tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43083461475211261362024-02-07T03:42:31.275-07:00The Johnson PostMany things considered: News, politics, history, the media and more... with Marc Johnson of Gallatin Public Affairs.Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comBlogger358125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-20224596325581800722011-04-08T15:59:00.000-06:002011-04-08T15:59:58.407-06:00New and Improved...<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;"><em>The Johnson Post</em> is moving April 11th to </span></span><a href="http://www.manythingsconsidered.com/"><span style="color: red; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">www.manythingsconsidered.com</span></a><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial;">Marc Johnson</span>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-47097925287230144772011-03-22T08:00:00.001-06:002011-03-22T08:09:19.328-06:00Survey Says<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinm5jQKQ_5lmaX7viO5fVIhTzLeEcpcqS66DYH_XBFGI3uSuDByzDyI9Zoxa1pKV1HGV_UaS0PXb_NlA-630WTa6R_i5ZN1V4JzOBGAj8K63AnrKKqw_w6YR6VuLWTTjP8WqEuGj8x5nAl/s1600/flag.jpg"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5586670069490937314" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 135px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 80px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinm5jQKQ_5lmaX7viO5fVIhTzLeEcpcqS66DYH_XBFGI3uSuDByzDyI9Zoxa1pKV1HGV_UaS0PXb_NlA-630WTa6R_i5ZN1V4JzOBGAj8K63AnrKKqw_w6YR6VuLWTTjP8WqEuGj8x5nAl/s200/flag.jpg" border="0" /></strong></em></span></a><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong>Don't Know Much About...Us</strong></em></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I've been fortunate to have the opportunity to travel a fair amount - Europe several times, South America, Canada - and after every trip I've returned thinking its good to be home, but man we sure don't know much about the rest of the world.</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I remember a trip to Canada a few years ago and engaging in serious conversation with friendly Canadians who seemed to be up on everything happening in the USA from our politics to popular culture. By contrast, most Americans couldn't find <a href="http://www.tourismsaskatoon.com/about-saskatoon/">Saskatoon with a GPS device</a> let alone name the Canadian Prime Minister - <a href="http://www.pm.gc.ca/eng/pm.asp">Stephen Harper</a> - or that the <a href="http://www.ottawa.ca/visitors/index_en.html">national capitol is Ottawa</a>, not Montreal or Toronto.</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Now it turns out we don't know much about ourselves, either. <em>Newsweek</em> has <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/2011/03/20/how-dumb-are-we.html">surveyed 1,000 Americans</a> on the most basic details of our history, government and politics. We flunked. Badly.</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The questions aren't exactly PhD level, either, but are questions that are asked in the official U.S. citizenship test. Questions like: What happened at the Constitutional Convention? How could 65% of those surveyed not know that the Founders wrote the U.S. Constitution at the <em><a href="http://teachingamericanhistory.org/convention/">Constitutional Convention</a></em>?</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Or, how about this. Fully 88% in the survey couldn't name <em>one</em> person who authored the <a href="http://thomas.loc.gov/home/histdox/fedpapers.html">Federalist Papers</a>. Hint: his wife's name was <a href="http://www.firstladies.org/biographies/firstladies.aspx?biography=4">Dolley</a>, as in Madison. Maybe those 65% know <a href="http://www.dollymadison.com/">her donuts and cakes</a> better. And, don't ask what the Federalist Papers were.</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I've railed in this space in the past about America's historical ignorance, but 29% not being able to name the current vice president or 73% not know why we "fought" the Cold War. This isn't funny. It is worrying.</span>
<p><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#000000;"><em>Newsweek</em> blames several factors for American ignorance, including a generally complex political system that unlike Europe tends to spread control among local, state and federal governments. I guess this is confusing and there is much to keep track of, but that hardly seems an excuse for the fundamental lack of knowledge exposed in the survey.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#000000;">The decentralized education system gets some blame. What we teach in Idaho they might not teach in Maryland. Some of the blame should go, I think, to those who have de-emphasized history, social studies and the humanities in favor of science and math. Kids need it all, in big doses.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#000000;">And there is the income and media reality. A <a href="http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2014449005_guest10hamilton.html">growing percentage of Americans are poor</a>, not of the middle class. Poorer Americans have less access to information and knowledge. In Europe, where a larger share of the population lives in the middle, people are generally better educated and much more knowledgeable about their politics and government.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#000000;">The mass media is both part of the problem and could offer a slice of the solution, but we mostly have a pure market driven media that features much more <em>American Idol</em> than <em>Meet the Press. </em>It is, after all, difficult to take politics seriously when so much of it is <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123568025">trivialized over the air and on the web</a>.</span></span></p><p><span style="color:#000000;"><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;">The <em>Newsweek</em> analysis concludes, and maybe this is the good news, “the problem is ignorance, not stupidity.“ </span><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;">One expert who has studied this American ignorance says, "we suffer from a lack of information rather than a lack of ability.”</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The real problem here isn't knowing James Madison authored many of the Federalist Papers, it is not knowing enough - as the current budget debate in Washington, D.C. makes so clear - about our federal government and our political system. It's impossible to assess, for example, what must be done to fix the budget if we have no idea how the government spends and taxes.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Survey after survey says <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20045439-503544.html">Americans want Congress to cut the budget</a> by reducing foreign aid and by stamping out that old standby <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/sen-blumenthal-entitlements-reformed-touching-social-security-medicare/story?id=13150206">waste, fraud and abuse</a>. At the same time they say whatever you do don't touch Social Security or Medicare where the real money gets spent. Too many <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/51109.html">politicians pander this ignorance</a> and we get the endless debates we now witness in Congress.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Simple fact: Americans need information and real knowledge to make sense of their government and then they must care enough to act on the knowledge. Ignorance isn't a strategy for a great country.</span></p><p><span style="color:#000000;"></span></p>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-50803932896509395002011-03-21T07:00:00.001-06:002011-03-21T07:23:46.344-06:00Guns and Porn, Oh My<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxRkwmcvuGDJvINtG7rkjuPiJjBfM5MilsTlfzdR2SQc2LRD-6qwk_nwCVp5hyjjjtB28fTOsy4oh4qxzJeYP9fkqKWrVTYCxqB7eRUEqapRyrsRWSZhEpmwXrONz4y7dMx3QzEQFwxnVD/s1600/guns.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5586224586460766706" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 112px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxRkwmcvuGDJvINtG7rkjuPiJjBfM5MilsTlfzdR2SQc2LRD-6qwk_nwCVp5hyjjjtB28fTOsy4oh4qxzJeYP9fkqKWrVTYCxqB7eRUEqapRyrsRWSZhEpmwXrONz4y7dMx3QzEQFwxnVD/s200/guns.jpg" border="0" /></a> <span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong>Solutions in Search of a Problem</strong></em></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The Idaho Senate will this week - choose your metaphor - cock the hammer, reload or take aim at the increasingly controversial issue of <a href="http://www.necn.com/03/20/11/Idaho-lawmakers-revive-guns-on-campus-pu/landing_politics.html?&blockID=3&apID=36760c80fb5248ef8c287c7d18d10f92">guns on the state's college campuses</a>. The House has already passed the legislation, the Senate may think twice.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Boise State University, the largest Idaho school, where football tailgate parties are arguably even more popular than guns. has <a href="http://idahostatejournal.com/news/state/article_d53658c3-cb65-56b7-9456-f89915dd2bfc.html">played the economic card</a> by raising concerns that events on the campus may be impacted by a proposed state law allowing students, faculty too, to pack a piece to a concert, football game or poetry reading, not to mention biology class.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Idaho is racing <a href="http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Campus-gun-billcalled-slam-dunk-1085608.php">Texas to see which state can get the campus gun toting legislation in place first</a>. Texas Gov. Rick Perry has said he'll sign legislation working its way through, as Molly Ivins used to say, the Texas Leg. Perry is the same governor who suggested a while back that the <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/04/15/governor-says-texans-want-secede-union-probably-wont/">federal stimulus legislation gives Texas a right to consider secession</a>. Fully armed obviously.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The <em>Los Angeles Times</em> visited the huge University of Texas campus in Austin recently, a place with an awful history of gun violence, and <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2011/mar/06/nation/la-na-texas-guns-20110306">found a mixed reception for the campus gun legislation</a>. In 1966 a student gunman at UT climbed to the top of the campus clock tower and systematically killed 14 people. Ancient history, I guess, in an age when proponents of such legislation argue that having more guns on campus will actually improve safety. </span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">One Texas professor told the <em>Times</em> he welcomed the proposed gun law and said he'd definitely consider taking his piece to class with him if it passes. Not a professor to argue with about a grade, I suppose. At another Texas school, Sam Houston State, a <a href="http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/College-Students-Surveyed-on-Guns-on-Campus-1405522.htm">new research project found considerably less support</a> among students. On a scale of zero being not comfortable at all and 100 being as comfortable as you can get, the Sam Houston students clocked in - or is it Glocked in - at 39. A similar survey at a Washington school produced a 33 comfort score. May just be that the students who are, pardon the expression, the target of this campus safety initiative aren't feeling all that comfortable about how safe they'll be in English 101. It used to be all you had to worry about was staying awake in class or understanding Milton.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">In times of severe economic turmoil like those faced in Idaho and most other states at the moment, I've noticed a curious legislative phenomenon. With limited ability for legislators to think big about new buildings or highways, they tend to find solutions to problems that may not really exist. The gun legislation, stoked by the National Rifle Association in Idaho, Texas and a dozen other states, seems to fall in that category. <a href="http://www.magicvalley.com/news/local/twin-falls/article_f00db590-b117-5b19-9a10-1b2f6a9c4fff.html">College administrators</a>, the State Board of Education and <a href="http://www.boiseweekly.com/CityDesk/archives/2011/03/04/bpd-chief-on-guns-on-campus">law enforcement leaders</a> - those closest to the vibe on a campus - are universally opposed to the gun legislation that has only come forward because, well, the NRA says its needed to protect our Second Amendment rights.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">As one Texas student said, college is already stressful enough, why add the prospect for even more worry by affirmatively introducing guns to the campus scene? State Representative Cherie Buckner-Webb of Boise said it pretty well: "One can only imagine a college classroom or a campus administrative situation where heated arguments about strongly held political beliefs or disputes about grades or even parking issues result in the use of a concealed weapon."</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Meanwhile, Idaho legislators are also <a href="http://www.spokesman.com/blogs/hbo/2011/mar/14/house-backs-library-filters-63-7/">debating a bill to require more actions from public libraries</a> to filter content on computers that library patrons - as in the tax paying public - utilize in vast numbers every day. Another solution in search of a problem.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Full disclosure, I am currently the president of the Boise Public Library Board, and we have long had in place a <a href="http://www.boisepubliclibrary.org/About_BPL/images/PDFs/4.06a_Filtering.pdf">perfectly sensible policy about computer use</a>. If a parent is concerned that a youngster might go where they shouldn't on the Internet, we take steps to ensure that won't happen. But, we also stay away from being the Internet nanny for adults who presumably are smart enough to make their own decisions about how to use a computer.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Both these pieces of legislation are in the one-size-fits-all category of legislating. Not content to leave it to local library boards in individual Idaho communities to figure out the best approach in their neighborhoods and unwilling to trust a college president in Twin Falls or Moscow to know enough about their campus environment to keep them as safe as possible, legislative solutions must be found to non-existent problems.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Guns and computers. Strange that in a largely educational environment - a college campus and a public library - some legislators want virtually unlimited access to one and to substantially limit access to the other.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;"></span>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-34242874257368766802011-03-20T06:45:00.003-06:002011-03-20T10:19:47.721-06:00The Hat is Back...<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEQzC4Bbbr4Ajm30YPNwVBwmNF8TDL-_Q_IuacicLpnkxp1PnC0pVOyyBPpmj6-K6l-p1VG-aKlMehRiQLznpFDOlbwRkJRAhL9zqA09onC3NXX1U1LyDqp0MrX5awC89D1kOF3_L-qS4l/s1600/hats.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 106px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 80px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5585202116219429330" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEQzC4Bbbr4Ajm30YPNwVBwmNF8TDL-_Q_IuacicLpnkxp1PnC0pVOyyBPpmj6-K6l-p1VG-aKlMehRiQLznpFDOlbwRkJRAhL9zqA09onC3NXX1U1LyDqp0MrX5awC89D1kOF3_L-qS4l/s200/hats.jpg" /></a> <span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong>Adjustment Bureau for Headware</strong></em></span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I used to think it old fashioned that my dad always wore a hat. He had a gray one, a brown one, I think, and I vaguely remember a dapper looking summertime straw hat. I never remember seeing him in a cap, but hardly ever remember him not wearing a hat.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Dad would be happy to know that <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/08/17/eveningnews/main6781790.shtml">hats are reportedly back in style</a> and I find I'm now just as old fashioned with my hats as I once thought him to be with his.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The new movie, <a href="http://www.esquire.com/blogs/mens-fashion/adjustment-bureau-hats-5340362">The Adjustment Bureau</a>, some say, is popular culture proof that the hat is back. Maybe. I think <a href="http://cdn.picapp.com/ftp/Images/0/2/6/c/Matt_Damon_seen_391a.jpg?adImageId=3596192&imageId=6644272">Matt Damon looks pretty good in a hat</a>, but have been told his hat is better than the movie.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">You can Google men's hats and find a thousand places to buy them on the Internet. My favorite store is <a href="http://www.johnhelmer.com/">John Helmer in Portland</a>. Great hats. I once bought a hat - a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Stetson-Dune-Gun-Club-Hat/dp/B0043G7R6C/ref=pd_sbs_a_2">brown Steton "Gun Club" model</a> - at a hat shop in Milwaukee called Jac Donges Hats and Gloves. I still have the hat, but sadly Jac's place is now a Subway shop.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;"><a href="http://www.suitsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/humphrey_bogart_coat_hat_400x800.jpg">Bogart</a> wore hats and still got the girl <a href="http://alt.coxnewsweb.com/cnishared/tools/shared/mediahub/06/36/47/slideshow_647366_MIL_RECORDED_CENTURY_H_511782.jpg">except when he let her go</a>. Al Capone deserved a black one, but his were often white - <a href="http://paranormalknowledge.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/al_capone.jpg">the gangster fedora</a>.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Don Draper, <a href="http://www.esquire.com/cm/esquire/images/3D/esq-13-don-draper-hat-101510-lg.jpg">the mysterious ad man on Mad Men</a>, favors the narrow brim job that sits high on his head. <a href="http://www.caliqo.com/ebay/hats_masks_gloves/johnny_depp_hat-grey1.jpg">Johnny Depp wears a hat</a> once in a while and looks good, even to guys.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I have a picture hanging in my office of Teddy Roosevelt's <a href="http://www.sandpoint.com/Community/images/history/teddytrain1a.jpg">visit to Sandpoint, Idaho</a>. Every man in the photo, and there are a lot of them, has a hat, <a href="http://imagecache6.allposters.com/LRG/37/3729/13QAF00Z.jpg">Teddy included</a>. <a href="http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://rachelbrianna.