Dear Senator Reid,

I am writing today because I have encountered a phenomenon with generic prescription drugs that cuts to the heart of everything we are trying to accomplish with health care reform.

Reaching my fifties, like many I am dependent on a few prescriptions to manage long term health issues. This is not remarkable in and of itself. But having been treated for a few conditions over a span of decades, all the prescriptions I use are out of patent and, until recently, available in low cost generic form.

Two weeks ago I went to refill a prescription for colchicine, a very old and effective compound for treating gout, and was told that it was no longer available and the substitute is something called Colcrys. So far, this was par for the course for recent experience, but the stunner was the price difference: colchicine averages around $.75 per pill at a discount pharmacy, but for Colcrys the cost is $5.63 per pill at my Costco pharmacy (other pharmacies quote even higher prices) with all the discounts they give me. That is a 750% cost increase. Yet, the best information I was able to obtain is that Colcrys contains a single medically active ingredient: colchicine.

This made no sense. Colchicine is a remedy for gout derived, I believe, from the Autumn Crocus plant. It has been used – literally – for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.  A maritime history scholar who is a friend of the family tells us that ships logs of the 18^th and 19^th century recount captains making landfall solely to send crew ashore to seek the Autumn Crocus as a remedy for gout sufferers aboard. The most famous gout sufferer in American history, Ben Franklin, may have taken the derivative of the Autumn Crocus to relieve his condition. A fairly exhaustive and well-documented treatment of the history and current status of colchicine is available on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colchicine#cite_note-accessdata.fda.gov-2.

There are over 5 million gout sufferers in the US, which implies that there are over 40,000 gout sufferers here in Nevada.

My doctor informed me that a relatively recent FDA rule was allowing drug companies to hijack generic formulations and force out the generic makers. The way he characterized it, once a generic is hijacked other manufacturers have to recertify their product, which costs tens of millions of dollars to do. The rule to which my Doctor was referring may be the FDA “Unapproved Drugs Initiative” that was apparently adopted in 2006.

But in the case of colchicine, there seems to be more going on. In 2009 the FDA “approved” colchicine for treating gout (an oddity when you consider that it has been used for centuries for just that purpose) and awarded URL Pharma the exclusive right to market colchicine under the brand name Colcrys. Two years later, the consequence of this bizarre and medically suspect decision by the FDA has made it to my pharmacy, denying me (and everyone else) a cost effective remedy for a very common complaint.

Those with prescription drug insurance may never notice a difference other than an increase in their co-pay.  I pay for my medications out of my own pocket; a 750% cost increase matters and will not get by me unchallenged.

While I assume that at some level the FDA’s action was accompanied by a good intention or two, this is nevertheless an example the FDA acting in total disregard for the needs of the public by handing a drug company a monopoly on something they neither invented nor improved. In a single stroke the cost of treating gout with a well-known, readily manufactured drug soared from $45 per month to $350 per month without an iota of innovation or medical research.  Conveniently, the new pricing for colchicine now matches the average price of Uloric, a relatively new, patented drug for treating gout (the first new treatment for gout in decades).

URL Pharma, of course, waxes poetic about how their product is the only version of colchicine that “conforms to modern FDA standards of safety, efficacy, purity, consistency and labeling.” http://www.urlpharma.com/url_unapproved_drug_Colcrys.aspx Whether or not they actually conform to those standards is unknown, but they certainly have ensured that they have the only colchicine available in the United States.

One need only look at what is available in Canadian pharmacies to understand how badly the American patients who need this drug are being abused by URL Pharma with its exclusive license from the FDA.  In Canada, generic colchicine is still available.  But the best part is this: in a few Canadian pharmacies that apparently specialize in catering to Americans, Colcrys now substitutes for colchicine.  But at Canadian mail-order pharmacies Colcrys costs $1.00 per pill, less than 20% of the retail cost in the United States.

I’m sure you will understand when I say that only an idiot would decline to take advantage of the pricing available across the border.

I’ve heard many arguments in recent years about how drug companies have to charge us more because the rest of the world won’t pay the high prices they claim to need for research & development.  Here is an example that shows how suspect and unreliable that argument is.  Colchicine is an old drug that is not burdened by extensive R&D.  All URL Pharma needed to do was give it a new name and persuade the FDA that only they could make a safe and effective version of the old remedy (there was apparently an agreement under which URL Pharma would do some studies. So what? They didn’t spend a dime to develop the drug in the first place) then, Voila, an abusive and profitable monopoly is born with very little effort and cost. My guess is that insurance plans are not balking at the cost of Colcrys significantly, allowing URL Pharma to get away with it and creating yet another factor to justify future premium increases well in excess of inflation.

My doctor tells me that things like this are happening with many generic drugs. Clearly, the FDA mandate does not require them to take into account the negative effects of summarily granting a monopoly. Perhaps it should. In this case, the FDA looks like an industry toady that will grant any request so long as it can be shoehorned into the safety and effectiveness bin, regardless of the physical and financial cost to patients.

What has happened to colchicine is not much different from what happened to a synthetic form of progesterone, used to prevent premature birth, which had been custom compounded by specialty pharmacies until the FDA granted K-V Pharmaceutical Co exclusive rights to make the compound under the trade-name Makena. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/mar/31/nation/la-na-fda-drug-price-20110331

K-V raised the price from $20 to $1500 per dose. Sadly, it was only after a hue and cry erupted over the outrageous price hike put through by K-V that the FDA took weak action to mitigate the problem – and so far there is no indication that the FDA action has actually improved the situation. That the original action by the FDA was both naïve (about the effects of granting a monopoly) and unjustified has yet to be discussed. This is one of the many reasons why health care costs will destroy us as a nation if we don’t deal with it now.

Accordingly, I ask that you investigate the FDA’s actions with respect to these and any other generic medications that have recently been given monopoly status. Whether the FDA’s action is related to the Unapproved Drugs Initiative or some other initiative or authorizing law, this action is clearly contrary to the needs of health care reform. It is also contrary to the principles of patent law which is usually the mechanism by which a drug company can have and enforce a monopoly. I have never heard any public discussion of how converting generic drug products into monopoly products would be beneficial to the consumer – probably because such an argument would very hard if not impossible to make.  I ask that you find out what the FDA thinks it is doing, what it thinks its authority is for granting monopolies under these circumstances, determine whether or not those actions are in fact lawful, and consider corrective legislation if needed.

Thank you for all you do.

I know. It’s heresy.

PBS was originally started to air programming that no one else would broadcast, back in the day when there were three stations—if you were lucky and lived where your TV aerial could pick up ABC, NBC and CBS in a nearby town. Forthwith, PBS started off showing crazy little programs—do-it-yourself shows on everything from quilting to homebuilding, teach-yourself-art shows, cooking programs, car shows and educational children’s programming. Man, this was some out-there stuff back in the day. It was all super-creative, rough and unpolished, but great. And the shows that came out of there were Sesame Street, Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, This Old House, The Joy of Painting, Julia Child, MotorWeek and many others.

Back then, the shows aired and then that was IT. There were no videos you could buy. No toys to play with. You had the sometimes-jittery picture and that was all.

But now Sesame Street is a multi-hundreds-of-millions-marketing juggernaut with videos, toys, games and mega-licensing deals. None of those profits go to PBS. Not a dime.

