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Saturday, November 30, 2013

Walmart follows the Downton Abbey model of doing business

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Walmart and Downton Abbey: rampant inequality and detachment from reality
By Sadhbh Walshe, November 29, 2013

I’m not exactly sure what it is about the hit British TV series, Downton Abbey, that has enthralled so many of us. The scenery is great, Lady Mary’s wardrobe is just fabulous, but there are plot holes so huge one could drive Lady Edith’s car through them. I suspect the fascination it provokes has something to do with nostalgia – a hankering for a simpler time, when everyone knew their place and where the classes, though separate and unequal, were at least able to be polite to one other. Whatever it is that we find so charming about the series, however, we should try to keep in mind that the rampant inequality it celebrates is not something we should be hankering after.

America has its own real-life upstairs/downstairs thing going on at the moment, best embodied by the Walton clan, who own the lion’s share of Walmart Stores, Inc. Walmart is the single largest private employer in America with a work force of some 1.3 million. Each of the four Walton’s who have an interest in the stores increased their net worth by $7bn last year alone. Meanwhile, the company’s sales associates, who make up the bulk of the work-force, earn an average of $8.81 per hour – less than the federal poverty level for a family of four.

So it’s a bit like Downton Abbey on a bigger budget, most of which is allocated to the above the line players. While the Walton’s, with their occasional charitable doings and their apparent detachment from reality, seem to feel very comfortable in their role as modern day Lord and Lady Granthams, their poverty-wage workers seem less inclined to imitate the subservient behavior of their below-stairs counterparts. And that’s a good thing.

Today, Black Friday as it’s known among shopaholics, a slew of protests are being planned outside some 1500 Walmart stores across the country to demand better pay and work conditions. I can only imagine what Downton’s dowager countess (she, of “What is a weekend?” fame) would have to say if the workers at Downton Abbey dropped their pitchforks (or raised them perhaps) on one of the estate’s busiest days of the year. I’m sure she would be shocked at the ingratitude of the Walmart employees, particularly since at least one Walmart store was recently kind enough to organize a food drive for its impoverished workers so they could enjoy a decent Thanksgiving meal. It’s unlikely that the dowager would ever have come around to thinking that it might be better for everyone if the serving classes were given a chance to rise up the social ladder. But the Walmart bosses may someday learn that their disinclination to share the wealth may not be entirely in their best interests.

Although the Walton family made out like bandits last year and the outgoing CEO of Walmart Stores, Inc, Michael T Duke, took home nearly $20m in compensation, the company is not actually doing very well. The US stores have reported shrinking sales for three straight quarters. In a rare moment of clarity, the president and CEO of Walmart US, William Simon, attributed the drop in sales to the over stretched incomes of the low wage consumer the store typically attracts. He explained:
Their income is going down while food costs are not. Gas and energy prices, while they’re abating, I think they’re still eating up a big piece of the customer’s budget.
The irony, of course, is that by paying so many of its 1.3 million employees poverty wages, and setting a low bar for wages across the board, the company is eating into its customer base and thus may be contributing to its own decline.

Writing about this issue recently, former secretary of labor, Robert Reich, made the comparison with Henry Ford’s approach to wages. In an effort to boost sales of his Model T’s, Ford decided to pay his own workers triple the average factory wage of the time. Ford would be called a socialist if he were alive today, and no doubt was called worse at the time. His cunning plan did work, though. By raising the wages of his own employees, wages for factory workers increased across the board. More workers were then in a position to buy the product Ford was trying to sell them and he made a killing.

With so many workers in America today being paid so little that they can’t even afford to buy food, it’s no wonder that even low price stores like Walmart are suffering a decline in sales. For now, however, the company seems content with the Downton Abbey model of doing business, where the top 1% get to monopolize the wealth and the long suffering workers are expected to keep a stiff upper lip about it.

The problem with this economic model is that it tends to crash under its own weight. As Nobel prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, wrote last year in Vanity Fair, if people like the Waltons (aka the 1%) are to survive and thrive, they should have the sense to know that “there would be no top of the pyramid without a solid base.” The best thing the top brass at Walmart could do to preserve their own privileged status would be to raise wages for their workers. A recent study by the progressive thinktank Demos illustrated that the company could afford to pay its workers an additional $5.83 an hour (pdf), enough to bring their wages just above the poverty level, simply by ending the company’s share-buyback program. This way prices could stay as they are but sales would increase as more workers would have more money to spend.

Even the dowager countess could get down with that scenario. So far, however, the Walton’s and their ilk have resisted such a move at every turn, preferring instead to loll around in smoking jackets a la Lord Grantham does while his estate collapses around him. Hopefully the workers, who have more to fight for, will not be so foolish or complacent.
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What's changed at the IRS - and what hasn't....

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Scant evidence of fixes at IRS after scandal
By James Pilcher, November 24, 2013

More than six months after a top Internal Revenue Service official acknowledged the agency inappropriately scrutinized the applications for tax exemption by tea party and other conservative groups, the scandal has faded from the headlines and moved to Congress' back burner.

But it's unclear how much has changed inside the IRS to fix the underlying problems that led to the targeting.

Some argue the agency has taken significant steps to revamp a flawed review process that left certain groups waiting years for approval and subjected others to intrusive, burdensome questioning.

"A great deal has changed at the IRS to prevent this from happening again," said Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, one of three congressional panels to investigate the matter. Cummings cited leadership changes, better training for managers and screeners, and a streamlined application processes, among other things.

But where some see progress, others see superficial tweaks and a still-festering problem.

"I'm quite sure they're not going to go after tea party groups again," said Paul Streckfus, editor of a trade journal focused on tax-exempt issues. "The larger question is, is the system working better than it did? And the answer, as far as I can tell, is it's not." He said IRS screeners are still overloaded and the tax-exempt unit has been paralyzed by the scandal.

Here's a rundown of what's changed - and what hasn't:

The IRS' top ranks have been purged

[snipped]

A ban on BOLOs

[snipped]

New review process with more neutral instructions for front-line workers

[snipped]

Murky decades-old rule still in place

[snipped]

Wait times for applicants still long

[snipped]

Cincinnati office still facing big workload without adequate resources

The IRS' exempt organizations unit receives more than 60,000 applications per year, most of which are handled by 300 employees in the Cincinnati field office.

With so many cases coming in and no new resources to handle them, "they're falling farther and farther behind," said Streckfus, the editor of the trade journal. "This is a problem of inventory management."

