John Young Column

Mother of all backlashes — from mothers

2012-02-07T16:53:00.001-06:00

Where have they been?

Where will they be tomorrow?

Let's hope they are in the political discussion for the long haul, countering the incessant propaganda that has placed their health — mothers' health — under the rolling pin of anti-abortion politics.

Women who understand the stakes of reproductive health and who support reproductive rights have been quiet far too long.

But when the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure cut off partner-in-prevention Planned Parenthood, these women spoke.

At long last.

They should never let anyone else seize the debate, for it's about them.

The forces that cheered the funding cutoff, including Mitt Romney, want to believe that this is about abortion. No, it's not, except, oddly, tragically and logically, for the fact that no entity does more to prevent the need for abortion among indigent women than does Planned Parenthood. That's right: prevent abortion, through sound choices.

And, of course, prevent cancer.

Jumping on the steed of demagoguery on the Komen matter, the better to be seen by religious-right voters, Republican presidential pretender Rick Santorum parroted right-wing assertions that abortion contributes to breast cancer. Rest assured, his intended audience members weren't experts on the disease. Every major entity involved in the fight against cancer rejects the claim. No matter.

The fact is, the cyclops force that would deny women choice has shown at every opportunity that women's health is less than secondary to its concerns.

Back to the key question. Where have they been — "they" whose collective rage forced Komen's governing board to reverse its decision?

In state after state, politicos on the authoritarian right have sought to do the same thing to Planned Parenthood, defund it, regardless of how that would undermine health care for low-income women — ranging from cancer screenings, to birth control, to fertility counseling — yes, women needing help becoming mothers.

Romney said he supports defunding Planned Parenthood, which is odd. In 2002 he appeared at a Planned Parenthood fundraiser seeking its support, and in a Planned Parenthood questionnaire then he said he supported state-funded abortions.

But enough about these men talking about matters they cannot ever fully appreciate or understand — like Pap smears and breast lumps. What about the women who do?

I speak of those who have allowed Republican-controlled legislatures to undermine women's health care on the altar of anti-abortion politics.

I speak of the women who have watched in general silence (acquiescence?) what The New York Times Magazine called a "war on contraception."

A Harris Poll found that 90 percent support contraception.

Hold that. It found that 90 percent of Catholics support contraception.

Yet Santorum can campaign for president saying that states should have the power to ban it.

And when asked at a debate on this outrageous notion, Romney can slink away by simply dodging it.

Today's Republicans apparently are satisfied with doing whatever they can to undermine that function of these women's clinics: birth control.

Where have the women been? Ah, here they come.

Bemoaning the pressure brought to bear on Komen, James Taranto writes in the Wall Street Journal online of the "totalitarian feminism" that forced the charity's about-face.

Sorry, but we've seen nothing of the sort for years. Instead, we've seen red state after red state carve away at women's rights, including their health care, in single-minded — totalitarian? — focus on taking away their reproductive rights.

We've seen states like Texas impose costly and pointless restrictions — including "informed consent" laws for women seeking abortions, based on specious claims about breast cancer and abortion.

Face it, Mr. Taranto. For quite some time, politically, it's been no contest.

Blessedly, the Komen decision has brought concerned women out. We need them long and loud, just like the forces pushing policies that see right through them.

We need to hear women roar the next time gray-flanneled lawmakers try to do what a pink-hued charity thought was a good idea, for a moment.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Campaigning to be our next Hoover

2012-01-31T16:11:00.001-06:00

"Economic depression cannot be cured by legislative action or executive pronouncement."

Hands now: How many of you wish that voters had taken President Herbert Hoover up on the words above, shared with Congress in 1930?

Matters would become so bleak, that depression earning a capital D, that Hoover's Republican predecessor, Calvin Coolidge, professed "nothing to give ground to hope — nothing of man."

Then came hope in the form of a man with useless legs but no other signs of resignation.

Yes. Hope. It was what Franklin Roosevelt brought to American kitchen tables. A few generations later amid dire economic times, "hope" was candidate Barack Obama's catchword.

Hope. I've seen the "Dope" bumper stickers. Slick. "Hopey Changey." Cute.

And yet: Take a look around. How hopeful would the nation be now if voters had handed this economy in 2008 to another Hoover?

The economy is growing again. Last year it added 1.9 million private-sector jobs. That "private-sector" modifier is pertinent, because under Obama's predecessor the most prodigious job creator was war and its wares. (Bush became the first president in history to have the growth of government-sector jobs outpace private-sector job growth. Under Obama the federal workforce has declined by 280,000. )

Mitt Romney calls Obama a "jobs killer." Actually, most of the jobs lost under Obama disappeared in his first year in office.

And Obama was left with the assignment: Do something.

His predecessor had stepped on the debt pedal to finance two wars and rounds of unnecessary, ineffectual across-the-board tax cuts. Then — hmmm — the economy tanked. Trickle-down magic, it was.

Before Obama grabbed the firehose for stimulus measures that many economists called too little, too late, Bush had already turned the spigot, authorizing $1.6 trillion in stimulus spending.

The nation, and its new president, were dug into a deep hole, fiscally and financially.

Now, let's imagine — and this will take some imagining — that today's tea party stalwarts awoke in 2007 and rose to oppose the debt monster when a Republican administration was stoking without a care. Let's say today's no-spending, no-matter-what, do-nothing Congress arrived four years early. What would the government have been able to do to address the economic death spiral of 2008?

Uh, nothing.

Would the tea party and its newbies in Congress have thwarted any attempt to stimulate the economy and to avoid what many warned was the beginnings of a second Great Depression? You can bet your "Who But Hoover?" campaign button they would have.

I'm not sure any of us wants to imagine where the economy, and the state of job creation, would be now if that were the case.

Obama pushed initiatives to invest in infrastructure and schools to help the economy. He also engineered a deathbed triage for the auto industry — something that not only salvaged automakers but also its domestic web of suppliers.

"Socialism," cried the fiscal fundamentalists. Rest assured, they would have denounced Obama the same if he'd let the industry dry up and drift overseas.

Oh, and the loans to automakers have been paid back. And, while we're talking about self-financing matters, how about the way that Iraq oil money paid for the war we waged in 2003?

Back to the Depression: I'm thinking about how the tea party types would have contested Roosevelt's creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration, and how much poorer the nation would have been if so impaired. It didn't happen.

Three years ago this nation came very close to experiencing the hopeless days that left millions in despair and made Hoover a pariah.

These days are not so hopeless, unless you get your history on a bumper sticker.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Those red-state family values

2012-01-24T17:12:00.001-06:00

"I wonder what his ex-wife is thinking, knowing she put him over the top in South Carolina."

My wife, who said this, wasn't being serious, of course.

Who could profit from his ex-wife telling a national audience about him making a teensy weensy request: to mess around on her? This just before a primary in Bible-thump country?

No one. Not even Newt Gingrich. And yet . . .

Marianne Gingrich's TV testimony didn't seem to hurt the man at all. Based on exit polls, it didn't appear to undermine his appeal to so-called evangelical voters. It didn't seem to hurt him vis-a-vis women voters.

We are left to assume that a definition of "family values" holds sway in red-state South Carolina — and in Dixie itself? — that differs greatly from that once presumed.