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/fdr1-thumb.jpg%3Fw%3D300%26h%3D257&imgrefurl=http://rachelbrianna.wordpress.com/category/uncategorized/&usg=__mV8iRgDPQY1NGZtrORBE0oISO7w=&h=257&w=300&sz=12&hl=en&start=0&zoom=1&tbnid=0WH-IxA6rQeTfM:&tbnh=146&tbnw=166&ei=4yiGTenLOIT6sAOEgb2MAg&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dfdr%2Bin%2Ba%2Bhat%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26rls%3Dcom.microsoft:en-us%26rlz%3D1I7GGLL_en%26biw%3D1075%26bih%3D590%26tbs%3Disch:1&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=482&vpy=91&dur=735&hovh=205&hovw=240&tx=106&ty=133&oei=4yiGTenLOIT6sAOEgb2MAg&page=1&ndsp=17&ved=1t:429,r:3,s:0">Franklin Roosevelt wore hats</a> and <a href="http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/pic/PHO/sp_AAIB026_16x20~Harry-Truman-and-General-Douglas-MacArthur-Posters.jpg&imgrefurl=http://lclfashion.blogspot.com/2008/07/hats-off.html&usg=__Ouu_CVZEm_BDBkL0QycD6ySBtjg=&h=320&w=400&sz=27&hl=en&start=6&zoom=1&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=FvYIg19mxZaFhM:&tbnh=99&tbnw=124&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dharry%2Btruman%2Bin%2Ba%2Bhat%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26rls%3Dcom.microsoft:en-us%26tbs%3Disch:1&ei=O6eCTcLBKpO4sQO6x_2AAg">Harry Truman</a>, too.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;"><a href="http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lhzbcn73WN1qg765go1_400.jpg">John Kennedy reportedly didn't like hats</a>, almost refused to wear one and when you see JFK with a hat he's often holding it not wearing it. Date the demise of the snap brim to Camelot. Hats made a brief return under Lyndon Johnson, but folks often made fun of his <a href="http://www.arichinnerlife.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/LBJ-2.jpg">Stetson "Open Road" model</a>. I liked it. May get one of those one day.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">So, back to my hat wearing father. I cherish a picture of him taken in about 1940, I guess. He's wearing a hat, Bogart-like, big smile on his face (hats do that) and standing in front a very shiny Model A Ford. I like to think he was about to get in that Ford, pick up mom and take her dancing. If I had a Model A Ford, I'd wear one of my hats while driving it. Like father, like son.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Maybe hats are back. But, then again, maybe they never really go out of style. <a href="http://www.betterworldbooks.com/hatless-jack-id-0452285232.aspx">Neil Steinberg wrote a book about all this</a>. He dealt with the Kennedy hat issue and argued that hats went out in the 1960's when younger guys decided not to conform with the styles of the older generation. What goes around comes around, they say, and today wearing a hat has become a mark of non-conformance.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Maybe you just need to be a little old fashioned, an individualist, to wear one these days. You should try it. Just take it off in a elevator, especially if a lady comes on board. Touch the brim to acknowledge a friend or someone you would like to be a friend and, like Bogart, <a href="http://danielheydon.com/blog4/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/bogart-bacall-big-sleep.jpg">maybe a Lauren Bacall look-alike</a> will find you charming, witty and worthy of wearing a hat <a href="http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/doff-your-hat.html">so you can doff it</a> to her.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">It couldn't hurt.</span>
<span style="color:#000000;"></span>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-20714605291953566872011-03-19T07:00:00.001-06:002011-03-19T07:30:56.184-06:00Another War<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixd_odH3s7DaMSylHygni2vgn5oiX4Vs2jJXP7hskr2jKeMqqww9a_YRj8NaCTHdOS9wzKYsSi0SpD2098RP5TNOe0sfhGBU8wXlFcXPfWyZ-lufEXJxf3vxJxxbxkdMZtrt7TXMb0pdHC/s1600/a.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 133px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5585759291550000690" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixd_odH3s7DaMSylHygni2vgn5oiX4Vs2jJXP7hskr2jKeMqqww9a_YRj8NaCTHdOS9wzKYsSi0SpD2098RP5TNOe0sfhGBU8wXlFcXPfWyZ-lufEXJxf3vxJxxbxkdMZtrt7TXMb0pdHC/s200/a.jpg" /></a><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong>The No Debate No Fly Zone</strong></em></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The truly amazing thing about the "no fly zone" policy adopted over the last few days by the United States and the United Nations is not that it <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-allies-prepare-military-action-against-libya-as-gaddafi-forces-continue-attacks/2011/03/18/ABLAOfs_story_1.html">will be imposed on Gaddafi's Libya</a>, but rather that it was done with virtually no domestic debate, no Congressional action and little effort to bring the American public along.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I know it has become a political non-issue, a quaint detail of American history, but <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Clause">Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution</a> says: "Congress shall have the power...to declare war..."</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Make no mistake we are going to war with Libya. The American policeman is walking the Middle East beat, again.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Moreover we are headed into another open-ended, frightfully expensive engagement with scarcely any attempt to define the short, let alone long-term objectives. Set aside for the moment the <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-03-18/libya-conflict-do-no-fly-zones-work/?cid=hp:mainpromo2">legitimate debate over whether the "no fly zone" strategy actually works</a>. Might it be appropriate for the president and the Congress to define, in a good deal more detail, just what we hope to accomplish by engaging in a shooting war in Libya.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">American anti-terrorism experts are already warning that <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/19/world/africa/19terror.html">Gaddafi is entirely capable of retaliating</a> with some non-conventional response - read terror attack - while we spend an <a href="http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2011/03/18/libya-cost-no-fly-zone">estimated $100 to $300 million a week</a> to try and use air power to enforce order on the ground in Libya. It's estimated that the initial attack on Libya's command and control capabilities could cost a billion dollars.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Meanwhile, the Congress is virtually paralyzed in a budget debate that may well shut down the federal government in three weeks. We'll spend millions to enforce a UN resolution on Libya with no debate, while the Congress runs the government by continuing resolution and bogs down in a completely partisan argument over funding laughably <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the_npr_emergency/2011/03/18/ABczyBp_story.html?wprss=rss_homepage">small budget lines for National Public Radio</a> and the National Weather Service.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">While the Obama Administration can claim an international consensus to use force against Gaddafi's military, only one guess is required in the game who will pay most of the cost. The world's greatest deliberative body - the U.S. Senate, where foreign policy used to be a regular concern - can find plenty of time for posturing over who is responsible for the budget deadlock, but couldn't find even 15 minutes to debate whether the country ought to send more brave, young Americans into another desert war.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">We can all lament the disaster of the Libyan nut job waging war on his own people, but since we've equipped Arab air forces from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Jordan, why not let the vaunted Arab League deal with one of their own? Have we no leverage over the King of Jordan or the princes of Arabia? The most sensible voice in the administration, soon to be gone Defense Secretary Robert Gates, may have made his concerns about the "no fly" strategy know too early, while the rest of the administration struggled to figure out a response.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">"Let's call a spade a spade," <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/03/world/africa/03military.html?hp=&pagewanted=all">Gates said earlier in March</a>, "a no fly zone begins with an attack on Libya." He called it a "big operation in a big country" and warned of the unknown unintended consequences of yet more American military engagement in a Middle Eastern country.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">We are left to hope that in a week or two no American carrier pilot is sitting in Gaddafi's custody after being shot down attempting to enforce a no fly zone with no defined objective, no end date and no obvious concern about the human and financial cost...to the United States.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The United States time and again undertakes military action with the expectation that it will be short, painless and sanitary and that the outcome will be entirely to our liking. Funny thing: our wars never seems to work out the way we envision them.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;"></span>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-72671460314602106792011-03-18T06:30:00.004-06:002011-03-18T06:30:00.206-06:00The Great War<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrGCDjhgMv6OJGstY3IU4lHXOuQR-BxYuLmV6Qs3-o_D1dH-qHnnIEumeyJfuJUFP3x1LDd1oHuEKzy8fPq-xGv76r8UNDIOL0FpEEr055203AuqKPnULV92XcIMq6Ig6c-dieX4XsciTH/s1600/300px-Australian_infantry_small_box_respirators_Ypres_1917.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 150px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5585179239924708274" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrGCDjhgMv6OJGstY3IU4lHXOuQR-BxYuLmV6Qs3-o_D1dH-qHnnIEumeyJfuJUFP3x1LDd1oHuEKzy8fPq-xGv76r8UNDIOL0FpEEr055203AuqKPnULV92XcIMq6Ig6c-dieX4XsciTH/s200/300px-Australian_infantry_small_box_respirators_Ypres_1917.jpg" /></a> <span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong>It Didn't End Anything...</strong></em></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The "<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/special_report/1998/10/98/world_war_i/198172.stm">war to end all wars</a>" didn't.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">In fact the case can be persuasively made that what before World War II was commonly called "the great war" really began a vicious spiral of nearly continuous war, killing and destruction that made the 20th Century <em>the</em> most violent century.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I got to thinking about this <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/frank-buckles-last-known-us-world-war-i-veteran-is-laid-to-rest-at-arlington/2011/03/10/ABHVLFZ_story.html">after reading a moving tribute</a> in the <em>Washington Post</em> this week to the last American veteran of the great war, <a href="http://www.frankbuckles.org/">Frank Woodruff Buckles</a>. Buckles died recently at the ripe old age of 110. What things he saw in his long life.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Paul Duggan's <em>Post </em>story made the point that Buckles, a West Virginia boy, was among the nearly 5 million Americans who were in uniform in 1917 and 1918. More than 116,000 of them died. Frank was the last one; a link in a now broken chain back to a time when there was no GI Bill, virtually no health care for returning doughboys and little acknowledgment from either the government or the public.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">By 1930 the war was thought by many in the United States to have been a great mistake, a fight not ours that had scarred - and scared - a generation. Isolationism dominated American foreign policy and the U.S. Senate even investigated the "<a href="http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/merchants_of_death.htm">merchants of death</a>," who many thought had profited from the wartime sale of American munitions.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Today, its the World War II "greatest generation" that gets the attention, but it was the war Frank Buckles and his generation fought that really defined the 20th Century. The war now mostly relegated to the dusty back shelf of American history still echoes down to us today in so many ways.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The modern map of Europe and the Middle East is the result of that war. We now have a modern democracy and a NATO ally in Turkey. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Ottoman_Empire">Ottoman Empire ended</a> with the war. The last <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_II_of_Russia">Russian Tsar</a> was ushered out and Lenin and eventually Stalin ushered in as a result of that war. The war brought an end to emperors in Germany and Austria-Hungary and made France and Britain fearful of the rise of the Bolsheviks, but even more fearful of another European war.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">An <a href="http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1707887_1525737,00.html">Austrian corporal injured in a gas attack in that war</a>, used the defeat of Germany and its allies as a springboard to create what became the horrors of Nazism. <a href="http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/biography/the-admiralty">Winston Churchill</a> knew both glory and defeat in the great war and at its end helped invent the country where today American soldiers still try to create a democracy. Iraq, born of the great war and always an unnatural nation, has long been a violent and troubled place.</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;"><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/woodrowwilson">Woodrow Wilson</a>, a prickly idealist about many things, thought the world - and his own nation - would study the horrors of the trenches, the gas attacks, the vast machine gun slaughter, and conclude that nations must band together to ensure a lasting peace. By 1920, Wilson couldn't get the U.S. Senate to support his grand ambition of a <a href="http://www.indiana.edu/~league/">League of Nations</a>. By 1931, Japan had invade Manchuria, Hitler and his followers where marching in the streets of Bavaria and Mussolini was planning a "new Roman Empire" that would begin with the conquest of Ethiopia.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">By 1939, barely 20 years after the war to end all wars had sputtered to a uneasy conclusion in muddy fields in France, most of the world was at war again.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#000000;">World War I produced</span> <a href="http://www.worldwar1.com/dbc/truman.htm">Captain Harry Truman</a>, <span style="color:#000000;">who served in France, and</span> <a href="http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/ike/ike.htm">Lt. Col Dwight Eisenhower</a>, <span style="color:#000000;">who never got out of the country.</span> <a href="http://www.worldwar1.com/dbc/tanks.htm">George Patton</a> <span style="color:#000000;">saw action as the first U.S. tank commander in France and</span> <a href="http://www.lostgeneration.com/ww1.htm">Ernest Hemingway</a> <span style="color:#000000;">and</span> <a href="http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1402052/walt_disney_during_world_war_i.html">Walt Disney</a> <span style="color:#000000;">were both ambulance drivers.</span> <a href="http://history1900s.about.com/library/holocaust/blgoering.htm">Hermann Goering</a> <span style="color:#000000;">learned most of what he needed to know to command the German Luftwaffe as a World War I fighter pilot.</span></span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">It was Frank Buckles's fate to be the last solider of the great war. We should remember him for what he did and remember his war for what it did, too.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;"></span>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-48418440238052116722011-03-15T06:15:00.003-06:002011-03-15T07:57:28.531-06:00The Union Way<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd0H0p7k_cxUeqW58qkW889tD8tZyGaLXkII5oFa-9GxG40nu9WJZOdwvF0E70kR2Q8Tmx8kLzZT3hL0soemyatz6T8sB_E_ts3RufRErYdURmOMrWJM9hJh6jZL0sVdq_nE7I9ELv6dm0/s1600/solidarity.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 130px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5584256834541447282" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd0H0p7k_cxUeqW58qkW889tD8tZyGaLXkII5oFa-9GxG40nu9WJZOdwvF0E70kR2Q8Tmx8kLzZT3hL0soemyatz6T8sB_E_ts3RufRErYdURmOMrWJM9hJh6jZL0sVdq_nE7I9ELv6dm0/s200/solidarity.jpg" /></a> <span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong>The Great Battle</strong></em></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">When the <a href="http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1983/walesa-bio.html">shipyard electrician Lech Walesa</a> led the trade union movement in Poland in the 1980's, he and his movement - <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_(Polish_trade_union)">Solidarity</a> - were the toast of the West. The Polish Pope received him, Ronald Reagan praised him, the Nobel Committee awarded him. Imagine. Such tributes for a union movement and its leader that, not incidentally, brought down a Communist government.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">When young people took to the streets of Cairo recently, commentators noted that Egypt lacks many of the institutions that contribute to a stable democratic society, including having no tradition of unions to represent workers, advocate for better working conditions and, by definition, create a middle class that works. Ironically, the <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/262096/arab-trade-unions-new-force-timothy-cramton">very conservative <em>National Review</em></a> - usually no friend of unions in the United States - celebrates the impact of new "freedom" for trade unions in the Arab world. </span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Wisconsin <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-15/walker-s-wisconsin-senate-majority-in-peril-as-thousands-work-for-recalls.html">Gov. Scott Walker and that state's GOP majority</a> hav yet to explain why ending collective bargaining rights for public sector workers, particularly teachers, helps improve classroom learning or delivery of public services in the land of the Packers. Same goes for Idaho's leaders who have gone down the same path, ending collective bargaining for educators.