U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

Remember when the only reason to watch the Winter Olympics was the hockey. Some people liked the figure skating but I grew up wondering when the American skier would fall down. Billy Kidd, our only medal hope, usually fell or finished 7th. Now in Vancouver, the United States has a slight three medal lead over Germany and could actually win the whole thing! It must be the cool outfits.

On the cultural front, just got Johnny Cash's last album in his American series "Ain't No Grave", where a stricken man sings out his life. The series produced by Rick Rubin consisted of Johnny just recording any songs he liked and Rubin would re-digitalize the cuts to Johnny's approval. I wish other artists did the same thing to capture what disappears in their rehearsals and from their albums. From the past albums, one of my favorites was "My Own Personal Jesus".

On DVD, David Straithern appears as the judge in Heavens Fall, a film about the Scottsboro Case. Watching it, the whites all reminded me of today's Republicans.

Now the consensus in Washington is that Republicans will take both the House and the Senate this year. My advice to Democrats is to move all 290 laws passed by the House and being filibustered by the Senate Republicans through reconciliation. All the major reforms for our financial system are all there. The only missing reform is Immigration Reform. But the rest would be an amazing accomplishment and the rest of the country would get a sense of how productive Congress has actually been.

We are waiting for another snowstorm in Washington. So if Bob Dylan and Joan Baez could brace the snow to sing at the White House, how many Republicans will not make the health reform summit? I think the standard of courage is a bit lower.

The newly minted Senator Scott Brown has instantly alienated his supporters by voting against the filibuster on the Senate Jobs Bill. This is the $18 billion low-end version stripped of all the tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations. An interesting fact--the House passed the Jobs bill in June and this was the Senate version, which had been bottled up ever since. Republicans wanted to filibuster the bill because lobbyists were angry with them because Reid stripped out all their goodies. Remember we're talking about people wanting to kill a jobs bill in the middle of a Depression--keep that in mind.

Republican Virginia delegate Marshall blamed handicapped children on abortion and entertained the crowds by citing Exodus as his medical text. This is part of the local debate to defund Planned Parenthood, which provides needed medical services to rural women in this state. Our closet Christian fundamentalist governor Bob McDonnell vows to veto any funding for Planned Parenthood. He also signed an executive order making it legal for the state to discriminate against gays, thus withdrawing Tim Kaine's 2006 order to the contrary.

Republican Governors are on a roll. Mitch Daniels, who was head of George W's OMB, has mebarked on dismantling his state's education and health system. He warns that all governors will have to follow suit. Our own Virginia governor did it the same day, making sharp cuts in education and health services but in a stealth manner without a public debate. Maryland's Republican legislators were trying to do the same with regards to Maryland's educational system.

Down East magazine, the grandfather of regional and state magazines, reports that evangelicals are quietly beginning to dominate Maine. We saw how they were mobilized to defeat marriage equality but the magazine reports that evangelicals are claiming that they will take care of all their parishioners' needs. I guess this is the Republican gameplan for all of us.

Other bloggers have reported what I had observed about the so-called Conservative Comeback--it's all old people. Political activism has increased among the 65-82 year olds, the demographic Republicans dominate. I received bitter e-mails from the colonostomy conservatives when I pointed out that Ron Paul was their new leader. They claim Ron Paul filled CPAC at the end with young college kids in order to "rig" the vote. Normally Mitt Romney rigs the vote. What we have is the beginning of a genuine war between generations. The senior citizens have theirs and intend to keep it, while younger Americans can go hang.

After finishing Patti Smith's memoir and Keith Haring's Journals, I began to think that we may be on the verge of a new counter-cultural revolution. Keith Haring wrote about how fragile life appeared to him when he was in his early 20s and how global issues seemed to overwhelm him. I can imagine a younger generation feeling the same way today. Employment among the young is at astronomical levels and soon we will have an open debate in this country of stripping them of all entitlements enjoyed by an older generation. I can not see--especially with the emphasis the right puts on political violence--that the young may begin to act out their frustrations. The push back may come in increased social restrictions being pushed by the Religious Right.

The young Ron Paul supporters at CPAC cheered his anti-imperial message. Ron Paul laid out his historic position that we are spending $1 trillion on the military-terrorist complex and have hundreds of bases around the world, which contribute nothing to the ntaional interest. The loudest cheers were for withdrawal from Iraq, Afghanistan and the rest of the Middle East. This was in sharp contrast to the Bush-Cheney crowd's attacks on Obama for national security and the calls to torture. It is Paul's anti-war message has been why the Campiagn for Liberty has won support on college campuses.

