Since you asked...

I first saw this questionnaire over at Katie Schwartz' place, and so far I've read excellent responses from Dr. Monkey and D-cup. I don't do a lot of politics on this blog, but I've grown increasingly upset at the direction our country is headed, and when I saw this I felt compelled to add my own response.

1) What is your name (nickname, whatever you're comfortable sharing), your age (range), gender, occupation, income bracket (range), how you identify (gay/straight/whatever)? Married/Single/Divorced? Kids (how many)?

Just call me Bubs. I'm a 46 year old cop living and working in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. I'm the proud father of two smart and beautiful teenage daughters and I've been married to my high school sweetheart for more than 22 years. I've been a police officer for nearly 20 years, and between my job and my bride's job at the library, we make more money than I ever imagined we'd make when we first got married. We feel blessed. We'll never be rich, but we don't want for anything. I won't have to worry about income when I retire, and we're paying for both our kids to go to college (as long as they start with community college and then go to a state university.)

I served in the Illinois Army National Guard (as did my bride) as a medic in the early to mid 80's, and we both finished our duty before the first Gulf War. I'm a gun owner and a member of the NRA. I am that middle aged white guy in the suburbs who is supposed to be a perfect Republican voter, although I don't go to church as much as I should.

2) What are the most important issues to you in this presidential election and why?

The most important issue for me is the economy; specifically restoring some sense of fair play for working people and the working poor. When I talk about the economy I'm including the issues of affordable health care and energy policy as well. I think it's obscene that the greatest nation in the world allows so many of its citizens to go bankrupt trying to pay for medical care. I'm alarmed at the growing disparity between the wealthiest and the rest of us.

I'm outraged by the fact that so many things my parents worked for and expected as part of being a middle class American--things like medical insurance, secure pensions, the ability to send your children to college without incurring crippling debt--are disappearing. Our energy policies have been focused on maximizing short-term profits for corporations instead of being geared to insuring the long-term strength and sustainability of our way of life.

And then, of course, there's Iraq. Putting aside the question of why we invaded in the first place, there can be no doubt that the invasion and occupation have sucked billions of dollars down a sinkhole; billions and billions of dollars that could have been far better spent here in the United States.

3) Why do you think voters should vote for Obama/Biden, what differentiates this ticket from McCain/Palin?

Simply put, I don't understand how anyone can look around at the current state of affairs--hemorrhaging money in Iraq, $4.00 a gallon gas, record bankruptcies, rising unemployment, record deficits, Wall Street and banking failures--and think that putting anyone from the party of George W. Bush in the White House could be anything but another disaster. McCain represents the party that has occupied the White House for the past 8 years, and has controlled Congress for 12 of the past 14 years.

It's like I told a coworker the other day: if you're more outraged by flag lapel pins and YouTube clips of angry black preachers than you are by the fact it costs you $3,000 a year to drive to work now, and you can't retire because you can't pay for health insurance, then I guess McCain is your man. Go home, pour yourself a stiff drink and listen to God Bless the USA a few more times until you numb the pain.

I don't think Obama and Biden will magically solve all these problems, but I'm confident that they won't make them worse. Obama and Biden are not ideologues, and they are not radical leftists. They didn't get where they are by being anti-business. I do believe that they share a concern for the little guy, a true concern for his well-being (as opposed to phony brush-cutting-at-the-ranch theatrics) and would work to do what they could to improve things. Obama and Biden have a far better plan than McCain to provide affordable health insurance to the most Americans.

I used to like McCain, and would have voted for him over Gore had he been the GOP nominee in 2000. It's been depressing to watch the diminishing of McCain as a public figure, as he works so hard to pander to the same "conservatives" and fundamentalists in his party who smeared him in 2000. And Palin? She's a ruthless autocrat and scares the hell out of me as a candidate. Who would you want one heartbeat away--her or Joe Biden? Can you imagine the howling of right wing talk hosts had the Democrats nominated a candidate like Palin? Good lord.

4) If McCain/Palin wins this election, where do you see our country going in the next four years?

I see every negative trend I talked about earlier continuing, and probably getting worse. I see more of the elevation of empty patriotic symbolism and posturing over the true love of neighbor and country. I think we'll see an increasing downward trend in the living standards and wages of average Americans.