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">All this begs a question: Why do we believe a union movement that helps foster true democracy in eastern Europe or the Middle East somehow cuts against the American way here at home? The answer is pretty simply: politics.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">You can date the demise of the Democratic Party in Idaho, for example, to the legislature's passage, after years of trying, of <a href="http://www.nrtw.org/rtws.htm">right to work legislation</a> in 1986. The <a href="http://www.idaflcio.org/">Idaho AFL-CIO</a>, never huge in numbers, had nonetheless traditionally been a force in the state's politics helping fuel the rise of successful political careers for guys like Frank Church and Cecil Andrus. Right to work started the decline of labor involvement and effectiveness in the state's politics that continues to this day.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">While <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/us/01poll.html?_r=3&emc=na">recent polling indicates</a> that most Americans reject the kind of efforts aimed at organized public sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere, there is little doubt that organized labor has failed to find a message and articulate an appeal that begins to explain to millions of non-union American workers why unions are important in Warsaw, as well as in Madison and Boise.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The <a href="http://www.blogger.com/www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2011/03/07/110307taco_talk_hertzberghttp://"><em>New Yorker's</em> Hendrik Hertzberg</a> may have identified one line of argument. He wrote recently: "Organized labor’s catastrophic decline has paralleled—and, to a disputed but indisputably substantial degree, precipitated—an equally dramatic rise in economic inequality. In 1980, the best-off tenth of American families collected about a third of the nation’s income. Now they’re getting close to half. The top one per cent is getting a full fifth, double what it got in 1980. The super-rich—the top one-tenth of the top one per cent, which is to say the top one-thousandth—have been the biggest winners of all.”</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I'm not sure I understand all the reasons, but it also cannot be denied that while organized labor has lost membership year-by-year since the 1950's, America's basic <a href="http://www.2point6billion.com/news/2011/03/15/china-tops-u-s-to-become-the-worlds-leading-manufacturer-8832.html">manufacturing infrastructure has also declined</a> at the same time and at a worrying pace. Sadly, I think, the kind of jobs that once employed blue collar guys who carried a lunch bucket to work are not nearly as important to the American economy as they once, and not that long ago, were.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The history of organized labor in America is in the main a story of building a sustainable middle class; jobs for moms and dads with wages that can support a family, pay a mortgage and save a few bucks to send the kids to college.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Have there been excesses during the up and down American labor story, of course. Violence was once a routine part of the unavoidable tensions between management and workers. But where unions remain a force today, as in the <a href="http://transportationnation.org/2010/07/23/is-detroit-coming-back-to-life/">rehabilitation of Michigan's automobile industry</a>, hard headed negotiations - and big concessions - have replaced the <a href="http://apps.detnews.com/apps/history/index.php?id=115">sit down strikes</a> that crippled the auto industry in the 1930's. </span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The challenge to organized labor now, as it faces fresh assaults across the board, is to convince more Americans that banding together and advocating a position with your employer isn't un-American, but actually a vital part of a sustainable democracy.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Andy Stern, one of the more forward-looking labor leaders in the country before his retirement, <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2011/02/andy_stern_it_may_not_end_beau.html">recently gave a fascinating interview</a> to the <em>Washington Post</em>.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Here is one line from Stern's interview that pretty well sums up the challenge organize labor faces: "We [organized labor] need an ideology based around working with employers to build skills in our workers, to train them for success. That message and approach can attract different people than the 'we need to stand up for the working class!' approach. That approach is about conflict, and a lot of people don’t want more conflict."</span>
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<span style="color:#000000;"><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;">True, but Americans do want good, middle class jobs. </span><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;">If a vital, constructive union movement is good enough for democratic Poland or for the democratic aspirations of Egypt, maybe it could work again here.</span></span>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-79695897764760437242011-03-13T08:00:00.001-06:002011-03-13T10:41:38.438-06:00Healing<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihdyijHDZcK-sVvxNy9NezgWFLSnqdciZwByOoa9-nmAkZiljGRPHdW1D0MJOzZ4Dh_i18Mz2oIQOZyQ1eo-5C7E-bXy7z2mOdgKsEyCn4Bo3IEnfk9cqaoNJU3cJd_mYMh_MrdypoMYXt/s1600/tucson.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 160px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5583574717464898226" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihdyijHDZcK-sVvxNy9NezgWFLSnqdciZwByOoa9-nmAkZiljGRPHdW1D0MJOzZ4Dh_i18Mz2oIQOZyQ1eo-5C7E-bXy7z2mOdgKsEyCn4Bo3IEnfk9cqaoNJU3cJd_mYMh_MrdypoMYXt/s200/tucson.jpg" /></a><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong>Tucson...Two Months On</strong></em></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">This city in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoran_Desert">Sonoran Desert</a> has been our adopted "second city" now for more than ten years. We have come to love the place, particularly this time of year.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The near arrival of spring brings a huge variety of life to the desert. The birds start talking at first light, the cool mornings give way to progressively warmer days until, as the incredible pink sunsets appear in the darkening, brilliant blue sky, the desert night cools again and one of the greatest star shows anywhere helps remind us how insignificant we are in the grand scheme.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The <a href="http://www.tucsonfestivalofbooks.org/">third annual Tucson Festival of Books</a> has been dominating the city this weekend, particularly the campus of the University of Arizona. Thousands flocked to the campus yesterday to wander among booths, listen to music and celebrate books with a long list of good writers.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I listened to writer <a href="http://jonathaneig.com/">Jonathan Eig</a> talk about his latest book on the Chicago <a href="http://getcapone.com/">mobster Al Capone</a>. As a baseball fan, I've admired and enjoyed Eig's books on Jackie Robinson and Lou Gehrig. He had a big crowd in a big tent laughing yesterday as he disposed of a few myths about Big Al. Capone didn't order the <a href="http://history1900s.about.com/od/1920s/p/valentines.htm">St. Valentine's Day massacre</a>, for instance, and Eliot Ness had almost nothing to do with bringing Capone to justice. More plausibly, Capone got crosswise with a smart U.S. Attorney.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Frank DeFord held forth, as did J.A. Jance and Douglas Brinkley. I'm looking forward to seeing a talented <a href="http://www.nyls.edu/faculty/faculty_profiles/annette_gordon_reed">historian Annette Gordon-Reed</a> later today and one of my historian heroes, <a href="http://www.oupressblog.com/subjects/history-of-the-american-west/in-praise-of-bob-utley-historian-of-the-west/">Robert Utley</a>.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;"><a href="http://www.npr.org/people/3874941/scott-simon">NPR's Scott Simon</a> moderated a fascinating panel with <a href="http://www.luisurrea.com/home.php">Luis Alberto Urrea</a> - his book <em><a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fg%2Fa%2F2011%2F02%2F23%2Fmexico_mix_best_books.DTL">The Devil's Highway</a></em> is a chilling and exceeding well-crafted account of human trafficking along the U.S. - Mexican border - and <a href="http://www.tjeffersonparker.com/">T. Jefferson Parker</a>, a novelist who writes about the drugs, money and guns that increasingly define our relationship with Mexico.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Simon seemed momentarily taken aback when a questioneer thanked him for his <a href="http://www.npr.org/2011/01/15/132956264/amid-tragedy-tucson-shows-what-its-made-of">sensitive and knowing reporting</a> in the aftermath of the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and so many others on January 8. The big crowd in the UA Student Union applauded the remark and the conversation returned to the nature of the misunderstood story playing out daily in the borderlands.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Still, a little over two months on from the shootings, the healing here comes slowly and one gets the impression that a whole city is still processing, reflecting, mourning and trying to move ahead.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Six white crosses still sit on the ground across the street from the Safeway at Ina and Oracle where Gifford was meeting constituents on January 8. There was a <a href="http://www.kgun9.com/Global/story.asp?S=14229842">big benefit concert this week</a> to raise money to further the healing. A Gifford's aide, Ron Barber, organized a fund for that purpose and a <a href="http://www.fox11az.com/news/local/Fund-for-Civility-Respect-and-Understanding-gets-big-donation-117525608.html">big car dealer and Republican businessman</a> who had supported Gifford's opponent last year made a large donation. The UA has launched an <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/21/us-shooting-university-idUSTRE71K67K20110221">institute devoted to civility</a> and a Gifford's intern-turned-hero, <a href="http://www.kold.com/Global/story.asp?S=14200292">Daniel Hernandez</a>, announced this week that he'll run for student body president at the University. And, of course, the <a href="http://www.latimes.com/health/la-na-gabrielle-giffords-20110312,0,3813761.story">updates on the Congressman's condition</a> dominated the news here and got big play everywhere. Life goes on.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The big book festival this weekend made me reflect anew on the power of stories in the hands of gifted storytellers to help us make sense of an often senseless world. Artists simply help us live and cope.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Luis Urrea, a great and gifted writer who straddles at least two cultures, gave me a new mantra while he was talking with Scott Simon. Urrea says he tells his writing students that every day is Christmas or their birthday, they just need to be open to the gifts - mostly little tiny gifts - that come their way every day.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Tucson is finding its way two months on by finding and enjoying the little gifts that come its way every day.</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;"></span>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-35030936659212830232011-03-10T07:00:00.000-07:002011-03-10T07:06:22.716-07:00A Reporter's Reporter<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE2zkcJ5ydHjB_eTEICeU05I11d2r-KEB_L5l3B1mXzip9B1sooJ1ZRSZC084eeozNnnTiQjjfeiJ-lg9nuXsH7vNTT_T5Wao2whPfa5WcpLCRr-B5vuNePkvNUYNYKgczHK12qOnkf5wy/s1600/broder.bmp"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 142px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5582283139148514114" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE2zkcJ5ydHjB_eTEICeU05I11d2r-KEB_L5l3B1mXzip9B1sooJ1ZRSZC084eeozNnnTiQjjfeiJ-lg9nuXsH7vNTT_T5Wao2whPfa5WcpLCRr-B5vuNePkvNUYNYKgczHK12qOnkf5wy/s200/broder.bmp" /></a><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong>David Broder, 1929 - 2011</strong></em></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">In the last few years it became "inside the beltway" sport <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/201010040019">for some to denigrate the kind of journalism</a> that Dave Broder practiced for so long from his lofty perch at the <em>Washington Post.</em></span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">To his few critics, Broder, who died on Wednesday at age 81, was old school, a guy interested in the substance of politics, not the cynicism, someone who actually believed that politicians could be motivated by something other than self-interest. Worst of all, to some, Broder was a model of civility; judicious with his judgments, slow to pull the trigger of blame.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">For my money, he was the gold standard, the dean, the kind of reporter who is rapidly disappearing from the political beat, or any other beat. Broder was to the soles of his well-worn shoes a reporter, not a pontificator. He was criticized by some for repeating the conventional wisdom on D.C., but by any measure of the work that journalist do, he was a <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/03/on-david-broder/72273/">calm, reasoned, informed, non-cynical voice</a> that both tried to understand politics and not debase politicians. Dave Broder was a nice guy in what is often a cutthroat business.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I met him once and spent a day with him at an <a href="http://www.andruscenter.org/">Andrus Center</a> conference in Boise a number of years ago. That forum, organized with the <a href="http://www.boisestate.edu/fci/">Frank Church Institute</a> at Boise State, focused on politics, the press and the law in the post-9-11 world. Well into his 70's, Broder consented to fly across the country and be part of a discussion that I moderated featuring judges, lawyers and journalists. He provided no bombast, just perspective. No harsh criticism of the political process, but rather understanding informed by the belief that most of the time people in public life try, as they see it, to do the right thing.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Many of the <a href="http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2011/03/09/david-broder/">tributes to Broder</a>, and there will be many over the next few days, will mention his penchant for going door-to-door to talk to real voters about politics. The tributes will stress his sensitivity, even his compassion for the mighty who tumble from great power and his <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/us/politics/10broder.html?partner=rss&emc=rss">fundamental decency and gentlemanly nature</a>. All true.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#000000;"><em>New Yorker</em> political writer Hendrik Hertzberg <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2011/03/david-broder.html">admits to criticizing Broder</a> for his repeating of the conventional Washington wisdom, but then recounts a charming story of Broder impressing the devil out of Hertzberg's fawning mother. Not every good reporter is a hit-headed Carl Bernstein. Thank goodness there has been room for a long, long time for a decent and discerning Dave Broder.</span></span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I connived to sit next to Broder at dinner after a long day at that Andrus Center conference. We'd spent the day discussing and debating how the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon would change American politics, law and the press. I wanted to hear him hold forth on Washington, but he kept gently turning the conversation local.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Always the reporter, he wanted to know what was going on in Idaho. Midway through dinner, he pulled out one of those uniquely shaped reporter's notebooks and starting taking notes. I was dumbfounded. Dave Broder, the dean of Washington political reporters, thought I had something worth recording in his notebook. If I hadn't already liked the guy, that would have sealed the deal. But, most importantly, he <em>really</em> did want to know. He was a reporter. Always looking for information, opinions, insight.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Writing in the <em>Post</em> yesterday, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2011/03/09/ST2011030902919.html?sid=ST2011030902919">Robert Kaiser said it well</a>: "In a business dominated by hard-driving egos, Broder was an anomaly: a Midwestern gentleman, gentle in manner, always eager to help fellow reporters and to preserve the reputation of his newspaper. His standards never slipped, save perhaps when yielding to his perennially unfulfilled dreams for his</span> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/22/AR2006032202172.html" target=""><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;">beloved Chicago Cubs</span></a><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;">."</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">One of the reasons our politics has assumed such a hard and nasty edge relates directly to the hard and nasty approach of too many opinion-driven news organizations and the people who work for them. Dave Broder, even when criticized, refused to succumb to the nasty and cynical. He uplifted his craft and, as a result, uplifted those he covered.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I've often thought since that dinner in Boise back in 2003 that Dave Broder would have been welcome on that particular night at any Georgetown salon, Washington embassy or U.S. Senator's dinner table. He chose to come to Boise. He wanted to know what was happening out here. He was curious and interested. He was a real reporter.