Sick Rebellion

The House passed a health care overhaul that would cost $940 billion over ten years and extend coverage to 32 million uninsured Americans, a signature accomplishment for the Obama Administration. All House Republicans and 35 Democrats voted against the bill, and the atmosphere in the House chambers was raucous and volatile.
There were strong emotions on both sides of the aisle that night.
Anti-abortion Rep. Bart Stupak, a Democrat, had the floor and was advocating for assurance that the health care proposal would not include federal funding for abortions. That’s when Texas Republican Rep. Randy Neugebauer screamed “baby killer” at Stupak, a move that brought swift condemnation. So much for preserving what little shred of decorum and dignity Congress still has. What’s really odd is the aftermath of Neugebauer’s outburst. Much like South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson’s condemnation during President Obama’s address to Congress when Wilson shouted “You lie!”, supporters are coming out of the woodwork to congratulate and donate money to Neugebauer.
Seems that emotional outbursts help rake the cash in.
Now if a Democratic lawmaker were to have shouted at former President Bush, or any Republican member of Congress, you’d see calls for that lawmaker to be expelled from Congress and hung from the highest lamppost in Foggy Bottom.
What’s particularly disturbing is the aftermath of this health care vote. Opponents have turned violent and threatened ten Democratic Representatives who voted for the bill.
The district headquarters of Rep. Louise Slaughter and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had bricks thrown through their windows.
Kansas Congressmen Emanuel Cleaver and Dennis Moore both received threats. A caller told Cleaver that he would receive “a bullet to the head,” while Moore received a call from someone promising to drive to his house and do him harm.
Stupak was threatened over the phone several times. One threatening caller said, “I hope you bleed…(get) cancer and die.”
Stupak also received threatening faxes, one depicting him with a noose around his neck that read, “All Baby Killers come to unseemly ends either by the hand of man or the hand of God.”
South Carolina Rep. John Clyburn was threatened with a photo of a noose. Clyburn is black, which made sending him an image of a noose even more disturbing.
People who threaten assassination and deface property aren’t patriots. They’re terrorists. I hope the FBI catches these Travis Bickle devotees and ship them to Camp X-Ray where they’ll share cells with their brothers-in-arms. Maybe they can learn bomb-making techniques from a 16-year old Iraqi boy.
But I’m not surprised the Teabaggers use violence and intimidation as an outlet.
Just look at what happened to Bob, a former nuclear engineer with a doctorate from Cornell University who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and went on disability. Bob attended a health care rally in Columbus, Ohio with a sign that read: “Got Parkinson’s? I do and you might. Thanks for helping! That’s community.” Pro-health care bill supporters and Teabaggers clashed and Bob sat down in front of his opponents. I guess it was a silent protest, or Bob just wanted the camera to film him seated in front of a bunch of furious patriots.
Anyway, one of the Teabaggers crouches over Bob and says, “If you’re looking for a handout, you’re in the wrong end of town. Nothing for free over here, you have to work for everything you get.”
Another Teabagger, who looked like an accountant or insurance rep, started throwing dollar bills at Bob like he was a stripper at Scores.
“I’ll pay for this guy! Here you go! Start a pot! I’ll pay for ya!” he said, and tossed money at Bob. “I’ll decide when to give you money! No more handouts!”
“You love a communist!” another one shouted.
I’ve always found it peculiar that those who profess to understand Jesus are the first ones to behave like the Romans.
All that was missing from the interaction between the Teabaggers and Bob was the crown of thorns. I’m not saying Bob was some kind of messianic figure, but he is disabled and was trying to make people aware of his plight. He shouldn’t be mocked and ridiculed in the public square. Nobody should. Respectful dialog and decorum must win the day because we’re Americans, damn it!
I guess the political paradigm shift is away from Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” to “Government is bad and leave us alone.”
Surely, this is an isolated incident. Only a few bad apples in a vast fruit cart of political dissent, right?
Even before the vote, protestors slung racial epithets at black lawmakers and anti-gay comments at Rep. Barney Frank, an openly gay Congressman.
Since when did the Teabaggers go from patriotic Americans fighting for freedom and justice to the cross-eyed Klan bumpkins from “Mississippi Burning?” I’m sure George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson didn’t spit at the Hessians and call them the N-word.
What separates the loathsome Teabaggers from the Founding Fathers and those brave minutemen who fought the American Revolution is intelligence and morality. The current bumper crop of sign-waving yahoos are really, really stupid. They’re ignorant sheep who believe unquestioningly in everything Glenn Beck espouses about capitalism and big government squeezing out the citizens and socialist tirades that would give Joe McCarthy’s corpse a wet dream.
The men who founded this country were from varied backgrounds, yet possessed a singular desire to compromise, negotiate and reason. They believed in order and the goodness of the Enlightenment and debated with skill and passion.
They didn’t, as many Teabaggers are doing, regurgitate hackneyed slogans and call the president a “communist,” or a “socialist” or repeat false claims that he was born in Kenya.
Look, I get it. I understand that people should work hard and keep what they earn. I understand it's tough these days to make a living and that the American Dream is slipping away.
But that doesn't give you the right to threaten bodily harm to anyone or smash windows like skinhead hooligans.
This angry, petulant mob won’t desist until members of Congress who don’t agree with their agenda are dead. That’s the kind of bloody revolution a Robespierre or a Stalin might endorse, and the last thing these growling Republican maniacs want is to be compared to the French or the communists.
It’s hard taking anything the Teabaggers say seriously. Sure, the health care bill was a legislative clusterfuck, forged from a year of debating and arguing and back room deals that would make New Jersey politicians embarrassed. And it’s probably unconstitutional to force Americans to but health insurance. Let the courts strike it down like the Supreme Court struck down the New Deal. Let the process work and the checks and balances the Teabaggers apparently don’t understand, work.
If the Teabaggers win, if their sick rebellion unfolds the way they want it, then what kid of place would America be then?
I suspect it would be a country with censorship, conformity and where the rational and reasoned are chastised or worse.
It would be the very place the Founding Fathers fought to change.

