	8
Sawyer	21/21	2,120	2,059	61				2,120	2,059
		51%	49%	0	0
Shawano	43/43	5,535	3,550	1,985				5,535	3,550
		61%	39%	0	0
Sheboygan	58/58	19,531	11,407	8,124				19,531	11,407
		63%	37%	0	0
St. Croix	43/43	8,272	7,953	319				8,272	7,953
		51%	49%	0	0
Taylor	29/30	3,602	2,266	1,336		267	267	3,765	2,370
		61%	39%	0	1
Trempealeau	26/26	2,878	3,330	-452				2,878	3,330
		46%	54%	0	0
Vernon	33/33	3,578	4,307	-729				3,578	4,307
		45%	55%	0	0
Vilas	15/15	4,204	2,820	1,384				4,204	2,820
		60%	40%	0	0
Walworth	40/40	14,233	8,929	5,304				14,233	8,929
		61%	39%	0	0
Washburn	25/25	2,275	2,453	-178				2,275	2,453
		48%	52%	0	0
Washington	38/38	30,788	9,903	20,885				30,788	9,903
		76%	24%	1	0
Waukesha	198/198	81,255	29,332	51,923				81,255	29,332
		73%	27%	0	0
Waupaca	38/38	7,204	4,938	2,266				7,204	4,938
		59%	41%	0	0
Waushara	26/26	3,394	2,300	1,094				3,394	2,300
		60%	40%	0	0
Winnebago	76/76	19,488	18,054	1,434				19,488	18,054
		52%	48%	0	0
Wood	56/56	8,844	9,274	-430				8,844	9,274
		49%	51%	0	0

Craigs List and Trafficking

.So after some intense pressure from a number of Attorney’s General of various states of the US, online service Craigslist has temporarily suspended it’s listings in the Adult Services section. It seems that it was fairly widely known that this section was being used to facilitate prostitution. It was further suggested by some that it was facilitating the exploitation of trafficked persons.

Very good link [here] to WSJ short article to get you up to speed.

I’m glad they shut it down. I hope it stays shut down, or if not, that it has far greater scrutiny by Craigslist. Should they be required to shut it down? No. I don’t think the AG’s had a very good case. The law currently protects services from prosecution for posting materials such as the ones posted on (but not by) Craigslist.

But it was the right thing to do. One should not profit from the exploitation of others, even indirectly. As I understood, Craigslist generated revenue from this section of their service. In my mind that revenue is tied to the exploitation alleged, and is unethical.

Some have suggested that shutting this area of service down makes it more difficult to catch exploiters and increases the risk to those exploited. It is suggested that having this service in the open allows it to be monitored and potentially leads to greater opportunities to end the exploitation. This argument is made very well at HuffPo [here] by a person with much more experience on this matter than me.

I disagree, however. I suggest there was little or no active monitoring or advantage taken by Craigslist or law enforcement to intercept exploitation. I further suggest that by eliminating a ready service for facilitating exploitation, we have driven the cost of business up for the exploiters. Anything we can do to make business more difficult for them is a good thing. If we can drive the cost of doing business up high enough, they will move on to more lucrative (although still likely illegal) activities. My approach would be to make business unprofitable for them, thereby lowering the number of exploited individuals.

It just strikes me as odd that we don’t allow advertising for cigarettes but we do allow advertising for the exploitation of vulnerable people.

The Craigslist move is the right thing to do, and they should be encouraged to make this move permanent, or subject to reinstatement under greatly improved oversight

My Rebuttal to CityCaucus.com

So I stumbled upon this tonight:

Robertson’s links to powerful foreign funders demands full transparency

In the article the author uses a great little rhetorical trick to get us started.  See if you can catch it.

Vancouver’s Mayor Gregor Robertson says that he wants our city to re-think the transit of oil tankers through our waters. In light of the horrific oil spill in the Gulf, surely every port city should be re-check plans and preparations for mitigating inevitable risks. No matter how well-prepared we are, accidents still happen. So if Mayor Gregor Robertson has Canada’s interests at heart, that’s great. On the other hand, if the Mayor’s recent move is partially to please the U.S. funders of his entourage, Vancouver voters have the right to know.

So she never actually says Robertson is not acting with Canada’s interests at heart, which is what she has set up rhetorically as the positive choice, but she is demanding that if he is doing this to please U.S. funders of his entourage (which is set up as the opposite choice), that he let Vancouver voters know (because she has asserted they have a right to know).  That’s awesome.  Great command of a rhetorical device.

But, what the hell, I’ll take the bait.  Let’s examine her premise.

Premise:  Mayor Gregor Robertson is examining oil related transit because of influence of US based, oil-backed interests.

Evidence:  1 contributor to Robertson sits on board of Tides Canada and Tides US.  They are big foundations.  They give a lot of money to a lot of people.  Some of that money comes from Pew and Hewlett.  Pew money comes from oil.  I’m not sure what the objection is regarding Hewlett, but for the sake of consistency let me add, Hewlett money comes from computers.

So in the immortal words of Deep Throat, “Follow the money.”: 

Oil – Pew – Tides US – Tides Canada – Renewal Partners – Strategic Comm. – Robertson.

 

Six Degrees of Separation?  Let’s put aside that social theory, a really fun Bacon-related game, and a pretty great Will Smith film all suggest that anyone can be connected to anyone via six degrees of separation, let’s see if we can connect Robertson to “Big Oil”.

In doing my research I used only the resources and links provided by the author in the story.

In 09 Tides Canda gave no grants to contributors to Robertson listed in this story.  No grants in 2008 either.

In 09 Tides US gave Tides Canada no grants, nor did it give any grants to contributors to Robertson listed in this story.

There was $173K in grants to Tides Canada in 08 out of $208M given that yr. (0.08% of giving)  I’m going to go way out a limb and suggest that’s insignificant in terms of Tides US granting that year.

The US Center for Consumer Freedom cited as the sole authority and critic of Tides is also a critic of MADD, PETA, and the Centers for Disease Control.  It was founded by a DC area lobbyist w/money from Philip Morris.  It focuses on making sure that extremist organizations do not infringe on the public ability to do things like smoke in restaurants or eat pharmaceutically treated meat.  Seriously, check these guys out.  Or better yet, read their own site.

 Pew Charitable Trusts was founded with Sun Oil money — in 1948.  It would be reasonable to assume therefore that the founding money for Pew is pre-WWII money, since it takes some time to accumulate significant funds (even in war time) and for those funds to pass to a future generation and eventually through probate to establish a major foundation.

Now on to Hewlett.

 In 2009 Hewlett made a $50K to Tides Canada out of $235M given that yr. (0.02% of giving). [Remember Tides DID NOT make any grant in 2009 to any group listed in article as donor to Robertson.]  Again, I’m going way out a limb here and suggesting that this grant is insignificant to Hewlett based on total giving that year.

At one point the author asks why Hewlett spend so much in Canada rather than in developing countries where the money is so badly needed.  I would suggest that it is because this where the NGO’s are.  Canada has a long and treasured history of establishing charitable organizations that carry their work out internationally.  The author also fails to mention what the charitable focus of the giving from Hewlett to Canada is, or what the charitable focus of Hewlett is worldwide, or the relative global distribution of viable non governmental organziations capable of carrying out the philanthropic goals of Hewlett might be.  All three variable I would assume would play a part in examination of the distribution of Hewlett’s charitable giving.

OK, there were a few errors and mislead statements I had to deal with as well.

Error1:  The author states:

“In 2008, Hewlett granted $US 3 Million to Tides Canada ‘for reducing the environmental impacts of oil and gas development in Northern Canada.’”

In 2008 Hewlett made a $3M grant to Tides US (not Tides Canada).  This is revealed when to click the link provided by the author to the Hewlett website listing grants to Tide US.  It is a direct link to this single grant, so there is no confusion.  The author either purposefully or accidentially misstates this basic fact.

Misleading statement 1  (the very next sentence):

 And in 2009, Hewlett granted a further $US 2 Million.

Well no, actually, since Hewlett didn’t grant the intial $3M, you can’t say they granted a further $2M.  Besides, they granted both to Tides US, not Tides Canada.  Oh, but wait, let me read on:

“However, this was granted through Tides Foundation (USA), not through Tides Canada Foundation.”

OK, so wait, you either intentially or accidentially misstate the giving from Hewlett to Tides Canada in the first sentence, compound it with a misleading statement in the second sentence, and then withdraw some, but not all of your misstatement in the following sentence?  Cool, let me try:

You suck as a writer.  And furthermore you stink.  However, the stink is coming from that cesspool you’re swimming in, not you.

Cool.  That makes what I said OK, right?

OK, some more misleading statements:

“…the Tides Foundation, a deep-pocketed American organization that has received at least $US 140 Million from the Pew Charitable Trusts…”

It would be clearer to add this was over 15 years.  In 2007 it appears from the US Federal Tax returns that Pew posts on their website for anyone to read, that they gave away $159Million.  One can only imagine what the total giving is over 15 years.  I’ll go way out a limb again and suggest that for a foundation as massive at Pew, $140Million over 15 years is insignificant.  That’s scary and crazy, but probably true.

 Oh, and check out this rhetorical trick ( love this one, guilt by association):

“ Hewlett also granted at least $US 7 Million to the Natural Resources Defense Council – which Mayor Gregor Robertson and his Chief of Staff, Michael Magee, visited in April of 2010.”

Did you see what she did there?  Robertson visited a recipient of $7M Hewlett gift.  Citation needed, none given for this particular gift.  One is led to believe by this association, that a) the Natural Resources Defense Council operates outside the interests of Canada in general and Vancouver specifically, and; b) Robertson’s visit was either because he already believes and supports whatever their agenda is (it is never stated), or; c) Robertson was naively tricked by the pod people at the NRDC and now is “one of them” (screeee!).  It never does say when this visit happened, so I’m not sure at what point Robertson was replaced with a pod person.

