The Dismal State of the GOP

Today's bad news for the Republican Party, spoken on Bill Moyers Journal by former Republican Oklahoma Rep. Mickey Edwards:

The Republican Party is not healthy.

Bush-O-Nomics Update: Gas Goes Up, Market Goes Down

Today's economic double-whammy: As the price of a barrel of oil goes higher and higher, the stock market dives.

Investors, the economists says, remain nervous. With Bush in charge (s0 to speak), of course they are.

Texas Turkey of the Week: Ex-Sen. Phil Gramm

Until recently, former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm was well hidden from public view, safely conducting his business out of the public eye.

But his role as a McCain economic adviser has recently put Gramm squarely in the spotlight, and the picture is increasingly ugly.

First, we learn that Gramm was instrumental in deregulating the banking industry, actions that fostered the current credit crunch and mortgage meltdown. Then we learn he has close ties to UBS, the giant Swiss bank that has reported major losses in—yes!—the mortgage market.

Good work, Phil!

Now, Gramm's shot off his mouth to the detriment of his pal John McCain, who's quickly moved to separate himself from Gramm's most recent economic pronouncements, which we quote below:

"You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession," Gramm said. "We may have a recession; we haven't had one yet."

"We have sort of become a nation of whiners," Gramm said. "You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline."

McMurtry's New Book on a Life in Books

One of AT's favorite writers, Larry McMurtry, has published a new book. It's called Books: A Memoir, and it chronicles the Texas author's life as an author, bookseller and antiquarian book dealer.

McMurtry, best known for his epic Western novel, Lonesome Dove, lived for years in Washington, D.C., where he ran his bookstore. More recently, he moved the business to his hometown, Archer City, Texas, where he now has more than 300,000 used books.

In an interview published today in USA Today, McMurtry says his bookstore, called Booked Up, is holding its own as a business, but not making a lot of money.

McMurtry, 72, also confesses to being computer illiterate. He writes on a Hermes portable typewriter, which makes it hard to get through airports, he says.

McMurtry's new book, published by Simon and Schuster, goes for $24. We don't have a copy get, but we'll get one. We love the guy.

Recommended Reading: David Quammen's Short Book on 'The Reluctant Mr. Darwin'

We ran across a copy of David Quammen's short biography of Charles Darwin the other day and found it a real joy.

One of the blurbs on the back of The Reluctant Mr. Darwin calls the book "a rich, dramatic story brought to life by a gifted and entertaining storyteller." It's an accurate assessment.

We didn't know Quammen before we read the book, but we can testify to the man's literary skill. In his hands, Darwin's life and scientific achievements are spelled out in plain and compelling language.

Along the way, Quammen explains Darwin's principal ideas, clears up a few misconceptions, and lays out the long and painstaking process that led to his theory of evolution. It's fascinating stuff, even when we see Darwin as a hypochondriac and an obsessive field biologist.

There are more thorough biographies of Darwin out there (as Quammen acknowledges), but this is one terrific introduction to Darwin and his ideas, from the famous voyage of the Beagle through his years of self-doubt and eventual success (and acceptance) by the scientific community.

As we say in the headline, recommended reading.

The book, again, is David Quammen, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (New York: Atlas Books, 2006). The book is part of the publisher's Great Discovery Series, which also includes short biographies of Einstein, Marie Curie, Copernicus, and several others.

Oklahoma Republicans Vote Against Vets

Oklahoma Republicans love to talk about supporting the troops. Too bad their talk is, to put it plainly, pure bullcrap.

We're talking about the recent bill that dramatically improved benefits for our vets, all those men and women the GOP claims to support. The bill passed the House the other day by a vote of 256-166. The President—who vocally opposed the bill—suddenly reversed course and signed it, pretending that he supported it all along.

How did Oklahoma's Republican representatives vote on this important legislation? You guessed it: They followed the party line, voting against increased veterans benefits.

