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

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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.

Calling out the wackos

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He's loud. He's bombastic. He looks like he's on the verge of drooling on himself or, perhaps, spitting all over the MSNBC cameras.

He's Chris Matthews of Hardball and, bless his heart, somebody had to look at the "Obama's not an American" wing of the Republican Party and call a bunch of loonies a bunch of loonies. Because the longer these nutjobs roam free from the attic where crazy aunts and uncles normally reside, the dangerouser it gets for the GOP and the USA.

Right now -- despite all the signs telling people not to feed the animals -- the Republican Party is throwing Twinkies to the baboons. And we all know how that worked out for Dan White once upon a time in San Francisco.

Omaha can't rely on cuts . . . or Erin Andrews

If you're running a mid-sized city and you're looking at starting the new fiscal year at least $11 million in the hole, you're pretty much looking at just three things you can do.

You can gut city services that already have been cut and cut again, thereby destroying your community's quality of life.

You can raise taxes.

You can sell nekkid pictures of Erin Andrews. And by that I mean not unclothed pictures of the ESPN sideline goddess, but rather pictures of the ESPN sideline goddess unclothed.

To his credit, Omaha Mayor Jim Suttle -- in a budget address that was anything but subtle -- rejected the first option out of hand, declaring it a supremely bad idea. Likewise, he recognized there's no way out of the second option -- that citizens face a choice between horrible and unpleasant, and sometimes you have to suck it up and fork over a little more to the community chest.

As for that last option (though it would be an exceedingly lucrative sideline for Omaha city government), the reality is that Erin Andrews' chest does not belong to the community . . . and neither do photographic representations thereof.

SO, IT LOOKS like the Omaha City Council will have to either like or lump what the Omaha World-Herald reports the mayor set in front of it this afternoon:

Omaha Mayor Jim Suttle wants to raise property taxes and impose a new tax on restaurant meals, movies and other entertainment to help the city climb out of a projected budget shortfall for 2010.

Both the property tax increase and new entertainment tax are part of Suttle's 2010 budget proposal, which he presented Tuesday to the Omaha City Council.

The 2 percent entertainment tax would affect anyone who sees a movie or goes out to dinner in Omaha. The tax would bring in an estimated $10.3 million at a time when the major revenue sources for city services — sales taxes and property taxes — are projected to remain essentially flat. Meanwhile, health care and other costs are projected to rise.

The proposed property tax hike would amount to an extra $36 a year for the owner of a home valued for tax purposes at $150,000. The $6.2 million in revenue would be used to pay off debt from the Qwest Center Omaha.

Whether either tax is approved ultimately will be up to the City Council. Omahans will get their chance to weigh in during a public hearing Aug. 11.

Suttle includes some new spending in his 2010 budget, including restoring the public safety auditor's position, as he had promised to during the campaign, and buying 44 police cruisers. His plan also includes some cuts to help address an $11 million shortfall, such as closing Westwood Golf Course and spending less money on street resurfacing.

Council President Garry Gernandt has said in the past that the council would be cool to the notion of increasing taxes and wants to look for further spending cuts.

But Suttle warned of the consequences if the council fights the tax proposals. The city would not open any pools next summer, he said, and libraries could close as well. He said both possibilities would be “a gross mistake.”

“If the council says no, then we've got problems,” he said. “There's just no place else to go (for cuts).”

LISTEN, tax hikes are going to be unavoidable. Not unless you relish life in a city remarkably less "user friendly."

But I have problems with the tax Suttle seeks to implement -- an "entertainment tax." Such a levy has the potential to hurt a local industry (encompassing everything from sports franchises to restaurants to concert venues) that's already being buffeted by people's lack of discretionary income amid economic hard times.

Obviously, the mayor wants to impose a tax that won't hit everybody . . . and one that has maximum "soak the out-of-towners" potential. There's three problems with that, though.

First, would it cause people to attend even fewer shows, skip the ballgame or decide to eat in rather than eat out? Second, would it make Omaha hotels and restaurants less competitive for the tourist dollar? In this tough economy, do you really want to roll the dice on that one?

