Lewis and Clark Landing gets the lead out

Welcome to another in our series of Omaha travelogues. This week, it's Lewis and Clark Landing on the downtown riverfront.

Here we have a magnificent plaza and boardwalk perfectly suited for a leisurely alfresco lunch . . . or for a summer music festival. Mostly, though, people just like to chill and watch the muddy Missouri roll past River City.

Lewis and Clark Landing lies between the riverfront's Heartland of America Park to the south and, to the north, the Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge across the Missouri River (shown here). Did I mention this is an excellent spot to chill on a summer evening?

THE LANDING also has a large monument to organized labor, centered on a water sculpture simply entitled "Labor." That's fitting.

Omaha has a rich past as a meat-and-potatoes, blue-collar, union-labor kind of Midwestern city once home to several breweries, some of the largest packing plants in the United States and a massive Western Electric works. And the plot of land where the sculpture sits -- indeed, where all of Lewis and Clark Landing sits -- once was home to this (right).

The ASARCO lead smelter operated on the Omaha riverfront for more than a century until it shut down in 1997 as the company faced numerous lead-pollution lawsuits. All in all, I think we'll take the cool plaza over a bunch of lead-belching smokestacks.

We're funny that way here.

It's an interesting dilemma, isn't it? Nobody wants a poison-belching lead smelter in the middle of their downtown, but getting rid of the bad -- pollution and an ugly industrial wart on your riverfront -- also can mean getting rid of the good as well.

IN THIS CASE, the good was relatively well-paying jobs for the working class. A generation before the ASARCO plant bit the lead-tainted dust, Omaha lost its big meatpacking plants on the south side of town -- thus dealing a devastating economic (and, by extension, social) blow to, for one, the city's African-American population.

What was one of the country's more prosperous minority communities now is one of America's poorest. I wonder what happened to the folks who used to work at ASARCO.

Obviously, we're better off with Lewis and Clark Landing . . . better off in countless ways. But you can be sure there's been a cost as well. Ironically, it's been at the expense of labor.

Speaking of "Labor" -- the sculpture, that is -- the piece actually suggests more of a foundry than a lead smelter -- and the real thing still sits a couple of miles or so to the east, in midtown Omaha.

It's not a huge foundry, but it'll do.

AS FOR OUR relatively new Lewis and Clark Landing, it will more than do. "Our." What do you know -- after a couple of decades in exile from the Deep South, I naturally say "our" when talking about all things Omaha.

Which suggests that if I were to -- as Louisianians would undoubtedly say to me from their perspective -- "come home," I wouldn't be. I'd be exiling myself all over again . . . from home.

The cliché tells us "home is where the heart is." Well, it is. And Omaha -- for that matter, the whole of this exotic, diverse place called Nebraska -- has a way of worming its way into one's heart. Of becoming home.

Or, more precisely, Homaha.

Omaha Moon

Omaha Moon keep shining, on Omaha keep shining down.

We’d like it if you wouldn’t shine on Council Bluffs, or for that matter any other town.

Omaha Moon we heard that

You shined on Cedar Rapids last June.

We’ll thank you to remember that you are a one-town moon;

Don’t forget your name is Omaha Moon.

Moon over the Missouri River,
Omaha riverfront

Ain't no budget ax big enough

Omaha thought it faced budgetary chaos.

Now the city finds out it's facing real budgetary chaos, not mere "economic downturn" budgetary chaos. There is a difference.

Right now, the difference is about $7 million. What was a $5 million hole remaining in the city's ledger for fiscal year 2008-09 -- and that's after city hall already had cut $9 million from the budget -- suddenly has become a $12 million chasm.

AND IF Joe Councilman and Jack Taxpayer think Omaha's going to budget-cut its way out of that kind of deficit, I'll show you a city no one's going to much want to live in anymore. The Omaha World-Herald this morning tells a tale only Arnold Schwarzenegger could love -- not:

Mayor Jim Suttle said Friday that Omaha faces an additional $7 million gap in its general fund budget this year. The new problems raise the total 2009 unresolved shortfall to $12 million.

The shortfall has grown mainly because of weak interest earnings, higher-than-expected health care payments for retirees and lower tax collections on gas and water usage, officials said.

“These latest numbers reinforce the depth of the financial crisis and point out the urgency in obtaining wage freezes from the city unions for both 2009 and 2010,” Suttle said.

Omaha has been struggling with its budget because of the weak economy, with revenues falling short of projections. Both Suttle and former Mayor Mike Fahey have scrambled to balance this year's budget, and Suttle also has proposed tax hikes and budget cuts for 2010.

So far this year, Omaha officials have cut $9 million from the budget passed last summer. Until now, they thought the goal was $14 million in cuts. Suttle had hoped to close the $5 million gap by negotiating wage freezes equaling that amount with city employee unions.

Now, even if the unions agree to those concessions, the city still faces a massive hole in its current budget.

“Ouch,” said City Council President Garry Gernandt. “It's the type of news we don't want to hear, now or ever.”