5) Economically, where do you think this country is today and how do you think Obama/Biden can make a positive impact?

One of the things that appeals to me about Obama is his commitment to invigorate the economy and create jobs by investing in our infrastructure. He also says he'll invest in green and alternative energy sources. We have to start somewhere. Here's a link to Obama's position page on the economy. Go look around.

6) In the past 8-years, how do you think this country has changed under the Bush regime? Have you been affected by these changes? If so, in what ways?

I've seen an increasing polarization, and willingness to demonize one's opponents. All that red state/blue state bullshit. We saw more of it at the GOP convention with the implication in several speeches that they represent "real" Americans, as opposed to Democrats, who presumably represent all us degenerate urban perverts, elitists, dope fiends and sandal wearing secular humanists. Conservative Republicans have given us the phenomenon of the sore winner.

How have I been affected? Well, it's turned me into a self-identified Democratic voter for the first time in my life. I don't think I'd vote for a Republican for dog catcher at this point.

7) I have read that Palin is considered the new voice of feminism, which is offensive in my opinion. Of equal concern are her views on abortion and the removal of books from libraries. I'd like to know what you think about all of that and how you feel about McCain choosing Palin as a running mate. And what kind of message you think that sends to women?

Republicans have successfully harnessed working class fear to get working class people to vote against their own economic interest (read What's the Matter with Kansas by Thomas Frank). Now it looks like they're trying to do the same thing--trotting out a candidate who, at first glance, working women and moms can relate to, but who actually opposes policies that most of those women would be in favor of. I don't think it sends any message to women, really, since women aren't some monolithic block.

I think that McCain's choice of Palin as a running mate shows that his desire to win is strong enough to overcome his previous problems with evangelicals and Bush conservatives. It's no secret he would've preferred Tom Ridge or Joe Lieberman, but ultimately he caved in to the right. And it's paid off for him, so far at least. By picking Palin he's put the GOP's favorite wedge issues like abortion and religion right back in the mix. If we try and win this election on issues like book banning and abortion, the Republicans will beat us like a rented mule.

August 29

Memorial to Hurricane Katrina victims taking shape

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Six mausoleums for the unclaimed dead of Hurricane Katrina stand on what was vacant land just five weeks ago, as New Orleans — in what could be a testament to its determination — scrambles to complete a memorial by Friday's third anniversary of the storm...

New Orleans remembers Katrina, Awaits Gustav

New Orleans will commemorate the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on Friday under the threat of Tropical Storm Gustav, which is creeping toward a city with many of the same vulnerabilities that proved disastrous in 2005.

Much has been done to repair and strengthen levees and install floodgates and floodwalls along the man-made canals that slice through New Orleans. But for every dollar that has been invested so far, at least three more of the federal dollars approved to shield the city from massive storms remain unspent.

Let's talk stupider

A few more thoughts on our national dumbing down.

My friend Bawb the Revelator sent me an editorial by my new hero Susan Jacoby the other day. (By the way--Bawb is new to blogging, so go check out his place.) The piece appeared in the Washington Post on Sunday:

The Dumbing of America

Here's a taste:

The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just "folks," a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.") Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era. (*Note from Bubs: Think of Ms. Pickler's performance on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?)

She identifies three issues:

• The decline of reading and the rise of video
• The erosion of general knowledge
• Arrogance about our lack of knowledge

There's a lot to work with in Jacoby's opinion piece. Did you know that, between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite for a presidential candidate declined from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds? And by 2000 it dropped even more, to an average 7.8 seconds! There's a sad contrast between the presidencies (and the citizenry who elected them) of "I'm the decider" Bush and FDR, who encouraged Americans to buy maps so that they could understand the geography of war in the early, frightening days of WWII.

Go read this thing.

_____________________

Speaking of George W. Bush, did you know he's explained why our economy is a little rocky right now? My mom called me yesterday to tell me about this and asked if I could find the clip on the interwebs.

During an interview with Ann Curry on the Today Show, Bush was asked about the economy. The first thing that got me was his dismissive "yeah, well" when Curry said some Americans believe they're suffering economically because of the war. It's right at the beginning of the video.

The POTUS goes on to say that he thinks war spending is creating jobs. So, Mr. President, what's wrong with the economy?

