RockThrower

Four More Years

If this is success, I don’t want to be around when these guys sober up and admit failure.

George Bush was sworn in this morning as president and in the Capitol they are getting ready to “put on the hog” as the Good Ol Boys say down Red State way.  Even though he has the lowest approval rating of any President at the start of his second term since World War II except Richard Nixon, Bush’s corporate cronies have ponied up more than forty million bucks for a hoedown to ring in a second term and celebrate the “Bush mandate.”

Some mandate. According to a new Washington Post – ABC News Poll, less than half (45 percent) of Americans approve of the direction President Bush wants to lead the Country.  On key measurements of his performance, Americans give the president failing grades.  Fifty eight percent of Americans disapprove of his handling of the war in Iraq, 52 percent disapprove of his handing of the economy, and 58 percent disapprove of his handling of the budget deficit.  (Note to Democratic consultants, can some one again please explain to me how we lost the election?)

But hey, every President deserves a coronation, so let’s party.  But before the fat cats line up at the trough, maybe Americans should just take a quick look at what the first four years of the Bush administration brought us.  Personally, I’m not sure we can handle another four.

From Boom to Bust

Under the administration of President Bush:

• The Budget for the United States Government has changed from a projected surplus of  $236 billion in 2000, to a record budget deficit of $415 Billion according to the Congressional Budget Office.

• According to the U.S. Department of Labor, America has suffered a net loss of more than 175,000 jobs since 2000. President Bush is the first president to lose more jobs than he gained since Herbert Hoover.

• 36 million Americans are living in poverty – five million more Americans than the 31 million Americans reported living in poverty by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2000.

• 45 million Americans have no health insurance - 1.4 million more than just last year, and more than 3 million more than when Bush took office.

From Peace to War

On President Bush’s watch:

• More than 3000 Americans were killed in the worst foreign attack on U.S. soil in its history.

• Osama Bin Laden, the perpetrator of the attack remains at large 

• Either on purpose, or through incredibly bad judgment, President Bush rushed the United States into a poorly planned and executed war with Iraq.

• Despite the Bush Administrations proclamations of the imminent threat posed by Iraq, no weapons of mass destruction have ever been found, and no connections between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida have ever been identified.

• More than thirteen hundred U.S. soldiers are dead and thousands more are gravely wounded.

• More than 100,000 Iraqi’s have been killed.

• The United States has spent at least $150 billion on the war in Iraq to date and is projected to spend at least $ 80 billion more next year.

From World Leader to International Pariah

• The war in Iraq has fueled an armed insurgency in Iraq and angered the Muslim world. Many experts have called the War a “recruiting poster for terrorists.”

• The war in Iraq damaged relations with longstanding allies and eroded the world’s trust and respect for America.

• Torture scandals at Abu Ghurayb and Guantanamo Bay have shocked the world and damaged the moral authority of United States.

• Worldwide public opinion of America has never been lower.  According to an AP Ipsos poll published in December 2004, more than 6 in ten residents of some of our historic allies say they are worried about the election of President Bush. (Germany (72%) and France (68%). Six in ten in Canada (62%), Spain (62%) UK (61%) Three-quarters or more in France (75%) and Germany (80%), and two-thirds in Canada (68%), Spain (68%) and the UK (64%) say President Bush plays a somewhat or very negative role in world affairs.

Unfortunately, the list goes on and on.  It’s not a record of achievement, it’s a train wreck.  Hang on folks, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Bundt Pans

Losing Pieces of our Future

For Christmas this year one of the things I got my wife was a new Bundt pan.  It was a shiny silver color, with decorative impressions on the bottom.  When you turn it over and take the cake out, it looks like a Christmas wreath.

Now that may not sound like much of a gift to some, but every year on Christmas Eve, my wife uses a Bundt pan to make a wonderful Christmas coffee cake that we have on Christmas morning.  We drink hot black coffee and eat slices of the moist cinnamon coffee cake while we open our presents.  It is a simple tradition, but one that has brought our family much joy over the years. It is one of my favorite things about Christmas.  By the way, the new pan made a beautiful cake this year.