Think of your favorite show on PBS. You know it has a video. It also has other things: books and programs to buy. None of that goes back into PBS’s coffers unless they offer something as a “premium” when you donate during pledge week. If PBS had a deal to revenue-share off the shows it airs, we wouldn’t need Congressional funding or “beg breaks.”

PBS was funded in an era when access to the airwaves was limited by the very few choices we had. That is most emphatically not true today. There are now plenty of stations that feature specialized programming (even children’s educational TV) making a government subsidized channel unnecessary. The private sector has it more than covered.

Some shows have already gotten the message. MotorWeek, which is produced by the magazine of the same name and Maryland Public Broadcasting, moved its iconic show to the HDTheater channel this year—which coincidentally is the show’s 30^th year on air. They joined a Tuesday night line-up that covers all automotive shows—from a funny little British program (that in early days PBS might have carried) to glitzy auction house produced rare car shows. The world has not ended because a once publically-funded show is now in the private sector.

As to NPR, this was supposed to be an effort to maintain a our vanishing cultural heritage of symphonic, Opera and Jazz music. Have you heard any classical music on your NPR station lately? It’s gone in almost every market in this nation, only to be replaced with endless chat shows. As if we need more of these (yes, I know, we need more Centrist or Left shows, but that’s not the government’s function, is it?). NPR execs said they just couldn’t sell ads on a station playing symphonic music. The purpose of the government grant wasn’t to choose a format to sell ads. It was to preserve a disappearing class of music. And they have failed in that mission. The only place you can reliably hear classical, Opera and Jazz is on the subscription stations. I’m sad about that. But if NPR isn’t going to play it, then why the heck is my tax dollar going to support something it doesn’t do?

Nope, I think it’s time these two aging welfare queens left the building. I’m sorry, but I don’t see a need for them.

The really sad thing is, when they are cut, they’ll hardly make a dent in the budget deficit, but they’ll make those dreadful Teahadists happy.

An especially memorable episode of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone from that era, imagined the arrival of some apparently benign aliens whose book bore a title that was translated into English as “To Serve Man.” Since the human characters could not translate the content of the book, they interpreted the book to be a manual for “helping” mankind. Only at the end when it is too late do the humans realize that the book is a cookbook with humans as the main ingredient. Serling’s voiceover at the end notes man’s fall from ruling the planet to being “an ingredient in someone’s soup.”

Such will be the fate of Teahadist voters whose “my way, or the highway” ignorance leads them to believe that they – and only they – have conferred a mandate upon the new Congress.

No sooner was the election over than there was an outbreak of compromise and deal making in Washington, ending two years of virtual deadlock at the hands of Mitch McConnell and his band of 41. Turns out that the only entrée the Republicans really cared about was the continuation of the Bush Cuts for the upper crust. The process of concocting that meal and what followed thereafter revealed the real fault lines in both parties that had been hidden for much of the term.

In exchange for $130 Billion for the well-to-do, the administration won concessions for everyone else – plus an extension of unemployment benefits, a payroll tax reduction for a year and a few pet business incentives. Total cost nearly a trillion dollars. Add in a few special gifts for the well-connected – ethanol subsidies near and dear to Senator Grassley’s heart come to mind – and what you had was a bill that everyone could claim was somewhat unpalatable, but as polite guests at the table could hardly refuse to consume. At least until the bill comes due and has to be paid.

From there the fault lines opened wide, permitting the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” ratification of the new START Treaty with Russia, and approval of a slightly scaled down but still significant bill to aid 9/11 responders suffering serious medical problems as a result of exposure to the numerous toxic substances the Twin Towers contained.

Meanwhile, the Teahadists were infuriated, demanding that the lame duck Congress just do nothing and go home. Their contention that immediately after the election of the next Congress, the current Congress lacked the right to enact legislation is par for the course with these self-proclaimed constitutionalists. I don’t expect people who wrap their selfishness and prejudice in the flag to be realistic or reasonable about the Constitution. Their objection to the 9/11 responders bill – because, gasp, it would cost money – only highlights their something for nothing, don’t ask me to share in sacrifice, keep government hands off my Medicare mind set.

Congress’s inability to pass a full budget bill for this fiscal year may look like a concession to the Teahadists, but appearances can be deceiving. The apparent cause of the spending bill’s demise was the revelation that the bill contained – gasp – earmarks. Some of the Senate old-timers actually had the poor taste to defend earmarks as a way of denying the executive branch (run by the other party) discretion. Republicans, having publicly embraced Earmarks Theater after the election by taking a no earmarks pledge, could not allow themselves to be unmasked in this way.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama embraced Earmarks Theater with a vengeance, vowing to veto any bill that contains earmarks, challenging Republicans to live up to their pledge and leave the discretion to the executive branch.

And because the American people deserve to know that special interests aren’t larding up legislation with pet projects, both parties in Congress should know this: if a bill comes to my desk with earmarks inside, I will veto it.

 Heads I Win Tails You Lose.

So the new Congress has been immediately thrown into the problem of what to do with spending this year, lest the goverment grind to a halt in March. Spending fetishes will be on full display with politicians lining up to gore everyone else’s Ox; right up to the point where their pet Ox is about to be slaughtered and a little wheeling and dealing looks like a good idea. It will be interesting to see how they sell the wheeling and dealing to the “no compromises” crowd.

To prove that they intend to serve the Teahadist voters, Majority Leader Boehner and his leadership cohort came up with some creative ideas. First, they arranged for the Constitution to be read out loud at the beginning of the new Congress. Twenty minutes later – the document is a bit longer than The Pet Goat – a new House rule took effect requiring new legislation to recite the provision(s) of the Constitution that authorizes Congress to take the proposed legislative action. Another new House rule requires bills to be posted on the web for three days prior to a vote. Then there was the requirement that all bills include a way to pay for the costs. No more running up the deficit! Except, of course, for the bill to repeal Health Care Reform which was explicitly exempted from all the new requirements (especially the budgetary one, which would have proved embarrassing) and rammed through the House with less dignity than Slam, Bam, Thank You Mam. The Senate, which is still (3 weeks later) working on its first day of the session will not likely participate in this particular game.

Teahadists are pleased, fully taken in by the delusion that they have a seat at the head of the table. No doubt the provisional title for Boehner’s memoir after his eventual retirement will be The Joy of Legislating (with apologies to Irma Rombauer, author of the original Joy of Cooking). But being a Republican leader these days is like being a host of a private party that turned into a Rave. For example, Michele Bachmann’s response to the response to the State of the Union was like a party crasher bringing a bunch of uninvited guests then daring to stand up and toast herself.

Lost in their exultation is the reality that the Tea Party movement is the creation of the Koch brothers money (aided and abetted, apparently, by Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Thomas) and Dick Armey’s demagoguery, with promotional muscle from Fox News. To serve the interests of the Koch brothers and their coterie of wealthy anonymous donors, Armey’s Freedom Works and Murdoch’s Fox News fanned incipient racism and economic fears to create a block of like-minded voters whose numbers – while quite small in absolute terms – were large enough to skew the Republican primaries and the low turnout mid-term election.