Porn Is Everywhere

Pornography went full-throttle mainstream about ten years ago and is getting more exposure in popular culture now than ever before.
Back in the day, you’d keep a stack on Penthouse magazines your uncle gave you hidden away from your parents. Now with DVDs, the Internet and the proliferation of pornography out in the open, such private pleasures created a populace desensitized to what once was taboo.
It used to be that pornography, the explicit manufacturing and distribution of graphic sexual materials, was a seedy underground enterprise, perpetrated by organized crime and a few sleazy characters in their Manhattan studio apartments or trailers scattered throughout Orange County. Entrepreneurs like Irving Klaw, who photographed women in garters and stockings performing light bondage in the 1950s might have made garnered Bettie Page international notoriety, but was hounded in his day as a purveyor of smut.
Everything was encased in brown paper wrappers and hidden below the counters, or shown on small screens in basement clubs or movie theaters with sticky floors. Porn in America was the hidden vice, food for perverts and degenerates and the bane of puritanical authorities that took this material to the torch.
Porn’s influence in popular culture manifested at the height of the porn chic era, with the release of 1972’s “Deep Throat.” The film’s impact spilled over from the dingy Times Square theaters to mainstream theatres across America. Linda Lovelace’s performance as a frustrated woman with a clitoris in her throat who could only experience pleasure by giving head became one of the top grossing pornographic movies of its time and sparked obscenity trials to ban it. Couples who never watched porn before went to see “Deep Throat,” and its presence in small towns prompted local police departments to closes theaters showing the film.
Though the porn chic era had its dark side, (“The Devil in Miss Jones” starring Georgina Spelvin and Harry Reems, “Behind the Green Door” starring Marilyn Chambers and the rise and fall of John Holmes) content was mostly lighthearted sexual romps with dialog and production values that rivaled most small films of the day.
Current pornographic subject matter is mostly hardcore, emphasizing anal, gangbangs and domination. Once clever dialog or erotic subtext has been totally stripped away, leaving just explicit sex acts recorded not on film, but on video. Once playful actors have now been replaced by weary amateurs who fuck each other like libidinous robots.
During the porn chic era of the 1970s and early 1980s, pornography had an almost romantic sensibility, a classical edge far removed from its seedy past.
Within this multi-million dollar business, a circus of freaks gyrating and getting off in several studios in Van Nuys, the Hollywood of porn, nestled in the San Fernando Valley. The output has gotten more explicit and gratuitous, with more content produced than ever before. What used to be titillating groping and close-up penetration of the girl next door with perk tits and massive untrimmed pubic hair, today’s porn is more violent, more hardcore and bereft of the whimsy of 1979’s “Debbie Does Dallas”, one of the more successful films of the classic porn era.
What used to be risqué and fun has become a cum-soaked den of humiliation and sodomy bereft of subtlety. The old titles were evocative and conjured an erotic mystique.
Today that mystique has been ruined by the direct and shocking, such as “Gang Bang Angels,” “Interracial Cheerleader Orgy” and “Cum Fart Cocktails #6.”
I don’t know what’s more disturbing, the fact that someone made a movie called “Cum Fart Cocktails” or that there are six of them.
Some porn titles try to be cute and put a humorous spin on mainstream Hollywood titles like “Forrest Hump,” “Star Whores,” “The Sperminator.”
Why go through the trouble of portraying sex as something lurid or scintillating when you can have “Assy McAss and Her Asstastic Assventures?” I made that title up. It really doesn’t take any imagination to name a porn film.
A simple straight girl-on-guy encounter is viewed as passé and bland in today’s hyper-sexed ghetto porn world, and the audiences demand rougher acts, including Ashley Blue getting choked, Sasha Grey getting gangbanged by ten men or Cytherea squirting her vajayjay juices like the fountains at the Bellagio.
The days of Peter North riding Ginger Lynn on a couch are over, replaced by Brianna Banks getting it up the pooper from a midget.
The problem with modern pornographic depictions of sex is that they’ve become travesties of themselves, spectacles only Caligula would admire. In a race to outdo others in the industry, the studios crank out more outrageous acts, but in the process, hardcore has become formulaic and trite. Every sex act must involve anal penetration and conclude with the man ejaculating on the woman’s face. Women have taken more bukkake blasts that by the end of the shoot, the actress has more genetic material on her face than can be found on a bed sheet in a Motel 6.
The sex act isn’t concluded until the guy cums on the girl’s face. That’s how you know it’s over. Just try that one with your wife. Fire a load of jizz all over her mug and see what happens. She’ll kick your ass faster than Chuck Norris.
Despite where the money shots originate or end up, modern porn audiences see more ejaculations now than ever before. Cumming on a woman’s pert tits is so old school. Now these would-be onanists fire their wads down the woman’s esophagus with alarming frequency. I hope for their sake that there’s a bottle of mouthwash on the set.
Internet porn sites climbed over the last decade, featuring everything from tame softcore to Japanese women shitting and vomiting on each other.
What the hell is wrong with the Japanese?
Before the Internet brought limitless, globe-spanning information into our homes, I never knew that a woman could blow a dog while another woman pisses on her. And after watching “2 Girls, 1 Cup,” I think I’m going to need therapy for the rest of my life.
Celebrity sex tapes brought the mainstream to the porn industry. Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's sex tape leaked online in 1998. The most famous home sex tape was Paris Hilton's, which essentially made her a household name overnight. As more celebrities continue fucking each other, it is inevitable that their videotaped carnal activities will be made public, which surprisingly doesn't destroy their careers.
The porn industry has leached into pop culture with some of its more famous denizens appearing in other non-pornographic media.
The most recognizable contemporary porn star, Ron Jeremy, made a notable appearance in The Surreal Life, a reality show where the Hedgehog shared living quarters with such noteworthy celebrities as Erik Estrada, Tammy Faye Messner, Vanilla Ice and Traci Bingham.
Jeremy also appeared in several movies and made cameos on TV shows, including “Orgasmo,” “Boondock Saints,” and an autobiographic film “Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy.”
Jenna Jameson, a former porn actress, is a successful businesswoman who appeared on TV and in mainstream movies. She wrote an autobiography, a comic book and did voice work for “Family Guy” and the video game “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.”
Veteran porn actress Nina Hartley made a cameo in “Boogie Nights” while Sasha Grey appeared in the Steve Soderbergh film “The Girlfriend Experience.”
In 2003, endowed porn actress Mary Carey ran for governor of California in a freak show of an election.
These appearances pushed porn onto Main Street instead of the dark dungeons of red light districts. “Porn Star” T-shirts and other merchandise glamorize the porn industry. Amateur Web sites allow you to post your own home movies for others to view, and by home movies I don’t mean that family trip to the Grand Canyon.
Privately, porn is growing edgier, with more bodily fluids and acts of penetration than a frat house on a typical weekend. Publicly, it is morphing into popular culture as a glamorous profession the young idolize. As more porn stars go Hollywood, what affect will that have on both industries?
Will young women in trailer parks across America aspire to be the next “Double Dildo Dyke” or something tamer, such as the next “Lactating Latina?”
Only time will tell if Bree Olson wins an Oscar for her performance in “Jane Austen’s Blowjob Bandits” or if Larry Flynt wins a U.S. Senate seat.
Just remember to stock up on tissues.

