Crowson Blog

My, my, how things have changed

2011-08-01T04:13:00.000-07:00

The great Rollin Kirby, cartoonist for the New York World drew this during the build-up to WWI.

Things are a bit different now.

Most ignored truth of our time

2011-07-25T10:29:00.001-07:00

Brownback vs. Brown

2011-06-05T07:01:00.000-07:00

Charles Millbern

2011-06-04T09:06:00.000-07:00

One of the perks of having the small amount of local notoriety that I may have, is that fascinating people sometimes approach me with cartoon-related stories to share. Over the years I've been the fortunate recipient of several such people's attention and it's always a rewarding experience.

So it was that a fellow member of my church, Calvary United Methodist, came up to me a few weeks back with a keepsake book she had put together of her father's cartoon work. She was Pam Malone and her father was Charles Millbern. Charles passed away at the age of 86 this past January. This is from his obituary:

Charles started his career as a printing pressman before becoming a commercial artist for Western Lithograph & McCormick-Armstrong. He was a very talented cartoonist, drawing cartoons for the Army Times during WWII. He later drew editorial, business, & sports illustrations for the Wichita World & Wichita Eagle-Beacon. Charles proudly served in the US Army during WWII in the European Theatre & fought in the Battle of the Bulge.

The book which Pam has generously loaned me was a treasure trove of Charles' cartoons. They are terrific and I asked her if I could share them here on the blog. So with her permission, take a little trip back into the Wichita of the late 1950s and early 1960s through the eyes of the talented Charles Millbern:

Ah, summer!

2011-06-04T09:04:00.000-07:00

Last week's KMUW commentary below, or listen here.

All the talk lately about the Rapture that didn’t happen has put me in the mood to remember a rapture that I used to experience repeatedly: The last day of school before summer break. I remember how delicious that day was. Going to school on that day was a hollow formality. Mostly, we just picked up our report cards, fidgeted our sticky legs in our wooden desks for a few moments, and popped out of that school like tightly wound little springs—all joy and expectation.

The dusty path that my canvas tennis shoes bounced me along led directly to three months of homemade bows and arrows, Tarzan yells, model cars, and St. Louis Cardinal baseball games through a scratchy-sounding plastic Sears Silvertone transistor radio. Throw in a couple of slices of watermelon and a sweating aluminum pitcher filled with homemade icy lemonade, and you’ve got something very much like the Rapture. I was ejected from the earthly realm of homework sorrows and six-week test dread, and plopped into a land of milk and honey—or, make that Milk Duds and Bit O’ Honey.

But I also remember my friend Mike. Mike was more subdued about the end of school than some of us. I found out why one night as a 4th grader when I slept over at Mike’s and witnessed his mother’s screaming rage as she slapped and spanked him relentlessly for some small act of disobedience. For Mike, a three-month summer break just meant three months of ‘round-the-clock terror.

I’ve heard tales from teacher friends about such students—little ones who felt safer at school than anywhere else and who sometimes cried at the beginning of summer of of Christmas break. The prospect of having to spend more time away from school is not a rapturous event for them.

Well, in this era of either two-working-parent or one-parent households, here’s hoping the children in your world will have enough imaginative free time for a rapturous summer. Between art camp, tennis lessons, swim lessons, violin, and all those other modern, keep-‘em-busy summer obligations.

I wish...

2011-06-04T09:02:00.001-07:00

1965...Lurch on Shindig...you had to be there

2011-05-25T19:34:00.000-07:00

Expendable

2011-05-23T07:50:00.000-07:00

Song to Governor Sam

2011-05-21T09:53:00.000-07:00

Rap-up session

2011-05-21T08:56:00.001-07:00

Count me among the unscrubbed Plebian souls who don't care for it

2011-05-21T08:39:00.000-07:00

Yeah, yeah. I know it was money that could only be used for art and not for museum funds. I still think it's ironic that the amounts were precisely the same...

Here's my KMUW commentary on the Waterwalk sculpture or read it below.

Man, talk about irony… there’s been enough irony in the air lately here in Wichita that they should be running crawls across the bottom of our TV screens: “Warning! Heavy irony in Wichita area atmosphere. Please wear protective head gear especially when in the vicinity of the Wichita City Hall.”

By now, everyone knows about the Wichita City Council’s recent approval of $350,000 to have an abstract sculpture by renowned New York artist Albert Paley erected at WaterWalk. The 38-foot-tall piece is supposed to be a tribute to—among other things—Wichita’s aviation heritage. Yeah. That’s what they said. Our aviation heritage.

This comes less than a year after our Kansas Aviation Museum asked the city for financial help with their desperately needed capital improvement project. The city turned them down. The cost of the Museum’s project: $350,000. The exact amount which the city council is willing to spend on the sculpture which is a tribute to our aviation heritage. That, my friends, is what you call irony.

Why is the Council more interested in symbolism than substance? This sculpture is a symbol of our aviation heritage. The Kansas Aviation Museum is a substantial upholder and steward of that heritage. Our city’s tepid support of this important institution is, as a recent letter writer in the Wichita Eagle pointed out, embarrassing.

The Kansas Aviation Museum cannot even afford to heat and cool most of its building. And our city leaders are paying $350,000 for a sculptural tribute to our aviation heritage? Breathtakingly ironic. They should just embrace its irony and erect a giant iron butterfly. Or, better yet, a led zeppelin. Or… no! I’ve got it! How about a lead balloon?

Come see us on Saturday!

2011-05-16T15:19:00.000-07:00

Newty

2011-05-13T11:39:00.000-07:00

Friend Dan Rouser forwarded this article to me and I thought it blog-worthy:

The Eleven Craziest Things Newt Gingrich Has Ever Said

By George Zornick (from The Nation)
May 11, 2011

Today, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich will announce a run for the presidency. Over his long and checkered career, Newt has said some wild and crazy things—most are deeply offensive, while some are outright bizarre. Here’s the most unhinged Newt-isms, 1989-present.
(1) “I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [my grandchildren are] my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.” [Address to Cornerstone Church in Texas, March 2011]

(2) “The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument.” [To Mother Jones magazine, October 1989]

(3) “All I would say is, why did it take so long? The whole thing is strange.” [Speaking to TPM about the recent release of President Obama’s long-form birth certificate, April 2011]

(4) “What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.” [To the National Review, September 2010]

(5) “It doesn’t matter what I do. People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.” – [Newt’s explanation for why his multiple affairs won’t damage his political fortunes, as told to his jilted wife.]

(6) “The secular socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.” [In his book To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine, May 2010.]

(7) “This is one of the great tragedies of the Bush administration. The more successful they’ve been at intercepting and stopping bad guys, the less proof there is that we’re in danger…. It’s almost like they should every once in a while have allowed an attack to get through just to remind us.” [At a book talk in Huntington, NY, April 2008]

(8) "A mere 40 years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. No bureaucrat would have invented it, and that's what freedom is all about.” [At the Republican National Convention, August 1996]

(9) “I want to say to the elite of this country—the elite news media, the liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite: I accuse you in Littleton… of being afraid to talk about the mess you have made, and being afraid to take responsibility for things you have done, and instead foisting upon the rest of us pathetic banalities because you don’t have the courage to look at the world you have created.” [Speaking about the Columbine shootings, May 1999]

(10) “How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane.” [Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, March 2007]

(11) “I’m running for President.” [5/11/2011]

Imagine how he'll play when he's 9!

2011-05-11T10:41:00.000-07:00

An 8-year old pickin' the far outn' that thang!
(Check out the taxidermy)

"All us folks is big on corn!"

2011-05-11T10:21:00.000-07:00

Now a word from our sponsor:

Cabin fever

2011-05-11T09:39:00.000-07:00

I reverted to an antiquated style of editorial cartoon with this one. Ordinarily I try to avoid things like giant menacing clouds with giant menacing labels on them such as these. It's all very 1950. But, then, I'm an antiquated guy.

Ollie

2011-05-10T14:20:00.000-07:00

Rest in peace, Oliver Fizzpatrick Crowson. Born January 8, 2002 - Died May 9, 2011

Joyland no more

2011-05-10T14:14:00.000-07:00

Here's a beautiful, sad video by Mike Petty of one of Wichita's ghosts.

No Joy from Mike Petty on Vimeo.

Thought you'd heard every Christmas song?

2011-05-03T10:48:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiVItDsBFGc

What's where in Wichita arts

2011-05-03T08:26:00.000-07:00

Last year I was commissioned to draw up a cartoon map of the City of Wichita which showed all of the nonprofit arts organizations in our fair city. Poster-size prints of the map are available from any of them. It's a fundraiser for Wichita's arts community. If you can get one of them and run me down, I'll happily sign it for you.

It turned out to be a bit more of a challenge than I expected, including both Prairie Pines and the Center for the Arts in one image...so the perspective is a bit skewed, as it were. (But some say my perspective is always skewed so that's fitting!)

Local marketing firm Marketing Resouces worked with me on the project. Mike Katzenmeier of that company has hired me for many years to produce art work for his clients. The entire thing was underwritten by the Trust Company of Kansas. This local company has been a strong supporter of our arts community for many years and deserves our thanks for continuing its tradition of believing in the value of the arts to Kansas' citizenry. In a state where politicians seem to think the arts are of questionable value to our community, such companies as TCK and Marketing Resources are especially heroic.

Stewart's on target (pun intended)

2011-05-03T07:35:00.000-07:00

The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Yes, we can!

2011-05-01T22:13:00.000-07:00

KPERS

2011-05-01T22:12:00.001-07:00

On Prince William and Kate

2011-04-29T11:03:00.000-07:00

Here's my KMUW commentary from this morning.

I need one of those trees

2011-04-29T11:01:00.000-07:00

The Bring Back Beck Fund

2011-04-29T10:50:00.000-07:00

Here's my KMUW commentary on Mr. Beck and such.

Oletha Fast Goudeau

2011-04-29T10:48:00.000-07:00

Hooray for the Shox!

2011-04-08T16:02:00.000-07:00

KMUW commentary on you, if you post hateful anonymous comments somewhere

2011-04-08T15:59:00.000-07:00

Now that our Kansas Legislature has passed a law protecting us all from the scourge of voter fraud, I believe it’s time for another law addressing another fraud issue. Seems to me that our culture has become awash with anonymous internet comments of the snarkiest sort.

Under the cloak of anonymity, people say all sorts of vile, nasty things in the comments sections after news, opinion and even sports pieces. These nameless, faceless attacks are aimed at the folks who actually had the courage to attach their names to what they wrote. But invariably in the comments they are ripped to shreds in a snarky feeding frenzy by what we who worked for newspapers used to call anonymous gutless wonders. They name-call. They accuse. They insult and they cower in anonymity.

So I got to thinking. 76% of Americans call themselves Christians. I suspect the percentage here in the Great State of Kansas is even higher. Yet the anonymous comments on our Kansas websites are full of as much vitriol as anywhere else.

