tales of copper city

"We are no longer a functioning government."

Charles Blow, a columnist for the New York Times, on MSNBC (O'Donnell), said tonight, "We are no longer a functioning government." He was referring to the no compromise, absolutism of most GOP political goals. Do everything possible to block Obama on everything. Hold the economy hostage, prolong the recession and high-raes of unemployment.

I can remember a time when Republicans would try to "work something out." Even Gingrich sat down with Clinton.

"Bernie"

I want to see Richard Linklater's "Bernie" soon and not months from now on a rented DVD.  It won't come around here anytime soon, if at all.  So, maybe I'll have to see it in Tucson.  Our daughter, Valerie, is spending a week with me soon, and maybe that's what we'll do.

"Flapsville"

I don't want to get into it over Gay marriage; it never has seemed to me as anything other than sane or sensible.  Why shouldn't gay couples be married? Why shouldn't we admit the diversity of sexuality and extend committed and legal relationships like marriage to gay couples?

But what drives me nuts is that we've turned this issue into another huge "flap." We love it, that is to say the media loves it, because another flap starts and the public turns on their laptops and spends huge amounts of time reading and view what others are saying, and on and on it goes for about four or five days, and then it dies down. And the media uses all of that coverage and public attention to justify advertising revenue.

Politics increasingly seems to be one episode of "Flapsville" after another. We no longer have any kind of extended, sustained comment or criticism of President Obama, the GOP and the House of Representatives, the upcoming election and its importance. What we have is a series of "flaps," each one vying with the last for maximum attention, the sound and the fury, signifying nothing.

Frankly, I've lost my place. I have no idea any more where we are as a nation or a society.  I'm waiting for the next "flap" to tell me.

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen

I'm finishing up Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen by Larry McMurtry. I don't know why it's taken me so long to finally read it. McMurtry's In a Narrow Grave, another book of his essays, is one of my all-time favorite books on Texas. Another book of McMurtry's that I'm fond of, and have read several times, is Leaving Cheyenne. And I have read a good many of the rest of his famous, wonderful books, like The Last Picture Show and Lonesome Dove.

You might wonder, "books on Texas?"  Well, yes, for those of us who grew up there at about the same time as he did, it was a terrific place to be, particularly Austin. Texas in the 1960s and even early in the late 1950s was beginning to wake up to what was going on in the nation, particularly culture and writing.  McMurty and I are the same age; he's a year older.  He went to Rice Institute as it was called back then, one of the best schools in the nation, even then. I went to the University of Texas.

Truthout

Truthout is one of the best stops on the Internet.  Most of the people that I care to read turn up here. The article "What it's really like to live in Arizona is terrific."

The elephant in the pews

A few weeks back, Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, was in Bisbee and lead a procession over the border to Naco, Sonora, to commemorate the Church's commitment to receiving the "migrant" not just as part of our church but also part of all of human history. Before the crossing over, Bishop Schori gave a wonderful homily on migration and its importance within the world and more pertinently, to the Biblical story.  I briefly shook her hand at our church, St. John's and there was so much I wanted to say, but, before our introduction I dropped a cookie I had in my hand, and she said, simply, "This man needs a cookie."  And so I just thanked her for coming to Bisbee.

Oh well.

I thought I would re-post something I wrote about church a couple of years back, something I would say to a bishop if ever I got the chance to actually talk to one, and not be given a cookie.

Every Christmas season our small Episcopal Church holds a Christmas service. The church is packed and there are people standing in the back, behind the pews. This past season, Valerie, our daughter was there, and a friend of ours whom we have known since we first moved here, talking to Val in the Fellowship Hall after the service, suddenly asked her, "Why does your Dad believe all of this religious stuff?"

Valerie said, "Why don't you ask him?"

More photography by Carole

Here's another photograph of Bisbee, downtown, taken by Carole, my photographer spouse.

Carole's photography

One of the delightful things about the woman I am married to is that she constantly has the ability to surprise, to come up with new things about herself that I wasn't aware of. As it turns out, I am finding out how creative she is with a camera.  

The irrelevance of it all

George Orwell once wrote, "To see what is in front of one's nose is a constant struggle." No kidding.

One of the things that I hope someday will happen---a kind of "national epiphany" that I wish for all of us about what kind of nation we truly are--is that we will look back on this Constitutional showdown at the Supreme Court over health insurance reform as the supreme irrelevancy that it truly is.  

I hope that some day we will look back and recognize how blind we were to what is going on in front of our nose regarding health care reform, health insurance, and all that.