Sanctity of marriage? You jest.

Honor thy wife? Depends.

Thou shall not commit adultery? On which days? How about if the life mate is under the weather? Cranky? How about bedridden?

I believe this is called — and correct me if wrong — moral relativism.

If that's the case, if it's all relative now, why do red states and the voters who call the shots carry on with the "sanctity of marriage" mumbo jumbo to prevent gays and lesbians from taking holy vows?

If monogamy is a joke as modeled by Gingrich, why should his supporters care about this marriage institution, anyway?

This is all confusing, I know, but it shouldn't be. From Ronald Reagan, to Henry Hyde, to Bob Livingston, to Bob Barr, to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the sanctity-of-marriage, family-values party has never been much of one, rhetoric to the contrary. Now, apparently, all pretenses are gone. And what a relief for pretentious prowlers like Newt Gingrich.

We all knew Democrats were reprobates, deviants, people who never met a marriage they didn't want to destroy. Republicans? No way.

It's been 20 years now, but my ears still ring from attending the 1992 Republican National Convention at the Houston Astrodome. That was the one where the term "traditional family values" was uttered every other tightly scripted line. Well, admit it. That is so 20 years ago. Right, GOP?

So, once again: If red-state voters, among whom Gingrich has climbed the charts even after his ex-wife's revelations, are so finished with defending the sanctity of marriage, why can't they give up that pious baloney about gay marriage and say, "I do"?

Washington state is about to become the seventh state to legalize same-sex marriage. A group of 70 mayors affiliated with the U.S. Conference of Mayors supports the same. We can trust that most of them aren't in the South, or in the red swath across the nation's midsection so predominated by Republican sensibilities. You know, the "real America."

I ask again: If sufficient numbers of Republicans are willing to have their standard-bearer make a mockery of marriage, why not let gays and lesbians in on the wreckage?

Here's why. Those Republicans who like a candidate with disposable morals, who'll ditch a wife or two to suit his lusty ways, are afraid. They're afraid of what same-sex couples might bring to the table. No, it's not immorality that concerns them, since morals are disposable.

They are afraid of the fierce devotion, the true spirit of monogamy, that committed gays and lesbians bring into this equation. What a way to spoil a free-love party. Keep those freaks out at all costs.

The Seventh Commandment is for squares, and is certainly not an electability consideration for strident anti-government politicos. Amen.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Let Mitt be . . . what exactly is Mitt?

2012-01-17T15:29:00.001-06:00

The best line so far in the 2012 presidential derby? This from Joe Klein:

"Authenticity is rapidly becoming a euphemism for simple ignorance. (Herman) Cain was authentic; Sarah Palin was authentic. Elitists — people who have actually studied complicated stuff and become experts at it — are phonies. Just ask Rush Limbaugh."

Klein was contemplating the ongoing challenge for Mitt Romney in coming across as human, not humanoid.

His point: Romney has a lot going for him — education, experience, smarts — but "authenticity"?

It's odd that anyone would comment on Romney's genuineness, when; well, consider . . .

Authentic? Serial adulterer Newt Gingrich professes his Catholicism.

Authentic? Rick Perry, he of ballot security schemes that purge the poor, says Virginia "disenfranchises voters" because it won't bend rules to let him on its primary ballot.

Authentic? Rick Santorum pontificates on evil government health care. And, um, his parents worked for the VA, and he grew up on VA hospital campuses.

Still, this authenticity thing is a real concern for Romney, as it was for one other Massachusetts governor of note.

What is Mitt about, except one who for eight years has been offering his hair for national office?

Disquieting (if you are a Republican) similarities seem to exist between Romney and Michael Dukakis, the squat Massachusetts governor who out-vagued a very puny Democratic field in 1988. Dukakis became short work of George H.W. Bush.

Republican voters want to fall in love with Romney, just as Democrats wanted to fall in love with Dukakis.

Are voters destined to find in Romney, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, that "when you get there there isn't any there there"?

Believe or discard: Like Dukakis, Romney is running on his resume. And like Dukakis, Romney is also tapping the potency of vacuousness in not saying much that will get him in trouble with any constituency.

Will it work in the general election? Sure, it could. But it probably won't. Romney is going to have to show that there is a "there there."

What was telling about Dukakis was that the only time his anemic candidacy started to show any traction with voters was when he started showing some red corpuscles and stopped running from the "L" word, something he had dodged vigorously.

Seemingly tied to that formula (made in Massachusetts?) Romney has been expertly dodging any number of matters throughout a very successful primary quest. Consider the debate when Santorum said he agreed that states should have the right to ban birth control.

Romney, given the chance to state his position, evaded most expertly, leading a lot of people to ask, "Really?"

Wrote Miles Mogulescu in the Huffington Post:

"Now, it might be easy to dismiss Santorum as an extremist outlier and assume that a President Romney would never do the same. But as Romney's evasive response . . . makes clear, that would be a profound mistake."

Really?

At this week's debate in South Carolina, Romney was similarly slippery when Santorum pressed him about federal law allowing allowing ex-convicts to vote if they completed their sentences. Romney's evasiveness was particularly odd because a pro-Romney ad attacked Santorum for voting for the law in the Senate.

So, this is Romney's authenticity problem. It's not whether or not he can summon a "ya betcha" to win the adoration of Palin's moose-killing set, or whether as a businessman he can pull off the "The Herman Cain Show." It's what in fact he is about, policy-wise, principles-wise. It's about how long it will take for voters to figure that out, and/or whether Romney will figure it out in advance of when voters decide for themselves.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

So howl the hounds of gerrymandering

2012-01-10T21:37:00.001-06:00

Whenever she sees gratuitous spending, my wife thinks like a dog-cat lover. She thinks of the animal shelters that money could build.

Don't look now, but whole cities of animal shelters are being expended in legal fees by states across the country to promote and defend something Americans least need: noncompetitive, lock-cinch, party-rigged political races.

It's happening in Texas. The U.S. Supreme Court this week heard a Republican appeal to court-ordered maps for Congress and the Texas Legislature.

It's happening in Arizona. The state Supreme Court intervened to keep the Republican governor from tampering with a nonpartisan redistricting commission.

It's likely to happen in Florida. There, majority Republicans in the Legislature aren't happy with constitutional revisions meant to take politics out of the process.

State lawmakers whose party has a controlling majority long have exerted as their privilege drawing districts that cement themselves and their kind into power, even if the districts look like barbells and mud puppies.

It truly is one of the gravest conditions facing representative democracy as we know it. Democracy is not representative when lawmakers have no legitimate opposition on Election Day.

Here's another problem with these practices, circa 2012: The population growth necessitating additional seats in Congress in these states is coming mostly from minorities, particularly Latinos, who are mostly Democrats. To figure out ways to contrive additional safe seats for Republicans based on this demographic surge requires even more grotesquely proportioned districts.

And it contravenes the Voting Rights Act when minorities' ability to elect people is crushed in said fashion.

The Supreme Court, in the Texas case, is asked to side with the politically driven Legislature against a federal court that drew up districts more hospitable to minorities, more competitive in general, and more in keeping with the Voting Rights Act.