And third, fiscal experts looking at Omaha's tax structure have said the city already relies too heavily on sales-tax revenue. That's what has bitten the city in the rear during this present downturn. Do we really want to increase that dependence, particularly on something as regressive as a sales tax? After all, an "entertainment tax" is nothing more than a targeted sales tax.

Better to just take the hit straight up, no chaser. Raise property taxes enough to cover both the shortfall and the Qwest Center debt -- the hike still wouldn't be exorbitant.

Of course, there's one thing Suttle could do tomorrow without council approval. He could implement the occupation tax on the books since the recession of the early 1980s. Denver and Kansas City already have.

Maybe that's Suttle's last-resort ace in the hole with the council. Or maybe an occupation tax is what's going to stave off municipal bankruptcy in the looming fire-and-police pension implosion.

Stay tuned.

Reeling in the years. . . .

I've saved this old copy of the Baton Rouge State-Times -- carefully wrapped by my 8-year-old self in a garbage bag labeled "20th century" -- for 40 years now.

THE NEWS of July 22, 1969 reflects an undertaking of historic, transcendent wonder amid a world in chaos. At least people then had enough perspective to recognize wonder when they encountered it.

This probably was because the Internet -- and right-wing talk radio -- did not yet exist. If it did, the moon landing probably would have been roundly condemned as a budget-buster conceived by a member of the evil Kennedy clan, the youngest of which had just driven Mary Jo Kopechne off a bridge and into a watery grave near Martha's Vineyard, Mass.

THE LOUDEST dissenting voices probably would have been the parents of these yahoos in Delaware.

Of course, it's important to remember that the stupidity we find ourselves awash in these days is not the exclusive domain of the red-meat right. The left has its nuts, cranks and flakes, too, and they likewise have access to the Internet and other forms of mass media.

Like the ABC Television Network.

Verily, Whoopi Goldberg is proof positive that one can fall out of the stupid tree, hit every branch on the way down and still manage to cobble together a successful career in "entertainment."

I HOPE Walter Cronkite -- somehow, somewhere in the Great Beyond -- has some idea of how much he will be missed.

Greatness: Much cheaper than avarice

When I was two months and one day old -- May 25, 1961 -- President Kennedy declared that the United States would shoot for the moon. Literally.

The goal was unimaginably complex for all its stated simplicity. Kennedy declared the country should "commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth."

What American, in the midst of an existential struggle with the Soviet Union, could be against beating the Russkies to the moon? To achieving mankind's greatest feat?

A STORY TODAY by The Associated Press answers that question:

"I thought he was crazy," said Chris Kraft, when he heard Kennedy's speech about landing on the moon.

Kraft was head of Mission Control. He was the man responsible for guiding astronauts to orbit (which hadn't been done yet) and eventually to the moon. Kraft first heard about a mission to the moon when Kennedy made the speech.

"We saw that as Buck Rogers stuff, rather than reality that would be carried out in any time period that we were dealing with," Kraft recently told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Houston.

Less than three months later, Kraft was in the White House explaining to the president just how landing on the moon would be done. Kraft still didn't believe it would work.

"Too many unknowns," he said.

It was the Cold War and Russian Yuri Gagarin had just become the first man in space. Kennedy chose landing a man on the moon because experts told him it was the one space goal that was so distant and complicated at the time that the United States could catch up and pass the Soviet Union, Kennedy adviser Ted Sorensen said.

The idea in a world where American capitalism was pitted against Soviet communism on a daily basis was "to prove to the world which system was best, which one was the future," Sorensen said.

"It's not just the fact that the president wanted it done," Sorensen recalled. "It was the fact that we had a specific goal and a specific timetable."

In another speech, Kennedy famously said America would go to the moon and try other tasks "not because they were easy, but because they were hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills."

They weren't just skills with rockets and slide rules. Bringing together countless aerospace companies, engineers, scientists, technicians, politicians and several NASA centers around the nation was a management challenge even more impressive than building the right type of rockets, said Smithsonian Institution space scholar Roger Launius.

