Anniversary, Longest Day Edition: Eisenhower Decides

Off of last year, where I did a brief review of Presidential Character, I had Eisenhower up, and I mentioned his leadership during the war, especially the part where he gambles on making the invasion go on June 6th, in bad weather and against his cautious nature:

Unfortunately the YouTube clip is a cropped and colorized version of the Longest Day movie, which is bound to get played on AMC or TMC or the many history/military channels on the digital cable this weekend.

But this was a big thing.  Eisenhower knew he had to send the Western armies into France and into Germany before the winter weather set in: June was the last best month to secure a foothold.

D-Day.  After North Africa, after Sicily, after Italy, each step marching towards the primary objective: liberating France as a prelude to ending Nazi Germany.

One of the most famous photos from that moment: Eisenhower meeting with the troops he was about to send into harm's way.

Eisenhower posted one letter to the troops:

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers in arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world. Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened, he will fight savagely.

But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man to man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our home fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to victory! I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory!

Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessings of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

He also wrote a second letter, in case the invasion failed:

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

The invasion succeeded.  Eisenhower didn't need to read the second letter.  He kept it on himself for a month and then showed it to an adjunct, suggesting it get thrown away.  The junior officer held onto it, and eventually it ended up in the National Archives.

The first letter was all about the troops: the airmen clearing out the skies, the home front providing them supplies and support, the men ready to go into battle.  There are a lot of "you" and "your" being used in that first letter.  The second letter was about the man who made the decision to invade: that it was his call, his judgment.  If there would have been anyone to blame if the beach landings had failed, "it is mine alone".

This was Eisenhower.

This was why a lot of people wanted him to be President.

Anniversary: Still Waiting, 25 Years Now, To Speak Free in China

Today is the 25th anniversary of the government crackdown on the freedom protesters in Tiananmen Square:

And it's been 25 years wondering about the guy who stood in front of the tanks:

Links to previous anniversary reminders here and here.

Seems like I need to re-link some photos in remembrance:

Dear Chinese leaders: the protesters weren't destroying your nation, they were speaking out against corruption, they wanted reforms and they wanted a government more responsive to the people's needs.  Instead they got shot down, bullied with tanks, arrested, disappeared...  And today, you're still dealing with the corruption they spoke against.

In a twisted way, the protesters won: they were right about corruption.  They were right about needing more freedom to speak up and speak out against such things.

If the Chinese government want to be truly serious about their current fight against that corruption, they need to be frank and honest and open about it... and they need to stop cracking down and censoring what happened in Tiananmen Square.  They need to admit a bad thing happened there.  They need to realize that the protesters and freedom speakers are not the enemy here, but the crooks are.

China should be free.  Today is a good day for them to do it.  Wouldn't it be pretty to think so...?

P.S. tell us if Tank Man is still alive.

Is This The Time For a Constitutional Convention?

For any of the readers who've been following my political blogging since Day One, you might remember I started off with the idea of blogging over a specific issue: the need to reform our federal government through any number of amendments that would fix things.  I even had the address as reformamendment.blogspot.com...

Of course, that all changed: I ended up ranting about current politics and election woes (GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT) more often, so I re-named the blog (see the banner) and re-created a new address (that old reformamendment one no longer takes you anywhere).

But the interest in reforming/fixing our federal system of governance is still here, which is why I perked up when I saw an Atlantic article asking "Is it time for a Constitutional Convention?":

In January, Gallup found that Americans from across the political spectrum picked the failure of “government” as the top problem facing America today. The vast majority link that failure to the influence of money in politics. Yet more than 90 percent of us don’t see how that influence could be reduced. Washington won’t fix itself, so who else could fix it?

It turns out the framers of our Constitution thought about this problem precisely. Two days before the Constitution was complete, they noticed a bug. In the version they were considering, only Congress could propose amendments to the Constitution. That led Virginia’s George Mason to ask, what if Congress itself was the problem?...

Which lead to the alternative solution: allowing a 2/3rds number of states to call for a convention to submit amendments for consideration.  Which is the point the article writer - Lawrence Lessig, one of the major constitutional scholars out there - is getting at.  He's openly musing over the possibility of enough states getting together for the express purpose of fixing Congress through the amendment process.

I've seen other calls over the years - Larry Sabato has been relatively consistent on the matter - for amendments, and I've joined in on the cry every so often, but I've been reluctant more often than not about pushing amendments as a solution because of one thing: a lot of the proposed amendments are f-cking disasters waiting to explode.

Lessig's article links to another article in Slate, highlighting the movement going on within conservative-led states to get this convention idea off the ground.  One of the primary amendments being pursued is that damned monster known as the Balanced Budget Amendment.  You know, the amendment Republicans conveniently ignore when they're in control of all three branches of government (between 2001 to 2007) but then trumpet and proclaim as our salvation whenever there's a Democrat in the Oval Office (especially now with Obama as President).

I've railed against that damnable balanced budget amendment before: the damn thing is rigged the wrong way.  Every conservative suggestion for a balanced budget involves making it impossible to ever raise tax rates or even create new taxes to, you know, actually pay for sh-t government needs to spend on to make this nation work.  They require a supermajority to raise a tax, yet require a simple majority to cut a tax: they make it too hard to do one thing and too easy to do the opposite, essentially ensuring that the easy thing ALWAYS gets done while the hard (yet sometimes NEEDED) choice never even gets considered.  This doesn't balance anything: all it does is force the government to take different actions, such as massive spending cuts to achieve that "balance" in a false and painful way.

And that's not the only one: that Article V Convention movement - named after the provision allowing it to happen - is also focused on passing amendments allowing Congress to override Supreme Court decisions (and preventing the President from overriding that override with a veto), essentially killing off a checks-and-balance system between the three branches of the federal government; an amendment abolishing the 17th Amendment that provided direct election of U.S. Senators, essentially taking away an individual voter's right and something fully ignoring the corrupt history of state-nominated Senators; an amendment allowing up to 34 states to override any federal laws or regulations deemed "exceeding an economic burden of $100 million," effectively destroying the Commerce Clause under Article I and pretty much giving those states license to kill off FDR's New Deal, LBJ's Civil Rights and Medicare laws, and everything ever born from those two eras.

These aren't exactly the amendments we need: we need genuine reform in federal government such as putting an end to corrupt campaign finance laws that have basically given the uber-rich direct access and control of our elected officials; we need to set tighter limits on a President's power to wage unlimited war and waste trillions of dollars without oversight or accountability; we need an amendment granting us all better voting rights and protection from intimidation and refusal, especially making voting a universal given for all citizens and making it easier to vote period.

Lessig's argument that a state-pushed Constitutional Convention is weak tea: he's arguing for a movement that is not working in the best interests of the American people.  He may have an honest intent - any potential for reform that Congress is unable to even consider is an honest one - but he's backing the wrong damn horse, and he's siding with the wrong team here.  The team he's arguing for is looking to UNDO every genuine reform our nation's had since 1900.

There's an even better solution than this, Mr. Lessig: it's called voter turnout geared towards removing every obstructionist vote in Congress in both the House and Senate.  It's called throwing the damn Far Right Wingnuts OUT of Congress, period.  Every failure of government the last 10-15 years can be laid at the Republicans' doorstep: the refusal to balance their own damn budgets from 2001 until 2007, creating the massive deficits we live with today; the refusal to work with Obama, deciding on obstructing every effort he makes to force history to label Obama "a failure" forever; the failure to maintain ANY oversight of the war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, leading to massive human rights abuses along with literally billions of dollars vanishing into thin air by 2005.  With no-one from that tenure ever being held accountable for the fraud, theft, lies, murder...