With relish, Texas Republicans will point out that the worm has turned, that the Democrats gerrymandered as well when they had a lock on power for generations. True.

One should acknowledge, however, that toward an actual system that reflects democratic ideals, nothing truly representative can come of this.

Pamela Powers Hannley, writing in Huffington Post, observes that, "To the world, Arizona is a firebrand red state solidly controlled by Republicans." Yet voter rolls show a 30-30-30 split between Republicans, Democrats and independents.

"How could all of this happen?" she writes. "Gerrymandering."

Arizona voters thought they changed this. They created an Independent Redistricting Committee, which indeed last month issued more competitive maps than majority Republicans want. Republican Gov. Jan Brewer and legislative leaders have tried everything they can to derail it this process, including the ouster of the commission's chairwoman, later reinstated by the state Supreme Court. The majority party in Arizona isn't through trying to circumvent what voters intended. Believe it.

In Florida, voters amended the constitution to make redistricting less partisan, and districts more competitive. This apparently is an untenable notion to majority Republicans and Gov. Rick Scott. They are seeking to overturn the new rules. The battle lines lead, of course, to court.

In the Texas case, the U.S. Supreme Court is going to decide if what the Legislature wants best expresses the people's will. Of course, it does not. It's what a majority party wants.

If allowed to, Democrat or Republican, that party will do anything it can to prevent voters from actually influencing elections, no matter how many animal shelters it expends fighting the public good in court.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Of coal plants and meth makers

2012-01-03T12:42:00.001-06:00

Let's say your neighbor spent his working hours cooking methamphetamine.

Let's say that instead of cooking it in the basement, confining lethal fumes to his home-sweet four walls and his two incinerated lungs, your neighbor cooked meth as one would a backyard brisket: over your fence.

Let's say that, nauseated by the fumes, you complained to the sheriff (who happened to be on the take from the meth dealer).

Let's say the sheriff granted that breathing meth-lab fumes is bad for you, but said the economic activity generated by the next-door business had to be weighed.

"What you propose — shutting down this enterprise — is a jobs killer," let's say the sheriff said. "No can do."

Welcome to the policy morass that has allowed utilities to spew deadly toxins over millions of backyard fences without a care. Hint: The policies have never been driven by breathers — until just the other day.

That's when the Environmental Protection Agency, after two decades of deliberation (read: stalling), finally set forth some protections fit for its name. By 2016 coal-fired utilities would (1) install scrubbers to limit airborne poisons like mercury, cadmium, arsenic and nickel, (2) convert to another fuel like natural gas, or (3) shut down.

This evoked exactly what one would expect. Republican U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, who calls global climate change "a hoax," called the rule a "a thinly veiled electricity tax" that would hurt jobs.

On the campaign trail in Iowa, Rick Perry said that as president he would go after the EPA with a veritable pickax, "audit every regulation that's gone forward since '08, and if it kills jobs versus help create jobs, it's gone."

Listen to discourse in the GOP presidential race this year and hear the yearning for the days cataloged by Upton Sinclair in the The Jungle and Rachel Carson in Since Silent Spring — where commerce ruled over all, where labor and environmental standards were matters for industry to dictate. Hear Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and, of course, Michele Bachmann call for dismantling the EPA. And in its stead? Well, state or local control, of course.

Now, come on, folks. Let's ponder what these people are saying. Really.

Local and state control? What happens when state lawmakers are on the take from polluters?

Also, what happens when pollution from one state threatens the health and welfare of another next door?

Days after the EPA issued its new mercury rule, notoriously recalcitrant states like Texas got a stay in court on another key EPA edict, the "cross-state emissions rule." Under it, sulfur and nitrogen oxide emissions in 27 states would be considered to have no boundaries when shared across state lines.

As with the decades-long stall against mercury controls, this court victory was seen as buying polluters time to plug along with antiquated technology, even if they had the means to do the right thing.

This is all dictated by dollars and cents for those calling the shots in each state capitol, and we aren't talking about elected officials or the people who elect them. We're talking about industry.

Jobs? Actually, jobs come from supplying technology to clean up utilities.

No, this is about the politics of stasis, of entrenched special interests having their way. It's the politics of convenience vs. the quest for sane and economical alternatives to things that kill us.

Face it. The old-technology power plant, the never-easing dependency on fossil fuels, the blindness to pollution's pathologies — whether to individuals or the planet itself — is the face of the political conservative next door.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Resolve in 2012: Abolish No Child Left Behind

2011-12-28T01:19:00.000-06:00

The subject here is destructive education policies. But first: Have you heard of the Capital One Cup?

It goes to the two Division I NCAA schools that win the most titles each year in men's and women's sports.

The prize? In addition to the glittering silver keepsake: $400,000 in athletic scholarships. Inspiring, right?

Don't you know Texas, or Florida, or USC, or some other booster-endowed NCAA mega power could use that extra scholarship money?

OK. It's not inspiring; it's ridiculous.

Now, imagine that in addition to awarding college behemoths with more riches, we decreed that a gridiron patsy like Columbia, Tulane or Florida Atlantic shut down its football program for having too bad a record.

This brings us back to destructive education policy.

For years states have been approaches just as screwy, praising and rewarding already wealthy suburban schools, while shuttering "failing" schools based on distinctions that bespeak the sporting term "competitive mismatch." All along it's been the University of Texas teeing it up against Prairie View A&M.

No Child Left Behind pretends to address learning disparities, but it makes matters worse in many ways.

It is horrifically punitive toward schools with the biggest challenges, going so far as to shut them down for failing to meet achievement targets.

I've seen how this system hurts inner-city schools and their neighborhoods. It works this way:

Under the Overpass Middle School, ensconced in a pocket of poverty and despair, has low test scores, for obvious reasons. Under the gun from the state and NCLB, low test scores yield a revolving door of principals ("new leadership"), faculty ("a new team") and increasingly cyclops-like ("new focus") approaches aimed at state test criteria.

Word gets out about this "failing" school and the junkyard-dog flogging it is getting. Good teachers stay away. Families flee. Failure becomes self-fulfilling. The district shuts down Under the Overpass Middle, depriving the neighborhood of one of its few uplifting and stable features. Thanks, folks.

Meanwhile, the students are farmed out of their neighborhood to larger, more impersonal schools. Rest assured, few policymakers live under the overpass. Any damage they've wrought, they won't feel.

On many dimensions, what has happened under "accountability" and NCLB is hurtful. For one, the standardization drumbeat impedes high achievers who don't need a constant drone about basic skills.

For another, it shackles teachers to a system that's not about teaching but about following a script, and wasting untold instructional hours on standardized tests, benchmark tests and test prep.

For the children with the greatest challenges, with test emphasis ramped up at every step, schooling is drained of the wonder factor. Dropouts ensue. Who would want this? No policymaker would ever accept his or her child being served this way.

If it sounded like a good idea, NCLB turned out to be a horror — Frankenstein in a good suit.

The Obama administration realizes that the monster is about to hit the wall — or crash through it — the one requiring 100 percent "proficiency" in core subjects nationwide next school year.

Almost from day one this administration has urged a rewrite of NCLB. However, the Senate is frozen into irreconcilable parts, and this House is sworn to resist Obama's every twitch. Consequently, the Department of Education has set up a system of waivers for states on a case-by-case basis.