Suttle and his new finance director, Pam Spaccarotella, did not outline what additional cuts they will propose. Suttle pointed out that his proposed 2 percent entertainment tax, if implemented, would take effect Oct. 1 of this year. While the tax is mainly aimed at solving next year's budget problems, Suttle said it also would generate $2 million this year that could be applied to the current shortfall.

Councilman Chuck Sigerson was not swayed by that argument. He remains skeptical of the entertainment tax and said the latest numbers don't change his mind.

“I think we need to be very, very careful before we leap into an entertainment tax,” he said. “We need to let cooler heads prevail. I just won't be railroaded into doing it, just because of the latest emergency.”

Sigerson also said he hoped that the city would gain extra revenue later in the year. For example, he said, the federal “cash for clunkers” program is enticing more people to buy cars, which would boost sales tax revenue for the city.

Gernandt doubted whether the city would be able to start collecting the new entertainment tax by Oct. 1, even if the council did approve it. He said there would be many logistical challenges in implementing the tax.

But Gernandt also said he couldn't immediately say where the city might make enough cuts to balance the budget.

Spaccarotella said the latest projections for the shortfall are based on actual spending for the first half of the year. Earlier estimates were calculated from spending and revenues during the first three months.

YIKES! One way or another, this is going to hurt.

I wish I thought Suttle -- or the city council, for that matter -- was up to the job.

Suttle this week has proved he's big on "listening tours" as a way of involving the public in city government. Personally, I think that's all hat and no horse, but that's not important now.

What's important now is realizing that this isn't a generation or two ago, and that the main thing the "public" is interested in is Numero Uno. Cynic that I am, I think people would rather see the city go down in flames than raise property taxes . . . so long as it's not their corner of the city getting torched.

No, that's not exactly right. I think that most people who call their council member or show up to these public meetings would rather see the whole city go down in flames than pay higher property taxes. And politicians, being the craven weenies they usually are, would rather be safe than voted out of office.

Of course, if the Founding Fathers had counted on that kind of lowest common denominator government, they would have given us a direct democracy and not a republic. But they lived a long time ago -- "duty" was still in the dictionary then.

Assuming for a moment that "duty" still were in the dictionary, I think politicians would figure it was their lot in life to govern during "interesting" times, and that lot in life included sucking it up and risking the wrath of the self-interested masses. After all, "the common good" never has been an easy sell.

IN A "DUTY-BASED" system, I think the Democrat mayor would recognize he led a small-"R" republican local government . . . and figure most folks don't even get one term to run a city of 435,000. Likewise, you'd see council members telling voters "You'll thank me later."

Even if later was after they'd been tossed out of office.

What's worse, getting the boot for keeping your city alive as a going concern, or continuing to preside over a smoking hulk of what used to be a pretty nice place to live?

The plain fact is the city of Omaha can't cut itself out of this financial pickle without doing severe and permanent damage to itself. The plain fact is that if people can't afford to pay an extra $30, $50 or $150 a year on their $130,000 home, they've got bigger financial problems than a rising tax bill . . . and can't afford to be living in a house that expensive.

The plain fact is taxpayers need to be told to suck it up in the name of the common good. The plain fact is city employees need to be told they have two options: Accept a pay freeze for the next two years or the layoffs begin tomorrow.

Lots of people in the private sector already have faced pay freezes, pay cuts, furloughs and layoffs. When the city has no bread, a city job doesn't mean you get to say "Let them eat cake."

THEM'S the facts. And here are two more for you:

Ronald Reagan is dead, and the party's over. Get used to it.

Honk if you heart Omaha

When I moved to Omaha in 1988, the first thing you saw driving across the Missouri River into downtown was a lead smelter.

That and some mostly abandoned historic warehouses.

That's not today's Omaha riverfront.

Today's downtown Omaha riverfront is a state-of-the-art arena. And a pedestrian suspension bridge.

And the Lewis and Clark Landing where the lead smelter used to be.

Today's Omaha riverfront also is the Heartland of America Park -- featuring walking trails, boating on a lake, picnic areas, a river overlook . . . and geese. Lots and lots of geese. (And a lonely mink I spotted.)

It really is amazing the aesthetic -- and economic -- progress a city can make when you have the basics for a strong community in place, then add a solid master plan and the civic will to make it happen.

So, I hope you enjoy these photos I shot last Sunday while the missus and I spent a picture-perfect summer evening in one of the city's picture-perfect green spaces.

OK, so I'm a sucker for skyline shots at sunset. And, yes, it's a pretty big lake.

Likewise, I'm a sucker for pictures of kids feeding waterfowl.

And the Deep South is not the only place you'll find cypress trees . . . and cypress knees.

Honk!

Blame the TV Lady

Would you like to know why, in New Orleans, this poor woman is screwed?

Why no one is going to listen to the people advocating for the right of all poor people to have decent housing?

Why, no matter how plain the moral scandal -- no matter how many vulnerable people die squatting in fetid Crescent City heaps for lack of affordable housing -- no one will care, and they will feel morally justified in not caring?

Two words: Sharon Jasper.


THIS IS HER. Sharon Jasper, a.k.a., "the TV Lady."

