Are you Abe Vigoda? No, Are you Abe Vigoda?

I was wondering just how much more Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled legislature can possibly suppress voting, confuse voters or otherwise ensure that Republicans have the advantage, even though Pennsylvania is already one of the most tightly controlled states in the nation when it comes to election law and despite that there are now more registered Democrats (4.1 million) than registered Republicans (3 million) statewide.

We already cannot:

• Vote by mail as Oregon and Washington do.  Voting by mail greatly reduces the states’ costs of having to provide and man polling places and purchase voting machines and it greatly increases voter turnout, which is, of course the opposite of what Republicans want to do.

• Vote early as nine states do, in some cases up to a week before Election Day, which also greatly increases voter turnout.  Early voting decreases the long lines that we saw, for example, in Ohio in the 2004 election, and it makes it much more convenient for workers who might have to take off Election Day to vote because we still insist on having elections on Tuesdays.  Maine’s new conservative legislature enacted a ban on early voting in 2010 but voters approved a referendum overturning it Nov. 8.  Ohio voters have submitted more than enough signatures to place a referendum on the ballot in 2012 to overturn a similar 2010 ban in that state.

•  Have a referendum.  No way, no how do the people of Pennsylvania ever get to directly express their will on any important issue.  Don’t you often wonder how come California, Colorado and other states can put questions on the ballot but nobody in Pennsylvania ever does?  That’s because Pennsylvania law simply does not provide any mechanism whatsoever for voter initiative and referendum.   You could gather the signatures of every voter in the state to place a question on the ballot and still could not do it.  The Legislature may place specific bond issues on the ballot, but even then, the question has to be approved two years in a row before it can be put before the voters.  Local referenda are allowed, but statewide, you cannot even amend the state constitution by public referendum.

• Register to vote or change your party registration on Election Day.  Don’t be daft!  Many states allow same day registration, but that loosens the reins the parties have over their members too much for Pennsylvania politicians to handle.  Here you have to be aware that you must register or change your registration at least 30 days before the next election in order to vote in that election and you have go to your local election bureau to do it.

•  Mail in an absentee ballot.  You have to jump through countless hoops: first you have to apply for an absentee ballot, and then you must deliver the ballot to the county election bureau in person within a week before the election, unless you are traveling or disabled, in which case you must have someone apply to be your designated agent to deliver the ballot.  And if you suddenly become disabled just before an election, you have to go to court to get an emergency absentee ballot!  

•  Know whether we are voting for Republicans or Democrats for judges and school board members by looking at the ballot, since these candidates usually cross-file in both party primaries, a deliberately confusing and infuriating practice.  The idea is to discourage partisanship in these positions of sacred public trust where party should not matter.  But somehow, it is only Republicans who get elected to the judiciary in Delaware County.  I want to know the party membership of judges and school board members in this day and age of corporate control of the courts and advocacy of Creationism and abstinence sex education only in schools.   By the way, have you noticed that most lawn signs for candidates rarely identify party affiliation? 

So what’s a good Pennsylvania Republican to do to suppress voter turnout even more than all these restrictions already do?  Why require each and every voter to show a state-approved photo ID to a poll worker on each and every election day, just to make sure that Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Abe Vigoda and Marilyn Monroe don’t actually show up to vote.

Republicans are terrified of voter fraud, even though there has been no reported cases of people actually showing up at the polls to impersonate someone else to vote in many, many years.  

Yes, in 2008 there was voter registration fraud.  That is a different thing.  That is when someone enters a fake name and address on a voter registration form, but those people did not then show up at the polls.  Voter-registration-drive workers, who were being paid according to how many new registrations they brought in, were making up those names merely to be paid.  The state Legislature was quick to outlaw that procedure after the 2008 elections.

So having already made it as difficult as possible for people to vote, all the Republicans have left is Voter ID.  House Bill 934 has sped through the General Assembly and is sitting in a Senate committee awaiting action to require photo IDs, which will cost the state government an additional $4.3 million to enact and greatly slow down the voting process. 

The law would require non-drivers to go to their local PennDot service agency and obtain the state-approved photo ID, but since the ID would only be for voting purposes, the state cannot charge people for that service.  That would be a poll tax and poll taxes are unconstitutional.