Also, can I just add something?  I assume Robertson also visits a number of local gas stations.  Should one assume Robertson is also under sway of Petro Canada?

Oh, and by the way, that $7M gift to the NRDC was over seven years.  I think I’m out of limbs to go way out on…

Then there is is kinda long section I’m calling the “red herring” section because it talks about how Hewlett funded a number of initiatives to address the potential hazards of farmed salmon on the ecology of the Pacific Northwest in general and the native salmon stocks in particular.  It’s kind of hard to make people fighting the effects of sea lice look bad, but the author sure tries.  In the end, the section is unrelated and irrelevant to the premise.

Got another error for you.  Error 2:

“And Tides Canada Foundation – of which Solomon is the Vice-Chair, has been paid at least $US 7 Million to “address” Canada’s oil and gas.” (sic)

I went through all the data linked by the author and I only counted $4,820,000 to ”address” oil & gas, not $7M.  This money came from Hewlett (not Pew or Tides US) and the amount was paid over 7 years.  It was also dwarfed by the amount received to assist aboriginal tribes and the amount received related to rainforest management.

Here’s another rhetorical trick for you (I know you love ‘em):

“…Tides Foundation, a deep-pocketed American organization that has received at least $US 140 Million from the Pew Charitable Trusts, another huge American foundation created with funds from U.S. oil interests.”

OK, so we’ve already covered the fact that this Tides Foundation got $140M from Pew.  Over 15 years.  Which is like a drop in the bucket for a huge foundation like Pew. We’ve also covered that the Pew money is old money, like pre-WWII money.  Oil money to be sure, but real old oil money, not the current nasty old BP kind of money, the nasty old “There will be Blood” mind of oil money.

So what’s my beef this time?  Well, when you use the word “another” that word is supposed to refer to the prior thing that you were talking about, anther action, or another actor.  In this case, it refers to another actor — Pew Charitable Truts.  The problem is, the author previously established that Pew was established by oil interests, so the reader (me) defaulted back to the next actor in line, Tides US.  The way this is written is either clever or poor.  I’m going with poor.  This statement, as it pertains to Tides US, is not proven within the article, nor is it necessarily true.

Let’s review:  Donor to Robertson sits on Board of Tides US & Tides Canada. Tides US and Tides Canada made no grants to this donor’s companies or Robertsons campaign during 2008 or 2009.

Premise = Fail.

While there have been gifts from Pew to Tides US, and Pew was founded on Pre-WWII era oil inheritances, these gifts are insignificant compared to overall giving of Pew over the last 15 yrs.  There is no such connection between Pew and Tides Canada.  There is relatively insignificant giving from Tides US to Tides Canada (in terms of total funds given by Tides US).  There are relatively insigificant gifts (in terms of total giving) from Hewlett, founded on computer inheritances (not oil)for oil-based initiatives by Tides Canada over the past 7 years.

There is no conncetion made between Pew funding of Tides US and Tides Canada grants.  There is no connection made between Tides US or Tides Canada and the donors to Robertson’s campaign.  There is no apparent taint on the source of Hewlett funding (computers).  There is no apparent connection between Hewlett funding of Tides Canada oil-related projects and funds going into the Robertson campaign. 

The author entirely FAILS to prove her premise and moreover fails to even conclude with her initial premise, rather, she calls on Tides Canada (not Mr. Robertson) for more transparency in the transmigration of funds from US donors through to Canadian charities.

We can either believe that Mayor Robertson is under the sway of a donor who sits on a foundation that makes grants to other organizations who do work in oil-related environmental areas, or we can believe that Mayor Robertson took one look at the largest oil spill disaster in American history and thought “Shit, I better make sure that doesn’t happen here” and got off his ass to do something about it.

Now, personally I like the third option, which is the “NRDC Pod People” option, but I’m going to go way out on a limb here and suggestion that’s probably not the case.

So read the story yourself and if you like, come back with a saw and start on those limbs I’ve climbed out on.

Haute Hijab?

So the people who brought you this:

Want to ban this:

France is seriously discussing banning the niqab and/or burqa in public. The argument for this is that it “hurts the dignity of women”, and that “wearing a full veil is a sign of a community closing in on itself and a rejection of our values”. There have also been arguments that it prevents the accurate identification of persons engaged in transactions with lawful authorities.

So this hurts the dignity of women:

But this doesn’t:

And wearing a full veil is a sign of a community closing in on itself, but this isn’t:

And as far as interactions with lawful authorities, my entirely unqualified opinion on the rules governing modesty lead me to believe that simply providing an orthodox woman with a female authority to reveal herself to would do the trick. Sort of like providing a translator or a person fluent in sign language. Only easier, since about 50% of the population is female, unlike, say, Urdu speakers or users of ASL.

Now what about the argument that a full face covering hijab is an affront to French values?
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite

It isn’t hard to argue that a woman should have the liberte to dress as she pleases, that all religions should be treated with egalite under French law, and that fraternite assumes that the state represents all citizens rather than pitting one against another.

Fashion bans like this are common in history and reflect a societal fear of incohesion in the face of change on a macro level. The small percentage of orthodox women wearing a full niqab in public is not going to undermine France. What France really fears is the lack of integration into the larger culture that these women represent.

Banning the hijab in public doesn’t invite greater levels of social cohesion from the orthodox religious. Attacking someone’s outward smybolism of piety rarely does that.

I Paid My Taxes, I Want My Culture

Art Strikes Back

From “The Blog According To Buzz”:

I have to admit that I sometimes look at the arts and wonder why they continue to go to government, cap in hand, asking for funding. I mean if the arts were reasonable and viable, then we would all appreciate them to the level they would be economically sustainable.

Seething anger is (nearly) my only response to comments like this after 20+ years in the arts and culture industry. Let’s see if I can get this out there in plain language w/o insult:

The Arts & Cultural industry has as much right to seek public subsidy, incentive, and favorable tax and business laws as any other industry.

The Arts & Cultural industry employs as many, and in many cases more individuals than many old-line manufacturing and agricultural sectors.

The Arts & Cultural industry exists on a tiny fraction of the public subsidy, incentive, and favorable tax and business law as many of the other sectors do.

The Arts & Cultural industry has replaced government programs in health, education, and public welfare at a fraction of prior cost.

The Arts & Cultural industry is supported overwhelmingly by ticket sales and private contributions, both measures of public valuation of their services.

The Arts & Cultural industry provides a positive net return on investment for public subsidy, much like and in some cases greater than the ROI for other industries receiving such subsidy.

The next time someone asks why the Arts & Cultural industry should receive public subsidy or why it can’t be self-supporting, try to remember these points.

Then remind your questioner that you pay taxes too and you don’t give a damn about (sector X) which gets public subsidy, tax breaks, protection, incentives, favorable legislation, etc.

Then tell ‘em:

I Paid My Taxes, I Want My Culture

Better Off Not Knowing?

I saw a series of tweets today:
“RT @Refugees We’ve found 2000 displaced ppl in awful conditions in Central African Rep. Sick, hungry & lacking even safe drinking water.”

“RT @Refugees: “[...] I have never seen people living under such circumstances”

With a link to: “It is estimated more than 125,000 people, many of them women and children, have been forced out of their homes in northern CAR (Central African Republic) since 2005. Another 137,000 are refugees in the neighbouring Chad and Cameroon.”

262,000 refugees at risk. Basically the entire population of British Columbia north of Kamloops is on the move and out of food, water, clothing, shelter or personal safety. Oh, and over 10% of them have HIV, did I mention that?

And my response was “And….?” What am I supposed to do about this? Is it enough for me to simply know about it?

I doubt it. Since the mid 1980′s I’ve had the impression that our ability to know about humanitarian disasters the world over has far outstripped our ability to respond meaninfully to them, to the point where we are inured to the horrors of the world and paralyzed by our relative inability to prevent or mitigate them.

While our ability to know about humanitarian needs has improved dramatically, our ability to address them is virtually the same as it was 25 years ago.

So for the last 25 years we’ve heard the screams of the dying more and more clearly, while we’ve had no more ability to address them.

In fact, in increasingly public ways we have repeatedly failed when trying to address them. Forty years ago mothers admonished their kids to clean their plates because “Children were starving in China”.

Now those kids are starving in your living room every night, and still our kids are right when they say “Oh yeah? Well send them this, then. Can’t do that? Then what’s your point?”

Moreover, the constant bombardment of images of humanitarian disaster makes it increasingly unlikely that people will help. When the Ethiopians were starving in 1984-85 they were it. We could rally around that. There was a distinct and confined problem with an obvious solution: we need to send these people some food, so ya’ll chip in some money and we’ll ship the right stuff over.

Now? Now I’ve got a new one every day. I gave my $100 to the Ethiopian relief, my $75 to Somalian war orphans, my $50 to Oxfam, my $25 to Liveaid, my $10 to Darfur….

Shit, man, I’m tapped. Now I don’t do anything. And each new wave of despair fills me with rage and grief because I am seemingly powerless to stop it or assist the victims.

I can’t imagine that politicans are any different. They’re only human. What if I write my MP or my MLA about each new disaster that deserves government help? I’ll be the nutcase writing him a letter each week and soon it’ll be “what is it this week from this guy?” Which will make my protestations meaningless.

So what are we left with? Am I being called on to witness each tragedy, each death, so that no one dies alone? Am I now being recruited into a silent nation of sympathy, which offers nothing more than that of a professional mourner, wailing away to show that this person had worth, regardless of how that worth was so cruelly neglected?

At what point does our sympathy begin to twist into mass psychopathy, where we can detect the emotional tragedy and can mimic the appropriate response, but feel nothing?