The woman whose Section 8 housing is nicer than my house, but not good enough for her to refrain from decrying it as a "slum house" almost two years ago.

The woman who can't afford to pay full rent but who can afford to have a 60-inch television.

The woman who spent her time protesting the demolition of rundown, crime-ridden public-housing slums so the city could replace them with mixed-income developments, designed to provide better housing while breaking up concentrations of poverty and violent crime.

The woman who, with a cadre of angry local and out-of-town "activists," spent her time protesting, yelling "Shut up, white boy!" during city council meetings and getting arrested for allegedly bopping a cop.

All this despite local housing officials' assurances there were more than enough subsidized-housing units for residents who would be displaced.

In a New Orleans Times-Picayune story this week, the head of a group that assists the homeless said hers is a race against death in some cases:

UNITY head Martha Kegel explained that the homeless people they met were placed on a waiting list and given priority according to how likely they were to die without housing. Quite a few already had died waiting for housing, she said.

"Is there a quick way to house people so that they're not dying on a list?" Farha asked. "What is the policy answer to address the immediate need?"

WELL, one policy answer might have been for local activist groups to not to jump on board the Sharon Jasper Express, which went full-steam for the right to live not in decent housing, but instead in a hellhole named Desire . . . or St. Bernard . . . or Lafitte. That is, before it jumped the tracks.

At top, Grace Bailey sits in her squat, as captured by Times-Picayune photographer John McCusker. In 2007, Sharon Jasper thought her nice Section 8 apartment with the 60-inch TV was a "slum house." I'll bet Bailey wouldn't mind trading up to Jasper's "slum" abode.

But she won't get to trade up to a house where she doesn't fall through the floor and where the mosquitoes don't swarm her as she sleeps. Justice -- and housing -- for the poor has been thoroughly discredited by many of those claiming to be their advocates.

Nowadays, the greedy and the callous in New Orleans can blow off "the least of these," and their cause, with three little words.

"The TV Lady."

Extra! Extra! You won't read all about it!

I think the one thing undergirding the decline and fall of newspapering is that, by and large, newspapers lost touch with their audience and communities long ago.

No, let me put it more strongly.

Most papers -- just like most of radio, another dying industry -- fundamentally have broken faith with their now-former readers.

They no longer are “in touch,” they haven't kept up with the times -- or with new methods of communication -- and they now find themselves with their butts in a serious crack. Something drastic needs to be done, and needs to be done pretty quickly.

UNFORTUNATELY, big-city papers have become utterly bureaucratic and wouldn't be able to move quickly enough to adapt even if the "powers that be" had any idea what to do. I don't know that I know exactly what to do, either, but I think it would revolve around making my paper's website absolutely indispensable for my community -- and not just for "news."

"Adapting," I think, also would involve revenue streams with little to do with traditional advertising. Advertising salesmen are going to have to morph into something akin to an ad rep/event planner/public-relations agency for clients, helping them craft a total communications strategy.

The ad-rep thing is not my original idea, but that's OK. Lots of people have good ideas about what to do, and they've posted them all over the Internet.

Not that anyone in the newspaper industry cares to compile them and cobble together an action plan not involving retooled, already-failed schemes to soak what readers they still have for content that's been free on the Internet for 15 years. It's a demonstrated fact that most people won't pay for Internet content unrelated to nekkid women doing nasty things.

If you put stuff behind a “pay wall,” some smart organization -- like National Public Radio does now, like ESPN will be doing in a city near you soon enough -- will offer equivalent content for free. Their free audience will grow; your paid audience will shrink. And when your paid audience shrinks, you're also destroying your advertising base.

No, the revenue you get from subscriptions will not begin to make up for lost ad revenue.

THE INTERNET, as the public perceives it, is like traditional radio and television -- a free service. Some argue people will pay for HBO and cable, but they don't realize that paying for cable (again, in the public imagination) is akin to paying for Internet access.

They grudgingly pay for movie and sports channels only because that's the only way to access "premium" content. Yet, only a certain percentage does.

The "make 'em pay" camp also doesn't take into account that television -– both free and cable -– no longer is a true growth industry. Kids aren't watching so much anymore . . . at least not on TV. They watch on their computers, mostly for free.

Maybe they'll pay a little something to get a popular show on iTunes, but they're not going to pay for cable when they can get just what they want -- à la carte -- for pennies.

This is much like how people won't pay for The New York Times if they can get The Washington Post for free.

THE KEY to newspapers' survival in any form is this: Newspaper websites are going to have to pick up where radio and TV left off when broadcast media decided serving their local communities was for suckers.

Think podcasting. Think creating a LOCAL, LOCAL, LOCAL web-radio station. I don't think you need to hire a million full-time people to pull this off. I do think papers need to partner with local organizations and schools to pull it off -- make it, for example, partly a training ground for high-school and community-college students.

Newspapers also need to embrace four beautiful words as a way of tapping into their communities: "High school sports webcasts." Webcast local schools' games live -- preferably a videocast . . . the technology is there to do this cheaply and easily -- and sell a boatload of commercials.

Newspapers also have to get into the advocacy-journalism business again. It used to be that lots of them were good at that.

