Bill Egnor

There is going to be a lot of analysis on the Republican Pledge to America today, and here is some more! Instead of going into the actual policy, which others can and will cover better, I thought I’d talk about the wording. There is a lot to be learned by how a group talks about its policies. Communication requires a certain tailoring to the audience to be affective but the choices one makes in that tailoring can often be as telling as the message.

The first thing that I noticed is unlike the 1994 Contract with America this document is just a pledge. A pledge is a lot weaker than a contract. Sure the Founding Fathers pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to establishing a new nation, but the march of time has warn down the meaning of pledge. People pledge to fund drives all the time but don’t pay; nations pledge to things like the United Nations Millennium Development Projects but they don’t come through with the money.

So a pledge is more of a weak showing of intent rather than a binding commitment. This is not a big surprise from a party that has played the Religious Right like carnival hucksters for more than two decades. There is also the way this will be rolled out. Unlike Old Newt Gingrich’s Contract, where there were over 100 Republicans standing on the steps of the Capital there will only be 12 Republican leaders at a hardware store to roll this pledge out. It is thought that this will make it seem less like the Republican establishment handing down marching orders from Washington by taking this tact, however it also makes the commitment less binding when nothing is official, just kind of a meeting of the minds around the cracker barrel.

(picture from Steve Wampler via Flikr)

Not much comes out of value comes from gangs. Oh sure there are some rap artists who started as gang members and I am not going to minimize the art that they have created, but really they are the exception not the rule. Gangs in history and in contemporary America are generally associated with criminal activity.

Given this basic premise it is hard to understand why a long time United States Senator would want to form a gang, but Sen. Lieberman really has a bit of a chubby for them. It was eons ago in blog time, 2005, but there was a show down between Democrats and Republicans over judicial nominees. The Dems where holding up 11 applet court nominees and the Republicans were talking about the “nuclear option” of ending the filibuster.

There are five Republican Senate nominees who would outlaw abortion in all cases, no exceptions for rape or incest. You probably know them but I’ll list them anyway, Ken Buck (here the great State of Colorado), Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Joe Miller and Rand Paul (real freaking Libertarian of you there Rand, how do you sleep at night with that level of hypocrisy weighing you down?) . This is what the Tea Party has brought us, people who believe that no matter what the Supreme Court has said time and again there abortion should be illegal and should have no exceptions for health or criminality.

It all seems to be part of their toughness shtick. Where everything is a life and death fight and they will take any position to the maximal and then declare that it is main stream. I love this tactic when it is my seven year old nephew and he insists he is a super-hero just because he says so, but it is more than a little frightening in someone who could be a United States Senator and be one for the next six years, at least.

There is a meme out there in the radical Republican Party about Shariah (Islamic law based on the Qur’an and other works) being imposed here in the United States. It has so much acceptance that a supposed 2012 Republican Presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich, could call for a Federal law banning it, at the Value Voters summit in Washington and get a standing ovation. To say that this kind of crazy gets right up my nose is an understatement on the level of saying the razing of Carthage was a minor property dispute.

It is hard to know where to start in on the stupid on this issue, but let’s begin on a point near and dear to my heart, the Constitution. The First Amendment makes it clear when it says:

Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

That means all religions, not just one. There is also the Article VI, Clause 2, the Supremacy Clause which makes the Constitution, Federal Laws and Treaties the supreme law of the land. No other law can supersede these laws, whether they be religious laws or State laws.

This whole “their going to try to impose Shariah!!” hysteria is just that, fear mongering to whip up the base of the increasingly insane Republican Party. What is particularly galling about all of this is the level of unselfconscious hypocrisy that goes along with these fears of religious law being established in the United States.

Happy Sunday Bread Heads!

This week we are going to take a little break from the sourdough and bake one of my favorite fall breads the French Harvest Loaf. Why is it the Harvest Loaf? I have no clue, it is what this recipe was called when I learned it and it was always at this time of year when it was baked. It has a cool feature that will seem intimidating until the first time you do it. That is the wheat stalks which decorate the loaf.

One of the great things about these stalks is they are so impressive that even when you do them poorly they look great. The real masters of this technique make them look like real wheat but even your first time they will look great, trust me on this! Plus the technique is easy to learn, it just takes practice to master. So, as always, don’t despair, don’t freak out, just follow the instructions and take all the credit when you show this loaf off to your friends and family.

Since this is a French style bread it does require a starter, which means you have to start the night before. It is also a half whole wheat, half white flour bread. The thing is that the flour they use in France is not one you can get easily here in the United States. It is a medium hard wheat, instead of the hard or soft wheat that we have here. It is also milled a little different than we mill our flour here. Still there is a way to get around this. We will be mixing 3 parts all purpose flour with 1 part bread flour to approximate the French white flour. If you don’t want to do this you can just use all purpose flour, though you will not get the same level of open cell structure in your final product.

Enough talk! Let’s bake!

Chapter Sixteen

There was no doubt in the Shadow’s mind, he was lost. He had left the House of Summer with a clear destination in mind, a dining hall of the Chositha that he had seen the night before, on his way to the House. It had seemed a simple enough route, two lefts, a right , then angle down a three way intersection to the right, but those steps had taken him to a street that he had never seen before.