I yearn for a massive increase in our ability to deliver relief directly to those effected by a tragedy that touches us personally. I wish to see the massively increased ability to trasmit these images and stories worldwide and virtually instantaneously translated into a two-way street that allows for delivery of relief in a similar manner.

Until that time and without such an effort to develop rapid, direct, worldwide and specific responses to such calamities, we risk a most ghoulish sort of voyeurism.

Law is about justice, not bumper stickers

From this morning’s Wall Street Journal:

Gays and lesbians are our brothers and sisters, our teachers and doctors, our friends and neighbors, our parents and children. It is time, indeed past time, that we accord them the basic human right to marry the person they love. It is time, indeed past time, that our Constitution fulfill its promise of equal protection and due process for all citizens by now eliminating the last remnant of centuries of misguided state discrimination against gays and lesbians.

I well-reasoned and literate argument, far better than I could make can be found in toto here

What is to be done?

I have watched the video of Neda Agha-Soltan brutally killed in Tehran. I felt I owed it to her somehow. That I needed to witness it. To shed that cloak of insulation and comfort I have in Canada was to achieve something for those struggling for freedom so very far away. Awareness at least by one more spoiled, lazy, contented Westerner. Maybe something would come of it. I don’t know the intent of the video maker except to add proof of the brutality of the government.

It’s not clear Neda wanted anything more than to go home. “Go home” seems to me to be the two sweetest, sad words right now. I imagine my young son saying that, and what those words mean to him; safety, security, peace.

Then I imagine the grief of Neda’s father. His baby girl is dead. Killed in an instant. In less than 90 seconds she is dead in the street. Killed by an unseen assailant, who will never be found. My little girl sleeps peacefully not ten feet from me. My heart aches for Neda’s father. My pain is merely a shadow of his own. Does it make it any easier for him, thinking others share his pain? Does is ease his burden?

I seriously doubt it, but if so, he is a better man than I am.

Responsibility to Protect

In a world where we are capable of knowing, almost immediately of almost any atrocity, what is our responsibility to act?

In a world of escalating technology devoted to the extermination of humanity, are the mechanisms by which we decide as a nation to act functional?

If you take November 1938 as a start of the Shoah, the Nazi regime exterminated nearly 6 million humans of the Jewsh faith in about 7 years. By June 1942 the US and UK knew and 3.9 people were already gone. By June 1944 when the BBC and NYT ran their first stories, it was over.

Today, we know about it practically as it happens.

Would the same death toll of the Shoah be less horrifying or more horrifying if it had been conducted over 60 years instead of 7?

In 2006 the UN adopted the Doctrine of “Responsibility to Protect”, which I’ve written about before.

Also in 2006 Vaclav Havel, Kjell Magne Bondevik(PM Norway) & Elie Wiesel authored a report called “Failure to Protect” which called for UN action against North Korea. The NYT ran an op-ed the same day by Havel on the matter.

I share a birthday with Havel and liked his plays, so I pay attention when he writes, plus the guy is like a Czech version of a saint. He won the Ghandi Award for Peace for cryin’ out loud. And Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize for goodness sake. Turns out Bondevik founded the Oslo Centre for Peace and Human Rights, so he’s no slouch either.

Canada has had diplomatic relations with the DPRK since 2001, although they seem pretty limited and unattended to, given the last update on the Canadian govt. website is 2006.

At least the Harper govt. condemned the latest tests. I have to agree that everybody’s idea that engaging the North Koreans and soft pedaling the human rights stuff in the hopes that would get them to back off the military options does not seem like it’s working. If we thought they’d play nice if we didn’t piss them off, that’s certainly not how it’s working out.

Furthermore, it looks like all the food aid we give them is just letting them cut back on food purchases. Then they take the money they would have spent on food, and put it towards nukes.

So all that food aid over the years has essentially subsidized their nuclear programs to the tune of over $2 billion over the last ten years.

And some question if the famine of the DPRK is not entirely the fault of the government, since foreign currency and arms sales appear to bring in more than enough money to support the food needs of the population. As one writer has suggested, the DPRK basically has put us in charge of feeding their population while they concentrate on weapons of mass destruction.

We seem to have the most bizarre relationship set up.

We feed their people so they can spend money on nukes, then they ramp up the nukes and we threaten to cut off the food, so they threaten to nuke us, so we give food aid again, so they can continue working on nukes.

Canada has a unique responsibility to act. It is one of the few western countries to have diplomatic ties to North Korea. It also chaired the ICSS which came up with the Responsiblity to Protect doctrine. The Havel-Bondevik-Wiesel report is very straightforward in making its case that the DPRK situation fits nearly perfectly the situations which require action under the Responsiblity to Protect.

Canada, at the very least should call for the full implementation of the Havel-Bondevik-Wiesel report recommendations, which call for immediate UN Security Council action.

Canada’s leadership in R2P, ICSS, and now the HBW report gives it the opportunity to take the moral highground here.

I hope we have the moral courage to take it.

Dead Aid or Broken Aid?

I think I will get the book Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo. Buy it from your local independent bookstore, I’ve only put that link there for convenience.

She makes the case that aid to Africa has stifled growth of the contries there, empowered dictators and disengaged the political system from the populous. She says, “You get the corruption — historically, leaders have stolen the money without penalty –and you get the dependency, which kills entrepreneurship. You also disenfranchise African citizens, because the government is beholden to foreign donors and not accountable to its people”.

I noted recently on Twitter (my nemesis) statments by Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda, calling for an end to reliance on foreign aid for his country through market forces. I am however, chastened in my opinion of these statements due to Mr. Kagame’s involvement in coups, invasions, genocide, and more invasions of neighboring countries. I would be very uncomfortable as the author, since repeatedly Mr. Kagame cites the book, and the book and Mr. Kagame are often cited together in news articles.

Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade has similar comments. I can’t comment on his politics despite a search.

Of course other critics who’ve actually read the book (unlike me) say she oversimplifies by blaming aid for corruption, as if removing it would remove the corruption. Also problematic from some reviewers’ point of view is her reliance on market forces to correct the problems. I would be tempted to seriously doubt that the market would be any less corrupt given recent history.

I do think it is legitimate to ask where the money is going. It is particularly useful to ask during stained economic times.
My concern is that I’m stuck in a moral quandry. You know the old saying, “Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish and you have fed him for a lifetime.”

But what if the guy can’t fish worth a damn? What if there are no fish for him to catch?

I’m also reminded about a Dennis Leary comedy routine that includes the harangue to “Move where the f*ing food is!”

I also think of my ancestors, who lived through the Irish potato famines of 1740, 1842, and 1845. Twenty to twenty-five percent of the population died, and another 20 – 25% emigrated. In raw numbers that’s about 1 million to 1.5 million dead and another equal number emigrating.

The worst famine in Africa may have been in 1980 Uganda, where 21% or about 900,000 people died. Just to give you a sense of comparable scale, 30 million died in China from famine 1958-1961, North Korea loses probably 600,000 a year, Vietnam lost 2 million in 1945, and India lost 1.3 million in 1966-69 due to famine.

So famine in Africa is not new, not particularly large in scale. It might be more widespread, but I can’t find data that lines up famine deaths by year in Africa. It seems that something else might be at work to cause all this suffering. Certainly China, North Koren, Vietnam, and India had corruption, failing political policies, internal strife. Somehow most of them (DPRK not included) have largely eliminated the crisis aid that flows into African nations. How and why?

I don’t think you can argue that Africa somehow has problems greater than Asia. All have, or had rampant communicable fatal diseases, coups, civil wars, external wars of agression or defense, and China in particular has had ample natural disasters. So why have they turned out better than most African nations?

I think it is worth a look at the political structures of the countries and their natural resources. Having done my undergraduate thesis on comparative political structures, I learned the power of beaurocracy. I can’t help but think that hobbled by rampant colonialism, most of these countries did not establish a sustainable political system capable of tending to the needs of their rapidly growing populations before crisis hit. Faced with mass casualties and a failing state, many reached out to their oppressors for financial aid, most of it with strings attached. In the end, they became beholding to their old masters, now their new masters. These masters in turn, I am afraid, placed a higher priority on political stability and alliances than on the long term security of the populations of these countries.

In the west we may stand on the shoulders of giants, but what if those giants that came before us and built these great lands stood on the necks of the weak to do so? Our obligation to right the wrongs of the past will have to be the subject of a future post.

Buckle Up, It’s Going To Be A Bumpy Ride

I love the film All About Eve. If you haven’t seen it do. It’s one of the only movies about the theatre business I can stand. Plus it has OMG performances by Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm, and Thelma Ritter — all of whom were nominated for Oscars!

Ok, enough fun, now to the matter at hand.

If you are a nonprofit manager, you’re riding a pretty bumpy road right now. Look at it this way, you may have increased demand for your services if you are in social services, or a dramatic drop in demand if you are in arts and culture. Either extreme is hard to deal with.

Without the benefit of significant cash reserves, and the long standing practice of paying below scale for good administrative help (when compared to the profit sector), this combination of factors can have you lurching from one crises to another as you search for ways to ride out this latest bear market.

Thomas McLaughlin wrote a great little piece for Nonprofit Times called “A Cheat Sheet for a Down Economy” which I will summarize for you here. Certainly if you have time, go read the original. Here’s the gist:

1. Cash is King – see how much cash you have on hand. How long will that last you? Do an “Acid Test” on your company. Take Cash + Accounts Receivable + Short Term Investments and divide by Current Liabilities. If the result is less than one, you’ve got trouble.

2. How much are you worth? Got any investments? How much are they worth compared to what you paid for them? You’re probably down. Were you counting on some spin off revenues? How much? Better go find an alternative.

3. Keep Things In Balance. It sucks, but if revenues are down, expenses have to come down too. Don’t book a huge deficit unless you are prepared to “pay it off” over three years or less. Got an unavoidable deficit this year? Look at next season and build yourself a cushion so you can pay at least one-third of it down. Who says this ratio of paydown is correct? Me. You can’t spend what you don’t have for long.