HERE'S A CASE STUDY in what should have been. The place: Omaha, Neb. The newspaper: the Omaha World-Herald. The time: a couple of months ago.

Omaha now faces the same kind of financial crisis most cities grapple with these days. When sales-tax revenues fell off the charts for fiscal year 2009, one of the city fathers' crisis actions was to gut the library budget -- to the tune of $100,000 right at the end of this fiscal year. This resulted in the kind of institutional mayhem you'd expect, including drastic cutbacks in hours.

The World-Herald ought to have -- within a week -- partnered with the Omaha Public Library, local business leaders and other local media on a citywide fund-raising campaign to make up the shortfall and add major dollars to the library foundation's endowment . . . insulation against future cuts.

The Omaha daily ought to have been running a front-page story a day about how the Omaha Public Library impacts the community. About how the cuts are hurting employees, kids and the public.

Finally, the newspaper ought to have editorialized in favor of an "Adopt-a-Library" program just like businesses have adopt-a-school programs.

Things like that -- actually embracing the notion of "the public good" -- is how newspapers demonstrate they are integral parts of their communities. It's how they begin to radically reconnect with people who ought to be readers, either of their print editions or online.

INSTEAD, you now have papers like the San Francisco Chronicle firing 230 pressmen, contracting out its printing to a state-of-the-art, third-party plant and touting how "advanced print technology" will help it compete against the Internet.

It won't work, of course, but I still want some of what the Chronicle poobahs have been smoking.

Newspapers just need to get with the program -- forget setting up a study committee, just do it. Webcast high-school sports. Start a truly local Internet “radio station.” Beef up coverage. Become LOCAL, LOCAL, LOCAL.

And it all had better be on the website . . . and the website had better be good.

Why? Like I said, ESPN is coming. ESPN local-sports websites -- the first one has been up and running in Chicago for a few months, and it's getting more traffic than the Tribune's website.

IF NEWSPAPERS can't own their local sports, right down to Little League and junior high, they're going to take a shiv to the gut sooner or later. And that's just for starters. ESPN will be one of many future “Craigslists.” Craigslist is where all newspapers' classified advertising went, by the way.

If I were a publisher, I'd trade out advertising for a Winnebago, turn it into a rolling promotion for the newspaper, make the inside a functioning newsroom with wi-fi and a Verizon (or whatever) mobile-broadband link, and I'd roll that sucker into a different town every Friday of football season. I'd put together a special web page for the local school's big game and do a webcast of it.

And I'd put together the sports section from the Winnebago, have local high-school journalism students write stories for online and let the whole damn town watch it come together.

The concept could work for a lot of things. That's because the key is in getting your audience involved. The key is in demonstrating solidarity with ordinary people . . . in showing you care about them.

It's all about loyalty.

NEWSPAPER PUBLISHERS –- hell, all American business leaders -- for far too long have thought loyalty was something consumers (or employees) automatically give them. Reality now is demonstrating they have been catastrophically wrong.

Loyalty is a two-way street. Always has been. It's time to relearn that.

What we do on the Big Show

Like the playlist for the latest edition of 3 Chords & the Truth says . . . "what we do!"

What we do is put together one of the most eclectic shows anywhere.

What we do is put together some of the most thoughtful sets of music anywhere.

What we do is enjoy the music.

What we do is have a little fun.

HERE'S WHAT WAS ON that playlist from the Big Show, available for download here (and from the player on the right side of this page):

Click to enlarge.

Katrina, poverty and America's Big Lie

What's the difference between the United States and a lot of banana republics where the rich get richer and the meek inherit not the land, but troubles and sorrows instead?

Pretension and self-delusion. Most banana republics, I would wager, have no real illusions about who -- and what -- they are.

America, on the other hand, has a grand national myth to uphold. Liberty and justice for all . . . Horatio Alger . . . rags to riches . . . the glory of the free market, and all the rest of that convenient rot allowing our hearts and our consciences to remain relatively unmolested.

AND TO THOSE Americans who hold fast to our national delusions -- to those who believe the Big Lie for the sake of an untroubled life of relative ease and conspicuous consumption -- I say let them come to New Orleans.

Or, at a minimum, read this story in the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

Mickey Palmer, who traveled the world for 20 years as a merchant seaman shipping out of the Port of New Orleans, welcomed international visitors on Monday morning to his home, an abandoned building scattered with Katrina-era debris.

As a cool wind blew through a large open window, Palmer, 57, puffed on a cigarette and tried to stay positive.

"This is a good place to squat, as we call it, " he told international housing expert Leilani Farha, who led a small entourage to New Orleans this week to interview people who have lost affordable housing and others who may lose their homes.

Farha, who leads a low-income-housing advocacy group in Ontario, Canada, is part of an advisory group that reports to UN-HABITAT, the United Nations agency charged with monitoring poverty and housing. The group spent Monday morning with outreach workers from UNITY of Greater New Orleans who tromp through blighted buildings searching for disabled people who need help. The group will publish a report online after their visit.

Representatives of the United Nations have shown special interest in New Orleans since Katrina, with some U.N. officials using the storm as an opportunity to critique the U.S. government's policies toward poor and minority groups.

