Bumper Sticker Christians

Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker:

Ordain Women

Or stop dressing like them

that was right up there with our old family favorite from the 1970s, when Phil Esposito was scoring at a goal-a-game clip for the Boston Bruins:

Jesus Saves

But Espo knocks it in on the rebound

I may well not be the person to critique religious doctrine and practices, since the church militant stopped speaking for me many years ago, and I had my quadrennial fill of fundamentalism during the last election cycle. But the spiritual side of my childhood faith resonates still, as I wonder: who are we? Where did we come from? Why are we here? And, increasingly, where are we going? I still love the music, the blended sound of organ and human voice. I love the beauty of the churches and the language of King James, and I can still recite much of the liturgy by heart.

But the doctrinal exclusiveness of many sects and their dogmatic definition of the good life turned me away. It is a complicated history. Churches have been both the essential drivers of civil and human rights and the great impediments to universal understanding. And the backlashes against women and gays, which are particularly strong in the three monotheistic religions, strike me as immoral. We express righteous outrage at the treatment of women in other societies but silently tolerate our own Taliban. In most cultures through most of history, women were essential members of the religious communion. As they should be.

Honk if you love Jesus

Modern Malefactors

I was going to decry the folly of John Boehner (R, Ohio), who occupies the Speaker’s chair and appears to think of himself as co-president, even though his party could not even carry Ohio. But behind Boehner – and often in opposition to him – stands the implacable right wing of the Republican Party. And behind them stand the vested interests of finance, whose pockets are stuffed with money and politicians – people like the Koch Brothers, the most venal twosome in America, and their lackeys like Sarah Palin, the most ludicrous. These people simply want to do away with government, which is the one thing that stands between them and a return to the robber-baron era of the 19^th century, when the country was dominated by those whom Teddy Roosevelt called “the malefactors of great wealth." How else can we explain their insistence that any additional budget revenues must come from a source other than taxes? Taxes are the way governments raise money. And right now the government needs money, not just to rein in the national debt, but more importantly, to rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. With corporations sitting on historic amounts of cash, the economy in a shambles because of the criminal behavior of the private financial system, and the world facing a grueling recession, it is time for our government to restore our highways and bridges, our public schools and universities, our national parks and transport systems.

This will cost money, but it will put people to work now creating an investment that will benefit the entire country for years to come.

Life Force

The phone rang late Thursday. “The doctor called from the emergency room,” my sister said. “Mum has huge clots on her legs and no pulse in her lower body. He said to come soon.” Our mother is 90, and while her spirit is irrepressible, her physical health has long been failing.

At the hospital the dire news was reiterated: her legs were virtually dead, she had a barely discernible pulse, and gangrene seemed imminent. While diagnosis was based on palpable visual evidence, it had not been vetted through her personal doctor, who is affiliated with a different hospital. His note explaining Mum’s history had inexplicably disappeared on its way to the ER, which was too bad because she has endured her startling symptoms for many years.

The doctors were good. The diagnosis was wrong. The system, which is corporate- rather than patient-centered, made understanding our mother’s unique situation almost impossible, and we, who have no medical expertise, had to translate between medical systems that did not communicate with each other.

Still, Mum’s health is failing, and we tried to prepare for what was to come. By 3 p.m. yesterday we had arranged for her return to her apartment with 24-hour care and hospice. She had eaten nothing in four days and slept a lot. “Let her know food is available,” the doctor said, “but don’t force her. She’ll know what she wants.”

“Mum’s had a good run,” I added portentously. “I think she’s trying to tell us something.”

At 3:15, she woke up and asked for a pizza.

Birth and Carbon

Last week the Pew Research Center announced that in 2011 the U.S. witnessed its lowest birth rate in history. The greatest decline was among immigrants, particularly Mexican women, which undercuts the image of hordes of Hispanics slipping across the border to have American babies. The news unsettled pro-growth conservatives, represented by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who equated America’s future as a great power with the continuation of “our demographic dynamism.” This is an idea whose time has gone. In the 19^th century American newspapers, in small towns and big cities, constantly beat the drum for population growth as a sign of greatness. Numbers mattered, not quality of life.

With 7 billion people on Earth, it’s time for a new model, particularly in light of a second report last week that record global carbon emissions have rendered current planetary warming targets already obsolete.