We need to vote out a Republican leadership in Congress that DOES NOT lead.  That will go a long way to breaking the damn logjam giving us a broken Congress in the first place, where we won't need a constitutional convention to fix any of that.

Florida Gerrymandering Is Real And The Intent Is There

I mentioned before I'm not a huge fan of the gerrymander.

Following up on an earlier story from December 2013, where I noted the state lege and the redistricting committee were facing a court trial over the questionable 2012 mapping, we've got some current testimony to report via Think Progress:

If Florida’s voters evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, the state’s Republicans could still expect to hold 58 percent of the state’s congressional seats. Indeed, according to California Institute of Technology statistics professor Jonathan Katz, a leading expert on redistricting who testified in a trial challenging these maps as an illegal gerrymander, Florida’s maps are the most biased districts he has ever examined...

The thing that gets my attention is how in a state where there's a slim majority of registered Democrats and the percentage of seating should be near 50-50 (kinda more 52-48 percent), the Republicans are able to hold a solid 62 percent (74 seats out of 120) of state representative districts compared to the Democrats' 38 percent.  The Florida Senate is 65 percent GOP (24 seats of 40), the US districts are 16 out of 27 for roughly 60 percent GOP (one seat currently vacant but it's a "safe" Republican seat).  There's no way the remaining other-affiliated or non-affiliated voters all leaned Republican in the 2012 election... and while there are some uncontested GOP districts, there's uncontested Democrat districts roughly balancing that all out.

There's no science to this viewpoint, I know: for all this, another explanation would be that the Republicans had better candidates at the state and congressional level.  Of course, considering how Far Right most of these GOP candidates tend to be (to where I can't conceive that many Moderate and Left-leaning voters would go there), that itself seems unlikely.

So let's get back to the experts, shall we?  That Think Progress article referred to the Orlando Sentinel report:

Katz is part of a group of political scientists considered among the nation's foremost experts on redistricting -- developing a standard for evaluating the partisan bias of maps known as "partisan symmetry" which has been used for years by scientists and the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether states were intentionally tilting electoral playing fields to help political parties or incumbents.

The method involves determining how an increase in voter-share translates into an increase in seats in a legislative body like Congress or a state legislature. With a perfectly neutral map, either Republicans or Democrats would gain the same number of seats on average for a given increase in the share of voters they turned out. Seats drawn with partisan intent would disproportionately boost the number of seats for one party over the other...

...His analysis suggested that the pro-GOP bias using 2010 voter-turnout data was 15.9 percent. Intuitively, that means Republicans could expect to capture 58 percent of the congressional seats to Democrats' 42 percent of the seats, even if voter turnout was perfectly balanced at 50 percent GOP and 50 percent Democrat.

Katz said preliminary analysis of the 2012 election results showed the same bias.

“In this case they did a really good job of following the recipe about how to do a partisan gerrymander," Katz testified in the Leon County court room...

The evidence is right in front of us: the Republicans hold a roughly 60-40 percent advantage over Democrats in a state where the voter registration favors Dems 42-37-20 (when you factor in the NPA and Other voters). Even if you give that 20 percent NPA to the Republicans by a 60-40 split, that's 12 percent to the GOP and 8 percent to the Dems, that's still a 50 percent - 49 percent difference, still close to even. And there's no way the NPA voting would go that further Right without the NPA voters pretty much becoming registered Republicans anyway (the remaining independent parties - the very extreme ones - barely have 300,000 voters combined - and I'm not sure if they're Far Right or Far Left - putting them in the statistical hiccup column).

How the hell are the Republicans dominating the representation UNLESS they're cheating via gerrymandering?

My arguments remain the same: we gotta get rid of gerrymandering.  The simplest solution is to boost the number of districts at least at the Congressional level to where it's that much harder to carve up the densely-populated - and more Democratic - cities spread out to the less-dense - and more Republican - remote counties.  And make the districts compact: none of this "spread out over six counties" crap we get for the minority-majority districts (if we go with the increase in districts, the odds favor the creation of minority-populations centers which tend to center on cities and dense-urban locales anyway).  Anything that doesn't stay within two counties of being formed is doomed (and yeah, I know some of the small Panhandle counties are sparsely populated.  We can still keep 'em blocked together, not stretched thin).

For the state-level districts, where expanding the number isn't likely, we need genuine non-partisan map-making: massive oversight of a public forum committee non-beholden to the state legislature or governor, to where the ONLY data they can work with is the basic census population numbers.

There's an even better solution to gerrymandering as well: getting the damn vote out among the Democrats.  The Republicans may have created a majority of districts favoring them, but to do so they had to stretch themselves out to a lot of +1 to +3 districts compared to the +8 to +12 the Democrat-safe districts are.  A massive turnout by Democrats in a Republican-safe district could still overwhelm a normal turnout by Republican voters...  The only real thing keeping those damn GOP-safe districts safe is Democratic voter (and party) apathy.  GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT, DEMS.

Rage: The Long-Term Unemployed Are STILL SCREWED

From Five-Thirty-Eight:

Laurusevage, 52, is one of more than a million Americans who lost payments when Congress allowed the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program to expire at the end of last year. The program, which Congress created in 2008, extended jobless benefits beyond the standard 26 weeks provided by most states; at its peak, the federal government provided an unprecedented 6 million workers with up to 73 weeks of benefits. The Senate earlier this year voted to renew the program, but House Speaker John Boehner (personal note: you sonofabitch!) hasn't allowed the measure to come to a vote in the House.

The case against extending unemployment benefits essentially boils down to two arguments. First, the economy has improved, so the unemployed should no longer need extra time to find a new job. Second, extended benefits could lead job seekers either to not search as hard or to become choosier about the kind of job they will accept, ultimately delaying their return to the workforce.

But the evidence doesn't support either of those arguments. The economy has indeed improved, but not for the long-term unemployed, whose odds of finding a job are barely higher today than when the recession ended nearly five years ago. And the end of extended benefits hasn't spurred the unemployed back to work; if anything, it has pushed them out of the labor force altogether.

Of the roughly 1.3 million Americans whose benefits disappeared with the end of the program, only about a quarter had found jobs as of March, about the same success rate as when the program was still in effect; roughly another quarter had given up searching. The rest, like Laurusevage, were still looking...

With chart from the article:

It's that "Stopped Looking" that should break your heart.  It's more than the ones who found a job in time.  It's the number of people dropping out - despairing - and most likely not coming back.  For bad and for worse.

Regarding Laurusevage:

Laurusevage didn't expect it to be this hard. She had been her family’s primary breadwinner, earning roughly $60,000 as a health and safety officer for a Philadelphia-area heating and air conditioning company. Her husband, David, earns less than $35,000 a year selling truck parts. When her position was outsourced in April of last year, she thought that as a college graduate with a three-plus-decade history of steady work, she would find a job relatively quickly. But in many ways, her experience is typical. The long-term unemployed — typically defined as those out of work more than six months — are slightly more educated on average than the broader population of job seekers. And older workers like Laurusevage face a particularly tough time: The typical job seeker in her 50s has been out of work 26 weeks, versus 17 weeks for the typical 20-something.

There has been, continues to be, massive age discrimination against the unemployed.  Part of it involves the practical issues of re-training someone to new work, part of it the refusal of companies to invest in a worker who'll retire in 10-15 years compared to a worker they can control for 20-30, part of it the irrational fear of hiring someone who lost a job, like as though there was something wrong with that person rather than a problem with the down-sizing company who slashed and cut with haphazard panic.