And it cost money. The United States spent $25.4 billion on the Apollo program, which translates to nearly $150 billion in current dollars — less than the U.S. spent in both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007.

IN TODAY'S MONEY, it cost us $150 billion to figure out how to get to the moon and back, then actually get to the moon and back. Several times. That first moon landing, during the mission of Apollo 11, came 40 years ago today.

The greatest feat humanity has ever pulled off, to put it another way, cost 3.19 percent -- again, in today's dollars -- of what it has cost us so far to bail out this country's financial sector. The financial sector. it must be noted, that precipitated the worst economic crisis the world has endured since the Great Depression.

The Apollo program . . . $150,000,000,000.

Bailing out a bunch of Wall Street swells who, of late, have taken taxpayers' money and gone back to business as usual: $4,700,000,000,000.

I think that says about all there is to say about the kind of country we were 40 years ago -- and the kind of country we are now.

The Bob

What I love about Omaha is that if you can't find something to do on a nice summer Sunday evening, you just aren't trying very hard.

Yesterday, a picture perfect day just cried out for taking a leisurely stroll to Iowa. So the missus and I did . . . brand-new Nikon Coolpix camera in hand.

And thanks to the new Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge across the Missouri River, you now can walk from downtown Omaha to Council Bluffs, Iowa, without the hassle of drowning in the Muddy Mo or dodging big rigs on the I-480 bridge.

Plus, you have the extra, added advantage of some really nice views of the Omaha skyline from the Iowa side of the bridge. I've been told this is what Council Bluffs wants to be when it grows up.

Of course, some refuse to focus on the advantages of a peaceful walk to our neighboring state, as opposed to a hair-raising, traffic-dodging, legally questionable scamper across the river on the Interstate.

Or the whole sinking and drowning thing on the river, sans boat.

And I think I really like the new digital camera.

And that's the way he was. . . .

Uncle Walter is dead.

That's a big thing if, like me, you grew up in a city that had only two television stations -- either Walter Cronkite or Huntley-Brinkley -- in a time before cable. For the most part, ours was a Cronkite house.

And that's the way it was in network news.

I WASN'T yet three on Nov. 22, 1963, when Uncle Walter (above) told a nation its president had been murdered. But I can guarantee you I was watching, both from my dim memories of that day, and because Walter Cronkite's first CBS bulletins on the tragic events in Dallas interrupted the popular soap opera As the World Turns.

As the World Turns was my mother's "story."

When I learned of Cronkite's death, I was preparing the previous post, reveling again in his coverage of Neil Armstrong's first footsteps on the moon, just as the CBS anchor reveled in that moment. It somehow felt fitting that he would leave us now, 40 years after one of our -- and his -- finest hours.

I could go on but won't. It seems to me all you need to know about Mr. Cronkite -- assuming you are too young to remember him from his work and his ubiquitous television presence more than a generation ago -- is this:

In Sweden, television news anchormen are called Kronkiters. In the Netherlands, they are Cronkiters. And the American term "anchorman"? That was coined to describe Uncle Walter, "the most trusted man in America."

May God rest his soul.

Here's the story from The Associated Press:

Walter Cronkite, the premier TV anchorman of the U.S. networks’ golden age who reported a tumultuous time with reassuring authority and came to be called “the most trusted man in America,” died Friday. He was 92.

Cronkite’s longtime chief of staff, Marlene Adler, said Cronkite died at 7:42 p.m. at his Manhattan home surrounded by family. She said the cause of death was cerebral vascular disease.

Adler said, “I have to go now” before breaking down into what sounded like a sob. She said she had no further comment.

Cronkite was the face of the “CBS Evening News” from 1962 to 1981, when stories ranged from the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to racial and anti-war riots, Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis.

(snip)

His 1968 editorial declaring the United States was “mired in stalemate” in Vietnam was seen by some as a turning point in U.S. opinion of the war. He also helped broker the 1977 invitation that took Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem, the breakthrough to Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel.