What do the masters want? The status quo which, for them, is pretty good. They don’t want to pay taxes even through they disproportionately benefit from the bounty of the American taxpayer. They deny global climate change because it implies that their business model would have to change. They vehemently object to public encouragement of alternative energy sources for the same reason. They don’t want regulators challenging their pollution, accounting practices or the way they treat consumers. In short, they like things exactly as they are, thank you very much.

I’ve got news for the Teahadists, you are being played for fools. When you allow yourself to be manipulated in this way, you are nothing more than the Dish of the Day. You’ll be served, all right, but only to feed the needs of the true masters whose money made it all possible.

I pity the Tea Party. By the time you figure it out, it will all be over but dessert.

Need to “compromise” (the new-age word for “cave”) to get the chance to address other priorities? What makes anyone think that conservatives – who are absolutely sure they “heard the American people” and have a mandate for their agenda – are going to allow anything through under any circumstances that does not address their peculiar fetishes? Even if they did as part of a deal – and a deal is imminent – as Dr. Faustus learned, deals with the devil just bring damnation.

The Republican caucus is focused and emboldened; Democrats are deluding themselves if they think they will get good faith negotiation and compromise. The preparation time for “Peking Duck” is short in comparison to the slow and agonzing marination procedure for “Washington Lame Duck,” a dish best served cold to Republicans’ masters among the überwealthy. Payoffs are hell when you are the dish of the day.

The canards being bandied about in the defense of tax cuts are all the golden oldies: It will create jobs! It will make American business competitive! It will stimulate the economy! The uncertainty about taxes is making business reluctant to invest! You can’t raise taxes during a recession!

When the Bush Administration and its Republican Congress passed tax cuts in 2001 – on the cusp of a different recession – and again in 2003 in the midst of war – they had to set them to expire automatically in ten years to evade Senate rules and disguise the sea of red ink that necessarily would be apparent. Our ship of state has been leaking money ever since.

If Congress does nothing, tax rates will revert to what they were in the 90′s.

The Clinton years had produced a vibrant economy (structural inequalities notwithstanding), balanced budgets and modest surpluses that were whittling away at the national debt and making the social safety net look safer. An awful lot of wealth was generated during those years – and I certainly don’t recall hearing anyone complain about that!

Apparently, shared prosperity angered conservatives. After George Bush was elected by the Supreme Court, the Republicans’ arch-toadie, then Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, had the temerity to testify before Congress in January 2001 that surpluses were bad – just awful if we let them continue – for the economy and must be stopped. In Fed Speak he said:

The emerging key fiscal policy need is to address the implications of maintaining surpluses beyond the point at which publicly held debt is effectively eliminated.

The time has come, in my judgement, to consider a budgetary strategy that is consistent with a preemptive smoothing of the glide path to zero federal debt or, more realistically, to the level of federal debt that is an effective irreducible minimum.

That was all the invitation they needed to give the country a Bush Cut. The deficit resumed its upward trajectory immediately. The additional tax cuts of 2003 were even more reprehensible given that we were trying to finance wars. Such poltroonery was truely craven. But really it was part of the larger movement towards freedom from shared sacrifice that had been building for decades.

None of the supposed benefits of the Bush Cuts came to pass for anyone other than the überwealthy – the top 1% whose share of total income climbed to 23%. Job growth was often referred to as anemic from 2003 to 2007, except for construction jobs (and the market for tainted Chinese drywall) in a few hot spots around the country. The share of income going to the middle class actually declined, though these were supposedly good times. The statistics about the concentration of wealth into fewer hands and the lagging fortunes of the middle class (not to mention those at the bottom) don’t lie. Call it the Saudification of America.

The other thing we got was an enormous bubble – created by foolish Wall Street barons whose cash so overflowed their coffers they had to lend it to anybody just to get rid of the damned stuff. And since lending money like that is akin to leaving mating lemmings unsupervised, their cash problem only multiplied until it drove us all off a cliff. Of course, while the rest of us were crashing into the rocks at the base of the cliff, the barons begged for and received golden parachutes at taxpayer expense. Their collective demand that now we must prevent their taxes from going up is par for the course – why should they sacrifice in any way when all they are doing is looking out for the rest of us?

Really, this recession is all the argument you need for taking money from the überwealthy. They are like children after Halloween who can’t ration their candy, whine when they get a stomach ache, then whine some more when it is all gone.

For anyone who is still confused about the concept of divided fortunes, consider this: corporate profits in the 3^rd quarter of 2010 were nominally the highest ever recorded and, adjusted for inflation, just under the all-time rate set in 2006. Yet the unemployment rate in November rose from 9.6% to 9.8%; the number of people out of work for more than 6 months is reaching levels not seen in this country since the Great Depression. The “comprehensive” unemployment rate, including the underemployed, is around 17%. And the real unemployment rate – including people who are no longer looking for work, but would take it if they could get it – is somewhere in the vicinity of 22% to 24%. The gulf between the haves and have-nots is the size of the Grand Canyon.

People profess puzzlement at this apparent paradox. “We don’t understand why businesses are not hiring,” say some.

Its pretty obvious, don’t you think? Businesses aren’t hiring because they can make more profits by wringing more production out of fewer workers. They see no reason to grow their business either because they see no demand growth, or worse, they see no avenue for innovation to create demand where there was none before. Even Silicon Valley – a veritable creche of innovation in times past – is so bereft of new ideas that venture capitalists are falling all over themselves to throw money at me-too social networking ventures. So much for American exceptionalism.

Meantime, the Republican party marches with goose-step precision to the tune of the überwealthy, ready to block extensions of unemployment benefits, a new START Treaty with Russia, repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and any other legislative business until the Bush Cuts are renewed for their masters. Extend them for just he middle class? Nope. Extend them for income up to (only) a million dollars? Hell no!  The Poltroon-O-Meter (which rarely has second thoughts)  says these people aren’t just craven, they are Total Wretches. 

I think we should just let the Bush Cuts die. All of them.

I come to this conclusion for several reasons beyond the obvious one that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is evidence of insanity.

First, our economy currently favors “financial innovation” over other kinds of innovation because the Bush Cuts made investment income a tax-favored class. Financial profits accounted for something like 25% of all the profits reported last quarter. “Financial innovation” clearly includes new and better ways to bomb the economy. Enough of that already. Profits should be taxed equally, no matter how they are made. Taxes are for paying for government, not for micro managing who is in and who is out on Wall Street.

Second, our Republican friends in Congress say they can’t vote for an extension of unemployment benefits unless they are paid for. Fair enough. Letting the Bush Cuts die takes care of that problem nicely.

Third, its better to piss off everyone all at once rather than piss off only a few. At least nobody can complain that they were the victims of discrimination.

Frankly, the taxes of the 90′s weren’t all that onerous, unless you were trying to squeak five homes out of a budget for four. I might argue for a return to the golden 60′s, when the marginal tax rate for the highest income level was 90% and the American economic engine was second to none. But I’ll give that up in favor of a return to the pre-Bush Cuts rules and a more progressive code that recognizes the need for the most fortunate to contribute substantially to the society that makes their good fortune possible. I am not alone in this thought; a few millionaires and billionaires have also reached this same conclusion.

