The Mitchell Report is out, and 80 or so baseball players have been identified as having used steroids to advance their careers. There is so much going on there that it would take a professional sports writer to parse it all out. And they are trying, but they are missing some key points, I think.

First, however, the comedy. Roger Clemens is in full-denial mode, and is so wealthy that he doesn’t even need to do it himself. His hired gun, his lawyer, is doing it for him. Andy Petitte is beating a strategic retreat, saying he did it once for an injury, not explaining the curative powers of the drugs. And Mike Stanton is doing the most common thing of all – he saying he never met the guy who fingered him, wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a police lineup.

But there’s other stuff to note as well. For one, the Mitchell Report pays only lip service to ownership and management’s role in promoting the sorry state of affairs. They knew. They had to know, but they also knew that baseballs leaving the park brought in the fans. The San Francisco Giants used Barry Bonds all they could, milked him for every ticket they could sell, and once be broke Henry Aaron’s record, unceremoniously dumped him.

But the report was commissioned by ownership, and it did not bite the hand.

Think of this: Mitchell had one real witness who led him to another, and two men gave him 80 suspects. Think what would be if he had four witnesses, if he had a line to every training room in the league. What I heard right after the report was released was a huge rush of escaping air. It was a collective sigh of relief. If you have a favorite team and follow its athletes, pay special attention to those whose performances have declined severely these past two or three years. I’m thinking of players like Austin Kearns, who was a rookie phenomenon projected for greatness who last year hit five home runs. Be suspicious.

I see very little expression of understanding for the athletes. Had I that kind of ability, and knowing my competition had an advantage in juicing, what would I do? Would I turn my back on millions of dollars to remain pure? We’re talking about people of ordinary means here, many of them from Latin America who are supporting families and communities. The pressure on them was substantial, the rewards high, the punishment nonexistent. In the end, their bodies will suffer, their muscles will deteriorate prematurely, and surely they are at risk for cancer. It’s an awful thing, but circumstances brought it about. These are not bad people. They are just people.

I do hope that the real records and superb athletes of days gone by – Ruth and Aaron and Koufax and Spahn and Seaver – are accorded higher respect than the ‘roid boys. Bonds deserves to be in the Hall of Fame for being a superior athlete during his natural years, as does Clemens. But anything they did post-injection deserves an asterisk.

And, finanlly, there’s the problem of testing – some forms of human growth hormone are still undetectable by means of urine testing. If there is a way, juicing will be done. I hope the players’ union sees its way clear to open the door for thorough and independent testing. I love this game, and want to see it clean and healthy.

Nike has come out with a new running shoe that has a computer chip embedded in it. The chip sends messages to your Ipod as you run. So, for instance, if you are in a 10K road race, it will tell you things like “five kilometers left to run” or “two kilometers to go and you have burned 1,980 calories”, and “the race is over. Please stop running.”

In the old days, runners would look at the signs on the raceway that said things like “1K” and “2K”. Some of the higher tech races would paint lines on the roadway delineating the distance. But it was awkward. Some runners would take their eyes off the course and look at their watches, a dangerous practice. The whole process of running a race was both puzzling and perilous. Hi tech has at last joined up with Runners World.

Talking shoes is a great concept that can be extended to other forms of clothing. In my own case, I’d be happy if, when I put my shirt on in the morning, it said “Day four”, or, concerning my shorts, “Day three. Please consider changing me out.” Computer chips could also enhance my fashion sense, as when I attempted to put on sandals with white socks – “Very nerdy – please remove socks”. Then there’s my age-appropriate attire – black socks with jeans, and the jeans themselves pulled up around my navel – “Please, please! Don’t do this.”

Computer chips could also sense galvanic skin responses. Say for instance, a 57 year old man happens upon a twenty-something gal in a halter top and tight shorts while buying his Metamucil at the grocery store. What would the chip say? “Avert eyes. Think fiber.”

There was a creepy piece in the Atlanta Journal Constitution – “Unfettered Citizen Journalism Too Risky”, by David Hazinski.

Makes me want to wretch – not that bloggers aren’t reckless and lazy, but the attitude he has that journalists are somehow doing their job. Right – it was journalistic integrity that allowed Bush to take us into the Iraq disaster, Iran to follow. It’s journalists’ willingness to cozy up to power that exacerbates the problems we have today with a runaway executive. And it’s journalistic integrity that allows presidential candidates to be peppered with softball questions in debates, without follow up.

CNN’s last YouTube Republican debate included a question from a retired general who is on Hillary Clinton’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender steering committee. False Internet rumors about Sen. Barack Obama attending a radical Muslim school became so widespread that CNN and other news agencies did stories debunking the rumors. There are literally hundreds of Internet hoaxes and false reports passed off as true stories, tracked by sites such as snopes.com.