Lawmakers are incensed by this, but they know what NCLB requires regarding "100 proficiency" is beyond the pale.

This is the year, with Democratic frustration over NCLB's untenable realities, with Republican frustration over the federal meddling it authorizes, it's time to kill NCLB.

Don't tweak it. Don't adjust it. Don't give it "new focus." Don't find a "new team."

Kill it. Kill it.

Stop the false comparisons that result in executioner-style resolutions. Turn the ax on No Child Left Behind.

The death of this odious initiative would amount to the happiest of new years for American school children and those who seek to educate them.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

The synthetic, utterly bogus ‘War on Christmas'

2011-12-19T23:28:00.001-06:00

My wife knew what she was talking about, but her fine instincts were not enough to move me.

"Write a Christmas book," she said. Nothing sells like a Christmas book. It's short. It's seasonal. It sells. You get it as a gift, you regift it next Christmas.

Sales receipts don't lie. Combine a cat with Christmas, a dog with Christmas, a reindeer, an orphaned tree, a gelatin mold with magic powers. Ka-ching.

I could do it, I told my wife. But it would be wrong.

Recently one TV talker decided these considerations outweighed any nod to personal integrity. But that was something he had left off at the hat rack when employed by Fox News anyway.

Surprise: The War on Christmas became a best seller.

The author's name gets no mention here, and needs none. The shill machine of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes took care of that.

The War masterpiece's subheading — "How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought" — no doubt was added to bump up the word count so as to justify its hardcover binding.

When Mohandas Gandhi said, "I love Christ. It's just that so many of you Christians are so unlike your Christ," I'm thinking he had in mind people who march around in superficial umbrage over something that, well . . .

For example, they will head step right over the homeless man sleeping on a grate to gesture at and denounce the "Happy Holidays" in the storefront window paint.

That's what it's all about, mind you. Two words. Two words that are part of a "plot" to "ban" a sacred holiday.

Call a Christmas tree a "holiday tree"? Horrors.

Well, brethren, those furrowed brows are like plastified, simulated evergreen boughs. Fake. Store-bought.

Outraged over a holiday greeting? Get real. Real Christians can find real outrages out there on the windblown streets, in the soup kitchens, in prisons, in struggling-to-get-by nursing homes, where Medicaid reimbursement rates are life-and-death matters.

Name your phony spiritual concern — that school pageants are too secular today, that local governments seek to treat the holidays in pluralistic ways. The same applies to retailers. They have Jews celebrating Hanukkah this month, as well as with adherents of Kwanzaa, and non-Christians of many stripes who just like the pretty lights and are in the mood for egg nog. They are customers. They are Americans. A business, or a nation, or a school district or city hall that doesn't serve all of these people is running a fool's errand.

Some Americans don't get the whole secular nature of the American experience and never will. This nation was born as a refuge from sectarianism. Its First Amendment protections against the latter have made it the most religion-friendly construct in the history of self-governance.

Yet you have Rick Perry telling Iowa voters that "war" is being waged against Christians. Talk about plastic indignation.

I lived in Texas for a long time — Perry's neck of the North American woods. To say that Christians, particularly the conservative, evangelical, Republican kind, are oppressed is to insinuate that the Dallas Cowboys play in a cardboard shack.

What Perry really says with this "war on Christianity" pitch to Republicans is that he doesn't buy the notion that government should be neutral regarding faith. He thinks its job is to exalt and advertise a majority's piety.

It is worth pointing out that the religious oppression the Pilgrims and Puritans fled was, in fact, Christian. Then to enforce the kind of Christianity they wished to see, these refugees created their own authoritarian systems.

The founders forming this republic agreed that such an approach, tyrannical piety, was no way to run a country. Apparently today, most retailers agree it's no way to run a business.

An amazing thing about the holidays, American-style: Everyone appears to enjoy them — that is, sadly, except for those who grow red in the face pointing at a storefront that proclaims "Happy Holidays."

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Is he worth an elementary school?

2011-12-14T05:19:00.002-06:00

Because I focused a lot of my writing life on small-town issues and a communal pact to educate my two sons and their peers, long ago I arrived at my own formula to justify, or not, a big sum of money.

I broke down that sum into how many elementary schools it would build.

Back when I first started thinking this way, an elementary school cost about $1 million. That doubled in short order. Now, according to Reed Construction Data, it costs $5 million, give or take a few hundred thousand dollars. Meaning:

The next generation of stealth jet fighters planned by the Pentagon will cost 16.4 elementary schools apiece ($82.1 million). Worth it? Your call, America. And I trust you’ve made that call. (Whether you want to pay for it is another matter. Based on three decades of blue-sky tax policies, you want my sons and their peers, and their grandchildren, to pay for it.)

I made a similar calculation about comparative costs the other day when the Los Angeles Angels agreed to pay the equivalent of 50.8 elementary schools over 10 years for Albert Pujols to don a first baseman’s mitt.

Worth it? Apparently so.

Angels’ ownership believes that, with prices jacked up sufficiently, enough posteriors will plant in enough seats to see Pujols jack majestic missiles out of the park.

Then again, that will depend if the roof is retracted or not. A new stadium is set for March completion. Cost: 103 elementary schools ($515 million).

No need to single out baseball, of which I’m a fan, or of Pujols, of whom I’m an admirer. Consider professional basketball, where the players recently held out for a larger piece of the pay pie.

Did these laborers in long shorts have a gripe? Let's see: The average NBA salary is — hmm— well, imagine that: It's one elementary school, plus a really good playground. Or $5.15 million. Your call, sports fans.

I was thinking the other day of what certain people are worth. Is Mitt Romney really worth 40.4 elementary schools ($202 million)? So says Money magazine. No wonder he could lay an on-camera $10,000 wager on Rick Perry. No wonder he could run for president full time for, what, eight years?

Is Republican Florida Gov. Rick Scott worth 20.6 elementary schools ($103 million)? Really? Such is the worth of leveraging one’s way into and out of for-profit health care (just ahead of criminal subpoenas).

Having leveraged his fortune in obtaining elected office, Scott says Florida spends too much on elementary schools.

By the way, after Scott was forced out as CEO of Columbia/HCA, the company admitted to 14 felonies and settled with the federal government for 120 elementary schools ( $600 million).

Let's talk Wall Street. In October, Goldman Sachs reported third-quarter losses of 85.6 elementary schools ($428 million). You see? Everyone suffers in a recession.

Goldman Sachs announced at the same time it had set aside $10 billion for compensation and bonuses.
So, you can see why some people whose needs are met, whose elementary schools have already been built, have taken to deriding Occupy Wall Street protesters. How dare those scruffy squatters bring to public attention how resources, public and private, are so insanely misdirected, not just via payrolls and pink slips, but as pertains to what the public needs, like education.

The next time you see a grade schooler, ask is he or she is saving up to pay for today’s priorities.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Moths to Gingrich's flame

2011-12-07T00:40:00.001-06:00

It was an amazing statement from a Republican, and just what Democrats wanted to hear.