I bring this up because yesterday while reading the Los Angeles Times I noticed a wonderfully written obituary by Elaine Woo in recognition of H. David Dalquist, a clever fellow who was the inventor of the Bundt pan. 

According to the Times, Dalquist, a metallurgy expert, first developed the pan in 1950 at the request of the members of a Jewish women’s group who wanted to make a cake similar to the dense moist cakes their mothers had made in Europe. The rest as they say, is history.

It seems such a simple thing, a cake pan.  But over the years, the Bundt pan became one of the world’s most popular cake pans and a driving force in Dalquist’s company, Nordic Ware. The company has sold more than 45 million Bundt pans since Dalquist developed the first one.  In the process, Dalquist created thousands of jobs and dozens of new products that have made baking more enjoyable and brought pleasure to families like mine. 

According to the Times though, Dalquist and his Bundt pan had even greater impact. Apparently in gratitude to the small group of Jewish women who first asked him to develop the pan, Dalquist donated his production seconds to the Minneapolis Chapter of Hadassah. The group sold them and used the funds to pay for schools and hospitals in Israel.  In the obituary, Elaine Woo quotes National Hadassah president June Walker as saying, “ who could have imagined that a simple aluminum cake pan, invented more than a half century ago, could have become a fundraising vehicle for an organization that now boasts more than 300,000 members across the country.  With that homey little baking pan, Hadassah women built the most advanced medical center in the Middle East, the Hadassah Medical Center at Ein Kerem.”

While pondering the simple, but wonderful contribution made by H. David Dalquist, I was drawn to another article about a clever young man by the name of Jonathan Castro, who dreamed of being an engineer.  As a high school student, he built an electric car from scratch.  He had also built an electric guitar and was planning to rebuild an old Ford Thunderbird he had bought.  He liked to ride mountain bikes and go to the beach. He wanted to go to college.  The article quotes his mother as saying “ He wanted to learn about a lot of different things in life. He liked to test his limits.” He sounds like a fine fellow, with a world of potential.

But Jonathan Castro won’t be building anything else. The article I was reading about him was also an obituary. Just 21, he was one of the brave soldiers fighting in Iraq who was killed in last week’s mess hall bombing that also killed 17 other Americans.

What simple contribution might Castro have made? What difference might he have made to our future?  Maybe he would have invented the next “Bundt pan.” Maybe he might have been a great inventor, a creator of jobs, a titan of industry.  Or maybe he would just have been a good man among his common men.  We will never know. 

But what we should know and understand is that the death of Jonathan Castro, and the deaths of the more than 1300 soldiers killed to date in the war in Iraq, is slowly robbing us of pieces of our country’s future.   What won’t get invented?  What companies won’t be created? What teacher won’t be there to help an aspiring student?  What father won’t be there to hold a child’s hand? 

That’s the cost of this war, and all of us should be asking if it’s worth it. 

A Lovely Bunch

" Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely" Lord Acton

Hitler had Hans Frank and Carl Schmitt.  George W. Bush has Alberto Gonzalez and John Yoo. They are a lovely bunch, and don't forget, Clarence Thomas is waiting in the wings.

Gonzales, Bush's nominee for attorney general is on the hot seat for his memo basically condoning torture and absolving the president from criminal charges for the torture and abuse of prisoners in the name of national security. Despite this, his nomination will likely be approved by the Republican majority in the United States Senate. But before the Judiciary Committee slams down its rubber stamp, the American people ought to take a closer look at the parallels between the legal policies promoted by Gonzales and others in the Bush administration, and those in Nazi Germany.

Hans Frank and Carl Schmitt, to a great extent, developed the legal and philosophical frameworks of the Third Reich, cloaking its actions in rule of law and justifying its crimes in the name of defense of the nation.