With all of the good Christian folks hereabouts, I have to conclude that most of those who are posting anonymous hate-filled comments must surely be doing so fraudulently. They can’t be real Kansans. They must be guilty of commenter fraud. So get on it, legislators. Force commenters to show IDs before they post those nasty anonymous, almost certainly illegitimate, internet rants. The scanned images of every spittle-slinging, hate-spewing commenter, taken from their photo IDs, must be visible with each posting they contribute on the internet.

Or else look for the glow of computer screens in their windows and shoot ‘em from helicoptors like feral hogs. After all, Kansas is a Christian state.

For KMUW I’m Richard Crowson.

And I use the term "thinker" loosely...

2011-04-08T15:56:00.000-07:00

Ode to Ode to a Daffodil

2011-04-08T15:48:00.000-07:00

KMUW commentary back on April 18:

Are you as happy as I am to see those daffodils popping up? Man, it seems like it’s been a long winter. And I’m not just talking about the weather. The news itself has brought us dark cloud after dark cloud as of late. I’ve found myself transfixed to an unhealthy degree by images of Northern Japan’s tsunami misery.

I thought we had it bad what with the looming deep budget cuts here in Kansas that are sending divisive cracks along our landscape. Those cracks spider outward from Topeka and we get our schools divided from arts divided from the disabled divided from teachers’ pensions divided from, well, you get the idea. If “to every thing there is a season” we are apparently in the season of civil division.

All of this is against a backdrop of our national political divisions. Storm after blustery storm of partisanship has whipped itself into a windy fury of uncivil public discourse, often ending in torrents of childish name-calling and deeply wounding mutual distrust.

And then upon this bleak and barren landscape, right in the middle of this seemingly unending recession’s chill, daffodils have the audacity to raise their little yellow trumpets toward the roiling gray clouds.

It’s enough to make one get up off the couch of self pity and open a book of poetry. Maybe to a poem by William Wordsworth. Maybe to these lines in which Wordsworth recalls having seen a stand of those impertinent floral fellows in his “Ode to a Daffodil:”

“For oft, when on my couch I lie in vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.”

For KMUW I’m Richard Crowson.

Could we round up and deport Kansas legislators???

2011-04-08T15:46:00.000-07:00

It's not very far from sulphur to sugarcane

2011-03-15T20:18:00.000-07:00

This song really grows on me. Elvis with killer band including Jerry Douglas and Stuart Duncan (the world's most underrated fiddler) and Mike Compton. At Merlefest last year.

Ralph and Carter with Reno and Smiley!

2011-03-15T12:41:00.000-07:00

Here's a great old clip of the Stanley Brothers singing and playing with Reno and Smiley!

Two of my favorite banjo players doing a punchy double-banjo break. What's not to like?

Why I play music

2011-03-15T12:18:00.000-07:00

So I can make posters, of course. I really enjoy making music posters. It gives me a chance to experiment with different techniques and try new stuff. Sometimes it works pretty well as in the first one below. And sometimes not so well as in the one below that. It came out kind of Hallmarky. I think it's partly that font I used. Plus the washed-out colors. I was trying for a light, springtime sort of effect. Oh, well. There's always next month.

Oliphant on PBS

2011-03-15T12:13:00.001-07:00

I'll be going in to KMUW at 4:00 today to record my commentary for this week. I'm going to look around while I'm there for one of those unicycle-generator thing-ies like Oliphant drew in this toon.

All us cartooners really miss Jesse Helms...

Oliphant on Europe

2011-03-15T12:12:00.001-07:00

Luckovich on the Newtster

2011-03-15T12:08:00.000-07:00

Everybody talks about how brilliant the Newtist is. Sometimes even people who are opposed to him talk about what a great mind he has. He's supposed to be so smart? Then why does he have a history of thinking with his d*#@???

Just can't tie us down!

2011-03-15T11:38:00.000-07:00

I love, no make that loooooooooooooooooooooove Richard Thompson's work. Here's one of his Cul de Sac toons that sort of hits home, since I sometimes play the banjo in classrooms. The way the kids can just run with an idea and take over is so true to life. You never know what they're going to say. That's part of what makes it fun.

Faux voter fraud

2011-03-15T08:58:00.000-07:00

Al

2011-03-10T13:22:00.001-08:00

Yeah. That'll revive 'em.

2011-03-10T13:20:00.000-08:00

Al

2011-03-09T12:36:00.000-08:00

Phred Phelps

2011-03-04T13:37:00.000-08:00

Today's commentary on KMUW is here or read it below.

Whenever I feel a little bit down about this old world of ours, about the direction things seem to be going in, I turn my thoughts to Fred Phelps and, by golly, I see the beautiful side of life again. His skeletal facial features are hardened by decades of wallowing in the odious, putrid mud of hate and self-loathing. Yet that face always serves as a reminder to me of our society’s amazing ability to resist the pull to meet violence with violence. The emotional and psychological violence inflicted by the Phelps clan has not been successful in eliciting a physically violent response from us. Remarkably he and the other members of Westboro Baptist Church are all able to walk around physically unscathed.

Considering how frequently and how long these people have been thrusting themselves at the rest of us, the fact that they are all apparently unbruised and physically healthy is nothing short of a miracle. To the Phelps family Americans have demonstrated nothing less than Christ-like behavior. We have turned the other cheek time and time again against the battering of Phelps’ fetishistic signage. Just this week the United States Supreme Court found yet another cheek to turn toward the Westboro-ites’ tightly fisted picket signs. The spirits of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Patriot Guard and others who will not be moved to violence against these hate-fueled people who try so hard to chide and goad us down to their level.

So whenever you find yourself thinking we’re all going to hell in a handcart, consider that this handcart may also have u-turning capabilities. We choose not to sink into Fred Phelps’ hell with its’ lake of fiery hatred, brimstone violence and flaming prejudice.

Thanks, Fred. For showing us how not to behave!

For KMUW I’m Richard Crowson.

Keeper of the Planes

2011-03-04T13:36:00.000-08:00

Pothole

2011-03-04T13:33:00.000-08:00

How can a state that can't afford a $600,000 Arts Commission possibly afford a 6 million dollar Governor's Mansion???

2011-02-18T07:11:00.000-08:00

My KMUW commentary for today is below, or you can listen here.

If Governor Sam Brownback is really serious about attacking our state’s 492 million dollar deficit, why is he messing around with teensy little amounts like the $600,000 that the state will “save” by obliterating the Kansas Arts Commission?

Come on, Guv. Let’s really get after it. If aesthetics are a luxury we can’t afford in these tight times, and that’s the implication of your Arts Commission abolition, what about the house you live in? I don’t know the true value of Cedar Crest, the Kansas Governor’s Mansion, but I suspect it’s considerably more than the 4.4 million dollars that was spent on renovating it in the 1990s. Let’s be conservative (we like being conservative!) and put a 6 million dollar price tag on it. And sell that sucker to the private sector.

What better way to send a signal to Kansans that you walk the talk, than by selling Cedar Crest and giving that money to the state? Then you can underscore your sincerity by moving into a double wide at Topeka’s Sunflower Acres Mobile Home Village. Heck, maybe the private sector will buy you one of those $29.95 sofa-sized paintings on sale in the Wal-Mart parking lot. Who needs all that pretentious NEA-influenced art made by Volvo-driving, pointy-headed, liberal-leaning so-called artists anyway?

By selling the Cedar Crest Mansion you can put a big ole 6 million dollar dent in the state deficit instead of pock-marking it with that measly $600,000 gained by abolishing the Kansas Arts Commission.

Never mind that the $600,000 actually brought 1.2 million dollars to Kansas each year. Never mind all of those small arts entities in rural areas that will lose funding once there’s no Kansas Arts Commission. Let ‘em raise money by selling Elvis paintings at intersections. That’s the kind of thing that attracts businesses to Kansas. Not theatres, galleries and museums. And certainly not governor’s mansions. For KMUW I’m Richard Crowson.

Lying liars.

2011-02-14T15:18:00.000-08:00

Oh yeah. Brilliant idea. Let's arm all university students.

2011-02-14T15:12:00.000-08:00

So here's a little glimpse of what life on campus would be like if students carry guns as many conservative gun-rights folks are advocating. Yeah. Real good idea there. Turn higher ed into higher dead.

Shooting suspect on Tennessee university campus captured

By the CNN Wire Staff

February 14, 2011 3:06 p.m. EST

One person was shot late Monday morning on the campus of Middle Tennessee State University on Monday.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

NEW: A shooting suspect is arrested at Middle Tennessee State, a spokesman says
NEW: The lockdown at the school has been called off, and have police confiscated a gun
NEW: The victim was shot in the hand and brought to a local hospital, the spokesman says

RELATED TOPICS

(CNN) -- A suspect is in custody about an hour after one person was shot late Monday morning on the campus of Middle Tennessee State University, a school spokesman said.

Officials called off a lockdown, which had been in effect as SWAT teams and other law enforcement authorities converged on the campus, after the suspect was detained about 12:45 p.m., said the university's media relations director, Tom Tozer. A gun said to have been used in the incident has also been confiscated.

Authorities were alerted at 11:51 a.m. about a shooting in a basic and applied science building located in a cluster of university structures.

"From what I understand, there were two men who got into an argument over by some of our buildings," Tozer said. "One shot the other in the hand, then took off."

The victim, whose condition was not immediately known, was taken to a nearby medical facility. Tozer said he cannot confirm whether those involved were students.

Meanwhile, police began hunting for the shooter on 25,000-student university's campus, in the central Tennessee city of Murfreesboro. Firearms are not allowed on campus, per school policy, according to Tozer.

The spokesman said that officials believe the situation is now under control.

"We are advising people to proceed with caution with normal activities today," Tozer said.

Snowed

2011-02-07T08:14:00.000-08:00

KMUW commentary on Satchmo

2011-02-04T06:23:00.000-08:00

Just finished the terrific biography of Louis Armstrong by Terry Teachout entitled “Pops.” It paints an image of the jazz trumpet master as a man of great emotional, artistic and intellectual complexity. That might be surprising to many who only knew him as a clownish, gravelly-voiced pop vocalist with an outrageous ear-to-ear grin.

Anyone who watched Ken Burns’ PBS documentary about the history of jazz knows that Armstrong was a genius on his instrument. It’s been gratifying to see him get the recognition he so deserved for his role in the creation of that most American musical art form.