He said it would take additional funding - or maybe even shifting the tax-exempt workload to a new agency - to really root out the problems that caused the targeting scandal. But he said lawmakers in Congress seem more interested in pointing fingers over who is to blame for the problem than in fixing it.
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Francis "has a pulpit – and right now he is using it to be the world’s loudest and clearest voice against the status quo. You don’t have to be a believer to believe in that"

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Since atheists don't believe in "prayer", how about just wishing him well?
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Why even atheists should be praying for Pope Francis
By Jonathan Freedland, November 16, 2013

Francis could replace Obama as the pin-up on every liberal and leftist wall. He is now the world’s clearest voice for change

That Obama poster on the wall, promising hope and change, is looking a little faded now. The disappointments, whether over drone warfare or a botched rollout of healthcare reform, have left the world’s liberals and progressives searching for a new pin-up to take the US president’s place. As it happens, there’s an obvious candidate: the head of an organisation those same liberals and progressives have long regarded as sexist, homophobic and, thanks to a series of child abuse scandals, chillingly cruel. The obvious new hero of the left is the pope.

Only installed in March, Pope Francis has already become a phenomenon. His is the most talked-about name on the internet in 2013, ranking ahead of “Obamacare” and “NSA”. In fourth place comes Francis’s Twitter handle, @Pontifex. In Italy, Francesco has fast become the most popular name for new baby boys. Rome reports a surge in tourist numbers, while church attendance is said to be up – both trends attributed to “the Francis effect“.

His popularity is not hard to fathom. The stories of his personal modesty have become the stuff of instant legend. He carries his own suitcase. He refused the grandeur of the papal palace, preferring to live in a simple hostel. When presented with the traditional red shoes of the pontiff, he declined; instead he telephoned his 81-year-old cobbler in Buenos Aires and asked him to repair his old ones. On Thursday, Francis visited the Italian president – arriving in a blue Ford Focus, with not a blaring siren to be heard.

Some will dismiss these acts as mere gestures, even publicity stunts. But they convey a powerful message, one of almost elemental egalitarianism. He is in the business of scraping away the trappings, the edifice of Vatican wealth accreted over centuries, and returning the church to its core purpose, one Jesus himself might have recognised. He says he wants to preside over “a poor church, for the poor”. It’s not the institution that counts, it’s the mission.

All this would warm the heart of even the most fervent atheist, except Francis has gone much further. It seems he wants to do more than simply stroke the brow of the weak. He is taking on the system that has made them weak and keeps them that way.

“My thoughts turn to all who are unemployed, often as a result of a self-centred mindset bent on profit at any cost,” he tweeted in May. A day earlier he denounced as “slave labour” the conditions endured by Bangladeshi workers killed in a building collapse. In September he said that God wanted men and women to be at the heart of the world and yet we live in a global economic order that worships “an idol called money”.

There is no denying the radicalism of this message, a frontal and sustained attack on what he calls “unbridled capitalism“, with its “throwaway” attitude to everything from unwanted food to unwanted old people. His enemies have certainly not missed it. If a man is to be judged by his opponents, note that this week Sarah Palin denounced him as “kind of liberal” while the free-market Institute of Economic Affairs has lamented that this pope lacks the “sophisticated” approach to such matters of his predecessors. Meanwhile, an Italian prosecutor has warned that Francis’s campaign against corruption could put him in the crosshairs of that country’s second most powerful institution: the mafia.

As if this weren’t enough to have Francis’s 76-year-old face on the walls of the world’s student bedrooms, he also seems set to lead a church campaign on the environment. He was photographed this week with anti-fracking activists, while his biographer, Paul Vallely, has revealed that the pope has made contact with Leonardo Boff, an eco-theologian previously shunned by Rome and sentenced to “obsequious silence” by the office formerly known as the “Inquisition”. An encyclical on care for the planet is said to be on the way.

Many on the left will say that’s all very welcome, but meaningless until the pope puts his own house in order. But here, too, the signs are encouraging. Or, more accurately, stunning. Recently, Francis told an interviewer the church had become “obsessed” with abortion, gay marriage and contraception. He no longer wanted the Catholic hierarchy to be preoccupied with “small-minded rules”. Talking to reporters on a flight – an occurrence remarkable in itself – he said: “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” His latest move is to send the world’s Catholics a questionnaire, seeking their attitude to those vexed questions of modern life. It’s bound to reveal a flock whose practices are, shall we say, at variance with Catholic teaching. In politics, you’d say Francis was preparing the ground for reform.

Witness his reaction to a letter – sent to “His Holiness Francis, Vatican City” – from a single woman, pregnant by a married man who had since abandoned her. To her astonishment, the pope telephoned her directly and told her that if, as she feared, priests refused to baptise her baby, he would perform the ceremony himself. (Telephoning individuals who write to him is a Francis habit.) Now contrast that with the past Catholic approach to such “fallen women”, dramatised so powerfully in the current film Philomena. He is replacing brutality with empathy.

Of course, he is not perfect. His record in Argentina during the era of dictatorship and “dirty war” is far from clean. “He started off as a strict authoritarian, reactionary figure,” says Vallely. But, aged 50, Francis underwent a spiritual crisis from which, says his biographer, he emerged utterly transformed. He ditched the trappings of high church office, went into the slums and got his hands dirty.

Now inside the Vatican, he faces a different challenge – to face down the conservatives of the curia and lock in his reforms, so that they cannot be undone once he’s gone. Given the guile of those courtiers, that’s quite a task: he’ll need all the support he can get.

Some will say the world’s leftists and liberals shouldn’t hanker for a pin-up, that the urge is infantile and bound to end in disappointment. But the need is human and hardly confined to the left: think of the Reagan and Thatcher posters that still adorn the metaphorical walls of conservatives, three decades on. The pope may have no army, no battalions or divisions, but he has a pulpit – and right now he is using it to be the world’s loudest and clearest voice against the status quo. You don’t have to be a believer to believe in that.
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The real issue is openness about who gave how much money to whom and for what. The political system is corrupted by wealthy corporations and others hiding behind the claim of "social welfare"

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Editorial: Loophole leaves millions in political money in the dark
Tampa Bay Times, November 29, 2013

When two political organizations look alike and talk alike, why aren't they held to the same standard of public disclosure? A full year after the 2012 presidential election, the public is just now getting a peek into the explosion of money that played so big a role in last year's political season in the form of so-called "social welfare" groups. But there is little to see, thanks to a gaping loophole in federal law that Congress refuses to address. Secrecy in financing political campaigns is antithetical to democracy, and Congress should at least require the same disclosure for this political activity as it does for political action committees.