By that I mean we could have done something different, something that the Court couldn't touch, but no, we chose the long way home out of the spirit of compromise. We could have faced the fact that we will not control health care spending, nor adequately protect the American public until everyone has health insurance, and, more than that, the health insurance I have in mind is Medicare.  

We should have national health insurance in this country, and that insurance should be Medicare.  

Is Obama Care headed for a train wreck? Maybe, maybe not

Jeffrey Toobin, CNN's veteran watcher of the Supreme Court, thinks that the Solicitor General Donald Verrilli had a dismal day today, defending President Obama's health care law.

On the other hand, Walter Dellinger, a former Solicitor General under President Clinton, argues that, despite the harshness of Justice Kennedy's and Justice Alioto's questioning, there is still a chance that the Court will uphold the law as a legitimate exercise of the Commerce Clause but on different grounds.

The origins of 1070: Arizona's infamous immigration act

Read this story and weep, the story of how we got the infamous Arizona anti-illegal immigration act, the act that requires law enforcement to detain and lock up any person in the state who cannot produce documents proving legal residency. It turns out that a major impetus for the new law, offered by State Senator Russell Pearce, was private corporations who stood to benefit by building the new prisons to house the detained "illegals."

The ACA

The ACA. The Affordable Care Act. Obama Care. We haven't even settled on a name. The Act has already begun to provide important benefits. As a senior citizen I now can receive a free annual physical; other important procedures that are needed for my age group will be paid without co-pays.  Here is a link to the major provisions of the ACA and how it affects individuals, young people, families, and businesses. Here is Senator Bingham's (D. N.M.) website showing seniors in New Mexico what benefits they now receive, like closing the "donut whole" or coverage gap in Medicare for prescription drugs.

In time all Americans will receive health insurance, and insurance plans will be more standardized, offering similar benefits. The result will be the major outlines of a "system" that can provide the platform for slowing down health care costs.  

And I've just covered a few of the major points.

Putting our money where our hearts are

Well, we've donated again to support the Obama campaign; we gave a lot the first time around, at least a lot for a retired couple who've been very active in politics and public policy most of our adult lives. We give a modest amount on a monthly basis, and we also try, every couple of months, to enter into the pool of those donors who might wind up at the dinner table with the president. 

We are not happy with American politics right now and we have complained about President Obama, sometimes fairly, mostly unfairly.  As someone who's suffered the ups and downs of politics at a fairly senior level, in New York, I always tell myself, "Politics ain't bean bag."  And especially these days when one party is trying to turn our politics into a national train wreck.

My Uncle Jay and Tobacco's Long Slide

I wrote this piece for the Bisbee Observer in June of 1999 and Laura Swan, the publisher and editor graciously dug it out of the back issues volumes. Thanks, Laura, for letting me write for the Observer for a year or so, and for help in finding an article that I will always remember.

 
My Uncle Jay from east Texas was my mother's oldest and only surviving sibling in the last years of her life. He was one of my most favorite people ever.

When he was about 21, he worked in a furniture store in Paris, Texas. He was standing one day outside the store, smoking a cigarette, when Clyde, his brother who also worked at the furniture store, suddenly said "Here comes Pappy."

Pappy was Walter Parish, my grandfather and my mother's and Jay and Clyde's father, who lived just across the line, in Bokchito, Oklahoma. Pappy didn't approve of smoking.

Getting out

I was talking with a friend, mulling over the latest tragic news in Afghanistan and the accompanying news that, "the President is reviewing our exit strategy." Or words to that effect.

May I be rude and offer a more comprehensive exit strategy, Mr. President?

How about our exit from, say, South Korea? As I understand it, we still have roughly the same number of American GIs there as back when I was there, and that was 1958 to 1959, five years after the shooting stopped and when Ouijongbu (of M.A.S.H. fame) was a village. Now it's a subway stop from Seoul, one of the largest and most modern cities in the world.

I used to clear Seoul in about 15 minutes with the Korean police waving us through.

And if that seems imprudent, given North Korea still weird version of tyranny, then why not bring half of them home?  

And while I'm at it, may I ask why are we still in Okinawa, if for any other reason than to serve as a wonderful destination for career military families seeking gracious accommodations, beautiful beaches, and gigantic PX's?  And where else might we still be?  Germany, Italy?  Surely we don't need to be there, at least not in anything more than a token presence? Iceland?

