Blunt Amendment Vote: Contraception Measure Fails In Senate

"This is just the beginning," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on the Senate floor before the vote. "If the government is allowed to tell people to buy health care, it won't stop there. I wonder what's next? This isn't about one particular religion -- it's about the right of any American to live out their faith without the government picking and choosing which doctrines they're allowed to follow."

That's right, Mitch. It should be business owners picking and choosing what doctrines their employees are allowed to follow. That's a much better system.

What a tool.

Shadrack McGill, Alabama State Senator, Says Keeping Teacher Pay Low 'A Biblical Principle'

"Teachers need to make the money that they need to make," McGill said, according to the Times-Journal. "If you double a teacher's pay scale, you'll attract people who aren't called to teach ... and these teachers that are called to teach, regardless of the pay scale, they would teach. It's just in them to do. It's the ability that God give 'em."

Exactly. That's why we need to cap CEO pay. People who are called to be CEOs do it for the love of it. You throw mad amounts of money at these people and they start making really bad decisions.­.. as we've seen.

Fight the Power

I've been thinking a lot about Mona Shaw.

We spent the weekend at my mother-in-law's. She has Verizon high speed internet; FIOS. Quite speedy... when it works. Not this weekend, though. Nope. So my husband spent about four hours, cumulatively, with customer support. At one point he clocked 40 minutes on hold... just listening to the pretty music. Three days later, my mother-in-law still has no internet. See, they have to make absolutely certain that it can't be resolved over the phone, without sending out a tech, even though everybody knows that it's an equipment problem. Everybody knows it. The techs know it. My husband knows it. The switchboard operators know it. The entire city of Mumbai knows it, because my husband was on the phone with most of the population. But, they can't just send out a tech... not until they execute a tier 3 support ticket. They'll call back, within 24 hours. The tier 3 techs. Just like the tier 2 folks did... except that they never did. Come to think of it... Nope. We just sat by the phone waiting, like a bunch of teenage girls, for the call that never came.

So, I've been thinking about Mona Shaw. The woman has guts. Guts and nothing left to lose. Mona Shaw is my new hero.

It seems that Mona bought into one of those "bundling" packages that cable companies like to arm-twist you about through endless phone calls and mailings. The service combines phone, cable and Internet service.

Her provider was Comcast. Without saying anything more about Comcast's reputation in the cable community, I will merely point out that there's a blog called ComcastMustDie.com that does a lively business on the Web.

Anyway, Mona and her husband scheduled a service call. The company failed to come on the appointed date. When they did show up two days late, they left with the job half-done.

Two days after that they cut off her service.

Mona and her husband decided the best way to get this misunderstanding straightened out was to visit the local cable office. When they arrived, a customer service representative told them the manager would be right with them and asked them to please take a seat.

They did - for two hours. At that point, the customer rep cheerfully announced that the manager had left for the day.

Shaw told the Washington Post, "They thought that just because we're old enough to get Social Security that we lack both brains and backbone."

So after a weekend spent at low boil, Mona, armed with a claw hammer, visited the Comcast office again.

But there was no waiting this time. Mona delivered a few well timed blows to a computer keyboard and monitor and, for good measure, to the telephone.

"After I hit the keyboard," Mona said, "I turned to the blond who had been there previously, the one who told me to wait for the manager, and I said, `Now do I have your attention?"

Mona Shaw is a 75 year old woman with a heart condition. Comcast left an elderly woman with a life threatening condition and her elderly husband without phone service and blew off her every attempt to rectify the matter. But to hear them tell it, they're the victims, so scared of a little old lady they took out a restraining order.

"Nothing justifies this sort of dangerous behavior," Comcast spokeswoman Beth Bacha said.

Police arrested Shaw for disorderly conduct. She received a three-month suspended sentence, was fined $345 and and is barred from going near the Comcast offices for a year.

Mona has no regrets.

"I stand by my actions even more so after getting all these telephone calls and hearing other people's complaints," she told The Associated Press in an interview Friday.

Mona Shaw got fed up. It's passed time to be fed up. The law is not on the side of the citizen; not on the side of the voter; not on the side of the consumer. The day is coming when none of us will have anything left to lose.

It's the Oil, Stupid -- Part Infinity

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I really tire of saying this. We are in Iraq for oil. And the latest pol to attest to this obvious reality: Alan Greenspan. With his memoir set to pub on Monday, news that Greenspan has been taking the piss out of the Bush Administration for its crappy economic policies has been bubbling out all week.

However, it is his view on the motive for the 2003 Iraq invasion that is likely to provoke the most controversy. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he says.

Greenspan, 81, is understood to believe that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the security of oil supplies in the Middle East.

Of Trump And Class Warfare

I've never watched "The Apprentice." Don't think I ever will either.

But you don't want to think about society's castoffs and losers, do you? No way! It's bad enough just glimpsing them on the street or smelling them in the corner store when you're in the middle of some really important gourmet-ice-cream-related errand.

The ambitious young yuppies on NBC's "The Apprentice" can totally relate! When asked to create a 60-second commercial for Renuzit Super Odor Neutralizer, Frank and Nicole made a super-funny commercial about a mom whose son is in the hospital right next to a smelly homeless guy! Ewww! As the camera rolls, the son's cute little button nose wrinkles in disgust and he gestures at the guy in the next bed. Like most proud citizens of your first-world nations of choice, Junior's pristine nose was revolting at the merest unwanted whiff of something that didn't smell completely citrusy or shower-fresh. Mommy took a moment to grimace at the stench emitted by the bum (Haw haw haw! The sweet-smelling, creative-minded yuppies in the room laughed and laughed!), then she helpfully whipped out her bottle of delicious-smelling chemicals and sprayed it in the air 50 or 60 times. And just like that, the middle-class mom saved her innocent son's virgin nose from the nasty stank of an under-bathed ne'er-do-well! Hurray!

Yeah. Poor people are funny. And just think. We'll have so many more opportunities to laugh at them in the coming years.

That's the Way the Pie Chart Crumbles

In case you missed it -- I did -- Harold Meyerson's column in yesterday's Washington Post is must reading for anyone concerned with our disappearing middle class. Actually the news is worse than that. Income is down for 90% of Americans. The wealthiest 1%, however, is doing swimmingly.

Circuit City may replace Wal-Mart as the emblem for all that is wrong with an economy evangelized by free market fundamentalists. Fuck Horatio Alger. Work hard and climb the ladder at Circuit City and your reward is getting knocked off the ladder.