The group's forays haven't been without controversy. Last year, two U.N. specialists attracted international attention when they said the federal government's response violated an international treaty on racism. But the authors of the resolution also acknowledged they hadn't visited New Orleans since the storm.

On Monday, UNITY officials told the latest U.N. visitors that they believe 6,000 squatters may live in the city's more than 65,000 abandoned structures.

(snip)

In a nearby decrepit house, two other homeless women cited similar medical woes. Peaches Jackson, 42, suffers seizures because she lost 20 percent of her brain in an accident 10 years ago, she said. Charlene Stewart, 35, is scheduled for abdominal surgery next week for a bacterial infection.

Bailey walked back to the room she sleeps in. She keeps the window there closed at night or else mosquitoes devour her, she said. When it rains, the roof leaks generously onto the rotting floorboards.

She didn't always live like this, she said quietly, talking about her work in the service industry and the low rent she'd paid nearly all her adult life.

TO THE EXTENT the average citizen can look at this and spout platitudes about free markets, bootstraps and "U.N. socialists out to get the United States," God will -- and should -- damn America. That human beings live like this in the richest country on earth -- live much as the biblical Lazarus did right under the nose of the rich man, begging for crumbs off a table of plenty -- should be as much a scandal to us as it was to Jesus Christ two millennia ago.

19
"There was a rich man who dressed in purple garments and fine linen and dined sumptuously each day.
20
And lying at his door was a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores,
21
who would gladly have eaten his fill of the scraps that fell from the rich man's table. Dogs even used to come and lick his sores.
22
When the poor man died, he was carried away by angels to the bosom of Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried,
23
and from the netherworld, where he was in torment, he raised his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side.
24
And he cried out, 'Father Abraham, have pity on me. Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am suffering torment in these flames.'
25
Abraham replied, 'My child, remember that you received what was good during your lifetime while Lazarus likewise received what was bad; but now he is comforted here, whereas you are tormented.
26
Moreover, between us and you a great chasm is established to prevent anyone from crossing who might wish to go from our side to yours or from your side to ours.'
27
He said, 'Then I beg you, father, send him to my father's house,
28
for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, lest they too come to this place of torment.'
29
But Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them.'
30
He said, 'Oh no, father Abraham, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.'
31
Then Abraham said, 'If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead.'"

IN THE WORST economic times since the Great Depression, there has been much talk about "stimulus packages."

The bottom line is that people need work. People need decent places to live. People need dignity and a sense of their basic worth. That's the "stimulus" we need.

President Obama, I have a "stimulus" package for you. The trial for this new stimulus program can be conducted in New Orleans, where many American citizens are living in Third World conditions in the wake of Katrina. (In fact, many were living in Third World conditions before Katrina.)

HERE'S THE STIMULUS: Put New Orleanians to work providing decent housing to people like the ones being surveyed by the United Nations. That such a survey is necessary is a national scandal -- but that's not important now.

What's important is eliminating the scandalous conditions.

And I don't see how it should take that much effort to make this project "shovel ready" -- or "saw and hammer ready," to be precise.

Take stimulus funds, hire unemployed and underemployed tradesmen and women -- hell, train "unskilled" workers for the job -- and salvage the abandoned housing stock in New Orleans. Turn it into livable residences for low-income people.

IT HAS BEEN four years since Katrina (and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) laid waste to New Orleans. If properties have not been razed or rehabilitated by now, it probably is safe to assume they won't be. At least not by the owner. Those property owners should be given 30 days to reclaim -- and remediate -- their property or forfeit it to the city.

If there are "legal impediments" to that, change the law. Property rights are important, but they are neither inviolable nor limitless.

Houses that can be saved should be. Those that can't should be torn down and replaced with "Katrina cottages" or new "green" construction. Most of the housing should be owned and administered by the Housing Authority of New Orleans as "scattered site" housing.

Some, say a quarter or a third, should be turned over to Habitat for Humanity and made available for purchase by eligible families.

DAMN IT, this is America. We don't "do" the Sudan -- or Haiti . . . or Somalia -- here. That's the party line.

It would be nice if that weren't just another damned lie in a world clogged with too many damned lies.

We say we are a great nation. But our collective inaction is that of small men and women.

Wheelbarrow garden 1, Wascally Wabbits 0

Just came in from the big vegetable garden, where the tomatoes -- as usual -- are outstripping the space allotted and the sticks that are supposed to hold them up.

The big backyard garden also is where stuff -- meaning dogs and other critters -- messes up the mulch carefully placed around the peppers, which otherwise seem to be doing fine. Fine, thanks to the copious amounts of water I put on the garden every day or two.

We seem to have slipped into another dry spell here in Omaha, by God, Nebraska.

THESE PICTURES, however, are of our wheelbarrow garden, designed to keep the critters -- and that means you, Bugs -- out of the greens, green onions and cucumbers. I have another bell pepper in there, too, but I'm probably going to transplant that into a pot.

The idea came to me when I saw a web page devoted to building a tabletop garden bed. It looked like a lot of trouble, building it out of lumber and all.