There's also the problem of the education.  Normally having a college or graduate degree gets you hired right quick.  In this recession, it's two strikes against you.  If you seek a job in a profession unrelated to your degree, your would-be employer is afraid you'll bolt for that other profession the moment you get a chance (this really hurts when you're a graduate-level job-seeker looking for part-time work in anything).  Other would-be employers would fear you would be too experienced, someone less malleable in terms of training and inter-office politicking.

And so, into all of this, we still have a sizable population of the United States struggling to stay afloat, struggling to keep a roof over their heads and food on their tables.  We have a situation that calls on Congress to provide help as they've provided help before: with emergency aid funding, and laws to fix the discriminatory hiring practices against the long-term unemployed.

And Boehner, that coward that crook that SONOFABITCH, refuses to get the House to act.  Because it's against the Far Right ethos of helping "the lazy".  Because it's too Keynesian for their ideological obsession with austerity and "small government".  Because it's not something that will embarrass or impeach Obama.  Because it's not #Benghazi or tax cuts or repealing Obamacare for the 58th time.

Goddamn them.

WILL YOU PLEASE AMERICA FOR THE LOVE OF GOD VOTE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY OUT OF CONGRESS?!  PLEASE?!  GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT.

Reparations, History, Justice (With UPDATES)

The Atlantic's cover story in their print magazine is from Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The Case For Reparations.

It is a hard look at the centuries of racism that underpinned the history of the United States.  About how it was hard for Blacks in both the rural South and the urban North to find any kind of economic and social equality.

You need to read it.

These are just samples from Mr. Coates:

Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate—the kind that HR 40 proposes—we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world...

And

Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history...

He's asking for a lot: the rot of racism and the fear/ignorance of the hateful are going to be tough to overcome. But isn't that the whole point of America... to make ourselves - not just as individuals but as communities and the nation as a whole - better? To leave a stronger lasting legacy to our posterity, our children?

We can bail out the banks that crash our economy every ten years or so.  But we can't bail out the impoverished?  We can't bail out the families that have lived in poverty for generations?

UPDATE: Coates has followed up with an Open Thread of sorts to handle any comments on the Reparations article (in order to keep the troll-haters off the main article).  Dunno how long that thread will stay open.  He's followed THAT up with a "how I got here" article describing how reparations became an issue for him to investigate.

Trying To Come Up With Replacement Logo For The Horde of the Lost Battalion

Or is that Lost Battalion of the Horde?  I think Lost Battalion of Platonic Conversationalists is too 2008... gotta update, gotta update...

I have dire need of a graphic artist.  I can do font design, but actual artwork is... well... I'm stuck at poorly rendered 2D figures.  Find me an artist, then we can get a 2014 Horde logo up that people will like.

A Disorganized Party

If the Democrats ever have to blame anybody for their failure to break past such things as gerrymandering, distorted campaign financing, and Far Right extremism, they ought to start pointing at the disjointed crowd of elbow-shovers gathering at the mirror:

Ed Jany, the Marine and former police officer hailed by national and state Democratic leaders as an ideal challenger to newly elected U.S. Rep. David Jolly, dropped out of Pinellas County's 13th Congressional District race Tuesday.

The sudden and surprise announcement came days after a Tampa Bay Times report about him appearing to pad his educational background and resume. (insert /headdesking here)

Jany entered the race at the last minute, after Democrats aggressively moved to keep a prominent African-American minister from St. Petersburg, Manuel Sykes, out of the contest. In a statement, Jany said he realized he does not have the time to run for office...

The 13th Congressional District, which includes much of Pinellas County, is one of the most competitive in the country. But it appears now that Jolly will walk into a second term without a serious challenge.
With the filing deadline passed, the only other name on the ballot will be Libertarian candidate Lucas Overby, who received less than 5 percent of the vote when he ran for the seat in a March special election.

Darryl Paulson, a retired USF St. Petersburg political scientist, said the Jany saga should be a case study on how not to handle candidate recruitment.

"What have the Democrats accomplished?" he asked. "They have alienated their core constituency by assaulting Rev. Sykes and now are left with no candidate to run in what was considered one of the most competitive districts in the nation and a district that Democrats said was a must-win..."

What this looks like from the outside was a bad mix of a national/state group trying to impose its will on the county/city level of activists to dictate who the local voters had to accept as a candidate. Rather than work with the local groups, it seems from here that the Powers That Be either feared the preferred local(s) options, or just didn't care for those choices and went with someone with the shinier-looking resume (which turned out not to be a good idea...).

Where the Republicans have their own internal divisions, those factions still reside on the far side of the political spectrum, and still answer (even the Tea Partiers) to a core set of financial backers and political consultants who can keep them all on-message.  The Democrats aren't so lucky.  The divisions between the national-level Establishment types and the local Progressive types tend to hamper the Dems' ability to field candidates that could challenge the state-level political machines the Republicans have across too many Red states (especially throughout the Southern states).

The recent special election for this very district - FL 13 - is a perfect example.  Where there was a candidate in place in Jessica Ehrlich who ran previously - and almost successfully - against the long-term incumbent Bill Young, the party leaders pushed her aside for Alex Sink, the Democratic candidate who lost to Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott thinking she was the better campaign draw.  But where the party leaders liked Sink, not enough voters in Pinellas County could: she gave flat speeches and weak public appearances for one thing, but another was that her background in banking was a turn-off to the Far Left voters who feared she would be too pro-business at a time they wanted representatives who would force the banks to play by the rules.  Much in the same way her lackluster governor's campaign failed to turn out the vote, the special election failed - 39 percent?! - and Jolly ended up winning by two percent points.

When Sink refused to run again for the seat in the regular election, you'd think the Democratic Party machine would invite Ehrlich back, as a regular local face who'd bring her fanbase with her.  But they didn't.  They pursued a few other possibilities before settling on Jany, whose military and law enforcement background would seem unimpeachable going against a Republican (never mind the fact Republicans routinely go after Democratic candidates with solid military careers all the fracking time).  Too bad in Jany's case they didn't take a closer look at that resume before the Times did...

Making this worse is how the party leadership went after Sykes to knee-cap him before he could even pose as a primary challenge to whoever the Dems could prop up:

When Sykes prepared to run, Democratic officials from Washington to Pinellas sought to discourage him. Pinellas Democratic chairman Mark Hanisee left a voice mail for Sykes promising the respected minister he would be "persona non grata" among political leaders if he ran.

The Democrats' preferred candidate: Jany, a Marine Corps Reserve colonel and first-time candidate who lives outside the district in Tampa. While embraced by the state and national Democratic party, Jany would have been listed on the ballot with no party affiliation because he had not been registered as a Democratic long enough under state law...

That's right: the Dems were trying to prop up a guy who wasn't even a registered Dem... /headdesk

And why was that?  It couldn't be because Sykes was a local Baptist minister (while Republicans would go after religious leaders the same as military types, it would be very awkward for them...). It could have something to do with Sykes being the president of the local NAACP chapter, which gets hit with the "librul" label in the regular media just as much on the Fox Not-News channel.

And so the Democrats problem comes into full view.  Where the Republicans have a problem with local extremist candidates challenging them in primaries (and winning enough of them to ruin their chances at the general elections), the Democrats have a problem finding any local candidates at all who would appeal to the actual voters.  And it has less to do with finding volunteers - why not ask Ehrlich? why not chat up Sykes to keep him in the loop rather than on the outs? - than with the Democratic leadership running scared from any candidate who's gonna make the wingnut media scream "SOCIALIST!"