Reading the story of his life as outlined in Teachout’s book, I was struck by another role that Satchmo played for us all: the roll of spiritual teacher. He was not a particularly religious man in the traditional sense. But here are Armstrong’s words about an encounter he once had:

“Years ago I was playing the little town of Lubbock, Texas, when this white cat grabs me at the end of the show – he’s full of whiskey and trouble. He pokes on my chest and says, ‘I don’t like…’ ”and here Armstrong says the guy used the n-word. Continuing with Armstrong’s words: “These two cats with me was gonna practice their Thanksgiving carving on that dude. But I say ‘No, let the man talk. Why don’t you like us, Pops?’ And would you believe that cat couldn’t tell us? So he apologizes – crying and carrying on…And dig this: that fella and his whole family come to be my friends! When I’d go back through Lubbock, Texas for many many years they would make ole Satchmo welcome and treat him like a king.”

That theme ran throughout Louis Armstrong’s life. He returned love for hatred. What a man. What a life. And what a lesson for us all.

Artless

2011-02-04T06:20:00.001-08:00

Musical response to Governor Brownback

2011-02-04T06:01:00.000-08:00

When I first started doing these commentaries on KMUW I expected that I'd often do song parodies. After all, that's always been a big part of my goofy presence on the station during their fundraising drives. Somehow now, a year and a half after starting with them I find that I haven't done a single silly song. But I couldn't resist while commenting on Governor Brownback's proposal to strip Kansas arts of all state funds. I admit it is not my best song parody. But it is at least as heartfelt as any I've ever done.

Listen here.

Great. Another ideologue in local government.

2011-02-04T05:52:00.000-08:00

It's official! I'm hateful!

2011-01-21T06:03:00.000-08:00

Here's the toon and below is the letter to the editor that ran about it.

Richard Crowson's editorial cartoon on Jan. 16 was another despicable hit-and-run from the left.

Did he tell us what words were said that were hateful? No. Did he name who said hateful words? No, but we have a pretty good idea. Did his cartoon include the man who actually pulled the trigger? No, apparently Crowson hates talkers more than an actual killer.

Do his hate-talkers include Alec Baldwin, who when appearing on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" in 1998 screamed that we should stone former Illinois Rep. Henry Hyde to death and go to the homes of House Republicans and kill their wives and children? It doesn't appear so.

Apparently Crowson wants us to imagine that everyone is guilty of either hate speech or is too cowardly to stop it. By the way — didn't this cartoon make Crowson guilty of hate speech?

How do I love this Oliphant cartoon? Let me count the ways.

2011-01-21T05:57:00.000-08:00

I love the image -- the way it's rendered with the beautiful shading and sculptural volume of it. I love the expressive faces. I love the posture of the figures. I love the drama of the image. I love the view it advocates. I love the lettering. Just for starters.

Atextual

2011-01-13T08:04:00.000-08:00

I hate texting and said so on KMUW.

Don't hear much out of arena bashers these days, do we

2011-01-13T07:54:00.000-08:00

Who would Jesus make a payday loan to?

2011-01-13T07:14:00.000-08:00

It is shameful that our Kansas Legislature continues to care more about the Payday Loan industry than it does about Kansas' working poor on whom that industry preys. If our new governor is as concerned about morality issues as he seems to so anxiously want us to believe, then he will address this problem. I'm betting he'll be quiet as a mouse about it. Too many of his good conservative Republican friends profit from it. Who would Jesus make a payday loan to, Governor?

Accordingly, I love this parody website called the Predatory Lending Association. The above is just a screenshot of it. Visit the website here.

On Libertarians and their world (from New Republic)

2011-01-06T18:48:00.000-08:00

Thanks to pal Dan Rouser for forwarding this.

The Trouble With Liberty

Libertarians, of both left and right, haven’t been this close to power since 1776. But do we want to live in their world?

By Christopher Beam
Published Dec 26, 2010

Illustration by David Drummond

(Photo: Shutterstock (White House, Picture Frame); iStock (Nature Painting))

Just before Thanksgiving, in an impassioned speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, Ron Paul called for Congress to be groped. The Transportation Security Administration, having rolled out its new airport body scanners, had decreed anyone who opted out could be subjected to the now-infamous enhanced pat-down. “Let’s make sure that every member of Congress goes through this,” Representative Paul said, waving his finger in the air. “Get the X-ray, make them look at the pictures, and then go through one of those groping pat-downs.” Perhaps this would put Congress in touch (quite literally) with real Americans.

Paul, the 75-year-old Texas libertarian and quixotic 2008 Republican candidate best known for his quest to abolish the Federal Reserve, is used to fighting lonely battles. But this time, he had company. Fox News went wall-to-wall on the (nonexistent) health hazards of body scans, naked outlines of passengers, and pat-down paranoia. “If you touch my junk, I’m going to have you arrested,” said newfound freedom fighter John Tyner to a TSA agent in a video that went viral. The left backed Paul too. Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald argued that the screenings had “all the ingredients of the last decade’s worth of Terrorism exploitation.” Blogger Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake called the X-ray devices “porno-scanners.” For one beautiful moment, the whole political spectrum—well, at least both vocal ends of it—seemed to agree: Too much government is too much government.

Maybe it was inevitable that the National Opt-Out Day, when travelers were going to refuse body scans en masse, failed to become the next Woolworth’s sit-in (how do you organize a movement that abhors organization?). It turned out most Americans actually supported the body scanners. But the moment was a reminder of just how strong, not to mention loud, the libertarian streak is in American politics.

No one exemplifies that streak more than Ron Paul—unless you count his son Rand. When Rand Paul strolled onstage in May 2010, the newly declared Republican nominee for Kentucky’s U.S. Senate seat, he entered to the strains of Rush, the boomer rock band famous for its allegiance to libertarianism and Ayn Rand. It was a dog whistle—a wink to free-marketers and classic-rock fans savvy enough to get the reference, but likely to sail over the heads of most Republicans. Paul’s campaign was full of such goodies. He name-dropped Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s seminal TheRoad to Serfdom. He cut a YouTube video denying that he was named after Ayn Rand but professing to have read all of her novels. He spoke in the stark black-and-white terms of libertarian purism. “Do we believe in the individual, or do we believe in the state?” he asked the crowd in Bowling Green, Kentucky, on Election Night.

It’s clear why he played coy. For all the talk about casting off government shackles, libertarianism is still considered the crazy uncle of American politics: loud and cocky and occasionally profound but always a bit unhinged. And Rand Paul’s dad is the craziest uncle of all. Ron Paul wants to “end the Fed,” as the title of his book proclaims, and return the country to the gold standard—stances that have made him a tea-party icon. Now, as incoming chairman of the subcommittee that oversees the Fed, he’ll have an even bigger platform. Paul Sr. says there’s not much daylight between him and his son. “I can’t think of anything we grossly disagree on,” he says.

There’s never been a better time to be a libertarian than now. The right is still railing against interventionist policies like TARP, the stimulus package, and health-care reform. Citizens of all political stripes recoil against the nanny state, which is nannier than ever, passing anti-smoking laws, banning trans fats, posting calorie counts, prohibiting flavored cigarettes, cracking down on Four Loko, and considering a soda tax in New York. All that, plus some TSA agent wants to handle your baggage.

Libertarianism has adherents on the left, too—they just organize around different issues. Whereas righty libertarians stew over taxes and bailouts, lefty libertarians despise de facto suspensions of habeas corpus, surveillance, and restrictions on whom you can marry. It’s not surprising that the biggest victories of the right and the left in the last weeks of this lame-duck session of Congress were about stripping down government—tax cuts and releasing the shackles of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Much of Americans’ vaunted anger now comes from a sense of betrayal over libertariansim shrugged. Right-wing libertarians charge that the Bush presidency gave the lie to small-government cant by pushing Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, and a $3 trillion war. Left-wing libertarians are furious that Obama talked a big game on civil liberties but has caved on everything from FISA to DOMA to Gitmo. Meanwhile, the country faces a massive and growing deficit (too much government!) that neither party has the power or the inclination to fix. If there were ever a time to harness libertarian energy—on left and right—it’s now.

Illustration by David Drummond

(Photo: Shutterstock (Mount Rushmore); Getty Images (Rand))

Libertarianism is a long, clunky word for a simple, elegant idea: that government should do as little as possible. In Libertarianism: A Primer, Cato Institute executive vice president David Boaz defines it as “the view that each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others.” Like any political philosophy, libertarianism contains a thousand substrains, ranging from anarchists who want to destroy the state to picket-fence conservatives who just want to put power in local hands. The traditional libertarian line is that government should be responsible for a standing army, local security, and a courts system, and that’s it—a system called minarchy. But everyone has his own idea of how to get there. Washington-think-tank libertarians take an incrementalist approach within the two-party system. The Libertarian Party offers a third way. Ayn Rand–inspired Objectivists promote their ideas through education. Reason magazine preaches the gospel of cultural libertarianism. Silicon Valley techno-entrepreneurs would invent their way to Libertopia. Wall Street free-marketers want deregulation. The Free State Project plans to concentrate 20,000 libertarians in New Hampshire. “Seasteaders” dream of building societies on the ocean. And then there are the regular old Glenn Beck disciples who just want to be left alone. “They all want to shoot each other in the face over who gets to be the real libertarian,” says Matt Welch, editor of Reason. At the very least, they all agree they should be allowed to acquire the weapon with which to do so.

Libertarianism gets caricatured as the weird, Magic-card-collecting, twelve-sided-die-wielding outcast of American political philosophy. Yet there’s no idea more fundamental to our country’s history. Every political group claims the Founders as its own, but libertarians have more purchase than most. The American Revolution was a libertarian movement, rejecting overweening government power. The Constitution was a libertarian document that limited the role of the state to society’s most basic needs, like a legislature to pass laws, a court system to interpret them, and a military to protect them. (Though some Founders, like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, wanted to centralize power.) All the government-run trappings that came after—the Fed, highways, public schools, a $1.5 trillion-a-year entitlement system— were arguably departures from our country’s hard libertarian core.

Ayn Rand is the gateway drug to Libertarianism, though many toke into adulthood.

About one in ten Americans self-identifies as libertarian, and even fewer consider themselves “movement” libertarians. Most of them don’t subscribe to Reason or attend conferences at the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank funded in part by the infamous brothers Charles and David Koch. But many are libertarians without knowing it. That is, they identify as economically conservative and socially liberal. That number may be growing. In a 2009 Gallup poll, 23 percent of Americans responded to questions about the role of government in a way that categorizes them as libertarian—up from 18 percent in 2000. A survey conducted by Zogby for the Cato Institute has put the libertarian vote at around 15 percent. Loosen the wording, and the pool expands. When the Zogby survey asked voters if they would describe themselves as “fiscally conservative and socially liberal, also known as libertarian,” the number rose to 44 percent. When it simply asked if they were “fiscally conservative and socially liberal,” a full 59 percent responded yes. Not bad for a bunch of trench-coat-wearing dungeon masters.

Libertarianism is far from synonymous with the tea party, but the tea party is the closest thing to a mass libertarian movement in recent memory. Tea-partyers surveyed by Cato split down the middle between social conservatives and social liberals, making half of them traditional Republicans and half libertarians. But the fact that the tea party organizes around fiscal issues alone—smaller government, lower taxes—gives the movement libertarian cred. Its members speak the language, too, waving Gadsden flags, quoting Hayek, and carrying signs that say WHO IS JOHN GALT?—a reference to the hero of the Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged.

