Sherry Chandler

Lexington, Kentucky offers writers a tremendous resource in the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, so it is with pleasure that I read in the Lexington Herald-Leader that the Center has been successful in its fund-raising campaign:

Even in these tough economic times as many non-profits are struggling, Lexington’s Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning is wrapping up a $1 million fund-raising campaign.

From Eagle Scouts who took on fund-raising as a project, to well-heeled philanthropists who wrote big checks, the fund-raising effort rallied some 400 community donors to save the center, which provides a variety of reading, writing and job-skills classes in a historic building by Gratz Park.

A few years ago things looked grim.

In 2003, then-Mayor Teresa Isaac slashed the budget of the literacy center, cutting the city’s $250,000 annual contribution. Since its inception in 1992, the center had operated as a “satellite” agency to the city, with the government supplying nearly all of its funding. The city also handled paying the center’s bills and meeting payroll. The announcement about funding cuts was made in April. The doors were set to close in June.

But petitions were circulated, letters were written and some 500 people rallied in support of the center, and a compromise was struck.

I am pleased to say that I took part in that original rally to save the Carnegie Center, one of the few successful events of its kind I’ve ever been involved with.

I have learned most of what I know about how to write in courses at the Carnegie Center and I am involved in a writing group that meets in one of its rooms, so I am more grateful than I can say to all those who have worked so hard to keep this great resource alive.

Via the Global Sociology Blog, a tale of personal courage and the importance of the rule of international law:

A West African court has found Niger’s government guilty of failing to protect a woman from slavery in a landmark case for the region.

The court found in favour of Hadijatou Mani, who says she was sold aged 12 and made to work for 10 years.

A judge ordered the government - which says it has done all it can to eradicate slavery - to pay Ms Mani 10m CFA francs (£12,430; $19,750).

Despite being outlawed, slavery also persists in other West African states.

“I am very thankful for this decision. It was very difficult to challenge my former master and to speak out when people see you as nothing more than a slave,” Ms Mani said.

“With the compensation I will be able to build a house, raise animals and farm land to support my family. I will also be able to send my children to school so they can have the education I was never allowed.”

Mossi Boubacar, a lawyer for Niger’s government, told Reuters news agency that the government would respect the court’s decision.

BBC West Africa correspondent Will Ross says the ruling is embarrassing for the government of Niger and sends a strong message that it needs to do more to implement the law and end slavery.

It could also have huge consequences for thousands of other people who have been kept in conditions of slavery across the region, he says.

Read this whole BBC report to learn more of Ms Mani’s story. It’s pretty horrifying.

I watched Walter Hill’s The Long Riders (1980) as part of my quest to track down all of Ry Cooder’s soundtrack work. I was not disappointed. Although the music doesn’t have the dominating role it has in Wim Winders’s 1984 Paris, Texas, it is an important element in the film, certainly deserving of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award it received for Best Music.

Cooder has long been interested in roots music and he gets to strut his stuff here, using all kinds of instrumentations and a variety of period musical styles. The music dominates in The Long Riders moreso than it does in the 1981 Hill/Cooder collaboration Southern Comfort where the last ten minutes or so are given over to a bayou barbecue with Cajun music and dancing. Cooder himself makes an uncredited appearance as one of the many musicians in Long Riders. There is also an intriguingly raunchy sounding version of “The Girl I Left Behind Me” performed by Keith (vocal) and Robert Carradine (mouth harp) that doesn’t make the sound track CD. I regret that.

The Long Riders is often breathtakingly beautiful. The review at DVD Times describes it this way:

However, to some extent, the film is more about a time and a place than about the specific characters or events. The period of post-War reconstruction is beautifully evoked in Ric Waite’s cinematography - some scenes are so beautiful they take the breath away, especially a couple of smokey night moments - and the production is precise and atmospheric without being too fussy, The elegaic tone of the film is set during the opening credits as the Long Riders gallop in slow motion against the expansive sky. Ry Cooder’s lovely music score is an important aspect of this too.

I would agree with this assessment. I had infant twins when this movie was released and about all I remember about it was the hoopla (and some sneering) about its using real-life brothers to play outlaw brothers (see Wikipedia for details). And it is true, as the DVD Times reviewer says, that James Keach doesn’t bring a lot of charisma or nuance to the central role of Jesse James, though his cold stoicism is sometimes effective, especially as a foil against David Carradine’s more audacious and voluble Cole Younger. (Carradine gets top billing.)

But the film isn’t really about these characters. They are hard-bitten and doomed from the start. In the words of the historical Cole Younger (spoken by David Carradine in the film):

“We tried a desperate game and lost. But we are rough men used to rough ways, and we will abide by the consequences.”

(Note: Cole Younger lived until 1916. He wrote a memoir, lectured, and toured with Frank James [d. 1915] in the The Cole Younger and Frank James Wild West Company. The movie pursues a theme of friendship between Cole and Frank that persists though it is sometimes topped by blood loyalty. I notice, too, that no matter how much these Rebel outlaws may fall out among themselves, they are always united in their contempt for the Yankee Pinkertons who are their nemesis.)