Having no knowledge of where he was, nor where his destination was, the Shadow made the logical choice, he would ask for help. But he would not throw himself on the mercy of just any Celesti, no, he wanted help from his clan or not at all. Logic is all well and good, but pride, that is something that will make you work extra hard at simple things.

So, the Shadow leaned his back against the nearest wall and watched the people walking by. Trasbello was a smith, one of the Vernita sept. So he was looking for any man that looked as though he was a smith too. This would be a member of his new clan, and could tell him where a dinning hall for the Chositha was, and direct him to Trasbello’s shop in the Street of the Hammered Metal.

He waited and watched as several likely men go by, but one looked so much like a smith that he made is move. The man coming down the street was nearly as broad as he was tall. His thick neck seemed to blend directly into his massive shoulders. His torso moved in that way that suggests that all of the flesh under his clothes was solid muscle, and that they pulled against each other, each one trying to dominate the others. On his head sat a mane of hair, brown warring with sun streaks of nearly blond amongst the wavy curls. His face was half covered with a closely clipped beard, that served to emphasize the strong plains of his cheeks, falling to the hard line of his jaw. This was the kind of man the Shadow had been waiting for.

Stepping away from his wall, the Shadow came and stood directly in front of this impressively muscled man. “Hail, and good morning. I do not mean to interrupt you, but you are a Vernita, are you not?”

The man studied the Shadow quietly for a moment and then said in a surprisingly high pitched voice, “Now, what, exactly, would make you think that I am a Vernita?”

One of the issues that spurred our war of choice in Iraq was the false insistence by the criminal Bush administration that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, specifically nuclear weapons. The premise was that he might fly a drone (nutty) or worse give one of his precious nukes to a terrorist group who would then try to smuggle it into the United States.

I am probably dating myself with this, but back when I was a kid one of the things that was almost an article of faith with my friends and I was the prospect of an nuclear war of some kind between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was not a daily worry but it was always there in the back of our heads. It led to a lot of blue sky talking about post apocalyptic survival (and the realization that Michigan had 300 primary targets and no one was likely to survive in the state if the worst happened).

Luckily the Cold War ended and the chance of world wide nuclear holocaust receded. However that dread is a part of many peoples childhood and still influences their thinking. While there is a much lower chance of a major nuclear war, there seems to be a higher chance of a single city being destroyed by a nuclear weapon.

There is something about Washington and taxes that seems to destroy the ability of law makers to do simple math. This seems to afflict Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats the worst. The Washington Post is reporting about the roll out of the Republicans Orwellianly named tax plan, the Tax Hike Prevention Act. Sen. Mitch McConnell (the man voted most likely to turn into a snapping turtle in our lifetimes) has put the idea on the table permanently extend all of the Bush era tax cuts, including the ones for the ultra wealthy, that top 2% of all earners.

From the WaPo :

"We have a spending problem. We spend too much. We don’t have a taxing problem. We don’t tax too little," McConnell told reporters Tuesday. "And if we want to begin to get ourselves out of this economic trough that we’re in, the only way to do that is to grow the private sector."

This is insane. We are currently collecting tax revenues at the same we did in 1950. In 2009 taxes were 9.2% of all personal income, just like it was when Harry Truman was president. A lot of things have changed since that time, the population has doubled and unlike now, in 1950 the United States was running a surplus. For Senator McConnell to say we are taxing too much is just another example of Republican bizzaro world, where black is white and up is down.

There are a lot of angry people in the American electorate. There are the Tea Party folks who think that there has been some kind of revolution and they are in danger of losing their country (even though the country they imagine they were part of never really existed). They are fired up and they intend to vote for some of the most radically reactionary candidates in decades. They have helped nominate folks like Sharon Angle who believes that unemployment insurance is a bad thing, and thinks that it is not a huge problem if conservatives resort to so-called “Second Amendment remedies”, basically armed insurrection.

Then there are another group of angry folks, this time on the Left. They were the ones who suffered through eight years of Republican lawlessness and were inspired by the promise of change the Obama campaign offered. Many feel betrayed by the fact that change has not been as intense as they imagined. They point, with good reason, to the promises made by the President on issues like Health Care reform and the reality of what the legislative process gave us. No public option, lots of compromise and a bill that while it does good things for some is not the kind of transformational change that the Left (myself included) wanted.

I always thought the change meme was a dangerous one. It suffers from a lack of operational definition. If you say change to ten people you will get ten different expectations of change. If you say “we’re going to have a change from the past but not a radical one” you still get different views of what that is. This led to wide and high expectations from many people (again myself included) and was always going to make the failures and compromises seem more galling than normal.

There are times in the life of a nation when ideas and attitudes that have been part of the conventional wisdom shift and there is very little that the forces of intolerance and the status quo can do about it. It seems we are reaching that point with the issue of full rights for our gay citizens. The recent decisions in the Proposition 8 case and the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) policy in California point are good indicators of this change.

While neither of these cases are finished by any means (though the issue of standing is one on Prop 8 is likely to end it at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals) the rulings by the judges in each case have been devastating to the premise that our gay citizens are some how so different from the rest of us that they can be treated with a different standard of law.

This week another case will go to trial, again, challenging the military’s DADT policy. Major Margaret Witt was an Air Force flight nurse. She was a veteran of the liberation of Kuwait, Operation Desert Storm. She also happens to be a lesbian (again and always the very least important fact about Maj. Witt, but one that too many of the more conservative of our citizens is obsessed about) .