Libertarianism gets marginalized in American politics because it doesn’t fit into the two-party paradigm. Libertarians want less state intrusion into the market, which aligns them with Republicans, but also less interference in social choices, which aligns them with Democrats. As Massachusetts governor William Weld put it in 1992, “I want the government out of your pocketbook and your bedroom.” To the partisan brain, this doesn’t compute. “In 1976, people didn’t have the vaguest idea of what I was talking about,” says Ron Paul. “Why was I voting with the left sometimes and with the right other times?”

Yet libertarianism is more internally consistent than the Democratic or Republican platforms. There’s no inherent reason that free-marketers and social conservatives should be allied under the Republican umbrella, except that it makes for a powerful coalition. Libertarianism lies crosswise to the partisan split, giving its adherents a kind of freethinker, outcast status. This can be especially attractive for young people. “When I was 19, libertarianism was an argument for being awesome,” says Will Wilkinson, a former Cato scholar who now blogs at The Economist. It’s about flouting convention and rejecting authority—the political equivalent of getting an eyebrow ring. It’s also an excuse to indulge your most selfish instincts. But you don’t have to call it “selfishness.”

Illustration by David Drummond

(Photo: Gilbert Stuart/Getty Images (Washington))

Ayn Rand has been called the “gateway drug” to libertarianism, but many converts keep toking well into adulthood. Her novels, including 1943’s The Fountainhead and 1957’s Atlas Shrugged, sell more than 800,000 copies a year. Other libertarians credit their conversion to Hayek, fellow Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (Ron Paul’s personal fave), American free-marketer Milton Friedman, or Austrian-influenced American anarcho-capitalist and father of modern libertarianism Murray Rothbard. Ever since its publication in 1944, Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom has been the anti-regulatory Ur-text. Hayek wrote the book in response to the spread of socialism—including National Socialism— which at the time was a genuine existential threat to Western society. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, though, socialism isn’t the menace it used to be. Hitler is long gone. Yet libertarians still cite Hayek and Rand with the same urgency. Ron Johnson, the newly elected senator from Wisconsin, called Atlas Shrugged, which tells the story of a group of creative capitalists who retreat from an overregulated society to form their own Utopia, a “foundational book” that serves as “a warning of what could happen to America.” Representative Paul Ryan, also of Wisconsin, requires staffers to read Atlas Shrugged, describes Obama’s economic policies as “something right out of an Ayn Rand novel,” and calls Rand “the reason I got involved in public service.” Glenn Beck touted The Road to Serfdom on his show, wondering out loud if it might be “the road we’re on.” The irony is that Hayek believed in a role for the state. “In no system that could be rationally defended would the state just do nothing,” he wrote. He favored government intervention in the markets, for example, and supported environmental regulation. When he warned against “socialism,” he meant actual socialism.

Wilkinson still identifies as a libertarian but distances himself from the doomsaying. “Part of my political maturation was realizing there’s really not that much at stake,” he says. “That our culture isn’t on the road to serfdom, we’re not one step away from drifting into Fascism or totalitarian socialism or anything like that.” It’s a realization many politicians have yet to make.

Republicans speak the language of libertarianism. They talk about shrinking government and cutting the deficit. But when one of them turns words into action, he gets shunned. The latest Republican to mistakenly put money to mouth: Paul Ryan. During the debate over health-care reform last winter, the GOP was getting savaged for failing to present an alternative to the Democrats’ plan to reduce long-term spending growth. Ryan, an econ wonk and the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, decided to take a crack. He introduced a budget and called it “A Roadmap for America’s Future.” The Roadmap made all the tough cuts that other Republicans discussed vaguely but never specified. It would simplify the tax code, privatize Medicare and Medicaid, and replace parts of Social Security with personal accounts. And it would work: The Congressional Budget Office estimated that Ryan’s plan would put the country in the black by 2063. Sure, it would rip a Texas-size hole in the social safety net, but it was a bona fide libertarian solution.

Ryan got points for boldness. Obama called the Roadmap a “serious proposal.” But Republicans including John Boehner and Newt Gingrich voiced doubts. Some GOP candidates initially supported the Social Security plank but then flipped when their Democratic opponents called them out. More recently, Republicans have studiously avoided specifics when it comes to deficit reduction.

That’s how conservative politics is played—talk shrinkage, do growth. Even right-wing godhead Ronald Reagan expanded the federal government, bailed out Social Security, and signed off on tax hikes. Bush 43 was only the latest in a long line of Republican spenders.

It’s this hypocrisy that makes some libertarians stray outside the two-party monolith. Some gravitate toward the Libertarian Party, which calls itself the third-largest political party in the country. But few of its candidates are ever elected. Infighting can also be a turnoff. “There’s something about libertarians where working as a team is inconsistent with the whole concept of being a libertarian,” says Warren Redlich, the 2010 Libertarian candidate for governor of New York, who was sued by one of his opponents for the nomination.

Others buck the political system altogether. In 2001, a graduate student at Yale named Jason Sorens wrote a paper arguing that if enough libertarian activists moved to a small state in the union, they could transform society—an undertaking he called the Free State Project. A decade later, more than 10,000 libertarians have signed the group’s pledge promising to move to New Hampshire once they get 20,000 signatures. About 800 activists are already there. What they do once they arrive is up to them. Some Free Staters have won seats in the State Legislature. Others engage in acts of civil disobedience: One man, inspired by the movie Gandhi, got arrested for performing a manicure without a license.

The last best hope for Libertopia may be the ocean. There’s a long, not-so-proud history of seeking freedom at sea. In 1972, Nevada real-estate developer Michael Oliver built an island in the southwest Pacific by dredging sand near an an existing reef, which he called the Republic of Minerva. The nearby Kingdom of Tonga quickly conquered it. A proposal in the late nineties to create a “Freedom Ship” nearly a mile long that would house 50,000 people never got past the planning stage.

That hasn’t stopped Patri Friedman, grandson of libertarian hero Milton Friedman, from trying once more. Friedman founded the Seasteading Institute in 2008 with the goal of creating a floating society free from government’s grasp. While seasteading communities would start small—just a bunch of family-size platforms floating off the coast—Friedman imagines them harvesting energy and growing food.

What distinguishes seasteading from pure fantasy is money. Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and bought a stake in Facebook back in 2004, has become the Johnny Appleseed of futurist libertarians. Since 2008, he’s given upwards of $750,000 to the Seasteading Institute. He recently announced that he will offer twenty grants of up to $100,000 each to teenagers who want to start their own tech companies—a proposal that drew liberal scorn. Thiel is unapologetic about his disdain for government. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote in a 2009 essay. He’s not alone. Silicon Valley has produced a whole cadre of libertarian entrepreneurs, including longtime Sun Microsystems president Scott McNealy, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, and Cypress Semiconductor CEO T. J. Rodgers.

It speaks to the breadth and versatility of libertarianism that it unites Teva-wearing California entrepreneurs and flag-waving tea-partyers under the same banner. The aesthetic is different, but the ideas are the same.

Over the TSA airport pat-downs, the whole political spectrum seemed to be in agreement.

And yet, for all of libertarianism’s diversity, the libertarian movement—those who feel so strongly about live-and-let-live that they want to make you live and let live, too—still prizes doctrinal purity. In 2006, a Cato scholar named Brink Lindsey wrote an essay for The New Republic called “Liberaltarians,” in which he argued that liberals and libertarians have more in common than they think. Both support civil liberties and gay rights. Both want to end the two wars. There’s also a growing willingness among some liberals to embrace libertarian ideas like school vouchers. The cold-war alliance with conservatives has situated libertarians too far to the right, Lindsey argues. It’s time to start reaching out to the left.

While the project drew attention in the D.C. wonkosphere, traditional libertarians took a dim view, especially when Lindsey and his colleague Will Wilkinson proposed writing a book. “There were a lot of people at Cato who didn’t very much like the book,” says David Boaz, executive vice president of Cato. The final straw was Lindsey’s scathing review of a new book by Arthur Brooks, head of the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI). In August, Cato and Lindsey parted ways. Wilkinson left soon after. The Cato exodus was a reminder that for all of libertarianism’s supposed ecumenism, there’s still an Establishment that does not brook dissent any more than its conservative counterparts. AEI pushed out former Bush speechwriter David Frum in March after he repeatedly criticized Republicans. Frum described his and Lindsey’s departures as “very similar situations, unfortunately.”

W hen I was in high school, I owned a book by Penn & Teller called How to Play in Traffic. It’s mainly a series of jokes, gags, and madcap yarns by the magic-comedy duo. But it also channels the libertarian id of Penn Jillette. “I sincerely don’t want to offend any of our readers, but I’ve got something to say,” he writes. “It’s very simple, but a bit controversial: The United States of America does not have a problem with terrorism. We just don’t.” Airport security is not worth the hassle, he continues: “Hey, we’re alive, there’s risk. Some planes are going to go down like falling twisted burning human cattle cars and there’s no stopping it. No one can make any form of travel 100 percent safe. We’ll take our chances.” As for the victims of a security-free transportation system? “Let’s consider those terrorism victims heroes,” he writes. “Let’s say they died for freedom. They didn’t die for us to have our phones tapped and have our time wasted at airports.” He then describes a prank where you create a screensaver for your laptop that looks like a countdown to detonation.

Jillette might choose his words differently today. Everyone knows going through airport security sucks, even without “porno- scanners.” But few dispute the need for some line of defense. More-efficient, less-intrusive security would be great. But none at all? Jillette’s tract is a good example of how libertarianism ventures down some fascinating paths but usually ends up deep in the wilderness.

Same story on issue after issue. Taxation isn’t just a poor allocation of resources; it’s an act of violence. “At least the highwayman would take your money and leave you alone,” says Douglas French, president of the Mises Institute. “The government takes your money, then stands around and tells you what to do with it.” The Federal Reserve doesn’t just restrict the markets; it’s an arrogant monstrosity that should be abolished and replaced by the gold standard—a policy that most economists agree would lead to economic meltdown. War isn’t just bad; it’s a bankrupt excuse to suppress personal freedoms and wield state control that’s never justified by the inciting incident. The North should have let the South exercise its “right to secede,” argues libertarian commentator Lew Rockwell. Conservative Pat Buchanan penned a book in 2008 calling World War II “unnecessary.”

No political movement deserves to be defined by its extreme elements. (For Democrats, that way lies socialism.) But middle-of-the-road libertarianism is already pretty far out. “The dominant strain of libertarianism these days is—and I’m not using these words in any kind of pejorative sense—radical and utopian,” says Lindsey. But if Libertopia is the goal, no one knows how to get there. Lindsey compares libertarians who preach purity to the “Underpants Gnomes” in South Park, a popular analogy in wonk circles: “Step one, articulate Utopia. Step three is Utopia. Step two is a big question mark.”

