Bring Back Civics!

I mentioned yesterday that there were two crucial issues that gave me the most concern. Today I focus on the second issue—education.

We are witnessing a revolution today among educators. There are statewide strikes occurring in state after state as a result of decades of neglect by our legislators in supporting education for our children. It is a fact that most statehouses are in the hands of Republicans and they have embarked on a decades long assault on funding our primary and secondary public education infrastructure. First West Virginia, then Kentucky and Oklahoma, and now Arizona and Colorado are windows into the results of years of appropriations neglect.

Broken buildings that never get fixed, books that are 10+ years out of date and in terrible physical shape, teachers who are paid so little that they have to have second jobs as minimum wage employees at fast food restaurants, teachers spending their own money to buy supplies like pencils, scotch tape and paper are the hallmarks of neglect and deprivation.

On a national level, we have a Secretary of Education who doesn’t really understand or support the public education system. She has been accused of supporting redirecting public monies to private schools via vouchers or other schemes, which is tantamount to defunding the public school system. She never attended public schools and favors the proliferation of charter schools, some of which are organized as for-profit businesses. On a recent 60 minutes program she was unable to defend her belief that public schools can perform better when funding is diverted to the expansion of public charter schools and private school vouchers. At one point, she admitted she hasn't "intentionally" visited underperforming schools.

One of the byproducts of this kind of institutional neglect is the disappearance of instruction in America’s schools for a civics curriculum. This is a true tragedy for our children. Perhaps one of the most important things we are NOT teaching our children is how our government works and how individuals have a responsibility to make it work. ‘Man on the street’ interviews produced by comedians like Jay Leno, Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel illustrate how our citizens can’t even identify the three branches of government, who is President, who we got our independence from in 1776, or anything about our Constitution. Our voter turnout continues to diminish with many states exhibiting less than 35% turnout in a presidential year.

And as a result we find that our populace is more divided than ever before. Issues that divide us are not clearly understood by a majority of our citizens and most discussions devolve into angry confrontations causing people to surrender friendships and beat each other up with vitriolic accusations. There is a broad swath of our citizens that are so uneducated about the workings of government, that all they can do is rail against ‘the swamp in Washington’ without even knowing why they are calling it ‘the swamp’.

Arguments and discourse about our national issues are reduced to buzz words and invective. People are not able to listen to each other and analyze opposing positions, which leads to an inability to compromise and find common ground.

It is probably not unreasonable to say that the lack of attention to our educational system is now exhibited by symptoms of breakdown in our societal norms and ability to reason with each other.

There needs to be a change. The vanguard of that change, thankfully, is coming from our teachers who are on the front lines. It is a surprise to many that there is such anger and despair in the educational community. Republican legislators have been more concerned about funding more weapons for the Defense Department or patronizing special interests than educating our children. Education is the caboose of the budget, getting the last consideration, which has resulted in a slow and steady disintegration of our public school system. Finally the teachers are shouting loudly enough, and those states which have had the longest Republican leadership, are being forced to consider higher taxes so that our children can regain their educational footing.

Only if our children are properly prepared to take their place in our society as productive, informed and effective agents of change will we succeed in repairing our collective awareness to acknowledge the real issues that we need to face. Informed discourse about our issues is the only way to finally find solutions.

It starts with a proper and fulsome education.

Clearer and Clearer.....

I have been rather silent over the past three weeks, mostly as a result of my inability to type fast enough since my shoulder surgery.  It's getting better every day, and so much better than before! It’s a blessing. Anyway, it has given me lots of time to think about stuff as it unfolds….and for sure the past three weeks have been momentous!

I have two areas that concern me most, so I will start with the ever clearer picture of what has been going on in our country for the past two years. The Russia conspiracy is coming together like a giant jigsaw puzzle---a piece here, a piece there, and suddenly the overall picture begins to take shape and the results are unsettling to say the least and horrifying to say the worst.

I am a journalist by trade, but foremost a citizen of this country. As a concerned citizen I have always been cognizant of the values that propel our democracy and tried to live by those tenets as much as I can. I have always believed in the purity of truth and the rule of law. The picture that has emerged concerning our recent political condition seems to reject those fundamental propositions that undergird our democracy. When Donald Trump and the Republican party came to power in 2016 we all had great concern about where the country was headed, and enormous anxiety about the behavior of our new President and the seeming inability of the Republicans to control his impulsiveness, not to mention his mendacity.