On March 28, Circuit City announced that it was laying off 3,400 of its salesclerks. Not because they had poor performance records, mind you: Their performance was utterly beside the point. They were shown the door, said the chain, simply because they were the highest-salaried salesclerks that Circuit City employed.

Their positions were not eliminated. Rather, the store announced that it would hire their replacements at the normal starting salary.

There was a time when such cynical corporate maneuvers would have shocked me, but when I first read about that last week, all I could do was shrug my shoulders and shake my head in disgust. Then I told my husband who shrugged his shoulders and shook his head in disgust.

Meyerson succinctly articulates what is ailing the average American worker; union busting.

What all this amounts to is a triumph of corporate and financial power, and of the conservative economics that shores it up. Once upon a time, American prosperity actually benefited Americans. From 1947 through 1973, productivity in the U.S. rose by 104 percent, and median family income rose by an identical 104 percent. Those were also the only years of real union power in the United States, years in which one-quarter of the workforce, and in some years one-third, was unionized. Apparently, this level of worker power and mass prosperity proved intolerable to our financial elite and their political flunkies.

Since the '70s, American business has generally done its damnedest to keep its workers down. Employers routinely opted to pay the negligible penalties for violating the National Labor Relations Act rather than permit its employees to join unions. In 1969, according the National Labor Relations Board, the number of employees who'd suffered illegal retaliation for exercising their right to join or maintain a union was just over 6,000; by 2005, that number had risen to 31,358. According to a study out this January from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, fully one in five activists on unionization campaigns are illegally fired. And as worker power declines, so do living standards. Secure retirement pensions are history; employer-provided health benefits are going fast.

Meyerson's hope is that the Senate will pass the Employee Free Choice Act. So call your Senators... and read Meyerson.

Hillary Cuts Off Nose -- Spites Face

There have been rumors circulating for months that Hillary has been trying to win the money primary by means of extortion. We've all heard the tales of her threats to big money donors that she wants them to lard up her campaign and only her campaign. Now comes news that her strong arm tactics have backfired.

Under intense pressure from the Clinton team to pick sides, [Leonore] Blitz—who bundled more than $1 million for John Kerry in 2004—felt deeply conflicted. Clinton operatives have warned donors not to contribute to other campaigns, and put a price on disloyalty: early supporters will be valued and latecomers scorned. But now Blitz is coming out of the shadows, ready to test the rules. "I have been a lifelong advocate of women and minorities' participating and running for political office," she told NEWSWEEK last week. "Therefore, I'm supporting both Clinton and Obama."

Well I'm sure that'll be fine with Hillary, because when she told people it was her way or the highway, she didn't really mean it.

The Clinton campaign denies that it has strong-armed anyone, saying the warnings were made in jest.

Oh that Hil. Such a cut-up. Always with the teasing and the joking. I'm sure she had them in stitches over at the Jon Tasini campaign, when they found they were shut out of the primary debate by Clinton donor TimeWarner.

But seriously folks, Hillary understands what campaigns are about. Money. Who's got it and who wants to use it to gain access to the halls of power. She just didn't expect that some high rollers would consider Obama the better bet.

What happened to the Clinton juggernaut? The answer lies partly in her go-for-broke strategy. There's a fine line between confidence and arrogance, and for some fund-raisers the Clinton team crossed it. "They clearly communicated a message that this candidacy is inevitable because we'll have more experienced consultants, more political insiders, more money and more of every resource that is vital to being nominated," says a prominent New York donor who joined the Obama camp but declined to be named to protect friendships with Clinton supporters. "Therefore, you are politically stupid if you don't get it, if you can't add."

Big donors to any campaign are keenly interested in what their money gets them. [Emphasis Added] Newcomers to Clinton's orbit don't expect to have much influence or access. So they have fewer reasons to call on wealthy friends for more cash. "That tent seemed pretty much full," says Howard Gutman, a D.C. lawyer who was part of the small team that raised $10 million for Mark Warner's aborted presidential effort. Several campaigns courted Gutman, but he chose Obama over Clinton. "I could raise money from now to eternity and not really be on the radar screen. And the Obama camp seemed to offer more upside in terms of personal fun for the next year and change for the country for the future."

Ouch.

Reagan's Legacy: Executive Amnesia

The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, c.1954

Dali, Salvador


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There's a very clever graphic on the cover of The Huffington Post this morning. A Warholesque pattern of 122 images of ex-Gonazales aide Kyle Sampson. One for every memory lapse he reported on the Senate floor yesterday. "I don't remember." Get used to that phrase. We'll be hearing it a lot in the coming weeks and months.

Reagan did it with an actor's flair, but it was Reagan who ushered in this age of executive exceptionalism. "I cannot recall," he said over and over in his Iran-Contra testimony. And with that endearing little nod, that seemed to say, "Why I am just a simple man. A man of the people, baffled by these dark political machinations."

I remember my grandfather cluck, cluck, clucking in disgust. "If he were the CEO of a company," he'd say, "You know how long he'd be tellin' that story? About as long as it took him to grab his things and walk to the front gate." But my grandfather was one of those men in "gray flannel" Paul Krugman writes about. He was the product of that bygone era, when the buck actually stopped somewhere.

This is Reagan's legacy. An era of unaccountability for those who achieve the requisite wealth and influence. A time when men of small skill, but excellent breeding, fail ever upwards and descend, when they do, on golden parachutes. An era when only the little people experience the consequences, not only of their personal failings, but of the colossal failings of their "betters." When average workers of a company like Enron lose their livelihoods, their savings, their homes. But can only stare in rapt amazement as the wheels of justice grind slowly on, bringing few prosecutions and vacating that of a dead architect of corporate failure.

There is no "pound 'em in the ass prison" for even token prosecutions like Scooter Libby. That nice white boy shouldn't see the inside of a jail cell says even his jury. He didn't mean any harm. He was just so forgetful.

Let the Little Brown People Do It

Lovely of Karl Rove to admit what the immigration "guest worker" policy is all about; importing Latin workers to turn the US into a Banana Republic-style oligarchy. I always assumed the agenda was something like this, but I'm still astounded to hear it in plain English. As per National Review's The Corner:

Karl Rove explained the rationale behind the president's amnesty/open-borders proposal this way: "I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas."

Slaves. That's what we're after. Non-citizens. Sub-humans to do our icky manual labor. Make no mistake. Bush's proposal stems from a racist, classist, exploitive agenda.