Libertarian minarchy is an elegant idea in the abstract. But the moment you get specific, the foundation starts to crumble. Say we started from scratch and created a society in which government covered only the bare essentials of an army, police, and a courts system. I’m a farmer, and I want to sell my crops. In Libertopia, I can sell them in exchange for money. Where does the money come from? Easy, a private bank. Who prints the money? Well, for that we’d need a central bank—otherwise you’d have a thousand banks with a thousand different types of currency. (Some libertarians advocate this.) Okay, fine, we’ll create a central bank. But there’s another problem: Some people don’t have jobs. So we create charities to feed and clothe them. What if there isn’t enough charity money to help them? Well, we don’t want them to start stealing, so we’d better create a welfare system to cover their basic necessities. We’d need education, of course, so a few entrepreneurs would start private schools. Some would be excellent. Others would be mediocre. The poorest students would receive vouchers that allowed them to attend school. Where would those vouchers come from? Charity. Again, what if that doesn’t suffice? Perhaps the government would have to set up a school or two after all.

And so on. There are reasons our current society evolved out of a libertarian document like the Constitution. The Federal Reserve was created after the panic of 1907 to help the government reduce economic uncertainty. The Civil Rights Act was necessary because “states’ rights” had become a cover for unconstitutional practices. The welfare system evolved because private charity didn’t suffice. Challenges to the libertopian vision yield two responses: One is that an economy free from regulation will grow so quickly that it will lift everyone out of poverty. The second is that if somehow a poor person is still poor, charity will take care of them. If there is not enough charity, their families will take care of them. If they have no families to take care of them—well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.

Of course, we’ll never get there. And that’s the point. Libertarians can espouse minarchy all they want, since they’ll never have to prove it works.

There are all sorts of situations the private market isn’t good at managing, such as asymmetrical information (I know my doctor is qualified to treat me because he has a government license) and public goods (it makes sense for the government to cover vaccines, which benefit everyone, not just the consumer). There’s also a consistency problem: Why should the government be responsible for a public good like national defense but not air-quality protection?

Or, say, a stable world financial system? Most of the libertarians I spoke with said they would have let the big banks fail in 2008. “I wouldn’t have done anything,” says French. “The key to capitalism is you have to have failure.”

The financial crisis was not an indictment of their worldview, libertarians argue, but a vindication of it. Letting the banks fail would have been painful. But the pain would have been less than it will be now that the government is propping up the housing, banking, and automobile industries. Plus, the economy would have recovered by now. “You’ve probably never heard of the depression of 1920,” says French. “You haven’t heard of it because it came and went in one year, because the government didn’t do anything to prop up failed businesses.” (Other economists argue that the government’s response was actually consistent with the philosophy of John Maynard Keynes.) Letting banks fail would also avoid moral hazard, say libertarians, since investors wouldn’t take such risky bets the next time around.

It’s a compelling story. But like many libertarian narratives, it’s oversimplified. If the biggest banks had failed, bankers wouldn’t have been the only ones punished. Everyone would have lost his money. Investors who had no idea how their dollars were being used—the ratings agencies gave their investments AAA grades, after all—would have gone broke. Homeowners who misunderstood their risky loans would have gone into permanent debt. Sure, the bailouts let some irresponsible people off easy. But not intervening would have unfairly punished a much greater number.

There’s always tension between freedom and fairness. We want less government regulation, but not when it means firms can hire cheap child labor. We want a free market, but not so bankers can deceive investors. Libertarianism, in promoting freedom above all else, pretends the tension doesn’t exist.

Case in point: A house in Obion County, Tennessee, burned to the ground in September because the owner had not paid the annual $75 fee for opt-in fire protection. As the fire raged, the house owner told the dispatcher that he would pay the cost of putting out the fire. The fire department still refused to come. The house burned down, with four pets inside. Libertarians point out that this is how opt-in services—as opposed to taxpayer-funded public services—works. If you don’t pay, you don’t get coverage. The firefighters can’t make exceptions without creating moral hazard. This makes sense in theory. In practice, not so much. The firefighters showed up to protect a neighboring property. The homeowner offered to pay not just the cost of the fire protection but the full cost of the spray. A court would have enforced that contract. But because the firefighters stuck to a rigid principle of opt-in services, a house was destroyed. Will this serve as a cautionary tale next time a rural resident of Obion County is deciding whether to buy fire insurance? No doubt. But will someone else inevitably not learn his lesson and make the same mistake? No doubt.

And that’s just the government side. Consider the social side of Libertopia. It’s no coincidence that most libertarians discover the philosophy as teenagers. At best, libertarianism means pursuing your own self-interest, as long as you don’t hurt anyone else. At worst, as in Ayn Rand’s teachings, it’s an explicit celebration of narcissism. “Man’s first duty is to himself,” says the young architect Howard Roark in his climactic speech in The Fountainhead. “His moral obligation is to do what he wishes.” Roark utters these words after dynamiting his own project, since his vision for the structure had been altered without his permission. The message: Never compromise. If you don’t get your way, blow things up. And there’s the problem. If everyone refused to compromise his vision, there would be no cooperation. There would be no collective responsibility. The result wouldn’t be a city on a hill. It would be a port town in Somalia. In a world of scarce resources, everyone pursuing their own self-interest would yield not Atlas Shrugged but Lord of the Flies. And even if you did somehow achieve Libertopia, you’d be surrounded by assholes.

To a Libertarian, nothing is worth sacrificing principle for—least of all political power. Yet Rand Paul has already made some concessions. The first sign of Paul’s domestication came when he appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show after winning the Kentucky primary. Maddow asked him whether he would have voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which made it illegal for businesses to turn away customers on the basis of race. Paul said it all came down to a question of private versus public businesses. “Does the owner of the restaurant own his restaurant?” he said. “Or does the government own his restaurant?”

Paul got slammed, even within his own party. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, usually a staunch defender of libertarian positions, wrote that Paul was wrong “even on his own libertarian terms.”

Paul went into lockdown. He gave few media interviews. His public statements were tightly scripted. And his stance changed: He would have voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act after all.

And he won. The lesson: If a libertarian wants to get elected, he’s going to have to bend a few principles, deal with reality as it exists. The same is true if he wants to legislate. Since the election, Paul has challenged Republican orthodoxy by suggesting he’s willing to cut military spending. He’s talked about expanding the House Tea Party Caucus to the Senate. But he also drifted from his “no pork” pledge by hinting he would accept federal earmarks for Kentucky in the end. (Paul said he was misquoted and subsequently pushed for an earmark ban.) During an appearance on CNN on November 9, he ended the interview rather than name a spending cut. The test will be whether Paul is willing to slash government in ways that irk his party—by cutting back Social Security, say, or trimming Medicare. Luckily for him, that kind of showdown will happen only if Republicans regain the Senate.

Ron Paul might even get the Fed to cough up a few extra receipts. But no one is under the illusion that he will “end” it. (If he tried, Republicans would smother him just as quickly as Democrats would.) It took 35 years for Ron Paul to reach the center of American politics. And it could take another 35 before he or someone like him is back. It’s certainly a libertarian moment—but it’s not liable to last too long. Libertarianism and power are like matter and anti-matter. They cancel each other out.

Published on The New Republic (http://www.tnr.com)

Happy (cough cough) New Year

2011-01-06T18:43:00.000-08:00

Got a little tired of Christmas music by Christmas Eve this year

2011-01-06T18:33:00.000-08:00

This was my commentary on December 24. In spite of my love for Perry Como and the fact that my family put out a Christmas CD this year. I reserve the right to be self-contradictory...

Listen here or just read below:

It’s a funny thing about Christmas music. Just about the time when I feel like I’ll lose my Christmas cookies if I hear one more “Fa-la-la-la-la,” the season peaks and all those songs go away for another 11 or so months. It’s kind of nice, really.

We get so bombarded with Christmas music everywhere we go that we get to the point where we don’t even hear it after a while. Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme giggle through some a giddy “Sleigh Ride” in the Dillon’s loudspeaker and I’m just trying to decide whether to buy the 12-pack or the 24-pack of toilet paper. I get in the car and slam on the brakes when another driver darts into my lane, totally oblivious to Johnny Mathis singing his quivery heart out about “Folks dressed up like Eskimos.” After so many weeks of seasonal tunes, they all just start sounding like Charlie Brown’s teacher: “Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa.”

In desperation I find myself seeking out offbeat and less familiar versions of the songs. I recently discovered James Brown’s funky, soulful version of “The Christmas Song,” and Ralph Stanley’s recitation “Don’t Make Us Cry On Christmas Day” about a “drunk man and his children on Christmas night.”

After wearying of the sounds of the season, like magic, Christmas comes along and all the familiar songs disappear. Again we go through the year, late fall comes along and by Thanksgiving we welcome them back! Carols perk me up, get me in the mood for Christmas, then because they persist like manic deranged little drummer boys pounding on my eardrums nonstop until an auditory numbness sets in, my novocained hearing tunes them out.

So it goes. We cycle through the year and recycle the soundtrack of Christmas, over and over. First welcoming, then tolerant, then weary, then numb. If you’re at that numb stage like me, be of good cheer! It’ll all be over tomorrow! For KMUW, I’m Richard Crowson wishing you a Christmas full of peace and quiet.

I lost a good friend right before Christmas

2011-01-06T18:26:00.000-08:00

And this idea came to mind. I also have a friend who lost his wife right before Christmas. These folks have difficult holidays and deserve our remembrance. It wasn't the cheeriest Christmas Day toon I ever drew but it was where my head and heart were this year.

Gee, thanks, Parkinson (and KDHE)

2010-12-19T06:41:00.000-08:00

Jobs trump public health and the environment, as usual in Kansas. Even though most of the power goes to Colorado, which is cutting back on coal plants within their state, we trumpet the benefit of some temporary construction jobs (often using out-of-state companies) and we become the outhouse of neighboring states. Textbook case of low self-esteem. "Go ahead and dump on me, I deserve it, in fact I welcome it."

Wow. A December cartoon that doesn't rely on a Christmas metaphor!

2010-12-16T06:47:00.000-08:00

But does rely on self-reference...it really is all about me, isn't it.

For extra credit, what's wrong with this image? Answer is below the toon. (And it's very inside so you probably won't know it.)

That's right. This is a drawing of Rhonda and Phil. Problem is, Phil has a beard now.

Sheesh. I can't keep up. (Oh, the other problem is: I don't office at the Eagle anymore, where they are.)