So college students from out of state, the elderly and non-car-owning city folk (usually Democrats) will be greatly inconvenienced, perhaps to the point of not participating, on the pretext of preventing even a single Mickey Mouse or Abe Vigoda from getting past a less than vigilant poll worker on Election Day.  

Republicans especially hate all those Swarthmore and Haverford and Bryn Mawr College students who register to vote in presidential elections and who tend to be liberal.  Don’t be surprised if you see legislation to push the registration deadline back to before these students show up on campus to eliminate these dastardly newly enfranchised citizens from voting.

But no matter how hard the Republicans try, they’re still stuck with all those Democrats in the evil big cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and increasingly their suburbs.  If they could only come up with a way to make sure that only Republicans could vote.

The new flim-flam could be happening to you right now

A few weeks ago a friend of mine received an email from a longtime acquaintance saying that he had been “mugged in London” and asking her to send him some money to help him get home.

Knowing that he had several family members and many closer friends to fall back on, she was really taken aback.

“The nerve of him,” she said.

Although I hadn’t heard of it before, I told her it sounded like a scam and suggested she call him, which she did.  It turns out it was a scam.  He was home, had not been mugged and hadn’t been to London in years.

Then, just today, I get this email text in my own inbox purportedly from a friend of mine:

“Hope you get this on time, I made a trip to Spain, Madrid and had my bag stolen from me with my passport and credit cards in it. The embassy is willing to help by letting me fly without my passport, I just have to pay for a ticket and settle Hotel bills. Unfortunately for me, I can't have access to funds without my credit card, I've made contact with my bank but they need more time to come up with a new one. I was thinking of asking you to lend me some quick funds that I can give back as soon as I get in. I really need to be on the next available flight.

Western Union transfer is the best option to send money to me. Let me know if you need my details (Full names/location) to make the transfer. You can reach me via email.

Thank you for your input and support.”

This message is especially hilarious to me because this particular friend has owed me a few hundred dollars since roughly 1999 and would never dare ask me for more money if she were dying.

The new “I’ve been mugged in – name a foreign city” is a more sophisticated version of the old “Nigerian letter” which has been around for years.  The Nigerian letter (send me your bank account number and several thousand dollars in processing fees and I’ll split this $50 million with you) is itself a new computerized version of the old “flim-flam” (Psst, I just found this money in the street.  Give me some “earnest money” to show me you’re honest and I’ll split it with you).

As it happens, journalist James Fallows details in the November issue of The Atlantic magazine how the exact same “mugged in Madrid” con happened to his wife.   

As Fallows explains it, six years of his wife’s emails disappeared from her Gmail account at the same moment that he and everyone else in her email address book received the “I’ve been mugged in Madrid” appeal in their own email accounts.  Since the two of them had just finished breakfast and were in the same house, they understood instantly that they had been hacked.

Typically, any replies to the email are actually rerouted to an account set up by the hacker, who then sends additional, seemingly personal, messages encouraging concerned friends and family to send money while preventing the victim from finding out about the scam.

If any of the victims’ friends and family members fall for it, they might be out a few hundred dollars, pain enough right there, but the real danger is that by hacking into an email account, the hacker can gain access to passwords and personal information about banks, credit cards and other online accounts that could prove much more costly.   

If the hacker gets just one such password, he may have hit the jackpot because most of us are so prone to using the same password or couple of passwords over and over.  Otherwise, how are we going to remember all of them?  The Fallows article has some good advice on this issue.  I urge you to read it.

The Fallows were forced to close out or change all of their financial accounts, but they did eventually retrieve the six-years’ worth of emails from cyberspace or, as it’s called now, “the cloud,” those remote servers that store our stuff for us.

In investigating the incident, Fallows discovered that like the Nigerian letter, most of the hackers responsible for the mugged emails are located in Nigeria, the Ivory Coast or other places in West Africa.  A convincing scammer running several of these dodges at a time can make on average $500 a day if only one or two gullible friends believe the story, investigators told him.

The swindle is so new it hasn’t even made it on to snopes.com, the venerable urban legend website.  One variation that does show up there though doesn’t even need a computer, just a telephone number.  In this one, the scammer calls and claims to be the victim’s grandson in need of money in some distant city to bail himself out of a DUI.  Since grandparents often have little contact with grown grandchildren and may not know their whereabouts or recognize their voices, this could work, though a heavy foreign accent might be a giveaway.