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">At that <a href="http://www.andruscenter.org/past_events/freedom.html">Andrus Center conference</a> Broder was asked what responsibility the press has to protect secrets that might impact national security. It was the time when then <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/28/AR2005102801172.html">CIA officer Valerie Plame</a> had been publicly identified and her cover blown thanks to political leaks and press reports. </span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Broder warned the questioner that he was going to get a longer answer than he might want and then proceed to say, with nuance and insight, that it is the government's responsibility to protect its secrets. The press has another job. The job of the press is to report what is going on, he said, what is important. The government tries to protect secrets, the press reports news.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Old school, indeed. </span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">If you don't believe Dave Broder was one-of-a-kind, try to think of anyone in journalism today who can now inherit his unique role. He was the dean, maybe the last of a breed.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I'm not sure he ever revisited those notes he took when we were talking during dinner, but he did write it down. I'll remember that - and Dave Broder - for a long, long time. Good guy, terrific journalist.</span>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-7192026877390842912011-03-09T09:00:00.003-07:002011-03-09T09:31:54.708-07:00Failing at Politics and Policy<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEga52A6jF_idHwWZ4EPcDXcf8EmmuWvidzcvxsup6QdwnNt44s7H-N55hNT6jnBoYn6c5XNomqhLiFI1AUpjLtcgPtrPHRz7VoCUmrALsJ0z9-Rh3ljaH9xFWjXb7Jfj4JurUf2K-uV3xzC/s1600/IEA.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 64px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5581805497499830642" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEga52A6jF_idHwWZ4EPcDXcf8EmmuWvidzcvxsup6QdwnNt44s7H-N55hNT6jnBoYn6c5XNomqhLiFI1AUpjLtcgPtrPHRz7VoCUmrALsJ0z9-Rh3ljaH9xFWjXb7Jfj4JurUf2K-uV3xzC/s200/IEA.jpg" /></a><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong>Expelled from Politics</strong></em></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">On Tuesday, the Idaho House </span><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;"><a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/08/us-idaho-teachers-idUSTRE72766020110308">approved the most political piece</a> of State</span> <span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Superintendent Tom Luna's "<a href="http://www.sde.idaho.gov/site/studentsComeFirst/">education reform</a>" effort and sent it on to receive a sure signature from Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Idahoans who care about schools - and politics - may look back on the vote to strip collective bargaining rights from the state's teachers and make tenure more tenuous for new teachers as a true watershed moment.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Like <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoSEEXIe6Gg">the great Jack Dempsey, knocked out of the ring</a> in a 1923 title fight, the Idaho Education Association's once-powerful role in the state's politics has been knocked for a loop, perhaps never to recover. Dempsey somehow pulled himself back in the ring against <a href="http://boxrec.com/media/index.php/Luis_Angel_Firpo">Luis Firpo</a> and eventually won his famous fight. The IEA has rarely demonstrated that kind of agility.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">It seems unfair to kick someone when they're down, but the reality in these events is obvious, just as the politics is raw. The IEA has failed at both politics and policy and when the legislative moment of reckoning arrived in 2011, the state's teachers were vilified, marginalized and defeated badly. This has been a long time coming.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Over the last 15 years, as Idaho's politics has shifted dramatically, the IEA has clung to an old and outdated strategy. Rather than try to elect allies to the legislature or cultivate those already there, the teachers have seemed to focus, without success, on top of the ticket races like governor and state superintendent. The folly of the approach was well documented in a <a href="http://www.idahostatesman.com/2011/02/27/1543772/myopia-kept-iea-from-seeing-big.html">good piece of reporting</a> recently by the <em>Idaho Statesman's</em> Dan Popkey.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Popkey got the quote of the current legislative session out of former Democratic State Sen. Brandon Durst who complained about IEA's focus on thwarting Luna's re-election bid rather than winning a handful of potentially decisive legislative elections, his included.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">“They’re my friends, so let me characterize it a little bit more diplomatically," Durst told Popkey. "They blew it. Their decision to put all of their resources, not just financial but also human resources, behind [Luna's] campaign and his campaign alone, really hurt races down the ticket.”</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">But this failure of political strategy goes deeper than misfiring in one election cycle. The IEA has something like 13,000 members in every corner of Idaho. That represents a grassroots organization that most interest groups would kill for, yet the teachers seem not to have been able to really mobilize these local foot soldiers and use them to build broader coalitions. This represent a failure of strategy that ignores a fundamental tenet of politics at every level: organize, organize, organize.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">At the same time, Idaho's teachers have become a punchline and a punching bag for what's wrong with education. Teachers have become the Idaho equivalent of the old story that everyone hates the U.S. Congress, but most of us still like our own Congressman.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Most Idahoans like the teacher who helps educate their kids, they have just come to hate the teachers union. At the risk of blaming the victim, IEA must shoulder a good deal of the blame for letting this damaging perception take root. The teachers, sorry to say, didn't fight back effectively against the ceaseless drumbeat that they are a major part of the problem with education.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Which bring us to policy. Whether its fair or not, perception is reality in politics and the perception hangs that <a href="http://www.ktvb.com/news/Education-reform--What-teachers-want-116712959.html">teachers have not engaged constructively</a> in the raging debate over why our education system fails to meet almost everyone's expectations. Playing defense all the time is not a political strategy and it has become for the teachers a recipe to become politically marginalized.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Successful movements - and interest groups - eventually need to stand for something, educate folks about the wisdom of the position and build broad support. I'm guess that even most of their supporters in the Idaho Legislature really don't understand the IEA's policy agenda, assuming there is one.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">IEA's leadership justifiably complains about not being at the table when Luna's reform agenda was hatched, but the teachers also had a chance to build their own policy table and haven't. Unfortunately, this is not just an Idaho-based failure, but a broader national failing of professional teacher organizations. Look no <a href="http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2052705,00.htm">farther than Wisconsin or Ohio</a> for proof.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">At the IEA website, there is a link called "<a href="http://idahoea.org/issues-actions/why-politics">Why Politics</a>?" A click at the link takes you to a short page that explains that the organization is involved in politics because decisions in Idaho and Washington, D.C. effect teachers.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Then there is this sentence: "Time and again, <em>over the last century</em> (emphasis added) IEA members have won major victories to both defend and set new standards for public education in Idaho."</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">It's hard to remember <em>in this century</em> when Idaho teachers won a major or even minor victory. It may be a long time - if ever - before that happens again. If it ever happens again, it will be because Idaho's worn down and increasingly hard pressed teachers, and the organization that represents them, adopts a real political strategy that can help them climb back into the ring.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;"></span>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-30778133527075103232011-03-07T06:30:00.001-07:002011-03-07T06:41:43.447-07:00The Great Game<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGcIcqE4pfkpCESMIKvoHNyOsnlWF1PYbrlwI7XjKTU_H090AOOQBwo9jcQ4hUW4VFtCwpi2Ffqv086xOc6EBWFILd6XKFG96vshYMu7E3mqetoMpulMRS9A39mu6mljiQpU4dj47qDW53/s1600/baseball.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 139px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 200px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5581037582696990946" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGcIcqE4pfkpCESMIKvoHNyOsnlWF1PYbrlwI7XjKTU_H090AOOQBwo9jcQ4hUW4VFtCwpi2Ffqv086xOc6EBWFILd6XKFG96vshYMu7E3mqetoMpulMRS9A39mu6mljiQpU4dj47qDW53/s200/baseball.jpg" /></a><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong>Memories of Baseball</strong></em></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">More than any other of the games that command the attention of the dedicated sports fan, baseball is a game of memory.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Memories of dads playing catch with kids, the mental image of walking up a ball park ramp for the first or the hundredth time and taking in the sight and smell of the green field, the endless records that record the history and detail of thousands of contests - all are a part of the individual recollections of so many hours spent in the magical spell of the great game.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">No matter how long you play, watch, read about or reflect on baseball, you will never have it mastered. You can never exhaust the infinite prospect that you will find and enjoy something fresh and new.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Today, I know, I'll find something fresh and new in the oldest and maybe the sweetest ballpark currently in use in the Cactus League, <a href="http://phoenix.gov/SPORTS/phxmuni.html">Phoenix Municipal Stadium</a>. The home Oakland A's entertain the boys of spring from Seattle this afternoon and for me it will be the unofficial start of another sweet season of memory. You can't go to a ballpark without remembering. In a way, it may be the best part of baseball.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">My baseball mentor, my dad, established this spring-time ritual of baseball memory. About this time every year he would start to recall: <a href="http://www.baseballlibrary.com/ballplayers/player.php?name=Mickey_Cochrane_1903">Mickey Cochrane</a>, his favorite, the great A's and Tigers catcher; <a href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/managers/mackco01.shtml">Connie Mack</a>, the manager who wore a suit and tie in the dugout; <a href="http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/f/foxxji01.shtml">Jimmie Foxx</a> and <a href="http://www.baseballhistorian.com/html/lefty_grove.htm">Lefty Grove</a>, <a href="http://www.dizzydean.com/">Dizzy</a> and <a href="http://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=642">Daffy</a>, and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/sports/baseball/15OWEN.htm">Mickey Owen's</a> tragically dropped third strike.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Memories.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Growing up in western Nebraska, I'm sure my dad never set foot in the <a href="http://www.ballparks.com/baseball/national/ebbets.htm">old ballpark in Brooklyn</a>, but it came home to him nevertheless in a hundred scratchy and distant radio broadcasts. He didn't have to <em>physically</em> be there to know the place and I know the feeling.</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I never saw the great <a href="http://baseballhall.org/hof/snider-duke">Duke Snider</a> play - he died a few days ago at 84 - but after reading the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/sports/baseball/06snider.html">memories of his Dodger teammate</a>, pitcher <a href="http://ralphbranca.net/">Ralph Branca</a>, I can almost see him roaming center field in old and long gone <a href="http://www.ebbets-field.com/">Ebbets Field</a> in Brooklyn. Branca's memories are the memories of a baseball fan.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">As a general rule this Giants fan doesn't waste much baseball admiration on a Dodger, but I make an exception for that old Brooklyn bunch - <a href="http://www.baseball-almanac.com/players/player.php?p=camparo01">Campanella</a>, <a href="http://www.baseball-almanac.com/players/player.php?p=reesepe01">Reese</a>, <a href="http://www.carlerskine.com/fastfacts.htm">Erskine</a>, <a href="http://www.gilhodges.com/index.php">Hodges</a>, <a href="http://www.jackierobinson.com/">Robinson</a> and, of course, the <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/more_sports/2011/03/06/2011-03-06_duke_snider_and_the_brooklyn_dodgers_boys_of_summer_were_a_baseball_treasure_at_.html">Duke of Flatbush</a>. They were something special. They live in our baseball memories.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Branca offered a warm and wonderful tribute to his old teammate over the weekend and it was all about memory.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">"I still see Duke as a young man," Branca wrote in the <em>New York Times</em>, "I see him out there in center field, racing past the ads for Van Heusen shirts and Gem razors, while executing a brilliant running catch. I see him at the plate, crushing Robin Roberts’s fastball and sending it soaring high over that crazy right-field wall at Ebbets Field. I see him rounding the bases. I see him smiling. I feel the joy of his sweet, happy soul."</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">There may be no crying in baseball, but there is poetry in the memories. Great humor, too.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Greg Goossen, who also died recently, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/sports/baseball/04goossen.html">inspired a great deal of humor</a> during his lackluster and <a href="http://www.dailynews.com/ci_17549589?source=most_viewed">memorable baseball career</a>. In his too-short but very full life, the one-time catcher also promoted big-time boxing, did a stint as a private detective and served as Gene Hackman's movie stand-in. Goossen, in what must be close to a record, if not a guaranteed laugh line, played for 37 different teams in the minor, Mexican and Major Leagues.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Goossen remarkably lead the team in hitting during the one season of the short-lived <a href="http://www.seattlepilots.com/">Seattle Pilots</a> and told an interviewer he would have played his whole career in Seattle. Teammate <a href="http://www.baseball-almanac.com/players/player.php?p=davisto02">Tommy Davis</a>, himself well-traveled, piped up with, "You did!"</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Goossen figured prominently in <a href="http://www.jimbouton.com/">Jim Bouton's</a> baseball classic <em>Ball Four</em> where Bouton recounted that he and Goossen once played against each other in an International League game. Goossen was behind the plate when a hitter rolled a bunt back toward the pitcher. "First base, first base," Goossen yelled. Ignoring those instructions the pitcher wheeled and threw to second with all runners safe.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Goossen, ticked that his simple directions had been ignored, moved back behind the plate while Bouton yelled from the opposing team dugout, "Goose, he had to consider the source."</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The Duke and the Goose, Branca and Bouton and all the rest will be there at Phoenix Muni today. That's the way this game is played with balls and strikes, hits and ground outs...and memories. It'll be great.</span>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-87140998108214928452011-03-05T10:00:00.002-07:002011-03-06T16:00:30.357-07:00The Great Race<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghVCo7vg61YnTgBruxCkTp0ot58R-h8tv9CLfSG4YHD3S4gipPkcJ-gn2LHOgXjDM8ERRutJaPieHzvgOSgWNIRHY2ZEglJJO9Vy1XdxTwYVZLD4v_CIRUafaSxWPuTlBDRl8c7HnOSA0D/s1600/imagesCAE7VYG0.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5580270873409489922" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 125px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghVCo7vg61YnTgBruxCkTp0ot58R-h8tv9CLfSG4YHD3S4gipPkcJ-gn2LHOgXjDM8ERRutJaPieHzvgOSgWNIRHY2ZEglJJO9Vy1XdxTwYVZLD4v_CIRUafaSxWPuTlBDRl8c7HnOSA0D/s200/imagesCAE7VYG0.jpg" border="0" /></a> <span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong>Grand Old Pretenders</strong></em></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">George Will has <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/04/AR2011030404613.html?hpid=opinionsbox1">finally written what many Republicans are thinking</a>: these folks aren't ready for prime time. In his Sunday column, Will laments the "vibrations of weirdness" emanating from the prospective GOP presidential field.</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;"></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Exhibit A this week is Mike Huckabee, often seen as the GOP front runner in what blogger <a href="http://politicalwire.com/archives/2011/03/04/the_fox_news_primary.html">Taegan Goddard</a> calls "the Fox News primary." The wise <em>New York Times</em> columnist Tim Egan, still a hard-nosed, fact-based reporter at heart, <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/03/the-fictions-of-mike-huckabee/">lays bare Huckabee's "misspeak" this week</a> about Barack Obama's growing up in Kenya. Of course, Huckabee got that all wrong. Obama grew up in Hawaii (still one of the 50 states), spent some time in Indonesia and didn't visit Kenya until he was in his 20's.</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">But, as Egan points out, Huckabee not only misspoke, he had a whole line of factless argument built around Obama the Kenyan. This wasn't a slip of the tongue, but a premeditated argument aimed at driving the wedge over whether Obama is really one of us.