Douthat attributed lower birth rates to “a decadence . . . that privileges the present over the future [and] embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.”

This is supercilious tripe. Historically women had more children because mortality rates were high, child labor was a critical economic asset, birth control was ineffective, and women had less control of their own lives.

The current trend toward smaller families is because young people want to provide their children a better life, are fearful of the world they will enter, and worry about the fate of the earth.

This is not selfish. It’s responsible.

Stumble of the Week

• Maine. When I applauded Maine for the diversity of its political system, I noted that its GOP governor had been a disaster. He is not alone. Tea Party Republicans have at least one more loon: party chairman Charlie Webster announced that Obama’s victory was a fraud because “in some parts of the state, there were dozens of black people who came into vote. Nobody in town knew them.” While it is certainly true that African Americans, who compose 1.3% of Maine’s population, would have stood out in rural towns, there must have been a lot of them trucked in to swing the election. Obama beat Romney by over 100,000 votes of the 700,000 cast. The Obama election team may be ruthless, but it isn’t stupid, and the image of busloads of Blacks heading north on the Maine Turnpike defies reason. Webster’s claims have never been validated, nor has the question of how he became GOP chairman ever been adequately answered.

• Global Warming doubters. 2012 has proved (again) to be one of the hottest years on record, and Arctic icecap melting outpaced both 2011’s rate and predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

• Common Sense.  By a vote of 138 to 9 (with 41 abstentions) the UN granted Palestine nonmember observer status. If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, why did the U.S. vote against the resolution, which isolates Hamas and reaffirms the two-state solution? Do Israel and the US think they can choose the Palestinians’ negotiating team? When elections were last held, Hamas won. It’s time to get real.

Dorian Gray

It turns out that jellyfish may hold the secret of eternal youth. I had thought it was mirrors. Each morning, when I look in the mirror, I see . . . me. The face staring back is the same one I have encountered for years. The daily changes are imperceptible and, of course, mirrors don’t lie. Aging pretty well, I smugly think.

Actually, mirrors do lie. But passport photos don’t, as I discovered yesterday when I got pictures for my trip next year to Burma and Vietnam. When the clerk handed me the 2”x2” portraits, I looked into an almost unrecognizable face – with the lines of an old man, yellowing teeth and gray hair that my passport swears is brown. This face looked nothing like the one I hard earlier seen in the mirror. No wonder strangers call me “sir.”

“You know what the Brits say,” said my friend David, who had had a similar experience, “’When you resemble your passport photograph, you are in need of the journey.’”

Enter Turritopsis dohrnii, the “immortal jellyfish” featured in the Times Magazine. This tiny invertebrate lives a circular life: it grows and then ages in reverse, returning to its earliest stage of life, from which it sets off again.  Jellyfish are more genetically similar to us than we might want to admit, which bodes well for stem-cell research. But the real excitement is the immortality bit.

Shin Kubota, a Japanese scientist who has studied Turritopsis for 40 years, believes we can learn its secret. But “before we achieve immortality,” he warns, “we must evolve first. The heart is not good.”

The General Store

A recent survey named Wal-Mart employees the lowest-paid corporate workforce in America. This was not especially surprising, as the giant retailer has a solid reputation for low wages, lousy benefits and class-action lawsuits brought by disgruntled “associates.” The survey reminded me of the time I published a weekly newspaper, and we opposed Wal-Mart’s plans to build a store on the edge of town. While our editorials resonated with most readers, who worried about the relentless sprawl the development portended, others called us shills for local merchants or elitist snobs. Wal-Mart won, as it generally does, but I like to think we made a difference to the final product.

And yet Wal-Mart is also the country’s most popular and successful retailer, patronized by 125 million people each week. It is the world’s largest employer, and its revenues trail only those of Exxon and Shell. Hilary Clinton once sat on its board, and George Will called it: “the most prodigious job-creator in the history of the private sector in this galaxy,” one that saves shoppers $200 billion annually.

You can find almost anything you want in a Wal-Mart, which is how I felt in the 1950s when I went to the general store in my grandmother’s town with my allowance in my pocket. I took my time deciding what to choose, knowing I couldn’t have everything on the shelves.