He followed the 1960s space race with open fascination, anchoring marathon broadcasts of major flights from the first suborbital shot to the first moon landing, exclaiming, “Look at those pictures, wow!” as Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon’s surface in 1969. In 1998, for CNN, he went back to Cape Canaveral to cover John Glenn’s return to space after 36 years.

“It is impossible to imagine CBS News, journalism or indeed America without Walter Cronkite,” CBS News president Sean McManus said in a statement. “More than just the best and most trusted anchor in history, he guided America through our crises, tragedies and also our victories and greatest moments.”

Man on the moon

If you don't hear this week's episode of 3 Chords & the Truth, there's a good reason for that. There isn't one . . . but just for this week.

Instead of doing the Big Show, I'm on the moon. It's July 1969, and once again I am 8 1/2 years old. Walter Cronkite is delivering the big news on CBS -- if you have to ask what the big news is, something's wrong with you -- and I'm sitting in front of the big Magnavox console TV watching history.

Some say 1969 was a time of turmoil. It was.

BUT THANKS to men like Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins -- the crew of Apollo 11 -- it is easier for us children of the Space Age to remember the '60s as a time of wonder. Greatness is strapping an entire planet onto your Saturn V rocket and carrying it with you to another world, allowing us to transcend our baser instincts, overcome our petty squabbles and fears -- even if only for a week or so.

Compared to such magic, all the ugliness that is our earthly stock and trade couldn't stand a chance.

People say America's best days are behind her. That might be so; it probably is so. I was blessed, however, to live when they weren't. When Americans reached for the stars, and men made it to the moon.

We as a nation once did these things, and my generation always will hold the memory of them close to our hearts.

One of these things is much like the other. . . .

Alerted by neighbors complaining of the stench coming from the little white house with the unkempt yard at 2857 Ida St., Omaha police Sunday broke out a window to get inside.

Allowing a swarm of blowflies to get outside.

In a bathroom, officers found severely decomposed products of conception in a bathtub, along with instruments designed to dismember the remains for disposal. The biological material had been covered with kitty litter to absorb the stench.

As far as they could tell, medical examiners say, the body had not been cut apart.

The legs and arms, however, had been bound with duct tape.

If this grisly scene had taken place 15 miles south, at Dr. Leroy Carhart's clinic in Bellevue, Neb., it would have been just another day in the late-term abortion business.

If it had taken place 12 years earlier, Angela Manns would be seen as courageously exercising her constitutional right to "choose," and woe unto any busybody who would tell her what to do with her own body.

Or that of her child.

BUT THE GRISLY END of Angela Manns' little boy, Michael Belitz, didn't come 15 miles south and 12 years earlier. It came sometime after the boy -- described as a "genius" and a great kid by his principal -- finished sixth grade at Minne Lusa Elementary School. The potential of his life was cut off after 12 years out of the womb, instead of 20-odd weeks inside it.

Michael Belitz, the "product of conception" of a tryst between an alleged drunk and an alleged addict, never did make it to the College World Series with his best friend and his best friend's mom.

He never did get to spend another weekend with his father -- a man with a bad liver and past accusations of methamphetamine use -- who had re-entered the child's life and was trying to make the most of it.

And he never did get to graduate as valedictorian, or go to college, or get married, or have children.

MEANWHILE, neither is Angela Manns being hailed as an upholder of the right to control her own body, nor of the right to choose whether or not to be a mother. Prosecutors, in fact, are charging her with first-degree murder, and the county attorney is trying to decide whether to seek the death penalty.

If prosecutors are right and Manns did hatch and carry out a plan to kill her son, circumstances suggest it was the senseless act of a tormented and desperate woman. Going by what has been reported in the Omaha World-Herald, Angela Manns -- and by extension her son -- had a dire existence:

Interviews with Michael's family suggest that problems in his home life were apparent well before friends say they last saw him in mid-June.

Angela Manns — who was born Angela Arbogast on Feb. 8, 1963 — worked as a cashier at the University of Nebraska at Omaha from 1999 until 2007, and bought the white house at 2857 Ida St. in the summer of 2003.