It will probably be the last time you'll ever hear me saying this but this NRO column is spot the fuck on.

Rove's comment illustrates how the Bush-McCain-Giuliani-Hagel-Martinez-Brownback-Huckabee approach to immigration strikes at the very heart of self-government. It is precisely Rove's son (and my own, and those of the rest of us in the educated elite) who should work picking tomatoes or making beds, or washing restaurant dishes, or mowing lawns, especially when they're young, to help them develop some of the personal and civic virtues needed for self-government. It's not that I want my kids to make careers of picking tomatoes; Mexican farmworkers don't want that either. But we must inculcate in our children, especially those likely to go on to high-paying occupations, that there is no such thing as work that is beneath them.

There is much more paleo-conservative, Republican cloth coat brandishing, economic elitism undermining, straight up wisdom at NRO. Read it.

Working Harder -- Earning Less

The economic data, as reported in the New York Times this morning, could not be more plain; "Real Wages Fail to Match Productivity." Translation: the middle class is getting clobbered. They're working harder as lay-offs, outsourcing, technological advances, etc., reduce the number of actual employees in businesses across America.

We've all seen how this works. I remember it all too well from my years in corporate America. Every so often a department is cut by an employee or two during an oh-so-necessary lay-off. The workload for the remaining employees increases, but the salaries do not. Thus the "productivity" of the average employee goes up. Stock holders are happy. Top management collects bonuses for their brilliance in extracting more work from people for less money. Average workers suffer the consequences... as do customers of those businesses.

Just last night I was discussing with my husband how much I despise the new self-checkout system that increasing numbers of supermarkets are using. I guess I can see the advantage to consumers who only need a few things and don't want to wait. But in real terms this is how it plays out. Supermarkets employ fewer cashiers so that long lines snake down the supermarket aisles. The self-checkout aisles also develop lines reducing the time-saved by motivated self-serve shoppers. So here's how it shakes out. Fewer people are employed. Those who are work nonstop to accommodate cranky customers who have been standing on line forever. And if you're using self-checkout you're paying the supermarket and working for them for free by checking and bagging yourself. It's another version of the scam gas stations pulled when they introduced self-serve gas and promised that it would cost less than full-serve; then simply raised the price on full-serve pumps. Net savings for consumers: none.

We're all frogs being brought slowly to a boil and, as the Times article makes clear, the water is getting hot enough that we just might begin to notice and start jumping. The economy feels bad enough to ordinary folks that the Republican Party is increasingly worried about the upcoming elections. They would probably be more worried if Democrats were offering a real alternative instead of taking potshots at Wal-Mart, which is not to say that they don't deserve it.

How bad is it for American workers? Here are some of the highlights from the Times:

With the economy beginning to slow, the current expansion has a chance to become the first sustained period of economic growth since World War II that fails to offer a prolonged increase in real wages for most workers....

The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation. The drop has been especially notable, economists say, because productivity — the amount that an average worker produces in an hour and the basic wellspring of a nation’s living standards — has risen steadily over the same period.

As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960’s. UBS,the investment bank, recently described the current period as “the golden era of profitability.”

Until the last year, stagnating wages were somewhat offset by the rising value of benefits, especially health insurance, which caused overall compensation for most Americans to continue increasing. Since last summer, however, the value of workers’ benefits has also failed to keep pace with inflation, according to government data....

Economists offer various reasons for the stagnation of wages. Although the economy continues to add jobs, global trade, immigration,layoffs and technology — as well as the insecurity caused by them — appear to have eroded workers’ bargaining power.

Trade unions are much weaker than they once were, while the buying power of the minimum wage is at a 50-year low. And health care is far more expensive than it was a decade ago, causing companies to spend more on benefits at the expense of wages....
Average family income, adjusted for inflation, has continued to advance at a good clip, a fact Mr. Bush has cited when speaking about the economy. But these gains are a result mainly of increases at the top of the income spectrum that pull up the overall numbers. Even for workers at the 90th percentile of earners — making about $80,000 a year — inflation has outpaced their pay increases over the last three years, according to the Labor Department.

“There are two economies out there,” Mr. Cook, the political analyst, said. “One has been just white hot, going great guns. Those are the people who have benefited from globalization, technology, greater productivity and higher corporate earnings.

“And then there’s the working stiffs,’’ he added, “who just don’t feel like they’re getting ahead despite the fact that they’re working very hard. And there are a lot more people in that group than the other group.” [emphases added]

The rich are getting richer. Everybody else is getting poorer and working harder. Great.

Big Three: Meet the Free Market

Michigan Republicans are said to be in a tizzy that their Republican president won't give any face time to Detroit automakers. The Big Three are facing "declining fortunes." Though the LA Times doesn't state it very directly, automakers are hungry and need a snack from the government trough. And they are increasingly disheartened that Bush wants to let market forces work their magic. I love the way Republicans worship at the altar of the free market when it means not raising the minimum wage or laying people off to keep stockholders happy. But when it means shutting off the corporate welfare tap, they're not so enamoured. When they need an infusion of capital, they rediscover the need for big government to meddle in their affairs.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos lashed out at the White House this week for not having set up a long-promised meeting with executives of the Big Three automakers, which are being squeezed by high healthcare costs and shrinking market share.

"We're being ignored here in Michigan by the White House, and it has got to stop," DeVos, who is challenging Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm, told reporters.

"It is wrong, and the behavior is inexcusable," DeVos said in a written statement Thursday. "The president needs to meet with the Big Three, and it must happen soon. Jobs are at stake."

Yes, the President must "meet" with the Big Three because otherwise jobs will be lost. Let's rewind a bit and recall that it was less than two months ago that GM announced it was laying off a quarter of its work force. Well, let's be more specific: their blue collar work force. And let us also recall that a Wall Street Journal report at that time demonstrated amply and painfully that for all their whining about pension costs, the pension programs of their rank and file workers were in the black. It is, in fact, the pay packages to top-tier executives that are breaking the bank. But GM's solution wasn't laying off the executive millionaires who are draining their coffers. It was to fire the little guys whose pension plans were not only paying for themselves, but for the company's other losses. And now they want to go hat-in-hand to the federal government for more money so that they can continue to hand giant pay packages to top tier executives who make genius decisions like continuing to make gas guzzling behemoths that a public in full-blown gas pump sticker shock doesn't want and continue kicking their labor force to the curb when they inevitably face continuing short-falls.