Snopes points out that these types of scams are especially insidious because while most frauds depend on the victim’s greed (flim-flams, the Nigerian letter), this one preys on the victims’ generosity and kind hearts.

If you get an email from me saying I’ve just been mugged somewhere in Europe, just send money to my home address, and if you don’t have my home address, well, you’re not that close a friend, are you?

I have incorporated my uterus

Just to be on the safe side, I want to announce that I have incorporated my uterus and you can too, assuming you have one, at Incorporate My Uterus.

Not that my uterus will actually make me any money at my age.  It’s all symbolic, of course, but the point is, since the fundamentalists in this country do not want government to regulate corporations, but do want it to control every aspect and function of women’s uteruses, incorporation should provide some protection for us women, or at least create a few major dilemmas for the law makers.

If this theory holds any water at all, women in Mississippi should hurry up and incorporate as it now appears, a week before Election Day, that a majority of the voters in Mississippi are going to enact a state constitutional amendment that declares that a fertilized eggs is a person. 

Only in Mississippi, one of the poorest, most poorly educated, least healthy and least developed states in the nation on just about every measure, can the voters be pumped up to obsess about an issue like this instead of say, jobs or education or health care or the social safety net.

The amendment reads: The term “person” or “persons” shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.”  (You have to throw in a “thereof” somewhere or it isn’t a legal document.)

This is, of course, yet another run on legal abortion.  Its backers hope the law will be challenged all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court and that the Court, with its 5-4 conservative majority, will uphold it and thus overturn Roe v. Wade.  Has anyone ever read Roe v. Wade?  Here’s your chance.

The blogger sphere is having a lot of fun with this “fertilized egg as person concept,” some of which I’ll get to in a minute, but personally I doubt the law will ever get to the Supreme Court.

It’s a nice sentiment, I guess, and it may further help prevent legal abortions in Mississippi, where I don’t think any abortions have been occurring for some time thanks to other already passed Draconian state laws.  In 2008, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks such statistics, 99 percent of Mississippi counties had no abortion provider and 91 percent of Mississippi women lived in these counties. I’m betting it’s at 100 percent by now.

But I think that the instant Mississippi tries to apply its new personhood amendment, it won’t survive a legal challenge because it is, quite simply, unenforceable.  This precedent is well-established throughout all of the courts of the United States:  where a law is unenforceable, it is null and void.

Of course it will take some years to fully resolve the matter legally but in the meantime the amendment raises all kinds of absurd questions.

Such as, what if a woman has an ectopic pregnancy? This is a pregnancy that establishes itself in a fallopian tube.  The standard medical practice is to remove the tube before it bursts and risks the mother’s life through peritonitis.

But if you do that, you kill another “person”, the fertilized egg.  Let’s call it Edgar. And even if you don’t, the mother will perish, which of course means Edgar will perish as well.  That, my friends, is a dilemma.  

Does it ban most forms of birth control?  As an extra added bonus to the most puritanical and sex-hating among us, it certainly will lead to a push to ban just about every kind of birth control except condoms because many kinds of contraceptives – IUDs and morning after pills and perhaps birth control pills as well – interfere with the attachment of a fertilized egg to the uterine wall.  

If a fertilized egg is a person, it must be afforded the opportunity to survive, but how will the state enforce that?  How will it even know a fertilized egg is struggling to attach?  Will it seize the medical records of all women of child-bearing age to determine if they are already using IUDs then force them to go to a hospital to rip their IUDs out?  Will it seize pharmacy records to see who is using birth control or who has purchased a morning after pill? Will it arrest doctors who prescribe the pill? 

Are miscarriages murder?  The amendment seems to make every miscarriage a crime and may require that law enforcement investigate every miscarriage as a potential homicide.  How will they gather the evidence for that? Raid doctors’ offices and emergency rooms?  Carry off miscarried (also known as spontaneously aborted) fetuses for autopsies? Oh boy, will that ever overload the state’s criminal justice system.  DUI suspects will be cheering.  Mississippi is very hard on DUIs.

Does it criminalize all risky behaviors practiced by women but not men? Little sexist there, don’t you think?  The law may criminalize any dangerous activity that a woman undertakes in the state of Mississippi in the early stages of pregnancy, even before she is even aware of her condition – like drinking, smoking or going skiing.  (I don’t think there’s much skiing in Mississippi, but who knows?)  Again, how will it enforce that?