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Even more damaging to Huckabee is Egan's reporting on the fictions around a the case of a parolee that Huckabee never really had to explain during his short run for the GOP nomination in 2008. Read Egan's reporting and see if this guy really has a chance. </span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Here's a bet that Huckabee opts to stay on Fox as a talk show host rather than troop around in the snow in Iowa and New Hampshire. Egan's piece will haunt him either way.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">George Will, meanwhile, does not count The Huck in the five candidates - Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman, Tim Pawlenty, Haley Barbour and Mitch Daniels - that he sees as the great hope of the GOP. But, as he writes, "the nominee may emerge much diminished by involvement in a process cluttered with careless, delusional, egomaniacal, spotlight-chasing candidates to whom the sensible American majority would never entrust a lemonade stand, much less nuclear weapons."</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Exhibit B: Another piece this week, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/03/AR2011030305195.html">also in the <em>Post</em></a>, detailing the relationship - if that is the right word for it - between Huntsman and Romney. Reporter Jason Horowitz's fascinating piece about the two ambitious LDS politicians says: "The respective former governors of Utah and Massachusetts have vast fortunes, silver tongues and great hair. They are also distant cousins, descended from a Mormon apostle who played a key role in the faith's founding. The two men enjoyed the early support of powerful and devout fathers and performed the church's missionary work - Romney in France during the Vietnam War and Huntsman in Taiwan."</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Horowitz goes on to make the case that both Huntsman and Romney wanted to run the Salt Lake City Olympics, knowing that the high profile post would help their political aspirations. When Romney won out, the two men's personal and family connection was badly frayed. Horowitz also gets into the issue of which of the men is the "better Mormon."</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Neither the Huckabee story line this week nor the Romney-Huntsman feud can possibly be the narrative Republican strategists are hoping to develop. At this point, in the desperate race for money and attention, this kind of story line doesn't help build momentum, but does raise questions that will linger and linger, first among the chattering classes and eventually among the voters.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Former Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus - he won his share of elections - has a favorite saying: "you can't win a horse race with a dog." Admittedly, it's early, very early, in the all-too-long political nominating process. The economy and Middle East oil prices may yet be a greater threat to Obama than anyone in the Republican field but, having said that, none of these contenders is reminding anyone of Ronald Reagan, or even Howard Baker, Bob Dole or John McCain.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The weirdness is vibrating and no one is running the lemonade stand.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;"></span>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-29250554997146252512011-03-03T10:00:00.001-07:002011-03-03T10:28:39.289-07:00A New Game<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk56ydq86oE4hyphenhyphenq3vV_8EImuv9iWjetY2ForUWaRYQ6HAGoMPVAzXFwwN-OpwlL1lC45FyuIZKwiicM0z2DLX2AlwFOH1oXPOwcW-TsHcFVJ7NgI7vnK6IoO1W7UhZ8XuQToj2cTMDrOcF/s1600/vote.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5579862473726797650" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 129px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 97px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk56ydq86oE4hyphenhyphenq3vV_8EImuv9iWjetY2ForUWaRYQ6HAGoMPVAzXFwwN-OpwlL1lC45FyuIZKwiicM0z2DLX2AlwFOH1oXPOwcW-TsHcFVJ7NgI7vnK6IoO1W7UhZ8XuQToj2cTMDrOcF/s200/vote.jpg" border="0" /></a> <span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong>Party Registration Comes to Idaho</strong></em></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Idaho's most conservative Republicans got what they long wanted yesterday with the <a href="http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2011/mar/03/idahos-open-primary-infringes-on-gop-judge-rules/">decision by U.S. District Judge Lynn Winmill</a> throwing out the state's open primary law. We'll see if this important decision becomes the political equivalent of the dog catching the car.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">It would seem that the immediate impact, as some Republicans exalted over "Democrats no longer picking our candidates," would be to shift the already very conservative Idaho GOP even further to the right. The after thought Idaho Democrats are left to <a href="http://www.spokesman.com/blogs/boise/2011/mar/02/dems-say-gop-purging-their-ranks/">lament shutting people out of the system</a>. Maybe.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">But, if Democrats were to pick themselves up off the canvas and seize <a href="http://www.idahoreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/IDGOP-ruling.pdf">Winmill's ruling</a> as the opportunity it could prove to be, it just might turn out to be the spark that lets the long-suffering party get back in the game.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">In politics you can often define opportunity as the moment circumstances collide with timing. The circumstances are the issues mix in Idaho right now - faltering funding for education and a still limping economy - the timing is reflected by the stark reality that Idaho Democrats need a new organizing principle and new blood; energy and ideas to jump start a political recovery. Scrambling the primary process, requiring party registration could be a very big deal.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#000000;">The current Idaho legislature will end sometime this spring likely having left many, if not most, Idahoans wondering just what happened to education. Expect more <a href="http://www.kivitv.com/Global/story.asp?S=14072081">Statehouse demonstrations</a> and perhaps even a teacher walkout in coming days focused on defining the education issue to the detriment of the majority party. If Democrats were smart they'd be in the streets collecting names and e-mail addresses of these </span><a href="http://magicvalley.com/news/local/article_30ae3648-450d-11e0-ba66-001cc4c002e0.html">motivated, mostly younger Idahoans</a>.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">(One wag noted the irony in proposing that Idaho students become more comfortable with on-line course offerings, while the kids are organizing on Facebook.)</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#000000;">The recent</span> <a href="http://sspa.boisestate.edu/publicpolicycenter/files/2010/05/20th-Public-Policy-Survey-Statewide-Results-12-8-11-.pdf">Boise State University poll</a> <span style="color:#000000;">says 37 percent of Idahoans now identify themselves as "independents," only 21 admit to being Democrats, while 33 say they align with the GOP. In the BSU surveys, the numbers of self-described Republicans has been in steady decline. By the same token, in a new closed primary those "independents" are, at least theoretically, up for grabs and for the</span> <a href="http://www.idahopress.com/news/article_abe675e2-456b-11e0-9ee8-001cc4c03286.html">first time in 2012 primary voters</a> <span style="color:#000000;">will have to be identified by a party label.</span></span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The Republicans in Idaho have long had the money, organization and hearts and minds of, at least, a plurality of Idaho voters. But this is also true: the most faithful adherents in each party are the "true believers" of the increasingly farther right and left. These folks volunteer at the precinct level, they attend the party conventions, they vote in primaries and, at least in the GOP, some of them pushed for a closed primary. The true believers also tend to push the parties to the extremes, which is why you see GOP proposals to nullify health care legislation and repeal the 17th amendment to the Constitution.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Most Idaho Republican officeholders no longer fear a challenge from a Democrat. They only worry about an assault from the right. This unrelenting ever more conservative push tends to diminish the already shrinking center were more Idahoans, if you believe the BSU poll, say they are more at home.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Democrats should look deeply into the impact of Judge Winmill's decision. It just might contain the fragile threads of a return to viability. Viability will, however, require a new strategy, true centrist policies, messages and candidates and a very big dose of luck. Democrats, of course, need to supply most of that. Ironically, a federal judge may have given the Idaho GOP the thing it says it wants, but also the lucky break Idaho Democrats need.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;"></span>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-4326250380841235352011-03-01T12:26:00.010-07:002011-03-01T13:33:14.860-07:00More McClure<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3cbUehTDIMxHTc8AmSzWKetp7m1fmJUU9ppaEnverYDBa57qjAiLgUuowkuYIIYfs4gzFL8mc-ypC4QLn300NQweRzpB57bhPG8R90OO4cfV5bDTNZTcV5fbQpN2fvBNWm3F3uNFGKRv2/s1600/wilderness.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 133px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5579195806103159106" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3cbUehTDIMxHTc8AmSzWKetp7m1fmJUU9ppaEnverYDBa57qjAiLgUuowkuYIIYfs4gzFL8mc-ypC4QLn300NQweRzpB57bhPG8R90OO4cfV5bDTNZTcV5fbQpN2fvBNWm3F3uNFGKRv2/s200/wilderness.jpg" /></a><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong>Man Bites Dog</strong></em></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Lots of <a href="http://www.ridenbaugh.com/index.php/2011/02/27/james-mcclure/">reaction and remembering</a>, very appropriately, to the weekend passing of one of Idaho's political icons Sen. Jim McClure. Most of the reaction, again appropriately, has described McClure's time in the U.S. House and Senate as <a href="http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/233161">distinguished, thoughtful and productive</a>. Others have noted that he was a work horse, not a show horse; a decent guy in a business that has become more and more characterized by nastiness and blind partisanship.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">One of the best and most thoughtful reactions to McClure's death and his career <a href="http://www.idahoconservation.org/blog/jim-mcclure">comes in a great piece</a> by long-time Idaho Conservation League Executive Director Rick Johnson. Johnson has taken the point in the Idaho environmental community in stressing a new approach to engagement and even collaboration with some of the traditional "enemies" of the conservation community. He writes of not initially thinking much of McClure, but over time coming to realize that the conservative Republican was a fellow you could talk with and maybe even make a deal with.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">"I now see," Johnson writes, "how much wilderness we didn't get back then working with him and later in the under-appreciated collaboration he had with then-Gov. Cecil Andrus. Those bills were far from perfect. But bills today are also far from perfect, and today's are more limited in scale. Nothing's perfect you say? I didn't know that then. Incidentally, my older mentors didn't know that, either."</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">It is almost a "man bites dog" moment and strong kudos to Johnson for recognizing and admitting that a guy who is a card carrying environmentalist - I say that with affection - could learn a thing or two from a senator who was often caricatured as an apologist for extractive industries. That is the beauty of politics - things are rarely as black and white, cut and dried as some try to make them. Progress is in the gray area of compromise and consensus.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">One aspect of McClure's career deserves special recognition as Idahoans reflect on his importance to the state's politics. The guy was a legislator. He didn't see his job as making bombastic speeches, although like any good and effective politician he could do that, he went to Washington, D.C. to get things done. Over a career that included strong advocacy for timber, mining and the Department of Energy, he also offered up conservation oriented legislation that, as my friend Rick Johnson argues, many of us would be glad to have on the books today.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">That alone is why Jim McClure and others of his ilk will be long remembered. They used public office to try and do things. His approach is always going to be a good model - at any time in any state.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;"></span>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-76963034358256515712011-02-28T07:30:00.002-07:002011-02-28T10:04:04.303-07:00One of the Greats<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie8VECTueN7ajnMrJlRQB5S8xOPTbR1U9P5wlaL3PnVoNIg4eG0ndCT3lSt5vTtbpH3Bw4NIPsi3DIIY7CmZoCXlxPQLTtErG5KfwuIRkqFIKUjubREstXcPvq_bLoP_ZoJPJgyhi1z04T/s1600/mcclure.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5578714385720635986" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 159px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 200px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie8VECTueN7ajnMrJlRQB5S8xOPTbR1U9P5wlaL3PnVoNIg4eG0ndCT3lSt5vTtbpH3Bw4NIPsi3DIIY7CmZoCXlxPQLTtErG5KfwuIRkqFIKUjubREstXcPvq_bLoP_ZoJPJgyhi1z04T/s200/mcclure.jpg" border="0" /></a> <span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong>James Albertus McClure, 1924-2011</strong></em></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">History will record that <a href="http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=m000346">Sen. Jim McClure</a>, who <a href="http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2011/feb/28/idaho-had-great-statesman-in-mcclure/">died Saturday at the age of 86</a>, was one of the most significant politicians in Idaho's history. A staunch Republican conservative, McClure nonetheless was liked and respected by those across the political spectrum, but beyond that he accumulated a record of accomplishment that has lasting impact.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">A strong advocate for the natural resources industries so important to Idaho, McClure also saw the need to resolve long-standing debates over wilderness designation in his native state.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">He worked out the boundary lines of the <a href="http://www.fs.fed.us/hellscanyon/">Hells Canyon National Recreation Area</a> by spreading maps on the floor of the governor's office and getting on his hands and knees with Democrat Cecil D. Andrus.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">He helped champion creation of the <a href="http://www.fs.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsinternet/!ut/p/c5/04_SB8K8xLLM9MSSzPy8xBz9CP0os3gjAwhwtDDw9_AI8zPwhQoY6IeDdGCqCPOBqwDLG-AAjgb6fh75uan6BdnZaY6OiooA1tkqlQ!!/dl3/d3/L2dJQSEvUUt3QS9ZQnZ3LzZfMjAwMDAwMDBBODBPSEhWTjBNMDAwMDAwMDA!/?ss=110414&navtype=forestBean&navid=091000000000000&pnavid=null&cid=null&ttype=main&pname=Sawtooth%2520National%2520Forest%2520-%2520Home/recreation/recreport.htm">Sawtooth NRA</a> and in the last days of Frank Church's life he got the iconic <a href="http://www.wilderness.net/index.cfm?fuse=NWPS&sec=wildView&wname=Frank%20Church-River%20of%20No%20Return%20Wilderness">River of No Return Wilderness</a> renamed for the Democrat.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">He fought tooth and nail to grow the <a href="http://inlportal.inl.gov/portal/server.pt/community/home">Idaho National Laboratory</a> and distinguished himself as a member of the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YobREhlitQI&feature=related">Iran-Contra Committee</a> investigating that scandal.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">As a reporter and in other capacities, I have had the chance to interview Jim McClure probably more than 20 times over the years. I never sat down with any person who was better prepared or who provided a better interview. He was candid, opinionated and always impeccable well informed. I also never saw the guy use a note card or a script. He was a marvelous extemporaneous speaker. He was also a complete gentleman.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Once in Sun Valley years ago, while McClure was chairing the Senate Energy Committee, he sat for a taped interview for well more than half an hour. At the end of the session, while we were making small talk, the technical crew whispered in my ear that none of the half hour of Q and A had been recorded on tape. Gulp. </span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I'd just wasted the time of a busy, important U.S. Senator and had absolutely nothing to show for it. Not missing a beat, McClure smiled and said, "Let's do it again." And we did. He didn't have to do that. Most would have said, sorry, but I've got to run. Obviously, I have never forgotten the kindness.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">One thing I'll never forget about McClure was his principled pragmatism. Never anything less than a loyal and conservative Republican, he also knew that progress often requires compromise and finding a middle ground. Such was the case when McClure again hooked up with Andrus in 1987 and spent weeks working out a comprehensive approach to the decades-long battles over Idaho wilderness. They flew around the state, spread out the maps and offended everyone - particularly their respective "base" voters. There was something in the grand compromise that everyone could hate and the McClure-Andrus approach ultimately failed.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I've thought many times since that the two old pols knew they were far out in front of their constituents, but were nevertheless willing to risk political capital to try to resolve a controversy. It's easy in politics to say "no." It is much more difficult - and risky - to try to lead. McClure was a leader.