For Glenn Beck fans, I found an oldy but goody from my library, which undercuts his belief that Fascism comes from the Left. I don't know whether this book is published anymore but it traces the roots of fascism in Italy, Germany, France and England and their intellectual followers. The paperback version was published in 1973 with an introduction by Stephen Spender--The Appeal of Fascism by Alastair Hamilton. Hamilton recounts all the right-wing syncophants for fascism and why it appealed to intellectuals. A few years later we got Jean Francois Revel's Totalitarian Temptation to go after the Left.

Glenn Beck has labelled Scott Brown a "progressive Republican", which is his version of a curse. I finally understood Ron Paul's disdain for Woodrow Wilson. As he explained to CPAC, it was Wilson's crackdown on dissent and the arrest of anti-war protestors. He went on at length to explain the case of Eugene V. Debs, who remained in prison until Warren Harding pardoned him. Beck's Wilson phobia is more rooted in economics and his support of democracy. It has nothing to do with a crackdown on civil liberties. But never fear Beck had little good things to say about Republican Presidents. He hates Theodore Roosevelt and claims Abraham Lincoln did not do enough to save "state's rights". I wonder why not. George W was a big spender--which he was. The only common President both Beck and Paul liked was Calvin Coolidge.

But as I have written, this all is a sideshow. Today, it's been reported that Wall Street and the Banks are pouring money into the Republicans. In the Senate, Republicans are trying to get a $1 trillion tax break for major corporations. Remember these people created zero jobs over the last decade and only 26% of them pay any tax at all on their income. What we are seeing is the alignment of corporate America supported by the oldest generation to finally bring the country down. Alan Greenspan, devotee of Ayn Rand, commented how unequal the recovery has been. The inequality in our economic system will continue to grow if these new policies are adopted. It's clear that the marching orders to Republican Governors are to thoroughly dismantle any remnants of the social welfare state. The fact that no advanced political economy can survive in this manner totally escapes these people.

A little flap has occurred in Washington over Brookings' wargame over Iran. The premise was that the United States would be dragged into a war if the Israelis attacked Iran's nuclear sites. The various outcomes were not encouraging and that was what triggered the conservative reaction. Now having worked since the late 1980s to support democratic change in Iran, I don't take a backseat to anyone on this issue. But a few things have emerged that have tempered my views on the so-called Iranian nuclear threat. The resistance exposed the Natanz facility in 2002. Now eight years later, Iran has only been able to enrich uranium to 19.7%, far below the high levels required to produce a nuclear device. At this rate, I will be in a nursing home when they actually produce a bomb or I'm more convinced--they need to buy one. In my view, the outstanding military threat posed by Iran to Israel is conventional--ballistic missiles with conventional warheads--and terrorism through their support of Hizbullah and Hamas. Even though 70% of Americans believe Iran has nuclear weapons, it seems very unlikely they will acquire them anytime within the next decade. So all the warhawks, in my view, are deranged and should be shut down. We went through this nonsense with Iraq and all we did was create an Iranian colony.

One of the more disappointing events has been the publication of the OPR report on the DOJ lawyers who wrote the torture memos. While Yoo and Bybee got slaps on the hand, there are no recommendations that they be disbarred. I know the Obama White House would like this all to be in the past, but what is to prevent another set of knuckleheads reviving torture as an instrument of American foreign (or domestic) policy? There are no penalties for going back to a policy that disgraced this country and we have seen that 54% of Americans still believe it might be necessary to torture terrorist suspects under some circumstances.

Given my daily quota of right-wing e-mails, I'm amazed at how scared conservatives are. I am amazed that they can actually leave their homes. That's probably because they think the ceiling is going to collapse on them, also. The list of what they fear is amazing: minorities, gays, taxes, Obama's "socialism", the national debt (they ignored before), Iran, terrorists, Islam,climate change legislation, health care reform, gay marriage, public schools, the confiscation of guns,universities, science,and the list continues. There is virtually nothing they do not fear.

I'm reminded that conservatives were hesitant to fight Hitler and were absolutely convinced we had lost the Cold War. Their love of Whittaker Chambers was not because he fingered Alger Hiss but because he was a homely man, probably gay, who fought an Ivy League educated, attractive man and won and still wrote how Western culture had so deteriorated that we already had lost the Cold War. I even heard born-again conservative David Horowitz this last year actually proclaim that we had lost the Cold War and that the communist agenda for America was coming to fruition. One has to be reminded that when Reagan decided to win the Cold War, he had to enlist a small army of social democrats, former liberals and labor activists to actually fight in the trenches because none of the conservatives had any experience in standing up to communists. The same applies to the so-called fight against Islamic Fundamentalism--conservatives already believe this fight is lost and that Obama is accelerating the defeat. I'm still trying to guess where Islamists have scored their great geopolitical victories.