Maybe it’s just my nostalgia, but the excitement of choosing something seems to have been lost in a world where we can’t ever seem to have enough.

Stevens

Abraham Lincoln isn’t even in the pivotal scene in Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s tribute to the 16^th president and his Herculean efforts to pass the 13^th Amendment. That scene belongs to Thaddeus Stevens, the iron-hard Congressman from Pennsylvania who led the radical Republicans in the House. When his Congressional opponents demand to know whether Stevens supports, not just emancipation, but racial equality, the hall falls silent as he struggles to answer. He had waged a long and lonely battle for both, and he had, as everyone there undoubtedly knew, a black common-law wife. In the gallery Mary Lincoln’s African-American maid sits expectantly beside the first lady. When Stevens declares that he speaks only for legal emancipation, a tear runs down her cheek, as pandemonium breaks out below: the most uncompromising man in America has publicly denied his most fundamental belief to save the amendment to which he had devoted his political life. In one short scene, Spielberg (and Tommy Lee Jones) resurrect and humanize a man whom history maligned and then forgot. After the war, Stevens pushed for equality for the ex-slaves and led impeachment proceedings against President Andrew Johnson. But his unbending opposition to racism, and his contempt for those who abetted it, did not sit well with a nation that wanted its most destructive war to be gone with the wind. Stevens became the fanatic with a clubfoot and a cold heart, the foil to Lincoln, the generous martyr. But Lincoln was dead, and the price the nation paid for vilifying Stevens and the radical Republicans was 100 more years of black oppression.

Who Elected Grover Norquist Anything?

Senator Saxby Chambliss, (R) Georgia, suggested last week that he might renege on the “taxpayer protection pledge,” which has been a litmus test for Republican politicians for over 25 years. Dreamed up in 1986 by Grover Norquist, and signed by 95% of all GOP federal officeholders, including Chambliss, the pledge requires signees to vote against any tax increase in whatever costume slippery liberals try to dress it. Naturally, Mitt Romney was the first presidential candidate to sign the pledge, which he had refused to sign as governor of Massachusetts. Every other Republican hopeful, except Jon Huntsman, followed suit. This kind of lockstep simple-mindedness is at the root of Congressional gridlock. It is the main reason we have to watch John Boehner feign bipartisanship while robotically repeating that Republicans will oppose any deficit plan that increases taxes on anyone – any plan, in other words, that is actually bipartisan.

It is mind-boggling that Norquist has gained such power by enforcing political thoughtlessness – not just on taxes but on the role of government itself. His most famous utterance, “I am not in favor of abolishing government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub" – with its pleasant image of drowning babies – continues to be smugly quoted by politicians who have spent their professional lives feeding at the public trough.

Perhaps it’s finally dawning on Chambliss and others that we would have a better government if those who live off it treated it with more respect.

Israel 56 Palestine 2

“There is no nation on earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders,” said Barack Obama in response to Israel’s retaliation against Hamas last week, and that is certainly true (although many countries have had to). “The tactic is deterrence. Our strategy is survival,” wrote Michael Oren Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. “Bound by its genocidal theology and crude anti-Semitism, Hamas cannot be induced to make peace. But it can be deterred from war.”

Whether Israel is acting within the legal and moral parameters of war and self-defense is a matter of opinion. What is a fact, however, is that Israeli firepower is killing non-combatants at 28 times the rate of Hamas rockets. Israeli and U.S. diplomats assert that this is a price that must be paid for a short-term cease-fire and an unsustainable peace.

No “Just War” theory justifies the killing of non-combatants in such a lopsided ratio. In a fascinating series last week, philosopher Jeff McMahon discussed current efforts to modernize the theory, which dates to Saint Augustine, “in ways that will bring it into closer congruence with the morality of war.” But the more we try to do so, the more we see that moral war is an oxymoron – 75 million people were killed in World War II, two-thirds of them non-combatants. That was “the good war.”

It seems inadequate simply to give thanks that I who write this and you who read it have not been innocent casualties in the insanity of war, so let's pledge to work to stop the carnage.