Nobody wants their taxes to go up, of course, but the middle class may well accept their share if it means that we’ll be able to help the unemployed and do other things to stimulate the economy.  Maybe we should invest in ourselves. If we are going to go into debt, let’s do so for a good reason, like addressing our physical infrastructure and energy independence. A rising tide lifts all boats so long as nobody has rigged the game to sink the ship of state.

The Rorschach Test, of course, is an infamous and somewhat debatable psychological test based on perceptions of standardized inkblots. It is useful, however, as a metaphor for people seeing different messages from the same information.

If you are a Democrat, it was not as bad as it might have been. But if you are a blue dog, the problem was that the Democrats were too progressive during the last term; and if you are from San Francisco, they weren’t progressive enough. Whatever. You can’t both be right.

If you are a Republican, you see a mandate. For what, pray tell? The economic ideas and policies that got us into this mess? I think it is safe to say that “more of the same” was not what voters had in mind.

Oh, right. It’s a mandate to overturn the”socialist” health care reform so that everyone is free to be unable to get health insurance at a reasonable cost. Freedom to be uninsured either because of the cost (is 50% of your income a reasonable cost to insure a family?), pre-existing conditions (is being alive a pre-existing condition?) or sheer obstinacy is a precious thing.

Obama ran on a platform of (among other things) pursuing health care reform and won that election handily. So it seems improbable that people are mad simply because he pursued a policy that he promised to pursue. Perhaps everyone tuned out that portion of his stump speech.

Of course, if you show people an inkblot while telling them that it looks like a dragon, they are quite likely to agree that it looks like a dragon. Such has been the fate of health care reform where the opponents (financed by the health insurance industry lobby) asserted that medicare benefits would be chopped and health care would be rationed by ‘death panels’. Why would you be in favor something that would make the already dreadful healthcare system worse? People are usually rational and the power of suggestion is undeniable.

The irony, of course, is that we have always had ‘death panels’ in the private insurance industry. Most medical practices have employees dedicated to cajoling insurance companies to approve procedures and pay the bills.

The denouement of the health care reform debate – in a contrived “I told you so” moment – is that the Republican budget hacks in Arizona are overtly exercising death panel authority over recipients of critical medical care in long standing public health programs. They aren’t making much of a dent in their budget hole but they are certainly proving the “death panel” concept.

Typical views were in evidence in the online commentary to a recent Washington Post article about how some doctors are limiting or ending their involvement with Medicare patients because of the limited payments. One of the points of the article was that this problem has been brewing for decades, to the extent that Congress attempted to limit Medicare costs in the 90′s and has since annually postponed the imposition of mandated payment cuts. A large percentage (seemed like at least 50% to my unstatistical eye) of the comments where an excoriation of Obama, Pelosi, Reid, liberals in general and the Health Care Reform Act. Huh? Aside from the fact that the comments suggested that the pontificators had not actually read the article, it is clear that the warring dogmas make an adult discussion about health care impossible. I have a lot to say on that subject, but will save it for a future post.

Or maybe the election was a mandate to prevent burdensome regulation of the financial industry so they can screw up at our expense again. The teajadists simultaneous rejection of the TARP bailout and insistence that government should not regulate anyone is another example of perceptions skewed by the suggestions of interested parties.

Hank Paulson (he worked for Bush, remember?) is not my all-time favorite Treasury Secretary, but as a Goldman Sachs alumnus he intuitively understood that the ‘G’-strings attached to TARP would chafe those delicate Wall Street bottoms. So, as luck would have it, Wall Street’s participation turned out to be short term (but they sure were glad to borrow the money for a while) and sufficiently profitable for the taxpayer that the worst projection at this point is that we will get nearly all our money back. Somehow, that fact just doesn’t get past the crumpet plate at the tea party.

The Wall Street barons who finance Freedom Works don’t want anyone to limit their ability to privatize profits and socialize loses. The lack of regulation – the dismantling of the Great Depression era protections put in place by a generation that lost it all – was what brought us to the miserable decade of the 2000′s where the middle class steadily lost ground until it was wasted by the Great Recession. Never mind history and reality, the teajadists dutifully and hysterically perceive as their masters suggest.

In many respects, Connecticut Senatorial candidate Linda McMahon was the perfect proxy for political Rorschach tests. After all, her wrestling enterprise, which for years insisted that their staged fights were – well – real, now admits to staging its shows and wears that like a badge of honor. If her audience is anything like her voters, they don’t know the difference. That she lost the political show suggests either that there are limits to the illusions voters will sustain or it is what she intended all along. I’ll bet that if you look at WWE’s ratings over the last few months the effect of the Fox News interviews and coverage were … priceless. Come to think of it, Fox News and the WWE have a lot in common.

Some saw abortions and divorce in the results. Kansas Republicans, flush with victory, are planning to make abortions impossible and create something called “covenant marriage” for which divorce would be nearly impossible. I guess the economy in Kansas is so comfy that they can waste their time and resources on the ever-popular culture wars. Memo to Kansas voters: be careful what you wish for.

But what really happened in the election of 2010? I don’t think there are any easy or pat answers, and the politicians’ determination to see a mandate for some fetish or other in the face of reality is frightening. Given the usual lack of participation in the mid-terms by the electorate (young voters in particular were absent), what we saw was a hardening of existing battle lines and a high level of frustration with the affairs of state.

Has it occurred to you people that the public is just plain miserable? I don’t think that misery is going away any time soon.

Wall Street just reported the most profitable quarter in history. That was in nominal terms, not adjusted for inflation, but comparable to the high points of the 80′s and 90′s. In terms of profits as a percentage of GDP, profits were less than 10% below the all-time high hit in 2006.

Funny thing, though, unemployment has not improved, and over a quarter of those profits are in the non-productive financial industry. I guess the foreclosure business is pretty good. Not many jobs in it, though.

So while they are whooping it up on Wall Street this holiday season, a lot of our neighbors are afraid their jobs will go away, afraid their unemployment benefits will end before they can get a new job, are in the process of losing their home, or just generally struggling to make ends meet.

Maybe they voted for the other guy or gal just ‘cause things are not going well on Main Street. I don’t think that was a smart thing to do, but I can understand the frustration that led to that decision. I pray that the unintended consequences of the intended cure are not worse than the disease. Time will tell what the inkblot of this last election really means.

I watched your speech Friday at the USC rally. [For excellent ground-level accounts of the rally, see R Paine's My Take and the Karoli's Blog.]

My first thought: “Who are you and what have you done with our President?”

Then I remembered — Oh yeah, that’s the guy I told my neighbors about. In fact, I told them about you so many times and with so much conviction that I’m sure that if they voted for the other guy they feel pangs of guilt to this day.

That was the guy would could take a simple idea like equal access to health care for all and infuse it with such passion that it really mattered to many people. It even mattered to people who have insurance; those who just keep their head down and go to work every day grateful for their employer paid insurance.

That’s the guy I voted for.  The one who brought me hope that after eight dreadful years there was some possibility that the American Polity could start to crawl its way out of the deep, dark hole it had dug for itself. Hope that the American Dream of Equal Opportunity and Equal Responsibility for all that you and I grew up with was only on life support, and not truly dead.  Did I tell you that by the middle of that dark period from 2001 to 2008 I actually started to pine for Richard Nixon? Unthinkable as that may be, there was a man who was unafraid of clean air and clean water! I think he would have been just fine with the whole climate change thing.  Now there is something to be paranoid about!