Like that has even stopped the wingnut media from screaming "SOCIALIST!" at every Democratic candidate anyway.  It's a losing battle for the Democrats at the national level if they keep f-cking jumping at the shadow of the New Deal at every turn of the corner...

And now FL-13 has no Democratic option against Jolly (or the Libertarian candidate, who I now want to win just out of pure spite).  And now we're wondering why the Democrats in Florida don't put up more candidates at the state level to try and win back Tallahassee (how many GOP seats are unchallenged this election cycle?  I counted 40 state house seats either unchallenged or just primary-ing between Republicans, out of 120 seats.  That's a full third of the elections!).

And now it's left to the voters to try and stir up some positive encouragement to even get out the vote for the districts being competitive, for any of the elections at all.  I don't want to think it's because the Democratic Party at the state level is just that lazy.  I'm terrified to think it's because the Democrats are scared.

Anniversary: North Regional Libraries, Where I Began...

cross-posted with my librarianship/writing blog:

Twenty years ago, on May 9th, I started my first full-time job.

It was a new library building in a new type of library: a hybrid large-public/community college library that supported the public reading (popular titles) and the academic (research books and journals).

It started just as the Internet exploded on the scene, before emailing took off and the demands for computer use increased.  Back then the job was answering questions and finding articles off these newly networked online databases and making sure nobody was looking at porn in the far corners of the second floor.

It was my first full-time job.  I had a workdesk and a staff lounge with new furniture and carpeting and chairs with rollers and everything (except a computer at each workdesk: computers back then were expensive, we had to share a staff computer to get work done).

So much has changed over those twenty years.  Nowadays I suspect most of the college students and the public will come in with their own laptops and tablets to use instead of the public machines.  I'd like to think the circulation numbers at North Regional has kept up (there *is* a nice-sized retirement community across the street so...), although Northwest Regional *was* the circ-checkout king of the system when I left Broward Libraries in 2003...

I hope to go back this year to the library's 20th anniversary.  It started when I did.  I'd like to go back and see who's left, who's coming back like I am, who's saying farewells and all...

The Day Is Just Packed

Personally, a very busy day for me both at home and work (it's so busy I had to drag dad across the state to help at home).

But it's also CINCO DE MAYO!

But wait!  It's also - because yesterday just happened to be Star Wars Day - The Revenge of The Fifth!

Are we having fun yet, kids?

Trying to Rank Scandals, Phase Four: When It's More About Humiliation Than About Justice...

It's been awhile since I've written about scandals - and how we need to form an unbiased effective means of determining which scandals need investigating and which deserve to get ignored - but an update with one of the events talked about - the GOP obsession with Benghazi - has taken place:

It is by sheer coincidence that just as Obamacare recedes as an issue, House GOP leaders have announced their intent to create a Select Committee on Benghazi—something they've long resisted—and that Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, perhaps overcome by zeal to maintain control over the issue, subpoenas Secretary of State John Kerry to testify about the 2012 attack—despite the fact that Kerry was a senator at the time, and hasn't been invited to testify, and is currently visiting Sudan.

The pretext for all this is the release of an email from White House adviser Ben Rhodes, which includes as a bullet point the goal that in speaking about the attack, then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice should "reinforce the President and Administration's strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges."

Slate's Dave Weigel did a great job earlier this week of placing the email in chronological context, to discredit the argument that the email represents evidence of a "cover-up." And while it might appear a bit unseemly for administration officials to be concerning themselves with the president's image and the administration's competence in the midst a crisis… this is actually completely uncontroversial. Would John Boehner and Darrell Issa have preferred it if Susan Rice went on TV that week and granted that the administration was in complete disarray? Or had refused to take a position on the administration's handling of the situation?...

The early responses from the left side of the aisle has been "Oh great, they're finally going there" alongside analysis that the Republicans are desperate to re-stage another round of Benghazi investigations because their 2014 Midterms talking point of "ObamaCare is broken and must be repealed" is falling apart as enough voters don't believe it's broken and are seeing enough benefits out of it.

But it's problematic to just dismiss the Republican obsession with Benghazi off-hand.

The reason the Republicans keep jumping on Benghazi is because it is a legitimate tragedy: four people died due to errors in security.  This isn't like the Far Right harping on Obama's birth certificate, or mocking whether or not Obama uses a teleprompter, or whether Obama ties his shoelaces in a proper American fashion.  This isn't even the matter where an IRS office in Ohio investigated Tea Party SuperPACs (the other big scandal the wingnuts obsess over, but which is meaningless because the IRS office investigated a lot of other SuperPAC 501s as well).  Benghazi is a real problem because people died.

But the Republicans have to realize they're pushing a scandal well out-of-proportion to the facts, and pushing it in such a way that all other outside observers will view it as insanity.  The Republicans seem to focus on how the Obama White House was handling the "messaging" in the wake of the attack, as though that was a cover-up worth having (or that the messaging would reveal malign intent of some kind).  The GOP House is looking into the standard back-and-forth of interoffice communications rather than focus on the real scandal: how the security systems for our overseas consulates broke down (and what can be done to re-enforce that security).

But I doubt the Republicans will want to dig too deep into the real scandal of Benghazi: that's the problem behind the GOP's All-Benghazi mission.  The Republicans' objective isn't to fix the problems: the Republicans' objective is to make Obama look like a failed President (and the Democrats all look like librul un-American incompetents).  At all costs.

The other reason the GOP is hitting hard on Benghazi is that it's also a way to attack the supposed front-runner for the Democratic Presidential primaries for 2016.  As Secretary of State at the time, Hillary Clinton is someone the Republicans want to have held accountable: they want to drop the four dead State employees around her neck like a millstone.  The Republicans want to turn this tragedy into another Chappaquiddick, another Willie Horton.

It's as TBogg writes over on Raw Story: Benghazi is all they got (remember Solyandra?  Remember the Birth Certificate?  Remember Rev. Wright's radical Christianity and Obama Still being a Secret Muslim on the side?  Remember Death Panels?  Remember a failed website rollout?  Remember nationalizing the auto industry?  Remember how Obama ties his shoes, even when he wears loafers?).   Just like pursuing Bill Clinton over Whitewater and Vince Foster led to getting impeached over blowjobs: the Republicans do not care about the facts or about justice, they only care about purging anybody who stands in their way of achieving their "permanent majority rule" of their 100-year Pax Reaganicus.

Someone tweeted or blogged a quip that ended up in the recent Balloon Juice take on the Benghazi obsession: Who could’ve predicted that when the GOP establishment handed Nixon the pearl handled revolver in the parlor, we would have to impeach every Democratic President for the next forty years to balance things out? It seems that way, doesn't it?  I mean, granted they never impeached Carter, but that's because Democrats controlled Congress his term of office (and Carter still angered Congress enough to hover on the edge of impeachment).  It's been noted before how it's gotten to where it's expected for the Republicans to impeach a Democratic President because they can't handle the idea of a Democrat sitting in the Oval Office... the current GOP can't seem to handle the idea of honest bipartisanship... the Far Right can't accept the possibility of making political deals and compromises of any kind, and there's no moderate faction (hello, RINO purity purge) to make those deals anymore...