Bush himself made clear in January that he was not inclined to bail out troubled U.S. auto companies.

For once I agree with him.

Hillary's Cash & Carry Election

If you doubt that the US is devolving into an oligarchy where powerful corporations and other moneyed interests control the political process, look no further than New York state. There, an unholy alliance between Hillary Clinton and TimeWarner has seized control of the electoral process by taking away the microphone of her opposition. I first learned about this in Matt Taibbi's most recent take-down of the DLC.

Remember 2000, when Ralph Nader was not only not allowed to debate with Al Gore and George Bush, but wasn't allowed in the building -- not even allowed in a second, adjoining hall in the building, not even when he had a ticket? Well, we have a replay of that proud moment in our history going on now, with Hillary's Senate primary opponent Tasini being shut out of debates by New York's NY1 TV channel (owned by TimeWarner) which is insisting that qualified candidates not only reach 5 percent support in the polls (Tasini is at 13 percent and rising) but raise or spend $500,000. Said NY1 Vice President Steve Paulus: "All Tasini would need is for each [New York state registered voter] to send him a dollar. Right now, with the money he's raised, he does not represent the party he claims to represent."

So a war chest is now the standard for representation? In order to get on television, you need a dollar from every voter? (Are we electing a Senator or holding a Girl Scout raffle? What the fuck?) And this is decided by . . . an executive for a corporate television station?

This morning Buzzflash guest contributor Jeff Cohen connects the dots.

The cover story in the new issue of TIME, the flagship publication of the Time Warner media empire, informs readers that Hillary Clinton has "virtually nonexistent opposition for her senate seat."

Hold that phrase in your head. Because at another outpost of the Time Warner empire, decisions have been made that help ensure Sen. Clinton will have "virtually nonexistent opposition." Time Warner's NY1 TV news channel ("the CNN of New York")adamantly refuses to host a Democratic New York Senate debate. Despite protests over its decision, NY1 says it is giving incumbent Clinton a no-debate free pass because her antiwar challenger, union leader Jonathan Tasini, has not raised enough money; the channel arbitrarily set the bar at a half-million dollars. This despite the fact that Tasini has reached 13% in polls. (NY1 first announced its no-debate ruling just as Ned Lamont -- given no chance months ago -- was defeating pro-war incumbent Joe Lieberman in Connecticut's primary.)

Ironically, NY1 has already hosted and televised a Democratic New York gubernatorial debate between frontrunner Eliot Spitzer and a Democratic challenger who was at only 10% in the polls. But that candidate had raised about $6 million. So spending millions to get just 10% in popular support was rewarded by Time Warner's channel, while building a more effective grassroots campaign, largely of volunteers, was punished. (One wonders how much of the money went to NY1.)

Did I mention that Time Warner's PAC is one of the many corporate PACs that underwrites Hillary Clinton's reelection campaign against the "virtually nonexistent opposition"? Or that conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch has also raised funds for her reelection? Or that Hillary Clinton doesn't criticize a media system now dominated by a handful of (JonBenet-obsessed) entertainment conglomerates -- while Tasini wants to see those conglomerates broken up? [emphasis added]

And there you have it. Hillary is the TimeWarner candidate, not the people's. And, in a bout of unintentional honesty, TimeWarner has admitted what it thinks elections are about: Money.

Watershed Moment?

A page one story in the Sunday Washington Post raises the specter of a watershed moment for the Democratic Party. As I said before, the Lieberman/Lamont race in Connecticut is emblematic of the fundamental problem in the Party. Put simply it is about whether or not they continue to be the Republican Lite party. Lieberman is so much the embodiment of an opposition party in the thrall of Republican domination that the most right leaning of Republican activists are currently batting for his team and suggesting, as many Democratic voters have, that he simply switch parties. As The Nation explains, Tom DeLay, Bill Kristol, and Ann Coulter, have all come out swinging for Lieberman, so he's got that goin' for him.

The Post describes the collision of entrenched power and righteous anger.

The passion and energy fueling the antiwar challenge to Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman in Connecticut's Senate primary signal a power shift inside the Democratic Party that could reshape the politics of national security and dramatically alter the battle for the party's 2008 presidential nomination, according to strategists in both political parties.

A victory by businessman Ned Lamont on Tuesday would confirm the growing strength of the grass-roots and Internet activists who first emerged in Howard Dean's presidential campaign. Driven by intense anger at President Bush and fierce opposition to the Iraq war, they are on the brink of claiming their most significant political triumph, one that will reverberate far beyond the borders here if Lieberman loses.

As Chris Dodd, of all people, points out, this is more than simply opposition to an unpopular war. It's appeasement of Bush Administration radicalism that is driving a good part of the backlash from the netroots and beyond.

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) said it is a mistake to contend, as the Republicans are doing, that the Democrats have been captured by left-wing, antiwar activists, saying the Connecticut race most of all reflects discontent with Bush rather than an ideological awakening. "This is really about Bush," he said. "It's deeper than an antiwar thing."

The Democratic Party continues, at its peril, to underestimate how divisive a figure Bush is and how much resistance there is to the man and his policies. The disconnect between the party powerful and the people is growing and the Lieberman/Lamont showdown should be serving as a wake up call.

Arguing for the continuation of Republican Lite policies is, unsurprisingly, DLC operative Will Marshall.

"Candidates know they cannot appease [antiwar] activists if they are going to run winning national campaigns," said Will Marshall, president of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute. "It will intensify the tension inside the Democratic coalition as we head into two critical elections."

Let's rewind for a moment to reflect on who Will Marshall is and what he stands for. Marshall is quoted at some length in the Matt Taibbi column I referenced the other day, on "Why the Democrats are still doomed."

Marshall is the president of the DLC's Progressive Policy Institute and owns the distinction of being the first public figure to use the term "body count" in a positive sense with regard to the Iraq war ("Coalition forces still face daily attacks but the body count tilts massively in their favor"). He wasted no time in giving me the party line: "What we're seeing is an ideological purge," he said cheerily. "It's national effort by the left to get rid of somebody they've decided to demonize . . . we have concerns about narrow dogmatism. . ."

We went back and forth for a while. I noted that his conception of "narrow dogmatists" included the readers of Daily Kos, a website with something like 440,000 visitors a day; I also noted that recent Gallup polls showed that fully 91 percent of Democrats supported a withdrawal of some kind from Iraq.