One of the advantages was supposed to be the ability to move it to a shadier spot in the heat of August, so as not to burn your greens up. That would be a two-man job, and Mrs. Favog, I am sure, would tell me she was not that second man.

Thus, my idea for the wheelbarrow garden was born. It's deeper, I didn't have to build it from scratch, and I can roll it to where the sun is.

Or isn't, as the case may be.

The mustard greens seem to be doing quite nicely this week . . . and that's after I cut a mess of them Saturday. Had them last night -- tasty.

This ends your Revolution 21 gardening tip of the day. Thank you.

'Patriots' ain't what they used to be

If you know how to use a web browser, you've probably seen the appeals -- usually with large parts WRITTEN LIKE THIS!!!!!! -- to individual choice, freedom and the memory of the Founding Fathers.

This is a sure sign, like yellowing foliage and the first nip in the air are harbingers of autumn, that the Great Conservative Freakout continues at no petty pace.

Another sure sign is the appearence of hateful and racist "artwork" passed off as satire or humor, and scores of people who can't see that dreck such as sits atop this post is neither.

As near as I can tell from reading the Internet as one might read the autumn leaves, it seems that one Barack HUSSEIN Obama (who apparently has usurped the presidency of the United States despite being a Socialist Kenyan national) is trying to shove some Liberal Communist -- as opposed to Libertarian Communist -- scheme called ObamaCare down the throats of Real Americans (TM). This will, in turn, transform America into a socialist police state, and road signs will be only in Spanish and Swahili.

THE RUN UP to ObamaCare already has been marked by police repression of Patriotic Americans (TM), who merely have been exercising their constitutional rights to overrun photo ops in favor of Communist Socialism and turn them into shouting matches.

The Liberal Mainstream Media have been trying to tilt public opinion against Pro-Capitalism Patriots (TM) by pointing out that the defenders of "health-care choice" actually spent a lot more time demanding to see the president's birth certificate than they did defending the Americanness of U.S. medicine.

One "Tea Party" member in Baton Rouge, La., has countered the socialist tendencies of The Advocate by posting a YouTube video of What Really Happened (TM), which excises all the day's events except for pro-Obama black people looking displeased and black Baton Rouge cops telling white Patriotic Americans they can't do stuff.

"HELP! HELP! I'm being repressed!"

Of course, if you try to "have a civil conversation" about health care with many of these pro-freedom fighters of ObamaCare -- that is, if you're not on a Tea Partier's web video -- expect to be shouted down, accused of being a socialist, called an idiot and be told to go to Europe with all the other pinko commie libs.

Happened to me on Facebook, and I think the Democratic health-care plans in Congress are a Rube Goldbergian mess. My mistake, however, was suggesting that the United States might want to look at the health-care system ranked as the world's best -- France's -- and set about trying to adapt it to our circumstances.

Little did I know that the World Health Organization is just another communist plot -- and out to destroy American capitalism. That's what I get for being an "idiot."

I suppose it's my idiocy that causes me to see the irony of a bunch of people who used to carp and whine about lefties' "Bush Derangement Syndrome" doubling and trebling the fear and loathing once the Democrat Obama took office.

And Obama hasn't even committed a war crime yet. Oh, wait. . . that's apparently part of his problem.

APPARENTLY, what passes for "patriotic Americans" today is a bunch of really, really angry people -- formerly angry at other angry people -- who have let their anger so take control of their hearts and minds that they're half a step away from becoming a lynch mob.

We have faced such phenomena at various other times in our history, and I don't think those instances ever ended particularly well.

The night of Nov. 22, 1963, NBC's Chet Huntley commented on one of those times. I'll let him have the last word.

Video of the Year

Watch it. Commentary would be pointless.

How to stay hip

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Don't change. That's how to always be cool and on the cutting edge.

If you don't change, popular culture will keep coming back around to where you already are. For example, I looked like Nirvana a good decade before Nirvana looked like Nirvana and helped usher in "grunge."

AND KIDS keep complimenting me on my Chuck Taylors. I don't think they're being sarcastic, being that they're wearing them, too.

So we now have the above report from Today, part of the continuing rediscovery of vinyl. As in records. LP's. Phonographs, not CD players or iPods.

I have three turntables -- two of them quite vintage and quite nice. I quit counting how many LPs I had about 15 years ago, when the number passed 1,000.

And now. . . . Dude! I'm cool!

Not bad for a 48-year-old relic.

3 Chords & the Truth: As seen on '60s TV

This week's episode of 3 Chords & the Truth has a lot to do with this. "This" being the video just above.

Of course, "a lot to do with" doesn't mean the Big Show is about nothing but the old Red Skelton Hour on 1960s television.

That's just our jumping-off point.

For instance, this week's program also could be said to have much to do with this:

OR PERHAPS this instead:

AW HELL, it's 3 Chords & the Truth, which means this week's episode could have something to do with most anything. That's just the way your Mighty Favog rolls.

Give it a listen and find out what's in it for you today.

Stop socialized space travel!

I miss the Soviet Union.