So we get this: a partisan response to investigating a scandal.  What happened in Benghazi does deserve investigation... but not as a political attack aimed to humiliate Obama or Hillary.  That way lies madness, and a refusal to make things work in government while the powers-that-be pursue a bullsh-t political agenda.

This is not how we should fix the nation's woes.

This Week... No, This Year... Hold On, This Ongoing Timeline In Racism

It's telling that some of the major news stories of this past week (actually, the past year, no wait the past decade, wait wait let's take this all the way back to 1963, but if we do that might as well drag it out to 1877...) has been about racism in America.

We had a Supreme Court led by a Justice in Roberts - who openly operates on the idea that the way "to end discrimination is to stop discriminating", as though not focusing on the problem will make it go away - issuing a recent ruling in favor of states that vote to end affirmative action policies for colleges.

The big news story of the week started off with a Nevada rancher, who spent years (decades) refusing to pay grazing fees for his cattle on public lands, stirring up an armed showdown against the feds that quickly turned Cliven Bundy into a Far Right, Tea Party, anti-government hero... who just as quickly got caught on tape making disparaging remarks about "the Negro" and claiming Blacks were better off being "happier" as slaves, to where most of the big-name Republicans who were cheering him on found themselves denouncing Bundy as fast as they could (with a few hardliners doing their best to defend the rancher or at least publicly tell him to keep his mouth shut before he digs a deeper hole).

And just this weekend, the sports world is aflame with reports and captured audio of a prominent basketball team owner - Donald Sterling of the Clippers - telling his mistress (oh by the by Sterling's still married, the adulterous lout) to stop bringing Black people to his Clippers' games (the argument apparently started over the girlfriend posting pics of her posing with Magic Johnson).  (P.S.: the mistress is part-Black, which adds a whole different layer of loathing to Sterling's issues)  The shocking element to this story is how Sterling's had the reputation of being a jerkass on racial issues for decades, ranging from unflattering dealings with basketball coaches and players to his mistreatment and disregard for the people who rent from his property holdings.  There'd been talk about doing something to slap some sense into Sterling... going back to 2006.  And only now almost 8 years later there are enough people honestly talking about it.

It just all piled up this one week, didn't it?  I mean, all this ignorance and hate.

Except it's been floating out there (I almost typed "flouted", but in some respects that word fits too) for years now...

Roberts' and the conservative SCOTUS Justices have just last year struck down the enforcement methods that kept the needed Voting Rights Act of 1965 functioning.  Roberts' reasoning seems to keep going back to his insistence on being literally color-blind - that pro-active efforts to fight discrimination were actually perpetuating that same discrimination - and therefore striking down enforcement provisions wherever possible.

Except that fellow Justice Sotomayor isn't having any of it, and has called Roberts out on his willful blindness:

...Sotomayor is not content to belittle Roberts’ formulation that racism will end when we stop helping minorities. She tells him that the act of ignoring pervasive structural racism is an abdication of judicial responsibility: “As members of the judiciary tasked with intervening to carry out the guarantee of equal protection, we ought not sit back and wish away, rather than confront, the racial inequality that exists in our society. It is this view that works harm, by perpetuating the facile notion that what makes race matter is acknowledging the simple truth that race does matter...”

...Roberts makes a substantive point in his rebuke of Sotomayor: Racial preferences may lead minority students to suffer shame and self doubt from racial preferences and that it is not “out of touch” to suggest that affirmative action doesn’t remedy race problems. But his deeper, sharper, point is that it is bad for the national dialogue about race for jurists to accuse one another of bad faith and lack of candor. His defensiveness at having someone explaining the limits of his own understanding of racism is palpable. He feels that he has been called out, shamed, and silenced. It is not clear whether or not he understands that his horror at being condescended to, his opinion disregarded, is among the very experiences of racial injustice that Sotomayor is describing...

Justice Antonin Scalia goes even further in his concurrence, describing Sotomayor’s logic in analogizing the Michigan anti-affirmative initiative to Jim Crow as “shameful.” In his view, she has crossed the line of poor taste by suggesting that racism in America today is as pervasive and toxic as it was in the 1950s...

With all due respect to Justices Roberts and Scalia... it IS still as pervasive and toxic as it was in the 1950s. It's as though Roberts and Scalia haven't noticed the high number of black youth getting shot at with Stand Your Ground laws in effect, or the indefensible policy of "Stop and Frisk" that overwhelmingly targeted Blacks and Hispanics over Whites. These Justices seem to think racism ended open discrimination Jim Crow laws were struck down in the Sixties and Seventies... little realizing that while those laws are gone the sentiment behind them is still out there wreaking havoc on our society.

And then you've got Rancher Bundy, Far Right Hero of April 22 2014.  The link here is to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who opens his essay with this point: "I've been laughing my way through the Cliven Bundy fiasco because, as Jamelle Bouie suggests, there may be no better example of racist privilege than the right to flout the government's authority and then back its agents down at gunpoint. Bouie asks, hypothetically, how we'd respond if Bundy were black..."

On the moment when Bundy's video got out to the media, Coates had more to say:

A couple days ago Jonathan Chait asserted that modern conservatism is "doomed" because it is "rooted in white supremacy." The first claim may or may not be true, but there's little doubt about the second. Whether it's the Senate minority leader claiming that America should have remained legally segregated, a beloved cultural figure fondly recalling how happy black people were living under lynch law, a presidential candidate calling Barack Obama a "food-stamp president," or a campaign surrogate calling Barack Obama "a subhuman mongrel," the preponderance of evidence shows that modern conservatism just can't quit white supremacy...

This is unsurprising. White supremacy is one of the most dominant forces in the history of American politics. In a democracy, it would be silly to expect it to go unexpressed. Thus anyone with a sense of American history should be equally unsurprised to discover that rugged individualist Cliven Bundy is the bearer of some very interesting theories...

It wasn't too surprising to others - like New Republic's Beutler - not just that Bundy was saying this stuff but that there's been an environment among conservatives for this ignorance for years:

...And now there's the lawless, mooching Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who takes things further than Robertson and argues that slavery, not segregation, was truly the golden age for "the negroes." Better to be enslaved than subsidized—unless your subsidy comes in the form of the public land upon which your cattle graze for free.

The right's special pleading for Robertson outstripped its special pleading for Bundy. Some conservatives have been willing to admit that Bundy's just an opportunist, not a tribune for individual liberty. But he nevertheless became a folk hero to high-profile conservatives like Sean Hannity and even some national GOP figures.

Today, most of them are either in full retreat from him, or pretending he never existed. Conservative radio host Dana Loesch is one exception. She isn't willing to throw him under the bus just yet, arguing that Bundy's problem may be a lack of polish rather than a rotten core: "I hope no one is surprised that an old man rancher isn’t media trained to express himself perfectly."

Bundy's either a hideous aberration, or another misunderstood soul. But he can't be representative of a subculture, because that would entail acknowledging that safety-net opposition and voting-rights opposition and other conservative policies draw political sustenance from sources other than heady libertarianism....

Same goes for (Duck Dynasty's) Robertson. And the Southern Avenger. And Chris McDaniel's surprisingly robust Senate candidacy in Mississippi. It's all just a weird coincidence...

The Daily Beast's Tomasky is clear on the whole coincidence point as well:

Come on, fellow liberals. Calm down. I guess maybe it’s fair to call Cliven Bundy a racist. That “picking cotton” business put it over the top, and wondering whether they were better off under slavery... 