Hell Freezes Over

A former New Jersey Assembly candidate wanted to “friend” me on Facebook. A Republican, he ran for state office twice and lost twice. Our newspaper endorsed him for office twice. I covered his candidacy and also interviewed him when he attended the Republican National Convention in Denver in 2008.
We haven’t spoken for many months. Then I checked Facebook today and saw he wanted to “friend” me.
Gobsmacked at this obvious possible breach in ethics, I reflected just how dangerous the Internet had become. It’s a stalking ground for perverts, pedophiles and criminals. Now the politicians are browsing the social network sites, looking for unsuspecting journalists to befriend.
I’ve prided my career in staying an arm’s length from any politician to avoid any misperception of bias or favoritism. On the phone, I’m always direct and business-like, talking about issues and not drifting off topic into personal subjects. If it makes me a stickler, then so be it. I’d rather be a matter-of-fact Joe Friday than everybody’s friend.
After I received the friend request from the politician, my paranoid mind kicked into overdrive. Why did he want to befriend me? Why now? Was it because I wrote a story about the county Republican Party’s disassociation from an incumbent freeholder? What was his angle?
Politicians don’t do things for altruistic or benign reasons. They’re shrewd and calculating, and always anticipate their next maneuvers. Their prime motivation is obtaining power and exploiting others’ weaknesses.
No politician, from president to local town council, likes journalists. It’s simply against natural law. It would be like a lion inviting a gazelle ‘round the house for a few drinks and light hors d’oeuvres.
The problem with social networking is that it creates a false sense of comfort and allows one to lower their guard. This poses a lot of knotty ethical concerns for journalists who want to preserve their objectivity.
Why would a politician want to friend a reporter on Facebook?
Has Hell frozen over?
This is the first time that a politician has tried befriending me on a social network site. I know reporters who have “friended” politicians who they no longer cover, which is fine for them. For me, I’d rather be safe than sorry and not compromise my integrity.
This guy might decide to run for some other office in the future. Then where would I be, with access to his Facebook information? Would he constantly e-mail me? Would he put my name on mailing lists? Privacy concerns are another reason why journalists should choose their Facebook friends wisely.
For a long time, I stared at his friend request on the screen. Is opening a Pandora’s Box of ethical questions worth upping my total friend count by one? I don’t care if he’s offended that I don’t add him as a friend. It’s not about personalities, political parties or past acquaintances.
It’s about professionalism. It’s about me, as a journalist removing all doubts that I can be thoroughly objective and uninfluenced by a thousand nattering whispers and familiar faces telling me what they want to hear.
Add technology to the mix and you get Machiavelli with a Facebook account, “friending” everyone they’ve ever met or hope to meet.
I had two options: Confirm or Ignore. Destiny branched out in front of me and I saw the consequences. Confirm the invite and join the unholy army of whores, panderers and flatterers and put my reputation for straight-shooting objectivity at risk. Ignore the invite and lose a potential source but preserve journalistic integrity.
What awesome evil hath technology wrought?
Would the barbs of insulting a politician’s ego weight heavily upon me?
What truly is a friend?
I chose Ignore.