Nearly four years after a divided U.S. Supreme Court rewrote the book on campaign finance with its Citizens United decision, 2012 federal tax returns for 501(c)4 organizations are just becoming public. Most lack any information about their biggest donors. Republican kingmaker Karl Rove, for example, was never shy last year about how much money he expected American Crossroads, his political action committee, and his so-called social welfare group, Crossroads GPS, to spend on campaigns in support of conservative candidates: $250 million. But more than 11 months after Crossroads attack ads flooded America's living rooms, particularly in toss-up states such as Florida, voters have no way of confirming which special interests were footing the bill.

Federal tax law has allowed Rove to cloak the donor list for Crossroads GPS, which raised nearly $180 million. American Crossroads, which as a PAC must disclose donors, raised $117.5 million. What is known about Crossroads GPS: $22.5 million of the group's funding came from a single, anonymous source. Another anonymous donor handed over $18 million; another, $10 million. All told, 50 undisclosed donors plowed at least $1 million or more into the organization.

Crossroads GPS told the IRS that of the $180 million it raised, $75 million was spent on political advertising in 2012 — roughly the same amount it claims to have spent on "grass-roots mobilization and advocacy." Never mind, as the journalism website ProPublica has reported, that when Crossroads GPS was applying for nonprofit status in 2010, it told the IRS that money spent on elections would be "limited in amount, and will not constitute the organization's primary purpose."

Rove is not the only master at exploiting this loophole in the law to collect dollars for his political efforts. Both conservative and liberal groups have done so. But he is by far the leader. ProPublica reported that the amount Crossroads GPS told the Federal Elections Commission that it had spent on political ads was nearly twice as much as the next highest-spending social welfare group last year, Americans for Prosperity. That group is backed by conservative billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. Because of the same loophole, voters don't know if the group is spending the billionaire brothers' money or someone else's.

President Barack Obama proposed last week that nonprofits such as Rove's Crossroads GPS be subject to tighter restrictions on political activity. The Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department also will clarify how much "social welfare" activity these groups have to do to keep their tax-exempt status. Those would be positive steps, but the real issue is openness about who gave how much money to whom and for what.

Democracy is supposed to be about giving every voter equal power. But when wealthy corporations and others hide behind the claim of "social welfare" to anonymously contribute millions to support political campaigns, the political system is corrupted. Congress should tighten up the social welfare statute to force this activity back into full disclosure.
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Friday, November 29, 2013

Ah, yes, Rafael Cruz is taking responsibility for conferences that he has not organized. Talk about hubris!

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Rafael Cruz: God told me to wake up the pastors so they will warn the people
By Eric W. Dolan, November 29, 2013

The father of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R) says that pastors in the United States who refuse to stand up for Christian values are to blame for the country’s misfortunes.

“Political correctness is killing us,” Rafael Cruz said at an event in Texas hosted Nov. 14 by the Montgomery County Eagle Forum.

“It is killing us. I speak to pastors all the time. You know, the Lord back in the beginning of this year, the Lord told me very, very clearly, ‘If there is one group of people that I hold responsible for what is happening in America it is the pastors.’”

“Because the majority of the pastors have been hiding behind the pulpit, and God called me to one verse of scripture, a scripture very dear to my heart because it is the verse of scripture that God used to call me to the ministry,” Cruz continued. “It is Ezekiel 3:17, which says, ‘Son of man, I call you as a watchman on the wall’ basically to do two things: To hear from me and to warn the people.”

“And God told me, you wake up the pastors so they will warn the people. And the reason I know without a doubt that I heard from God is that — supernaturally — without my moving a finger pastors’ conferences began materializing week after week after week. I’m doing pastors conferences now all over the country. I have not organized one of them. It is God.”

Cruz said that Christians needed to “take this country back for righteousness.”

Watch video, uploaded to YouTube, below:


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The political system has become completely unresponsive to the genuine concerns and the physical needs of the under employed, hence the plight of the Walmart and other retail workers

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Wal-Mart arrests could fuel “a new political movement of the disenfranchised,” Grayson tells Salon

Florida Congressman questions Obama's praise for Wal-Mart: “What has Wal-Mart given the president in return?"

By Josh Eidelson, November 29, 2013

Firebrand Congressman Alan Grayson hailed Black Friday civil disobedience in an afternoon interview, saying the protests by Wal-Mart workers and supporters show “the dissatisfaction of the middle class” since the 2008 financial crash “coming to a slow boil.”

“If one person falls out of the middle class, that’s sad,” Grayson told Salon. “But if millions of people fall out of the middle class, that creates a backlash which is being seen all over the country, and will potentially create a new political movement of the disenfranchised.”

Members of the union-backed workers’ group OUR Walmart promised 1,500 protests today, including nine civil disobedience actions. Organizers say at least eighty-one total people were arrested among six of those actions, including a St. Paul protest which included both Walmart workers and striking sub-contracted janitors who clean buildings for Target. “Even people who are employed now, many of them are not making enough money to survive,” said Grayson. “And the outlet more and more for people that they see is this kind of civil disobedience, because the political system has become completely unresponsive to their genuine concerns and their physical needs.”

In a Friday statement, Wal-Mart Vice President David Tovar said that the company pays “on average, close to $12.00 an hour” and “The real issue isn’t where you start. It’s where you can go once you’ve started. Retail is one of the few industries that has jobs at all levels and ongoing advancement opportunities.” Using Glassdoor.com and 2011 IBISworld data, OUR Walmart has pegged the retailer’s hourly wage at below $9.

Grayson charged that the company “feels compelled to cheat its own employees to the point where they’re forced to turn to public assistance simply to stay alive.” The common thread between deadly disasters at factories which have supplied to Wal-Mart in Bangladesh and abuses in the United States, he contended, is that “Wal-Mart is a machine that exists solely for the purpose of enriching its owners and…the top managers of Wal-Mart, and in so doing wreaks havoc on the lives of both workers and suppliers.” As workers have in industries like miners and auto, he argued, the solution “is for people to get together and stop fighting each other, but rather fight the boss and beat the boss.”

As I’ve reported, Grayson cited Wal-Mart’s firing of activists – including a worker he had accompanied when she went on strike last Black Friday – when he introduced a bill in June to dramatically broaden and strengthen the remedies available to workers fired for organizing. Asked Friday if that bill has gotten traction in the House, the Florida Congressman told Salon, “not yet,” but that it was an effort to “point things in the right direction” for a time when the House has more progressive leadership.

While some congressional Democrats have joined Grayson in blasting the retail giant, the Obama Administration has not. Asked whether the Administration’s repeated praise for and appearances with Wal-Mart hurt the workers’ cause, Grayson told Salon, “It certainly doesn’t improve things.” Then he asked, “What has Wal-Mart given the president in return? Or, for that matter, what has Wal-Mart given to the president’s constituents in return?”