"So these hundreds of thousands of Democrats who are against the war are narrow dogmatists," I said, "and. . . how many people are there in your office? Ten? Twenty? Thirty?"

"Well, it'd probably be in the thirty zone," sighed Marshall.

I asked Marshall if there was a publicly available list of donors to the DLC.

"Uh, I don't know," he said. "I'd have to refer you to the press office for that. They can help you there . . ." (Note: a DLC spokeswoman would later tell me the DLC has a policy of "no public disclosure," although she did say the group is funded in half by corporate donations, in half by individuals).

"So let me get this straight," I said. "We have thirty corporate-funded spokesmen telling hundreds of thousands of actual voters that they're narrow dogmatists?" [emphasis added]

He paused and sighed, clearly exasperated. "Look," he said. "Everybody in politics draws money from the same basic sources. It's the same pool of companies and wealthy individuals . . ."

"Okay," I said. "So basically in this dispute over Lieberman, we have people on one side, and companies on the other? Would it be correct to say that?" I asked.

"Well, I guess if you live in a cartoon world you could say that," he said.

That's the DLC in a nutshell, and sadly, because of the corporate money they bring in, it is also the voice of the Democratic Party establishment. When Lieberman and Lamont face off in the upcoming primary, Connecticut voters will have an opportunity to speak directly to the smug visage of a party that shows contempt daily for the voting public. As the Post points out, it's a message that may reverberate.

Taibbi Explains Why Dems Are Losing: It's Not the Sierra Club

Earlier today I went off on Paul Krugman for his Kosesque soliloquy on why the Sierra Club (NARAL and other left-leaning issue groups) should put aside their non-partisanship and stop endorsing non-Democrats. Krugman's point, like Kos's, is that we should support Democrats at all costs because Republicans are ruining the country. The reason I can't sign on to this idea, aside from the fact that it means asking organizations to violate their own charters and stated goals to become nakedly partisan, is that it ignores the fact that Democrats are also ruining the country. Krugman implies that Democrats keep losing because they are not mimicking the soul-less authoritarianism of the Republican party. When a reader responding to today's column writes that she's in a dilemma about voting her conscience because she likes Chafee's voting record but does not like the rest of the party or want it in power, Krugman responds:

The strength of the conservative movement is that it rarely agonizes about such things.

So the poltical left would be "stronger" if we stop voting our conscience and become mindless party cogs?

But my disagreement with Krugman on this is not simply about the importance of principle. I think he has misdiagnosed the cause of the Democrats losing streak. We need to stop blaming the voters for the manifold failings of the Democratic Party. Matt Taibbi absolutely nails the Democrat problem in the new issue of Rolling Stone. In his analysis of the Lieberman/Lamont race in Connecticut, he offers some of the most targeted, insightful analysis of the larger problem I've read to date. He pulls apart Lieberman's black church "I met Dr. King" stump speech and exposes the cynicism of his DLC, faux populism.

The scene says everything you need to know about the modern Democratic Party. It spends its weekdays sucking off the Pentagon and Wall Street and the pharmaceutical industry, and on the weekends it comes out and spends five minutes getting teary-eyed for the "I have a dream" speech and thinks you owe it your vote because of it. Some party members agree, but quite a few don't, which is why Joe Lieberman—the hawkish one-time vice-presidential candidate who has made himself the most visible symbol of the "new" Democrats—is facing a surprising primary challenge on August 8th. Like Lieberman himself, the "I was there in the Sixties" act is finally getting old.

"I hate the Sixties, and I'm tired of hearing about it—what have you done for me lately?" says Regina Meade, one of the churchgoers. She shakes her head. "I lost a cousin in the war. Twenty-nine years old. What about that? What about that?"

While Lieberman is one of the most vulnerable of the old guard Democrats, his campaign is emblematic of a much deeper problem. That so many beltway Dems have run to his rescue, despite his smooching with Bush, should tell us everything we need to know about where Democratic Party alliances really are. As Taibbi states, they're not with voters.

Of course it's fairly obvious where it's coming from. Even the most casual Democratic voters understand by now that there is a schism within the party, one that pits "party insiders" steeped in the inside-baseball muck of Washington money culture against . . . well, against us, the actual voters.

The insiders have for many years running now succeeded in convincing their voters that their actual beliefs are hopeless losers in the general electoral arena, and that certain compromises must be made if the party is ever to regain power. [emphasis added]

This defeatist nonsense is sold to the public in the form of beady-eyed party hacks talking to one another in the opinion pages of national media conglomerates, where, after much verbose and solemn discussion, the earnest and idealistic candidate the public actually likes is dismissed on the grounds that "he can't win." In his place is trotted out the guy the party honchos insist to us is the real "winner"—some balding, bent little bureaucrat who has grown prematurely elderly before our very eyes over the course of ten or twenty years of sad, compromise-filled service in the House or the Senate.

This "winner" is then given a lavish parade and sent out there on the trail, and we hold our noses as he campaigns in our name on a platform of Jesus, the B-2 bomber and the death penalty for eleven-year-olds, consoling ourselves that he at least isn't in favor of repealing the Voting Rights Act. (Or is he? We have to check.) Then he loses to the Republicans anyway and we start all over again—beginning with the next primary election, when we are again told that the anti-war candidate "can't win" and that the smart bet is the corporate hunchback still wearing two black eyes from the last race.

That's why the Democratic Party is imploding faster than a Republican Party that has detatched itself from discernable reality. Not because the Sierra Club, NARAL, and some kooky Independants aren't behind the Democratic Party right or wrong.

Taibbi goes on to describe, in dirty detail, Lieberman's corporate whoredom, but he could be describing any one of a number of beltway Democrats.

He is everything a Washington insider loves in a politician. He is pompous, pious and available. Routinely one of the very top recipients of campaign donations from the insurance, pharmaceutical and finance sectors, and a man whose wife, Hadassah, is a pharmaceutical-industry lobbyist for Hill and Knowlton, Lieberman has quietly become one of the greatest allies corporate America has in Washington.

For example, Lieberman, who as chairman of the DLC in the mid to late Nineties presided over an organization heavily subsidized by companies such as AIG and Aetna (the latter of which also contributes lavishly to his campaigns), sponsored a bill that limited auto insurance suits by permitting the offering of lower rates to consumers who forfeited their right to sue. He has fought for similar anti-lawsuit laws for tobacco, for HMOs, for pharmaceutical companies. Victor Schwartz, general counsel for the American Tort Reform Association, once bragged that "if it were not for Lieberman, there would never have been a Biomaterials Access Act"—a 1998 law that protected companies like Dow Chemical and DuPont (also big DLC contributors) from lawsuits filed for the production of defective medical implants. Yes, that's right: Joe Lieberman fought for the principle of manufacturing faulty fake tits with impunity.