What a Lovely Tea Party...

The Tea Party Movement is challenging incumbent Congressman Frank LoBiondo by supporting a candidate who claims LoBiondo votes more like a liberal than a conservative.
LoBiondo was first elected to Congress in 1994 and has remained there, enjoying wide popularity throughout New Jersey’s Second Congressional District. But his vote on the “Cap and Trade” Bill, which places limits on greenhouse gas emissions has provoked ire among his fellow Republicans. LoBiondo voted for the legislation, one of eight Republicans that did so, and as a consequence, the party is fighting back.
This is the first time LoBiondo has been challenged so ferociously from within his own party, and it’s primarily due to the rise of the Tea Party Movement, which advocates fiscal conservatism and limited federal government.

From the New Jersey Tea Party Coalition’s website:

“We use the term ‘tea party’ as an allusion to the Boston Tea Party, when colonists, on December 16, 1773, in a protest to taxation of tea, threw the cargo of three British ships overboard into Boston Harbor.”

There’s a vast difference between those who protested the Tea Act in 1773 and the Republican faction behind the modern Tea Party Movement. The Tea Act was passed to increase the British East India Company’s monopoly on tea to the colonies and to thwart smugglers who sold tax-free tea. The colonists protested being taxed without representation in Parliament. Americans do have representatives in Congress and the Senate and are free to communicate their concerns to them. They might not always like their representative’s response, yet that’s the system we have under the Constitution.

From the New Jersey Tea Party Coalition’s website:

“If you were to listen to the news media, you would hear that we are an organization of rich people who don't want to pay their taxes. We have been called mobsters. We have been called Asto-turf. Nothing could be further from the truth! We are the epitome of a ‘grass roots’ movement made up of citizens who are concerned with the high spending, high taxing path the United States government is on. We feel that this is a road to economic ruin not only for us, but for our children and grandchildren.”

The Tea Party Movement has not been called “Astro-turf.” There were published allegations that the group is an example of “astroturfing,” a technique where an organization hides its origins by inventing grassroots movements that appears to be spontaneous and authentic, when in reality, it’s all bullshit. The published allegations linked the conservative groups FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity as the real catalysts behind the Tea Party Movement.
As far as demographics, at the Tea Party meeting I attended, all of the participants were white, in their 50s or older and conservative. I don’t know that’s the makeup of the group in other parts of the country, but that’s what I saw.
The Tea Party Movement compares themselves to the colonists who rebelled against the British Empire. However, they’re rebelling against a democratic republic, with representatives (including the president) who are elected directly by the people. That’s a far cry from the tyrannical reign of George III.
The way the Tea Party followers talk, you’d think we live in a military dictatorship with armed soldiers who randomly stop citizens, conduct strip searches and issue a steep bill for harassing them.
One Tea Party faction, the Tea Party Patriots, conduct rallies throughout the country where they protest the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009 (passed under the Obama Administration) and the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 (passed under the Bush Administration). While most of the blame should be heaped on the Clinton and Bush administrations, Obama seems to take the brunt of the Tea Party Movement’s anger. Members refer to Obama as a “socialist,” a “Nazi” and a “tyrant.”

From the Tea Party Patriots website:

“Tea Party Patriots, Inc. ("TPP") is a non-partisan, non-profit social welfare organization dedicated to furthering the common good and general welfare of the people of the United States. TPP furthers this goal by educating the public and promoting the principles of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government and free markets. Tea Party Patriots has not endorsed candidates for public office.”

Non-partisan? Really? Here are some of the supporters of the Tea Party Movement: former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, Texas Governor Rick Perry, Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, former GOP Vice Presidential candidate and former Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin and conservative commentators Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin and Sean Hannity.
Do they really want to label themselves as a “social welfare” organization? Sounds a bit like socialism, doesn’t it? You know: the very thing they’re fighting against.
According to one hotheaded Tea Party follower, who bitched out a CNN reporter at a tax rally, “Lincoln believed that people had the right to share in the fruits of their own labor and that government should not take it.” In other words, the government should not tax its citizens.
Not according to Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution:

“The Congress shall have Power to Lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposes and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States…”

So Congress has the ability to tax its citizens? Surely, we are entitled to the fruits of our labors like the Tea Party activists purport?
The 16th Amendment to the Constitution says different:

“The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”