Grayson said he expected today’s civil disobedience to have an impact because “it shows that people are willing to put their lives on the line, and at least temporarily their liberty on the line, in order to improve the circumstances for working people in this country.” He cast those circumstances as dire: “We’ve established a system that makes a tiny, tiny number of people unbelievably wealthy at the expense of everyone else – and turns everyone else into debt slaves and cheap labor.”
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The GOP, whether motivated by unbridled Obama hatred or simple cruelty and lack of interest in the plight of fellow Americans who are struggling, is determined to end the Obama presidency here and now. Solely because Obama exists....

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Obama, GOP and political cruelty
By Joy-Ann Reid, November 27, 2013

As we prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving, one thing is clear: We are living in an age of strange and persistent cruelty, and our politics is making things worse.

In Washington, where lawmakers are taking yet another break from a Congress that has been the least productive in a generation, three truths have ground the entire governing project to a halt: Barack Obama exists.

And because Barack Obama exists, Republicans have deemed that nothing of substance will pass the House of Representatives. And by ensuring that nothing of substance will pass the House of Representatives, Republicans hope to regain power, so that they can ensure that nothing of substance passes the Senate, either.

House Speaker John Boehner made the bizarre pronouncement in July that Congress should be judged, not on how many laws they pass (the name “lawmaker” apparently being a term of art) but on how many laws members repeal. First among the things to be repealed, must be the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s signature achievement, which Democrats managed to pass during the five-month stretch, from July 7, 2009 — when Al Franken was finally seated following the disputed Senate race in Minnesota — until January, 2010, when they enjoyed a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and before they lost the House in the 2010 midterms and the new Congress was sworn in.

At any cost, Republicans have said, Americans must not have access to the benefits of universal healthcare, and so they would rescind the right to coverage despite pre-existing conditions, the ability of young people to remain on their parents’ insurance until age 26, the end of lifetime coverage caps and rescission and, most important, the opportunity for as many as 40 million Americans — many in the rural South — to get health insurance for the first time in their lives. They must not have these things, because Obama exists, and this achievement of his cannot be allowed to stand.

Therefore Republicans are gleeful that one method of accessing that lifesaving care, the Healthcare.gov website, has had a tough rollout. Those on the far right (which increasingly is the only right) are just as gleeful — immorally so, in my estimation — that some 5 million Americans will be locked out of Medicaid coverage by the dispassionate political calculus of their Republican governors.

Because Obama exists, food assistance to the poor must be slashed by $39 billion, despite the fact that Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps, kept an estimated 5 million Americans, including 2.2 million children, out of poverty last year. SNAP must be gutted, and millions of children thrown off of not just food stamps, but the school lunch programs they are tied to, so that Republicans can strip the federal government of any available power to interrupt the natural process of social Darwinism — the only form of Darwinism many conservatives apparently believe in.

Obama has had the temerity to try and use the power he earned through two elections to do just that — intervene on behalf of those who weren’t blessed with inherited riches or a keen eye for business (or the access to funding to start one up.)

In the estimation of this Republican Party, Obama should never have tried to exercise power. And so the Republican Party has made rolling that power back its sole reason for being in Washington. (Of course, this will be reversed if a Republican should become president. Then, we’ll welcome back the “unitary executive.”)

Obama, to this way of thinking, must not appoint judges. He must not appoint agency heads. (Which is why Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Democrats had to reform the filibuster now, rather than waiting until the Republicans do it themselves.)

He must barely govern at all. His election was, to some on the right, meant to be a holiday ornament; a testament to the benevolence and greatness of America, which conveyed one of its once-despised minorities to the highest ceremonial office in the land.

The president has come very late to this realization. But it’s clear that he finally understands just what he’s dealing with in the opposition party, which whether motivated by unbridled Obama hatred or simple cruelty and lack of interest in the plight of fellow Americans who are struggling, is determined to end his presidency here and now.

For the sake of Americans who remain on the economic margins, here’s hoping he hasn’t realized it too late.
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Leveling the playing field with Democracy.com

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One-stop shopping for political candidates online
By CNN Wire, November 27, 2013

Prime shopping season might be underway this holiday season, but candidate shopping might be a little easier for voters next campaign season.

Melissa Yasinow, 28, was born and raised in suburban Cleveland Heights, Ohio, which has a population of about 46,000 people.

Yasinow is so vested in her town that she decided to run for city council. To help her run her campaign, she enlisted family and friends.

Yasinow did what any serious candidate would do. She engaged voters, planned and hosted campaign events and solidified a platform.

It was a tall order for her and her loyal team of helpers who all simultaneously held down full time jobs. But she had checked all the boxes of a traditional campaign.

She ultimately won, but an aspect of modern campaigning was missing and not within her reach.

Daunting for the political novice and attorney was creating an online presence.


While the millennial is an avid user of social media and the Web, she had no idea how to build a website, calling it "completely overwhelming." Plus, she didn't have the time or campaign cash to maintain it and update it.

"I tried to set up a website and it's not something that's easy to do," she said, acknowledging that a candidate must have a social presence to engage voters.

Businesses and brands are much more successful when there's a website. It's no different for political candidates.

Obama perfected it, but many left out

While the 2012 presidential race was a $1 billion campaign and most Senate and House races are multi-million-dollar episodes featuring an interactive website, it's not in the cards for most running for some 550,000 state and local elected positions around the country.

That's what the founders of Democracy.com set out to change, believing that an online presence will level the playing field for candidates, regardless of economic and political background and experience.

Democracy.com is the "social network for politics," founder Talmage Cooley said during a recent interview.

He thought of the idea while attending the Harvard Kennedy School where he worked to find a solution to the abundance of money in politics and a flawed campaign finance system, which is steeped in political agendas with little chance of being reformed anytime soon.

"The only thing left was the marketplace of voter opinion," Cooley said.

He noted that many candidates still didn't have an online presence in 2012, four years after Barack Obama revolutionized the use of the Web to mobilize supporters.

Cooley formed a team with expertise in politics, tech and business, and received investor support to create a Facebook-type website for political candidates.

"For the first time, [candidates] can have an Obama quality" Web presence," Cooley, a former Wall Street bond trader and filmmaker, said -- and at no cost.

'Democratizing democracy'

The portal includes every political office -- from school board in Belfast, Maine, to President of the United States. All candidates have to do is "claim" their profile and then it's theirs to advertise campaign events, list their platform and raise money.

It's how we can "democratize democracy," Ray Rivera, the organization's co-founder and former Obama campaign organizer and state director.