Cutting the Grass

The inevitable happened again again last week: Hamas began launching missiles into southern Israel; and the Israelis unleashed a furious response that produced hundreds of Palestinian casualties for that of each Israeli. Images of dead children, wounded non-combatants, and physical carnage filled the world’s newspapers, as the great powers called for a ceasefire and the proxy fighters dug in for more. One reason the almost-seven-decade war in the Middle East seems so insoluble, at least to me, is that the combatants are in so many respects mirror images of each other. Israelis and Palestinians are fighting for their survival and for what each insists is its homeland. Each carries deep wounds from their histories of unspeakable mistreatment, including genocide and forced Diasporas. Each has a collective story, forged over time, that insists on a right of return. Yet that story insists that the legitimacy of one negates the legitimacy of the other.

Each insists it is fighting a just war, which vindicates the use of horrendous practices in its pursuit. The Palestinians fire rockets indiscriminately into Israel. The Israelis respond with a disproportionate ferocity that, despite their sophisticated weaponry, kills hundreds of non-combatants. They call their tactic of periodically decapitating the Hamas infrastructure “cutting the grass.”

This is a war of missiles and bullets, blood and death. But it is also a war of the language of justification, which goes back at least to St. Augustine and which has rendered creative thinking impossible. Tomorrow I want to ask if it is logically possible for both sides to be fighting a “just war?”

Stumble of the Week

Personhood. Since the Supreme Court has declared corporations to be people, it stands to reason that they can be criminals as well, and yesterday British Petroleum pled guilty to 11 felonies in connection with the fatal oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico two years ago. BP will pay $4.5 billion in fines and stands to lose up to $21 billion more for violations of the Clean Water Act. Three of its employees have also been indicted. Unlike other kinds of people, however, a corporation cannot go to jail, so BP has instead returned to profitability and increased its dividend. There is ongoing debate as to whether that is a sign of rehabilitation or recidivism. Finally, while felons lose their right to vote, BP can continue to give millions of dollars to those who promise to vote on its behalf. Right-wing conspiracy theorists are having a field day connecting the dots from the Petraeus affair to the Benghazi incident. I myself am on to a somewhat larger story, one that traces a devious line directly from Paula Broadwell to Benghazi to Nairobi to the Clintons’ murder of Vince Foster to the LBJ single-bullet cover-up to John Wilkes Booth to Aaron Burr’s 1807 indictment for treason. Democrats all, they have been funded by a secret cabal of secular humanists, from the Marquis de Sade to George Soros, whose unwavering goal is to impose the party’s alien ideology and elitist values on an innocent America. Think big, Krauthammer. Think DaVinci Code. I’ll keep you posted.

A Skunk at the Oil Party

Gone are the days when we asked of the Arab world, “How did our oil get under your sand?” Now we are relentless in our quest for energy independence, and recent forecasts indicate that we will achieve it within a few years. Who knew that, while the presidential candidates bashed each other over who would develop fossil fuels faster, we were already exporting more oil products than we imported? We are expected to overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil producer in five years, and Russia as the top gas producer by 2015. Only China produces more coal than we do. A future of no more gas lines, no more US warships escorting Mideast tankers, no more energy blackmail has been America’s dream since the 1970s. We now really can turn our backs on the world. All of which puts Barack Obama in something of a bind.

The forecasts assume development of the natural gas locked in our shale deposits, increased oil drilling and, of course, coal. In other words, we must tear up our ground, drill in our water and remove the tops of our mountains to replace Middle Eastern oil.

Both parties made economic growth the mantra of their campaigns, and Obama will be expected to deliver – to consumers, to labor, to business. The costs of doing so went unmentioned during the campaign. No talk of climate change, of carbon emissions, of pollution.

But the long-term trends of such dependence are clear and serious. Environmentalists voted for the president in huge numbers, and he owes us a serious discussion about alternatives to conventional growth.

Randy Generals

As someone who never made it out of the enlisted ranks in his military career, I don’t have a good grasp on the recent behavior of the general staff. But with a second Afghanistan commander-in-chief in limbo for what is being deemed “flirtatious” behavior, others are reacting to the unexpected hormonal explosions. “It’s the damned drones,” said a person not authorized to speak for the Pentagon. “With more and more of the real fighting controlled by technocrats at an airbase outside Las Vegas, instead of by commanders at the front, the number of testosterone-displacement-syndrome cases has risen sharply. This is a serious problem, and video games and authorized biographies are only part of the solution.”