OK, so Bundy’s a racist. It’s fine to point that out. But point up the fact that he’s a registered Republican? That’s where I draw the line, friends. I mean, come on. That’s just a coincidence. Total cosmic coincidence. Just like it’s a coincidence that that one black comic, a Barack Obama impersonator, was yanked offstage at an official Republican Party meeting in 2011 for telling a series of racially themed jokes. I mean, that could easily have happened at a Democratic—well, maybe not. But still. A coincidence. 

Just like it’s a coincidence that one federal judge who sent an email around to friends saying that Obama’s father was a dog happened to be a Republican. Complete and utter accident of fate, the puny matter of his voter enrollment.

Those rancidly racist T-shirts and posters one sometimes sees at Tea Party rallies? They’re just a coincidence, too. I mean, Tea Party people might not be Republican, strictly speaking, and it’s totally unfair to assume that! OK, Tea Party candidates run in Republican primaries, not Democratic ones, and the Tea Party caucus in the House doesn’t include one Democrat. But still. Guilt by association!

Bundy has a broad libertarian streak, too. But please, let’s not suggest that libertarian-leaning Republicans might be a little racist, too. I mean, again, what’s the evidence for such a statement? What—the fact that Ron Paul’s ghostwriter(s) of his newsletters in the 1990s had very clear Confederate sympathies? If I were you, I would be careful about drawing any inferences from that. It was a long time ago. And a sentence like this one: “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began” ...well, admit it. It’s open to ambiguity. Can be interpreted in any number of ways. What’s that? You counter by telling me that all that was two decades ago? OK. You’re right. And you’re right that it’s also a coincidence that his son Rand’s ghostwriter—that’s Rand Paul, the current Republican front-runner to be the party’s presidential nominee in 2016—on his book also has expressed sympathetic views about the Confederacy? Remember this guy—called himself the Southern Avenger, was photographed wearing a stars and bars superhero kind of mask? It’s just a coincidence that he ended up in Rand Paul’s orbit...

And it's just a coincidence that it's been Republican-nominated Justices like Roberts and Scalia talking about how racism isn't the problem like it used to be in the 1950s...

Topping this all off has been the cherry of a sports owner who's been known for years to be a total dick: not just a racist but also a sexist and a penny-pinching miser of a team owner who kept his Clippers franchise a joke for years just out of sheer spite half the time.

This is a guy in Donald Sterling whose outside means of income of being a team owner is property rentals.  And has a bad history of that to boot: he's been sued multiple times for discriminatory practices, either banning certain ethnic types from renting or using dirty tactics to force those ethnic types out.

With regards to Sterling's behavior towards his rental tenants, that problem has been a major racial issue for decades itself: Coates' biggest discussions lately have revolved around poverty, race, and a policy of neighborhood segregation that kept minorities - Blacks above all - trapped in impoverished conditions regardless of their income.  Sterling's pretty much a poster boy for how those racial policies work in today's America.

So here we are, in Roberts' color-blind America: where Black kids get frisked for the crime of WWB or worse shot at by gun-toting angry guys; where the voting rights of minorities can get legislated out by the states where Republicans fear they'd lose in fair elections; where college admission guidelines can ignore maintaining any semblance of ethnic diversity without requirement to create alternative means of keeping minority enrollment up; where rental costs and neighborhoods suffer at the whims of landlords who express the worst about the very people trying to live under their roofs; where white guys get all the public support they need to break the law but whenever blacks rise up they get arrested or worse...

I'm with Sotomayor.  Racism isn't going to end by turning a blind eye to it.  Racism ends when you get in its' collective goddamn face and tell it you "dare to care."  You fight racism by calling it when you see it, and pointing out the flaws of logic that fear and hate bring to the issue.  You work to end it, you work to find solutions to the segregation we inflict on our communities, you work to get the kids to break the cycle of fear and keep them engaged with each other as friends, as allies against corruption and hate...

Meanwhile, the clock ticks and with it another day of stupid to defeat... sigh.

Schadenfreude In Florida Episode 37: Tee-Hee Over The Pee-Pee

I wanted the subtitle to read "Losing the Pissing Match" but it's not exactly language that's Safe For Work and all...

That said, here's what the Supreme Court said to Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott when he petitioned them to overturn the lower court rulings striking down his efforts to make state employees undergo "suspicion-less" mandatory drug testing: Piss off.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected Florida Gov. Rick Scott's petition to review a ruling that his random drug testing policy for state employees is unconstitutional, the latest in a series of legal battles facing the governor.

The decision leaves in place a May 2013 appeals court ruling against Scott's 2011 executive order making consent to suspicionless drug testing a condition of employment. A judge had previously concluded that the program, covering up to 85,000 state workers, violated Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did grant Scott some leeway, saying drug testing without suspicion could be used in "certain safety-sensitive categories of employees — for instance, employees who operate or pilot large vehicles, or law enforcement officers who carry firearms in the course of duty..."

Getting tested the one time you're getting hired - I've had to do that with each of the county and city library jobs I was hired to - may be questionable, but it's a one-time deal and an argument can be made then for doing it (part of making sure the applicant is fit to begin work).

But Scott and his ilk were pushing for ongoing testing even after getting hired, arguing they wanted "clean safe workplaces."  While testing someone who is clearly under-performing and showing the signs of drug abuse may be warranted, constantly testing everybody ignoring actual innocence becomes a form of harassment.  It's a violation of the Fourth Amendment protection from warrantless searches.  (It also runs the risk of tagging a clean person with a "false positive" result, and that's a nightmare nobody deserves to suffer)

There may be an argument for drug testing in the workplace (the courts did leave wiggle room to test high-risk employees like cops and drivers), but not when a crook like Rick "Kickbacks From My Chain of Clinics" Scott is making that argument.  This is a guy whose wife oversees the trust that Scott's business holdings were placed under - including a clinics chain Solantic that profits from Scott's efforts to privatize Medicaid programs - and who'll expect to make even more money pushing drug-testing programs - his push to drug-test welfare recipients is another bag of bad ignorance and unjustified punishment - that would have to use his clinics.  Putting his businesses into a "blind trust" isn't going to stop Scott from making decisions that will still profit himself and his family at the expense of the state.

Dear Floridians: this is why we don't vote Medicare Frauds into high office.  Please for the Love of God get the damn vote out this year and vote this crook out of the governor's office before he causes any more self-serving damage.

#LibJobShadowFL Today (Update)

Let me Tweet to Mah Peoples!

Follow me on Twitter @PaulWartenberg, and keep up with the hashtags #LibJobShadowFL and #NLW (or #NLW14) and with anything librarianship today!  Support your libraries!

@FLA (Florida Library Association) too.

And I'll find out about why our Bartow Public Library driveway was blockaded over the Easter Weekend by abandoned RV Campers!  #DefendTheLibrary

UPDATE: I finished my run today on tweeting about working at the Bartow Library.  You can check it out on Twitter via this link here.

That said, some documentation is in order...

For some reason over Easter weekend, a pair of free-range RV Campers were abandoned on the driveway into the library and city civic center (the grassy area where the tents are is Mosaic Park).  Someone wanted to blockade the library.  The RVs were moved eventually, but the mystery surrounding this event remains unsolved...

On Monday afternoons I teach computer class.  Basic computing skills for the community of Bartow and surrounding cities.  Today was Teh Intertubes!  Many thanks to the attendees for being patient while I tweeted a few time during class (got to teach them Twitter in the process).