"I think this economy is down because we built too many houses."

Yep. That's what he said:

Toady

–noun
1. an obsequious flatterer; sycophant. –verb (used with object)
2. to be the toady to. –verb (used without object)
3. to be a toady.

[Origin: 1680–90; toad + -y2] —Related forms
toad·y·ish, adjective
toad·y·ism, noun

—Synonyms 1. fawner, yes man, parasite, apple polisher.

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.

Word History: The earliest recorded sense (around 1690) of toady is "a little or young toad," but this has nothing to do with the modern usage of the word. The modern sense has rather to do with the practice of certain quacks or charlatans who claimed that they could draw out poisons. Toads were thought to be poisonous, so these charlatans would have an attendant eat or pretend to eat a toad and then claim to extract the poison from the attendant. Since eating a toad is an unpleasant job, these attendants came to epitomize the type of person who would do anything for a superior, and toadeater (first recorded 1629) became the name for a flattering, fawning parasite. Toadeater and the verb derived from it, toadeat, influenced the sense of the noun and verb toad and the noun toady, so that both nouns could mean "sycophant" and the verb toady could mean "to act like a toady to someone."

toady (n.)
"servile parasite," 1826, apparently shortened from toad-eater "fawning flatterer" (1742), originally referring to the assistant of a charlatan, who ate a toad (believed to be poisonous) to enable his master to display his skill in expelling the poison (1629). The verb is recorded from 1827.

Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper

The surge is working

I just saw this over at American Idle and laffed my ass off. Maybe it's because we used to have a big scary parrot. I don't know.

What percentile are you?

Believe it or not, my life is not all joy and dope fiends and sex perverts and circus clowns and alligators. Nope. Some times I try and focus on serious topics, like the economic health of our great nation. And when I do focus long enough to read stories like this one in the Boston Globe, my head hurts.

The chart at right is from the March 28 Economic Snapshots page at the Economic Policy Institute. Here's the title:

Recent income gains went to those with highest income. Here's an excerpt:

The economy expanded in 2005, with gross domestic product and productivity both posting solid gains (3.2% and 2.1%, respectively). Yet, as shown in the chart ..., real market income (i.e., income aside from government transfers) actually fell slightly (-0.6%) for those in the bottom 90% of the income scale.

Income growth for households within the 90-95th percentile was moderate in 2005, up 2.2%. But higher income households did much better. In fact, income growth among the top half of the top 1%—a group whose average annual income is already $1.8 million—was up another 16% in 2005 alone.

So, in other words, wealth distribution in this country has come to resemble Bruce Campbell's pitch in those Old Spice ads:

If you have it, you don't need it. If you need it, you don't have it. If you have it, you need more of it. If you have more of it, you don't need less of it. You need it to get it. And you certainly need it to get more of it. But if you don't already have any of it to begin with, you can't get any of it to get started...

Look around: a million Americans went bankrupt as a result of medical problems in 2004, and half of all bankruptcies in this nation are due to medical issues. Household debt continues to rise.

The subprime lending market is falling apart, having suckered millions of people into buying houses they couldn't really afford, or borrowing against the paper value of their homes.

I got an email from my friend Bawb the Revelator under the heading "And from the 'I GOT MINE, UP YOURS' desk". That caught my eye, and I opened it to find this L.A. Times story about the latest business failure:

Subprime lender New Century files for bankruptcy, fires 3,200 people

You know, you just know, that for those 3,200 drones who are now out of work, and all those thousands of foreclosures and bankruptcies, that there were quite a few people (maybe that top 1 percent?) who made out like bandits.

It seems to me that for the last 7 years there's been a conscious effort to ransack the middle of this country to enrich a handful of cronies and greedheads at the top. Enron, the subcontracting of the war in Iraq, the bungling horrors of Katrina--if we thought about it we could probably name even more examples of that predator mindset, the one that says maximize profit and f*ck the consequences. This is what happens when you have a president who's quite open about looking out for that top 1%, and doesn't care at all about the bottom 90.

And now it begins

What a difference a little congressional oversight makes. Fresh from the Bloomberg.com website:

Gonzales Aide to Take Fifth About Prosecutor Firings

By James Rowley

March 26 (Bloomberg) -- An aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will invoke her constitutional right to refuse to testify before a Senate panel investigating the firings of eight U.S. attorneys, her lawyer told the committee.