To turn once again to the DVD Times review:

The film is also, crucially, about the Western genre itself and particularly, I would argue, about the revisionist Westerns of Peckinpah. We get several of Sam’s favourite themes; betrayal by old friends; ties of blood and land; an elegaic sense of loss; the yearning for something better than violence and death; and even specific scenes such as the young admirer dying by mistake and the hold-up in a barn (both scenes from Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, the last word on Western myth). Hill’s tone is one of regret for the passing of something beautiful due to the civil war - echoing Clint Eastwood’s line in Josey Wales; “I guess we all died a little in that damn war.” An awareness of what has been lost is constantly present in the film, notably the scene in the whorehouse where Clell Miller forces the band to play “I’m a Good Old Rebel” rather than “Battle Cry of Freedom”. There’s a horrible sense of inevitability too, as if Jesse’s dream of settling down to become a farmer is doomed from the start, just as Pike Bishop’s Mexican retirement is fated never to be in The Wild Bunch.

Though I was curious about the music, I had not expected to like this movie. I expected it to be as violent as it is, and I am not fond of violence as entertainment. What I had not expected was that the film would be as beautiful as it is. Not in the slow-motion ballets of violence a la Peckinpah but in the incidental shots of, say, the slender grace in horses’ legs as they emerge from heavy woods.

See my take on Southern Comfort and Paris, Texas. See The Long Riders trailer.

From The Progressive:

The American Civil Liberties Union is raising questions about why the Pentagon has assigned a fighting unit to the United States itself.

On October 1, the Northern Command (NorthCom), for the first time ever, got its own dedicated Army force.

And not just any force. The unit the Pentagon assigned to NorthCom is

the 3rd Infantry, First Brigade Combat Team, which has spent three of the last five years in Iraq. One of its specialties is counterinsurgency.

“This is a radical departure from separation of civilian law enforcement and military authority and could, quite possibly, represent a violation of law,” said Mike German, ACLU national security policy counsel. “Our Founding Fathers understood the threat that a standing army could pose to American liberty.”

German also noted that Congress has “passed statutory protections to ensure that the Army could not be turned against the American people,” he said in the ACLU’s press release.

“The erosion of these protections should concern every American,” German said.

The ACLU is seeking documents from the Justice Department, the Pentagon, and Homeland Security that “authorize the deployment of military troops for domestic purposes.”

Change comes from the bottom.

At YouTube

Link via The Politico

__________
Update: In Fine Print, a Proliferation of Large Donors :

Much of the attention on the record amounts of money coursing through the presidential race this year, including in Senator Barack Obama’s announcement on Sunday of his $150 million fund-raising haul in September, has focused on the explosion of small donors.

But there has been another proliferation on the national fund-raising landscape that was not fully apparent until the latest campaign finance reports were filed last week: people who have given tens of thousands of dollars at a time to help the candidates.

Enabled by the fine print in campaign finance laws, they have written checks that far exceed normal individual contribution limits to candidates, to joint fund-raising committees that benefit the candidates as well as their respective parties.

Many of these large donors come from industries with interests in Washington. A New York Times analysis of donors who wrote checks of $25,000 or more to the candidates’ main joint fund-raising committees found, for example, the biggest portion of money for both candidates came from the securities and investments industry, including executives at various firms embroiled in the recent financial crisis like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG.

The joint fund-raising committees have been utilized far more heavily this presidential election than in the past. Mr. Obama’s campaign has leaned on wealthy benefactors to contribute up to $33,100 at a time to complement his army of small donors over the Internet as he bypassed public financing for the general election. More than 600 donors contributed $25,000 or more to him in September alone, roughly three times the number who did the same for Senator John McCain.

And Mr. McCain’s campaign, which had not disclosed most of these donors until last week, has taken the concept to new levels, encouraging deep-pocketed supporters to write checks of more than $70,000, by adding state parties as beneficiaries of his fund-raising.

All told, each candidate has had about 2,000 people give $25,000 or more to his various joint fund-raising committees through September.

“What we’re seeing is an emphasis on the high-end check that we have not seen since the days of soft money,” said Anthony J. Corrado Jr., a campaign finance expert at Colby College in Maine.

Interesting revelations in a race between a man who says he’s running a different kind of campaign fueld by small donors and a man who was co-author of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Bill.

Read the rest for details, which may be significant.

Meanwhile, the man who claims money is free speech, Mitch McConnell, is running only 4 points ahead of his Democratic challenger, Bruce Lunsford, according to the latest KOS poll. [Update: Survey USA's latest poll says it's tied 48/48.] McConnell ranks 19th in the U.S. Senate for personal wealth and his campaign coffers are equally fat, so he can afford to buy obscene amounts of free speech. Most of it has been pretty hateful. He learned well from the Bushes.

It has been said that the Clinton economy floated all boats. If the Bush economy sinks a few, including McConnell’s, well, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good.