It came from ex-Colorado congressman, hard-right foghorn and recently candidate-for-everything Tom Tancredo:

"I firmly believe this … The greatest threat to the country that our founding fathers put together is the man that's sitting in the White House today."

Tancredo was appearing at an event to support Colorado Republican Senate nominee Ken Buck, a tea party darling. His words drew loud applause.

Democrats would thank them both for this kind of rhetoric when Buck lost to centrist Michael Bennett in the Senate race. Meanwhile, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper routed Tancredo and another tea party product, Dan Maes, in a three-man race for governor.

Advantage Dems. Advantage voices of reason. Oh, and thank you, Newt Gingrich.

Before Tancredo let fly with this bombast, Gingrich coined it. In a Fox News interview, he affirmed writing in his book To Save America that the Obama administration was as "great a threat to America as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union." (Maybe so as not to be charged with plagiarism, Tancredo called Obama a greater threat than al Qaida.)

Suffice it to say, then, that thank-you notes go out this week from Democrats thrilled that Newt the Bomb Thrower is at the head of the Republican pack. Talk about an easy target, and we aren't talking girth.

How joyous should the Ds be about this development? RealClearPolitics.com keeps a running cumulative poll: Obama vs. the Republican front runner. For weeks, the RCP average showed Obama leading Mitt Romney by one to 2 points. When Gingrich started outpolling Romney among Republicans (now by an average of 7.5 points nationwide), Obama suddenly had a six-point advantage.

What is the reason for Newt's surge? Clearly, it is the same reason why hard-right Ken Buck was the man who Republicans sent up in the Senate race in Colorado, and Sharron Angle in Nevada, and Christine O'Donnell in Delaware. The tea party is the GOP's life force. He or she who enunciates best what it is thinking and saying will be its standard-bearer.

As in Obama depicting "Kenyan, anti colonial behavior." (Gingrich)

As in Justice Sonia Sotomayor being "racist." (Gingrich)

As in saying the nation was "in danger of becoming a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists." (Yes, Gingrich)

You realize what you are hearing from this man; you are hearing Rush Limbaugh in a better suit. And isn't that the way it's always been?

If Rush got caught playing fast and loose with OxyContin scrips, Gingrich got caught — reprimanded, the first sitting U.S. House speaker so disgraced — for misusing tax-deductible contributions. He was fined $300,000.

Rush, while howling about Godless Democrats and out all those Christian family values he upholds, as well as "defending marriage," has been through several marriages. He is on No. 4. Guess who, at wife No. 3, is playing catchup? Gingrich.

Well, then, Limbaugh never cheated on and dumped his life-mate while she faced grave illness, as Gingrich did wives Nos. 1 and 2. Until death? See you later.

You understand, it's all about Christian principles, as Gingrich stressed to a campaign gathering the other day in a South Carolina church. The congregants seemed less interested, naturally, in Newt's track record as a moral person than with his fealty to anti-choice politics.

Wait, you say: The key reason Gingrich has risen in the polls, aside from right-wingers' discomfort with Romney, is that at times he has appeared to be the only adult in the room during the comedy chautauqua advertised as the GOP presidential debates. It's true.

And the Democrats are sitting in the living-room audience, applauding his every measured word.

When it comes to a paper trail, a list of damaging quotes as long as Lincoln's arm, and a track record of achievement headed by shutting down the government (helping assure Bill Clinton's re-election), well, what better candidate could the opposition ask for?

Unless. Rush, will you run?

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

'Activist' conservatives’ judicial con

2011-11-29T22:13:00.001-06:00

Here's the situation coming down the stretch: The Affordable Health Care Act is winning by a nose.

That would be the one-vote majority by which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the constitutionality of the most sweeping reform of health care since Medicare.

A Reagan appointee, of all people, Judge Laurence Silberman, wrote the opinion affirming its constitutionality, saying the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution allowed it.

And, so, you know what that means.

It means that conservatives are pleading, beseeching, burning incense on altars for a little judicial activism by conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Justice Antonin Scalia, this is your cue to show us the political animal you are and always will be.

We have been led to believe that you and your cohorts on the court's right wing are "strict constructionists" who don't bend with partisan breezes. Pardon while I sneeze.

The drone from the right is about villainous judges who ignore the popular (legislative) will.

If that activism is rejected by Justices Scalia, Roberts, Thomas and Alito, President Obama's signature social achievement has it made in the shade.

By review relative to the health care that was law "rammed down our throats": Obama ran for president promising reforms to insure all Americans. The Senate and House arrived at a compromise. He signed it. This is called representative democracy.

Conservatives now beg fellow conservatives on the court to overturn it.

That, by review, is judicial activism.

Anyone paying attention to Scalia and company will acknowledge that such activist urges — ignoring the popular will expressed through legislation — is hardly unprecedented. The court overturning key aspects of campaign finance law in the 2010 Citizens United case is Exhibit No. 1.

Other examples include the conservative wing of the court voting to overturn the Violence Against Women Act and the Gun-Free School Zones Act.

Then there was a certain presidential election in 2001. The court overruled Florida's courts because — as constitutional constructionist Scalia explained — all that counting and recounting had gone on long enough.

That, wrote Adam Cohen in The New York Times, "isn't a constitutional argument. It is an unapologetic defense of judicial activism."

Back to the Affordable Health Care Act, which a gaggle of Republican attorneys general seeks to repeal. The argument is that the individual mandate to have insurance exceeds federal power.

However, as Silberman points out, the Commerce Clause is open-ended. Additionally, he points out that the circuit court was ruling on "a long-established constitutional power, not recognizing a new constitutional right." This sounds like, um, strict constructionism.

Republicans challenging the law in court want to construct, 223 years after ratification and through judicial fiat, limits existing only in their minds.

Once again: The law in question was signed by a popularly elected president after passing Congress. This is how the system works, unless capricious judges can't stomach it.

Honestly, sometimes it appears Republicans don't know what they want with the courts. One day they advocate court-stripping mechanisms to get judges out of the way of what they do legislatively. The next day, to block duly enacted legislation, they burn incense hoping their favored judges will get a whiff.

The Constitution? They revere it — except when they can't hack it, and want to amend it. I am reminded of Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who from the moment he came to Washington in 2003 and got seated on the Judiciary Committee seemed to spend every moment conjuring up new constitutional amendments — against gay marriage, against flag burning, against abortion, for school prayer, for an "official" language, and most recently for a balanced budget.

This is a document conservatives revere? Said reverence is more commonly reserved for toilet paper.

The conservative wing may in fact bring Obama's chief legislative accomplishment crashing down. If it does, however, know what is at play: partisan judges who say lawmaking is what the legislative branch does, except when they don't like it.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Zucchini logic with sweet potatoes

2011-11-23T20:56:00.001-06:00

The long campaign continues. It's not quite a lifetime long, like Gandhi's against violence. Nonetheless, many miles have passed beneath my sandals as I've advanced my theme.

For more than a quarter century each year around Thanksgiving, I have carried out a lonely and thankless campaign about sweet potatoes. Message: Think before you eat.

Because, surely, sweet potatoes are not for oral application.

I know this to be true, because I ate sweet potato once. Once.