After the election of 2008, I knew I’d voted for the right guy when the fierce opposition sprang up before the toner was fixed on your inaugural address. Honeymoon? Schmunymoon! You scared the crap out of them and they wasted no time opposing you.

They – the well-to-do who call themselves “conservatives” – perverted the American Dream, you know.  They said: “Look at our wealth and good fortune.  Your dream – the American Dream – is to be us in our fine homes, driving our fine cars, and living our fine life.”  So they sold us the homes and the cars, and the mortgages and credit card debt and monthly payments to go with it.  Today’s economy is all about recurring revenue streams and those folks have that trick down cold. 

“Ask not what we should give our country. Ask only what our country should pay us.”  Now that, as it turns out, is a good business model. 

In 1977 the top 1 percent of earners garnered 8.9 percent of all income.  From WWII through that year, ups and downs notwithstanding, income increased across the entire economic spectrum an average of 3 percent per year.  The tide rose steadily, lifting all boats.  My late parents, college professors in the most disrespected and underpaid of disciplines (Philosophy and English, for God’s sake! Couldn’t they be in something lucrative like Science or Business Administration?), saw their standard of living rise steadily – even in the year of the OPEC Oil Embargo when my father and I took turns getting up at 5:00 am on Tuesdays to gas up the family car because some damned Arabs had a burr in their camel hump. 

Come 2007, though, the picture is different.  Now the top 1 percent of earners gets over 23 percent of all income.  Wow.  1 in 100 people control nearly a quarter of the income stream available to the other 99.  As Darth Vader said in The Empire Strikes Back: “Impressive.”  Yet to hear conservatives talk, they are grossly over taxed and under privileged; and they are all middle class.  Did I mention that the average income of the middle class actually declined during the last years of that period? Don’t pay any attention to the guards at the entrance to their gated communities…..

How could the American Dream be co-opted so ruthlessly and effectively? I’ll tell you how. Thirty years ago, a man called Ronald – not to be confused with the hamburger and fries salesman of the same name – became President in a time of pain. His mission was to sell the idea that if we help the rich get richer by various means but especially by lowering taxes on the rich, all our fortunes would improve. He had the gift of talking to the people, he used it relentlessly, and he won.  My father, a philosopher who bloody well knew better, voted for that man and those ideas, and we suffer today because of it. 

You have that gift, Mr. President, and I saw you wield it like Excalibur on Friday.  You can crumple the opposition with but a smile and a word.

So where have you been?

I know, I know.  You took a new job and got down to the dirty business of doing it.  And you did a lot.  Reined in and effectively executed a bank bailout gone awry (Damn! We’re at least going to break even on that deal, better than I ever did when I let some Wall Street mogul play with my money). Got the Euros to be a little less tense about us. Got some sort of stimulus going – including construction projects keeping workers in my community busy and on a payroll. By the way, kudos to Harry Reid for knowing that his job sure as hell is about jobs here in Nevada! Oh yeah, and you somehow got those donkeys – er, congress people – to pass health care reform legislation.  Yes, I know, it ain’t perfect and we’ve got work to do.  But its a start. Even Richard Nixon couldn’t manage that though he knew, like nearly every President since WWII save a few odd buttheads, that it was needed.  And you got the Israelis and the Palestinians to sit down in the same room again.  A piece of advice though – don’t hang your hat on that one.  The last President who made real peace in the Middle East came a cropper in the next election.

So, yes I am proud of you.  But you need to look out the windows of the White House from time to time.

See, while you were busy doing your job (did I say Thank You?), those billionaire populists (when you control more than 23% of all income, that may no longer be a contradiction of terms!) started riling up mostly good folks (OK, some are not so good; especially on the touchy issue of differences of complexion) and telling them that all their woes were your fault. That you were the one who sold them the houses and the cars and indentured them with debt then destroyed their jobs so that the banks could foreclose on those mortgages and kick their silly middle class asses out of those homes. Convinced them that you were the one who ran the deficit up the flagpole – forgetting that nearly half the total national debt was racked up between 1/20/2001 and 1/20/2009; the other half having a long and glorious history spanning the decades since the Great War. They convinced these folks that they were Taxed Enough Already – which is a pretty amazing sales job since Federal taxes are the lowest they have been in our lifetime (I think of that as the fun part of the fiscal screw-job to which we were treated over the last presidential term).  If the Bush years proved anything it’s that not only is the theory of “supply side economics” total bunk (even George Sr. knew that, and he went to Yale. He called it “voodoo economics,” which is a somewhat plebian turn of phrase for a yalie.), but there actually is a correlation between tax rates and general prosperity of the middle class just not the correlation the supply siders contended.  We can say with certainty now that the prosperity of the middle class is inversely correlated with the concentration of wealth in fewer hands.

They called it a “Tea Party.”  How quaint.  Given we can’t remember that times were good in the 90′s (even if the fortunes of the middle class were already slipping) and taxes were higher, I don’t expect anyone to remember that the complaint in Boston was taxation without representation.  Oh, and another complaint in the eighteenth century was about shipping raw materials, and the jobs to make something nice out of them, overseas.  Ironic, isn’t it?

So the billionaires started a teajad – which like the jihad of other locales is entirely dependent on duping suffering innocents into believing at least three impossible things before breakfast – to oppose you and any change in the status quo which is working so nicely for them.

How could this happen?

I’m not saying it’s your fault, but in the course of doing the job of the President, you forgot to be the President.

You see, leadership is more an idea than a thing.  A leader doesn’t take action so much as he inspires action in others.  You know, the harshest criticism conservatives leveled at President Clinton (aside from something about an improvident stain on a blue garment) was that he was always “campaigning.” But that, sir, is what effective leaders do.  What was it Rob Reiner and Aaron Sorokin wrote in their “love letter” to Bill Clinton, The American President:

People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they’ll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They’re so thirsty for it they’ll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there’s no water, they’ll drink the sand.

Leadership is a never-ending campaign to tell what is right and true to the World and persuade others to follow and act on it.  You must remember who you are, why you are, why anyone cares and constantly remind the people of those things.

You are the idea of the American Dream.
You are the expression of the American Dream. 
You are the realization of the American Dream. 

Only when you talk to us and share you passion – talking to those donkeys on the Hill does not count – do you help us understand and see clearly.  You did that on Friday. You must do that every single day you are in the office.

Campaign for the American people to come to their senses.
Campaign for our lives and the future of our people.

Do that, and we’ll want you in that job a while longer.  Do that, and your daughters will tell your grandchildren that you saved America from its worst self.

* * *

Many thanks to Karoli for her generous permission to use her pictures from the rally.  See more of her work here.

1. Was unfamiliar with the constitutional duties of the Vice President;
2. Did not know the name and function of Justice Department; and
3. Whose only prior full term government experience was as a small town mayor?

Hmmm. Let me think. Ulysses S. Grant? Nah …. He was never a mayor. He was confused about a lot of things, but not the Vice Presidency and he signed the bill that created the Justice Department in 1870.

Give up?

There is no such President in history. But there is a person who aspires to that profile: Palin of Wasilla (POW).

POW is not very interesting, but the POW Cultural Phenomenon (POWCUP) is fascinating.