Over the course of the last 18 months as we all became aware of the sinister machinations of the Russians in tampering with our democracy and elections, we tried to understand how this foreign power managed to mobilize the various forces to accomplish their goals. Now it is clearer just how they did it and the forces active behind the effort.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, the separation of powers and the system of checks and balances inherent in our Constitution presupposes that all the players in our government are men of honor and truth, and guided by the rule of law. I think the biggest revelation for many of us is that that is simply not the case in the current governmental structure of America right now. We all watch in amazement at the Republican majority in Congress that seems not to be interested in the Constitutional oversight responsibility that comes with the position. The newest ‘report’ issued by the Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee is a prime example of the abrogation of responsibility in that regard. While Trump trumpets the ‘findings’ in this report that he says clears him of any collusion or obstruction of justice, the actual reality is that the Republican majority of that committee refused to investigate clearly disturbing facts that would point to exactly the opposite conclusion. The question must be asked, “Why??”

I think I have a possible answer. You’re not going to like it!

We are beginning to see the outlines of a vast conspiracy that started several years ago when the Russians and the FSB realized that they had a malleable proxy in Donald Trump that might enable them to gain control over our democracy. This was a big plan and wide ranging strategy that had many fronts of action and was brilliantly conceived. The Russians saw the advantage they would have with a society that was becoming more and more economically unequal and, based on their own history, saw the opportunity to use their tools of propaganda and misinformation to steer public perception in ways to maximize their advantage.

There were also many accomplices to this plan….let me name a few….Nunes, Flynn, Page, Papadapoulis, Manafort, Lewandowski, and others. These people were suggestible because of their greed and hunger for power. Who knows if they were witting or unwitting? The Russians were masterful at appealing to their lust for greed and power. So over the past several years they supported the Republican’s growing metamorphosis into a party that favored the rich and fooled the poor. Their policy positions became increasingly focused on self-aggrandizement, special interest appeasement, and disregarding the middle class. It worked so well, that what we have now is a Republican party that seems to have eschewed the fundamental obligations of oversight, truth and the rule of law. Republican members of Congress have acquiesced in the attack on our judicial institutions, the FBI, and the Justice Department. They let President Trump attack these institutions without any objection….in fact they are the Greek Chorus shouting their support for these actions.

All the while, the Russians were busy planning their attack on our 2016 elections. They planned and executed a very sophisticated social media campaign to flood our social media platforms with fake news, lies and propaganda. They hacked into the DNC servers and planned campaigns of distraction by releasing stolen data that would undermine and destroy the Clinton campaign. They bred a cadre of supplicants that would blindly support Trump and his campaign to disrupt our institutions. The Russians were astute in realizing that Trump was exactly the kind of personality that was corruptible. Doesn’t it seem unusual that with all the things that our President thinks are ‘disgraceful’ about our government and the Democrats, somehow ‘disgraceful’ does not apply to the Russians and Vladimir Putin?

Trump continues to accuse the media of being the ‘enemy of the people’. The media is, in fact, the only institution that is doing any revealing of this conspiracy, with the possible exception of Mueller’s investigative unit, but those findings remain to be revealed. Trump insults the media constantly, he relentlessly and vociferously demands that people who criticize him be locked up: Clinton, Comey, McCabe, various judges, and anyone else who raises his ire. That kind of behavior is disturbingly similar to what the Russians do in their own country.

One could almost believe that all of this has come about without the active participation of the major players in the Republican party. However, what if they are all complicit and actually knew what the plan was, and are bent on exercising this slow rolling takeover of our government….all the while screaming, “No collusion, no obstruction, blah blah blah!”

What roles are McConnell and Ryan playing? Why are all the Republicans silent about what is happening to the rule of law and the truth? Think about it…..!

The most powerful tool we have to fight this takeover of our system of government and our democratic society built on respect for the truth and the rule of law is the vote. Each one of you must identify what your own true values are. It is your responsibility to find people that agree with your world-view and value system and support them this fall. It is only through our ability to elect like minded patriots to Congress that we can reverse this path we are on and bring back to full measure the institutional values our country was founded on.

If we don’t manage to change this slide toward autocracy, we will continue to diminish as a global example of freedom and democracy. America will not be a pretty place to live anymore…..

American Truth

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When the Founding Fathers gathered in Philadelphia after the American Revolution to try to conjure up a formula for the new United States of America, it is hard to imagine the size of the challenge they faced.  They had just been through a war and finally had shed the miserable cloak of tyranny from England.  They were embarking on a quest for a blueprint to insure that they and their fellow citizens would not find themselves at the mercy of another monarchy or tyrant.  They were grappling with incredibly divergent ideas about stability and longevity for the new republic.

Fortunately for us, they focused on Truth as being the central lynchpin of the new political mechanism.  Starting with truth, they layered, like an onion, the various sentences and paragraphs, enshrining the pursuit of truth and rule of law as ideals that would become our Constitution.  Imagine the arguments, interminable debate and ultimate compromise that resulted in a remarkable document that has guided our actions as a country for over 200 years.