Now, you might ask: "Why only a quarter century? You are at least a little bit older than that. Before a quarter century ago, what were you doing relative to such a crucial public issue? Wasting your words and your platform? Wasting precious time to inform humanity?" Yes and no.

The fact is, I heard the call to inform people back in the '80s when I moved to the South and detected a veneration of (read: misconception about) sweet potatoes that I hadn't while living in the North.

So, I started writing about this matter — this orange, stringy, steamy, often-subjugated-by-marshmallow-cream matter.

Once again, however: What was I doing all those years before I took up this cause?

Well, of course, I was writing anti-zucchini columns.

This is when I lived and wrote in my home state of Colorado. I didn't write my anti-zucchini columns at Thanksgiving time, but rather earlier in the fall — harvest time for backyard-grown zucchinis. That is when armies of Coloradans parade up and down their neighborhood streets with arms full of oversized zucchinis, some as big as torpedoes.

They have no use for all of that vegetable matter, so they go around trying to pawn their zucchinis off on friends. Whatever the intent, this is not my idea of kinship. Back when I was a newspaperman in Colorado, I wrote about it.

The sad thing about zucchini is that when people cannot find unsuspecting victims onto whom to dump the giant cucumbers, they retreat to their kitchens to come up with recipes with which to (get this) EAT the zucchini.

After I expressed my concerns about this in print, it seemed that not a dinner invitation went by that someone did not seek to sneak something containing zucchini onto my plate. I did not bite.

"But zucchini is nutritious and full of fiber," I was told.

"So are (1) tree bark; (2) grass clippings," I replied.

Fast-forward to the present and the push for truth: that sweet potatoes couldn't possibly be what's for dinner.

Not only are they food, but they're the "perfect food," say the apologists, "full of vital minerals."

Yes, and so is molybdenum.

I have to keep pointing out that I am not opposed to sweet potatoes per se, just to eating them. They have dozens of uses — ethanol, plastic, dye. Just not anything involving a fork.

All right. So, now we live in Colorado. This summer my wife, in our small backyard garden plot, did what Coloradans do: plant zucchini. Not surprisingly, we had more than we cared to eat.

Noticing that our dogs love fresh produce, like carrots, she decided to see if they would eat sliced zucchini when mixed with their dog food. They loved it. All of our excess zucchini went away in a flash. We did not have to show up at our neighbors' doorsteps with armfuls.

Once the zucchini supply was exhausted, Becky looked for other vegetables the dogs might like. She was reminded that the pet store has dog treats made of sweet potato. So, from the grocery store came home an orange tuber the size and shape of a bazooka shell.

Sliced up, it went into the dogs' meal. They gobbled it up. "At last," I thought, "I have a reason to praise the sweet potato this Thanksgiving."

Not so fast. Almost as soon as the sweet potato went into the dogs, extremely foul gaseous aromas began to come out.

We had to evacuate the house.

Message: Sweet potatoes may be fit for dogs, but what emanates, at least with my dogs, may not be fit for humans unless they have severe adenoid problems.

The long campaign continues.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

‘Occupy’: squatting for glory

2011-11-22T15:37:00.002-06:00

As they took pepper spray in their faces, I wonder if they thought about fire hoses in Birmingham, tear gas in Chicago's Lincoln Park, National Guard bullets at Kent State.

Probably not. They thought of pain, and disbelief, the kind many felt seeing it on YouTube and on the news.

That, and inspiration.

The seated Occupy protesters in Portland and at the University California-Davis were doing something gallant in the face of unblinking authority. In the process they were burrowing into the nation's consciousness.

Back when Bull Connor was brutalizing uppity "nigras," face it: Most Americans were wholly ambivalent, or on the side of Birmingham's police commissioner. They were concerned with order — you know, commerce, convenience, stability, the blessed status quo.

So, too, today, do most Americans side with police in whatever they might do to subjugate the Occupy protesters. They wince at the methods, sure, but not the motivations: commerce, convenience, the blessed status quo.

Back when marchers disrupted that order in the South in audacious and nonviolent defiance, most Americans were saying, "What do they want? To completely overturn all sense of normalcy? Of tradition? Do they hate America? What role are Communists playing in this?"

Don't believe for a second that most Americans turned on the TV, saw the fire hoses crushing those people, and said, "This is unacceptable." What was acceptable, what they wanted most, was normalcy.

What the Occupy protesters are doing right now is amazingly gallant and important, even if all they do is make people think about America's definition of "normal." The phrase, "We are the 99 percent" is already etched in history, just as striking "nigra" Memphis garbage workers made "I am a man" part of it in 1968.

Watch and see the extent to which Occupy's graphic illustration, "America Divided by Wealth," becomes a banner. It shows 1 percent owning everything from the Pacific coast and across the Dakotas, and from the Canadian border to the Texas Panhandle.

So, what would these protesters suggest that we do about that? Consider these proposals from a list of Occupy demands:

They want less regressive taxation, such as an end to the cap on Social Security payroll taxes that exempts income after $102,000.

They want to eliminate tax breaks for capital gains. They want to remove loopholes in the tax code for huge corporations which escape federal taxes.

They want a federal tax on financial transactions involving securities or derivatives.

Your response might be: Any of these, though they would raise revenue for what America needs, would be terribly disruptive to the status quo, one which might require sacrifices, crimping markets and affecting all Americans. The amazing thing is that somehow apologists for the status quo think that what we are doing now comes without the very sacrifices that they don't wish to visit.

Who is going to pay for blue-sky economic policies that drove up the national debt to untenable heights? Will it be America's wealthiest with their tax attorneys? No, it will be the middle class and poor when it becomes evident that this nation can't simply cut its way to a balanced budget, something that should be obvious already. The higher taxes to come will hit those with modest means, and what we cut ("Hands off defense spending") will hit those who already hurt the worst.

America's fiscal policy is not serving the needs of the 99 percent but those of the lenders, the traders, the insurers, the fiduciary slave masters.

I'm not sure this is what was going through the minds of the protesters who took faces full of pepper spray, or if bewilderment and disbelief were the extent of it.

But they have made increasing numbers of the 99 percent think that maybe what America has come to accept as normalcy is not really that. It is a form of oppression that few of us have stopped to consider up to now because, well, order is so much more efficient than justice.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Is the angry man out?

2011-11-15T22:31:00.001-06:00

The most amazing story of Nov. 8 was how Arizonans in a heavily Republican district ousted the state's most powerful Republican lawmaker.

Russell Pearce, president of the Senate, was replaced by a comparably conservative Republican. The key distinction, however, may be that the man who beat him wasn't quite as angry.

Pearce is author of SB 1020, the immigration law that tacitly made dark-skinned Arizonans suspects for a police shakedown. And don't believe for a second that would not be the case had a court injunction not left the hard-right creation to snarl and snort at the end of a junkyard chain.

But Pearce's prideful legislative monstrosity wasn't the sole reason why he was recalled and replaced by milder-mannered Jerry Lewis, a charter school executive. As one exit-poll analysis put it, the core of Pearce's opposition cited his "divisiveness, fanaticism" and "rigid ideology" — an angry man's impulses manifested in dozens of ways.

Apparently, what even angry Arizona voters were saying is that they don't want a lawmaker's anger to be a full-time occupation.