Several potential 2016 presidential candidates also wasted little time in weighing in.

Happy to finally be able to explain why someone as belligerent as he is took a series of draft deferments during the Vietnam War, Newt Gingrich said, “The military is the only place left in America where adultery is still a crime . . . except, of course, in Callista’s and my house since I made my peace with God.”

“Crime or no crime,” retorted Rick Santorum, “the real problem here is contraception,” which he called “nothing but a license to commit sin.”

Paul Ryan reassured the Joint Chiefs of Staff that he has “binders full of women” left over from his last campaign.

Flying 42,000 feet above the fray in her Boeing 757, Hilary Clinton was unavailable for comment. As was Bill.

Herman Cain enlisted. He can now be reached at @Herman@fortbragg.gov.

Principles and Pragmatism

As I drove northeast into Maine, listening, when I could stand it, to talk radio’s toxic spew, I wondered whether Maine’s diverse political composition might provide a blueprint for a fractured nation to move forward together. The first step is to turn off the hatemongers, those who make a living demonizing their opponents and inciting their followers to make it personal. The antidote to bad ideas is not personal attacks. It is better ideas. The response to lies is not bigger lies but an honest effort to find the truth. The role of journalism is not simply to tell us what each candidate said but to analyze the truth of their claims.

But then what? How can we reach common ground without compromising our principles? How do people like me, who find much of the current Republican platform abhorrent, bridge the divide? One answer is to honor basic principles – our own and others’.

For pragmatists, accommodation is a first principle. It is not a bad thing to have leaders who understand the importance of compromises that will enable small steps forward. But core principles are, by definition, not negotiable. We must determine which those are for us and keep fighting for them. That’s what Lincoln did, and Churchill.

We must be sure that the principles on which we stand are too vital for us to give up and too important for us to give in. And if we lose, we must keep fighting for them without scorching the earth.

MaineStream

As I drove east through Ohio and Pennsylvania after Election Day, listening to Rush Limbaugh spew his relentless rhetoric of hate-filled racist and nativist venom, delivered in Stepinfetchit dialect and Latino accent, I thought, what hope have we of coming together? And what would it look like if we did? As I entered Maine (where Limbaugh has a big radio audience), I wondered if a piece of the answer might be here. Maine has been a reliably blue state in presidential elections for 20 years, although it had earlier been solidly Republican (one of two states to vote for Alf Landon in Roosevelt’s 1936 landslide). But consider:

• Its two senators are moderate Republican women, although Independent Angus King, a popular former governor, will replace the retiring Olympia Snow.
• Its governor is a Tea Party Republican, elected with just 38% in a three-way race.
• While both members of Congress are Democrats, one is a liberal woman, the other the only New England member of the conservative Blue Dog Coalition.
• The state legislature is narrowly Republican.
• After rejecting same-sex marriage in 2009, Maine voters approved it last week.
• It has implemented one of the country’s most successful dam-removal programs.

But Maine is not some political nirvana. Its governor has been disastrous, and an unholy alliance of left-wing demagoguery and corporate greed killed a broad-based sustainable forestry initiative several years ago. So what lesson can we take from its kaleidoscopic political landscape that produces disproportionately good candidates across a spectrum of strongly held beliefs?

I’ll try to answer that tomorrow.

Stumble of the Week

Karl Rove. “Congrats to @KarlRove on blowing $400 million this cycle. Every race @CrossroadsGPS ran ads in, the Republicans lost. What a waste of money” – tweet from Donald Trump, who should know a stumble when he sees one (but doesn’t). Rove’s political groups gave $127 million to Romney and $10 million to defeat Sherrod Brown in Ohio, where Rove played a particularly seedy role – or roles – as an “outside” fundraiser, a political insider and a Fox News commentator. When the network declared Ohio for Obama, Rove had a conniption and then an on-air fight with the Fox (!) staff. Results: Rove’s groups lost one of one presidential, 10 of 12 senate, and four of nine house races. Common Ground. Amid all the talk of bipartisanship, consider this: In Obama’s first term, Congressional Republicans tried to kill 70 percent of all bills before a vote and made more filibusters than had been made over six decades after WWII – an era that included intense opposition to civil rights.