4. Everything on the Chopper. Freeze, cut or postpone, everything has to be looked at. This is where your mission statement and strategic plan comes in handy (please tell me you have one). If it does not make money and/or does not contribute to the core mission of the company, it’s out. Necessity is the mother of invention. Scarcity is the father of innovation.

5. George Bailey is your friend. Talk to your banker. Got a line of credit? Get one. Into your line of credit? Pay it off, if only for 30 days, to stay credit worthy. Teach your banker about your business and cash flow. That cup of coffee could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars when the chips are down and you need a favor.

6. What’s your balance sheet look like? Lots of nonprofits don’t pay close enough attention to this. This is a great measure of the overall health of your organization. It can show you how you are doing vs a prior year and where your biggests assets and liabilities are — literally.

7. Who is in control of your organization? Whoever controls the cash inflow, cash outflow, or holds your grants or accounts receivable. Get control of it NOW. Make sure YOU are in control of expenditures and that a good system of checks and balances are in place. Key an eye on the register; nervous people do stupid things. Who owes you money? Time to make some “Bitch where’s my money” phone calls! On the flip side is anyone who’s holding a grant out for you. Time to make nice, baby. There’s the other people to spend time in the coffee shop with.

I’ll add some:

8. Question everything. Get your reporting structure in order. How much cash is on hand TODAY? How much did you bring in TODAY? How much did you spend TODAY? Who signs off on what? Who decides?

9. Take the long view. Consider running a rolling 12 or 18 month budget and forecast alongside your fiscal year projections. It might be some work, but it might show you were things will turn around (or get worse) for you.

10. Your biggest asset is people. Treat them right. Fix any underperformers. Show people that good performances matters now more than ever. Everyone must (and can) contribute to the bottom line. Make sure everyone is. Including you.

I think we are in for a long recession and that we are merely in a bear market rally right now (May 09). Even if I am wrong (and I hope I am), these kind of measures can serve you well in a recovering economy too. Nothing here applies only to a down economy, it just applies moreso. These are the basics, stick to them and they will provide your company with the seat belt it needs to make it through this bumpy ride.

Is This Who We Are?

US Citizens have to ask themselves if this is who we are?

Are we a country which believes it is ok for the government to torture people? I don’t think it is a matter that allows for much nuance.

I hear two arguments now:
1. That’s not torture.
2. Even if it was torture, it was necessary.

I feel very certain that the US government authorized and institutionalized torture. I think given the details of what we now know took place, that it qualifies as torture. I certainly believe that if these same techniques were used on US soldiers that we would consider them torturous.

Torture is illegal in all circumstances under US law. It would seem that these activities also violate important international agreements to which the US is a party and uses as justification to assert its moral authority internationally.

So, now what do we do?

It seems to me that if the US wants to reclaim any moral authority, that we need to treat this as a criminal case.

Whoa, OK, Time Out!

OK, while the rest of you knuckleheads were watching American Idol, the POTUS has been zombied! Hellloooooo?

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell should be repealed……eh, not so much.
We’ll have ultimate transparency….except for these pictures.
Hold it a minute on those Gitmo trials….uh, ok, carry on.
We’re closing Gitmo in a year…yeah, about that….

The Dickomats today voted with the Gopasaurs to (metaphors fail me) refuse funding for the closing of Gitmo unless and until the Pres. can certify that “terrorists won’t be released into the US”.

I got news for you shit-for-brains. Most of them sorry sons-of-bitches we got locked up in Gitmo couldn’t find their way past the corner 7-11 if we brought them to the US. Most of them wouldn’t last a week in general pop in a US prison. Most of them should have never been locked up in the first place. Most of them are pussies compared to the monsters we got locked up in prisons here.

Most of them are in Gitmo specifically so we could abuse them and fail to offer them the rights they are entitled to either as enemy combatants or as prisoners of war, or as prisoners of US law enforcement. The reason they are in Gitmo is so we could skirt our responsibilities. I thought the last election pretty solidly proved that we as a nation had decided that it was time to carry the burden of our aspirations: to be better than our enemies, to astound them with our fairness, our justice, our compassion; to leave them speechless in the face of our equality, to leave them dumbfounded by our liberty.

There is a dramatic shift away from the principles upon which this administration was founded. This was not what I voted for, this is not my idea of a fair, equal and just resolution to the eight years of darkness we were to have left behind.

Briefed? Not Briefed? Doesn’t Matter!

I think that this writing is very good, logical and approaches the issue from an analysis of rhetoric, which I appreciate

Daily Kos: PiRierran writes The Disingenuous Cry of “They Were Briefed!”

And the first time I’ve seen someone properly describe and dissect an enthymeme.

A well constructed argument warms my little dork heart. A bonus for me is that I agree.

Give Me A Waterboard, Dick Cheney, And An Hour…

Jesse tells it like it is. I post this in honour of my brother, a recovering Minnesotan and I suspect a Jesse fan.
And a guy who also tells it like it is.

Here’s one for you, Doc.

You Know Your Party Is In Trouble When…

Your spokespeople are:
A drug addict
A guy who lies about being a plumber
A beauty pageant runner-up
and
A potential war criminal.

goposaur courtesy of Daily Kos.

And now a look at Canadian politics

We had an election in British Columbia today for a new governor, er, premiere and a new provincial legislature.

We elected for an apparently unprecedented third term the apparent irony-free BC Liberal Party, which is the conservative party in BC. Apparently there is no truth in advertising, nor a trademark issue here. Beats me.

Items up for debate appear to be how long it will take to put BC budgets back in surplus, where they have been for years. The winners promised by 2011, the losers by 2013. Environment was a bigger issue, with parties promising new carbon taxes, investments in green technology, and expansion of wildlife refuges. Also on the ballot was a revision of the parlimentary voting system to incoporate the use of something called “single transferrable vote”. Beats me what that is all about.

I can’t vote, so I maybe paid less attention than I should have. But it seemed tremendously mild in comparison to US elections. There was some kind of candidate who pulled out of the race ’cause they found pics on his facebook of him grabbin’ some boobs at a party. I think maybe another guy got busted for pot, and another guy resigned from a law enforcement job in the government after he lost his license for too many speeding tickets. Seriously. one of the 11th hour “breaking news” stories was how the ruling party used lumber from oregon (instead of bc) to build their campaign signs. That’s the best the challengers could come up with.

So, it is kind of cute. They are actually pretty proud of their boring politics. I have no reason to believe it is anything otherwise, or perhaps its crazy corrupt and we’ve just not turned that up yet. Who knows. I find it kind of relaxing and refreshing.

US Supreme Court Is Not A Sleepover

Barbara Boxer is an idiot. She just suggested that justice ginsberg was lonely as a reason to nominate a woman for the supreme court, and that this person might be especially qualified to bring empathy to the court. She also sees no reason that this person needs to a member of the judiciary. She’s a great source for the rightists. Idiot.

A good reason to nominate a person for the most important court in the country is firstly that they have impressive judicial credentials that you agree with. Let’s not kid ourselves, this is a political appointment and should be treated that way. When rightists are in office, they have every right to nominate rightists, and for leftists to fight them. Same goes the other way. That way, we end up with someone who leans a little one way or the other. The candidate should be able to withstand the crucible that the senate judiciary committee creates.

I’ll allow that it is preferrable to have the supreme court represent the diversity of the nation for political reasons. I think that Clarence Thomas and Sandra O’Connor have shown however, that legal philosophy trumps race or sex.

Whoever gets nominated, let them please be a jurist of the highest caliber, and put on that court because they are generally believed to be the smartest one we could find.

Let us choose based on the content of their minds, not their pants.

Curiouser

The bloggers and msnbc are still beating the drums on torture in the US, but there is not one mention of this topic on the new york times site, nothing at/on chicago tribune, nothing in la times. Just what is going on here?

rush is ranting about how obama is purposefully driving the economy in the ditch so as to drive up food stamps in an attempt to forceably institute reparations. fox news is running front page items about the “buy black” movement taking hold.

rightists seem most interested in making the case that leading leftists were told about torture and did nothing, rather than continue to debate whether or not torture occurred. only dick cheney is debating if it was torture or not, and at this point seems to be arguing that regardless, it was appropriate.

trillions and trillions of dolllars have been poured into the financial system to prop up banks and brokerage houses, but do you where it went or why or what’s being done with those dollars? Has it helped you at all? Has your bank, credit card, or mortage company offerred to help you out in any way? Or are you satisfied that some unknown terrible thing hasn’t yet happened to you?

are you aware that US Bank and Citigroup have $342 billion to secure their potential losses from mergers and bad loans, and that the economic stimulus action of 2009 allocates only $117 for the entire population of individuals in the US? Are you OK with that math?

anybody still concered about h1n1? has that run its course or was it beaten down by stats about other diseases with higher fatality rates?

Liar!

Nails it……..http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/05/the-lies-of-presidents.html

Thanks to Tuesdays for keeping up with Andrew Sullivan.

I just have to ask. If we don’t prosecute guys who pretty clearly OK’d torturing people, are we going to prosecute people for anything?

Unclear On the Concept

Weren’t these guys big fans of some dude who, you know, who was basically tortured to death because he believed in supreme loyalty to a religion considered heretical to the established powers of the country?

Support for terror suspect torture higher among the faithful.

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

This Is How Canada Rolls

I’d love to say, this is how “we” roll. But I’m not Canadian.
Yet.

Operation Diplomat
How Canada mounted the most complex rescue mission in its history to free Robert Fowler and Louis Guay from the clutches of al-Qaeda

And somehow, this all happened without torturing anybody…

Foresake, Disavow, Repudiate, Condemn

I never felt kinship with the lunatic fringe who have been calling Bush and Cheney war criminals for years. I have always thought they were hemp wearin’, pot smokin’, tree-huggin’, smelly flippin’ hippies. It gives me no peace to think they may have been right.