In a move that was perfectly characteristic of everything he stands for, Lieberman in 2001 offered a piece of legislation, S. 1764, that purported to provide incentives to companies that develop medicines to treat the victims of bioterror attacks but, more important, extended the patent life of a wide range of drugs for several years, delaying the introduction of more cost-friendly generic drugs. Shilling for the socialist subsidy of drug companies while masquerading as a Churchillian, tough-on-security Democrat in the War on Terror age: That's Joe Lieberman, and the modern Democratic Party, in a nutshell.

Taibbi expounds further in the first installment of his new web-only column, in which he demonstrates the curious parallels between the DLC and neoconservatives like David Brooks. The column is worth reading if only for commentary like this:

Brooks worships the status quo because he has no penis and wants to spend the rest of his life buying periwinkle bath towels without troubling interruptions of conscience.

But his larger point, that the DLC has gnawed away the core of the Democratic Party and turned it into a party of corporate toadies, bent on convincing the 91 percent of Democratic voters who want us out of Iraq that they are the lunatic fringe.

The DLC are the lowest kind of scum; we're talking about people who are paid by the likes of Eli Lilly and Union Carbide to go on television and call suburban moms and college kids who happen to be against the war commies and jihadists. On the ignominious-sellout scale, that's lower than doing PR for a utility that turns your grandmother's heat off at Christmas. And that's pretty bad -- but with enough money and enough of the right kind of publicity their side still might win in the Lamont/Lieberman primary on August 8th.

Which tells you just about everything you need to know about the modern Democratic Party. Why is anyone surprised that the Republicans never lose?

I, for one, am less and less surprised. Mr. Krugman and Markos Moulitsas can blame the Sierra Club if they want, but it seems like a race to the bottom of the self-defeatism pond to me. We need to stop assuming voters are idiots who need to be shepherded into the Democratic flock, regardless of whether or not party leaders demonstrate that they can actually lead us back from the cliff.

Put it this way: If the Democrats gain only five rather than six Senate seats this November, Senator James Inhofe, who says that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” will remain in his current position as chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. And if that happens, the Sierra Club may well bear some of the responsibility.

Think about that for a minute. The Democratic Party can't win against a party represented by the obvious insanity of a Senator who compared environmentalism to Hitler's "big lie" and it's the Sierra Club's fault? A party that can't make hay of what Republicans have become and offer a reasonable alternative doesn't deserve to win.

Craven Dems Still Leaving Workers to be Flattened

I'd share David Sirota's disappointment if I had ever been optimistic about beltway Dems standing up for the American worker. Writes Sirota:

Last night, I wrote optimistically about the possibility of Democratic Party elites finally realizing the error of their ways in ramming corporate-written trade policies down the throat of average Americans. Though I noted that most of the key players are still comfortable in the minority, and still awash in Washington's pay-to-play culture, I cited some recent moves as evidence that they may at the very least realize that they no longer live in the go-go Clinton Era where rhetoric about the "booming economy" could paper over the very serious economic challenges faced by regular working folks.

Apparently, I was wrong. A stunning piece by Washington Post business reporter Steve Pearlstein today shows that the real agenda of these Big Money insiders is to pretend to care about stagnating wages, slashed pensions, and job outsourcing - but not actually be willing to attack the "free" trade policies that are causing those hardships.

Pearlstein's piece is an eye-opener and he puts trade policies in a broader context of the Democratic Party's political impotence.

Democrats now have a perfect opportunity to deliver what the business community wants -- and to demand in exchange programs designed to provide workers more economic security. But such negotiations will never succeed if influential Democrats give away the store in advance by signaling they support all trade liberalization, unconditionally.

No guarantees of health care, pensions, expanded unemployment insurance -- no more trade deals. It's a simple message even chief executives can understand. Voters, too.

To appreciate why reigning in free trade and standing up to corporations are winning issues for Democrats one need only listen to increasingly frustrated Americans whose earning power is not recovering with the economy. Our current trade policies are a key factor in our increasing income disparity. I've written before that wages for many Americans are stagnant. In fact they are worse than stagnant. Earlier this week the LA Times reported wages for college graduates have actually dropped a stunning 5.2% over the last five years. Consider that as those wages have fallen, the cost of living, particularly energy prices, has risen steadily.

The recent wage slump has affected a substantial part of the workforce. About 30 million Americans age 20 to 59 have a four-year degree and no advanced degree, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

The White House economists did not lay out wage trends for people with master's and other advanced degrees. But other studies have found that their inflation-adjusted wages were essentially flat between 2000 and 2004, and the studies have confirmed a decline for people with four-year degrees.

When wages for people with bachelor's degrees declined in the 1970s, the cause was a flood of baby boomers entering the job market.

This time, economists say, much of the blame goes to trends familiar to workers with less education, who are now creeping up the wage ladder.

Offshoring, which has shifted manufacturing and call-center jobs to such nations as Mexico and India, is increasingly affecting white-collar sectors such as engineering and software design.

And companies have continued their long effort to replace salaried positions with lower-paid, nonsalaried jobs, including part-time and freelance positions without benefits. Those contingent positions make up nearly half of the 6.5 million jobs created since 2001, said Paul Harrington, a labor economist at Northeastern University in Boston.

Harrington said the number of salaried jobs increased an average of 11.5% during the last five economic recoveries, compared with 2.5% during the current recovery.

"There's clear deterioration in the college labor market," he said. "The American economy just does not generate jobs the way it has historically."

As long predicted the repercussions of free market fundamentalism are affecting both white and blue collar workers. The benefits of our economic growth are concentrated in the hands of a very small group of people. As Paul Krugman wrote recently, workers across a broad economic spectrum are being left behind.

Here's what happened in 2004. The U.S. economy grew 4.2 percent, a very good number. Yet last August the Census Bureau reported that real median family income — the purchasing power of the typical family — actually fell. Meanwhile, poverty increased, as did the number of Americans without health insurance. So where did the growth go?