Monica Goodling, who helped coordinate the dismissals as the attorney general's White House liaison, will invoke her Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, her lawyer said in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee. She will refuse to be interviewed by committee lawyers and decline an invitation to testify at a public hearing, said attorney John M. Dowd, citing the ``legally perilous'' environment of congressional probes.

Where y'at?

Happy Mardi Gras everyone. Hope y'all have an excellent day, full of good food and music. Wear a little purple, green or gold. Try and work a little dance step into your daily routine.


I really fell down on the job this year, and I don't have a lot of good visuals and music. I tried to find a digital version of James "Sugar Boy" Crawford's original recording of "Iko Iko" (originally known as "Jockamo".) It's a quintessential New Orleans song. Most people think it's much older than it really is--Crawford wrote it in 1954, and the Dixie Cups had a top 40 hit with it in 1965. You can listen to the Dixie Cups version here. I love the sound of it, especially when it was used to sinister effect in the movie The Skeleton Key.

This video features Dr. John, the Meters and Professor Longhair:



You can check out the Neville Brothers' version here. You can find some more ass-shakin' piano music video from Dr. John here (check out his boots!), and from Professor Longhair here.


Cook yourself something from The Creole and Cajun Recipe Page.


You can work on your faux New Orleans accent and vocabulary here: How ta tawk rite.

I've saved the best for last. Visit the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity website, and make a donation. Better still, try and head down there and do some volunteer work this spring or summer. The St. Bernard Recovery Project, having cleaned out and gutted over 2,000 homes, is preparing to rebuild.

I am a terrible failure

I've gone and left out too many wonderful New Orleans musicians to even begin to list. Here's a few:

Fats Domino
The Nevilles
The Meters
Dr John
Clifton Chenier
Buckwheat Zydeco
Ernie K-Doe
The entire Marsalis family

That's for starters.

Mea culpa.

I think I'm going to delete that sub-par Jolie Blon and get it off the page completely. I was just so desperate to hear its sweet melancholy strains last night, and maybe even see someone performing it, that I put it up there without the proper forethought.

Yeah, I've come a little bit... unglued the past couple of days.

I subjected my coworkers to a 10-minute long rant yesterday that ended with one of them asking (a little more than half seriously) if they could just take me to a bar and get me a drink to calm the f*ck down. Well, there's no mistaking now exactly how I feel about the current administration and what I refer to as their avalanche of f*ckups. My coworkers brought up what's now being referred to as "the rant" in roll call this morning, and we had another brief but spirited discussion. Here's what I've discovered: a year or two ago I would've been shouted down by Fox News-watching, talk radio-listening Bush cheerleaders. Now, they all went pretty much quiet when confronted with a few facts. Making fun of Clinton, Gore and Kerry isn't much of an answer any more, and in the face of the news from horrid third-world hellholes like Iraq and New Orleans, Clinton/Gore/Kerry bashing doesn't seem to bring the same self-satisfaction to Bush voters that it used to.

We were Americans

That's something you could say during our response to Katrina. When I say "our" I don't mean our government's non-response, but rather the response of all the decent big-hearted Americans who sent money, and volunteered, and opened their homes to other people in need. And all those good people trapped in horrible circumstances who did their best and helped their brothers and sisters. Like September 11th, it was a grand moment of ordinary people rising to the occasion and performing heroic deeds in the face of tragedy. I never want to forget that.

This is how a good part of New Orleans looked back at the beginning of April 2006. This is a house a couple of blocks from where the Industrial Canal levee broke in the lower 9th Ward.

My anger meter just pegged at 11 so I shut off the television. The spectacle of watching two pompous blowhard f*cks like Pat Buchanan and Al Sharpton on MSNBC arguing over whether the levees were dynamited to kill black people was too much. CSPAN was running interviews with people in St Bernard Parish, filmed on 8/16/06. Da Parish looked about the same as it did when we were there in March, depressingly enough. It looked like they'd gotten control of the trash levees, (trash levees was how everyone down there referred to the huge piles of debris next to all the gutted houses) and there were more vacant lots where houses had been demolished and hauled away, at least.