This column by “Hunter” at Daily Kos diaries is stunning, well-written, and somber. Please, please read it. An excerpt:

I am fucking sick of it, and I am fucking sick of hearing how we have entered a new age of enlightenment merely because we have stopped a transparently abominable practice, one that we condemn with vigor when undertaken by any other nation. I am fucking sick of myself, my compatriots and the rest of the public having to act as collective conscience for all those in power that, apparently, have long since evolved past even common sense, much less common shame.

I wonder if I feel this same sickness more because I am an American living “abroad”, or if I would feel the same rising level of bile if I was still back in The States. It is with great despair that I must foresake, disavow, repudiate, and condemn the actions of my government. And I am increasingly furious for being put in a position that requires me to do so.

By my count I have been represented by Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Gerald Carter, Ronald Regan, George HW Bush, William Clinton, George W. Bush, and now Barack Obama. All were “my” Presidents, whether I voted for them, or not, or even actively opposed them. Johnson expanded Vietnam in ways I would in hindsight be repulsed by, Nixon in contrast seems like nothing more than a bitter, paranoid little man, Regan obviously circumvented the Congress on Iran/Contra, and the rest seem right now to be relatively harmless, or at worst embarrasing (Clinton) for personal failures.

Perhaps it’s a product of my age that I feel so repulsed by these recent revelations, that I feel for the first time that I don’t want to be a part of this, that I think no, no, this is not my country.

At this point, I will confess to a darkness of intent that may justifiably undermine my righteous indignation. I will admit in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 a willingness to use torture. I even recall times much later when I could not understand anyone’s concern about using torture. I actually thought it might be a good thing if a field agent used torture to get info. I wanted someone out there to be willing to go to jail in order to get information. To willingly break the law to protect the country. To me it was vengeance. Unethical, punishable, but in my mind ultimately forgiveable given the circumstances.

I did not, can not, and will not accept the institutionalization or the legalization of such actions. I will admit that I was naive enough to have never considered this possibility.

We are a nation of laws, in cases to a fault. We were founded in part in response to the capriciousness of a government which acted without regard to common law. To find that there was an insidious, considered program to subvert not only the nation’s law but international law with the intent specifically to support an otherwise indefensible political decision seems to be a greater threat to our nation than Nixon’s paranoia, or Regan’s end-around.

I am aware and grateful that there are hard men of great moral flexibility who do things in dark and dangerous places for my country that I would not condone. I am also protective enough of my country to demand that they do so without the benefit of legal “cover” for their actions. Yes, I am asking them to walk the line, and when they feel it is necessary, break the law and suffer the consequences if they are caught. What they must do, they must do without that cover, or else we are all guilty of their actions.

I refuse to be a party to torture. Full stop. Period.

So Where’d The Money Go?

I’ve often wondered as debates raged about the role of government in funding the arts, just comparatively large the budget was. Look at this wall sized poster and try and find the National Endowment for the Arts, which has a budget of .128 Billion. Now gaze around to find out how that compares to other areas of the budget.

I encourage anyone who cares about government support for the arts to use the following arguments:

The NEA budget is smaller than the budget just to run the White House.
Charter Schools Grants Program is twice the size of the NEA budget.
NEA budget equals about 3 weeks of the budget for domestic HIV/AIDS funding by the Federal Govt.

Or next time you are arguing with someone who thinks the money could be better spent on social welfare programs:

Affordable Housing Program – 3 times the funding of the NEA
Immigrant and Refugee Programs – 7 times the funding of the NEA
Homelessness – 16 times the funding of the NEA

I don’t think it’s a good idea to compare NEA funding to military spending for two reasons: firstly, there’s no comparison in size or impact of the funding, and; secondly, I’ve yet to hear a guns or art argument.

I can’t resist a few little nuggets however.

The NEA budget equals only 10 days of financing for foreign government military financing the US provides.
Our financing of the Israeli military would burn through the NEA budget in 17 days. Egypt in a little more than a month.

The NEA budget would cover about 3 months of the (100 member) Senate expense accounts.

Or the entire NEA budget could get you one of these and a crew to blow the crap of whatever you want in Iraq:

The CV-22 Osprey

An absolutely brilliant visual display of the 2009 US Federal Budget can be found here.

More Math:

So the 2009 Discretionary Budget is 1182 Billion.
Indivuals will each contribute through taxes about $4,728 a piece towards that.
NEA budget is .128 Billion or .0001082 of the discretionary budget (0.01082%)
So I think that means 0.52 (fifty-two cents) goes to the NEA.
But wait, that assumes the NEA is fully funded by taxpayers, but we only put in 55% of funds.
So, it’s really more like 0.28 (twenty-eight cents) goes to the NEA from your pocket.

So next time someone says they don’t want their tax money going to fund crap like the NEA, hand them a quarter and tell them the shut the fuck up.

This pretty much sums it up

I’ve been reading, watching, investigating, and researching all over the US map all the crap that’s been going on there in the past week or so. Nothing I’ve seen sums up my feelings (except for the Michelle Malkin bit) better than this:

In other words teabaggers don’t mind paying taxes to fund the salaries of Bolivian miners, Lou Gerstner’s stock options, deliveries of “sailboat fuel,” the Hermes scarves on Sandy Weill’s jet pillows, or even the export of their own goddamn jobs. But they do hate it when someone tries to re-asphalt their roads, or help bail their slob neighbor out of foreclosure. And God forbid someone propose a health care program, or increased financial aid for college. Hell, that’s like offering to share your turkey with the other Pilgrims! That’s not what America is all about! America is every Pilgrim for himself, dammit! Raise your own motherfucking turkey!

Read the article (NSFW) for yourself.

I think maybe I’m done with this crap. I find it more and more nauseating.

How Many Different Kinds Of Crazy Can You Be?

I’ve been following the situation in the US, which has morphed into today’s “Teabagging” parties. I first off wan to suggest you go to the Daily Kos to read up on the stupidity.

But it did occur to me tonight that perhaps what we are seeing in a shift away from the concept of loyal opposition, which has been common for decades in the US, to a more European concept of opposition that I see here in Canada, namely that of the opposition “critic”.

What I see in Canada is the critics being critical no matter what the issue. Now this might be my own perception, but it seems that the criticism is always present and is offered as a counter-point to the ruling party policy. It is also put forward as a constant pressure on the ruling party. See, here under a parlimentary system, you can change governments if the ruling party loses a vote on a critical piece of “confidence” legislation. These are not fixed terms for the government. Recently the newly elected government nearly was overturned a matter of months into its term and was only saved by an unusual parlimentary procedure.

I first noted this when the former VP decided to take shots at the newly elected Obama administration weeks after the election (not weeks after the inauguration). If viewed through the lense of a parlimentary-style critical opposition structure, this can be a creative force in US politics and need not be destabilizing.

I’m just trying to find some silver lining out of the insanity that we’ve seen this last week, culminating (hopefully) today.

WTF Texas?

OK, Texas apparently wants to secede….again.

If you listen closely, it’s not clear exactly why, but…

Let’s look at some other popular things for which states have asserted “states’ rights”:

* That people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants—whether or not they were slaves—were not legal persons and could never be citizens of the United States
* That Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories
* That slaves could not sue in court.
* That slaves are property.
* That fugitive slaves could be extradited upon capture.
* Right to restrict the right to vote by any means deemed necessary, specifically w/regard to race or colour.
* Right to discriminate against people based on gender or race in allowing education, accomodations, and employment.
* Right to segregate based on gender or race for any of the above
* Right to refuse to pay federal income taxes
* Right to discriminate against buyers of homes
* Right to execute criminals
* Right to assist suicide
* Right to prohibit same-sex marriages
* Right to allow medical marijuana
* Right to print their own money

The last time Texas wanted to secede this was the reason:
“We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.”

It’s like time stopped for States’ Rights advocates sometime around 1791 and the ratification of Article X of the Bill of Rights. Somehow the other 17 Amendments, and 218 years of case law have been overlooked, especially:

Thirteenth re: Slavery abolished
Fourteenth re: Citizenship, Due Process, and Equal Protection
Fifteenth re: Voting rights (because the states just didn’t get #14)
Sixteenth re: Federal power to collect income tax
Seventeeth re: How states elect Senators
Nineteeth re: Voting rights (this time for the women, ’cause #14 and #15 still didn’t get the point across)
Twenty-fourth re: Voting rights (this time to outlaw poll taxes, ’cause #14, #15, and #19 didn’t make it clear that everybody gets to vote, whiteboy)
Twenty-sixth re: Voting rights (to clarify that everybody = everybody 18 or older)

Please don’t make me go into the bazillion pieces of case law that pretty much establish the existing relationship between the Feds and the States.

Basically, like it or not the Feds currently carry a good deal of the power and the States don’t have a very good record of being on the side of righteousness in hindsight.

Besides, Texas, if you were going to secede couldn’t you have done it back in 1995?

So Does It Or Not?

Someone else asked what I did the other day, if you want the rightists to tone down the calls against Obama and fear that it causes violence, don’t you also have to apply the same logic to music? You know, how Tipper Gore did back in the day? I cautioned that if you wanted to draw a line from Fox to Pittsburgh killings, then you might have to go back and draw lines from Dee Snider to, well I don’t know what. Maybe from Marilyn Manson to Columbine?

Daily Kos turned the idea on its head. If the Neo Victorians want to denigrate gangsta rap for leading to violence, might they also need to draw the same lines between Fox and Pittsburgh? Read and watch it here.

So, I’m not comfortable with this idea that mass media leads to violence because it leads to censorship. On the flip side, if mass media has no effect on public action, then it calls into question the efficacy of any public statement, oh say like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.