We knew we were in the midst of something new when a Republican vice presidential candidate came out of nowhere, whose story and persona contradicted the established norms of Presidential politics. I’ll concede that POW’S name circulated among right-wing talking heads for several months as the idea VP candidate – something we might fairly characterize retrospectively as a “Rush” to judgement. If I thought those talking heads had either brains or a shred of good character between them, I’d wonder how it happened. But they don’t so there is no mystery at all.

I’m not entirely sure John McCain knew what hit him when Sarah made it to the top of his running mate short list. One minute he’s basking in the adulation of the Republican primary electorate, then . . . POW!

POWCUP was born overnight after a shotgun wedding. Everyone was invited, making it all the more fun.

POWCUP is a dream (whether or not it is also a nightmare is a matter of perspective), induced by some form of tea I have not encountered. It is the idea of the unsophisticated, unknowledgeable and innumerate leader who makes followers feel better about themselves every time she opens her mouth. It is a consistent contradiction that demands simplicity from a complicated world. It is spoonerisms and malapropisms reborn as aphorisms and wisdom.

POWCUP has a life of its own. Just ask Dierdre Scozzafava. She thought she was running a nice civilized race as the Republican candidate in the New York 23^rd District – as reliable a Republican district as you’ll find north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Then … POW! Sarah shows up, along with a bunch of Republican also-rans who are desperate to find relevance, to throw their combined weight behind Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party (its so small, I’d characterize it as a “klatch” rather than a “party”) candidate. Suddenly the 23rd’s POWCUP runneth over, displacing poor Dierdra and awarding victory to the Democrat, Bill Owens. Be careful what CUP you drink from.

The title of POW’S book is either a malapropism or a really cruel joke by the publisher. “Going Rogue?” Let’s see,”rogue” means as a noun:

• A scoundrel, rascal or unprincipled, deceitful, and unreliable person.
• A mischievous scamp.
• A vagrant.
• An aggressive animal separate from the herd, especially an elephant.
• A plant that shows some undesirable variation.

As an adjective it means:

• (of an animal, especially an elephant) Vicious and solitary.
• (by extension) Large, destructive and unpredictable.
• (by extension) Deceitful, unprincipled

Unprincipled, deceitful, and unreliable seem to fit; though the “aggressive animal separate from the herd” or “vicious and solitary” elephant works too. I just don’t think you can tease a superlative out of this term. I can’t imagine that the publisher is that cruel, so it has to be a malapropism.

Never mind, the publisher left it in. Draw your own conclusions.

The extraordinary thing about POWCUP is how the idea overwhelms the reality.

The idol of POWCUP’S affection resigned her position as Governor of Alaska last summer, saying that staying on the job would be “a quitter’s way out.” What an extraordinary sophism – “I’m quitting because staying would make me a quitter!” POWCUPPERS view it as proof positive of POW’S conservative governing credentials.

Of course, it was really all the fault of those “political operatives” who descended on Alaska the moment POW was nominated for the Vice Presidency. So, it was true fiscal conservatism that inspired her to resign:

Some Alaskans don’t mind wasting public dollars and state time. I do. I cannot stand here as your Governor and allow millions upon millions of our dollars go to waste just so I can hold the title of Governor.

And, honoring the principal that no good sports metaphor should go unmolested, she analogized the Governorship to a the role of a point guard:

Let me go back to a comfortable analogy for me – sports… basketball. I use it because you’re naïve if you don’t see the national full-court press picking away right now: A good point guard drives through a full court press, protecting the ball, keeping her eye on the basket… and she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can WIN. And I’m doing that – keeping our eye on the ball that represents sound priorities – smaller government, energy independence, national security, freedom! And I know when it’s time to pass the ball – for victory.

Come to think of it, I like this idea. Would all true conservatives in government please resign now?

POWCUPPERS and their tea bags have been showing up around the country to adore their idol and – egged on by the press who find this phenomenon too good to be true – to proclaim their desire to elect POW as POTUS. POWTUS, anyone?

There has certainly been the appearance of dedication and commitment in POW’S book tour. But it is only skin deep. You know that bus that has been appearing at every event? Turns out she is not riding the open road after all – she venue hops on a comfy and quick private jet, although she did make some effort to further the illusion by giving televised interviews from the bus, including one to Greta Van Susteren en route to Fort Bragg.

Even when she shows her true nature obviously, POWCUPPERS just don’t get it. Take the 5k Turkey Trot in Kennewick WA on Thanksgiving morning. After much ado on her Facebook page in advance, POW and her “Rogue Runners” started the race, then …. disappeared. The tricityherald.com blandly reported:

She didn’t finish the race, opting to leave the course early to avoid more crowds at the end. About 40 minutes into the run, word started trickling out to people gathered at the finish line that she was gone.

Heck, I could walk 5k in 40 minutes, so I can’t imagine that the assembled POWCUPPERS had particularly great expectations Not fuss about this in any case. Only a quitter would have finished the race.

One especially good POWCUPPER in attendance said:

It’s exciting. There’s just something about her, the way that she can articulate exactly the way we feel about the country.

Since “articulate” is not a word I would associate with POW, it begs the question of just how these people “feel” about their country. We know they are unhappy; apparently with too much government. Clearly, POW has blundered into the ideal solution to that problem: conservative politicians should just quit and get off the people’s back.

Or maybe the government isn’t doing the right things – such as really mucking up people’s reproductive rights, or doing something about the appalling lack of morality in this country. You know, Governors and Senators who think with their gonads. Oh wait, the POW solution would work with that too!

I won’t even touch the bit about how Hawaiian birth certificates are inherently suspect. To most of these people there is a reason they call it the “White” House.

Sadly, POWCUPPERS and their tea bags represent the worst instincts of American ignorance. They fall for phony populism so long as the speaker looks and talks like them. You betcha. They will happily pony up for books, pictures and souvenirs of all sorts without thinking for a moment about how they are enriching their idol. They call themselves Patriots because they hate everyone who does not look or think like them. Community is just an anagram for Communism (so what if we had to take liberties with a couple of letters? Liberty is what we are all about!).

It may well turn out that we need to rename (with apologies to noted Hierarchiologists Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull) the “Peter Principle” to the “Palin Principle.” But with the press reveling in POW, effectively inflating POWCUP, it is probably too soon to tell. After all, we do need to see how far she rises before the inevitable fall.

We’re not done with this yet it seems. The bottom line is this: one should not dismiss lightly the power of the cultural phenomenon.

One family in Northern Nevada is celebrating a Thanksgiving of special significance this year. With the help of Habitat for Humanity, a single mom who is a full-time kindergarten teacher is celebrating her first Thanksgiving Day with her three school-aged children in their own home. Owning her own home as been her dream of many years and Habitat made it possible.

I have often admired Habitat for Humanity’s work. They have made the dream of homeownership possible for many working families. There is nothing fancy or luxurious about Habitat homes; they are basic shelter done competently. Donated materials and labor are essential ingredients to making it possible. Recipients of the homes have to qualify for a modest mortgage, come up with a modest down payment and devote at least 500 hours of their own time working at other Habitat building sites. For the right family, it is a wonderful program that puts homeownership within reach.

What troubles me is that such a program is needed to help families who are employed. A working mother or father should be able to support a family of four, including owning a modest home.