The answer comes from the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, whose long-term estimates of income equality have become the gold standard for research on this topic, and who have recently updated their estimates to include 2004. They show that even if you exclude capital gains from a rising stock market, in 2004 the real income of the richest 1 percent of Americans surged by almost 12.5 percent. Meanwhile, the average real income of the bottom 99 percent of the population rose only 1.5 percent. In other words, a relative handful of people received most of the benefits of growth.

There are a couple of additional revelations in the 2004 data. One is that growth didn't just bypass the poor and the lower middle class, it bypassed the upper middle class too. Even people at the 95th percentile of the income distribution — that is, people richer than 19 out of 20 Americans — gained only modestly. The big increases went only to people who were already in the economic stratosphere.

The other revelation is that being highly educated was no guarantee of sharing in the benefits of economic growth. There's a persistent myth, perpetuated by economists who should know better — like Edward Lazear, the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers — that rising inequality in the United States is mainly a matter of a rising gap between those with a lot of education and those without. But census data show that the real earnings of the typical college graduate actually fell in 2004.

In short, it's a great economy if you're a high-level corporate executive or someone who owns a lot of stock. For most other Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.

Free trade enthusiast Thomas Friedman claims that The World Is Flat and that it is incumbent on American workers to make themselves competitive in a global marketplace, but it would be fairer to say that American workers are being flattened by policies that do not serve them. Democrats could gain a real advantage this election year by demonstrating some moral courage, but it would mean biting the corporate hand that feeds them. As I wrote before, their surprising rectitude on the minimum wage is a start but it's a drop in the economic bucket. It allows them to demagogue about their concern for wage earners, while they scratch the backs of corporatocrats who are displacing increasing numbers of middle class workers. The Post's Pearlstein gives us a glimpse at the cynicism of Democratic big-wigs. I wish I could say I was surprised.

World Destruction

This is a world destruction
Your life ain't nothing
The human race is becoming a disgrace
The rich get richer
The poor are getting poorer
Fascist, chauvinistic government fools

People, Moslems, Christians and Hindus
Are in a time zone just searching for the truth
Who are you to think you're a superior race?
Facing forth your everlasting doom

We are Time Zone
We've come to drop a bomb on you

World destruction, kaboom, kaboom, kaboom!

Public Image Limited and Afrika Bambaataa circa 1984, the heart of the Reagan era, and more timely now than ever. For months now that song has been in my head like an unshakable commercial jingle. With every story I read on the economy, for instance, I hear the plaintiff whine of John Lydon, "The rich get richer, The poor are ge'in' poorer."

As I've noted in earlier entries, the wealth gap has been increasing steadily over the past 30 years, but the rise of the American aristocracy has been given a substantial boost by Bush Administration policies and the Republican takeover of all the levers of government. Management does set the tone, after all, and one need look no further than the way our CEO President captains his own ship to see evidence of his contempt for working stiffs.

President Bush’s most senior aides -- the ones who hold the coveted title of "assistant to the president" -- recently received a $4,200 cost-of-living bump-up in compensation and now earn a top pay rate of $165,200, according to an internal White House list of staff salaries. The list was compiled by the administration for the year that ended June 30 and is displayed both alphabetically, and by dollar ranking, below. Those at the bottom of the White House staff pay scale -- the folks answering phones and responding to the president’s mail, for example -- remain stuck at last year’s pay floor of $30,000, according to a year-to-year comparison of White House data obtained by National Journal.

I noticed the other day that the Washington Post has noticed the income disparity in its own backyard. In the DC area, they note that the "Well-Paid Benefit Most As Economy Flourishes." Well no kidding.

Wages are rising more than twice as fast for highly paid workers in the Washington area as they are for low-paid workers, an analysis of federal data by The Washington Post shows.

That means the spoils of the region's economic expansion are going disproportionately to workers who are already well-paid, widening a gap between rich and poor in a place where it is already wider than in most of the country.

Molly Ivins points out that the cruel impact of Bush's policies and determination to make the poor more "self-sufficient" are beginning to become very apparent.

Anyone who doesn't think this is a country where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer needs to check the numbers -- this is Bush country, where a rising tide lifts all yachts.

According to the current issue of Mother Jones:

• One in four U.S. jobs pays less than a poverty-level income.


• Since 2000, the number of Americans living below the poverty line at any one time has risen steadily. Now, 13 percent -- 37 million Americans -- are officially poor.


• Bush's tax cuts (extended until 2010) save those earning between $20,000 and $30,000 an average of $10 a year, while those making $1 million are saved $42,700.
  

And yesterday the New York Times editorial board took the piss out Bush's tax revenue triumph.

Much of the increase in tax receipts is from corporate profits, high-income investors and super high-earning executives, sources that are just as unpredictable as the financial markets to which they’re inevitably linked.

So, the revenue surge is neither a sign that the tax cuts are working nor of sustainable economic growth. A growing number of economists, most prominently from the Congressional Budget Office, point out that upsurges in revenue are also the result of growing income inequality in the United States, an observation that is consistent with mounting evidence of a rapidly widening gap between the rich and everyone else. As corporations and high- income Americans claim ever more of the economic pie, revenues rise, even if there’s no increase in overall economic growth. [emphasis added]

I caught a few minutes of "Hardball" yesterday -- a few minutes is about all I can generally stand. I always get a charge out of listening to a bunch of overpaid TV pundits discussing why average Americans are so down on the economy when it's growing so well. Maybe, Chris Matthews posited, it's because the Iraq war is making everyone feel pessimistic about everything. To his credit, David Gergen pointed out repeatedly that it depends on whether you're part of the investor class or not, and that average Americans really aren't enjoying the benefits of economic expansion. He was a voice of reason in an otherwise surreal discussion. For some reason this exchange has not, as yet, been included in the official transcript for yesterday's show, but others like it aren't hard to find. It's become a running narrative amongst the well-heeled, made very evident in the pondering of the six figure earning punditocracy. They all seem baffled that average folks with stagnant wages, looming threats of lay-offs, and declining health and pension benefits, aren't feeling more upbeat. Becoming a disgrace indeed!

From the Annals of Our Cultural Entropy: What is Going On With Our Food?

Originally published: Wednesday, March 01, 2006

I'm worried about our food supply. No, I'm not terribly concerned that terrorists will contaminate our grain silos with bio-toxins. As with so many things, Americans have become our own worst enemies, when it comes to food. I stopped buying food in supermarkets, for the most part, years ago, because what sits on those shelves isn't food. It's processed chemicals with elements that may or may not be derived from organic matter. There's no food in our food.