Without the Red Menace to push us and scare us -- without the dadblamed commerniss Russkies to goad us into transcending our inherent pettiness and whackjobbery to achieve greatness purely out of spite -- it's no wonder we can't get a damned thing done in this country nowadays.

In the 1960s, we had "dominoes" falling, commies lurking, nuclear war looming and college campuses overrun by Red-loving pinko freaks. In that most tumultuous of decades, national humiliation was just one cosmonautical feat of derring-do away.

Our response to all that psychic trauma was to send Americans to the moon and bring them safely home again.

The Soviet Union, however, fell apart in 1991. Damn.

NOW, THERE'S NOTHING -- no common enemy, at least -- to keep our all-American whackjobs on the reservation. In this country, somebody's always going to be looking for Reds to bait, and without a large, reliable foreign Red Menace supplier, homegrown paranoiacs are turning against their own government and president.

For example, this was the scene a reporter for The Advocate found in Baton Rouge, La., yesterday:

On the day after President Barack Obama asked the nation to back his planned revamp of the $2.4 trillion system that pays for health care, opponents and supporters squared off Thursday on the sidewalks surrounding the U.S. courthouse in downtown Baton Rouge.

Police officers kept the two groups — which police estimated to be about 125 people — apart as the sides shouted at one another.

The gathering was largely peaceful — police reported no arrests — but points made on health-care plans soon were overshadowed by arguments of whether the president is an American citizen.

(snip)

Steven Walker of New Orleans, state director of Louisiana’s Organizing for America, said he wanted a handful of people to share their struggles caused by inadequate health-care insurance.

Obama’s plan would lower costs and free up options for people with insurance while giving people without insurance access to policies, said Walker, whose group is affiliated with the Democratic National Committee, which is promoting Obama’s agenda.

Walker said Obama’s plan would allow individuals greater choice.

“But this is a campaign of smear and fear,” Walker said pointing to an opposition sign that condemned the president as a communist.

“These people are anti-Obama,” he said.

A few feet down the sidewalk, on the other side of a cordon of police officers, Kurt Wagner, a Port Allen insurance sales manager, asked the crowd: “Is he rightfully the president?”

“No,” responded his listeners.

TO WHAT'S LEFT of the conservative base, President Obama not only is a "socialist," he's a Red pretender who isn't even American. Even amid the Great Clinton Freakout -- which at least had Whitewater, a high-level suicide and bimbo eruptions to hang its hat upon -- nobody for a minute questioned whether Bill was anything but an all-American, skirt-chasing, not-inhaling, draft-dodging pinko scalawag.

This won't do.

We need the Soviet Union back. We need a credible existential threat -- at least until al-Qaida proves it can take out midtown Manhattan -- to help us get over ourselves and get our rears in gear.

Otherwise, Allah only knows (Obama the Muslim made us all convert) how long we'll be letting the lunatics drive the agenda. Picture Toonces.

Your daily dose of surrealism

I think moments of supreme awkwardness on television all through the '60s must have shaped my generation somehow. We acquired a certain je ne sais quoi from watching old people on nationwide TV act strangely in the presence of youth.

A NOV. 10, 1964 episode of the Red Skelton Hour (embedded above) is a classic of the Establishment Doesn't Know What to Make of Youth Today genre. Kids, watch this and have a few things you've wondered about Mom and Dad suddenly make sense.

With that brief preface, I present for your squirming (and/or nostalgic) enjoyment, Red Skelton meets the Rolling Stones.

Mahna mahna!

I remember this song being in a "moon creature" sketch on the Red Skelton Hour from the fall of 1969. Unsurprisingly, all things "moon" were big that year.

This version, performed by the Muppets on the Ed Sullivan Show, is also from that mooniest of years, 1969. But I sure would like to see the Red Skelton version again after 40 years.

Mahna mahna!

Of 'abortion mandates' and political stunts

Sound the alarm!

Powerful abortion industry lobbyists and Wasington [sic], D.C., politicians have just launched a massive effort to mandate taxpayer-funded abortions as part of their proposed trillion-dollar healthcare takeover.

This political power-grab is an effort to implement one of the cornerstones of the "Freedom of Choice Act" (FOCA), and could lead to a massive abortion industry bailout -- something the overwhelming majority of Americans oppose, and certainly cannot afford in these tough economic times.

"Sound the alarm"?

"Proposed trillion-dollar health-care takeover"?

"Political power-grab"?

Why am I thinking the organizers of this protest against public funding of abortion as part of health-care reform may be just as undone over "socialized medicine" as they are about paying for killing unborn babies?

YES, I REALIZE Democrats for Life is part of the protest effort -- and good on it for opposing the "abortion mandate" -- but the pro-life Dems aren't in the driver's seat on this one. Note all the red-meat conservative code words on the website.

I wonder why that is?

According to a "whois" search, stoptheabortionmandate.com, is registered to Students for Life of America, and the administrative contact for the domain is the group's executive director, Kristan Hawkins. Hawkins -- author of a recent op-ed piece opposing any "nationalized healthcare system" as a virtual death sentence for her son, who has cystic fibrosis -- is an alumna of Bush/Cheney 2004 and also has worked for the Republican National Committee.