Current Status 04/20/14

Just to note a few things:

1) Still working at the library.  I will be part of an all-day Twitter posting this Monday Apr. 21st to promote librarianship for Florida Library Association.  It's called @LibJobShadowFL and we have librarians who update their ongoing duties: working Check Out desks, cataloging, ordering new materials, and hosting / teaching events.  Hashtag is #libjobshadowFL and don't be surprised to see #NLW for National Library Week (which technically was last week but this jobs events is a two-week deal).

2) When I updated my XLibris account (publisher of my short story anthology Last of the Grapefruit Wars) due to my recent move, I realized I still had on order a purchased book publication.  So two things now: A) finish writing SOMETHING in book format to use up the purchase, and B) FINISH WRITING SOMETHING /headdesk

I tried getting something typed up this Good Friday/Easter weekend but... gah, too many distractions.  ...no, that's not fair.  Shouldn't blame the lack of time.  Should blame meself: half the time I'm sitting here at a keyboard yelling at myself for trying to write a story and yet the story just... doesn't seem right... the ideas in my head are one thing, but the words don't seem right on the screen.  I'm lacking the confidence to get something writ wrote righted.

3) Gotta keep reminding folks to GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT.  Well, gotta remain consistent about this stuff somewhere...

So, if anything, keep track of me this Monday!  My Twitter handle is @PaulWartenberg and the hashtags are #libjobshadowFL, #nlw, #libraries, #Floridalibraries, #ILikeCheese, #TheNorthRemembers, #FireSchiano (wait, that's been done) and #RickScottIsACrook.  ...what?  Okay, okay, I'll tweet the anti-Scott stuff later... sheesh...

Some Tips On Surviving Heartbleed

With the latest news that a particular bug in OpenSSL has pretty much made everyone's passwords to every registration-based website vulnerable, I felt it was necessary to use my computer-training skills to provide some helpful tips to all.

First off: Don't Panic.  Heartbleed has been out there for two years, so everyone's pretty much f-cked already.  If you're worried about the government or any private corporate entity getting into your emails and personal stuff, it's too late especially since the NSA has been exploiting this bug for all that time, and stressing about it now isn't going to change that.  Those cosplay photos of you hanging out at the Furry Con has already been passed around the NSA and Booz Allen offices and openly mocked.

Second: You're Gonna Need To Change Your Passwords and Security Questions to All Affected Services.  Which means you gotta change every security detail for your Yahoo!, your Google/Gmail, your Windows, your iTunes, your Blogger pages, your Facebook, your MySpace, your Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Bumblr, your online banking, Amazon, Barnes&Noble, Costco, Sams Club, Fight Club, Wikipedia, TV Tropes, Transformers Wikia, Playboy.com, that strip club on Dale Mabry that offered a good VIP membership deal...

You'll need to make sure the fix/patch for Heartbleed has been verified before you go changing those passwords though.

Third: Come Up With a Decent Password That's Easy To Remember But Difficult For The NSA To Guess.  This is always hard to explain to library patrons when they come in asking for help creating their first email accounts (yes, it still happens after 20 years of free Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail services.  Not everyone got an email account back in 1998...).

The rules for passwords are pretty simple: letters and numbers and special keystrokes like exclamations, asterisks, parentheses, percent signs, pound signs, and umlat.  Hope that's not too confusing...

Okay, let's make it a little easier.  The letters (a-z) can be lower case OR Upper Case (A-Z) when you create the password: passwords are Case Sensitive.  One or more letters cAn be upPer caSe.

NEVER use a common word out of a dictionary - Esoteric, for example - and especially NEVER use a name associated to yourself - say, Aunt Jessificiantia's middle maiden name Frank.  Hackers use social gathering info through other researched resources and they'll know about Aunt Jessificiantia, oh yeah...

Try not to use numbers that relate to yourself personally, such as: Year of birth, year of high school graduation, year of getting married, year of getting divorced, year of getting hacked by the NSA, etc.  Last four digits of your Social Security is WAY WRONG do not do that (last four of your SSN tends to get used for other things... oops).  A lucky number could work as long as no one else knows how unlucky that lucky number is to you.

The best tricks involve using abbreviations you can remember - nobody's gonna know what WDTSHTM stands for - and then a combination of numbers mixed in.  To make it harder, follow off the last number in the password with another smaller (two or three-character) abbreviation.

Oh, and the password is usually a minimum of 8 characters and a maximum of 14, maybe 16 chars.

A decent password is gonna look like this Wdts7htM601Ga.  Some sites will insist on throwing in a special keystroke character so Wdts7thM6Ga# is a workable variation.

Fourth: Do NOT Use the Same Password for EVERY Site that requires a password.  Yes, it may be simple to remember just the one password, but if someone hacks into your Facebook account they can use the same hack on your online banking records.  Mix 'em up.  You could try variations of a base password - changing numbers and/or abbreviated letters around, using different keystroke characters, etc. - but make the variation hard to guess.  Most sites WILL lock down an account after three failed tries, so don't make the passwords something that's just one character change between each other.

On that note, you can write down the different passwords you're using, but that sheet has GOT to be in a secured location and unavailable for anyone else to look at.  Best tip: don't write the password itself down, but write down a memory clue / hint that will make your remember "oooooooooh that's what my password is".

Fifth: Get the VOTE OUT and vote into office candidates sworn to make the NSA answer for their evil hackery.  Make the candidates swear on a copy of Orwell's 1984 for good measure.

Now.  Don't you feel better?

Anniversary: My Generation, And The One Who Fell Behind

No I don't have a gun/
No I don't have a gun/
No I don't have a gun...
- Kurt Cobain and Nirvana's lyrics to Come As You Are

Cobain, you goddamn liar...
- Paul Wartenberg, after finding out on April 8 1994 along with everyone else what happened to the guy


Friends, Americans, Culturists, lend me your media feeds.  I come to praise Generation X, not to bury it.

And no, I'm not talking about the punk band or the Marvel graphic series.  I'm talking about the boys and girls who were born roughly between 1965 - the year Dylan went electric - and 1980 - when Lennon was assassinated - so that they had to be three years old at least when Return of the Jedi was out and Reagan was in the White House.  I'm from 1970 - Year of the Dog - so me and the Class of 1988 (Go Spongers) are right in the middle of it.

We were the following generation of the Baby Boomers, the genealogical anomaly of a birthing group (1945 to 1963) that came after the Depression / War generation.  Where the War generation was defined by sacrifice, blood sweat and tears, and superhero comics, and where the Baby Boomer set defined by middle class affluence, reactionary rebellion, and rock n roll, the Generation X was defined by the X.  A random elusive variable...

Gen Xers were the generation that grew up in the wake of the national malaise post-Vietnam and post-Watergate, when our political and social institutions were beset with scandals.  We were the generation that was the first to be mostly self-raised as our parents both went to work (Latchkey kids), where divorce was common compared to previous generations or where single parents were becoming a norm.  We had to cope with the consequences of the burgeoning War on Drugs, the spread of sexual diseases in the aftermath of the Sexual Revolution, and the disaster that was New Coke.

But it wasn't all bad.  Ours was the generation that grew up to Star Wars, a cultural milestone akin to the Beatles.  We had the benefit of cable TV bringing us more Sports (ESPN), more news (CNN), more weather.  We got our MTV.  We gamed to Dungeons & Dragons despite the moral outrage, we danced to Prince and Madonna despite the moral outrage, we permed our hair and wore mullets despite the moral outrage.

We are, were, still will be, a generation rather schizophrenic to the core: both jaded and optimistic, sarcastic and sincere, conspiracy-minded and complacent.  We were the generation doomed to barely survive as the Boomers sucked all the oxygen out of the room as they came of age of political and economic power in the Nineties (when they all turned 40 and became CEOs and Presidents).