Why is it that leaving, getting out, and coming back home has become unthinkable?  We left Vietnam, eventually, and Laos, pretty quickly.  Why can't we leave all of these other distant places?  Is it possible that, while we at home pretend hat we are out there because of what might happen out there, the truth is that long ago our reasons have shifted.

Now we are Empire, much as George Bush thought we are Empire, and we're staying because leaving would leave us feeling diminished and lost.  What would we do with ourselves if we were to bring the troops, the civilians, the contractors, and everyone else, home, finally home?

Then we can't avert our gaze from the needs we have right in front of our nose: our highways, our still-wasteful cars, our insane dependence on oil and gas, and our shameful lack of planning for the next world that we must come to inhabit, or else everything goes to pot.

Back to Texas

Well, we didn't go, after all, but I'm leaving this up because we would have had a great time.

Carole and I are heading back to Texas, this time through the Big Bend country, Marfa, Alpine, Marathon, and then over to San Antonio, my old home town and to see some friends. I made this trip 10 years ago with my good friend, and Army buddy, Bill Crull, who has since died. We had a terrific time seeing a Texas he had never seen, and had ribbed me about when we were very young and getting used to Army life. Bill was actually impressed with Marfa, especially the Presidio County Courthouse.

We are excited to get in the car and head out again; we're both good with travel and trips. And we love this part of the Southwest. We will drive through country featured in Tommy Lee Jones's wonderful movie, "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada."  I wrote about this movie here.

The Sixties, our Sixties, after all

My wife and I met in Washington, D.C. in July of 1967.  It was my first ever job in the Nation's Capitol, and by then Carole was a veteran of the Capital, and an administrative assistant for a prominent, up-and-coming liberal (and later moderate) Republican, Silvio Conte, of Massachusetts.  I met Carole through a fellow North American Aviation representative in our company's Washington Office.  We were a fairly big office, with space for each of the major Divisions, and we took up most of two floors in the Davis Building, located near the intersection of K Street and Connecticut Avenue.  

The building today looks a little more grandiose than it did then, in the late 1960s. I worked for three years as a lobbyist, or representative, for North American. Back then, K Street wasn't so infamous. It was mostly business, working with federal agencies to win more business for our California divisions.  My "division" was the Life Sciences Division, and we represented an amazingly eclectic collection of projects, from biomass to be used in wastewater conversion to projects for the Biosattelite mission of NASA, to the Field Medical Laboratory then being used in Vietnam.  It was an exciting time for me, and I had worked for the company for about five years before, and to be asked to work in Washington was a great honor and opportunity.

And Carole was one of a small band of women administrative assistants, A.A.'s, smart, capable, and full of the bravado and energy that the Sixties gave to so many of us.

Step-children of a lesser god, one more time

(I have written about hearing loss several times, over the years, the first time for The Bisbee Observer, and then once before in this blog. My hearing loss has stablized; but that's not the whole story. Hearing with hearing loss is work and it is a skill, and skills can go rusty. And the environments you hear in change, and I'm teaching again, and I need to always keep on the students, to get them to speak up, and to speak to me. Students often think a classroom is like a church; one must speak softly. I constantly remind them that their voice will be a primary part of their professional life. It's working but it's still work.)

I bought the hearing aids I now wear, in 2010, probably my fifth set in almost 20 years, and each time I get new instruments, it takes me back to Austin and the Texas School for the Deaf. This was 1959.

 I had spent three years in the Army, including 16 months in Korea. I was discharged from Fort Meade, near Washington, D.C., and returned Austin to finish college.  I first attended the University of Texas in 1955, but early in my sophomore year, I had decided to enlist. I was tired of college, I wasn't ready to settle down, and i knew that I needed to travel first, maybe grow up a little bit, get more serious.

Sweet Thursday

I'm going to read Sweet Thursday, a book by John Steinbeck I've never read.  I've read The Grapes of Wrath, long ago, in the Army.  I should read it again. I've read Travels With Charley, a wonderful book about a man and his dog and travels throughout the United States.  

"The Country Just Over the Fence."

If you would like to read about the part of the world I live in, read Paul Theroux's "The Country Just Over the Fence," a wonderful story about Nogales, Sonora, a few miles from Bisbee, a town much like Agua Prieta, across from Douglas.  Naco, Sonora, across from Bisbee and our Naco, is much smaller scale, but still the same.  

It's a part of the world most in Arizona never, ever visit.  We have been across many, many times, and, its true, not so much since 9/11.  Everything changed then.