Taxes and the Constitution go together like tea and scones. Or tea and crumpets. Or whatever you eat with tea. The point is, the taxation system is ingrained into our laws as a way of funding the government. We, the people, pay for our government. The Tea Partiers are complaining because the government wants more money to run its bloated, unwieldy self.
The Tea Party Movement claims less government can be effective, yet they don’t cite examples of which departments could be reduced and how exactly this would work efficiently overall. Most of their rhetoric is against the federal government, lamenting about “too much government” in our lives. They make no bones about their loathing for government, except the military. They really sport massive hard-ons for the troops while bashing the Commander in Chief and the government those troops serve.
That’s like a colonial saying, “I really hate King George and the British Empire, but I support the redcoats.”
Participants of the Tea Party Movement are disparagingly referred to as “teabaggers” because members mailed teabags to the House and Senate as part of the 2009 Tax Day protests.
After listening to the speeches and reading some of their propaganda, I think they should be called teabaggers for another reason: if they actually manage to ascend to power, it would be like dragging a scrotum across the face of America.
The Tea Party Movement uses the purest, most cherished principles from a chapter of American history (the fight for liberty and self-governance) and perverts them for their own purposes.
Though they are free to assemble and form their own political movement, the teabaggers aren’t examining the whole picture. The federal government is full of career politicians (like LoBiondo) and does implement cumbersome programs that result in waste. If we didn’t have bloviating, ineffective politicians more interested with partisan one-upsmanship instead of actual bipartisan attempts at governance, maybe the Tea Party Movement wouldn’t exist.
The Tea Party Movement are a pissed off rabble who ignore the biggest problem with American politics: the corporate donors who buy and own representatives lock, stock and barrel. Corporate donors and lobbyists are the scum of the system and apply pressure on lawmakers to either vote for or kill legislation based on their special interests.
The lobbyist’s plentiful donations steer Congress. If you want to talk about who’s doing more damage to the process, it’s not Obama’s “socialist” agenda, but the entrenched corporate and lobbying interests.
Look, America is a capitalist country where free enterprise and industry reign supreme. In order for business to thrive, sometimes businesses need tax breaks or lax anti-pollution laws or land to strip-mine. They woo members of Congress, who in turn propose legislation or vote the way their corporate masters want them to.
It’s the way things have been done in this country since the beginning.
The teabaggers should direct their outrage to the root of corruption: corporate campaign contributions and lobbyist groups.
Maybe these “patriots” remain silent because they’re side is heavily invested in the system more than they care to admit. Maybe all of this posturing and evoking the sacrifices of our colonial ancestors is a way to capitalize on the discontent and frustration they feel and to give their movement a higher and worthier purpose.
The problem with the Tea Party Movement is that it’s too cynical to be effective. Their entire argument revolves around bashing the federal government and claiming that the federal government is somehow going to control every aspect of our lives like Stalinist Russia, that people would be part of the system from the cradle to the grave and America would be a dystopia the likes of Orwell’s 1984.
The Sons of Liberty were successful in uniting the disenfranchised colonists against the British Empire because their cause had an intellectual ideal: a people’s self-determination of their own destiny. This was a radical, 18th century idea, the fact that leaders were elected and not born and that the people govern themselves.
Yet in their zealousness to quote from and evoke history, the teabaggers fail to learn its most important lessons. So afraid are they of phantom socialists suppressing their freedoms that they don’t realize the ones manipulating them into outrage are the ones who would like to see the Democrats gone, namely the Republicans.
The Tea Party Movement is a petulant, angry mob devoid of any cohesive message and an articulate way of expressing their grievances. Instead, we get Photoshopped images of Obama with a Hitler mustache.
The teabaggers claim the Democrats will turn America into a socialist dictatorship. Hey, we're talking Democrats here. This party is so disorganized and can't pass meaningful legislation, yet somehow it will undo over 200 years of American democracy?
Presidencies are temporary things and laws can be amended and repealed. Yet the rancorous messages spouted from these fearful people are dreadful warnings regarding the rise of socialism and the death of Constitutional freedoms.
The movement fails to adopt the long view of history, preferring to mythologize the Boston Tea Party and American Revolution as bold examples of citizen defiance against an entrenched world power. However, unlike the Sons of Liberty or the founding fathers, the teabaggers are not advocating an armed rebellion and a new national system. Their property, jobs and lives aren’t threatened because of their activism.
Before signing the Declaration of Independence, which would forever brand him a traitor to the British Empire, Dr. Benjamin Franklin said, “We must, indeed, hang all together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
The Tea Party Movement is nothing like the American Revolution, where to ally oneself with the rebellion meant death.
It is, at its best, a gathering of citizens upset with politics as usual and burdensome federal taxes that are affecting the quality of their lives during an economic crisis.
At worst, it’s a paranoid faction of the Republican Party, Independents and Libertarians pissed off and insane with rage against the United States government. If Obama really was a socialist and their freedoms were in jeopardy, don’t you think these teabaggers would be censored or jailed?
They have under the First Amendment, freedom of speech and freedom to protest their dissatisfaction with the government, which means wearing tri-cornered hats, holding up teabags and calling the president a Muslim terrorist.
I also, under the same Constitution have the freedom to write about how ridiculous they are.
God bless America.