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I was pleased to have a hand in creating a <a href="http://www.uidaho.edu/class/mcclurecenter/mcclures/tribute">University of Idaho video tribute</a> to Jim </span><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">McClure in 2007. You can check it out at the University's McClure Center website.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">In the Idaho political pantheon, McClure stands with Borah and Church as a among the greatest and most important federal officials Idaho has ever produced. He was a genuinely nice guy, too.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;"></span>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-68061860190961690172011-02-27T07:00:00.002-07:002011-02-27T16:14:34.156-07:00Symbolic Cuts<span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 150px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5578151916117616578" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF5vPbRM5AgVj3fPeRff6WXQ5gUqFCs53hlulqmJhPSb2KjpHWFlqbkAe6KZYS8bmqHyPHmQL1-lbNhF44Rbh8bD6eUdD83takFoK-AN5NU8cyrRE3_IywXlEWyhyphenhyphent3ItdmN7dzzfNTjPm/s200/burns.jpg" />Minimal Money, Real Impact</strong></em></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Noted documentary filmmaker <a href="http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/">Ken Burns</a> has waded into the fray over eliminating federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and sharply reducing the measly dollars we spend on the national endowments for the humanities and the arts.</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">In a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/25/AR2011022506317.html">piece in the <em>Washington Post</em></a>, Burns - <span style="color:#000000;">his <a href="http://www.pbs.org/civilwar/">Civil War documentary</a> may be the best long-form television ever - asks us to remember that during the Great Depression somehow the country <a href="http://memory.loc.gov/wpaintro/wpahome.html">found the dollars</a> to support artists, writers and photographers who produced some of the most enduring work of the 20th Century. Surely, he says, we can afford a fraction of a cent of our federal tax dollar for CPB and the endowments.</span></span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">In the interest of full disclosure, loyal readers need to know I have a strong bias here. I cut my journalism teeth years ago with a daily half-hour broadcast on public television. I have volunteered for 15 years on various boards dedicated to the mission of the public humanities and the bringing of thoughtful programs on American and world culture, history, literature, religion and philosophy to Idahoans and Americans. I'm a true believer in these well established and minimally funded institutions and I also understand the federal budget.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/145275-organization-for-npr-pbs-funding-sticks-up-for-public-media-after-deep-house-cuts">$420 million we spend on CPB</a>, almost all of which goes to local public TV and radio stations and programs like those Ken Burns makes, and the <a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/02/obama-budget-proposal-slashes-cultural-agencies-by-13.html">$168 million we spend on each of the endowments</a> is a total drop in the federal budget bucket. The Pentagon spends that much in an afternoon.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Case in point, Boeing just <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/business/25tanker.html">got an award from the Defense Department</a> to build a new generation of aerial tankers - price tag $35 billion. Assuming Boeing builds a full fleet of 179 tankers, that averages out to about $195 million per plane. That buys a whole lot of what the endowments and CPB provide Americans.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I know, I know, we need new aerial tankers to replace those in service since Eisenhower was in the White House, but don't we also need a place - for a tiny fraction of the cost - where Ken Burns' documentaries reach a huge audience or where the humanities endowment supports a local museum or library?</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Congress and the president <a href="http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/7448010.html">continue the gandy dance around the real need to address the federal budget deficit</a>. We have a crisis in three areas - defense spending, Medicare and Social Security. We need to address a combination of very difficult tradeoffs. Extend the retirement age, means test Medicare, reduce the size and scope of our military power on every continent <em>and</em> raise taxes. It's easier to say than to cut, but there you have the real issues.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Anyone who tells you we can address the dismal federal deficit by cutting CPB and the National Endowments is practicing demagoguery on the scope of Huey Long, the subject, by the way, of a <a href="http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/hueylong/">Ken Burns' documentary</a>.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Much of this debate, it must be noted, is <a href="http://demint.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=PressReleases&ContentRecord_id=b4535225-a006-4342-83b4-f7ba12cc5364">about ideology rather than real budget savings</a>. Some conservatives assail public broadcasting or the pointy headed humanities and arts community as the preserve of "liberals." Nonsense. <a href="http://hoohila.stanford.edu/firingline/">William F. Buckley</a> found a home on PBS. Were the great man alive today, do you think he could find a place on Fox or CNN? Not a chance. Listen to a week of <em>The NewsHour</em> or <em>Morning Edition</em> and really consider the range of views, opinion and ideology you hear. Public TV and radio have become one of the few real clearinghouses of ideas about the American condition. Not liberal, not conservative, but truly fair and balanced.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">America is a country of ideas. We have thrived for as long as we have because we value the big debate, the chance for lots of voices - from Ken Burns to the <a href="http://www.redgreen.com/">Red Green Show</a> (on PBS) to the Trailing of the Sheep Festival and a <a href="http://www.idahohumanities.org/?p=news_item&id=273">summer teacher institute in Idaho</a> (funded by the Idaho Humanities Council) - to be heard, considered, rejected and embraced.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">We must get serious about the federal deficit. We must also recognize that a guy as talented as Ken Burns would never have a chance in the "marketplace media." A long-form documentary on baseball, jazz, the National Parks or World War II simply won't find a place in modern commercial broadcasting. So, eliminating that platform is really a decision to eliminate the ideas represented there.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">If we lose what a Ken Burns represents, we lose a connection with our history and our culture that simply can't be replaced. We will regret it, but not as much as our children.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;"></span>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-70386009179274057352011-02-23T06:00:00.003-07:002011-02-23T07:04:56.129-07:00Myths and More<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDWGsYb8R1nxwiY9t8dRGKc7q4uCVKGW9Esib0da0ivuu2xzL64hekJe1VceSAAEMinfNH4QNaZThglXDJ47LJ2y9IwvAqmclc2dZu3hNq6H6a-0IKAbkfM5n0auhqmohuQYp7gW_mR99L/s1600/flag.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 130px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 96px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5576665122396436818" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDWGsYb8R1nxwiY9t8dRGKc7q4uCVKGW9Esib0da0ivuu2xzL64hekJe1VceSAAEMinfNH4QNaZThglXDJ47LJ2y9IwvAqmclc2dZu3hNq6H6a-0IKAbkfM5n0auhqmohuQYp7gW_mR99L/s200/flag.jpg" /></a><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong>Somethings Just Ain't So</strong></em></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">How many times have you heard someone say - usually a <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2010/11/09/2010-11-09_memo_to_john_boehner_american_health_care_is_far_from_the_best.html">politician</a> - "Americans have the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/opinion/26wed3.html">best health care in the world</a>."</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Or this one - no one goes hungry in America. Or, America is the world leader in - fill in the blank.</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Truth be told, we aren't leading the world in much these days. Our health care is the most expensive in the world, but by almost any measure no where close to the best. And, according to a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/15/AR2010111502930.html">recent USDA report</a>, fully 15 percent of Americans are now food "insecure," literally unsure where the next meal is coming from.</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">One of the great challenges to American democracy, made particularly acute by the vast expansion of "information" available to all of us every minute of every day, is the challenge of separating what we think we know from what is really, verifiably true.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Some of the myths, 51 percent of likely Republican primary voters <a href="http://publicpolicypolling.blogspot.com/2011/02/romney-and-birthers.html">don't believe Barack Obama was born in the United States</a>, for example, serve to warp political judgments and reinforce a constant theme of some of his opponents that Obama is "not like us." It is a myth that serves some political ends.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Other myths, like the oft repeated notion that the NFL Super Bowl is the most watched sporting event in the world, just play to the old notion that if it happens here it must be the biggest, the best, the most important. Actually, the <a href="http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/index.html">World Cup soccer</a> championship, thanks to a truly world-wide audience, gets more viewers than the Packers beating the Steelers.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Some of the so called "mainstream media" are trying to debunk some of the myths out there. The <em>Washington Post</em> runs a regular feature - "<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2010/02/10/LI2010021001916.htm">Five Myths</a>" - that puts the facts back into common myths. Its good stuff. A recent piece by Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/17/AR2011021703340.html">challenged the myth</a> that the 16th president was "just a country lawyer." He wasn't.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Holzer writes: "...in the 1850s [Lincoln] ably (and profitably) represented the Illinois Central Railroad and the Rock Island Bridge Co. - the company that built the first railroad bridge over the Mississippi River - and earned a solid reputation as one of his home state's top appeals lawyers."</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#000000;"><em>New York Times</em> graphic columnist <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/opinion/19blow.html?ref=charlesmblow">Charles Blow</a> is another of the mythbusters. His recent piece compared the United States to more than 30 other countries on the basis of the</span> <a href="http://www.imf.org/external/index.htm">International Monetary Fund</a> <span style="color:#000000;">assessment of the conditions that contribute to an "advanced economy."</span></span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;"><a href="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/02/19/opinion/19blowcht/19blowcht-popup-v5.gif">We don't fare very well</a>.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Our income inequality has us compared - is unfavorably the word - to Hong Kong. We're doing better on unemployment than Greece or Spain, but no where near as well as Switzerland, Denmark or even Canada. With regard to life expectancy, we're not nearly as good as France, but about as good as Cyprus. Cyprus?</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">We have the largest number of people incarcerated per 100,000 citizens of any place in the world. More than 700 per 100,000 in jail here. It's about 50 per 100,000 in Iceland. Little wonder our corrections costs are running wild.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Student math achievement is - big surprise - way behind Japan, Korea and Singapore. And, food security. No one goes hungry in Belgium or Austria. We're the worst of the worst in the "advanced economy" class when it comes to food security.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">There is an old saying in politics that holds that you will know that a candidate for public office is in trouble when he or she starts believing their own press releases. In other words, the spin of what we'd like to be able to accomplish overtakes the reality of what we are really living. We start living myths, substituting our opinions for facts.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Amid all the talk about "<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jessica-corry/american-exceptionalism-l_b_826238.html">American exceptionalism</a>" we struggle to separate the myths of our standing in the world from the reality of our challenges. All the while, the rest of the world is catching up, or already leading us and, in many cases, moving on.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Mark Twain said, I think, “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;"></span>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-15794679950504896632011-02-21T10:00:00.001-07:002011-02-21T10:18:32.150-07:00President's Day<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDiowJTNU0DH8i3YSKyU7w58MTfiu_TYVqcVZv8OZpJvUhoRkDcMQQ-Lw9YrPI51gB8Nm8cMOp3hKDDLM3vDdmt2vtAKFBFFhe0XiZRZYH9Kx-4SJc7XpTgr4rW_vvubvuO2K2d5rtHgKI/s1600/buchanan.jpg"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5576186334724617218" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 90px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 117px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDiowJTNU0DH8i3YSKyU7w58MTfiu_TYVqcVZv8OZpJvUhoRkDcMQQ-Lw9YrPI51gB8Nm8cMOp3hKDDLM3vDdmt2vtAKFBFFhe0XiZRZYH9Kx-4SJc7XpTgr4rW_vvubvuO2K2d5rtHgKI/s200/buchanan.jpg" border="0" /></strong></em></span></a><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong> Great Readers</strong></em></span>
<span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong></strong></em></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">James Buchanan was the <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/jamesbuchanan">15th President of the United States</a> and by nearly universal assessment the worst we've ever had. He dithered while the Union came apart, <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2952.html">helped precipitate Bleeding Kansas</a> and did nothing to help Lincoln during the succession crisis in the last days of his administration. Mark Buchanan as a near complete failure...<em>except</em> as it turns out the guy was a great reader.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The <em>Daily Beast</em> website has a <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-02-14/the-best-read-presidents/?cid=hp:mainpromo7">fun series of short profiles</a> of the presidents who were most in love with books. You would guess, of course, Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and the two Roosevelts, but Buchanan or Rutherford B. Hayes? Hayes amassed a personal library of 12,000 volumes and Herbert Hoover, a very smart man and not a very effective president, had a library of rare books on obscure science subjects and many were in Latin.</span>