Cooley said his goal is to "to see that elections are accessible to everyone." He thinks he is doing just that by removing a significant technological and financial barrier.

Even the most obscure candidates representing obscure political parties can have a profile on Demcoracy.com.

Yasinow agrees. "It levels the playing field and encourages qualified individuals to run for office," she said.

Willingboro, New Jersey Town Councilman Nathaniel Anderson said Democracy.com enabled him to reach voters he normally wouldn't be able to, especially on the fundraising front.

"I would normally target relationships I already had," Anderson said of his 2013 re-election campaign. He said the public didn't donate to his campaign before he opened his profile, but then said, "I was reaching a wider universe" as voters took advantage of the donation mechanism on his Democracy.com profile.

Cooley also said he couldn't believe that in 2012 candidate information for voters still couldn't be found in one place.

So for the voter, it's one-stop-shopping.
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"It's not an easy thing to do when you attempt to mesh politics with religion, but when the pope does it that should make the world take notice."

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Pope Francis speaks out against everything republicans stand for
By Willie Carlisle, November 27, 2013

On Tuesday, the sovereign leader of Vatican City and by default the head of the Catholic Church made headlines with sharp criticisms of those who worship money as their god. Pope Francis as has been his routine of late has transformed the role of pontiff into that of the head of a state. He has somehow managed to incorporate the social issues of today into those of religion and drawn sharp criticism from those of the ilk of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. As if being liberal is a bad thing, Sarah Palin labeled the newly appointed pontiff as being "too liberal" and later apologized as if she didn't mean what she asserted.

In his most recent statements, Pope Francis criticized the economic strategy Americans have lived under for the past 30 years known as Reaganomics. Under this structure tax breaks and incentives would go to the wealthy (job creators) and out of the goodness of their hearts they would create jobs and everyone would live happily ever after. Thirty years later according to the pope, those disenfranchised people at the bottom are still waiting for some benefits of that strategy to finally trickle down.

Pope Francis was quoted as saying:
“Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world,” Francis wrote in the papal statement. “This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacra-lized workings of the prevailing economic system.”
“Meanwhile,” he added, “the excluded are still waiting.”
One might expect the leader of the Republican Party (Rush Limbaugh) and the de facto leader of the Tea Party (Sarah Palin) to criticize the pope's recent statements, but many liberals and progressives are waiting for the reactions of devout Catholics such as John Boehner and Paul Ryan to denounce the statement made by the leader of the church they claim to hold allegiance to. The pope without calling any names was making a direct challenge to those who would cut social programs such as S.N.A.P., Medicaid and Medicare and fail to pass any legislation that would benefit the less fortunate. Not to mention those who would be opposed to people at the bottom of the totem pole having access to heath care and affordable housing. Who in their right mind would be in opposition to raising the minimum wage for those of the working poor or passing a jobs bill for the millions of unemployed whose unemployment benefits have run out so long ago until they are not even counted in current statistics.

It's not an easy thing to do when you attempt to mesh politics with religion, but when the pope does it that should make the world take notice. One of the missions of Francis' papal tenure is ti transform the Catholic Church. Let's see, "Transform," that's what the president of our nation promised when he was elected five years ago. He has been called everything under the sun except a child of God. Only time will tell whether or not Pope Francis receives the same sort of treatment. But one benefit has already transpired by the pope's openness. Conservatives and the religious right can no longer claim some moral purity while billionaires and millionaires do everything within their power to depress and oppress those who are merely trying to eek out a living in a society that worships the almighty dollar while at the same time denying the principles of the faith they claim to live by. With the pope's example we may finally have an answer to the once famous question, "What would Jesus do."
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Thursday, November 28, 2013

"Dump the Myth!" Atheism is absolutely okay!

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Atheist Billboards To Flood California City As Non-Believers Make Holiday Push
By Meredith Bennett-Smith, November 27, 2013


Just in time for the holiday season, an anti-religion organization is planning on erecting dozens of atheists billboards in an effort to let fellow non-believers know they're "not alone."

The Greater Sacramento Chapter of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) has paid for 55 different billboards this year, all of which will go up in Sacramento, Calif., the Monday after Thanksgiving, according to local station News 10.

"It's because atheists are starting to speak up and they're beginning to identify each other," chapter president Judy Saint told the station. "There are a lot of non-believers and this time of year, they feel like they're all alone. This is not directed to people who enjoy their church, who enjoy their religion. That's fine. But we're talking to people who don't know that atheism is okay."

The billboards, all featuring area residents sharing messages like, "I worship nothing and question everything," or "Science. It works," are part of the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation’s overarching campaign to try to get atheists to "come out of the closet," Fox News reports.

“The whole month of December is taken over in a celebration of the religious beliefs, in particular Christianity," FFRF co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor told Fox. "And it’s just as if the whole month turns non-believers into outsiders."

Not everyone is excited about the planned signs, however.

Sacramento Bishop Jaime Soto of the Cathedral of a Blessed Sacrament told local Fox affiliate KTXL that he wasn't particularly pleased about the billboards, which he labeled propaganda.

“While I’m not happy about these billboards, I am certain people still, when they look deep down in their soul and in their heart, find a spark," Soto told the outlet. "They believe in a higher power."

While the tone of the signs is not meant to be confrontational, according to Saint, both atheists and Christian groups have used similar billboards as a way to criticize their rival's principles in the past.

This October, for example, the creationist group Answers in Genesis paid for large billboards in New York City's Times Square, San Francisco and Los Angeles bearing the message: “To all of our atheist friends: Thank God you’re wrong.”

Times Square has previously included billboards paid for atheist groups like American Atheists, which last year posted a controversial sign reading: "Keep the Merry! Dump the Myth!"
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Unfortunately, Cruz' style is too abrasive

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In the Senate, a Matter of Style
By Ross Ramsey, November 25, 2013

John Cornyn and Ted Cruz are opposites, right?

One is a senator from central casting, with the white hair and the soft face, a former judge who looks at ease in a suit or a golf shirt. An establishment guy, second in the U.S. Senate’s Republican hierarchy, the go-to guy for the White House during the Bush years and now a leader in the resistance to the Obama White House. He is a corporate type — the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.

This other fellow’s hair is jet black. He’s younger, but did all of the things an establishment politician might do: Princeton, Harvard Law, a clerkship at the U.S. Supreme Court, a stint as an appellate lawyer for the state attorney general’s office. Son of an immigrant, great student, debater and so on.

But he is a firebrand, an unlikely pinup for populist conservatives, a hero to them as much for whom he beat and the way he won as for his politics.