Is the amendment retroactive?  If so, does that mean all residents can, as of the moment of the law’s passage, legally drink upon attaining the age of 20 years and three months, or can they apply for a learner’s permit at the age of 15 years and three months?  Can citizens apply for Social Security at age 65 and three months or Medicare at 64 and three months?  Can a woman apply on behalf of her fertilized egg for welfare, Medicaid and food stamps as of the moment she knows she’s pregnant?

When she was interviewed by National Public Radio on the subject in 2008 – when it was on the ballot in Colorado – Jessica Berg, a professor of law and bioethics at Case Western Reserve University, said the amendment could lead to some other bizarre situations — such as counting fertilized eggs in the state census and allowing pregnant drivers to use the carpool lanes. 

And, Berg pointed out, it’s not clear that in-state fertility clinics could ever destroy unwanted fertilized eggs, freeze them or implant them in other women without having to put them through the same adoption procedures as people who want to adopt actual children.

The personhood amendment has failed spectacularly twice in Colorado but I don’t think the voters in Mississippi will be so sensible.  And other states are watching attentively, such as Ohio and Florida, where similar laws have been introduced.

Of course, the amendment makes no exceptions for eggs fertilized through rape or incest and doesn’t provide any means of determining whether the mother’s life or the egg’s should be saved in a life-threatening situation, or indeed, even how the egg could be saved instead of the mother.  Medical science is amazing though and I’m sure they’ll come up with a way.

The bottom line is this, neither side will ever win on the abortion issue because it is just too lucrative to keep it going.  We have all 50 states in which to wage this battle, not to mention more than 80 federal trial courts and 13 federal appellate courts, although I do not think the Federal Circuit ever deals with abortion, so call it 12 federal appellate courts.

That’s not to say that some states are not succeeding very well at enacting laws that can be enforced, such as a newly implemented very restrictive anti-abortion law in North Carolina.

But just imagine if the fundamentalists were completely successful in banning abortion (and birth control) throughout the United States.  All of that Bible-thumping, sanctimonious “pro-life,” “oh my God, we have to save the unborn babies” money would just dry up.  And if abortion survived every onslaught and remained safe and legal, I would stop getting calls and emails from Planned Parenthood and NARAL.

It’s not going to happen.

Oh those funny, funny rightwing nuts

Who knew the Teapublicans were so funny?

These past few days it’s been one thigh slapper after another.

First there was Herman Cain saying if he is elected president he would put up an electrified fence between Mexico and the United States with a sign on the other side saying “This will kill you,” presumably in Spanish.

Then on a Sunday talk show he said he was joking.  Then on Monday, after meeting with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, he kind of took the “It’s a joke” part back.   Maybe he thinks he can get the Hispanic vote on even-numbered days and the anti-immigrant votes on odd-numbered days.

Mike Huckabee is hilarious too.  He urges supporters of an Ohio initiative to roll back union rights to suppress the votes of its opponents.

“You just make sure that they don't go vote. Let the air out of their tires on election day. Tell them the election has been moved to a different date. That's up to you how you creatively get the job done."

That was a joke too, Huckabee now insists.  What a kidder!  And it’s a “joke” he’s made before.  In 2009 he said pretty much the same thing here in this video while campaigning for Bob McDonnell in Virginia:

 "One, get all those people who are going to vote for Bob out to the polls and vote. If they're not going to vote for Bob, you have another job. Let the air out of their tires, and do not let them out of their driveway on Election Day. Keep 'em home. Do the Lord's work, my friend. I'm giving you an opportunity ... yes, do the right thing."

Do the lord’s work, indeed!  Keep those Democratic, Godless Commie bastards out of the voting booth. In some, no doubt humorless, circles, Huckabee’s little joke would be considered a federal crime, a violation of the Voters Rights Act of 1965. 

By the way, that ploy, “tell them the election is a different day” has been pulled all around the country in recent years, most recently in the Wisconsin recall elections.  Not by Democrats.  Also, “Tell them they’ll be arrested for parking tickets or outstanding child support if they try to vote” was actually tried in Philadelphia in 2008.

Speaking of the Lord’s work, Rush Limbaugh must have been joking when he expressed his support recently for the Lord’s Resistance Army:

“Lord's Resistance Army are Christians.  They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan.  And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them,” Limbaugh said.