UPDATE: Um, wow, um, okaaaay. Be sure to go to that daily kos link and scroll down to watch the, um, Glenn Beck video….I might have to review my position here…

PS: But the Ice Cube video is also really good and makes a point too…..

So where to draw the line?

This Just In…

Christians complain they are be persecuted for not being allowed to persecute homosexuals….

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30146878

“I don’t want to say that gay marriage is responsible for mass murders but… gay marriage is responsible for mass murders”

 http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/904759988.html

Tip O’The Hat To FARK.com

Watch Where You’re Shootin’ Folks

There’s a fair amount of speculation by leftists that rightist radio and TV contributed to the violence recently seen against police in Pittsburgh.

Careful folks, if you believe that, then it follows that violent video games and rap lyrics have the same effect.

Now, I’m on record that I believe that some comments by rightists are over the top and in some cases seditious.

But I think now that there is no such thing as sedition in the US.  For good reason the Sedition Act was repealed in 1920, after 2 years in service.  It was grossly misused, poorly written and is unlikely to have stood a constitutional test.  God help us if it had been in place over the past eight years.

There’s other law to cover this:

INCITE A RIOT – Urging or instigating other persons to riot, but shall not be deemed to mean the mere oral or written (1) advocacy of ideas or (2) expression of belief, not involving advocacy of any act or acts of violence or assertion of the rightness of, or the right to commit, any such act or acts.

“…a public disturbance involving (1) an act or acts of violence by one or more persons part of an assemblage of three or more persons, which act or acts shall constitute a clear and present danger of, or shall result in, damage or injury to the property of any other person or to the person of any other individual, or (2) a threat or threats of the commission of an act or acts of violence by one or more persons part of an assemblage of three or more persons having, individually or collectively, the ability of immediate execution of such threat or threats, where the performance of the threatened act or acts of violence would constitute a clear and present danger of, or would result in, damage or injury to the property of any other person or to the person of any other individual.”

Or, in many jurisdictions:

Inciting to violence.

(A) No person shall knowingly engage in conduct designed to urge or incite another to commit any offense of violence, when either of the following apply:

(1) The conduct takes place under circumstances that create a clear and present danger that any offense of violence will be committed;

(2) The conduct proximately results in the commission of any offense of violence.

I have to be honest, I think most of this rightist rhetoric walks right up to the line, but it would be hard to show that the circumstances in which these comments are made are those wherein a “clear and present danger that any offense of violence will be committed”.  Namely because the statutes are written on the assumption that the person inciting the violence is physically present in the situation described, or at the very least is directly and knowingly communicating with a person in such a situation.

 

So I say back off on the claims of causality.  You can condemn them for being irresponsible, but you can’t tie them to the crimes.  That is, unless you want to see Dee Snider in jail too.

 

 

 

About Idiocy, Not Race

I am astounded that this is the same state that gave us Gov. Ann Richards and satirist Molly Ivins.

But then again, it also gave us W.

Good lord, seriously?  This just is a green light for every comedian out there.

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/04/09/brown-asian-names/

Perhaps all Texas names should be limited to those registered prior to when Texas became a state.

We’ll start with Aquilla and end with Zapata.

If it works well for them in Texas, Wisconsin plans to institute the same rule for all the Poles.  Minnesota plans to outlaw the umlaut, and Iowa is planning to ban the use of three or more consonants in a row.

Zbigniew Brzezinski will henceforth be known as Big Newski.
Yo-Yo Ma of course will now be Jojo Ma.
Pat Morita is now Pat Morris.
Connie Chung is now Connie Young.
and conductor Seiji Ozawa…

Is now Abe Vigoda.

Fascism? I’ll Give You Fascism You Twit!

From the far better Tuesdays blog feature “Quote Of The Day”

“It all adds up to me, now having to admit that I was wrong. Our government is not marching down the road towards communism or socialism…they’re not marching us that direction. They’re marching us to a brand of non-violent fascism. Or to put it another way, they’re marching us towards 1984: Big Brother.

Like it or not, fascism is on the rise.“
– glen beck, fox news

First, why should we pay any attention to anything the critics on the far right have to say?  Helloooo, anybody look at the stats after the last eight years?  Bush and Co. left a flaming bag of poo on the doorstep of the Whitehouse and they and their little pals now crouch in the bushes snickering and jeering as Obama tries to figure out what to do with it.   Credibility = zero.

Ok, now on to the comment, which is as clear an example of careening pseudo-intellectualism as I have seen in a long time.  Kudos to Tony for pick it up.  I realize that it is a popular conception that on the extreme edges of the political spectrum things get a little quantum, with various isms acting as both a populist wave and an authoritarian particle.  But let’s examine from the basics on up to the final utterance, shall we?

Oh, fuck it, nobody will read this the way I have it laid out in my mind – get to the point as M would say.

OK, Beck so now we’re not marching towards communism or socialism – brother isms based on collective ownership of the means of production and variations on that theme.  Nice to see you lower your screechings long enough to catch your breath.  However, the opposite direction would be capitalism, not fascism.  But I’ll give you the (large) benefit of the doubt and imagine your troops not doing an about face, but a vector over to fascism.

You lost me at non-violent fascism.  By definition, these two items are mutually exclusive, in fact the utterance of the phrase “non-violent fascism” is a pristine example of an oxymoron.  So maybe you are trying to inject wry humour?  OK, now I understand why you continue this line of humour by clearly choosing the wrong illustration; 1984 being a book about totalitarianism not fascism.

Yes there is a difference.  Yes it matters.  Nothing compares to a holocaust, and people are righteously upset when you make such comparisons.  I would argue that having seen extreme examples of all these political models in the 20th Century, it does justify disgust when they are inappropriately equated.

So it does disgust me when such comparisons are made by a lynch mob of nattering good old boys, self-identified seditionists, and opportunistic loyalists to Reaganomics.

To complain about isms under the circumstances seems a little like complaining the Captain of the Titanic got a little bossy there towards the end.

And for a supporter of the party of W to suggest that “fascism is on the rise” after the myriad violations of US and international law committed by the prior administration smacks of an association fallacy.  For example, Obama plans partial takeover of the banks in return for bailouts.  Communists own all the banks.  Therefore, Obama is a Communist.

I have yet to see a Republican plan for treatment of the current economic crisis, but imagine what would happen if we followed the principles of Reaganomics:

Reaganomics refers to the economic policies promoted by United States President Ronald Reagan during the 1980s.  The four pillars of Reagan’s economic policy were to: reduce the growth of government spending, reduce income and capital gains marginal tax rates, reduce government regulation of the economy, and control the money supply to reduce inflation.

I suggest that reagonomics would be a disaster in the current circumstances, which seem to call for expansion of governmetn spending, increased regulation and expansion of teh money supply.  The risks are many; stagflation for example, but the risk of doing nothing seems more catastrophic.

Our Hull Is Pressed Deep Into The Waterline, Under The Accumulated Weight Of Your Debt

Sedition  be sure to check the definition before you watch the video.

I’ll just point out for the record that this flaming bag of poo was left on America’s doorstep by Mssrs. Bush and Cheney, although I must say the gentleman of the Parliment has a much more eloquent turn of phrase.

Oh yes, by the way, the odious speaker in the video references the Council on Foreign Relations and a recent speech by Timothy Geithner.  You can read a transcript here.  You can literally skip to the very end of the transcript for the relevant portion.

And there is a book referred to.  You can see it here.  And you can see a description of the Author’s day job here.  You can also just check out the homepage of his Foundation here.  I think that will have the desired effect, without any superfluous comment by me.

We Are Well and Truly F*cked

I had a friend, maybe a roommate, who said the line that makes up today’s header, one night in response to some insurmountable problem we faced.  He, and the problem, have long since faded in my memory, but the phrase remains.

That sentiment is the lead sentence in an amazingly thorough and clearly written article by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone.  In it, Matt lays out how the US economy get into this mess, who is responsible, and what exactly has been going on so far in response.   Notice, I don’t say “has been going on to solve it”, and that’s because I’m not at all convinced that what has gone on so far has been aimed at solving the crisis.

I just have to ask after reading this article why the government didn’t just give everybody some money to pay their personal debts that underpinned all these failed debt instruments, that were in turn insured by AIG?  It seems to me that it would have been cheaper.  No?  Well, it would have been wildly more popular and no more likely to fail than the plan as explained by Matt, in my opinion.

But who am I?  I’m just some dumb bastard that can barely pay his own bills.  How the hell am I supposed to understand ABCP, CDO or that a “naked CDS” wasn’t a fetish site for fans of CSI Miami?  After reading this article however, I was struck by a thought that this is exactly what “they” want me to think!  “They” being some Gordon Gekko type; thoroughly Ivy league, white, and smarter than thou.

I’ve alwasy been bothered by the dumbing down of America, but was also turned off by the hijacking of this argument by moralists who seemed to be more concerned that we were losing accepted knowledge in the face of new criticism from non-western and post-modern thinkers.  But I did always wonder why?  Who would want the country to raise Bart Simpson, Hank Hill, and Peter Griffin to stardom?  What benefit is there is lowered expectations for intelligent discourse?

Matt hints at this in his article, saying,
“By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future.”

So we spent the last 15 years making everybody happy to be stupid, then create a massive emergency only the really smart could fix.  But the problem is the “really smart ones” were the guys who created the problem, and they are more interested in keeping their money in their wallets and their asses out of jail.  We are going to put the guys who robbed us f*cking blind in charge of fixing the system that allowed them to rob us f*cking blind.

I think it is going to take a generation for the humour of this situation to fully sink in.

In the mean time, I’m not putting one more dime in the hands of my mortgage lender, and I will happily pay a Canadian accountant to make sure I never pay another dime to the US government.  As far as paying those US credit card bills to companies getting bailed out I’ll keep asking myself “Why?” everytime I cut them a check.