Their ideologies are pretty much in sync, though they have their differences. The two are split on whether military sexual assault cases should be left in the chain of command (Cornyn) or handled by independent prosecutors (Cruz). Cornyn was critical of the strategy to shut down government over the budget for the Affordable Care Act, a strategy Cruz championed. Cornyn is up for re-election next year, and Cruz has pointedly avoided an endorsement of his colleague.

A lot of this is style. Independent scorecards generally rank Cornyn among the most conservative senators — a point he is insistently invoking in the run-up to the March primaries.

But while Cornyn has taken a methodical path to the top of the heap, Cruz has stormed the hill, flashing a rhetorical flamethrower and a knack for getting in front of the cameras.

The contrasts between Cornyn and Cruz aren’t exactly the same as those between the former Texas senators Lloyd Bentsen and Phil Gramm, who were from different parties and had bigger substantive differences, but there are parallels.

Cornyn succeeded Gramm. Cruz occupies the seat once held by Bentsen.

Gramm bucked the Democratic Party in support of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies, switched parties, quit his U.S. House seat, won it again and then won the Senate seat he held for 18 years. He was a camera hustler, especially early in his career. He had a flair for grabbing national attention on issues that more experienced colleagues considered their turf.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Cornyn isn’t the patrician Bentsen was, but he has the manner of a boardroom regular. If Cruz’s success is in his edginess, Cornyn’s is based on an ability to be congenial and confrontational at the same time.

Cornyn, first elected to the Senate in 2002, rose very quickly to a top position. In seniority, he’s right behind the minority leader, Mitch McConnell, who is facing a serious re-election challenge. Cornyn could be at the top in a year, if things go wrong for the Kentuckian.

Cruz, unknown two years ago, is now the state’s most popular Republican. He’s a national news figure, a contestant in the current prospecting phase of the 2016 presidential contest.

Cornyn, like Bentsen, worked his way into the club. Cruz, like the early Gramm, is a noisy phenom.

In the 1980s, the two political parties were competitive in statewide races. Democrats had the edge, but Republicans were starting to win some statewide contests. With the competition confined to the Republicans for the last two decades, the most important distinctions are being made in that party’s primaries.

Cruz’s politics might be like Cornyn’s in many ways, but other things are important. Cornyn waited for an open seat to run for the Senate after working his way up from a district judge to the Texas Supreme Court to state attorney general. Cruz jumped the line, famously elbowing Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst out of the way in a primary that was supposed to be Dewhurst’s to lose. Dewhurst, after all, had worked his way up the old-fashioned way.

The elections next year could bear odd and unexpectedly powerful fruit, leaving Texas with the hottest Republican in the Senate and the highest-ranking one, too.

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This is a start, but only if the IRS enforces the rules

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Regulating political spending. Lighten our darkness
The Economist, November 28, 2013

THE $180m raised last year by Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies included 50 donations of at least $1m. No one knows who those generous people were. Crossroads, co-founded in 2010 by Karl Rove (pictured), a Republican strategist, does not have to reveal its donors because it is registered as a non-profit “social welfare organisation” under section 501c(4) of America’s tax code. Chief among the groups receiving grants from Crossroads was Americans for Tax Reform, a group founded by Grover Norquist, which during last year’s elections extracted pledges on taxing and spending from Republican politicians.

To its critics, this made Crossroads the most egregious example of “dark money”: anonymous donors financing political campaigns under the guise of traditional social-welfare charity. The volume of dark money has soared in recent years (see chart). Last year some $256m was spent on political ads, phone calls and mailings by around 150 501c(4) non-profits. Most of this was by conservative groups; almost 15% was from the left and centre, such as Organising for America, which raises funds for Barack Obama.



On November 26th the Treasury and Internal Revenue Service proposed new rules to curb the political activity of 501c(4) non-profits. The rules focus on prohibiting certain political activities explicitly, such as specific support for a candidate in an election. They are carefully even-handed; yet they go much further than had been expected, defining as political activities what used to be seen as non-political democracy-building, such as non-partisan voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns. Many mainstream non-profit groups are alarmed by this, even though they had campaigned for dark money to be reined in by regulators.

The proposed rules are a response to social-welfare charities being used for a purpose they never previously had, as money denied its traditional voice sought new ways to influence politics. That, at least, is the view of Howard Husock of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think-tank. He thinks the best way to restore 501c(4) charities to their non-political role would be to scale back the restrictions on the political role of money that forced donors to seek new vehicles in the first place. Many other conservative commentators simply dismiss the new rules as politically motivated, even though not all dark money comes from the political right.

The proposed new rules would apply only to 501c(4) organisations, not to c(5) or c(6), notes Kim Barker of ProPublica, a news outfit that has done pioneering research into dark money. Because most money going to c(5) groups is from trade unions, anonymous wealthy donors may be tempted to switch to c(6) groups, which are mostly trade associations, such as the US Chamber of Commerce and Freedom Partners, a group set up by Charles and David Koch, two conservative billionaire brothers. But Marc Owens, a lawyer who works to tackle dark money, says the proposed rules are sufficiently ambiguous not to shut down the big partisan players. They could, however, restrict non-partisan organisations such as the League of Women Voters, which provides information on elections to its members.

The consultation process is likely to be fierce, but it is still uncertain whether the new rules that emerge will be enforced. Since 2010 only one small non-profit has been denied tax-exempt status by the IRS on political grounds. Unless the IRS makes this a higher priority, it may be some time before the days of dark money are over.
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What is the real pro-family agenda? Defending the living wage, the family holiday, the Freedom from Want, that's what!

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Joel's  third step is important:  watch how your member of Congress acts, and votes, on food assistance.  Reward or punish him or her for his/her votes on the so-called food stamps!
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The War on Thanksgiving: Where are the ‘pro-family’ forces?
By Joel Connelly, November 27, 2013

The sight of “big box” stores opening their doors on Thanksgiving bespeaks an obvious, insidious objective:  The bottom-line boys in America’s corporate boardrooms are out to destroy this holiday as a time for the country to stop its daily grind and come together with family and extended family.

With more and more stores open — Walmart, Target, Kmart, Staples, OfficeMax, Gap — the “idolatry of money” (Pope Francis’ term) is taking away the possibility of Thanksgiving for those who don’t have the resources or the prestigious jobs to just say “No!” to work.

A  question flashes to mind:  Where are the “traditional values” and “pro-family” groups?


Why don’t those who get lathered up (for publicity purposes) about a “war on Christmas” speak up about what is a REAL war on Thanksgiving?  Corporate America is in the process of turning a holiday with deep religious roots into a workday.

We are witnessing, this year, what is a two-front war — at least in terms of the bounty we associate with Thanksgiving and what has been the prosperity of our country.