You would think Limbaugh or his producers would at least Google an organization before going on the airwaves to defend it.  If he had, he might have learned what the evangelical magazine Christianity Today thinks of the LRA:

“The perpetrators commit atrocities with such malevolence that even the most irreligious people familiar with their acts describe them as ‘unrestrained evil.’  The targets of the butchery are children. They rape, mutilate, and kill them with a rapaciousness that staggers the imagination.  Worse, they compel children to kill one another and their own families, fighting as ‘soldiers’ in an armed force deliberately composed of children.”

Sometimes sticking to your principle of opposing every last thing the (Democratic, Godless, secret Muslim, Commie, Socialist, half-black) president does can really lead you down strange byways, but that’s Rush, clueless all day, every day.

The “merry prankster” of the nutwing right has also been up to some new high jinx, but without much joy.  James O’Keefe, he of the Acorn, NPR Muslim Brotherhood and Mary Landrieu hilarity, has been trying to pass himself off to the Economic Policy Institute as a researcher for a hedge fund manager who is interested in funding a study showing that cuts to education would hurt students.  In other words, he was trying to get a progressive think tank to agree to buy bogus research results so that he could “prove” that the left will do anything to support its causes (unlike the Republicans, of course).  Luckily EPI was on to him.

"He was trying to get me to say, yeah, give me the money and I will come up with a report that says cutting back on school funding is going to hurt school kids," said EPI President Lawrence Mishel. "Which actually is the truth — I could have given him evidence that shows that."

O'keefe also made a video at Occupy Wall Street in which he passed himself off as a banker who was approached by a “protester” to invest in a company.  O’Keefe pleaded guilty to entering property belonging to the United States under false pretenses in May and was sentenced to three years of probation.

Keep 'em coming, you kings of comedy, you!

Civics, we don't need no stinking civics

College professor Denise Oliver Velez asks a very important question in this Daily Kos diary Whatever happened to civics?  I encourage you to read it and then to read or at least sample the extensive, lively and thoughtful (for the most part) comments section that follows.

Velez reports that every year she gives her incoming freshman students at a New York public university a quiz about what they know about the political system and every year the results are always dismal. 

This year, she says, none can name either of their two U.S. senators, only one could name his congressman, only one could name a single candidate running for the Republican nomination for president and none knew the names of any of their state government reps, though roughly half did name the governor of New York.

All could name the President, of course.  I wonder how many could name the Vice President? 

Their lack of specific information about the current cast of characters in our ongoing political drama isn’t so shocking.  I don’t think many 18-year-olds of any generation have had much of that knowledge either, fresh as they were from an intense course of study on how to get into college, how to get or keep a girlfriend or boyfriend and how to be popular.

But according to Velez, her students lack “a basic understanding of how political systems work —especially ours —and … of the basics of legislation, politics, civil rights and social change and how they are affected by political and social systems.”

Secondary school education in civics, government, geography, social studies and American history seem to have diminished or disappeared at an alarming rate in recent years thanks in part to the pressures on schools to “teach to the test” as dictated by the Bush Administration’s implementation of No Child Left Behind (which seems to be leaving the vast majority of children behind) and by the explosive growth of social media, which seems to be replacing reading as a pleasurable and important pastime.

As Velez puts it:  They don't read newspapers. They don't blog.  They spend a lot of time texting each other because they all have cell phones. A majority have Facebook pages.  Question is, what are they talking to each other about?

In the comments section of Velez’s diary, another teacher reports that many of his students seem to believe that the President of the United States is like the CEO of a company, that he merely has to issue an order and things get done – health care reform, jobs creation, taxation – and that his students have no concept of the duties or prerogatives of Congress.

Other commenters discuss the need for teaching critical thinking and problem solving, the need for children to see other parts of the country and the world, and the importance of parental involvement in making sure each generation understands how our political system works and how voting affects all our lives. 

Taking your children to see Williamsburg, Gettysburg, the Alamo and other historic sites is important.   For me, the shock of getting off a bus in Virginia as a white 14-year-old girl from Connecticut in 1959, seeing the words “Colored Women” over a restroom and suddenly realizing what that meant was an education all by itself.

Some of the commentators speculate that conservative Republicans and Tea Partiers actively seek to keep civics education out of the public schools because, after all, learning about evolution, the Great Depression and New Deal, the union movement, the Vietnam war, the Civil Rights struggle and other such milestones in our history can put some very un-Republican ideas in a young person’s head. 