Last night we ate at Cafe Roka, a wonderful restaurant in Bisbee owned by Rod Kass, one of the best restaurants I have ever eaten in. And we were on the main floor near the bar, and all night people stopped by to say hello and talk for a minute.  A few had been to Alamos, Sonora, a town we have visted three or four times, a town we would consider living in, were the political situation here in the U.S. to require it. Like the elevation of certain GOP candidates to the highest office in the land.

The GOP is now over the cliff

The GOP presidential free-for-for all is a race to the right, with each desperate candidate slamming the president with attacks that smack of racism and sheer hysteria.  President Obama, according to Gingrich, is incapable of defending the U.S. because he has accepted the modest cuts to the Defense budget proposed by the Department of Defense.

Meanwhile, Santorum attacks the President's theology as anti-Christian.  The Founding Fathers were not Christian nor men of God in the sense that right wing ideologues define that term. They were Deists, uninterested in Christian theology, and far more interested in founding a Republic. And Christian fundamentalist theology is pretty much a 20th century phenomena. 

You are Accepted

The great essay and sermon of Paul Tillich, "You are Accepted," collected in a book of Tillich's powerful sermons, The Shaking of the Foundations, has been for me a seminal reading and text of my faith and of my way of living my life.  

As part of my Lenten examining, I want to turn again to the power of acceptance that is a gift of grace, grace that we must wait for, that happens to us, grace that proclaims, "you are accepted." 

Tillich fled Nazi Germany in 1936 and became a leading Protestant theologian and a prominent member of Union Theological Seminary in New York.   Tillich referred to God as "ultimate concern" or "the Ground of our Being."  

The three of us

Several months back, our daughter Valerie came to visit with her friend Mark Lopez, and we had a great weekend.  Then we got a picture of the three of us Beauchamps that I really like.

A very interesting, unexpected weekend

This past weekend two things happened that really stopped me, made me think again, about how things are going and about the things that have happened in my life.

The first was attending a memorial service for a man in town I didn't know very well at all, Eddie Rivas, who died last week. Carole and I only knew Eddie and Emily Rivas from two occassions when we were together, but I knew people who knew Eddie well and who truly loved him.  He was something of a character, an ex-Las Vegas detective, a man who headed up security at some of the big hotels and casinos in Vegas, and a man who loved to tell stories. I heard a lot about those stories from those at the service at the Serbian Hall here in Bisbee. 

Andrew Sullivan gets Obama right

I've written my share of critiques of President Obama, but quietly, and over time, he has shown me how his style is absolutely spot-on for handling a restless and confused Democratic Party and a GOP that has become a train wreck. Here's the best thing I've seen on Obama's outstanding first-term record by Andrew Sullivan in Newsweek.

Some hair-raising beliefs

The theological unease with Romney, a recent NY Times story by Laurie Goldstein, reveals some rather unusual aspects of Mormon theology that make Evangelical leaders nervous.

God has a wife, for example, and Jesus was his son, but not divine. So much for the Trinity.

Carole has recently read When Jesus Became God, by Richard Reubenstein, the story of the creation of the Nicene Creed. I read parts of it some time ago. A violent, ugly story about how Jesus was elevated to "divinity" by warring bishops in Nicea. 

I wonder if the Evangelical leaders have read books like this on Christian origins.  The book is probably widely-read in mainstream Protestant seminaries but the seminarians have to promise not to utter a word about this story to any parishioner.

But apparently the evangelical hatred of Obama trumps that "religious" objection. Racism never dies.  

Is that fair? Well, it's likely more than racism; it's also a deep revulsion to what many evangelicals (and other Tea Party members) feel is Obama's socialist, Islamic plans for the United States.

 I suppose if you grow up believing rather stange and unusual things it's hard to stop.

Both "faiths" have some hair-raising beliefs and origins.

MLK, Jr. and The trip to a small town in Texas

I published this piece on April 14, 2010, and I thought I repost it, given the day, Martlin Luther King, Jr. Day, the day we remember our past: the Civil Rights movement to end segregation and before that there was chattel slavery and a Constitution and political order designed to protect slavery. 

But my trip took place in 1954, in Texas.

 

"Mister, do you think you could get the driver to slow down?  He's going to get us killed."

This from a worried young black man dressed in a suit who had been sitting in the back of the bus.

The young man had first asked the driver to slow down and was told to "sit down or ring the bell and get off the bus."  Then he turned to me.  I was sitting up near the driver.

Did I mention it was 1954? In East Texas?