Dim lights

2010-12-16T06:34:00.000-08:00

Got LED lights on your house or tree? I started out my KMUW commentary last week whining about how dim the dang things are and it morphed, as often seems to happen, into something else. Listen here or just read on:

This Christmas season we found that some of our big, bright C9 multicolored light strings weren’t working so well. So, I decided to try to be a little greener this year and bought some strings of the new low-voltage LED lights. I climbed up on the roof, attached them and plugged them in. Then, I had to check the connection to see why they weren’t lit up, and I realized that they were, indeed, lit up. (I’m making little quotation marks with my fingers when I use the term, “lit.”) They are about 1/5 of the brightness level of the old incandescent lights.

My problem is that I believe in big ol’ sloppy. gaudy Christmases, and these new lights just don’t cut it. The big plastic early-1960s Santa and Frosty Snowman that stand on our porch, and the color-wheel-lit aluminum tree in our window embody the spirit of a more jubilant time, I guess. They contrast with our sad, dim LED roof lights. The grins on Santa and Frosty’s faces are beginning to look a tad ironic.

My daughter reminds me that we are doing something better for the environment with our weak LED lights, and I try to find some solace in that. Perhaps, I reason, the new, faintly glowing decorations are a metaphor for the weak economic times that are the backdrop to this holiday season.

This Christmas does seem a bit muted in its exuberance at our home. We have several friends that are dealing with serious health issues or the recent loss of loved ones. Are my dim Christmas lights there to remind me to look less at the outer and more at the inner meaning of this season? Perhaps I should seek more of the comfort and a little less of the joy this year. Maybe you know someone who needs comforting as well. Holidays are hard for those grieving or dealing with the uncertainty of serious illness.

Maybe the light we need to share doesn’t come in strings across a roofline. Maybe it comes from a star.

You're invited

2010-12-07T07:22:00.000-08:00

Last year my family and 3 of our ace musician friends did a Christmas music program at my church, Calvary United Methodist. Karen, Haley and I are joined by guitarist and mandolinist Dennis Hardin, bassist Phil Burress and violinist Rob Loren. Two other churches requested we do it for them and this year we're at it again.

This summer we recorded 13 of the songs on a cd which is available at Watermark Books and at Artworks Gallery in Picadilly Square. Or you can buy one from us directly (and we make a little more money that way!)

Our cd release party will be at Watermark on Saturday, December 18 from 5:00 p.m. until 7:00 p.m.

You'd be welcome at Calvary tomorrow night at 6:00, if you'd like to come listen. It's at 2525 N. Rock. It's free but the offering plate is passed.

Love to see you there!

Crack house

2010-12-07T07:21:00.001-08:00

Luckovich time

2010-12-07T07:19:00.000-08:00

Perry Christmas

2010-12-07T07:13:00.000-08:00

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Perry Como rocks. Ok..."rocks" isn't exactly the right word but you know what I mean. My last KMUW commentary was about Perry should you wish to hear it, go here.

This was our only Christmas album when I was little. It still gets played in my house every Christmas.

My spacey talk at the Cosmosphere

2010-12-01T07:08:00.000-08:00

Just lining up an appearance by me at the Kansas Cosmosphere. They have an exhibit opening on Feb. 12 about Snoopy and the space program and they asked it I would come and give a cartooning presentation. I love Peanuts and jumped at the chance. Plus I love space. Outer space and innner space. So I'll post more later as we get closer to the event. Being a spacey cartoonist does sometimes have its perks!

KMUW cartoons

2010-11-30T18:25:00.000-08:00

Here are toons drawn for KMUW's website and not yet posted here:

Some of my weird irrationality

2010-11-30T18:14:00.000-08:00

A caller to the Eagle's Opinion Line said that the Republicans swept the election in Kansas in spite of my "weirdly irrational" cartoons. I love that. I want a t-shirt with "weirdly irrational" on it. Here are some of the cartoons he or she was talking about. These ran during my long blog-black-out period so I will post them here.

De-cycling

2010-10-08T06:08:00.000-07:00

Yeah. I know. I did it yet again. I went umpteen weeks without posting anything on my "blog."

And even though I am very sure that I have driven away every last one of the good souls who once came here every now and then just in case I had posted something, and just in case it had been worth reading only to be rebuffed by the lack of anything new at all being here, I am revving it back up.

This time I have a really good excuse for the absence. Really. It was surgery. After years of steadily worsening lower back pain, I finally made the decision to let then slice me open and perform a couple of procedures called a laminectomy and a spinal fusion. So on August 30 I checked into the Kansas Spine Hospital and they did the deed.

I learned something: surgery hurts. I had a morphin pump but I'm pretty sure it was just full of sugar water. I wore a sizeable calouse on my morphine pump thumb and I'm kind of proud of the night I tapped out the drum solo to "In-A-Gadda Da-Vida" on that sucker in a vain attempt to get enough of it into my system to ease the pain.

But after 3 nights or so, the pain began to ease considerably. They took away my morphin and gave me Percocet and Valium, which it turns out, is a muscle relaxer.

And here we are 3 months out, exactly. I'm happy to report that the surgery seems to have worked. Whereas before I could walk Ollie for half a block and had to turn around and head home, now I can go for 30 or 40 minutes without much pain at all. Pretty sweet.

That's why I quit for a while. And then, like when you put off writing a letter to a friend (back in the olden days when such things were still done) and you wait so long to write that the guilt snowballs and the next thing you know it's all just too embarrassing and you end up in a cycle of guilt and procrastination until you become catatonic, I stopped posting.

Herewith I jump off the cycle.

Another perfect Luckovich toon

2010-08-27T06:41:00.001-07:00

The Atlanta Constitution's Mike Luckovich is the Gary Larsen of editorial cartooning. Larsen's "Far Side" cartoons were by far the most consistantly hilarious single-panel toons of all time, in my humble opinion. He came very close to batting .1000. I see Luckovich almost the same way. Just go over to his blog and scroll through this week's cartoons. Every one a jewel. Most cartoonists are hit and miss (present company at the front of that line!) but the Luckster just keeps 'em coming.

This one on Glenn Beck is killer. I've never actually watched a Beck show, I'm proud to admit. Life is way to short for that. But I've seen little clips of it and I know about his blackboard fetish. This toon works on lots of levels. A good caricature. A funny joke. A good sort of deeper meaning to it, as we see Beck is actually vandalizing Abraham Lincoln's legacy.

One more cartoon for me to throw in my bin labelled: WIDT (Wish I'd drawn that).

Look familiar?

2010-08-24T10:15:00.000-07:00

From R. Crumb's "Cradle to Grave" print, which isn't everybody's cup of tea.

On consumerism

2010-08-24T10:02:00.000-07:00

Here's a short excerpt from the British film "The Age of Stupid."

Heartstrings

2010-08-23T10:57:00.000-07:00

I wrote this little ditty to promote a great program at Trees for Life.

Balbir Mathur, president of Trees for Life, was presented with a world-renowned Manuel Rodriguez & Sons classical guitar in Nov. 2009 after speaking at an international conference in Spain.

“I would like to present your guitar to the children of Nicaragua,” Balbir told the president of the guitar company. “Those children have no musical instruments, and their hearts will sing with such a gift.”

“Books for Life, an educational branch of Trees for Life, has 50 libraries in Nicaragua. Your guitar will go to one of the libraries, where many children can enjoy the music of your precious gift,” Balbir told him.

The guitar maker was inspired and offered 200 guitars for only $50 each.

Now you can join in by providing a guitar worth $350 to the children of Nicaragua for only $50—or giving a share of a guitar for as little as $5.

He hearts (and lungs) Wichita

2010-08-23T10:51:00.000-07:00

My KMUW commentary: WSU football

2010-08-23T10:44:00.000-07:00

Listen here or just read below.

Lots of good folks locally feel pretty strongly about college football. Some of them are convinced that Wichita State University made a wrong-headed move when it punted its own football program into the trash bin of history at the end of the 1986 season.

There is always a conspicuous absence of WSU on the sports pages this time of year as Kansas State and KU become the subjects of endless speculation about this season’s football teams.

I’d put myself in the camp of those who think dropping football was the right decision. The more I read and hear about college football programs, the huge amounts of money spent on coaches and staff and facilities and such, the more I think of the proverbial tail wagging the dog. Are football programs an extension of a college or is the college merely there to support the football program?

Yeah, I know, it’s a school spirit thing. Sis-boom-ba, rah rah rah and all that. But what it’s really mostly about is the money. That’s been apparent for a long time but the recent conference reshuffling was as brazen an admission of money’s importance as could ever be.

Seems to me that college football has a three-fold purpose. It exists for our entertainment, it exists to make money for universities and it exists to serve as a free minor league program for professional football.

So when I read recently of all the excessive travel charges which KU’s athletic director, Lew Perkins, had racked up, it wasn’t much of a surprise. Yawn. More of the same. One very muscular tail wagging that Jayhawk furiously.

I can live with WSU getting shaken up a little less than KU and K-State every fall. They bobbed off that tail 24 years ago.

For KMUW, I’m Richard Crowson.

A Chopra moment

2010-08-23T05:30:00.000-07:00

I like this phrase used by Deepak Chopra recently when telling about his first 2 days in America. He says that he quickly got into the system of "spending money that I hadn't earned to buy things that I didn't need to impress people that I didn't care for."

Why, it's Perry introducing Hank Snow!

2010-08-21T06:05:00.000-07:00

A great song, Music Makin' Mama from Memphis, by a great performer "in the country tradition" introduced by the great Perry Como!

Weurker toon

2010-08-18T12:53:00.001-07:00

What went wrong?

2010-08-16T15:18:00.000-07:00

If trucks still looked like this all would be right with the world.

We're overdue for another Perry moment

2010-08-16T14:54:00.000-07:00

I make no attempt to disguise my unabashed love for Perry Como. And I don't mean it in an ironic way. I simply love Perry. Nobody else even came close to singing in his laid-back, easy-going style. He seemed to channel peace in his music. Let's have a little Perry music in honor of the recent Perseids meteor shower.

Simplification

2010-08-16T14:26:00.000-07:00

Like a lot of people, we've been forced to learn to do more with less at my house, especially after my layoff almost 2 years ago now. And along the way I've gotten interested in some of the Buddhist/Eckhart Tolle thought regarding materialism. So this article from the New York Times was right up my alley. Maybe you'll get something from it as well.

This is just the beginning of it. Read the whole thing here.

It's long but well worth your time. Another reminder of some of the great reporting and writing that still comes out of the NYT.

But Will It Make You Happy?

By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

Published: August 7, 2010

REPRINTS

SHE had so much.

Enlarge This Image

Viktor Koen

Weekend Business: Tim O’Brien and Stephanie Rosenbloom on what makes consumers happy.

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

Roko Belic, a filmmaker, moved from San Francisco to a trailer park in Malibu and now surfs often. He is working on a documentary about happiness.

A two-bedroom apartment. Two cars. Enough wedding china to serve two dozen people.