I can buy into that.   Glenn Beck often railed against public education as being an agent for “Socialism.”  What he chose to misunderstand is that public education has always been a force for “socialization,” for teaching about our common history and rights and responsibilities as citizens of a democracy.

In the last two years we have seen Republicans in state after state enact stringent voter ID laws to “prevent” virtually nonexistent fraud and to actually prevent college students from voting in the districts where their colleges are located.   

Now, the Colorado Secretary of State says that those in military service serving overseas are “inactive voters” and cannot receive absentee ballots if they did not vote in the 2010 off-year election.  So they can fight and die for their country but if they skipped one election, they cannot vote for their commander in chief. 

He is, he says, just trying to prevent voter fraud, but really, if Republicans believed those college students and soldiers would vote their way, would they be waging this war on young voters?  

Like King Canute, conservatives are trying to hold back the tide, but the young are going to be around for a long time and to the consternation of conservatives, they just don’t care about issues like banning abortion or Gay marriage.  That tide will eventually come in anyway.

But there’s a great danger in failing to provide an adequate civic education and in seeking to disenfranchise young people.  If you Saddle them with oppressive student loans, fail to provide jobs, force them into the military to use them for cannon fodder and take away their vote, they may take to the streets, sort of like they’re doing now with Occupy Wall Street.

Did you know ... ?

Some news items that may have escaped your attention:

• That Ground Zero mosque -- which is two and a half blocks from Ground Zero -- that raised such a hullabaloo last year quietly opened to the public Thursday Sept. 22 with an exhibit of photos of New York City children of different ethnicities.  The photos were taken by Danny Goldfield, a Jewish photographer.  There were no protesters.

• Some, not a lot, but some potential employers actually advertise on job sites like Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com seeking applicants who are currently employed.   This is pretty outrageous.  Legally, prospective employers cannot discriminate against applicants due to race, age, gender or sexual orientation, but they can blatantly advertise their discrimination against the unemployed. Of course, potential employers can actually discriminate against all those categories because, as long as they don’t say it or write it down anywhere, who’s going to know.  Still, what’s the point of stealing employees from one company for another when there are so many equally qualified unemployed to fill those same slots? 

• Speaking of discrimination, a recent poll by the Brookings Institute and the Public Religion Research Institute found that 46 percent, or nearly half, of those polled agree that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against minority groups.  A slim majority, 51 percent disagree.  Well, this is fascinating.  I was not only totally unaware that whites experienced much in the way of discrimination, I was also unaware that it is a big problem.  Maybe somebody out there can enlighten me as to how we whites are so abused. Not every instance of a black person getting a job you were competing for or an Hispanic store clerk being a little slow to ring up your purchases is discrimination against white people.  Maybe it's you.

• We  seem to believe in religious freedom for some. That same poll showed that while 88 percent of Americans agree that religious freedom is absolute bedrock of our nation’s values, 47 percent agree that the values of Islam are at odds with American values.  And, while two-thirds did reject the idea that American Muslims want to impose sharia law as the law of the land in the United States, six in 10 Republicans (almost the exact reverse) who “most trust Fox News” believe they do.  This fear of Sharia law is, of course, absolute lunacy.  Our nation’s 300-year-old body of common and statutory laws will never be replaced by sharia law any more than they will be replaced by the 10 commandments. Where would that leave our three million lawyers? Religious law of any stripe is just that, laws or commandments followed by that religion’s followers, if they want to follow them.  The rest of us will never be required to do so.  Don’t worry about it.

•  It seems to me that people (and cable “news” organizations) set up straw men to worry about when we have plenty of real problems to solve.  Another example is the “English as the Official Language" movement.  The simple truth is, children of immigrants learn English, even if the first generation doesn’t.  It has been this way with every immigrant group since the Pennsylvania Dutch in the 1700s.  There’s no real problem there to worry yourself to death over or pass laws about.

•  Rick Perry’s claim that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme is nuts.  It can become that only if we allow the Republicans to rip it apart, but we can protect it from insolvency if we have the political will to do so.  Republicans need to stop scaring the next generation about Social Security.  See this article.