A check of the voting record shows that Tulsa Rep. John Sullivan voted "nay." Ditto GOP leader Rep. Tom Cole. Same with OKC Rep. Mary Fallin. To be fair, Rep. Dan Boren, the state's only Democrat in the House, also cast his bone-headed vote against the bill. So much for supporting the troops!

Oklahoma's gutless legislators—supporting the vets only when it's cheap.

Global Gardens Makes Good News

Congratulations to our friends at Global Gardens for the great weekend story in the Tulsa World. 

As we have previously noted (see AT's June 23 posting), Global Gardens is a program that introduces low-income students to the pleasures of planting and growing. The photo above was taken at this year's Brookside Herb Festival. 

Read Saturday's Tulsa World story here. For more on Global Gardens, their philosophy and their programs, click here. 

War Supporter Hitchens Gets 'Waterboarded' and Concludes: 'It's Torture'

Writer and polemicist Christopher Hitchens is no blushing wallflower. In contrast to his many anti-war friends, Hitchens vigorously supported the invasion of Iraq, as well as the elimination of Saddam and his regime.

On the matter of U.S.-inflicted torture, however, Hitchens now has a different view, one based on his decision to have himself "waterboarded," a technique that Bush Administration officials have defended in the name of national security.

In an article for Vanity Fair (the link is at Think Progress), Hitchens left no doubt that the procedure was torture. He writes: 

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

Trouble in McCainville: GOP Candidate Shuffles His Top Staff

Things aren't exactly peachy in the McCain campaign. The GOP standard-bearer and his party are getting worried about his prospects in November. 

Here's the lead paragraph from the CNN.com story posted today: 

Sen. John McCain's campaign announced a shakeup at the top Wednesday, in the wake of growing Republican concern about its ability to compete against Sen. Barack Obama.

Fox Attack: Right-Wing Blabbers Alter Images of Times Reporters

Speaking of Fox News (see last post), the network today lived up to its reputation for putting partisanship ahead of the facts when it broadcast digitally altered photos of two New York Times reporters. 

The Huffington Post has the whole sorry story, complete with original and altered photos of the reporters, who were—Fox claims—involved in a "hit piece" on the network and its declining influence.  In FoxSpeak, "hit piece" appears to be any story that is critical of Fox News.  

We don't mind Fox News defending itself. But Fox can't seem to do this honestly. Instead, they play games with facts and images, distorting reality to make a dishonest point. Come to think of it, that's the whole purpose of Fox News. 

As Times Change, Fox News Finds Fewer Viewers While CNN, MSNBC Have Gains

After years of cable news dominance, Fox News losing its ratings edge.

Increasingly, viewers have had enough of the network's "fair and balanced" treatment of current events—code for a reactionary opinion that is too often fact-free.

The ratings numbers show that CNN and MSNBC are adding viewers at a healthy rate, while Fox viewers are switching channels or tuning out. One of the stars of MSNBC is Keith Olbermann, whose "Countdown" program has been responsible for much of the growth at MSNBC.

Writing in the New York Times, Jacques Steinberg noted that CNN and MSNBC have copied the Fox style, emphasizing "sharp opinions, glitzy graphics and big personalities…."

Meanwhile Fox has fallen victim to its own rhetorical excesses. Steinberg documented three recent "inappropriate references" to Barack Obama, including the idiotic comment by Fox's E.D. Hill that the "fist bump" between Michelle and Barack Obama was "a terrorist fist jab." (We are not making this up.)

Fox News: Giving viewers the party line, whether it's true or not.

Recent Reading: Annie Proulx's Latest Story

For fans of contemporary short stories, Annie Proulx is a respected writer. The reading public knows her, if it knows her at all, as the author of "Brokeback Mountain," the so-called "gay cowboy" story that became a prize-winning movie.

We never got a chance to read "Brokeback Mountain," but we can recommend Proulx's latest story, "Tits-Up in a Ditch," which was published last month in the Summer Fiction Issue of The New Yorker, dated June 9 & 16, 2008.