Midwestern morals, it seems, take a bit longer to stamp down…

The Deep End Of the Ocean

Sometimes you run across things that just make your blood run cold.

The link is an audio link to a conservative radio host who uses what I found to be a shocking epithet to describe the new US First Lady Michelle Obama. 

What I don’t understand is where this hatred comes from.  With Bush, I understood the hatred over policy decisions.  With Clinton, I understood the hatred over his moral choices.

This…this to me is the going off the deep end…the implications of which are truly frightening.

I guess what gets to me is that I’ve heard the exact same story that Michelle Obama tells from a black female colleague.  And maybe that’s why I react so strongly to this commentators attack; it feels like an attack on someone I know who felt very deeply and honestly about the effort they had to put into their success and the loss that they incurred to get it. 

Perhaps what makes it even more uncomfortable is that it appears to be coming from a person with no personal connection to the circumstances derided, but rather seems to be from a position of privilege.

In the past the left has  flamed the right with claims that some of the right’s criticism of Obama used code words for outdated racist impulses.  In this case, there is no code being used, and in the end that is what I find most troubling.

The Crucible

From Greg Sandow in WSJ:

“The San Francisco city government is facing a $576 million budget deficit. Cuts have been proposed, some involving public health. For hours at a meeting of the city’s Board of Supervisors, there were protests from advocates for homeless people, medical clinics that serve the poor, and many other worthy groups.

So somebody proposed an alternative — cut funding for the symphony and ballet. The matter hasn’t been resolved, but would you like to be the ballet representative, arguing to keep your funds, with people from endangered clinics in the room?”

Do it.  Make the argument.  Post your comments.

Economics?  Job Creation?  Americans for the Arts makes a great argument.  But I wish I could put my hands on a foundation study I saw years ago that showed that other infrastructure investments paid off just as well as arts investments.  In other words, build a mall or a new freeway exit and you’d get the same economic impact.  I always thought this argument, which I’ve made many many times myself, was a little weak.  People didn’t go to these shows originally because it was good for their economy, they did so because the shows were good.  They fulfilled a need, be it enlightenment or entertainment.

Enlightentment or entertainment?  Between the web and cable tv I think most people have got that covered without a trip to the local ballet.  You tell me how I’m supposed to compete with wikipedia, TMZ, or HBO, each with economic efficiencies we could never touch in the arts.

Maybe it’s simply artistry, the exceptional made manifest in your midst, live.  Corey Dargel at Mind the Gap interprets Lawrence Lessig’s Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy as suggesting that the more people get involved in creating content, the greater the appreciation will be for true artistry.  I could go with that.  It puts the pressure back on us as “fine” artists to make quality, which plays to our strengths.  

So, justify your existence fine artists.

Without any further thinking, I fall back on an argument I’ve held dear for years.  We put the quality in quality of life.  If you are saving people from addiction, suicide, putting roofs over their heads, feeding them, curing disease, and generally keeping them alive, what are you doing it for?  So they’ll not miss the next season of sitcoms?  So they can lead meaningless work-a-day lives? 

There is an inherent value in human life, and that can be measured in the enlightenment of the individual (an internal measure) and the benefits that person brings to others (and external measure).  Various religious and economic theories go further into measuring that value than I can.  However, to simply exist is not enough, and since I believe that creative expression is inherent in the human spirit (something else I believe in), and necessary for human enlightenment, I think the arts are a critical part of public life and must garner some sort of public financial support.  Where the argument gets hairy is when you point out that there are many avenues for creative expression and enlightenment now available that require no such public subsidy.  Another is to point out that many an enlightened individual never set foot inside a theatre.  In fact there are broad swathes of philosophy and religion that extol the virtues of the natural world as a source of enlightenment.

This is hard…

Why Should I Pay For It?

I notice the argument often, “Why should I pay for someone else’s kid’s education?”, or “Why should I pay for the arts when I don’t care about them?”, or currently in Canada “Why should I pay for the CBC when I don’t listen to it?”.

So here’s my arguments for why you should pay for things (via your taxes) that you don’t personally benefit from or agree with:

1.  You do benefit, even if not directly.  An educated populace is the prequisite for a thriving democracy, for instance.  Even more importantly, an education populace derived from a common text is the underpinning of a society.  Indirect benefits accrue from funding for the arts, culture, national public broadcasting, social services, farm subsidies, etc. etc.

2.  If I have to pay for your military, you have to pay for my art.  There’s no federal check-off of where your tax money goes.  We elect reps to decide how we divide up the pie.  That’s the basic idea behind a representative democracy.  You can argue against arts funding, I can argue against your military budget.  Turned on its head, I could say, “Fine you don’t want to fund PBS, CBC, NEA, etc?  I want 100% of my tax money to go there.”  I bet there are enough people who do support these things to fully fund them.

3.  Democracy is compromise.  Nobody gets everything they want.  In fact, the system is kind of set up to allow for the minority to get a fair share of what it wants so they don’t exit the system and try to overthrow it.  Throw ‘em a bone and keep them in the system and everybody is fairly happy, if not estatic about the situation.

Got more arguments for why in general you should be expected to pay for stuff you don’t personally benefit from or agree with?  Add ‘em.

Oh Stop Snivelling You Big Pussy, I Was Just Teasing…

I think I have a new crush.  Meghan McCain.  She told one of the chatterati to “Kiss my fat ass!”  I love that someone can just say it like it is.

Seems Ms. McCain opined on the need for reconciliation betwen GOP and Dem sides of the coin in DC.

Then one of the chatterati derided her, not for her naivete or moderation in political opinion, but on her appearance.  Never a good move.

“What do young women think when I speak my mind about politics and I want to have a political discussion about the ideological future of the Republican Party, and the answer is, ‘She’s fat, she shouldn’t have an opinion.’ What kind of message are we sending young women?” she asked.
(source:  CNN)

What I love most about this story is the buried lead.  In response to this criticsm, the critic said “that she needs to learn to deal with satire and ‘teasing’.”  Said the critic, “Can I say ‘lighten up,’ or is that offensive too?”.
(don’t correct my punctuation; I don’t care)

Now, as the father of two small children, I’m already familiar with the “but I was just teasing” defense.  It doesn’t work when you’re four, it certainly doesn’t work when you’re forty.

For the critic’s take on the matter, click here.  I think it’s fair to hear her (oh, didn’t I mention it was a woman?) side of the story.

Destroy the Village to Save the Village

“It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.” is a quote attributed to various individuals but is generally agreed to refer to American military action in Vietnam.  The underlying theme is that overwhelming or unnecessary or ill-advised actions were taken in an attempt to preserve something that was unfortunately destroyed in the process.  Additinoally, it requires that those doing the destroying actually point to the destruction of the thing to be preserved as a success.

Dick Cheney and George Bush seemed to have adopted this mindset in their waging of the “war on terror”.  Many people have pointed out their overstepping of the bounds of morality, ethics, legality, and international standards of conduct during their administration.

Cut to the chase?  OK.  They say, “What we did was OK, and you didn’t get attacked.  Now the new guy wants to stop doing some of the stuff we were doing.  I think that’s going to end up with you getting attacked.”

So let’s say you got robbed.  The cops say, “we’ll make sure that doesn’t happen any more.”  You say “Great!”  Then you find out the reason you haven’t been robbed in the last seven years is because the cops have been rounding up guys, beating them up and locking them up for no reason.

I for one, would say “Gee guys, thanks for keeping me safe and all, but do you think we could maybe not do the kinds of things I thought we all agreed we weren’t going to allow you (the cops) to do?”

That’s the way I look at Dick Cheney’s talk last weekend about how the Obama administration actions were making it more likely we were going to get attacked in the US.

How do you feel?

Why Should We Listen To You?

9-11 is always the excuse for the most disasterous administration in my lifetime.  Cheney goes on TV to explain why.  When confronted with the numbers/evidence he has no excuse except 9-11.

Yes, we had no further domestic attacks, I will give the Bush admin. credit for that.  No argument from me.  Here’s your medal, George.

“…we ended up with 2 wars…” One of which was by choice!  I remain convinced that the road to ruin runs throug Baghdad.

Stuff happens…

“This Song Ain’t About You!”

You see, Stewart’s real critique wasn’t about Cramer, it was also only marginally about CNBC.

Click above for a great article on the REAL story behind the Daily Show drubbing of CNBC host Screaming Man Cramer.

Ok, you don’t have time to click through:  Here’s the gist: 
“When we can’t compete with a comic in terms of speaking truth to power, then it’s more clear than ever that journalism in the US has lost its way.”

From the same article a link regarding how nobody would really miss print media if it went away…

This is a test of this blogs ability (and mine) to post accurate hyperlinks.  Did it work?  Do you have any comments on the story?

Arts Jobs ARE Real Jobs

One puzzlement in the debate over the congressional stimulus bill has been the inability — or the perverse refusal — of many to include jobs in the culture industry as a legitimate concern. Politicians of various stripes, from California Democrat Dianne Feinstein to Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn, seem blind to the simple reality.

Scott Lilly of the Center for American Progress recently put it like this:

Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) was typical of the opponents to the stimulus legislation who seized on the arts to discredit the overall package; he told the House chamber, “It included wasteful government spending that has nothing to do with creating jobs. As I asked on this floor last week, what does $50 million to the National Endowment for the Arts have to do with creating jobs in Indiana?” Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) was even more emphatic, saying, “We have real people out of work right now and putting $50 million in the NEA and pretending that’s going to save jobs as opposed to putting $50 million in a road project is disingenuous.”

Lilly cited a government study that showed at least 3 million arts industry workers are in support jobs —electricians, carpenters, seamstresses, janitors, accountants, publicists, etc. — and they’ll be just as out-of-work as a Wall Street trader or a Wal-Mart clerk if an arts center cuts back or closes. So what gives? Why are so many blind to the simple reality that arts workers are real workers?