Yet Tammy Strobel wasn’t happy. Working as a project manager with an investment management firm in Davis, Calif., and making about $40,000 a year, she was, as she put it, caught in the “work-spend treadmill.”

So one day she stepped off.

Inspired by books and blog entries about living simply, Ms. Strobel and her husband, Logan Smith, both 31, began donating some of their belongings to charity. As the months passed, out went stacks of sweaters, shoes, books, pots and pans, even the television after a trial separation during which it was relegated to a closet. Eventually, they got rid of their cars, too. Emboldened by a Web site that challenges consumers to live with just 100 personal items, Ms. Strobel winnowed down her wardrobe and toiletries to precisely that number.

Her mother called her crazy.

Today, three years after Ms. Strobel and Mr. Smith began downsizing, they live in Portland, Ore., in a spare, 400-square-foot studio with a nice-sized kitchen. Mr. Smith is completing a doctorate in physiology; Ms. Strobel happily works from home as a Web designer and freelance writer. She owns four plates, three pairs of shoes and two pots. With Mr. Smith in his final weeks of school, Ms. Strobel’s income of about $24,000 a year covers their bills. They are still car-free but have bikes. One other thing they no longer have: $30,000 of debt.

Today's Eagle toon

2010-08-15T17:54:00.000-07:00

Pat Oliphant and Mike Luckovich show how it's done

2010-08-13T05:45:00.000-07:00

Seems like a good time for this rerun

2010-08-11T05:58:00.000-07:00

Luckovich on Bush tax cuts

2010-08-10T06:21:00.000-07:00

Krugman: "Who cooked the planet?"

2010-08-10T05:26:00.001-07:00

Never say that the gods lack a sense of humor. I bet they’re still chuckling on Olympus over the decision to make the first half of 2010 — the year in which all hope of action to limit climate change died — the hottest such stretch on record.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Paul Krugman

Go to Columnist Page »

Blog: The Conscience of a Liberal

Times Topic: Climate and Energy Legislation

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Of course, you can’t infer trends in global temperatures from one year’s experience. But ignoring that fact has long been one of the favorite tricks of climate-change deniers: they point to an unusually warm year in the past, and say “See, the planet has been cooling, not warming, since 1998!” Actually, 2005, not 1998, was the warmest year to date — but the point is that the record-breaking temperatures we’re currently experiencing have made a nonsense argument even more nonsensical; at this point it doesn’t work even on its own terms.

But will any of the deniers say “O.K., I guess I was wrong,” and support climate action? No. And the planet will continue to cook.

So why didn’t climate-change legislation get through the Senate? Let’s talk first about what didn’t cause the failure, because there have been many attempts to blame the wrong people.

First of all, we didn’t fail to act because of legitimate doubts about the science. Every piece of valid evidence — long-term temperature averages that smooth out year-to-year fluctuations, Arctic sea ice volume, melting of glaciers, the ratio of record highs to record lows — points to a continuing, and quite possibly accelerating, rise in global temperatures.

Nor is this evidence tainted by scientific misbehavior. You’ve probably heard about the accusations leveled against climate researchers — allegations of fabricated data, the supposedly damning e-mail messages of “Climategate,” and so on. What you may not have heard, because it has received much less publicity, is that every one of these supposed scandals was eventually unmasked as a fraud concocted by opponents of climate action, then bought into by many in the news media. You don’t believe such things can happen? Think Shirley Sherrod.

Did reasonable concerns about the economic impact of climate legislation block action? No. It has always been funny, in a gallows humor sort of way, to watch conservatives who laud the limitless power and flexibility of markets turn around and insist that the economy would collapse if we were to put a price on carbon. All serious estimates suggest that we could phase in limits on greenhouse gas emissions with at most a small impact on the economy’s growth rate.

So it wasn’t the science, the scientists, or the economics that killed action on climate change. What was it?

The answer is, the usual suspects: greed and cowardice.

If you want to understand opposition to climate action, follow the money. The economy as a whole wouldn’t be significantly hurt if we put a price on carbon, but certain industries — above all, the coal and oil industries — would. And those industries have mounted a huge disinformation campaign to protect their bottom lines.

Look at the scientists who question the consensus on climate change; look at the organizations pushing fake scandals; look at the think tanks claiming that any effort to limit emissions would cripple the economy. Again and again, you’ll find that they’re on the receiving end of a pipeline of funding that starts with big energy companies, like Exxon Mobil, which has spent tens of millions of dollars promoting climate-change denial, or Koch Industries, which has been sponsoring anti-environmental organizations for two decades.

Or look at the politicians who have been most vociferously opposed to climate action. Where do they get much of their campaign money? You already know the answer.

By itself, however, greed wouldn’t have triumphed. It needed the aid of cowardice — above all, the cowardice of politicians who know how big a threat global warming poses, who supported action in the past, but who deserted their posts at the crucial moment.

There are a number of such climate cowards, but let me single out one in particular: Senator John McCain.

There was a time when Mr. McCain was considered a friend of the environment. Back in 2003 he burnished his maverick image by co-sponsoring legislation that would have created a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions. He reaffirmed support for such a system during his presidential campaign, and things might look very different now if he had continued to back climate action once his opponent was in the White House. But he didn’t — and it’s hard to see his switch as anything other than the act of a man willing to sacrifice his principles, and humanity’s future, for the sake of a few years added to his political career.

Alas, Mr. McCain wasn’t alone; and there will be no climate bill. Greed, aided by cowardice, has triumphed. And the whole world will pay the price.

Today's Eagle toon on Brownback

2010-08-08T15:52:00.000-07:00

KMUW cartoon (yet again) on primary campaign's dirtiness

2010-08-08T15:51:00.000-07:00

KMUW commentary and cartoon on this past primary campaign

2010-08-08T15:44:00.000-07:00

The unprecedented nastiness of this season’s primary campaign seems noteworthy. Has there ever been a political atmosphere as charged with negativity as this one? Have there ever been so many candidates who’ve had so little to say about what they are actually in favor of? Okay, we did hear some platitudes about “Kansas values.” But mostly we heard negative messages telling us what they were against. They were against President Obama. They were against health care reform. They were against taxation. They were against undocumented immigrants. And more than anything else, they were most emphatically against whatever low-life scoundrel was their opponent.

The older I get the less interest I have in negativity. It saps my energy and my time from those things in life that are truly important. Things like going out for ice cream with my family; listening to the warm August wind as it rustles the cottonwood leaves and scratching my dog, Ollie’s belly for him when he rolls over on his back and sticks his limp legs skyward expectantly.

I know negative campaigning is nothing new. We’re all pretty used to it by now. Heck, there’s a whole news network that’s dedicated to negativity 24/7. Talking heads blather on incessantly about this outrage or that one and we soak it up. Negative campaign ads are widely known to be effective as a way of winning elections.

If opposite polarities attract, then my theory is that we are attracted to negativity because we are basically positive beings. But sometimes our positive terminals get corroded. We can fill ourselves with dispiriting negativity and the unhappiness and suffering that results from it.

Here’s hoping someday a politician will talk about ice cream and rustling cottonwood leaves and my dog’s belly. That’s the person I’ll be campaigning for.

The canine-didates

2010-08-08T15:41:00.000-07:00

Climate change accelerates

2010-08-08T15:31:00.000-07:00

The mentally challenged talking heads at Fox chortled about all the snow last winter as if it proved Al Gore was wrong. They're as quiet as mice now in the face of global climate disasters. This piece from Daily Kos outlines the current situation while Fox News nibbles on its usual cheese crumbs tossed from the Industrial-Republican Complex.

[UPDATED] They laughed at Al Gore - now the "Inconvenient Truth" starts to make its presence felt

by frisco

Sat Aug 07, 2010 at 06:46:51 PM PDT

A few items from the recent news and a note to readers - "weather" and "climate" doesn't just affect your city, state or country. Open your eyes and smell the GLOBAL warming happening all around you.

Please follow me over the fold. I've tried to take a look at five or six current and very recent events that I think foretell the consequences of the sequence of inconvenient truths that await us, our children and their children after them if we cannot find the political and organizational will to enact major measures slow and then halt global warming as soon as possible.

frisco's diary :: ::

ITEM 1 - A Giant Floating "Ice Island" Is Born
Early on Thursday this week, the Peterman Glacier (northernmost glacier on Earth and one of the two remaining largest glaciers on Greenland) calved off a monstrously large 100 square-mile iceberg. The floating ice island is MORE THAN FOUR TIMES THE SIZE of the island of Manhattan in New York and at its thickest part is half the height of the Empire State Building.

Thursday's iceberg calving took approximately 25% of the Peterman Glacier's floating ice shelf out to sea in one fell swoop. The last time an iceberg of this size was calved into the Arctic was nearly 50 years ago, in 1962. Now, as this island makes its way out to sea between Greenland and Canada, its drifting at the hands of North Atlantic ocean currents and winds could take it into common shipping and fishing lanes.

Here's what MSNBC's "Science and Technology" page had to say about it yesterday:

[University of Delaware Professor of Ocean Science & Engineering, Andreas] Muenchow said he had expected an ice chunk to break off from the Petermann Glacier, one of the two largest remaining ones in Greenland, because it had been growing in size for seven or eight years. But he did not expect it to be so large.
"The freshwater stored in this ice island could keep the Delaware or Hudson Rivers flowing for more than two years," said Muenchow, whose research in the area is supported by the National Science Foundation. "It could also keep all U.S. public tap water flowing for 120 days."

ITEM 2 - Uh-oh! It Appears Earth Has A Nasty Fever Coming On.
The news coming from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association's (NOAA) report in mid-July was not good. NOAA monitors the Earth's temperature, combining both land and sea temperatures, and it appears that Earth has a very nasty fever coming on, to wit:

The six months from January through June 2010 was the warmest global 6-month period on record.
The three months from April through June 2010 also represented the warmest on record for that period.
And finally, June 2010 was the warmest June on recordglobally, and especially hot on the land masses of the northern hemisphere.

That first item about the first six month temperature record is particularly interesting to me. Why? Because what it means is that while climate-change denialists like Senator Jim Inhofe (~~Moron~~Republican-OK) and the idiots who accommodate and believe him were having a great big belly-laugh, building igloos in Washington, D.C. and poking fun at Al Gore because of a string of "abnormally strong" blizzards sweeping up the mid-Atlantic coast of the US, the EARTH WAS WELL ON ITS WAY TO SETTING NEW HIGH-TEMPERATURE RECORDS!

And those "abnormally strong" storms in February? Also predicted by climate change science, at least as far back as TWENTY-TWO YEARS AGO. That's primarily because warmer air has a higher "carrying capacity" for moisture/humidity combined with the fact that warmer temperatures lead to higher rates of water evaporation, feeding moisture for these monster storms. Yes, 1988 is when Professor James Hansen (also of NASA & NOAA - yes, *that* James Hansen) was quoted by the New York Times predicting much stronger droughts and storms:

He said the warming of the ocean would speed evaporation, which would cause more active convection currents in the atmosphere. This increased atmospheric activity could produce storms with 40 percent to 50 percent more kinetic energy than the fiercest storms known today.