Peter Jennings Fellow

I admired Peter Jennings and his integrity and commitment to journalism, so when I had the opportunity to apply for a fellowship named after Jennings at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia last December, I jumped at the chance.
Happily, I received word in January that I had been selected a 2010 Peter Jennings Fellow for the Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution.
Named after the late Peter Jennings, former news anchor and editor of ABC News “World News Tonight,” the project is designed to help journalists and students understand the U.S. Constitution and constitutional issues and apply them to their work.
In late February, I participated in the program, one of the greatest experiences in my life as a professional journalist.
Journalist Fellows for 2010 included 32 professional journalists from various newspapers, magazines, broadcasting networks and online publications such as The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, Forbes, BBC, CBS News, The Philadelphia Inquirer, MTV News, Houston Chronicle, Hawaii Public Radio, Telemundo Network, World Policy Institute, Fox Television Stations, The Associated Press, How StuffWorks.com and Voice of America.
In addition, seven Collegiate Fellows from such institutions as Yale University, Brandeis University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Missouri and the United States Military Academy at West Point participated.
The 2010 faculty included Akhil Reed Amar, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University; Sherrilyn Ifill, professor of law at the University of Maryland Law School; Timothy Lewis, former federal judge for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit; Nina Pillard, professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center; Jeffrey Rosen, professor of law at The George Washington University and legal affairs editor of The New Republic; Kenneth W. Starr, Dean of Pepperdine University School of Law and former U.S. Solicitor General; and Witold J. Walczak, Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.
After a brief orientation, we viewed the Constitution Center’s excellent main exhibit, “The Story of We the People,” a stirring and emotional overview of America’s struggle for independence and creation of self-government. I get choked up every time I see that presentation. It accurately reflects the doubts, fears and strengths of Americans and the desire to extend freedom to those who were historically deprived of it.
The Constitution is the blueprint for America’s political and legal system, but the rights we’re granted under it are fragile and must constantly be maintained. Freedom and liberty are greater than cynicism and tyranny, something I believe many in this country are forgetting.
Each Jennings Fellow received a packet containing a pocket-sized copy of the U.S. Constitution and two books: “In Search of America” by Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster and “Peter Jennings: A Reporter’s Life.”
We had to analyze a federal case with a faculty member and develop our own findings, which we then reported back to the group.
Kenneth Starr facilitated my group, which analyzed Morse v. Frederick, a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court school speech case. The case stemmed from a 2002 incident at the Juneau-Douglas High School in Juneau, Alaska where students were excused from classes to watch the Olympic torch pass through their town. Student, Joseph Frederick and his friends displayed a 14-foot banner that read “BONG HiTS 4 JESUS” across the street from the school. Principal Deborah Morse ran across the streets and grabbed the banner and suspended Frederick ten days.
The fellows ruled 4-3 that Frederick’s free speech was violated.
I delivered my group’s minority opinion, which supported the principal’s decision to discipline Frederick.
Starr was a very affable, cordial person and dynamic litigator who was unfortunately demonized as solicitor general during the whole Bill Clinton investigation. As our facilitator, he talked us through the case and allowed us to explore the issue of student free speech deeper. Plus, he rewarded us with Ghirardelli chocolates whenever we contributed.
In my book, he who dispenseth chocolates and wisdom shall be doubly blessed.
We also heard a moot court case at the James A. Byrne U.S. Federal District Courthouse about rationing health care in favor of citizens over immigrants after a fictitious pandemic strikes the country.
We also heard two panel discussions at the F.M. Kirby Auditorium in the Constitution Center.
“The Long War,” explored constitutional issues during a protracted military conflict and consisted of moderator Terry Moran of ABC News, retired Army Vice Chief of Staff General Jack Keane, Yale Law School Professor Bruce Ackerman and Brigadier General H.R. McMaster.
“Behind the Scenes: Arguing Before the High Court” focused on litigator’s experiences with the Supreme Court and included moderator Jeffrey Toobin, legal analyst for CNN, Nina Pillard, professor of law at Georgetown University, Lisa S. Blatt, of Arnold & Porter LLP, Richard Lazarus, professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center and Kenneth Starr, Dean of Pepperdine University School of Law.
We were charged with writing three stories this year that incorporate what we’ve learned. The stories would be published on the Peter Jennings Project blog.
I am honored to be a Jennings Fellow. The people I met were an impressive cross-section of media, law and academia and I am humbled to be among such distinguished company. The overall experience solidified my commitment as a journalist and gave me a new appreciation for the Constitution and the Supreme Court's role in preserving our rights.

Is This Thing On?