Angry voters? Well, yes. And who isn't in this dreadful American slump? But anger as an appeal to voters in general is starting to show a rate of diminishing returns. Various players in the race for the Republican presidential nomination are finding that out.

Herman Cain is so angry at President Obama that he couldn't even think through the dynamics of developments in Libya before saying the president, um, was, um, well, um, wrong doing whatever it is he did there, wherever Libya is.

Rick Perry is so angry at the federal government for being a federal government that he can't, count, to, three.

Enter Newt Gingrich — anger incarnate, the man who shut down government as House speaker and liked it (but didn't like it when the gambit helped re-elect Bill Clinton).

Mean, meaner, meanest. This is electability? Check again.

We understand that the super-angry tea party was the life force of the 2010 off-year election. So doing, the results hewed to the age-old election adage that a low turnout accentuates the negative vote. Sure did.

We are approaching a general election when turnout will be higher. How high it is might be decisive. It remains to be seen if Barack Obama, the one who at times over the last seven months seems to have been the only adult in the room, will be rewarded for that sense of composure, or if an economy that won't be righted means anger will be decisive in ousting him.

One point: It seems that the candidate who seems least angry in the GOP sweepstakes, Mitt Romney, is the one who keeps bobbing placidly in the water while candidates like Perry, Cain and Michelle Bachmann gasp, gulp and flail.

Elsewhere, the anger that fueled conquest in 2010 is proving not so compelling to voters. Ohio rejected Republican Gov. John Kasich's attempt to emasculate public employee unions. Wisconsin has shown every indication that the very angry Gov. Scott Walker, who laid a big hit on public employees, will pay for it at the polls.

In Colorado, Republicans blew big opportunities to take the governor's mansion and a U.S. Senate seat by nominating rabidly right, very angry tea party favorites instead of more circumspect candidates.

In Nevada, the over-the-top extremism of GOP nominee Sharron Anger — er, Angle — allowed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to survive the political scare of his life.

Don't look now, ye who wake up angry at our president, but: Obama's favorability ratings are on the upswing. More Americans are seeing him as the statesman with the public interest at heart, rather than characters like the hit man (Scott Walker), the "no" men (John Boehner, Mitch McConnell), the wolf man (Gingrich — didn't someone drive a stake in that guy?), or any number of politicians who rode a wave of venom to where they are.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Dear Mr. Do-Nothing Congressman

2011-11-08T14:00:00.001-06:00

Thousands of unemployed Americans got a form letter from Congress last week:

"Dear Unemployed American: Your benefits have run their course. Sorry about that. We realize that this is the worst economy in decades and you might think we helped make it the way it is. But extending your benefits might give the impression that we are helping the less fortunate; our job description is to help the fortunate. As always, know that we are committed first to making Barack Obama a one-term president. Catch you later."

This is not exactly the letter Evie Garza received from her congressman, but it was every bit as galling.

Garza, an Austin resident, wrote me to say that she was ready to take to the streets along with protesters in the Occupy movement.

"I'm ready to protest, because I feel powerless."

Excuse her for feeling idealistic about contacting her congressmen — Republicans John Carter and Mike Conaway. She really thought that if she told them what motivated her, they'd be touched, and maybe less recalcitrant about working with the president to create jobs.

The reason: She sent pictures of both congressmen shaking hands with her son at Camp Liberty in in Iraq. That's a pretty personal message.

"I wrote to tell them that they should pass the jobs bill, especially for the soldiers who are transitioning to civilian life."

She got a form letter back from Carter. "It listed why he's against the jobs bill, no surprise, but I was surprised that he didn't thank our family for my son's six years in the military."

Welcome, back, servicemen and women. You just drove up the nation's unemployment rate. Ah, hah: something else to pin on Obama.

Those returning service personnel — and hooray for their return — might not understand what has prevented Congress from doing a thing to make things better for them on the homeland.

The whole thing is about resisting any means of raising extra revenue. With tea party patriots providing marching orders, Republicans say that Washington has enough money and needs no more. They say this in the face of a $15 trillion national debt that these veterans and their children and grandchildren will have to resolve.

It is revealing that even Congressman Paul Ryan, budget wunderkind, he of the allegedly visionary deficit plan, admits that down the road the nation would have to raise taxes in some way under his plan. Not now, of course. That would constitute sacrifice. Only our nation's fighting forces are in line for that.

If the Republican Congress really wanted to do something to help the nation's unemployed, it would have done it, because President Obama has given it every opportunity. What it wants to do is posture to its core constituency, which, by review, is not unemployed.

Evie Garza tried to lodge her concerns the traditional way, the time-honored way.

"That's powerlessness, being told all your life to write your congressmen, and when you do, you get a form robo-signed letter that doesn't acknowledge anything personal that might have been addressed in the letter."

When I search for actual contributions to the common good by this, the do-nothing 102nd Congress, Google delivered me by accident to the deeds of 102nd Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron in World War II.

These dog faces tramped around godforsaken spots of Europe after landing on Omaha Beach. The horror and heroism of D-Day was just the beginning for them. They got the job done. They came home to a supportive nation.

How many of those returning from war this time will be greeted by form letters from leaders who were too committed to their partisan pursuits to make things more hospitable at home?

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Smart power vs. dumb power

2011-11-01T22:42:00.001-05:00

At first glance, nothing justified the remake of Footloose. Then again, if we examine the political landscape, whether the issue is dancing or this nation acting like an adult on the world scene, we all need to be warned of the price of provincialism.

Know without a doubt that parochialism and regression are the itches that the tea party has scratched.

A common theme: The United States should cease foreign aid as a grand gesture of budget austerity. Of course, generally such claims spring from ignorance of how much the federal foreign aid represents.

That would be less than 1 percent. The tea partiers want less than that. Ask them.

That would result in exactly the opposite of what Time magazine describes in a report focused on the successes of the Obama State Department and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The subject: "smart power."

The New York Times describes it as emphasizing "diplomacy and development to complement U.S. military power."

Don't expect any of those with daggers drawn for Obama to admit he has done so much as one smart thing in the world. But Time looks at what the administration did in Libya, and: In the NATO operation that toppled Moammar Gadhafi, the State Department engineered a coalition with players as diverse as the Arab League, France and Britain, while convincing Russia not to veto in the U.N. Security Council. This, Clinton says is the efficacy of "convening power" — building up one's hand with widespread support. This is in contrast, Time observes, to the go-it-alone approach of the Bush administration, which believed that "too much international cooperation weakens America."

Back to the issue — no, the imperative — of foreign aid.

It's a realm in which the United States has done great things worth its proclaimed status as a beacon of reason and compassion. One such matter was a credit to the Bush administration: monetary support for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Just the other day the World Health Organization reported tuberculosis at a 20-year low. The world's second leading killer, TB works as executioner hand-in-glove with AIDS amid immune suppression.

An international player supporting this and other forms of foreign aid that deliver much good for modest bucks is the organization RESULTS. Among its causes: the amazing power of "micro credit," where tiny loans spawn enterprise and hope in the world's poorest regions.

Nowhere is "smart power" a more apt term than in one of RESULTS' current initiatives: support for the Global Partnership for Education. It couldn't address a more pressing issue — that as many as 67 million children in the Third World, mostly girls, don't go to school at all.