Here we are

Here's a pic of Carole and me at a downtown party held by one of Bisbee's artists, Gretchen Baer, that we dearly enjoy and love.   She took the pic and sent a copy to Carole and hence...

Here's a link to Gretchen's Facebook page. Gretchen, more than any other artist in town, captures Bisbee in all of its outrageous independence. Here's another link to her work.

Carole, as usual, is beautiful, and I'm, well, tall and so forth.

 

Romney likes "firing people"

Well, finally Romney is catching some real hell.  Romey said he likes "firing people." He now says he meant firing insurance companies and "Obamacare"won't let him do it, which is of course false. And so in truth he's not telling the truth.

But also in truth the company he worked for was Bain & Company, a consulting firm and corporate raider, and finally the former governor of Massachusetts is being attacked by Republicans for being a corporate raider. Which he was. And corporate raiders love to fire people, all over the place.

Here's Matt Viser of The Boston Globe on Romney's response to his love of firing people statement. Ezra Klein at The Washington Post says that Romney's Bain & Company's figures of jobs added, "don't add up."

Why is this perspective on Romney just now breaking into news? We've known for months, years even, that he worked for a company that raids corporations and downsized them.  

More Tales of Copper City

For those who might want to read these blog entries another way, I have arranged some of my favorites (and other people's favorites too) into a separate blog, More Tales of Copper City.

You can also find the link to More Tales on the front page of the blog, in the upper right corner, under "Pages" and also under "Links."  I have grouped the topics under Texas, Bisbee, Acceptance, and "And Another Thing..." If you so browse there, please comment, or send me an email at danbeauchamp@mac.com. Give me your thoughts, your criticism, and what have you.  And if you really don't like it, or find it pretentious, let me down gently.

 

 

Krugman and debt

Today, class is in, and Paul Krugman explains how government debt works, and how and why we never paid off the massive WWII debt.  Our economy just grew faster than our debt. 

As Krugman puts it: "[F]amilies have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base." 

Why is it that clarity is so quickly dismissed in the nation's Capital?

Listening

Listening as a discipline and practice came up at our church here in Bisbee, last Sunday, and I decided to post again a piece I wrote on listening back in 2009.  I need to read this frequently, maybe once a week, to remind myself of how poorly I listen, and how much I need to change that. Listening can become a practice, much like meditation is a practice to Buddhists and others. Perhaps that's my New Year's resolution.  Here's the piece:

 Yesterday, on the Fourth here in Bisbee, 2009, we had a large crowd at our house, watching the parade, eating, and talking. It was a fun day all around and the fireworks last night were spectacular. 

Our house is on the parade route in Warren, one part of Bisbee.  When we lived in Bisbee for 10 years before, from 1996 to 2005, we lived in "Old Town" or old Bisbee up the road and on the canyon walls. Now we are down in the flatlands, still at 4000 feet or so in the high desert.

Religion is poetry

Today is Christmas and I'm a little disappointed that I started out with bloviating about liberalism.

On this day, after a Christmas Eve celebration at St. John's with so many people I love, Carole and I find ourselves talking about what we believe and what we don't, and I nearly always wind up with one person, James Carse.

Carse is a student of religion generally, which is why I think he goes further than anyone else in capturing the dilemma of those raised as Christians or Jews but who balk at a lot, a whole lot, of the theology (in the case of Christianity).  Here ia a recent interview with Carse on Salon that captures where he's coming from.  

And what's missing from that interview is his profound spirituality, a spirituality of everyday life.  I have written a lot about him in the past (see the entries under "Carse" as a category, listed on the first page of the blog), and he has helped me enormously, encouraged me to keep on trying to make sense of things "religiously", when the conventional ideas of "God" just don't help anymore.

 

Ending Loser Liberalism

I am really learning from Dean Baker's The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive.  I have long read Baker's columns on economic policy but his book really spells our how narrow and how uniformed we liberals are in national and state policy debates. 

I once spent about a "New York Minute" in a doctoral program in economics and I soon saw it wasn't for me. To plow through a doctoral program and survive as a policy and social liberal takes all kinds of endurance and courage.  You have to hang on to your convictions in courses on price theory, money and banking, economic development and on and on.  The same goes for law school.  I dropped out of both, for much the same reasons.

Shadows

I wrote this early in the year but never put it up.  But somehow I think I should, to honor Callie, our wonderful dog who suffered a lot at the end, this time real suffering. But this time she knew she had us to be with her.

