Weekly Wrap-up:

Our new "Think Again" column, "The Surprising Success of the Right-Wing Rant," is here. It's an exploration of the weird success of the right's hysterical racist and sexist attacks on Sonia Sotomayor in setting the MSM's agenda for their coverage.

I also did two columns this week for The Daily Beast; one this morning about Osama's attempts to link Obama to George W. Bush, here and one on the success of the Christian Right in this country in preventing access to abortion, even without murdering the doctors who perform it. My Nation column on the campaign to smear Izzy Stone is here with a follow-up in yesterday's Altercation, which is here (after the wrap-up).

Alter-review: The return of the New Riders of the Purple Sage. Last night I had the odd experience of being pretty much the youngest person at a concert, which hasn't happened since about 1970. That's because when you go a Dead concert, there are at least four generations there, including the Deadhead grandkids. For the New Riders, who were a bluegrassy offshoot of the Dead that featured Jerry on their wonderful first album, everybody who goes to see them was also seeing them in 1975, a time when I was pretty young. Anyway, they were great for a while in an extremely unpretentious, country-folkish way--you can see them with Jerry in the newly released Rhino DVD The Last Days of the Fillmore--singing songs about loveable pot-smugglers and train-robbers. I strongly recommend that first eponymous record with the beautiful cover and a greatest hits collection.

Members of the band reformed four years ago and are touring now with a new album called Where I Come From. It's not bad, and they are not bad--actually some of the guitar and pedal steel work is pretty great. Seven of the songs on the new record were co-authored with Robert Hunter, who helped make the new Dylan album such a success. Anyway, they're on tour; check 'em out here.

Now here's Pierce.

Charles Pierce
Newton, MA.

Hey Doc--

"Here come a man with a paper and a pen/telling us our hard times are about to end/And then, if they don't give us what we like/He said, 'Men, that's when you gotta go on strike.'"

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "I'm Slippin' In" (Snooks Eglin)--This week, I once again forgot to hire a battalion of trained and hungry polar bears to visit George Will at his home and, ahem, explain to him their unique perspective on the global climate crisis and, in passing, how much I love New Orleans.

Short Takes:

Part The First: I have to admit that I never quite got the unwritten rule about not criticizing the president while he's overseas. (American politics stops at the water's edge? It does? Tell that to Grenada.) First of all, unwritten rules pretty much suck. Among other things, they're why we have beanballs. Secondly, I have to imagine that this one's honored more in the breach than any place else. I suspect, though I cannot prove, that, when it comes to foreign policy, there's just as much covert backstabbing, agenda-smuggling, and bureaucratic eviscerating done in DC when the president's out of town as there is when he comes back. Why not make it public? Particularly when the whole country can, as Sister Marie de Paul used to say, compare and contrast?

Part The Second: With geniuses like this, who needs stupid?

Part The Third: I just finished Sag Harbor,the latest from the ludicrously gifted Colson Whitehead. There are now five great child narrators in American fiction: the Tom-and-Huck entry from Mark Twain, Scout Finch, Louis Benfield from T.R. Pearson's A Short History of a Small Place,and Ben (not Benji, dammit) Cooper from Whitehead's book, a kid wrestling with all kinds of identity questions, not the least of which is an untoward affection for the recorded works of Hurricane Smith. Read this soon.

Part The Fourth: Maybe I missed it the first time around, but the PBS American Masters thing on Neil Young--now being pounded into pulp on your local station for the purpose of peddling tote bags--is a nice piece of work. I forgot what a great cut "Mr. Soul" is.

Part The Fifth: Back in the 1970s, I heard a lot of guff from anglophilic American columnists on the subject of Irish Americans who were angered at the tactics of the British military and security apparatus in the northern part of Ireland. It wasn't our fight. We were terrorist sympathizers and so on and so forth. I recalled a lot of that palaver when I saw this at Max B's joint.

Not to be too critical while he's overseas or anything, but this statement simply will not do. A murderous rampage in a church is simply not the unfortunate by-product of a national debate gone badly out of control, which is what this statement fairly clearly implies that it is. The problem with the abortion debate in this context is not the abandoned wrath of its rhetoric. It is that one side of the argument regularly has made use of criminal behavior, up to and including murder, to advance its arguments. Too often, I've heard about how the murder is not part of the "mainstream" anti-choice movement. Perhaps not. But vandalism certainly is. Harassment certainly is. Trespassing certainly is. The idea that you can employ little crimes but distance yourselves from the big ones is transparently disingenuous. Once the guy with the guns decides that gluing the doors of a clinic shut, or stalking a doctor's children, or jumping ugly with traumatized patients, or mailing phony anthrax isn't working, what is he likely to do? Start a blog? Go back to writing impassioned letters to the editor? Not hardly.

To be sure, the Tiller shooting has the potential to be a watershed moment, but not in the way this statement would have it be. This isn't the time for a prayer that cooler heads will prevail on "both sides." This is time for the country and its leaders to tell one side of the debate to knock it the hell off. Start turning in the vandals and thugs in your midst. Acquaint yourself with your friendly local FBI agent if somebody shows up at your meeting with a rosary in one hand and a Glock out in the car. Surely, a president who has proposed the astonishing concept of preventive detention for people who might one day abet and commit terrorist acts can muster up a more vigorous condemnation than this of people who are actually doing it. Barack Obama should have attended George Tiller's funeral.