A coalition of developed nations has convened to help build schools and pressure recalcitrant governments. The United States is in the coalition, but fiscally it is sidelines-bound, embarrassing for a nation that has so much. Forces in the Congress are trying to change this for the better, but right now all we hear are voices of a regression that has convinced them we don't have the resources to help in smart ways. It would be so good for Obama to express how much a little could do in this regard (8,000 children educated for every $1 million the fund adds.)

Don't have the resources, America? We had enough to wage two wars on the other side of the world, enough to have a military budget that dwarfs entire developed nations' budgets. At the same time, possessed of tax policies whose ultimate goal was to starve all but military spending, federal taxes as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product have shrunk to a rate not experienced since 1950.

Yes, we we have the resources to be smart overseas. Over the last decade we have invested heavily in the utility of war. Those who now denounce foreign aid sat mute while billions of dollars flowed to that enterprise like a great river. Never once did they appear to worry about war's staggering fiscal dimensions, the debt accrued, they waitied until Obama became president.

Smart. Not.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

GOP came to work, went on strike

2011-10-26T00:13:00.001-05:00

It may be historically inaccurate to say that the 112th U.S. Congress is on track to do less than any Congress in history. But, let's face it. Less than zero is a bar under which not even a snake could slither.

When John Boehner became U.S. House speaker last January, he said he was all about promoting jobs for Americans. Dial up this up — whenarethejobs.com — to see how many jobs his labors have created.

The number is highlighted in red.

In September, after President Obama proposed a jobs bill which contained several components that Republicans have supported in the past, Boehner shrugged, sighed, and said, well you know: Tough nuts.

Actually, what he said was, "Job creators in America are essentially on strike."

Or was he speaking of the House under his leadership?

What a pitiful bunch these "leaders" have become. And if you are thinking President Obama hasn't performed much better, let's compare. He's preparing to end one armed conflict launched by his predecessor. He's drawing down another. In the process he ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. He ordered U.S. forces to participate in the NATO action that brought down Moammar Gadhafi.

Meanwhile the Republicans under Boehner's leadership have done?

Everything in their power to bring down Barack Obama.

In September, Boehner and his buddies assaulted America's golf courses after the deathly deadlock on the debt ceiling. A divided government had dragged down the economy, America's global standing and its credit rating.

Obama was still in Washington, where he called on Congress to do something about, you know, jobs. Pass a bill with many GOP-style components and features supported by Democrats. In golf parlance, Mr. Speaker, after your horrific hacking during the debt-limit debacle, the president was offering you a mulligan.

Truly, if a record exists for a Congress that does nothing, this Congress is gunning for it. So frustrated was the administration over Congress' inaction over the untenable No Child Left Behind law that it enacted key changes by executive order. Over at the Capitol, folks were incensed. But guess what? Last week angry senators finally were talking up their own revision, and with bipartisan participation. Is this what it takes? For the administrative branch simply to ignore the branch that used to pass legislation?

Obama said this week he would resort to other executive decrees to achieve some of the regulatory relief he's asked of Congress under his jobs bill. He also said he would issue executive orders to ease the burden on college students facing crushing debt and to help some stretched homeowners keep their homes.

Members of Congress say that such things are their job. Well, it would be, if they were doing their jobs.

Speaking of jobs — you know, the thing John Boehner said he was all about — recently because of federal budget cuts, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., announced it would be losing 100 to 150 positions — roughly 10 percent of its staff. Smart policy, that. Here we have efforts to help this nation do what the Republicans say we must — reduce our dependence on overseas sultans — and this great country can't afford to fully staff the enterprise.

Well, of course we can. We have the resources. We can do what great nations do, what a great nation has done. But when Congress goes on strike, well, watch greatness wane.

The party of Boehner is making this happen in the quest to obtain one job: Barack Obama's. If that's not true, blink those golf-tanned eyelids once.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Toward closing the doodad gap

2011-10-18T23:15:00.002-05:00

Here’s what’s amazing about events in New York City, and Austin, and Denver, and Miami, and 62 other locations so far.

We were thinking that young people were off soaking their brains in social media ooze — overly expressive chipmunks, angry birds, double rainbows.

Instead, what do you know? They were paying attention to stuff that matters.

They were watching an unaccountable finance industry take the economy down, then get rescued while millions of Americans are gasping and grasping for floating debris.

These protesters were watching as corporations gained more power over our government and our political parties — impossible, right? Wasn’t big business's power absolute already? Not quite. But leave it to the Supreme Court, gutting key campaign finance reforms, to bring corporate power even closer to absolute.

These young people were watching while TV talking heads blamed consumers for accepting low-cost loans that weren’t worth the low-grade paper on which they were penned. Yes, blame homeowners for bad lending practices.

Since word of, and participation in, the Occupy Wall Street movement started to spread like information ought to in the information age — initially ignored as it was by mainstream media — a lot of people have sought to discredit it. Points taken: The protesters are unbathed and unorganized. They lack position papers and people in suits to take media questions.

Say this for the participants, however: They have locked in on the fundamental issue afflicting America: corporate control of our government. The secondary issue is “bigness” itself, as in “too big to fail” — whether it is big-box stores gobbling up America’s retail landscape, or multinational goliaths taking America’s wealth overseas (and avoiding tax liability), whether it is banks turning the screws on the very taxpayers who rescued them.

This is it. This is the issue of our time. This is why America is hurting so, and why the nation finds it so hard to climb out of the current recession.

While renewed attention has been drawn to the fact that 5 percent of Americans hold more than half of the nation's wealth, it is time to examine the massive share of commerce monopolized by so very few corporations.

The nation is well served by protesters who voice alarm about these issues. Unorganized? Lacking a coherent theme? That sounds like most movements derived from powerlessness.

Listen closely and hear a counterpoint to the strain of discussion that paralyzed the government recently. Here the nation was in the depths of one of its worst economic droughts in its history, when an activist government was of the essence. Instead of aggressively addressing those problems, it crawled inside an anti-government, anti-spending shell.

In Occupy Wall Street we have the populist counterpoint to the congressional do-nothing chorus. Do something, say these protesters. Get moving. Now.

Some of the Occupy proposals are truly radical, like debt relief, even debt forgiveness, for American consumers.

Realistic or not, it addresses a matter too rarely discussed: that consumers’ situations mirror the nation’s own — with consumer debt representing 90 percent of Gross Domestic Product. The big banks in this case are like the money men of the People’s Republic of China, holding the fate of each debtor in their hands. Any sort of debt relief sounds fantastical, but America’s taxpayers footed $4.7 trillion of relief for over leveraged banks and trading houses. Just whose idea is radical?

If nothing else, say the Occupy protesters, government needs to make Wall Street its servant, and not the other way around.

How many times can deregulation of the financial sector be discredited? We have seen over and over again that big business, unchecked, will fall victim to its own excess and the nation will pay dearly.

Observe, however, the voices on the right who say that bigness is not the problem, that regulations are the enemy. They seem to say that all benefit when the big get bigger.

The country is now making note of people who have taken to the streets to say that’s baloney.

Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Taking to streets vs. Wall Street

2011-10-11T23:19:00.003-05:00