Yes, the title is salacious, but the story is more troubling than titillating. More importantly, Proulx packs a novel's worth of plot and character into a few thousand words about life on the lower rungs of the social and economic ladder in present-day Wyoming.

Proulx's main character is Dakotah, a hard-luck young woman raised by her grandparents. Dakotah drifts through her life, dropping out of high school months before graduation, marrying poorly, eventually following her husband into the army.

Short story readers should check out "Tits-Up" and other Proulx offerings in her collections, including a new one due out this fall, Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3.

Gun Headline of the Day: It's Often About Suicide, not Protection

Now that we have an individual right to own a handgun, we note this unfortunate U.S. gun statistic, courtesy of CNN.com:

Surprising fact: Half of gun death are suicides

Gun owners often use weapons on themselves, not intruders

Wishful Thinking in Bush Land: President Convinced Public Will Love Him After All

It's take more than seven years, but the American public has finally realized that George W. Bush has been a disaster as president.

The list of Bush errors and deceptions is long and serious, from an elective and trumped up war against a nation that did not attack us and a bungled Iraqi reconstruction effort to prisoner abuse and torture and illegal spying on U.S. citizens.

And then there's the domestic arena, where the White House bungled the Katrina response ("Heckva job, Brownie!"), worked to politicize the Justice Department, and ignored scientific evidence on global warming and a host of other topics.

And let's not even get started on gas prices, which some in the Administration predicted would go down as a result of a stable, democratic Iraq. What a joke.

It's no surprise, then, that Bush's approval ratings are in the toilet, among the lowest in the history of presidential polling. Despite such reports, the president and his aides remain optimistic that Bush will rise the eyes of the public.

Here's the latest fiction from an administration in denial, courtesy of U.S. News:

When he travels around the country, Bush feels less “antipathy” than he used to in the crowds, along the motorcade routes, and expressed by the individuals who talk to him at his events. “He feels there has been a shift in attitudes out there that’s not reflected in polling data,” the aide says. […]

Reinforcing his point, the latest AP-Ipsos poll, released in mid-June, found that only 29 percent of Americans approved of Bush’s job performance, one of the lowest presidential ratings ever. White House officials, by the way, say they aren’t sure such polls should be believed because the questions are biased and the population samples are flawed.

Recommended Katrina Reading: Ellis Anderson's Saga of Mississippi's Bay Town Inn

AltTulsa made a note last week about the Katrina issue of Southern Cultures, an interesting journal published at the University of North Carolina. Since then, we had a chance to read another article in the issue and we want to recommend it in the highest terms.

The article, "Storm Journal: The Story of the Bay Town Inn," tells the completely harrowing tale of seven Katrina survivors who rode out the storm at the Bay Town Inn, a sturdy old building in Bay St. Louis that survived Hurricane Camille, a "storm of the century" that battered the area more than 30 years ago.

Writer Ellis Anderson explains in her introduction that she didn't "need a writer's imagination to fill in the details. I'm simply recording their story, interweaving five individual accounts."

And what accounts they are! The situation goes from bad to worse to absolutely terrifying in a matter of hours, with several of the survivors clinging to an oak tree after the inn blew apart. A sample:

Exhausted, the three friends tried to get their bearings. The disorientation was overwhelming. They could barely recognize each other under the sticky, black silt covering them head to toe. Even the landscape around them was no longer familiar. They might have been standing on the surface of another planet. There was no sign of the Bay Town Inn, nothing even to mark where it had stood.

As it happens, you can find more of Anderson's writing on her blog, The Language of Loss, which can be found at katrinapatina.blogspot.com.

As we said, it's a gripping story about the power of nature, the fragility of life, and the role of friendship and hope against incredible odds.

New Poll: Bush Polices Judged a Failure

It's a bad time to be a George W. Bush supporter. A poll released today shows the public increasingly fed up with what we like to call Bush-O-Nomics. 

The LA Times/Bloomberg poll showed 75 percent of Americans "blame President Bush's economic policies for making the country worse off during the last eight years."