On one front, low-income workers are forced to spend Thanksgiving away from families.  The “family wage job” is becoming an endangered species in America.  The middle class is eroding.  Seeking the American dreams, for the disadvantaged, is becoming a grind of two (or more) jobs.

The Thanksgiving dinner used to symbolize the “Freedom from Want,” one of the “Four Freedoms” which President Franklin D. Roosevelt said was our purpose in fighting World War II.  The scene of a family Thanksgiving, as drawn by Norman Rockwell, graced the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.

Now, we’re just trying to “make ends meet” with the ends getting more and more elusive.

And some in Washington, D.C., are setting out to make that harder.


U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., a member of the House Republican leadership, on Wednesday sent out a lovely greeting, wishing her Eastern Washington constituents a “happy and blessed” Thanksgiving.  “Our hearts are full. Full of joy, love and gratitude for the things and people that matter most,” she wrote.  “Together, let us give thanks for the many blessings of our lives.”

She, and the House majority, voted last month to cut 3.8 million Americans off food stamps in 2014, and to slice $40 billion in the next 10 years out of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Rep. Dave Reichert, R-Wash., who chairs the subcommittee overseeing food stamps, voted for the cuts as well.

In 2012, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) kept almost 5 million people — including 2.2 million American kids — out of poverty.

About 91 percent of SNAP assistance goes to families with incomes below the poverty line, 55 percent to families earning less than half the federally set poverty level.

The Great Recession, America’s largest downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, saw the number needing and getting SNAP assistance rise by 20 million.  These were not idlers or loafers or welfare queens.  They were working Americans, who worked hard and played by the rules — and lost their jobs.

Hunger is real.  Riverton United Methodist Church in Tukwila hosts a “food pantry” three days a week.  Each draws about 120-130 people.  Are they working people?  “Yes, some with two jobs,” Rev. Jan Bolerjack, the church’s minister, said at a minimum-wage rally on Wednesday.

Not only is SNAP needed in places like McMorris Rodgers’ Eastern Washington district — 14 percent of her constituents have received food assistance — but growing and processing that food has sustained farmers in places like Whitman and Lincoln and Asotin counties.

Historically, this has been a bipartisan accord.  Nutritional programs have helped people in cities, while food growing has helped agricultural communities.  Lately, however, the ideological opposition to this has reached a fever pitch,” Rep. Steve Israel of New York, in town this week, said in an interview.

What is to be done to defend Thanksgiving?  Wonderful words from the Sunday night Compline service at St. Mark’s Cathedral come to mind:  “Resist, steadfast in the faith.”

– An obvious step:  Box the ears of the “big box” stores open on Thanksgiving.  Take your business to companies showing the decency to observe this holiday, like our Seattle-based Costco, Nordstrom and REI.

Reward Radio Shack’s CEO for the words he spoke in a Wednesday interview that his stores were staying shut “in honor of Thanksgiving and the time-honored tradition of gathering with family and friends.”

– A second step:  Ignore “Black Friday” — a suitable name for a madhouse day — and observe Nov. 30 as Small Business Saturday.  It is a day to poke around in such charming downtowns as Edmonds,  LaConner and Langley, or neighborhoods like Madison Park, rather than the surrounding malls.  Buy your books at Moonraker in Langley, rather than online.

– The third step:  Watch how your member of Congress acts, and votes, on food assistance.  A House-Senate conference committee is writing a new Farm Bill.  A Senate-passed version trims $4 billion from food assistance in the next decade.  The House, with its $40 billion in cuts, has wielded a meat axe.

The “Greatest Generation,” which lived through the Great Depression and triumphed in World War II, put everything on the line for the Four Freedoms.  It came home from war to build an American middle class. And that middle class lifted all boats, and brought the country its greatest years of prosperity.

We must stop and reverse its gradual erosion.   Defending the living wage, the family holiday, the Freedom from Want — “an essential human right,” as Roosevelt called it — that is the real pro-family agenda.  That is the real upholding of this country’s traditional values.
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Almost nine out of ten Americans will gather around Thanksgiving dinner, a meal built around a political principle

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Thanksgiving, or how to eat American politics
The democratic ideals behind turkey, pie, and the rest of our holiday feast

By Rachel Laudan, November 24, 2013

On Thursday, almost nine out of ten Americans will gather around Thanksgiving dinner—some version of the traditional family-style meal of roast turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pie. And once again the accepted wisdom about how the Thanksgiving meal took root and what it means will be rolled out.

This story is as much a tradition as the meal itself. Even if we doubt the schoolroom version of an unbroken tradition going back to a founding feast shared by Native Americans and Pilgrims, it is still easy to think of Thanksgiving as a celebration of the bounty of the New World, an American custom whose origins are lost in the mists of time.

But food—what we eat and why we eat it—is rarely as simple as the tales we tell about it. In the case of Thanksgiving, a closer look at the history of the dishes we set out and how they came together on our tables suggests a different story.

Thanksgiving as we know it today—a holiday that brings family and nation together over roast turkey—took shape 150 [years] ago. And although it is certainly built on American culinary traditions, the meal we’ll eat on Thursday is also built around a political principle. It is a deliberate, small-r republican contrast to the haute cuisine that for millennia had been served at events of state.

Food can embody ideas as well as customs, and our standard Thanksgiving draws on a long tradition of antimonarchical political and culinary thought. These ideas had deep European roots in France, England, and the Dutch Republic, and even before that among Roman republicans and the Church fathers.

Political philosophers and cookbook authors alike had long railed against the appetizers, complex sauces, sweets, and expensive, imported ingredients central to high cuisine. Indulging in these created an appetite for expensive luxuries that, it was widely believed, ruined the individual, the household, and the nation. But it was in the United States that the simple meal that these people advocated became a national celebration embracing all citizens.

Starting in the 1840s, Sarah Josepha Hale, a novelist and editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the nation’s most widely circulated women’s magazine, campaigned in print and in letters to politicians to extend Thanksgiving, a holiday already celebrated in New England, to the country as a whole. She finally persuaded Abraham Lincoln to declare a national holiday in 1863. It was, in Lincoln’s words, intended to restore “peace, harmony, tranquility and union” to a nation torn by the Civil War.

At that time, the ruling classes in much of the world dined on French haute cuisine, widely regarded as a mark of a civilized, progressive nation. From Britain to Russia, from Mexico to Japan, and in the United States as well, diners dressed in formal attire sat at tables set with expensive crystal, china, and silver. Servants passed a sequence of richly sauced meats, elaborate molded desserts, and hothouse fruits that neither they, nor the professional cooks who prepared them, could enjoy. It was everything the anti-aristocratic republican tradition was arguing against.