Return on Investment. Sheldon Adelson was the “biggest single donor in political history” and Linda McMahon spent $97 million of her own money on two senate seats in two years: ROI 0%.

Graciousness. “What happened? A political (sic) narcissistic sociopath leveraged fear and ignorance with a campaign marked by mendacity and malice rather than a mandate for resurgence and reform. Instead of using his high office to articulate a vision for our future, Obama used it as a vehicle for character assassination, replete with unrelenting and destructive distortion, derision, and division” (Mary Matalin).

King Coal

Both sides in the election campaign made impossible promises about economic growth based on unconscionable pledges to develop energy sources: drill, baby, drill; go nuclear; frac that shale; build that pipeline and, above all, remove those mountaintops and strip that coal. At least the president consistently included alternative energy sources in the mix, for which the Republicans consistently ridiculed him. Amid all the talk of moving forward, we got paeans to coal, the engine of the 19^th century. In the midst of one of history’s most destructive storms, we heard nothing about global warming. We must change the conversation about growth and energy, and only the Democrats seem willing to do it. And no matter how shrill our environmentalist warnings, they will not reach the hearts of those struggling just to get by.

So instead of going after the bad guys in the GOP who won’t listen, why not begin with the Democratic senators from coal states? There are a lot of them, and they tend as a group to be more “moderate” than their caucus. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania is pro-life; West Virginia’s Joe Mancin refused to attend his party’s convention; Jon Tester just scraped through a close election in Montana. And Jay Rockefeller need not rely on coal companies for money. While their constituents depend on coal jobs, they are also the front-line victims of the environmental contamination that accompanies production. And they are increasingly organizing on behalf of their families’ health and quality of life.

Their leaders need to get ahead of them on this issue. In 2012, the only Cole that should be King is Nat.

The Morning After

What has changed? The president was re-elected with fewer electoral votes than he had in 2008, an almost identical political composition in the House, a sliver of a gain in Senate seats, a knotted popular vote and a political map of America that shows vast expanses of red between coastal slivers of blue? No wonder Democrats take global warming seriously: they live by the oceans. But yesterday, I think, brought a sea change of a subtler kind. In a country where millions of people are really hurting, voters rejected the Republican’s punitive economic alternative and stayed the course. We do need real change, but not the kind being offered. And we saw a more generous America in other ways: gay marriage won a referendum for the first time ever – in Maine and Maryland – and is leading in Minnesota and Washington; the Tea Party’s most frightening candidates – Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana – lost in heavily Republican states; and Obama’s huge support among immigrant voters of all kinds will lead, I hope, to kinder and more effective immigration policies. (One person told me yesterday that Asians vote overwhelmingly Democratic because the evangelical lectures on “family values” so offend them.)

What now? I think the pundits need a rest. We have had enough of scrutinizing Obama’s impenetrable soul and parsing Romney’s shifting principles. The question the president faces remains: how do you reach across the aisle to folks who want nothing to do with you? With neither Romney nor Ryan carrying his home state, Americans signaled that they are tired of hard-right intransigence.

Immigrants and Others

For the immigrant families, both working- and middle-class, I have met in my few days in Ohio, the vote is an almost mythical thing. Unlike many people whose doorbells I have rung, new citizens seem grateful I have come to urge them to vote. They have not taken Ohio’s early-voting option because they want to go to the polls in person today and stand in line with their fellow citizens. Several plan to take their children to see the process of a democracy in which they still strongly believe, at least on this one day. The people of color with whom I have spoken – native-born and immigrant – are overwhelmingly supporting Barack Obama. Does that mean that race is the driving force in this election? I believe it is one of them. But those who play the “race card” are not those seeking the minority and immigrant votes, but those who have written them off. Voter suppression is a big issue in Ohio, as it is elsewhere, and it is the Republicans who are most intent on using it, while its victims are overwhelmingly minorities, immigrants and the poor.

Yet those are the people who have said to me, “We are all in this together,” which is exactly the opposite message the Republicans have been sending overtly until a few weeks ago – and continue to signal to their core.

In a changing country, I think it is both a reprehensible and a losing strategy.

The sun is out this morning in Cleveland for the first time in a week. I take it as an omen.