Name: Timothy Barrett
Hometown: Louisville, KY

In a world of limited resources, difficult choices are made or reality makes the choice for you. A soldier is shot through the stomach on Omaha Beach. Another soldier quickly drags him screaming in pain beyond a low hill partly obscured from the automatic gunfire still raining down on them. The medic moves back and forth along on his hands and knees checking the soldiers and administering morphine, sutures and bandages. He grabs the wounded man and turns him to see his back. He immediately cracks three morphine ampoules and strikes each in the man's thigh, one after the other, and moves on. His colleague grabs the crying man's leg and drags him off the hillside to make space. The wounded man falls unconscious from the morphine and bleeds out. Later, when the fighting is done, soldiers collect his spare dog tag and bag his body for shipment. The medic made a wise choice, spared the man great pain and probably saved the life of several others who had survivable injuries. This is combat triage.

Today, we practice similar triage under the cloak of fiscal policy and administrative practices, not on a battlefield but under the cool florescent light of day. Resources are limited by money, rather than circumstance, time and risk. Given enough money, every ill person could be given the most effective treatment known to man, regardless of the patient's age and other factors affecting mortality. But no one would reasonably expect a health system to meet this standard. So we all agree that the value of human life is limited, but by what measurement?

I may think that there is a better alternative for our resources than to provide a 95-year-old with a heart transplant, to continue to house and feed a comatose woman with repeated flat line EEGs for over a decade, or to deliver a fetus in the 28th week whose tests leave no doubt that severe abnormalities will either kill the infant or render her a burden to her parents for life. You may not agree. You might say that saving every life is a noble goal and worth fighting for. Reality will choose for you. A younger person will die for lack of a heart, tens of patients will sicken for lack of nutritional consultation and basic care, and a family will bury an infant rather than a fetus while anguishing over the medical bills left to be paid.

Dr. George Tiller was murdered. He was not a murderer. He was not even a lawbreaker. He ran an ethical medical practice within the legal requirements of a very strict statutory standard. He was the only domestic choice for patients facing terrible decisions. And now he is gone and these people have one less option. In this case, reality was a conservative "pro-life" kook with a gun and one twisted rationalization.

Anti-choice proponents like to make the argument simple, life v. death. But it's always been so much more than that. For many anguished parents it was death v. worse than death. And yet they still suffer from the decision they made. They deserve respectful compassion, not straw man criticism and self-serving simplification.

If you believe in God and that any abortion is murder, then don't have one. Our country is a secular representative constitutional republic based on democratic principals, not a theocracy. Medical choice, including pregnancy termination, is legal and constitutionally protected. It's a private matter and should remain so. You don't want the state making your personal health decisions and I don't want your God making mine

Name: Ed Tracey
Hometown: Lebanon, New Hampshire

Professor, an Australian national Jewish sports authority called Maccabi Australia has reversed a decision to require its teams to drop their (relatively few) non-Jewish athletes by year-end.

Interestingly, this decision stemmed not from legal problems (as Australia allows groups to discriminate to preserve a minority culture) nor as a result of protest from the general public.

Instead, criticism largely came from within Australia's Jewish community, concerned about the message it sent, that led to the reversal.

Name: Cindy Morgan
Hometown: Irvine CA

Hi. It's me again about California props 1A-F. Mr. Meranze commented about my response to these props and yes, some of the things he says are correct but if he looked at the props a little closer he would have seen the long term outlook which is not very good.

"Regarding spending, while the measures could make it harder to approve spending increases in some years by restricting the access to revenues, it would not cap the total level of spending that could be authorized in any given year if alternative revenues were approved." "The fiscal effectsof Proposition 1A are particularly difficult to assess." "Consquently, the measure's effect's may be very different from one year to the next." The only way to put more money in the Budget Stabilization Fund, the Special Fund for Economic Uncertainties and Economic Recovery Bonds is to increase taxes. How much do you want to bet that these "temporary" tax increases would have been made permanent by 2012? The legislature will spend more money then they have and then they'll find another way to extend the increases so we have to vote for them in another special election.

Sure, I don't know how they calculated what is acceptable to the legislature but I do know that I can't afford to live here much longer. As long as I have lived here I don't think California has had a year where they did have a balanced budget on time with any extra revenue. They find ways to spend every last dime and then some more. My personal taxes and the increased sales tax along with the increased fees are killing me!!!

Okay, after reading the Lottery prop, 1C, again I see your point. They wanted to change it so the profits for the school system, which is what the lottery was created for, not go to the school system anymore. That was just brilliant thinking on the government's part!!

Prop 1D, children's services, temporarily redirects a significant portion of Prop 10 funds to achieve budgetary savings and makes permanent changes to state and local commission operations. In other word,"County borrowing of First 5 Funds" which means a county controller can borrow local commission funds for that county's general fund, unless the transfer would interfere with local commission activities. "The reduction in state and local First 5 commission funding could result in other costs to the state and local agencies. This would occur to the extent that some children and families rely on other health and human services programs instead of those now provided under First5." These children need all the help they can get and I for one am not going to take it away from them.

1E is an equivalent reduction in Prop 63 funding. "State and local governments could incur added costs for homeless shelters, social services, medical care, law enforcement and county jail and state prison operations." This one I refuse to give up.

Why doesn't the government of California just learn to live within their means and stop putting these stupid props up for a vote every six months? And don't even try to tell me it's because people are asking for more then they can afford. Every one of the bonds (which I did not vote for) I know I pay for with my home taxes every year and when the people vote to pay for services to help the needy cut a program that doesn't. The legislature needs to stop working for the lobbies, and yes they are, start working for me again.

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