To Hale and others like her, a feast based on such haute cuisine, far from being the hallmark of a modern nation, would only perpetuate the monarchic traditions so firmly repudiated by “our Great Republic.” To make good on its political ideals, the new state had to find a middle way—a meal that lay somewhere between the extravagance of Old World aristocratic feasts and the scanty fare of the common people.

The will to bridge this gap had long been at work in American political thought, and had long been expressed through food. In the 1760s, as a patriotic protest the Daughters of Liberty had organized boycotts of expensive imported tea, offering recipes for local herbal alternatives. In 1796, a few years after crowds in Paris had protested the king’s failure to ensure their daily bread, Amelia Simmons, the author of the first American cookbook, “American Cookery” (1796), promised her readers pies and cakes “adapted to this country and all grades of life.” And Lydia Maria Child’s “Frugal Housewife” (1829), which went through 32 editions in the succeeding 25 years, preached the values of the simple home-cooked meal as truly republican.

In her magazine, Sarah Hale published recipes for roast turkey and pumpkin pie, and popularized homecoming for the holiday through sentimental poems, images, and stories of “traditional” Thanksgivings. In the Union states, at least, her campaign finally found a receptive audience, accustomed through long tradition to the notion that household meals of national ingredients contributed to the flourishing of the greater American family. Although the wealthy continued to dine French-style on other occasions, and although the South was not to accept it until after Reconstruction, Thanksgiving was on its way to being the celebration we recognize.

Turkey, a large, affordable, and readily available fowl, allowed the whole family generous servings of meat. Pumpkin pie could be prepared by the housewife in the home kitchen. Children, traditionally barred from aristocratic tables, were expected at the meal as well, to be physically nourished by ample, wholesome food and mentally nourished as they absorbed civic principles from the adults’ manners and conversation.

Neither turkey nor pie nor any of the other dishes that appear on the Thanksgiving table was a new invention. All of them had appeared in other times and other contexts. Gravy was a democratized version of lush sauces served at court; cranberry relish has origins that stretch through medieval Europe to Islam. This thing we now call tradition was a creative reworking of culinary elements from different, often even unrecognized cultures to create a feast that in its accessibility to all citizens was uniquely American.

Over the years, as the Thanksgiving dinner has spread to all regions, all faiths, and successive waves of immigrants within the United States, it’s been easy to forget what a radical achievement it was, and what a specific expression of American ideas. When we look across the table on Thursday, we see a meal both more politically American and more philosophical than many of us give it credit for. What could be more worthy of thanks?
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Wednesday, November 27, 2013

How our fellow citizens view Thanksgiving discussions

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We Asked, You Answered: Thanksgiving, Politics and Family
By Karin Kamp, November 27, 2013

“Treat each others’ ideas with respect. My late father-in-law and I disagreed on a number of issues but we argued the point and asked questions. I left each of many dinner time conversations with him with a new admiration and love for him. As my mother used to say, you can disagree without being disagreeable.” — Kaye Thompson Peters

“It suddenly becomes clear, sometimes right in the middle of dinner, that my dog desperately needs to go out for a walk.” — Karen Cody Howser

“I cut them off…period. I cannot accept anyone in my life who espouses hate and bigotry. Ain’t nobody got time for that!” — Harper Greer

“We love heated discussions around the table and encourage them; they sharpen the wits and educate the kids and keep everyone’s hearts beating with passion.” – Michael Wilds

“[If] potentially divisive topics come up, I will engage. I don’t believe that one ‘shouldn’t’ discuss anything. It’s important to hear out the people you love and to have a chance to speak your own mind. If the conversation starts to get heated, the key is to know when to disengage, when to encourage returning to the meal or to topics closer to home.” — Jeff Lange

“I was a kid during Vietnam and I remember how they used to declare a holiday truce. We observe that in my extended family- no politics on holidays.” — Lisa Vipperman

“I believe a host should be able and quick-witted enough to steer conversation to avoid heated controversy. One must always be at the ready when politics, sex and religion are proffered as topics.” — Mike Watson

“Focus on feeling and not intellect and listening as opposed to talking. There’s a reason why people will cling to political ideas — liberal or conservative — and understanding what those feelings are can bring to light a lot of understanding.” — Val Vadeboncoeur

“I ruined the last Thanksgiving dinner with my wife’s family before her father died arguing about politics … In hindsight I truly wish I would have kept my mouth shut. I wasn’t going to change anyone’s mind.” — Ted Ashley

“Turn off my hearing aids (that I have to pay for out of pocket) and keep my mouth shut. Nobody can agree on anything, so there is no point in saying anything.” — Andrew Rumble

“We must discuss. There is no way to avoid it. We have nearly come to blows. But we know we love each other … We have become the Congress.” — Hershel Lacey

“Watch Jonathan Haidt’s [interview] and then respect the fact that others have the right to have values and beliefs that are different from yours. If Jonathan Haidt’s research is right, conservatives actually share liberal values, but have additional ones that liberals don’t share. Thanksgiving is about giving thanks for what we have – gratitude – not converting conservatives to your ideology.” — Scott Wolfel

“Arguing and discussing is not a scary thing, it should be practiced more so we get better at it. Most people don’t want to ruffle feathers so we keep silent about what is going on in America today, walking around like zombies when we could be talking it over.” — Denise Ward

“No subject is allowed to be discussed for longer than 15 minutes. Any debates that become heated are moved to the outside deck until conversation is frozen down to inside level. All duels are scheduled prior to Christmas gatherings so there are less arguments at that gathering.” — Thaddeus Kozubal

“Remind those around the table that First Thanksgiving was a time when Native-Americans fed newly arrived immigrants who were starving, many were children. Mercy and compassion for the helpless. Lest we forget.” — Rona Malika Robins

“If a hot topic comes up I do my best to divert the conversation. If that’s impossible I try diplomacy in mentioning something about how great it is that in America we can have differing opinions. Passive aggressive tactics come in handy as a last ditch effort.” – Kristen Naylor Ingman

“I try to keep quiet and listen [and] take deep breaths when I’m about to react. My job isn’t to change anyone, rather it’s to offer facts and alternatives, and like Drano, truthful information can slowly unclog the worst stopped-up ideology … Stay loving and be a learner.” — Jonathan Nelson

“I have in my ‘back pocket’ a few questions that will put the conversation back on a congenial track as it veers off into incendiary topics like politics, religion, or the one true way to make barbecue. Questions that have to do with family history or nostalgia seem to work best in re-uniting people.” Cheri Thomas
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