<p><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The same website has a <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/galleries/2643/1/?redirectURL=http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-02-20/presidents-day-test-your-presidential-iq-with-a-21-question-pop-quiz/?cid=hp:beastoriginalsR1">Presidential Trivia Quiz</a> today.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Who was the first president to fly in an airplane? Hard to believe, but true, only one president is buried in Washington, D.C. and, believe it or not, Jimmy Carter was the first president born in a hospital.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">So...on President's Day, a toast - a rare toast - to James Buchanan, a bad president, but a book lover. With that knowledge, he can be modestly redeemed in my eyes.</span></p><p></p>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-37242345490667686622011-02-20T10:00:00.000-07:002011-02-20T10:55:55.195-07:00Effective and Not<img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 80px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 80px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5575822058698111458" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUt0LUC5_VGvL21sDK_Ot5vX75pRKI7L5Av2r-c3lmRtf232GmtkwTK7tY1TFmrig1I8AdjJ6Vy3xFutkrRUYFLuzsJ-0PzbM9WOhMWKgbQjE6HLW1-mIHxoZ4JDhP_h6x2P4l0ufAYK03/s200/6.jpg" /><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong>Nullification or Common Sense</strong></em></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">They celebrated Jefferson Davis's inauguration yesterday in Montgomery, Alabama. Actually, it was a day late. One hundred fifty years ago Friday, Davis became the President of the Confederacy.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">As the <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/18/nation/la-na-confederate-sesquicentennial-20110219"><em>Los Angeles Times</em> noted</a>, it was a much bigger celebration in 1961 on the centennial of the event that presaged the Civil War. Several southern governors showed up then, none did this weekend. The crowds were smaller and more people were in the ceremony than in the audience.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">As <a href="http://atimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2011/02/jefferson-davis-csa-civil-war.html"><em>LA Times</em> blogger Andy Malcolm</a> points out, Davis - this is history, not state's rights mythology - is a <a href="http://www.tulane.edu/~latner/Davis.html">curious hero for modern day southerners</a>. He actually opposed succession, but not the "right" of a state to do so, and his wife openly opposed the war. The prickly former Mississippi Senator had a stormy tenure. He tried to micromanage the operations of southern armies in the field, advanced his favorite generals over more accomplished men and developed an uncanny ability to feud with southern governors. Still, he was the only president the south had. You go to celebration with the president you have.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Apropos of the political moment in several states - Montana now <a href="http://www.kxlh.com/news/mt-legislature-endangered-species-act-healthcare-reform/">seeks to nullify</a> health care and the Endangerd Species Act - even <a href="http://www.britannica.com/facts/5/89827/Jefferson-Davis-as-discussed-in-John-C-Calhoun-vice-president-of-United-States">Davis opposed nullification</a>, arguing that just leaving the Union was a more practical and effective approach. That didn't work all that well, either.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;"> </span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">As the Idaho State Senate prepares to ignore <a href="http://www.bonnercountydailybee.com/news/local/article_3dee4864-3a60-11e0-a660-001cc4c002e0.html">the sound and fury of "nullification" of federal health care legislation</a> that came over recently from the state's righters in the Idaho House, it may be worth a moment to consider how a state that depends so heavily on federal largess - INL, Mountain Home AFB, the Forest Service, irrigation projects - can wage an effective battle against the big, bad federal government.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Former Idaho Gov. Cecil D. Andrus has a <a href="http://www.magicvalley.com/news/opinion/article_f3d29394-ef80-5562-a0c3-a2aa6bcd8598.html">piece in the Twin Falls <em>Times-News</em></a> that makes the case for the quiet, but effective approach of applying common sense to our not infrequent battles with Washington, D.C. In short, fix problems by using the courts and the legislative arena, not by passing time wasting bills that garner big headlines, but don't fix problems.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">That approach is more difficult, to be sure, but it can work and have lasting results. All that lasts from the nullifiers of 150 years ago is the memory of a lost cause, the consequences of which we still struggle to put in context and understand. The real question may be, have we learned anything from that disasterous piece of American history?</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;"></span>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-65770051403584556862011-02-17T11:00:00.000-07:002011-02-17T12:27:55.459-07:00Bashing Teachers<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidkE-jnN-zUJhVlrZusH3rqnruJdv56miwvaFMD_ju33mDTZpyqmOLGOTYLzFV2LcqCK3QHl4B_QeGmNuFcZFlK6kW5ctAiu3IihmDXgR3Pc5yUChohLWJZlr-7LqopMGs0pn6r2oiuVmz/s1600/chips.jpg"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5573566659167582386" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 135px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 91px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidkE-jnN-zUJhVlrZusH3rqnruJdv56miwvaFMD_ju33mDTZpyqmOLGOTYLzFV2LcqCK3QHl4B_QeGmNuFcZFlK6kW5ctAiu3IihmDXgR3Pc5yUChohLWJZlr-7LqopMGs0pn6r2oiuVmz/s200/chips.jpg" border="0" /></strong></em></span></a><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong> Teachers as Targets</strong></em></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Like most everyone, I suspect, I had a favorite teacher growing up. (Actually, I had a hopeless crush on my high school chemistry teacher, but that is another story and probably goes some distance to explain my very weak performance in her class.)</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">My favorite was Mr. Parr, a history and social studies teacher and the 8th grade basketball coach. It's not an overstatement to say that <a href="http://www.sweetwater1.org/page.php?pid=442">John Thomas Parr</a> changed my life. I was a pimply faced, shy, decidely underachieving, near teenager when I walked into his class. </span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I was interested in history. He made me love it. </span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;"></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I wanted to play basketball. He made me want to play for him.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I lacked confidence. He gave it to me. I'll never forget making both ends of a one-and-one free throw opportunity in a game in Evanston, Wyoming. With 30 seconds left in the game, I couldn't even think of missing. I didn't want to disappoint Mr. Parr.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I used to marvel at the way he used humor, a set of firm but fairly applied rules and his moral authority to handle anything that came up in class or during practice after school. Kids not only liked the guy, they wanted to do well - and do good - for him. He reflected his talents and personality back on us. What a great teacher he was.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I've been thinking about Mr. Parr - he'll always be Mr. Parr to me - as I've read stories from Idaho to Wisconsin betraying an increasingly nasty undercurrent in the on-going debate over education budgets or, in the Idaho and Wisconsin cases, education "reform." Teachers as a class are getting hammered. Its both a shame and a major public policy mistake.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">In Wisconsin, new <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/02/17/teachers-march-wisconsin-capitol-senate-moves-curtail-union-rights/#">Gov. Scott Walker has proposed eliminating</a> <span style="color:#000000;">many teacher collective bargaining rights and in response thousands of teachers have descended on the state capitol to protest. Meanwhile Democratic legislators have walked out in their own protest. In Idaho, parts of the reform proposal <a href="http://www.spokesman.com/blogs/boise/2011/feb/16/senators-question-teacher-contract-rule-changes">focus on changing the way school districts handle contracts</a> with teachers. I've yet to see a story that links improving classroom performance to changing contracts.</span></span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">In both states teachers complain about being left out of the "reform" discussions. Meanwhile, Education Secretary Arne Duncan seems to offer a more complicated, but perhaps ultimately better approach.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;"></span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">At an <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2011/0216/Here-s-an-idea-Teachers-and-school-officials-unite-on-education-reform">education summit this week</a> - collaboration, not confrontation was the theme - Duncan asked teacher unions, administrators and school board members "to take on tough issues such as teacher benefits, layoff policies, and the need for more evaluations of administrators and school boards, not just teachers. 'The truth is that educators and management cannot negotiate their way to higher [student] performance. The [labor] contract is just a framework. Working together is the path to success.'"</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I don't know if Mr. Parr was "ruled by a labor boss" over at the local teacher union. I never thought about what he got paid or the hours he worked. It was pretty obvious the guy loved what he did. Sure there are bad teachers out there. Gosh, I suspect there are even bad investment bankers, misbehaving members of Congress, even retired NFL quarterbacks who haven't quite measured up.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;"></span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">There are lots more Mr. Parr's, too.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;"></span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Getting kids better educated and creating the workforce for the 21st Century may just require that we focus on the best teachers and finding ways to make good teachers great.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;"></span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">I'd gladly swap all the educational experts for 30 minutes with John Thomas Parr. I'm betting the old teacher and coach would have some ideas. I'm betting he'd begin with the moral authority that goes with common sense.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;"></span>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-79994815622066997832011-02-16T09:00:00.001-07:002011-02-16T09:41:44.436-07:00Still Fighting the War<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn7pWjJoDxomdZZ4OwD3f8IqvrCpw8PgKkomsLEO7eAQyrN5R0W5XmHX3d68QnMIc4RDmYXBoCkmD81E29r-fvS55qzzCH4ATsw29fFdNLD8rndxHOccUBo7FR385Oxe1FqrZjD9rRXBT5/s1600/Forrest.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5574302232777106802" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 93px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 116px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn7pWjJoDxomdZZ4OwD3f8IqvrCpw8PgKkomsLEO7eAQyrN5R0W5XmHX3d68QnMIc4RDmYXBoCkmD81E29r-fvS55qzzCH4ATsw29fFdNLD8rndxHOccUBo7FR385Oxe1FqrZjD9rRXBT5/s200/Forrest.jpg" border="0" /></a> <span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong>That Devil Forrest</strong></em></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">This just in: Civil War still rages.</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;"></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">From nullification battles in Idaho and several other states to a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/burns-strider/license-plates-heritage-a_b_823825.html">Mississippi proposal to remember Confederate cavalry Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest</a> with a new license plate, the Civil War - it began <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/disunion/">150 years ago in April</a> - is still with us. </span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">For those who don't understand why the Arabs and Israelis can't get beyond their ancient disputes or scratch their heads over the "troubles" in Ireland, you need only look just below the surface of American politics and culture to appreciate that our old war is new again. We're still fighting over the cause, meaning and memory.</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;"></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">In case you're <a href="http://www.civilwarhome.com/natbio.htm">wondering about Forrest</a> - that's him in the uniform of a Lt. General - he rose from private to general officer during the course of the war, is generally regarded as a military genius, albeit a blood thirsty one, and was a founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Forrest notoriously presided over a massacre of black Union troops at <a href="http://www.nps.gov/hps/abpp/battles/tn030.htm">Ft. Pillow in 1864</a>. When a Forrest statute was <a href="http://www.blueshoenashville.com/history.html">erected in Nashville a while back</a>, the debate began again over whether the man <a href="http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/foo0int-6">historian Shelby Foote</a> called the one true military genius of that awful war deserved to be commemorated in his home state.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;"></span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#000000;">Now Forrest is back in the news.</span> <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?q=nathan+bedford+forrest&rls=com.microsoft:en-us&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1&um=1&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&ncl=dBkVxgGTsdYBmqMmjB3SjQ5RMedhM&ei=LelbTYu2KIq4sAOTjO2bCg&sa=X&oi=news_result&ct=more-results&resnum=1&ved=0CCgQqgIwAA">Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour</a>, <span style="color:#000000;">a possible GOP presidential candidate, says he won't "denounce" supporters of the license plate for the general. The <em>Associated Press</em> quoted the guv as saying, "I don't go around denouncing people. That's not going to happen."</span></span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;"></span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Strangely enough Idaho and Mississippi often <a href="http://www.independentmail.com/news/2011/feb/16/not-such-shining-idea/">show up in the same paragraph</a>. The two states, worlds apart in so many ways, often compete for worst of show in educational spending or per capita income. Now, we're competing for throwbacks to 1860. Or, as one wit said recently, Idaho has gone from being West of the Mississippi to being the Mississippi of the West. After all we do have our Secesh Creek and there is a town called Dixie. Perhaps <a href="http://www.idahostatejournal.com/news/online/article_754393b6-34e1-11e0-bda9-001cc4c03286.html">we come by this nullificaiton impulse naturally</a>.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">As a truly famous Mississippian, <a href="http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-bio.html">William Faulkner</a>, once famously said: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."</span>
<p> </p>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-27718819997734852722011-02-14T14:00:00.005-07:002011-02-14T14:30:57.803-07:00Getting Serious<span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5573607056983737298" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 134px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSh1wf2c2HMJ_R4eGIibpJPKae3nicWWqPOciveWSvLMGeJ1OSH9DS8pB4Vd7Gt_btj7SbcSruorP0oi_yyq9yMbcNSC-BvTtdOEGll0DQzPwC5-hCwfU4JGZt-WQOfvEG-tHXS4n8V3FH/s200/MW-AI615_dfense_20110211154303_MD.jpg" border="0" />Defense Cuts = Deficit Control</strong></em></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">You'll hear a <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0211/49481.html">lot of politicians making speeches</a> over the next few days regarding the imperative of getting the federal budget under control. Few will, I predict, be arguing for cutting the massive U.S. defense budget. If they're not talking about defense they're just not serious.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">In inflation adjusted terms, <a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/story/pentagon-spending-is-budget-blind-spot-2011-02-14">we're spending more money on the Pentagon</a> than we did during the Vietnam War. We're spending more than we spent in the first year of World War II. No kidding. Talk about something that is not sustainable, yet it is hardly seriously debated in Washington, Boise or Butte.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Give credit to <a href="http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2011/02/14/gates-discuss-defense-spending#">Defense Secretary Robert Gates</a> for starting the conversation about the need to reduce military spending, but then give yourself a reality check. The Gates budget for next year, released today by President Obama, is $553 billion. The cranky old Republican who co-chaired Obama's deficit reduction commission, former <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2011/02/alan-simpson-remembers-reagan.html">Sen. Alan Simpson</a>, calls Gates' effort to reduce - "crappy little cuts."</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;"></span>
<span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-family:Arial;"><span style="color:#000000;">Further reality check - that $533 billion figure does not include what will likely be another $118 billion for actually fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As </span><a href="http://www.macon.com/2011/02/13/1449875/pentagon-budget-multiplies-as.html#">McClatchy reported</a>, <span style="color:#000000;">the Pentagon budget for next year will "</span></span><span style="font-family:arial;color:#000000;">mark the 14th year in a row that Pentagon spending has increased, despite the disappearing presence in Iraq. In dollar terms, Pentagon spending has more than doubled in 10 years. Even adjusted for inflation, the Defense Department budget has risen 65 percent over the past decade."</span></span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Lawrence Korb, a senior Defense Department official in the Reagan Administration, <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2011/02/11/news/economy/lawrence_korb_defense_obama_budget/">argues that the first place to start to trim</a> the Pentagon budget is "reducing or eliminating funding for a number of unnecessary weapons programs, such as V-22 Osprey, rolling back the post-Sept. 11 growth in the ground forces and reducing the number of American forces deployed abroad outside of Iraq and Afghanistan."</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The U.S. <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/five-expensive-us-military-bases-spark-controversy-abroad63988">maintains more than 800 military installations</a> around the world in 46 counties. That contributes just a few bucks to the deficit we all worry about.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#000000;">The American Empire is costly to maintain. Fact in, in the budget language of the day, it is not sustainable. Devotees of Ronald Reagan</span> <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/259034/reagan100-his-restoration-presidency-john-yoo">give him credit for bring the Soviet Union to its knees</a>, <span style="color:#000000;">in part because the old Communist state just couldn't keep spending vast amounts on its military in an effort to keep up with us. </span></span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#000000;">Here an example of part of the problem. </span></span><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Virtually every Congressional district in the country has a financial stake - jobs, bases, contractors - who live or die by the defense budget. Hence this <a href="http://www.dispatchpolitics.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2011/02/14/copy/dodging-a-bullet.html?adsec=politics&sid=101">story from the Columbus, Ohio <em>Dispatch</em></a> - "Central Ohio dodging a bullet on defense cuts."</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The paper says with reference to a proposed new Marine amphibious vehicle set to be manufactured in Ohio: "...lawmakers of both parties are less willing to cut defense spending in their states, fearing that it could lead to a loss of jobs.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;">
<span style="color:#000000;">"'I think it's necessary for our national defense,' Rep. Steve Austria, R-Beavercreek, said of the Marine vehicle. 'A lot of money has been invested in this vehicle.'