Especially teachers. Whether kindergarten or 12^th grade, a full-time teacher should be earning a decent middle class income. Are not teachers important enough in our society? Do we care so little for our children that we don’t think the people who provide a critical role in preparing out children for adulthood are worthy of a bit of our hard earned cash?

Apparently. At least in some areas like Northern Nevada. I’ve lived around the country and seen the contrast between how teachers are compensated in Northern Nevada and North Carolina, versus a suburban school district outside of Hartford, Connecticut. In suburban Hartford, we lived next door to a high school teacher who made a decent middle class living. That school district is one of the best in the nation, notwithstanding the fact that there are legendary private schools nearby. Northern Nevada and North Carolina? Well the statistics about the quality of those schools are out there, and its not pretty. If the national median household income of about $50,000 per year represents a decent middle class existence – in parts of the country it does – that does not seem like a high bar for paying our teachers adequately. In other parts of the country (any large metropolitan area, much of the Mid-Atlantic, the Northeast and the West Coast), that median income does not get you far at all and more compensation is needed.

Nationally, the average teacher pay is a little below the household median, ranging from a high average of $63,640 in California to a low average of $35,378 in South Dakota. Unfortunately, many techers make far less than the average. There is a direct correlation between a community’s willingness or ability to financially support its teachers and schools, and the quality of education offered.

Yet in the Platinum Age we have Goldman Sachs, whose employees earn base salaries that are well above the 95^th percentile – more than enough to live a comfortable upper middle class life. Two taxpayer bailouts – yes, two; one direct and the other indirect through the bailout of AIG – and one year later they have set aside $16.7 billion for year-end bonuses. That amount averages to over $700,000 per employee. But don’t think every employee gets that – the low end employees get far less and the upper end employees get far more.

They continue to sack the economy without doing anything useful for the rest of us; except financial engineering of the sort that brought us toxic mortgages and brought the economy to its knees. If we allowed Goldman Sachs to teach our children, no playground would be safe from sandbox barons.

Do you know what that money could do for teachers? It could give a million teachers a raise of $16,700. That could be the difference between relative poverty and a decent middle class life, espeically in high cost regions.

There is a thought that is worthy of Thanksgiving.

[For some very special music for Thanksgiving, click here.]

Now comes the case of Anthony McKinney who was convicted and imprisoned 31 years ago in the shooting death of a security guard. McKinney was running from the crime scene, arrested, interrogated and eventually charged. As happens in many cases where the inmate is ultimately exonerated, Mr. McKinney confessed but later recanted saying he had been beaten with a pipe. As one wag noted, it was an interrogation technique not without precedent in Chicago.

Medill undergraduates investigating the case for three years starting in 2003 came to the conclusion that McKinney had been wrongfully convicted. Among their findings:

• McKinney was indeed running from gangbangers that night as he had claimed. Students found two of them who admitted chasing him, angry that he had damaged their car.
• The “eyewitnesses” now say police beat them into falsely implicating McKinney. Both had told police they were home watching the Ali-Spinks fight until the ninth round, which (based on the official ABC-TV fight log) would have made it impossible for them to witness the murder.
• The now-retired police officer who led the investigation had been the subject of numerous brutality complaints and once faced federal criminal charges for allegedly beating a suspect.
• A convicted killer, Anthony Drake, told students he was “present” at the murder — and that McKinney was not. Additionally, the Medill Innocence Project has on-the-record statements from seven witnesses who say that Anthony Drake confessed to being “involved in” the murder, characterizing it as “an armed robbery gone bad.”

In 2006 the students forwarded their findings to the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, which filed a petition for hearing on Mr. McKinney’s behalf. Cook County prosecutors have all the material. The case is pending before Judge Diane G. Cannon of the Circuit Court of Cook County.

Sounds like a slam dunk, right? Not so fast.

Cook County prosecutors recently had a subpeoena served on Professor Protess and the University, demanding the grades, grading criteria, class syllabus, expense reports and e-mail messages of the journalism students themselves. The New York Times reported that

Lawyers in the Cook County state’s attorney’s office say that in their quest for justice in the old case, they need every pertinent piece of information about the students’ three-year investigation into Anthony McKinney . . . . Among the issues the prosecutors need to understand better, a spokeswoman said, is whether students believed they would receive better grades if witnesses they interviewed provided evidence to exonerate Mr. McKinney.

They want to know if the students “believed” they would get better grades depending on what the witness said? This is a bizarre assertion on its face, given the record of the Medill Innocence Project of concluding in the majority of cases they’ve examined that there was insufficient grounds to challenge the conviction. Even more bizarre is the idea that there is something sinister in the idea that students were motivated to seek out evidence of McKinney’s innocence by the desire to get good grades. So what? I don’t think there is a cop or prosecutor in the world who is not motivated to do their job by the prospect of their next paycheck – and unless they are sharing their paycheck with someone to obtain a conviction, it is unremarkable. The highest grade I can possibly give the Cook County state’s attorneys office is “mean spirited.” I’m being generous.

Three years into the challenge Cook County prosecutors are still looking for some reason – any reason, it seems – to change the subject.

But never mind, because the spokesman for the Anita Alvarez, the Cook County States Attorney elected last fall, tried to backpedal from the obvious poltroonery:

At the end of the day, all we’re seeking is the same thing these students are: justice and truth,” said Sally Daly, the spokeswoman. She said the prosecutors wished to see all statements the students received from witnesses, whether they supported or contradicted the notion of Mr. McKinney’s innocence.

We’re not trying to delve into areas of privacy or grades,” Ms. Daly said. “Our position is that they’ve engaged in an investigative process, and without any hostility, we’re seeking to get all of the information they’ve developed, just as detectives and investigators turn over.

Except that they are student journalists, not paid investigators. And prosecutors are not asking for information about the McKinney case; they are demanding information about the students and the program. The attempt to intimidate is so obvious its pathetic. Poltroonery confirmed.

But wait — as they say on the commercials — there’s more!

On November 10, prosecutors filed documents stating that Anthony Drake had recanted his statement to the students and further claimed that the students and the investigator working with them had given a cab driver $60 to drive him – a short distance apparently, since he claimed that after being dropped off he used $40 of the money to buy crack cocaine.

There is no dispute that one of the students gave a cab driver $60 to transport Drake. The figure was arrived at after discussing Drake’s destination, and the cab driver gave the student a receipt.

So let me see if I’ve got this straight: the guy who confessed to a bunch of students to being present at the shooting – and who may have been the killer – recants his confession when confronted by prosecutors. Notwithstanding seven other witnesses to whom Drake confessed his involvement, and a hard-to-believe tale about a cab driver coughing up 2/3 of his fare, prosecutors present this with a straight face? Even if you take Drake’s cab fare story at face value, they think his confession was somehow influenced by $40? I wonder what the police are paying for confessions these days – surely the old iron pipe is a cheaper method.

The final irony is States Attorney Alvarez herself. As the Chicago Sun-Times noted on November 21, 2008 in an editorial entitled “Alvarez should speed justice for McKinney,” during her campaign for the job

Anita Alvarez called the subject of abusive cops beating witnesses for confessions ‘an issue we must stay on top of’ and ‘a top priority.’

The McKinney case was waiting as her first test, and so far she gets a failing grade. Stick that in your subpeoena and smoke it.