And we had our heroes and icons, the ones who spoke to us, spoke for us, on the national media stage.

1991 was a major turning point in our culture.  The Cold War of the last 25 years was ending as the Soviet Union literally withered on the vine.  The Berlin Wall had already fallen and the political threats were no longer coming from Asia but from the Middle East.  Movies were about to turn into special-effects behemoths as CGI effects in Terminator II showed that anything was visually possible.

Music was also changing as the decades changed.  The video-driven 80s pop and hair metal bands that dominated MTV and radio were getting stale.  Rap was still having a problem getting outside of the ghettos of L.A. and New York.  Michael Jackson was making a major media campaign to prove himself relevant in the 90s as he had been the previous decade, but was doing so in a heavy-handed, self-defeating way.

But it was a little-heralded band out of Washington state - part of the Seattle music scene that soon became known as "grunge" - called Nirvana that blew the speakers out of every teenager and college student's sound systems that year.  A song - "Smells Like Teen Spirit" - that was part Ramones up-tempo rock, part metal, part protest - just hit the right damn notes with the Gen X age group.  From epic opening riff to the fading scream of singer Kurt Cobain shouting "A denial...", it spoke to a generational apathy of teens and college students who wanted to unplug from a crazy world, couldn't, and just had to cope.

Nirvana went from a garage band that traveled to shows in beat-up vans to a headlining act filling packed arenas and stadiums.  Cobain became the iconic grunge rocker: dressing in hand-me-down flannels, with shaggy hair and three-day beard growth, walking about with a dazed look in the eyes and a knowing grin.  Everyone thought it was cool.

Except for Cobain.  He never asked to be a hero or a rock star.  He wanted to be a rocker, sure, but someone who plugged in, played a few chords, moved on.  He had his own heroes - other post-punk and college radio bands that he eagerly talked up in interviews, which gave them brief bumps in popularity - but he also had his own demons.

Like a good number of other Gen Xers, Cobain grew up in a broken home in an economically-depressed town.  He grew up as an artist (his family had a history of musical talent and his grandmother encouraged his drawing), which made him a target for a good amount of school bullying by the jock clique (it didn't help that Cobain's father tried to get him to play sports).  It got worse when Cobain befriended a gay student which made those jocks think Cobain was gay as well (Cobain eventually made many pro-gay gestures around town in order to piss off the homophobes, and later opined he was bisexual despite all the girlfriends he lived with).

After getting thrown out of his mother's home - having dropped out of high school, having problems finding work - Cobain lived the struggling artist life, finding part-time work where he could, going to music shows across the Northwest, starting up his own attempts at music, hooking up with girls in the scene, and making his way onto the stage with one band line-up after another.  Teaming up with Krist Novoselic to form Nirvana in 1987, they went through a series of drummers until they tabbed Dave Grohl for the job in 1990.  Then they went in to a major studio to record the album Nevermind...

Cobain's work as a musician and lyricist focused on dynamic contrasts: the lyrics themselves would have a stanza of meaningful incoherence followed by a repetitive chorus back to another stanza before closing out with a repetitive chorus that underscored a melancholic dread or a resigned fate.  "Smells Like Teen Spirit" worked that way, as did "Come As You Are", "Lithium", "Polly", later songs like "Heart-Shaped Box" and "Rape Me"...  The songs were tinged with political rage and social despair, but sung in a light-hearted disconnected tone.

Cobain didn't expect so many people to get into what he was doing, and was dismayed a lot of his work was getting overplayed... or worse played out of context.  One of the things that haunted him was finding out his song "Polly" - a disturbing tale of an unconcerned man raping a girl, based on a real-life serial rapist who haunted the Pacific Northwest - was being sung by two rapists assaulting their own victim.  Cobain got disgusted finding out that as Nirvana got more popular they were attracting the same jerk jocks and frat-boy bullies that made his teen years a living hell, many of them not even getting the fact that a lot of Cobain's own songs were raging against them.

Not helping matters were Cobain's history of drug use - some of it psychiatric, some of it to cope with a chronic stomach ailment, some of it recreational with the hardest of them being heroin - and getting into a volatile relationship with Courtney Love.  Due to the couple's drug use, they temporarily lost custody of their daughter Frances Bean and he continued to live under the fear of losing her again.  In this environment, a handful of drug-using moments seem to turn into suicide attempts.

By the end of March 1994, Cobain was confronted with an intervention and convinced to put himself in detox/rehab in Los Angeles.  He only stayed for about a day, then hopped the clinic's six-foot wall and fled.  By April 2nd, he was spotted in a few places around his stomping ground Seattle.  By April 5th, he ended up at his big secluded home.  His body was found April 8th, shotgun to the head, body pumped of heroin, a suicide note nearby.

There's been the conspiracy theories, of course: Generation X grew up with Roswell and the Kennedys and King getting shot and the CIA MK/Ultra stories and the FBI Conintelpro scandals.  The idea that Courtney Love had Kurt killed for some reason or another.  But the sad truth is that everything we know about Kurt Cobain, the pains and the addictions, the fact he fled on his own, that he wandered (wondered) about town his last few days, by himself for the most part, alienated and disconnected... the suicide has all the markings of the bliss of a man who'd decided to unplug for good...

This was all twenty years ago.  I was working as a part-time librarian in Clearwater at the time - St. Pete (then Junior) College - and I came home to my mom telling me the kids in her classroom were talking about Kurt.  I turned on the news, to MTV, and watched.  It was a kick in the gut.

Cobain was 27 when we died.  Same age as my older brother.  He was three years ahead of me.  He could have been my brother, or someone I knew at school.  Like him, I had to deal with bullies and not fitting in, and coping with a world that seemed so painful.  Still I got some of the lyrics he sang, not all of them, but I got them.  I felt the tempo of the music, understood the mood.  Like Cobain and millions of other Gen Xers I had depression, but I coped.

And I hated Cobain for what he did.  He chickened out.  He had more going for him, more to live for (a daughter for God's sake), than I would ever know.  Not just the money or the fame.  He had friends despite the disconnect that seemed to be there.  He had the ability to enjoy the world on his terms - with wry bemusement - that I can only barely do on my own.  And still he couldn't cope.

Cobain fell.

It's 2014.  On Facebook recently I saw a shared photo of famous dead artists with the poster asking which of these artists would you like to see perform one more time?  For me, that poster isn't asking about whether we'd want to see them perform, it's if we want to see them... meet them, before the moment those talented souls fell to their fate, to drugs or illness or madness or worse.  Warn them, save them somehow, so that they'd still be here in the real world rather than in our fading memories.

Generation X are now in our 40s, mostly.  We're well within the age of being parents, raising our own kids, coping as always only now we're on the older side of things bearing witness to this new generation - the Millennials - learning to cope on their own with their hopes and fears and cultural touchstones ("Call Me Maybe"?  Sigh...).  We're about the age of becoming CEOs and Presidents ourselves, although the Boomer generation hasn't ungripped the reins of power just yet and we're suffering - much like our own kids among the Millenial crowd - from the short-sighted Boomer self-indulgences...

Except for Cobain, who fell behind, stuck at 27 forever.  Stuck as a reminder that not all of us got out of the Nineties alive.  Stuck on the same last repeating lyric.

A denial... 
A denial... 
A denial... 
(bemused grin that quickly disappears as the video ends)