I don’t know who reads this blog.
A month ago, I installed a counter that ticks upward every time visitors view the blog, but I have no way of actually gauging who reads my writings or even how my words affect them, if they do at all. Seldom does anyone post any feedback and it seems that the whole blogging venture is just a useless exercise in emoting and rending thoughts from my head and spilling them onto a published format.
That’s neither tit-for-tat, since most of what I write are my own opinions on politics and life. If I wanted, I could set up an absurd celebrity blog where I post embarrassing paparazzi photos of starlets in compromising positions. Have you seen the photos of Hilary Duff blowing her boyfriend after he proposed to her? I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. Totally hilarious! She’s on her knees, ass up, blowing Mike Comrie! God bless sleazy paparazzi and the Internet!
But I digress.
A blog’s purpose is to record and present the author’s thoughts. With newspaper subscriptions taking a nosedive and journalists now universally hated more than serial rapists and baby eaters, it’s time for me to question my career.
I’ve dedicated most of my adult life to journalism. Besides the cadre of corrupt elected officials, the whining ninnies in most municipalities and the billions of trees killed to inform the public on the daily activities of their community shuffleboard teams, the job has been overall good to me.
My first editor, Julie McWilliams, gave me really good advice when I started out as a copy editor in 1994. I worked in a cramped office above a fudge shop in a weekly newspaper in Cape May, New Jersey. I went on to cover county, state and federal politics and eventually won several awards for my reporting through the years.
I can do this job and do it well, but I feel my writing has suffered somewhat. My greatest dream, to write novels and have them published, has eluded me. I know it’s a cliché for writers to carry around a manuscript they started in college, one chained to their arm and weighing them down like a millstone crammed with navel-gazing goodness (or badness as in most cases). Maybe they work on this mammoth tome at a coffee shop where a lot of skinny girls from Belarus in turtleneck sweaters argue with the barista over the price of a mocha latte. Perhaps said writer attends a writing conference filled with published writers who treat the unpublished like medieval lepers, ostracizing them or worse, patronizing them for their wide-eyed attempts at breaking into publishing.
If you’re still hanging on my words and reading, know this: I love writing and I’m not quitting.
My father dispenses advice like cigarette machines dispense Marlboros and the one thing he said that will always resonate with me are three obstinate but tough words: “Never give up.”
That applies to my writing, whether a newspaper article to making an editor notice a short story or novel I’ve written. If I live to be as old as Methuselah, I’m not abandoning my dream of becoming a professional writer.
Never give up.
Lately, I’ve become mired in despair over love. I haven’t made any real attempt to connect with women for a long time. This is because I’m about as popular with women as painful menstrual cramps. Because I’m not driving a Porsche, wearing Armani suits or possessing a royal title in front of my name, women are not interested in anything I do or say. I’ve seen men who look like the back end of an evolutionary chart, with sloping foreheads, dragging knuckles and the personality of a besotted warthog in happy relationships and I wonder why.
Then I realized the same three words: Never give up.
Instead of sulking in their bachelor pads every night, they circulate and socialize. They’re not afraid to be themselves, no matter how repulsive or awkward.
They have not abandoned the essential strengths of love.
Love is one of the most rewarding, most frightening, most exhilarating things in life. Human existence is drawn toward love, and nothing we ever encounter in our brief lives can match it. Love is the all-encapsulating emotion, the state of bliss and perfection we strive for.
Without love we are empty hollow husks, deprived zombies shambling through life unfulfilled and incomplete. With love, are at our most generous, most caring and the most graceful we’ve ever been. We’ve found that connection, that bond with another human being, that familiarity of the kindred spirit. That, my friends, will banish loneliness, cynicism and wrath. That will make us better human beings. In the end, isn’t that what we long to become? Isn’t that our lifelong quest, to understand our humanity and broaden our existence through contact with others?
Earth can be a desolate, empty hellhole and life a mundane, unrewarding gulag of tormented suffering. Yet when we dare ourselves and reach out to others, when we make ourselves vulnerable and lower our defenses and let love in, this planet and life can be a great, rewarding adventure.
And the people, with their multitude of ideas, emotions and gifts, can enrich our experiences in ways we’ve never dreamed.
The carping, volatile masses sowing discontent and gloom need only that push into awareness and self-actualization to understand that all humans, when you get right down to it, share the same drives, desires and wants.
I used to think that the ideal woman for me doesn’t exist, that she was a figment of my imagination or that she was aborted as a fetus. Yet part of me has faith that this perfect woman, my beautiful and intelligent soulmate is out there waiting, and that she’s just as miserable as I am.
Thanks to the far-reaching, global power of the Interwebs, I can tell her to never give up.