Prosecutors can be like bad dogs that, once they get hold of your trousers, won’t let go. Is it an ego problem, a fear of admitting mistakes? Or is it something worse, a systematic disregard for truth and justice when it gets in the way of scoring a conviction. Unfortunately, I think both are true, and the latter is far and away more disturbing.

Out of the post-Vietnam ashes of liberal idealism born in the Great Depression came the conservative revolution that has held sway for the last 30 years or so. With it has come the worship of individual wealth and freedom from sacrifice.

Yet one should not confuse that with the question of whether sacrifices have been required. Oh yes, sacrifices have been made. The issue is who bears the burdens and who does not.

The burden of military service is borne by those who volunteer. We are grateful to them all, but it is not without consequences. It has made war sterile to a degree. Arguably, the Pentagon and the conservative administrations (including the Clinton Administration) in charge have pushed that sterility to the point of absurdity.

For quite some time, the fact of the ultimate sacrifice – the death of military personnel – has been hidden in a dark corner. The press was barred from covering the repatriation of remains of fallen soldiers at Dover. The press was barred from military funerals of those killed at war. Ostensibly, it was out of respect for the privacy of the grieving families.

Bull puckey. It was to mask the cost of war, because some thought that the lesson of Vietnam was that if you don’t allow the public to see the coffins they won’t ask questions about the war. It was to mask the inequality of sacrifice, and in so doing makes a mockery of it. Because the great light of our community is not shined on these sacrifices, the only attention they get is from wing-nuts who protest that the deaths are God’s wrath for tolerating homosexuality. These loathsome cockroaches would scurry back to their dark holes if the rest of us showed up.

That some conservatives had the chutzpah to criticize President Obama for going to Dover for the return of remains from Afghanistan shows just how far they have fallen. We knew they learned the wrong lessons from the past; what we did not know is how much contempt they hold for those fallen in battle and their families.

The faux indignation over the Dover event is just a sideshow in the larger narrative of the reduction of sacrifice to a fetish. In the days since the loss of 13 lives in the Fort Hood shootings, terrorism-obsessed conservatives have offered little sympathy for the families of the victims, less sympathy for those injured and nary a moment’s reflection on the stresses and strains of war on military personnel and their families. Instead, all the vituperative energy has been devoted to criticizing the decision to charge Hasan with premeditated murder. They want him to be charged with “terrorism” and are rabidly searching for Muslim-coddling co-conspirators within the White House, the CIA, the FBI and the Army.

The juxtaposition of the conservative Muslim hunt, conservative calls for a massive troop buildup in Afghanistan, the denigration of Obama for publicly attending repatriation of remains from Afghanistan and the public mourning of Fort Hood victims brings the problem home. As appalled as I am about those lives lost at Fort Hood, I am even more outraged that until recently we have been forbidden – to the point of forgetting – compassion for those who died at war in far greater numbers. Instead of any real appreciation for either the specific or general sacrifice of Military personnel, what we get from conservatives is a noun, a verb and “terrorism.” It is political pandering at its worst, at the expense of those who gave their all. It is disheartening that the herd has fallen for this for so long.

Nor are we willing to sacrifice our hard-earned dollars to causes we claim are just. The twin towers of war, Iraq and Afghanistan, have consumed our treasure at the combined rate of several hundred billion dollars per year. Yet did anyone ask for a tax increase to pay the cost? No way. All we heard through the period was a noun, a verb and ‘tax cut.’

Sterile wars don’t require sacrifice. Or, more precisely, they do not require us to sacrifice. Our children will bear the burden of the mounting national debt – which climbed from $5.8 Trillion to $10 trillion from 2001 through 2008. Yet throughout the last eight years, few have dared notice how the wars and the lack of money to pay for them have contributed to the mounting problem. We’ll leave the wisdom of cutting taxes in the face of such urgent needs for another discussion.

Instead, when money is on the line we see conservative fetishism in full flower. Take Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) and his well-timed – in honor of Veterans Day – senatorial hold on the Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act of 2009 (S. 1963). Among other things, the bill provides unprecedented support for family caregivers of severely wounded veterans injured in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. They would be paid a stipend based on hours and level of care. The VA would ensure caregivers are properly trained and have their own medical coverage to include stress counseling if needed. VA also would pay for replacement caregivers when family members seek respite from their care obligations. All of this comes at an estimated cost over 5 years of $3.7 billion, less than 1% of current annual defense appropriations excluding war costs.

Is it a perfect bill? No. The lack of similar assistance to veterans injured prior to 9/11/2001 (read: Vietnam and Gulf War I), is pathetic and shows that the hand of politics simply cannot grasp anything that does not provide instant gratification.

Senator Coburn, whose medical training apparently included advanced techniques for speaking out of both sides of his mouth, said of the bill:

And I think many of the programs that are in this bill are ideally suited for the problems that our veterans have.

Yet, in spite that that, he went on to say:

What I object to is the fact that were going to create $3.7 billion worth of spending over the next five years and not make any effort whatsoever to eliminate programs that don’t have anywhere near the priority that this program does.

Coburn is ostensibly proclaiming that if some other $3.7 billion program was offered up in sacrifice to offset the cost of the bill, he’d go along with it. Coburn did not show such devotion to fiscal discipline with respect to the Iraq war spending bills – and was part of the Republican Congressional majority that ran the deficit up the flag pole at the rate of half a trillion dollars per year during good economic times and proclaimed it a virtue. Notice the consistency of the narrative: there is not a whiff of a suggestion that everyone should kick in a few dollars to a worthy cause (about $2.46 per citizen per year by my math), but instead there is the insistence that some other interest or need should be sacrificed. So long as it doesn’t involve his priorities and his wallet. For example, one suggestion Coburn makes is to reduce the U.S. contribution to the United Nations (an old chestnut among his ilk). Fiscal discipline is just another fetish in the conservative arsenal.

Democrats, whose hearts are sometimes in the right place, are not helping. Politicians are nothing if not plagiarists when another politician’s pitch is getting votes, and the Democrats are not immune to the siren song of sacrifice at no cost. At least they seem to get the sacrifice part, if not the cost part, when they make steps toward acknowledging and reckoning with the sacrifices so few have made for the benefit of the many. The Democrats will likely pass S. 1963, or something like it. Will they go the next step and suggest we all sacrifice $2.46 per citizen per year to pay for it? Not likely.

But the day of reckoning is coming, and the real question is whether we in the stockyard will own up to our problem. Politicians do these things because we support and encourage them. We have to get over the idea that we are entitled to benefit from the sacrifice of others at no cost to ourselves. If there is something we want for our community – military protection, good roads, national parks or medical care – then each and every one of us has to be willing to sacrifice something for those things. To rely on the sacrifice of others and to be unwilling to give of ourselves is greedy, immoral and craven.

Thomas Jefferson’s pledge in the the Declaration of Independence was not empty rhetoric:

And for the support of this Declaration . . . we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

There was no coda to that declaration; no qualification that all bets were off just as soon as the business with the British was concluded. It was an expression of values meant to last.

The culture of freedom from sacrifice which brought a generation of politicians into power has been an abomination. It is time for the denizens of the stockyard to accept that true freedom comes at a price; that the price of freedom is not just someone else’s problem.