What they couldn’t possibly have realized was the brilliance of the result.  They had no idea whether it would work or falter.  There was no history, no example that predicted success.

Fast Forward 242 years…..

We are living through our own chapter in the evolving experiment we call democracy.  Our country has changed, evolved and become something the Founding Fathers could not have imagined 242 years ago, and yet we are still clutching to a document and an ideal that we believe will be our salvation.  Why?  Because it has always been there to save us.  It is our foundation, and we all believe in it’s central lynchpin…..The Truth.  Face it….democracy cannot exist without the truth.

So what we are witnessing every day is the clash of that central lynchpin with a force that is attempting to corrupt it.  Those battles have always been there during our history, but this time the battle seems more existential.

As Americans, we have taken for granted that we believed in our ideal, that we are one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.  It is our bedrock belief.  We never expected to be testing that ideal in the way we are currently having to grapple with the situation we face today in America.  What we are witnessing everyday is the messy, bloody battle that is the hallmark of democracy…a minute by minute conflagration between the purity of truth and the rot of corruption.

And the end result, I believe, will be the triumph of Truth and the Rule of Law.  You can actually see the beginnings of our collective consciousness coming to the realization that what we have been enduring for the past two years is perhaps one of the largest battles we have ever fought on this battleground.

The Trump administration ushered in an amplified era of lies and deception and we weren’t paying attention as guardians of our Constitution.  And it didn’t just suddenly happen two years ago.  We have been on this slide for several decades as greed and self-interest got the upper hand in our legislative machinery.  Somehow the agents of corruption slipped in, bringing all the deplorable characters that are their sycophantic minions with them.  Like a cancer that takes root, or a tapeworm that latches onto its host, they found their way into the body politic bloodstream and are attempting to corrupt the integrity of the machine so carefully constructed by our forefathers.  They will ultimately fail.  You can see signs of it appearing in so many ways:

--The steadfastness of the Special Counsel

--The awakening of the populace and increasing size of the Blue Wave developing on the electoral horizon

--The recent polls showing that the majority of Americans want Mueller’s probe to continue

--The increasing mania of the Trumpists as the evidence grows concerning obstruction of justice and the collusion with Russia.

--The daily hysteria from the White House, with louder and more disgusting vitriol every day.

--The emerging facts about Michael Cohen and all of Trump's and his shenanigans.

All these signs and so many more that are beginning to be seen by all of us, should give us confidence and hope that the process of vetting our true ideals according to our Constitution is working.  It is messy and causes incredible anxiety, but the purity of Truth and our belief in the rule of law will ultimately be America’s salvation.

Thank You Dr. Guerra!

Last Tuesday I became bionic.  I had a complete shoulder replacement implant replacing my arthritic right shoulder which I injured over 20 years ago.  At that time, I underwent arthroscopic surgery and had what is called a ‘slap’ repair which involved literally hammering in place a tack to re-attach the tendon that had been ripped off the bone in a fall. The repair was good for about 5 years and then progressive degenerative arthritis stole my mobility over the ensuing years.  Also my shoulder caused me constant pain, which only got worse year after year.

Eventually the only solution was to replace the joint, which I avoided for years until the pain became constant and unrelenting.  So, less than a week ago I underwent the surgery even though the concept of it was abhorrent to me.

I was pleasantly surprised.

As you might imagine, typing is a bit difficult since I only have limited use of my right arm, but let me soldier through to extoll the miracle of todays orthopedic surgical techniques.

My brilliant surgeon, Dr. James Guerra, sports medicine director at Florida Gulf Coast University has perfected the ideal protocol for shoulder replacement.  He is leading the design team at Arthrex, one of the countries pre-eminent producers of artificial joints and instrumentation.  These engineers have brilliantly designed my implants to mimic the actions and range of motion of the shoulder joint, one of the most complex joints in the body.

My experience at the hospital was amazingly smooth.  I arrived at the hospital about 7am and within 20 minutes I had been admitted, washed, disinfected and prepped with a painlessly administered IV.  Every tech I came in contact with immediately examined my wristband to confirm who I was and then questioned me repeatedly about my birthdate.  It was reassuring that they wanted to make sure who I was and which shoulder was getting replaced!

After about another 20 minute of this, my ‘bartender’ arrived and without fanfare, versed took me to a peaceful place far from where my new companions were working on me.  That is that last I remember until I awoke in the recovery room, wondering when I was going in for surgery!  These docs have mastered the pain protocol.  They gave me a 36 hour nerve block shot to deaden my right shoulder and arm so when I awoke, I was completely comfortable with no discernable pain at all!