Frank, who had been Hitler's personal attorney and served as president of the German Academy of Law during Hitler's rise to power, built the German legal system for a war of aggression to benefit the homeland.  In a speech before the Academy of German Law in November 1939 he said. "We are proud to have formulated our legal principals from the very beginning in such a way that they need not be changed in the case of war.   For the rule, that right is that which is useful to the nation, and wrong is that which harms it."  In other words, no legal norms, other than those that preserve the state itself, matter.  Frank used this principle to justify the arrest without warrant ( not to mention murder) of tens of thousands of Jews and Russians as a threat to the homeland, and later to plunder the resources of Poland for the benefit of the homeland.

But it is in the writings of Carl Schmitt, a leading jurist, philosopher and Nazi party member whose work and writing provided much of the intellectual justification for Hitler's concentration of power, that even stronger parallels emerge.  Schmitt wrote, " there exists no norm that is applicable to chaos." He contends that legal norms are only applicable in stable and peaceful situations, and not in times of war, "when the state confronted a mortal enemy with the threat of violent death at the hands of a hostile group". Schmitt contended that in such times, the actions of the leader were not subordinate to justice, but were the "highest justice." In other words, the law does not apply in times of war or other exceptions.  And, as Schmitt wrote, "Sovereign is he who determines the exception."

Hitler and his underlings used Schmitt's writings to justify a war in Hitler's words of "unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness," and in which " all officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies." Orders were issued severely limiting the military's martial courts, and virtually giving immunity to German forces for war crimes.

Sanford Levinson, a respected professor of law at the University of Texas, makes the case that Schmitt, known by some as the"Crown Jurist of the Third Reich" has emerged as the eminence grise of the Bush Administration.  In his article, " Torture in Iraq and the Rule of Law in America,, published in Daedalus in the summer 2004 issue, Levinson contends that Bush administration lawyers seem completely willing  to embrace George w. Bush as the de facto sovereign. This sentiment can be seen both in the 2002 Gonzales memo on torture and the Working Group Report submitted to Secretary Rumsfeld. Both documents argue that "the president enjoys complete discretion in conducting operations against hostile forces. " By their thinking, Levinson further argues, international and domestic laws against torture do not apply to the president.  That is certainly the case the 2002 memo which states " In order to respect the President's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign (federal laws against torture) must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander in Chief Authority. "

The Gonzales memo, much of which was apparently developed with substantial help of John Yoo, then a deputy assistant attorney general in office of the Legal Counsel and now a Berkeley Law Professor, is frighteningly close to the writings of Schmitt and the philosophies that guided the Third Reich.  Gonzales writes that the president had called the war on terrorism "a new kind of war," which rendered "obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on the questioning of prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.  And in endorsing a view of presidential power in which the president has "complete discretion" he is endorsing a view of presidential power that as Levinson says is "all to close to the power that Schmitt was willing to accord his own Fuhrer."

In doing so, Gonzales and others in the Bush administration have opened the gates to hell, making the torture and abuse at Abu Ghurayb and Guantanamo Bay possible.  And while, in their attempts to push through the Gonzales nomination, the Bush administration has issued a new memorandum revising its position on torture ( what's next, Ron Zigler rising from the grave to say "that statement is no longer operational" ?) hundreds have been tortured and even killed, and the basic principles of law and morality that have governed the United States and made it a leader in they eyes of the free world have been undermined.  It remains to be seen as to whether they will be held accountable for it.  Apparently they believe that they are above the law. 

ps- one thing Gonzales might want to remember, they hung Hans Frank

Armor and the Inauguration

In case you were wondering....

I'm not sure how much the armored Stetson George Bush is going to wear to the Inauguration is going to cost.

But it costs about $58,000 to put armor plating on one of the Humvee's used by soldiers in Iraq.

That's chump change when you look at what the Bush administration is spending for the coronation of King George.

If you throw another $600,000 into the $40 million slush fund raised by Bush's cronies for the inauguration ( a phone call would do it) you could put armor plating on about 700 humvees to protect our soldiers in Iraq instead.

But hey, I hear they are going to invite some soldiers to a Ball.

Works for me.