Still laughing, Senator Inhofe? How about those 110-degree days in Washington this summer - how's the old "igloo" holding up, you denialist ***hole?

ITEM 3 - Whodathunkit? A 10,000 Year Flood Season In The First Year?!?
Speaking of those "abnormally strong storms" and the increased moisture-carrying capacity of warm air, this summer has brought story after story afterstory after story after story of heavy rains falling across interior China. Since the rains started in April and continue through today, hundreds of rivers have overflowed their banks. Reservoirs and dams have failed. Thousands of people have died and more than 100 million people have been affected by the floods, with nearly 10 million people relocated because of the rising waters.

And in late July, China's latest "engineering marvel", the Three Gorges Dam stood under threat of failing. Just one year after completion and built to withstand a supposed "20,000 year flood", the dam was within just 20 meters of having its crest topped by floodwaters. To avoid devastating tragedy, officials oversaw relief flow-rates from the dam that exceeded 70,000 cubic-meters per second, much higher than the flow rate of the then-undammed Yangtze River that caused nearly 4,000 deaths and 10s of millions to be displaced in 1998.

And yesterday came another story from the Three Gorges Dam. Now, in addition to the swollen floodwaters of the Yangtze and other rivers feeding into the dam, its superstructure and administrators are also having to deal with floating islands of rubbish - flotsam - from cities, towns and the countryside upstream. The combination is proving to be a real threat to the $25 billion dam project.

ITEM 4 - Worst Monsoon Season In 80 Years Devastates Pakistan
Still more on those "disturbingly abnormally strong storms".

This past week has seen stories erupting from the Punjab province of Pakistan (that nation's "heartland") of devastating flooding and disrupted food and water supplies for millions of people. Already, more than 1,500 have died and the BBC are reporting that as many as 500,000 people have been evacuated and relocated to higher ground, while another 4.5 million are being impacted by the rains and floods. This summer Pakistan is suffering the worst monsoon flooding it has seen in 80 years.

Monsoon rains continue to fall - already at totals that are 25-30% above normal - hampering the ability for Pakistani government and volunteer aid workers to deliver supplies to those affected areas. Bridges and roads have been washed out and helicopter aid flights are continually being suspended because of the ongoing strong storms. The floods are expected to spread further across Pakistan and already Pakistan's largest city, Karachi in the Sindh province, is suffering from flooding overflowing the city's rivers.

In politics, timing is often very-nearly everything. Adding insult to injury for Pakistanis is the fact that their president took this week for for a trip to France and to England. President Asif Ali Zardari left Pakistan late last week, just as the floods began, to meet with British Prime Minister David Cameron and to make seriously-pouty faces about and then smile, shake hands and pose for the camera in the spirit ofrapprochement over this statement by the British PM in Bangalore, India last week:

"We cannot tolerate in any sense the idea that this country [Pakistan] is allowed to look both ways and is able, in any way, to promote the export of terror, whether to India or whether to Afghanistan or anywhere else in the world."

ITEM 5 - Mother Russia, "En Fuego"!

While the rivers and waters of China and Pakistan run wild, the Steppes of Russia are burning up under dramatic drought conditions. Russia has been under a weeks-long heat wave, the worst heat wave since Russia has been keeping official records (130 years) and in the past several weeks the dry heat has helped spawn over 800 raging wildfires (nearly 300 in the last day) that are burning through forests, peat bogs and expanses of the Russian wheat fields. Temperatures have risen as high as 108 degrees Fahrenheit in the plains to the east of Moscow and over 100 in the city itself ("normal" summer high temperatures are in the mid-70s) for weeks.

Smoke from as near as the outskirts of Moscow and as far away as 1900 miles has choked Muscovites with smog pall for days. Today, over 200 flights in and out of Moscow have been cancelled or delayed, with visibility down to under 50 meters in some areas. Earlier today, the level of carbon monoxide detected in the city were at 4.8 times the maximum safe levels. So far, over 50 people have died as a result of the fires and about 2,000 homes have been destroyed.

The heat wave engulfing Russia has been brutal and raging since late June. According to one story:

An official from the Moscow registry office, Yevgenia Smirnova, told reporters they had "recorded 14,340 deaths in Moscow in July, that is 4824 deaths more [a 51% increase] than in July 2009." She said that the numbers did not begin to increase significantly until July, not in June when the heat wave began, but added "...the heatwave has certainly had an influence."

ITEM 6 - Congress Goes On A (Spineless) Summer Break - Without Addressing Climate Change & Still Without The Political Will Or Cajones To Do So
In the last item, we have the whimpering of Democratic Senate Leader, Harry Reid. Minutes before heading off home to try to save his re-election bid in ~~Arizona~~ Nevada (luckily, his opponent is more offensively moronic than most), Reid declared any debate and/or votes on Comprehensive Energy Legislation all but dead.

As usual, the "Party of No" Republicans have offered nary a shred of possibility that they would come up with a single "yea" vote and Sen. Reid whined about that. But also the Democrats lacked the political will and resolve to push for any movement of import on this important topic, choosing instead to run home and hide from the political heat in their air-conditioned abodes.

According to Senator Reid:

"Many of us want to do a thorough comprehensive [climate and energy] bill that creates jobs, breaks our addiction to foreign oil, and curbs pollution," Reid said. "Unfortunately at this time we don't have a single Republican to work with in achieving this goal. For me it's terribly disappointing and it's also very dangerous. So the President, Senator Kerry and I and others, large numbers of my caucus will continue to reach out to Republicans and work with environmental and energy committees, communities, to garner the support we need to move forward on a much larger more comprehensive bill."

Both Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California are now promising to bring legislation to the Congress after the summer break, but it's widely assumed that trying to move forward this close to mid-term elections will make the politics of Climate Change legislation a non-starter and that trying to deal with it in the subsequent "lame-duck" sessions will be even more so.

Frankly to Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi I say, "I'll believe it when I see it."

And so far, President Obama and the White House has been very loathe to engage in trying to move on any comprehensive climate change legislation. For lack of political courage to do what's right, and not necessarily what's popular, Nero fiddles while the Earth burns.

UPDATE: ITEM 7 - Hey Dude; Who Moved My Plankton?
[A special hat-tip to Gooserock for this one!]

Late last month, NPR reported that the population of phytoplankton in the Earth's oceans this year is down by over 40% since the 1950sand falling in "8 out of the 10 large ocean regions". Now, they are microscopically tiny and you may not think much of them, but phytoplankton are key to the world's ocean food chains and (note: please sit up and pay attention here) plankton are responsible for producing about 50% of the Earth's oxygen. If pockets of the oceans suffered from large plankton die-offs, "dead zones" in the oceans could occur, with limited oxygen in the sea for fish and crustaceans.

So that's it. Is this a glimpse into our future saying, "WELCOME TO THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH YOU CHOSE TO IGNORE AND LAUGH ABOUT!"? Or will the Democrats somehow muster the courage to move forward with some bold actions at the end of this scorching-hot summer? Don't wait for them - get mad, get active and then get going. The Earth is the only place we've currently got to inhabit - for our children and their progeny can we please try to keep the place livable?!?!?!

Please visit 350.org and find out what YOU can do today.

Like they care

2010-07-25T06:43:00.000-07:00

Pat Oliphant on the Fox News/Brietbart/Rovian smear of Sherrod

2010-07-23T11:10:00.000-07:00

My KMUW commentary: The humble banjo's perseverance

2010-07-23T05:50:00.000-07:00

Listen here or just read:

It’s been my lot in life, probably to the everlasting dismay of some around me, to be enamored with that humble little musical instrument, the banjo. Originating in Africa, the twangy thump of banjo notes just seems to resonate with some primal part of myself. The cheerful sound of it once prompted Charles Schultz’s Peanuts character Linus to proclaim, “As soon as a baby is born he should be issued a banjo!”

Yet this joyful musical instrument has a sorrowful story to tell. The reason there were so many banjo players among the slaves on southern plantations was because the captured Africans were not allowed to play drums. Slave owners feared they would be able to communicate with secret drumming codes. And to encourage dancing to work their atrophying muscles on the long voyages from Africa, each slave ship included at least one banjo player.

As white people began longing to also play them, the minstrel show era was born with the banjo at its center. When white, and sometimes African, players toured the nation and exposed audiences to the catchy sound of banjos, everyone wanted one. Manufacturers could barely keep up with the demand. Unfortunately, the cruel stereotypes of Africans that were also part of those shows cast a shadow over the banjo for African Americans almost to the present. Only recently have they begun to reclaim their invention as black banjo players are beginning to return to the little half-drum, half-guitar instrument with the cheery, twangy tone that it has retained throughout its dramatic history.

I love the banjo and I love the banjo’s message: Adversity be damned! I won’t stop my happy song!

For KMUW, I’m Richard Crowson.

He didn't "survey" me

2010-07-21T15:11:00.000-07:00

Yeah. I'd like to know how Ben Stein "surveyed the ranks of the unemployed." What a liar.

What a hater. More of the same from the far right.

Ben Stein: The Unemployed Are People With ‘Unpleasant Personalities…Who Do Not Know How To Do A Day’s Work’

Today, the Senate extended unemployment benefits for millions of jobless Americans. Despite the terrible shape of the economy, conservativesresisted extending unemployment insurance for weeks for Americans who can’t find work, launching a filibuster to prevent a vote on the benefits.

Writing at the American Spectator yesterday, former Nixon speechwriter and TV personality Ben Stein downplayed the suffering unemployed Americans are experiencing by writing that the people who are unemployed right now are “generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities.” He claims the unemployed are Americans with “unpleasant personalities…who do not know how to do a day’s work“:

The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities. I say “generally” because there are exceptions. But in general, as I survey the ranks of those who are unemployed, I see people who have overbearing and unpleasant personalities and/or who do not know how to do a day’s work. They are people who create either little utility or negative utility on the job. Again, there are powerful exceptions and I know some, but when employers are looking to lay off, they lay off the least productive or the most negative. To assure that a worker is not one of them, he should learn how to work and how to get along — not always easy.

Of course, saying that the 15 million Americans who are unemployed right now are “generally” people with “poor work habits” is as offensive as it is wrong. The current recession is a global phenomenon caused by the collective bad behavior of the world’s largest financial institutions. Before the recession, the unemployment rate hovered aroundsix percent; it is ludicrious to say that millions of Americans suddenly got lazier and less able to work within the span of a few months.

Unfortunately, Stein is a widely respected voice on the American right who regularly appearson cable news to offer his thoughts on politics and policy. Using the Critical Mention media search engine, ThinkProgress finds that the name “Ben Stein” was mentioned 64 times in major television media networks within the past thirty days alone.