After about an hour of dozing off and on, they took me to a private room where the nurses hovered over me and made me comfortable.  Within an hour or two I was pretty well conscious, just tired.  Slept on an off all afternoon and had a small bite to eat about 6pm.  Made it through the night, arising every hour or so to march around the nurses station to incite my bladder to start working again.  Finally about 6am in the morning, it obliged me, thank God.  I was probably a mere 15 minutes from having to face the catheter monster.  I think it finally scared me into rousting my sphincter from it’s refusal to answer my prodding.  I think that was the worst part of the whole experience.

Meanwhile, by 9am, I was checked out of the hospital, sent home with drugs and told to expect almost daily visits from home nursing and home physical therapy.  So stem to stern my surgical experience lasted only 26 hours, a true miracle for something so major.

So here I am exactly one week post op and still not a shred of pain!  The strongest pain relief I sought were two Tylenol last Friday.  That’s it!

Now clearly, I am facing 10 weeks of PT that is not going to be a picnic, but the horrid arthritic pain I had been enduring is gone!  I am wearing a sling/brace for another three weeks which reduces any chance of disturbing the healing, but I am already experiencing increased range of motion and mental relief at seeing this experience in the rear view mirror!

So kudos for science!  The next 20 years of my life will at least be pain free and more mobile because of the brilliance of my docs and the engineers that support them!  For those of you who need a better frame of reference for this procedure, here is a pic of the ‘after’ taken yesterday.

Freedom of the Press

I was always under the assumption that a journalist is a person who is a curious independent soul who investigates the who, what, where, when and why of a news story.  That was the mantra I learned from my first day in J-school at the University of Florida.  It was the journalist’s creed to find the truth and speak the truth in an unbiased way.

Our democracy has depended on the ‘Fourth Estate’ to be the voice that speaks to power.  In times when politicians and those who want to influence public opinion and behavior work hard to make us believe a particular point of view, the journalist has been the ‘vox populi’ that exposed corruption and shined the light of veracity on any issue that was of public importance.  An independent press has been the backbone of our democracy. 

There is no better example of the degrading of that concept than what is happening today in the age of Trump.

While Trump rages on and on about the ‘fake news’ and demeans the media by calling them the ‘enemy of the people’, those of us who are journalists know what he is attempting to do.  Our mission becomes more important and vital to the survival of our free society and the rule of law.  His attempts to shape current events by elevating the half-truths and outright lies, especially promoted by the Fox News organization, only redouble the efforts of a free press to speak truth to power.

Now comes a more insidious threat to our democracy.  The Sinclair Broadcast Group, a collection of stations owned by the family of Julian Sinclair Smith is the largest station group in the country with over 200 stations owned in over 100 markets covering over 40% of the country.  The company has always expressed a conservative bent, supporting Trump during the 2016 campaign.  Sinclair is also trying to increase its holdings and stations to reach more and more of our population.  In its effort to buy more stations it is doing the Trump administration’s conceptual and political bidding to expedite its acquisition approvals by the FCC.

Sinclair often mandates its stations to air specific reports, segments, and editorials, referred to as "must-runs". The practice has been criticized by some of Sinclair's stations' news staff due to the viewpoints they propagate.  In April 2017, Sinclair announced it had hired Boris Epshteyn, who was briefly the White House assistant communications director for surrogate operations for the Trump administration, and a senior advisor of Donald Trump's presidential campaign, as chief political analyst.  All Sinclair stations are required to air Mr. Epshteyn's commentary nine times per week.  This month Sinclair ordered its stations to deliver an "anchor-delivered journalistic responsibility message" during their newscasts. The wording of the mandated script was criticized by some station news staff and outside pundits for its discussion of "fake news", with some critics arguing that the message used similar language and rhetoric to that of Donald Trump.  Here is a video showing how the on-air ‘journalists’ were mandated to parrot the script supplied to them by the management of the network:

The segment ends with the clarion call, “This is extremely dangerous to our democracy!”  No kidding!

This is just another glimmer of the kind of creeping authoritarianism that is threatening our democratic experiment in America.  The effort to corrupt the tenets of a free press by Sinclair is made even worse by the complicity of the on-air journalists!  For the most part the people in the previous video example are supposed to be seasoned journalists.  Where is their integrity?  How is it that they can justify this blind acceptance of a policy that is reminiscent of state media control practiced by countries like Russia??  It is a sad consequence of the constant barrage of accusations against the free media promoted by the Trump administration, Fox News, and now Sinclair Broadcasting.  Moreover it is a frightening abandonment of the integrity these individuals are supposed to live their professional lives by.  I am really surprised that not one of these people values a free press more than their paycheck.  I can forgive the young first timers, but the veterans should be ashamed of themselves.

The more we surrender our minds to those who do not honor and respect the truth, the closer we careen toward the abyss of autocracy.

If you are a watcher of any of the Sinclair stations, I would urge you to not patronize their sponsors and call them out for their desertion of perhaps one of our most cherished traditions….freedom of the press!