American Martyr

Joseph Stack boarded his Piper PA-28 Cherokee in Georgetown, Texas on Feb. 18 knowing he wouldn’t return.
The 53-year-old software engineer, sickened by what he perceived to be unfair treatment from the federal government, took matters into his own hands. He purposefully crashed his plane into an Austin building that contained Internal Revenue Service offices.
Before he embarked on his suicidal journey, burned down his wife's house. Fortunately, his wife wasn't home at the time.
What had boiled inside Stack for years, the notion that prosperity and the American dream were forever lost in a land of big government, corporate bailouts and a system that put the screws to the little guy, drove him over the edge.
Both Stack and an office worker named Vernon Hunter, a Vietnam veteran, were killed in the incident.
Conservative commentators have hailed Stack “a new American hero,” a David standing against the federal government’s Goliath. Grim portents indicate that Stack’s vendetta against the IRS could cause a backlash of copycat incidents is frightening.
Before he took to the skies, Stack posted a rambling note on the Internet describing his dissatisfaction and outrage.
The letter captures a frustrated diatribe of a man trying to get ahead, but thwarted at every turn by politicians, insurance companies and corporate decisions. If Stack had written this as a newspaper column, had he spoke publicly and attracted like-minded Americans pissed off at the plutocrats and powerful moneyed interests that are rewarded for failure while decent people work themselves to death, then he might have garnered sympathy. The little guy versus the mean ol’ government. It would have been a stirring moment, a time when the people have said enough is enough and brandished their pitchforks and torches and taken to Congress to reform their shenanigans.
But Stack shanghaied his own cause through violence. His wrath got the best of him and he went out a blazing cannon who murdered an innocent office worker.
“I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the ‘only answer’,” Stack wrote.
Like the Michael Douglas character in the 1993 movie “Falling Down,” Stack sees murder as the only way to express his frustrations and rails against greed, economic insecurity and a corrupt political system that favors the wealthy.
Despite Stack’s kamikaze attack on a federal agency, his manifesto resonates with the downtrodden and powerless plebs who feel victimized by a government warped by its own appetites and bolstered by partisan politics and corporate agendas.
Stack was batshit crazy at the end, describing his failed business ventures, the Catholic church and a government akin to Orwell’s “Big Brother.” There are thousands of malcontents out there who espouse similar rants. Most of them silently fret and fume. Fewer commit acts of domestic terrorism.
That’s really what Joseph Stack was: a low-rent Guy Fawkes seeking to bring down the government with cataclysmic violence that he thought would prod others into action.
Though what Stack did was barbarous, his plight is heartbreaking. If he wasn’t a roiling cauldron of unpredictability, I might have empathy for his misfortune.
Stack wrote that the 1986 tax reform act negatively impacted his career as a software engineer. He and a few friends spent time and money understanding the tax loopholes and exemptions as “the vulgar, corrupt Catholic Church.”
“The intent of this exercise and our efforts was to bring about a much-needed re-evaluation of the laws that allow the monsters of organized religion to make such a mockery of people who earn an honest living. However, this is where I learned that there are two ‘interpretations’ for every law; one for the very rich, and one for the ret of us… Oh, and the monsters are the very ones making and enforcing the laws; the inquisition is still alive and well today in this country,” Stack wrote.
Stack spent tens of thousands of dollars and a decade wrangling with the tax laws, and his retirement plans likewise suffered.
“It made me realize for the first time that I live in a country with an ideology that is based on a total and complete lie. It also made me realize, not only how naïve I had been, but also the incredible stupidity of the American public; that they buy, hook, like and sinker, the crap about their ‘freedom’ and that they continue to do so with eyes closed in the face of overwhelming evidence and all that keeps happening in front of them,” Stack wrote.
In the early 1990s, when the federal government closed Air Force bases in California, it caused an economic depression for the Los Angeles region, where Stack lived at the time. The dot-com bust of the late 1990s and terrorist attacks of 2001 further shook the economy.
When the government bailed out struggling corporations with taxpayer’s money, rewarding failure and incompetence, Stack had had enough. He moved to Austin, but struggled to find employment. He worked for lower rates, which he wrote were the result of corporate collusion to drive down prices and wages.
His letter also assails former President George Bush for proving the wealthy get away with far more than the average Americans who toil and work fruitlessly only to get robbed by burdensome taxes.
“Nothing changes unless there is a body count (unless it is in the interest of the wealthy sows at the government trough). In a government full of hypocrites from top to bottom, life is as cheap as their lies and their self-serving laws,” he wrote.
While the sane and rational view Stack as an angry man raging against the machine of inequity and plutocracy, the far right lionized him as some sort of folk hero, a Jesse James in a small aircraft taking the outlaw path against a corrupt government.
Conservative talk show host Jon Alvarez created a Facebook page honoring Stack, who he said made “a sacrifice to others who were having problems with the IRS.”
Facebook responded by pulling the page.
Tea Party Conservatives, upset with the current Democratic administration and Democrats in general, call Stack a communist because he quotes the “communist creed” in his manifesto.
Liberals referred to Stack as a right wing looney terrorist whose rant espouses anti-government sentiment.
Yet Stack may have been apolitical, or at least disgusted with all politicians. He referred to political representatives as “thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags.”
“While very few working people would say they haven’t had their fair share of taxes (as can I), in my lifetime I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say,” Stack wrote.
Stack was pissed off at the well connected, privileged few who didn’t suffer as he did. Angry at an America filled with shysters, conmen and bureaucrats, Stack snapped and justified his actions for murder as the first strike in a revolution.
I phoned in my friend’s radio show the day after the incident happened and we briefly talked about it. While my friend thought that Stack’s actions were wrong, he said the suicide note did have valid points and “made sense.” Then he said Stack tapped into some kind of discontent with the American people and “it only takes one person” to start a revolution.
One man sacrificing his life for his own warped cause borne out of frustration is not a revolution. Joe Stack shouldn’t be feared.
Others who see his act as symbolic and ascribe meaning and power to it, they should be feared, because they have their martyr. They have their battle cry against the government. They have a warrior of economic desperation and victim of the IRS.
Whether the Cult of Stack takes root in the Tea Party Patriots or the disaffected rabble remains to be seen. Hopefully, Joe Stack will be remembered not as a revolutionary beating the drum against the federal government's wretched excesses and flagrant abuses but as a tormented soul who chose to kill himself and others as a final, personal act of rebellion.