I do most of my grocery shopping in Whole Foods – a luxury that may force me to take out a second mortgage at some point – and Trader Joe's. But what I saw at my local Trader Joe's the other day has thrown my relationship with that store into peril. I've written them a letter.

Here is the text:

Dear Lauree Bradley, Director of Product Information
Trader Joe's Company
538 Mission Street
South Pasadena, California
91031-6270

During a recent shopping trip to Trader Joe's in [location redacted], I observed a situation that imperils not only food quality but safety. I reported this situation to two store managers and my concern was received with total nonchalance.

I have been purchasing Trader Joe's frozen chicken parts for years. On Friday, when I attempted to take a bag from the freezer bin, I observed that the bags near the top were completely thawed. Other bags were thawed to varying degrees. I assumed that the freezer was broken and informed the first employee I saw. He assured me that it was a natural result of the defrost cycle of the freezer and began to remove the chicken that was completely thawed and sloshing in its juices in the bags. I asked to speak to a manager.

The manager also assured me that the situation was due to the defrosting of the freezer and said she was sorry that I "had to see that." She offered me a bag from the bottom of the freezer that appeared to be completely frozen. I said, no thank you. How could I tell what bags may have been reshuffled to the bottom of the freezer and refrozen? Depending on how completely that chicken has thawed, there is a serious risk of contamination, let alone the loss of quality caused by even partial thawing and refreezing. I was assured by the manager that it wasn't a problem, because the frozen chicken sells so quickly. I disagree.

After purchasing the rest of my groceries, and heading for the car, I noticed that I had been overcharged 50 cents for a bottle of Marsala wine. I went back into the store and located another manager, who checked the shelf and conceded that I had been overcharged and would be refunded. I took the opportunity to inform him of my disgust over the condition of the frozen chicken. He also assured me that it was just part of the defrost cycle and that it wasn't a problem, as the thawed chicken was removed when it was observed by staff or customers. This, I informed him, is not a system of regulation! He graciously refunded me the entire cost of my Marsala, which I now realize I have little use for, as I have no chicken.

I don't know what disturbs me more; the fact that I observed perishables thawing in the freezer bins, or the fact that store managers exhibited so little concern over a potential public health risk. Those bins also contain frozen prepared meals, raw shellfish, and stuffed meats. Such items are far less forgiving of thawing and refreezing than meats alone.

I have a small child. As of now, I am not comfortable feeding her anything from a Trader Joe's freezer bin. I cannot be as cavalier about her health -- nay, her life -- as the managers and staff of the [redacted] Trader Joe's.

I am left with a number of nagging questions:

1) Was an episode of violent nausea I experienced a couple of weeks ago after eating a meal including Trader Joe's frozen chicken caused by that chicken or some other factor? I consumed the rest of the bag without incident, so I assumed it was a fluke. Now, I'm not so sure. Perhaps I just got lucky.

2) How is it that my own freezer remains frost-free without periodically thawing out all my food, when Trader Joe's freezer bins are incapable of the same feat?

3) Is the management of Trader Joe's aware of the risk posed by food poisoning?

4) Can Trader Joe's afford to eat the profit losses caused by spoilage of its frozen food -- even if it is confined to those items eye-balled by staff and customers -- or are those losses being passed on to consumers in the form of price increases?

5) Why do East Coast Trader Joe's stores pale in comparison to the West Coast stores, in terms of inventory, customer service, price/value, etc? I realize that's a separate issue. I just needed to get that off my chest.

If you were wondering how a nation of such vast wealth as the United States manages to produce 76 million cases of food poisoning per year, well, mystery solved. Let's put that number into perspective shall we? From Wikipedia: the United States logs 26,000 cases of food borne illness for every 100,000 inhabitants. The United Kingdom sees 3,400 cases for 100,000 inhabitants, and France, 1,210 cases for 100,000 inhabitants. We are devolving into a third world country. We have a population so uneducated that two store managers, responsible for food handling, looked at me like I was a crazy person, when I pointed out that frozen food should not be stored in warm freezers.

And don't expect government oversight to be the answer. Our government is too busy handing our port security over to countries with ties to terrorism and the writing of our legislation to the industries they are supposed to be regulating. We'll have to rely on our new found religion of "free market fundamentalism" to work it's corrective magic. John Stossel would probably tell me that Trader Joe's has the right idea, because now they can charge 10 times the regular price for those packages of chicken they can guarantee were never thawed and refrozen.

This morning I received two emails about pending legislation that will further undercut the rights of consumers to know what dangers lurk in their food. H.R 4167 will actually negate state labeling laws, forcing them to comply with the more lax federal standards. This effort is being spearheaded by Congressional Republicans – you know, the party devoted state rights – at the behest of Grocery Manufacturers of America. (So call your Congressperson.)

If you think federal labeling laws are sufficient, think again. Recently,
McDonald's "voluntarily" disclosed that their fries derive their flavor from wheat and dairy ingredients, to which some people are very allergic. I checked. It really is voluntary on their part, because the woefully insufficient labeling law -- a law that doesn't even require disclosure of allergenic substances in refined oils -- provides an exemption for restaurants. Here's my favorite part of the McDonald's statement.

McDonald's director of global nutrition, Cathy Kapica, said its potato suppliers remove all wheat and dairy proteins, such as gluten, which can cause allergic reactions.

Because everybody knows that potatoes come out of the ground just chock full of wheat and dairy.

For my part I swore off McDonald's fries after learning from the movie "Supersize Me" that they don't biodegrade. A jar of McDonald's fries left sitting on a shelf changes little over weeks, months, and years. Perhaps it's small of me but I'm a little put off by the idea of food that has a half-life longer than plutonium.

I write this with full knowledge that I may be sued for food disparagement. Many states now have laws to protect vulnerable corporations from citizens maligning their perishables. It was such a statute that Texas cattle ranchers used to punish Oprah for expressing her fear of mad cows. Oprah won that fight, and presumably a victory for speech, but that was before our political climate devolved into one of "first amendment zones" to protect the President from dissent If you haven't noticed, corporate rights trump consumer rights in nearly every arena now. So it's probably only a matter of time before publishing a letter of complaint to a grocer will land me in court. And if Oprah's experience is any guide, I'll have to hire Dr. Phil to help me "get real." That's an indignity I don't know if I'd survive. I'm a strong woman but I have my limits.