Earlier, Manns had given up two children for adoption, including her oldest daughter, Carrie, when the child was 3, and a son at birth.

Manns kept a daughter, who now is a teenager, and Michael. According to court records, the daughter ran away from home in 2007 and eventually went to live with Carrie, now 28.

Carrie, who agreed to comment on the condition that she be identified only by her first name, reunited with Manns in 2006 and tried to maintain a relationship with her biological mother.

Carrie's family grew close to Manns' remaining two children.

“When we first met her, she seemed normal,” Carrie said of Manns. “But the more we got to know her, the more we didn't want to be around her.”

Manns avoided attending family get-togethers and often would stay up late into the night painting her living room, tearing up carpet or doing yardwork. She drank heavily and frequently lost her temper with the children.

Dirty dishes piled up in the sink, and the refrigerator and cupboards were mostly empty.
Her half-sister told Carrie that Manns woke her up one morning by beating her with a broomstick until it broke.

“Some days, she'd never get out of bed or she'd stay up for three or four days at a time,” Carrie said. “A lot of people only knew a part of her. ... If you were inside and with her for a day or two, you saw a whole different person.”

I GUESS YOU might say she had her reasons. Allegedly.

Then again, we all have our reasons for committing evil in the hope that good might come of it, right? We have our reasons, the abortionist has his reasons, and mothers have their reasons for passing a death sentence on the lives within . . . just like Manns apparently had for, authorities say, carrying out a death sentence on the child she bore 12 years ago.

A senseless murder? When does it ever make sense for a mother to choose death for her child? How does Michael Belitz' death make less sense than what Leroy Carhart does for a living -- less sense than the taking of any innocent life?

What is sensible about a culture that places the line between a constitutional right and homicide somewhere along the birth canal? That's not the reasoned application of civilized standards; that's the law of the wild, where the big critters kill and eat the little critters.

At least in the wild, the big critters can cite "got to eat to stay alive" as a reason. Not so for us. And we thought we had outgrown "might makes right."

The question at hand in River City is this: Ultimately, who is the victim of a societal double standard? Is it Michael Belitz? Or is it Angela Manns . . . allegedly?

WE OMAHANS live in a city, a state and a country where we have plenty of money and desire for McMansions, multiple automobiles, electronic gadgets and overpriced concert tickets but not enough money or civic will to operate a Department of Health and Human Services capable of protecting vulnerable children.

We Americans have run up a massive national debt not while making sure women have every reason to welcome their unborn children -- or not kill those already born -- but instead while . . . doing what, exactly? Fighting imperial wars of choice? Creating a land of senseless excess where the second-richest man in the world pays a lower income-tax rate than his secretary?

What kind of people, at long last, decide to tackle health-care reform but only if -- as a condition of expanding access to affordable treatment -- we can mandate federal funding for abortion?

One on side, we have "progressives" so enamored of death as a solution to the problems in women's lives that they insist on provisions that almost assuredly will doom the entire push for health-care reform. On the other, you have "pro-life" conservative activists railing against pro-abortion provisions in the House and Senate bills, mainly as a pretext for sinking a "socialist" scheme they wouldn't have backed anyway.

Despite how many "good reasons" for abortion that affordable, universal health care might eliminate.

But we all have our reasons -- Don't we? -- for embracing death as an answer for the problems of life.

If a jury finds that Angela Manns killed her little boy (for reasons that seemed really good to her at the time), let's not merely say, "Ah, because legal abortion exists, she. . . ." No, what we need to acknowledge is the evil deep in the crooked little heart of every man . . . and woman.

Evil that leads us to confuse principle with the sophistry candy-coating our desire to revert to the law of the jungle "in just this one instance." Because it's easier that way.

It was easier, at least so authorities suspect, for a disturbed and alcohol-addled woman to kill her son rather than straighten up and fly right. Than it would have been for her to call her eldest daughter and ask her to take on young Michael for a while.