Journalists allowed Grover Norquist to horn in on the Republican YouTube debate. Agenda, anyone? The last Democratic debate I saw, Dennis Kucinich was excluded by the Des Moines Register. Before that, he had to interrupt to be heard. Why? Journalists have decided he’s not a “front-runner”. The Obama rumor was spread by FOX News, supposedly comprised of journalists. And there’s Media Matters and FAIR, fine organizations that are devoted to debunking mainstream corporate journalism. Somebody had to do it.

Bloggers do an end run-on journalists. We work without their supervision. In the old days, we were relegated to letters to the editor, sidestepped, censored and muffled, all to satisfy the embedded right wing philosophy of some smug editor.

We’re not a pretty lot, and we don’t pretend to be journalists. Neither should Hazinski.

From: The Thom Hartmann Show, December 4, 2007:

Wendell Willkie, Republican, running against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940:

I believe that the forces of free enterprise must be regulated. I am opposed to business monopolies. I believe in the right to collective bargaining by labor, without any interference, and full protection of that obvious right. I believe in minimum standards for wages and maximum standards for hours, and I believe that such standards should constantly improve. I am in favor of the regulation of interstate utilities, of banking, of the securities markets. I believe in federal pensions, in adequate old age benefits, and old age allowances. I believe that the federal government owes a duty to adjust the position of the farmer with that of the manufacturer. If this cannot be done by parity prices, then some other method must be found without too much regimentation of the farmers’ affairs.

Ronald Reagan, Democrat, in 1948:

The profits of corporations have doubled while workers’ wages have increased only one quarter. In other words, profits have gone up four times as fast as wages, and the small increases that workers did receive was more than eaten up by rising prices, which have also bored into their savings. For example, here’s an Associated Press dispatch I read the other day about Smith L. Carpenter, a craftsman in Union Springs, New York. Seems that Mr. Carpenter retired some years ago thinking that he had enough money saved up so that he could live out his final years without having to worry. But he didn’t figure on this Republican inflation, which ate up all his savings. And so he’s gone back to work. The reason this is news is because Mr. Carpenter is 91 years old. Now take it to contrast the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, which had a net profit of $210 million dollars, after taxes, for the first half of 1948 – an increase of 70% in one year. In other words, high prices have not been caused by higher wages, but by bigger and bigger profits.

The Republican promises sounded pretty good in 1946. But what has happened since then, since the 80th Congress took over? Prices have climbed to the highest level in history, although the death of the OPA was supposed to bring prices down through “the natural process of free competition”.

Labor has been handcuffed by the vicious Tart-Hartley law. Social Security benefits have been snatched away from almost a million workers by the Gerhardt Bill. Fair employment practices, which had worked so well during war time, have been abandoned. Veterans’ pleas for low-cost homes have been ignored, and many people are still living in made-over chicken coops and garages. Tax reduction bills have been passed to benefit the higher income brackets alone. The average worker saves only $1.73 per week. In the false name of economy, millions of children have been deprived of milk once provided through the Federal School Lunch Program.

This was the payoff of the Republican promises, and this is why we must have new faces in the Congress of the United States. Democratic faces. This is why we must elect not only President Truman, but also men like Mayor Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis, the Democratic candidate for senator from Minnesota.

CNN reports that the Democrats are on board to provide almost $70 billion in war funding to Bush – score another one for the lame duck. Democrats are patting themselves on the back:

“What is for sure is he will not get all $200 billion,” said one senior Democratic lawmaker. “Whatever number it is, it is much less than what the president asked for. For the first time in this war, he has received less than his request.”

That’s reassuring I suppose, except for what the White House has to say:

… senior administration officials privately say they expect to be able to get at least of the rest of the president’s $200 billion request passed through Congress next year.

How to read this? It’s popular to say that Democrats lack a spine, but I question how spitting on your own base equates with cowardice. Every time the Dems capitulate to Bush, there is hell to pay. Of course, that hell is only paid to liberals, and we know how much Democrats care what liberals think.

I think it far more basic – the job of the Democratic Party is to corral dissent and cut off its balls. The Democrats give Bush what he wants because they are on board. Yes, it’s difficult to continue funding an unpopular war, but Democrats voted for that war, by and large, and did so knowing the why’s, if not the how’s. They are, formally anyway, the opposition party, but what they are in reality is more akin to hired Quislings.

But that’s their job. Foreign policy in this country is bipartisan, always has been. The key is for liberals and progressive to understand that Democrats are attune to what we think. They’re not going to do anything about it, but they do know what we think. They tell us that every two years.

But that’s as far as they are willing to go. They view their job as marshaling us as resources to get them elected, but not to give us what we want. That’s a high wire act. I marvel at how liberals respond when screwed – they tell us that we can’t always get what we want, but that we have no alternative but to support Democrats. See below.

Dear Mr. Rehberg:

Please stop calling my house and leaving messages. I don’t like telemarketing.