And the Students for Life home page directs visitors to "SFLA’s new website dedicated to exposing the facts about national health care and how it will hurt all Americans." Unlike how, I suppose, having no health care . . . or losing one's health care with one's job . . . or being denied coverage for pre-existing conditions . . . or being denied coverage for lifesaving-but-expensive treatments apparently does no harm whatsoever to Americans now.

MEANWHILE, the Students for Life domain is registered to Josh Mercer of Ann Arbor, Mich. Mercer, a board member of Students for Life of Michigan, is an alumnus of the conservative Hillsdale College where, in 2000, he belonged to the College Libertarians and was its contact with the Libertarian Party of Michigan.

Mercer, communications director for the Catholic advocacy group Fidelis, also was a member of the anti-tax Club for Growth from 2001 through at least 2004.

The anti-mandate site's self-parodying scare language is the stock and trade of PAC attacks across the political landscape, and thus set off my BS detector. Trolling the Internet for information on who, and what, is behind the "URGENT nationwide webcast event" merely serves to confirm one's suspicions.

Which leads to an important question: Is this about principled opposition to an "abortion mandate" in health-care reform, or is it about partisan political posturing aimed at turning this most contentious of issues into President Obama's "Waterloo"?

Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan is one of 19 Democrats publicly bucking their party's leadership, declaring to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi they will oppose any health-care reform measure that doesn't explicitly reaffirm standing congressional strictures against taxpayer funding of abortion. That is principled opposition to objective evil -- the evil being the taking of innocent human life in the name of "health care" -- and you can be sure those pro-life Democrats have paid, are paying and will continue to pay the price for their stand.

But Republicans shedding crocodile tears over an "abortion mandate" in a plan they'd be deriding as "socialized medicine" and a "political power grab" even if Mother Teresa were brought back from the dead to administer it? That's as disingenuous as it is cynical.

That organizations such as Priests for Life -- and even Democrats for Life -- have been suckered into being "useful idiots" for the Party of Greed's continuing war against ordinary Americans' economic and medical interests is damning testimony to the dysfunctional, codependent nature of our politics.

LET ME be unequivocal here -- abortion is evil. It is homicide directed against the most innocent and defenseless members of the human family. Financial support of this repulsive practice has no place in a health-care reform package.

Not only that, the presence of public subsidies for killing the innocent is philosophically incompatible with "reforming" a broken system that fails to affirm that medical care -- even life-saving medical care -- is a right based on one's humanity rather than a privilege based on one's ability to pay.

Both the deliberate taking of innocent life and the refusal to structure civil society so it values human dignity and worth over corporate profit and "the free market" are but variations on the world's oldest dodge. And we've been hemming and hawing on that count since Genesis, when God asked Cain a simple question and got a research paper from a PAC-funded think tank in reply.

Cain said to his brother Abel, "Let us go out in the field." When they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.

Then the LORD asked Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?" He answered, "I do not know. Am I my brother's keeper?"

ONE WONDERS whether today's conservatives would be upset that Cain slew Abel if they weren't convinced that Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi put him up to it. One also wonders whether liberal Democrats could bear to inhabit a world where Eve slaying Abel in the womb would be just as unthinkable as Cain doing the deed some years later in the field.

It seems to me, however, that "abortion for all" Democrats and free-marketeer "pro-life" Republicans are more kindred in spirit than either side cares to admit. What it really boils down to is whether one prefers death by commission or by omission.

Legal abortion is one of the more obvious indicators of the "culture of death." But even if elective abortion disappeared tomorrow, the United States could not be considered a "pro-life" society so long as health care -- so long as treatment of serious and even life-threatening disease -- remained dependent upon one's ability to pay.

If Americans ended abortion today but still denied critical treatment to those who couldn't pay, we still would be sinning against human dignity. "Pro-life" nations don't make sick, old people choose between medicine and food.

Nations committed to justice don't have people with insurance still going bankrupt because of a serious injury or major illness.

IN TODAY'S "URGENT nationwide webcast event," we're going to see a variety of groups come out against "the abortion mandate" in congressional health-care reform bills. Great . . . we know what they're against. Heck, I'm against it, too.

What they won't be saying, though, is what they're for. Are they for equal access to medical care for all Americans? If "socialized medicine" is bad, what's their solution? Or are some Americans just more equal than others?

And since we're all into big "Stop the Abortion Mandate" events, it certainly is reasonable to ask whether the next "nationwide webcast event" will be a protest against the 86 percent of work-based health-insurance plans that pay for abortion services already.

Check that. Employment-based insurance that compels you to pay for elective abortions through your premiums.

Really, where are the protests against the massive -- and successful -- effort to mandate consumer-funded abortions as part of a corporate power-grab?

Does the present health-care system's free-market roots (and that it will likely leave 52 million Americans out in the cold by next year) mean we somehow haven't already been made accomplices in mass homicide? Or is killing somehow just a lot more icky when it's "socialized"?

ONCE UPON A TIME, John Lennon put it quite directly:

I'm sick and tired of hearing things
From uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocrites
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth

I've had enough of reading things
By neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth

What he said.