Just like it's easier for us to have an under-resourced, beleagured social-services agency -- one where kids too often slip through the cracks and into the abyss -- than it is for us to commit the willpower and the funding to save the children.

For it is better for us that millions should die instead of our illusions, so that the consumer society may not perish.

So much for Crime Stoppers

Single? Female? Hot? Under 16?

For a good time, call 911.

Ask for the AIM handle of Omaha police officer David M. Kass. It has been credibly alleged by LaVista, Neb., police that he's the guy for gals too old for the Jonas Brothers but too young to remember Nirvana.

At least so says the Omaha World-Herald, which probably needs to devote a special online index to stories about OPD officers hanging out on the wrong side of the law:

An Omaha police officer was arrested Wednesday afternoon, accused by La Vista police of initiating a graphic online sexual conversation with a person authorities say he believed to be a 14-year-old girl. On the other end was actually a La Vista detective.

David M. Kass of Omaha was taken into custody after investigators served a search warrant on his home, according to the La Vista Police Department.

Police siezed [sic] Kass's computer. It will be forensically examined.

Specifically, Kass is accused of enticement by electronic communication device, a felony with a maximum sentence of five years in prison, a $10,000 fine, or both.

Kass 25, graduated from the Omaha police academy in fall 2006.

SIGH. On a less snarky note, I'd be really interested to see some research on the arrest numbers -- by year and then broken down by age for each year -- for various sex crimes.

It seems to me there's been a lot of arrests lately of pervs under 30. What I'd like to get a handle on is whether this has always been so, or whether a young-perv trend is something we all can look forward to for a generation raised on pornography.

How do you think John Daly got his start?

Carrie Nation and Billy Billie Sunday took their campaign against demon rum -- and demon whiskey . . . and demon beer -- to Nebraska's demon-regulating panel today, seeking to save unsuspecting Omaha children from possession by evil spirits somewhere between the water(ing hole) hazard and the big windmill.

AFTER ALL, it's a proven fact that kids can develop lifelong addiction from watching Mom and Dad have a cold one on the miniature-golf course. And, remember, today's plastered Putt-Putters are tomorrow's drunken golf-cart drivers.

As a matter of fact, the siren song of the liquor-soaked road to perdition is so strong that I had the overwhelming urge to climb into a bottle just reading this story in the Omaha World-Herald:

Officials with two groups opposed to teen-age drinking told the Nebraska Liquor Control Commission that while similar family-oriented businesses already have liquor licenses, giving one to the Boulder Creek Amusement Park would further risk mixing underage customers with grown-up alcohol.

"We need to send the message to our children that alcohol is not the center of all social life, and that we don't need alcohol to have a good time," said Susie Dugan of PRIDE Omaha Inc., a group that seeks to keep kids from using drugs and alcohol.

Dennis Schuett, a partner in the Boulder Creek mini-golf/batting cage complex near 142nd and S Streets in the Millard area, said he has been forced to seek a liquor license because competitors for corporate outings already have them.

UNFORTUNATELY, Miss Nation had the fairness under the law argument going against her here. So it was left to Rev. Sunday and her Plan B argument:

Schuett and his attorney, Mike Kelley of Omaha, cited the Pizza Machine, the Fun Plex, Skate Daze and Dave & Busters as similar, family-oriented amusement facilities that sell liquor in the Omaha area.

A representative of another group opposed to teen drinking, Diane Riibe of Project Extra Mile, told commissioners that while that was true, the bigger issue was the wisdom of allowing liquor licenses "on every corner of this state."

BECAUSE we all know that if we can only try Prohibition -- or at least some half-assed local imitation of it -- one more time, crime will vanish, men will quit beating their wives, teen sex will give way to Wednesday-night church, rehab centers can close their doors and no one will ever wreck a car again. Just like the nirvana we experienced from 1920 through 1933.

Just like raising the drinking age to 21 has eliminated binge drinking on college campuses everywhere. And the last high-school keg party took place when . . . 1985?

Fortunately, the commission voted to give Boulder Creek that liquor license. And frankly, I really could use that drink about now.