Sincerely,
Mark Tokarski

PS – Mr. Schweitzer – you too. You are the worst.

Eric over at his SoHum Parlance blog puts up interesting stuff all the time. Here’s from a recent post:

That’s a dolled-up peace symbol. Ever wonder where it came from? I’ve heard many wicked tales, like it’s Satanic, masonic, a witch’s foot, and on a milder note, a dove’s print. But it turns out to be something far simpler.

The symbol was designed in 1958 by Gerald Holtom as the symbol for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It was not originally intended to become the generic peace symbol, although the Campaign certainly never had any objections. They made a deliberate decision not to copyright the symbol.

The lines are overlapping naval semaphoric sympols (see the graphic below which comes from designboom) for N and D, intended to abbreviate Nuclear Disarmament.

Very simple, and yet artistic.

Ideas spread like viruses, and are often as hard to kill. But some ideas have been tainted by historical events, and though not dead, are not discussed openly. One such idea is what came to be known as Social Darwinism. It’s a combination of ideas of social progress and laissez-faire economics that proscribes a minimal role for government in our lives. It goes something like this: For government to interfere in the natural order of things is harmful, as people less able to survive in the natural market place are allowed to survive anyway, thus weakening the human strain.

The root of modern manifestations of what we call “conservatism” is nothing more than this – the conversion (and perversion) of Darwin’s theory of natural selection to the political economy. We don’t say so openly – Social Darwinism has led to all sorts of tragedies, such as genocide, and not too long ago, the idea that an inferior race of people ought to be eliminated.

That’s why Social Darwinism is tainted, why it is no longer discussed in polite circles, why mentioning it in the context of modern conservatism is a social faux pas.

But scratch the surface and you’ll see the infection. It’s there – it expresses itself in fears that our society is being taken over by lesser mortals. It can be fear of people who depend on government assistance, or of illegal immigrants.

The original progenitor of Social Darwinism was Herbert Spencer, who lived during our Gilded Age, a time when the cream was rising. He invented the phrase “survival of the fittest,” rather than Darwin. He originally fostered the idea that government can only preserve the less fit at the expense of the more fit.

It’s an idea, a meme, and it’s hard to kill. It is, in my view, at the center of the conflict between libertarians, conservatives, liberals and progressives.

What alternative do we offer over here on the left? It’s simply a different world view. We are, by nature, nurturers. We see undeveloped potential in all people, and view modest government interference in the natural order as a means of fostering our well being, of unleashing human potential. We take ordinary people of modest means, and if necessary, give them food and shelter. But more importantly, we educate them, and then they educate others, and before you know it, you have a self-sustaining group.

Admittedly, there are among us people who can only be fed, but not nurtured. There are those who respond to nurturing with dependence. They are, fortunately, a small minority. Our social experiment is bound to fail with this in a small segment of the population. But this small group stigmatizes the great lot of people who need only education and opportunity to make a go of it. Ronald Reagan had them driving Cadillacs and collecting multiple welfare checks. For the excesses of a few, many millions suffer.

So there it is – on one side are Social Darwinists intent on preserving the fittest, on the other nurturers who want to see all of us advance. I cast my lot with the latter, but admit that any idea can be taken to extremes. Such an extreme of the right became Nazism, of the left, Bolshevism. Both unleashed frightening destructive powers.

I’ve been asked several times these past few days what I think of the NIE that says that Iran stopped its nuclear bomb program in 2003. I’m making that up, of course. No one has asked. Honestly, it’s just a silly blog. Who cares?

But here’s what I think, no matter how silly. There are competing forces within Washington, and power shifts back and forth depending on who’s in office and other political considerations. The Pentagon is a massive organization, and there are factions within it, and power shifts within it too. Most within that building are concerned about the American corporate agenda – first go corporations, then follows the military. That’s the ideal they serve, and that agenda seems to carry on no matter who is in office.

But several times now I’ve seen a different faction work in the shadows, and for the good of the republic, interfere in normal political affairs. Once was Watergate, when we had a seriously deranged president. Once again was the exposure of Abu Ghraib – an attempt to do lasting damage to Rumsfeld and Bush. And now the NIE report on Iran. It exposes what has likely been known for years. The amazing thing is that the underlying facts came to light. Bush has been good at suppressing truth. But there are people within that building who care about decency and the rule of law. The report could have been buried, would have been buried save for some dynamic maneuvering.

Bush and Cheney have at once been stopped in their tracks and exposed as a liars. That’s what should have happened in 2003, but in the wake of 9/11, there was too much power in the Oval Office. This exposure is a sign of a weakened administration. It’s the kind of thing we expect, but never get, from our ‘probing’ media.

For the time being, Iran is off the table. There’ll be no attack in the final days of Bush. It took some serious finagling to make it happen. It’s a good day for the republic.