</span>
<span style="color:#000000;">"'Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said that 'in some sense, it's what makes the Marines the Marines. You don't just cancel this and waste the investment ... that we've already made as taxpayers. This program needs revamping, it needs updating, it needs perhaps a different direction. But we build on this rather than canceling it.'''</span>
<span style="color:#000000;"></span>
<span style="color:#000000;">Translation for both Republicans and Democrats: don't cut the military budget in my state, but gosh this federal spending really is out of control.</span></span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The vast U.S. military-industrial complex has a vice grip hold on our economy, but in a way that is, there's that word again, unsustainable.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#000000;">We're not competing with Reagan's "evil empire" anymore. Today we are the lone military superpower and have projected our military power around the world much as the British Empire did in the 1800's. As the lone superpower, we certainly spend like a superpower.</span></span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Hope it doesn't bankrupt us.</span></span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;"></span>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-72171935047515161042011-02-10T09:00:00.001-07:002011-02-11T09:08:29.061-07:00Nullification Crisis<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1Yj708XYT-y2hEBKZwpHDcKZ0ilzw_7gMxpig3ENsGm2xVOJL3jbgKYWSDvqu79x34uanYdO6FQW1jYaNYaTlIezT4PFHITbNyyISDAemBUYv6W38Am7qcfhX-bIAw0jfchd0IMrDZLe3/s1600/imagesCACH40VZ.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5572246053503741122" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 159px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1Yj708XYT-y2hEBKZwpHDcKZ0ilzw_7gMxpig3ENsGm2xVOJL3jbgKYWSDvqu79x34uanYdO6FQW1jYaNYaTlIezT4PFHITbNyyISDAemBUYv6W38Am7qcfhX-bIAw0jfchd0IMrDZLe3/s200/imagesCACH40VZ.jpg" border="0" /></a> <span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong>Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing</strong></em></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">In 1832 when the always frisky state of South Carolina objected to tariff legislation passed by the Congress and signed by <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/andrewjackson">President Andrew Jackson</a>, the state's leaders decided they could just ignore the federal act by invoking an "<a href="http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Nullification_Crisis">ordinance of nullification</a>."</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Jackson, not for nothing called "Old Hickory," thought his fellow southerners were nipping a bit heavy into the sour mash, while flaunting the Constitution that he and they were sworn to uphold. The president sent seven U.S. warships to South Carolina waters and Jackson told the state's residents, with a certain decisiveness, that they were flirting with treason.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Asked by a visiting South Carolinian if the president had any message for the good people of the Palmetto State, Jackson replied, give them my compliments and tell them if they follow through with these acts of treason, "I'll hang the first man I can lay my hand on." Soon enough <a href="http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/Nullification.html">South Carolina thought better</a> of this nullification business.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Cooler heads will surely prevail, as well, in frisky Idaho - likely in the state senate - after the Idaho House of Representatives has had its fun with a futile, costly and snicker-producing effort to <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-10/blast-from-the-past-idaho-panel-oks-nullification.html">nullify the federal health care legislation</a>.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Ignoring the official opinion of the state's Republican chief legal and law enforcement officer, <a href="http://media.idahostatesman.com/smedia/2011/01/25/13/11-35557_Response.source.prod_affiliate.36.pdf">Attorney General Lawrence Wasden</a>, who is already suing the federal government over health care, as well as the considered judgment of one of the nation's top Constitutional scholars, <a href="http://www.idahostatesman.com/2011/01/30/1507954/support-for-this-doctrine-is-based.html">Dr. David Adler</a>, the House State Affairs committee voted 14-5 on Thursday to recommend to the full House that Idaho do what South Carolina wanted to do in 1832.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">At least two things are missing here: Historical perspective on the 200-plus year history of our federalist system and the kind of principled political leadership that once in a great while requires elected officials to tell the folks who elected them, sorry, you're just wrong and we can't do that.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The historical perspective goes back to Jackson and even farther. The principle that any state, acting on its own motion, can chose to defy the duly constructed law of the land has been rejected time and time again in American history. The legislature can hold hearings and object, it can pass a non-binding memorial voicing its displeasure, it can sue, as Idaho has, but it just can't decide to ignore federal law. Not possible unless you subscribe to an anarchist interpretation of more than two centuries of American history.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Arkansas in the 1950's tried to defy a federal court order - the law of the land - to desegregate its public schools and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0925.html">Dwight Eisenhower federalized the National Guard</a> to make certain the Constitution was upheld; to avoid anarchy, as Ike said. End of story. States cannot ignore federal law.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">At some point, genuine political leadership requires serious people to step back from these kinds of emotionally charged efforts and shine some light rather than stoke more heat. Understanding that some folks are mighty upset with the federal health care legislation and that many of them showed up to support the legislature's nullification approach does not abrogate an elected official's responsibility to not always play to the crowd.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">One of those testifying yesterday in Idaho said, according to the <em>Associated Press</em> account of the hearing, "We as citizens are tired of being lorded over by representatives. We're not conspiracy theorists. We aren't kooks. No one is going to force me to buy anything." It must be hard, in the face of such passion, to not get along by going along. But, once in a while it must be done.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">In 1946, a very conservative Republican, <a href="http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=t000009">Sen. Robert A. Taft</a> of Ohio, son of the former president, delivered an <a href="http://www.jfkmontreal.com/profiles_in_courage.htm">historic speech at Kenyon College</a> in his home state. Taft sought out the opportunity to publicly oppose the extremely popular <a href="http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/nuremberg.htm">Nazi war crimes trials in Nuremberg</a> that were just then concluding. John F. Kennedy wrote about Taft's political guts in his <a href="http://www.jfklibrary.org/Events-and-Awards/Profile-in-Courage-Award/About-the-Book.aspx">famous book <em>Profiles in Courage</em></a>. Here's part of what the Kennedy Library website says about Taft, a man known in his time as <a href="http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/People_Leaders_Taft.htm">Mr. Republican</a>.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">"To Taft, the [Nazi] defendants were being tried under ex post facto laws (laws that apply retroactively, especially those which criminalize an action that was legal when it was committed). These laws are expressly forbidden in the U.S. Constitution (Article I, section 9 and section 10). Taft viewed the Constitution as the foundation of the American system of justice and felt that discarding its principles in order to punish a defeated enemy out of vengeance was a grave wrong."</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Hardly anyone in America supported Taft's views. He knew his was speaking directly into a hurricane force wind of opposition, yet he courageously stood for principle over political expediency.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">"[Taft] was pilloried in the press, by his constituents, by legal experts, and by his fellow Senators on both sides of the aisle. The fallout from the speech may have also played a small part in his unsuccessful presidential bid in 1948. However, Taft so strongly believed in the wisdom of the Constitution that speaking out was more important than his personal ambitions or popularity. Many years later, William O. Douglas of the Supreme Court [a great liberal] agreed with Taft’s view that the Nuremberg Trials were an unconstitutional use of ex post facto laws."</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Only one Idaho Republican on the House State Affairs Committee, Rep. Eric Anderson of Priest Lake spoke up yesterday and ultimately voted with four Democrats to oppose the nullification proposal.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">"It's an outright defiance of the law," Anderson said. "If we vacate that rule of law, we simply become nothing but a collection of states that decide among themselves that they're going to nullify everything that's inconvenient to them."</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">There is a higher principle at stake here than making a useless statement about a hated health care law. Courage and political leadership, once in a while, requires an elected official to say: "I hear your concern, I may even agree with your concern, but we can't go this far."</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The Idaho State Senate will likely have a chance to take that stand and not follow the Idaho House in making a statement of sound and fury, signifying nothing.</span>
<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;"></span>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-50341382990715443132011-02-10T08:00:00.002-07:002011-02-10T15:12:34.259-07:00Unique Among 50<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw768RmW3bUDdDa78TZZMU_oVf3XnRymhR7UVKxycxEI5py2qit44d-0ea2szefTWf4DJWpXOr3UYkGSb1Mx-YBg9o1_QX0EGhjs0WQ01nzLDqckVc7Nz6J_hDIDb6lMTu73m8cABXGYpw/s1600/NNFCARH7VTMCA7F8KAJCAS3WXMCCA5OTY6ICAD9624NCAP2L0BJCAVOL42CCAID4PGLCA6B0TH6CAL1KZT1CANEDXQDCAGP7YH2CAJVZRYECABJQPNBCAEV9PXNCAZB6RJVCAQ9GUNYCAD9E1T1CADG12SR.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5572070717602745106" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 94px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 113px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw768RmW3bUDdDa78TZZMU_oVf3XnRymhR7UVKxycxEI5py2qit44d-0ea2szefTWf4DJWpXOr3UYkGSb1Mx-YBg9o1_QX0EGhjs0WQ01nzLDqckVc7Nz6J_hDIDb6lMTu73m8cABXGYpw/s200/NNFCARH7VTMCA7F8KAJCAS3WXMCCA5OTY6ICAD9624NCAP2L0BJCAVOL42CCAID4PGLCA6B0TH6CAL1KZT1CANEDXQDCAGP7YH2CAJVZRYECABJQPNBCAEV9PXNCAZB6RJVCAQ9GUNYCAD9E1T1CADG12SR.jpg" border="0" /></a>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJgMbI7fhD4Ym_fGsOUWvxkDpt2e3JZLbe9MXwEkpWbPOUiuZioa9L7YHz2iSkLIEihGnWt3DnXAMGwFzEIPVFoQpGBhgiOQo7NQbUDpiZZ6G7BfMhzYr5Bygx9sZYuwlKAL7VlLJCXFac/s1600/cap9.jpg"><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5572070193683211714" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 130px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJgMbI7fhD4Ym_fGsOUWvxkDpt2e3JZLbe9MXwEkpWbPOUiuZioa9L7YHz2iSkLIEihGnWt3DnXAMGwFzEIPVFoQpGBhgiOQo7NQbUDpiZZ6G7BfMhzYr5Bygx9sZYuwlKAL7VlLJCXFac/s200/cap9.jpg" border="0" /></strong></em></span></a><span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong> Nebraska's Unicameral</strong></em></span>
<p><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-family:arial;color:#000000;">The great <a href="http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=n000139">Nebraska Senator George Norris</a> (that's him in the photo) had many ideas during his long years of public service. His ideas and his enduring reputation for decency and integrity mark him as one of the truly great figures in American politics and one of the best ever U.S. Senators.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-family:arial;color:#000000;">Among other things, Norris was the "Father of the TVA" - the <a href="http://www.tva.com/abouttva/history.htm">Tennessee Valley Authority</a>. Unusual for a man from the prairie land of McCook, Nebraska to care about rural economic development in the American south, but Norris was a different kind of senator. He didn't believe <a href="http://www.tva.gov/heritage/titans/">auto builder Henry Ford should gain control</a> of the vast hydropower resources in the Tennessee Valley and fought for public development of the resource. Norris Dam, a TVA project, carries his name. Norris also successfully pushed the <a href="http://newdeal.feri.org/tva/tva10.htm">Rural Electrification Act</a>, instrumental in bringing electricity to much of rural American.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-family:arial;color:#000000;">A progressive Republican, Norris was a <a href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,757250,00.html">huge supporter of Franklin Roosevelt</a>. In 1936, he ran as an Independent and FDR famously said: "If I were a citizen of Nebraska, regardless of what party I belonged to, I would not allow George Norris to retire from the U. S. Senate."</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">One of Norris's most interesting ideas resulted in my home state of Nebraska having the only one house, non-partisan state legislature in the nation. Nebraskans call it simply "<a href="http://nebraskalegislature.gov/about/on_unicameralism.php">the unicameral</a>."</span></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Norris personally conceived of the idea of eliminating one house of the state legislature - he said it was just inefficient and a wasteful duplication to have two houses doing the same thing - and, after he campaigned for the idea statewide working through two sets of tires, <a href="http://nebraskalegislature.gov/about/ou_history.php">Nebraska voters overwhelming approved</a> the unicameral legislature in 1934. The single house has 49 members who are called Senators. The 35-year-old <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2023831_2023829_2025230,00.html">Speaker of the Nebraska legislature</a> was recently profiled in TIME magazine as one of the nation's 40 top leaders under 40 years of age.</span></p><p><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The Nebraska system is far from perfect. No political system is. But the next time you read of a huge fight between the House and the Senate in your legislature, and those fights happen in 49 states, you'll not be reading about Nebraska. At least, George Norris took care of that problem.</span><span style="font-size:0;"></p></span>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4308346147521126136.post-80485264001935019992011-02-09T05:35:00.012-07:002011-02-09T08:56:16.071-07:00Colonel Roosevelt<span style="font-size:130%;color:#ff0000;"><em><strong><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5571667920367135394" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 129px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 181px" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA4FflSVy4hNUGzu2vLg9uA-eSdd8Fq611QSW9ZYSMT4Li92f_urc33njshAaVB6s4ZZ5R3Kz8Iz5N8OO6wKoMKmc266i0WD22AJjFakVBFkK5tLW1vae1mUl4aChJ2Fs30o-29hSu63Wd/s200/TR.jpg" border="0" />The Most Famous Man in the World</strong></em></span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">We have become accustom to former presidents writing their memoirs, establishing the presidential library and undertaking a good cause here and there. That's what ex-presidents do.</span>
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<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Jimmy Carter has led an exemplary post-presidential life and has, with single-minded determination, come close to <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/15/AR2011011500420.html">eradicating a deadly disease</a> in Africa. <a href="http://www.clintonfoundation.org/">Bill Clinton's Foundation</a> has focused on AIDS and third-world development with considerable success. George W. Bush is still settling into the post-White House role and reportedly his recent book has become a best-seller on, of all places, <a href="http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/126021/">college campuses</a>.</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">As impressive as they have been, none of these recent ex-presidents come anywhere close to matching the life <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/theodoreroosevelt">Theodore Roosevelt</a> lived from 1909 to 1919. He packed a near lifetime of activity, scholarship, authorship and politics - including his own and many other campaigns - into the ten years <em>after</em> he left the White House.</span>
<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">This amazing Roosevelt history is superbly recounted in Edmund Morris's new biography - <em><a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2010/nov/21/entertainment/la-ca-edmund-morris-20101121">The Colonel</a></em>. The volume is the third in Morris's life of T.R. and it will doubtless stand for a long, long time as the authoritative source on the larger-than-life personality who in his time was called "the most famous man in the world."</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">One things our recent ex-presidents are loath to do is criticize their successors. Clinton and Bush 43 have been particularly careful - we can excuse Clinton's role in stumping for his wife - not to mix their former status with current politics. Teddy had no such reservations. He literally sought every opportunity to bash his own hand-picked successor, <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/williamhowardtaft">William Howard Taft</a>, and the man who wrenched the progressive label from him <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/woodrowwilson">Woodrow Wilson</a>.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Yet even without his deep and prolonged forays into partisan politics post-White House, Roosevelt would have been a world celebrity on the order of, say, Bono or Michael Jackson. The guy was a rock star before we had rock stars. He seemed to know everyone and write about everything.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">The press of the day covered his African safari, his European tour, complete with marching in the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQRzmvr5ZxE">funeral procession of England's Edward VII</a>, his near-death expedition into the Amazon jungle and, of course, his 1912 run for the presidency that included <a href="http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/theodore-roosevelt-shot-in-milwaukee">Roosevelt being shot in Milwaukee</a>. Were this life a novel, it simply would not be believable.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">We have certainly had supremely accomplished presidents since Theodore Roosevelt. <a href="http://millercenter.org/president/wilson">Wilson earned a PhD</a>, served as a university president and was a fine writer before the presidency. Herbert Hoover was a <a href="http://www.americanheritage.com/people/presidents/hoover_herbert.shtml">world-class engineer</a> who also wrote well. John Kennedy won, with a little help from <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2007/11/07/ted-sorensen-famous-ghostwriting-speechwriter-lawyer/">Ted Sorensen</a>, <a href="http://www.jfklibrary.org/Events-and-Awards/Profile-in-Courage-Award/About-the-Book.aspx">the Pulitzer Prize</a>. None could touch the breadth and depth of <a href="http://www.nysun.com/arts/rough-writer/5279/">Roosevelt's writing</a> - books, hundreds of magazine pieces, essays, speeches and letters, thousand and thousands of letters.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">This is a great book about a great man and, a little prediction, Morris will win another Pulitzer for producing what, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/books/18book.html">as the <em>New York Times</em> said</a>, "deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject."</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">In the end, as with much great literature, T.R. story is tragedy. Roosevelt's enless agitating for American involvement in World War I served, in Morris's telling, to glorify the tragic, wasteful, useless war that came to define the 20th Century. The senseless slaughter - only later did Roosevelt come to realize that war is not glory - also cost the life of the youngest Roosevelt, <a href="http://www.theodoreroosevelt.org/life/familytree/Quentin.htm">Quentin</a>, who died flying over German lines in 1918.</span>
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<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:130%;color:#000000;">Quentin's father, worn out and dispirited, died the next year. Theodore Roosevelt was only 60; the youngest man to ever serve as president and still and forever one of the greatest. </span>
<span style="color:#000000;"></span>Marc Johnsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10460890437605750482noreply@blogger.com