• The Justice Department really didn’t pay $16 per muffin for a 2009 legal education conference as NBC reported earlier this week.  Or probably not.  In any case, a $16 muffin beats the hell out of a $71 straight pin that should have cost 4 cents or a $1,600 roller assembly that should have cost $10, according to a recent Department of Defense Inspector General’s report on Boeing Co.’s overcharges for helicopter parts.   Where was the Mainstream Media’s reporting on that?

• We really, really have to look at defense spending for areas to cut.  Why are we still building multi-billion dollar planes, tanks and aircraft carriers to fight the Cold War that have never, and will never, be used?  Why do we need 900 military bases around the world?  Why are we still furnishing troops for South Korea, Japan and Germany while those very flush countries go about the business of making money and not providing their own defense forces?  This too is nuts.

The real ‘rugged individualists’

When I hear Ron Paul or other Teapublicans talk about “rugged individualism,” I shudder.  I’ve seen it, at least from a distance, and it isn’t pretty.

In 1962 when I was 18, my father took me to Wyoming to meet my grandfather, William O. Mayberry, for the one and only time.  He was 79 years old and lived in a one-room shack on the high prairie near Newcastle, Wyoming.

The shack was an uninsulated wooden shed, a little larger than the one where you might keep your garden tools.  It was furnished with a bed, a small table with two wooden chairs and a wood stove.  No armchair, no sofa, no kitchen, no TV, just a small tabletop radio.  He did have indoor plumbing, an added-on “water closet” with a small sink and toilet.

He also had an old car, a 1940s-something Studebaker, I think, which he drove at a stately 25 miles an hour whether he was on a highway or dirt road.  He never rode on an airplane, never traveled more than a few miles from his home and never saw a baseball game.

My grandfather was so crippled with arthritis he couldn’t stand up straight, but he did odd jobs at a nearby sawmill several days a week to earn money for food and gas and chewing tobacco.  His uniform was bib overalls.  He lived like that until he died at 90 in 1971.  I don’t know what became of his shack, but somebody should have turned it into a museum honoring the western pioneer spirit.

He was the very embodiment of rugged individualism.  In 1893 when he was 11 years old, he walked behind a covered wagon herding pigs up the last remnants of the Oregon Trail, from Red Cloud, Nebraska, to Cambria, Wyoming, where his father and grandfather went to work in a coal mine.

The Mayberrys had gone bust in Nebraska in the Depression of 1893, the worst depression the country had ever experienced until the Great Depression.   I suspect my ancestors had also gone bust in every depression and recession prior to that and just kept losing their land and moving west at each downturn, from Maryland to Ohio to Nebraska and finally to Wyoming.   

When he was 19, my grandfather was a ranch hand on the Flying “K” ranch near Newcastle, according to the 1900 census.  After that, he turned his hand to whatever jobs were available.  He was a lumberjack, a cook, worked on the railroad, caught and tamed wild horses and tried his hand at ranching.

He married in 1911. He had saved enough money to buy himself a herd of cattle and he obtained a land grant from the government in 1913.  His entire herd froze to death that winter and that was the end of his homesteading.  

My grandmother, Laura Belle, died in 1914 from what her death certificate says was “neuralgia of the heart.”  She was 27 and had given birth to twins the year before. 

That land grant, and later maybe a tiny bit of Social Security, was the only thing my grandfather ever got from the government.   Did he have Medicare in his last few years from 1966 to 1971?  I don’t know but I hope so.

(My father and his twin brother had the good sense to join the Navy shortly before World War II and get the hell out of Wyoming for good.) 

So when I hear someone talking about good, old-fashioned “rugged individualism,” I wonder if they have any idea at all what they are talking about?  I can’t help but think they have idealized a way of life they have never experienced and would refuse to embrace today.

Is that what they want?  A one-room shack out in the bitter cold of a Wyoming winter?  A radio for entertainment?  Working into their 80s at one menial job after another?  Living most of a lifetime without modern medical care?

I honestly don’t think they do.

My point is this:  my grandfather was, for me, a living embodiment of the lives of nearly all Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries, before the New Deal created a Middle Class.
Millions of other American “rugged individualists” – farmers, ranchers, miners, factory and mill workers, garment workers – lived in lifelong poverty because they had to, not because they chose to exemplify some wondrous, noble libertarian fantasy. 
Ron Paul and the Tea Partiers seem intent on nothing less than repealing the Middle Class and all the nation's economic gains of the 20th century.