I admit my liberal partisan bloodlust runs pretty high lately. Even so, I sometimes find the postings on Daily Kos to be a bit much. But today, I found this post by a blogger named DarkSyde and I really appreciated it. I'll leave y'all with this excerpt:

I predict the anniversary of the worst natural disaster in decades will be quickly pre-empted by stirring speeches sung over the graves of 9-11 by meat puppets of the right clothed in designer suits and wearing somber, rehearsed expressions for the multitude of cameras. They will be read in carefully scripted, grave tones, in front of bronze statues of soldiers sacrificed and granite monuments to the dead of wars past, and they will be read mostly by those who never choked down a stale MRE in the desert heat or freezing cold.

I imagine in the not too distant future, Ph.D. dissertations and classes in political science will be devoted to analyzing how this crop of neocon miscreants lurched clumsily from one monstrous failure after another, and still held solidly onto a third of the electorate. Maybe the academics will figure it out. Part of me hopes someone will. For now, as one who has lived it, I find the phenomenon incomprehensible. When a co-worker defends Bush or Iraq or the handling of Katrina, I have to consciously try not to stare in open contempt, jaws agape, as a half dozen possible explanations for why they could be so sadly misled and yet so confident, wrestle with one another in the small part of my brain that insists on finding order in chaos.

Remembering Katrina

Ok, I'm a cop, so I'm supposed to have a shrine to 9/11 and be prone to exclaiming "never forget!" any time there's a discussion that's even remotely related to September 11th. The thing is, that's not what I'm remembering, or what I want other people to remember right now. Far as I can tell, we've got a presidential administration that's done a fine job, thank you, of making sure that no one "forgets" September 11th. I'm sure our current administration would much rather we remember 9/11 than think about the reality that our government f*cked up on a colossal scale as a major city drowned. Not me. I'm remembering Hurricane Katrina. I still have a hard time controlling my rage whenever I think about it.

New Orleans is the closest thing to my adopted home town--I love the place, I feel more comfortable there than I do almost anywhere else, and I've been in enough eateries and gin mills there that I nearly feel like a local. Only without the regional dialect that sounds like a Brooklyn accent on quaaludes. I like the premium that New Orleans (and most of southern Louisiana, really) puts on hospitality, food, music and showing people a good time. I like their goofy stories, and the way they tolerate eccentricity. And being from Cook County, Illinois, I appreciate the breadth and depth of their public corruption.

When Katrina hit, and the levees broke and the city descended into chaos, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I started calling places like the Red Cross to see if I could volunteer in some way--yeah, I have no real skills but I'm good at dealing with hysterical people and I'm cool in a crisis, and I've got a gun and 17 years of law enforcement experience, which it certainly looked like was needed at that moment. The Red Cross suggested I sign up for a volunteer orientation-- the next month. Yes, in October 2005.

I was eventually lucky enough to be part of a group of police officers who volunteered to go down there, and I spent nearly a week working in the 2nd District of New Orleans (the Uptown/River Bend area) in the aftermath of the storm. I was blessed again with the opportunity to go to St Bernard Parish in March, gutting houses with Habitat for Humanity as part of the St Bernard Recovery Project. When we got down there I was shocked to see how much was still undone 7 months later.

I've been reading the various Katrina-one-year-later stories, and catching a couple shows on TV. It's just too easy to be enraged, or maudlin, and no one wants to read stuff that just relentlessly brings you down.

So, let's talk instead about food and booze, and wish the people of New Orleans strength and courage in their recovery.

Sunday afternoon we had my mom over, and actually managed to get both daughters home at the same time for a nice sit-down family dinner. It was, if I may say so, delicious. One of our better efforts. Here's the menu (recipes available on request):

-Sazerac cocktails (a delightful blend of rye whiskey, absinthe and bitters, invented in New Orleans)

-Chicken & smoked sausage gumbo

-Southern style greens (mixed turnip, mustard & collard greens cooked in beer, with a little vinegar and molasses)

-Corn maque choux with crispy bacon

-Abita Turbo Dog beer

-And for dessert, a peach blackberry crisp, made with fresh fruit from our farmers market.

I'll try and post some pictures from last year, and from our trip to do rehab work this spring.