I chalk it up to our celebrity culture.

Funding for theater? Tim Robbins doesn’t need money! Funding for art museums? Jeff Koons is rich! Funding for concert halls? Yo-Yo Ma is a superstar!

The glare of the celebrity spotlight obscures our view of the ticket-taker at Robbins’ play trying to make ends meet, the preparator at Koons’ museum exhibition struggling to put a kid through college or the education program coordinator at the concert hall where Yo-Yo Ma performs who has a pile of medical bills. Their jobs are at risk.

But they are anonymous, faceless. And of course, most artists are themselves obscure. Celebrity culture teaches us to equate the arts with fame, fame with success, success with money. Even in a national financial crisis, why would that need stimulus?

The distortion is severe. Whether Feinstein, Coburn, Pence, Kingston and the rest are just dumb, or whether they do get it and are cynically using the knowledge for their own political purposes is immaterial. People will still suffer, with no help from them.

— Christopher Knight

Credit: Andy Warhol, “Elvis,” 1970; print. Los Angeles County Museum of Art
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/816965/39667635

No Nipples For You!

This is why you/we don’t get arts funding. The wrong people are in charge… see below

LA Times

By Louis Sahagun

February 10 2009

A battle over what constitutes “overtly sexual” art unfolded on Long Beach’s trendy main thoroughfare on Monday, with an artist demanding that two of her abstract nudes be put back up on the walls of a public exhibition organized by a program that deemed them offensive. (Really, you have to see the paintings)

Liza Simone, executive producer of Phantom Galleries L.A., which sponsored the exhibition, said, “The public went bonkers when Janet Jackson revealed one nipple during a Super Bowl game. Anything that could potentially offend someone, we don’t show.”
she added. “We have quality control.”

Simone said Christiana’s series was selected to be among 17 ongoing exhibitions installed throughout the city because “she went to Cal State Long Beach” and was acquainted with Phantom Galleries curator Christine Faraci.

So much for quality control.

When idiots and poseurs and dilettantes like Liza Simone have any say or control over art, then I suggest that we do not deserve public support. We have created our own generation of slef-appointed pseudo-intellectual “academie” members of the sort that were offended, ridiculed and eventually run out of Paris 150 years ago.

The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-long-beach-art10-2009feb10,0,2515704.story

Visit latimes.com at http://www.latimes.com

Canada as International Crown Council

Something I’m working on for a local Op-Ed piece, and to clarify my stated position as a “non-interventionist”. Let me know what you think:

Canada’s Leadership Role in International Conflicts

The responsibility to protect should not be confused with the notion of preemptive war as practiced under the “Bush Doctrine” by the US. Comparison of the two leads to confusion as expressed recently: “It strikes me as strange that Canadians … believe, on the one hand, that the US and Canada do not have the right to invade another country in order to protect innocent civilians here from an imminent threat to their lives but that the US and Canada do have the right – moreover, the duty – to invade another country in order to protect innocent civilians living there.”

The key element of the “Bush Doctrine” is that the US “will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country…”

Preemptive war actually has a Canadian connection in its establishing principles. In 1837 British forces in Canada crossed the US border and killed several Canadian rebels and one American citizen who were preparing an offensive against the British in Canada, known thereafter as the “Caroline Affair”. The US rejected the justification offered by Britain at the time. In 1842, U.S. Sect. of State Daniel Webster pointed out that the necessity for forcible reaction must be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation. As part of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, the affair was settled by an expression of regret on the part of Britain that there had not been an immediate explanation and apology for the occurrence, and defined for the next 160 years the acceptable basis for preemptive war.

It is curious that Canada played a leading role in defining both legal preemptive war and the principle of a responsibility to protect. In Sept 2000 the Govt. of Canada responded to a Secretary-General of the UN call to action and established the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). The purpose was to reconcile the notion of intervention for “humanitarian” purposes and state sovereignty. The resulting recommendations formed the basis of the notion of a “responsibility to protect”.

The responsibility to protect as proposed by the Canadian-led ICISS requires that intervention must be based on six criteria: right authority, just cause, right intention, last resort, proportional means, and reasonable prospects.

Right authority calls for the UN, the Security Council, or in their absence, a regional authority to take action. It does not allow for the unilateral action of the US or Canada or a coalition of the willing to take such action.

Just cause is an ancient notion reflected in all six of these principles, but for the purposes of this Canadian-led commission, they specifically stated two situations which would meet this criteria:
• large scale loss of life, actual or apprehended, with genocidal intent or not, which is the product either of deliberate state action, or state neglect or inability to act, or a failed state situation; or
• large scale “ethnic cleansing,” actual or apprehended, whether carried out by killing, forced expulsion, acts of terror or rape.

It is important to note that the authors go to great lengths to very narrowly define situations with qualify as just cause for the purposes of the responsibility to protect, specifically precluding its use for the purpose of “spreading democracy”.

Right intention allows for correcting or preventing a wrong, but does not allow for material gain or maintenance of economies or advantages; last resort is heavily emphasized under the principles of responsibility to protect and calls for a wide variety of methods to be employed prior to any sort of military intervention; proportional means calls for a scale of response required to achieve success and nothing more; while probability of success precludes futile action, or actions that would require a disproportionate measure of force to succeed.

Canada, which has played a leading role in the definition of both preemptive war and responsibility to protect, now has a leading role to play in actions taken under the principles of both. I suggest that Canada pursue the application of the classical definition of legal preemptive war, and refrain from, if not actively oppose actions taken outside of that narrow definition. Furthermore, I suggest that Canada take a similar vigorous stance with respect to the responsibility to protect, and not apply it to every conscience-shocking situation we face today. Canada is uniquely positioned to play International Crown Counsel (Attorney General) to anyone who would presume to act as the world’s policeman.

We Can Still Impeach Bush, Right?

Has Bush lost his ever-lovin’ mind? First he crosses the border into Pakistan to attack the Taliban, which I kind of gritted my teeth over and took like a man. Now, he’s ordered troops into Syria to kill some guy* who’s been smuggling weapons into Iraq.

Problem number one: The war in Iraq is bs. We should not be there, period. Now that we’ve broken it, however we need to FIX IT and get the hell out asap. Bleeding the war into neighboring countries is probably not the way to go – examples abound in SE Asia.

Problem number two: The prospect of Bush using Iraq as a staging area for attacks by US forces on neighboring counties is EXACTLY what the locals in the area has been using as recruiting material for anti-US forces. Thanks, George, ya just proved ‘em right.

Problem number three: Syria, has for the most part, focused its animosity on Lebanon, and loomed over Israel, but without outward violence. Now we just gave them every reason to prove thier territorial integrity and the worth of their miliary forces. They probably are not going to focus them to the east, Iraq or the US. Oh, did I mention that Israel is currently in the middle of a leadership crisis and Lebanon JUST is barely getting over their latest sectarian violence? Nothing like a big F-you to Saad Hariri and Tzipi Livni from our pal George. Good luck kids!

Problem number four: The NYT has checked its credentials at the door on this one. First they report the airstrikes on Sunday as not involving US aircraft, then within 12 hours report that not does it involve them, but also US troops ON THE GROUND in Syria! OK, so they bought the US military line on the first story, but then they don’t even reference the LIES they were fed when they file the second story. PLUS they spend almost the entire story on the US justification for such actions WHEN NO SUCH RIGHT HAS EVER BEEN RECOGNIZED BY INTERNATIONAL LAW. It is a wholly owned fabrication of the Bush administration you dumb m-er-f-ers and you talk about it as is it is legitimate?!?!?!?

For a lame-duck administration to pull this kind of BS one week before an election is indefensible under any circumstances. Crossing an international boundary in violation of international law, the soverignty of a nation, by military forces, to kill people? Isn’t that like, um, I dunno, considered an act of war?!?!?!?

Seriously, I need to go to bed and wake up tomorrow and remind myself I’m in Canda…nice, bland Canada, ahhhhhh………

*the “some guy” may or may not be linked to Al-Qaeda in Iraq, but why should we believe the US gov’t on that one? They thought Maher Arar was a terrorist too…..

Stick a Fork In Her, She’s Done

The Rake, gathering the stray thoughts of a wind-blown mind.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081021/ap_on_el_pr/palin_gay_marriage_9

Start there. VP nominee for the GOP has solidly endorsed a ban on same-sex marriage.
OK, not unusual for a social conservative. Oh, no wait, that’s not right.

She’s endorsed a FEDERAL ban on same-sex marriage.

Wow, um, OK, but isn’t marriage law governed by the STATES Ms. GOP-states-rights-small-govt. Lady?

Now I’m distracted by the whole counter-intuitive position of a woman who has enthusiastically supported states rights as governor, so much so that she has “palled around with” separatists.

Oh, but it gets better.

She actually wants a CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT to ban same-sex marriage.
A
CONSTITUTIONAL
AMENDMENT

A document composed to govern the rights of citizens and limit the rights of government in the exercise of a republican form of democracy. One of the pinnacles of 18th C. political thought and the template for the democratic revolution of the 19th and 20th Centuries.

A document what SPECIFICALLY STATES, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

Is now to be used as a tool to enforce the social norms of a religious minority. Riiiiiight……….

No matter what you think of same-sex marriage, the complete lack of constitutional awareness (let alone knowledge) is enough to disqualify this candidate for office.

DO NOT TAKE THE BAIT!!!! If you are a same-sex proponent, ignore the spurious argument about the appropriatness of the legislation governing civil recognition same-sex couples!!!!

Point out that this candidate lacks the ability to truthfully take the oath of office, which includes a requirement to “SUPPORT AND DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES”.

I would suggest that any candidate who so enthusiastically supports the use of the Constitution to forward the aims of religion, and who is simultaneously so clearly at odds with the basic tenants of their own party’s current principles of governance is clearly unfit for office of this importance.