I've mentioned our dog Callie, who's been with us for almost two years.  She's a wonderful and very affecting dog, especially since she had a really rough first six months. She had spent her early months in a "hoarder house" with a large pack of stray dogs and she must have been constantly insecure and anxious.  And then she was placed with an older and disabled man and he abused her, and she was taken away.

When she arrived she was in shock.  I remember her being brought to our mayor's shop, Jack Porter's place, the Bisbee Bug, and she tried to crawl away from all the big people who were waiting to see her. When I picked her up, she peed. I think now that she simply had never been around people very much, which is very damaging to dogs. She's soon stopped the peeing when we handle her up and now she's fine with us most of the time. Carole has worked with her tirelessly, patiently for months but she still spooks easily and is always alert and vigilant, as if expecting the worst.

Food, football, and the federal government

This story was sent to me by my good friend for so many years, Jim Brown, from Austin, or near abouts.  We went to college together at UT in Austin. Jim is a fine steel guitar player who played out at Threadgill's before Janis Joplin made it famous.

The story Jim sent me is about a football team in Georgia, a triple AAA team, from a poor rural county. The players couldn't get enough to eat...literally. The area is so poor that many, many living there simply don't have enough food to put on the table, certainly not enough for their kids to go out and play football hard and fast.

http://rivals.yahoo.com/highschool/blog/prep_rally/post/Georgia-school-overcomes-hunger-to-claim-state-t?urn=highschool-wp10283

It's a wonderful story about some terrific kids, a smart coach, and, guess what, the federal government.

The team went on to win the state championship...

Jim came from a poor part of Texas, which back in those days was not just a few areas, and he says this story has a lot of meaning for him. We were both born as the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl was ending, so our families were just escaping the damage the 1930s  did to Oklahoma and Texas. My family managed to make it to the oil fields of East Texas where there was work. Others weren't so lucky.

Thanks, Jim, and I'll pass the story along to our mutual friend in California, who's struggling again.

The 'Say Anything' Party

Mark Schmitt, in the recent New Republic has a wonderfully trenchant analysis of Newt Gingrich's politics: "Say Anything."  Gingrich doesn't really try to explain his flip-flops; he just says what he needs to say to fit the politics of the eternal now he lives in, which is a parody of the "One Day at a Time" of A.A. fame.  Their "One Day at a Time" is to find themselves; Gringrich's is to endlessly counterfeit himself.

The wonder of life!

I don't know why, but somehow this picture of a young Pygmy goat, captured by Carole at the Cochise County Fair a few months back, captures the miracle of life, in all of its wondering faces.  

Food, Inc.

The scariest movie I have seen in years is "Food, Inc."  I think a lot of people have seen it.  I had not. If you want to see what happens when capitalism comes to agriculture, and who wins (big, big business) and who loses (nearly everyone else), then see this movie. The treatment of animals alone, and the workers, brings tears to your eyes.  And the story of Monsanto and genetically-altered seeds, and what this does to the farmer, is just a devastating story of political power and a craven Congress and Administration.

There is a short segment on workers who make minimum wage and who have to choose between cheap, cheap fast food, and vegetables, and they can't afford vegetables because of the price.  Sugar, salt, and fat is what we're wired to notice in food, and fast food contains these three in abundance.  No wonder we are fat.

No wonder so much of our land mass is devoted to the production of corn. No wonder cattle feed lots are actually factory feed lots with cows standing in feces all day long and slaughtered, crippled or injured.

This movie goes a long way to convince me that capitalism is a disease.  The whole idea of democracy in a capitalist regime is that capitalism has a place but it must be kept in its place.  And that isn't happening in the food industry.

It's economic power, not military power, that carries clout in the world

Leslie Gelb, calling attention to a fine speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, notes that in today's world, when it comes to power and influence, it's the economy, not the military.

China has military might but it is largely confined to its borders; China's clout comes from its economy.  European powers spend far less on the military as a percentage of GDP than the U.S.  Turkey is becoming a regional power because of its economy, not its Army.

And yet, there is a good chance that the country will turn back to the party that has brought us to the brink of economic ruin, partly because President Obama was not resolute enough in meeting the financial crisis and the plundering of banks and Wall Street, and partly because he tried to negotiate with Republican leaders who wanted to ruin him, even if it meant ruining the economy.

And the media keeps itself busy focusing on daily polls so that they don't have to tell the public what's actually going on and thereby unleashing Rush Limbaugh and the power of talk radio.