Avedon says Katie Couric asked Hillary Clinton a creepy question: “Why do you think Sarah Palin has an action figure and you have a nutcracker?”

But Lance says the question is more telling than creepy.

I do think the question was a waste of time, under the circumstances. There was no way Clinton was going to answer it seriously. She was there to talk up Barack Obama’s performance in the debate and if there’s one thing Hillary Clinton is good at it’s staying on point.

But under other circumstances it could be an interesting and important question and I’d like to hear Clinton answer it. Couric might want to ask it again a decade or two down the road when Clinton’s coming to the end of her political career and the focus of an interview can be Hillary herself as a person and a personality and a personage exiting the public stage and entering the history books, when her feelings matter as much as her actions.

Because the way I took the question it was a playful way of asking why does one strong, intelligent, ambitious woman get treated by the Media and half the public as a castrating shrew and another embraced as warm, safe, lovable, and cuddly?

Put another way, why is Hillary Clinton hated and vilified and feared for doing what other politicians do as a matter of course?

…

The nutcracker is ugly but ridiculous and ultimately without power or threat. The action figure—the doll—isn’t as vicious, but it’s far from flattering because it too is ultimately without power. Both the nutcracker and the doll reduce the women in question to toys and jokes.

I urge you to read all of this post. It’s astute, and I’d like to hug him for this part, especially given that my husband likes to talk fondly about my own “Hillary cackle:”

So Couric might as well have saved the second question for another day.

Still, I’m glad she asked it.

It gave Clinton an opportunity to do something she does even better than stay on point.

Laugh.

But then I like her laugh.

We know what other people think of it. And we know what that means.

But after I read Lance’s posts, in one of those odd little serendipity things that happen from time to time, I decided to go have a look at some Powell’s book reviews that have been sitting in my in-box for well over a year waiting for me to get time to read them. And the one I happened to open was Christine Stansell’s review, originially in The New Republic, of Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President (in 1884). It begins like this:

Women’s biographies are the pre-eminent form of popular women’s history, and the only nonfiction books that female readers will dependably buy. In the past forty years, the genre has flourished, nourished by an unending curiosity about women’s lives that feminism generates. Famous men’s wives and sisters turn out to have amazing stories of their own (Vera Nabokov, Alice James, Zelda Fitzgerald). Sagas of sisters, spun from strands of rivalry and adoration, are mesmerizing (the Peabodys, the Mitfords). Writers, their struggles for art and life in equal measure inevitably complicated by their sex, are an endless store of plots (Virginia Woolf, Margaret Fuller, Colette). Family relations, marriage, motherhood, isolation, sex, social opprobrium, anger, friendship, and creativity: all are explored in the study of such women’s lives.

The same cannot be said about political power. Biographies of Jane Addams and Eleanor Roosevelt illuminate the achievements of women at the edges of formal politics. Of those who wielded institutional power, only Eleanor Rathbone, one of Britain’s first female members of Parliament, has merited a significant book. True, there are any number of biographies of queens and aristocrats who practiced politics in oblique and unusual ways; and true, there are many studies of women in protest politics, beginning with the great feminists of the nineteenth century (Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Stanton, Angelina and Sarah Grimké) and running through the civil rights movement (Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer). But it is undeniable that most biographies of women concern love, creativity, and the search for self, rather than ambition and the scramble for the nomination.

The obvious reason is that women have been barred from politics for so long that there are few figures of importance to observe and to study. Yet the absence of biography redoubles the difficulties in understanding the lives of those women who have gone into politics. From a distance, they seem a little dull. It is easier to haul them back into the familiar plots of modern womanhood — thwarted ambition, struggle for self-esteem — than to imagine what they mostly do and mostly care about: winning elections, lining up votes, passing bills, making policy.

This long and informative review also deserves to be read in full. Lockwood seems, in some ways, quite Clintonesque (and indeed it is interesting to see the way this essay addresses the Clinton candidacy, in that it was written before the primary and all the sexism and misogyny used against Clinton):

A story of Lockwood’s disappointments and sorrows winds through the book, but Norgren gives it short shrift. It wasn’t the woman’s nature to dwell on sadness. She struggled for money most of her life, saw the small fortune in fees she won in the Cherokee case dissolve in legal action with the clients, and lost both her children. At eighty-four, she also lost her home — then, as now, a premier measure of dignity for an aging woman. Yet she remained nonplussed: involved in world affairs, interested in younger friends, indifferent to the handicap of old age, and very proud of herself. At eighty-six she regaled reporters with the story of her feats. She died shortly after, in 1916.

Norgren has the great discernment to see Lockwood’s life as large and anticipatory rather than eccentric and half-realized.

The review also provides some insight into the split between African-American men and the suffragists:

The prewar movement, comprising men and women whose feminism was born of deep anti-slavery commitments, had gone into abeyance during the Civil War. It revived in the mid-1860s, only to split bitterly over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which guaranteed full citizenship and voting rights to the freedmen but not to the freedwomen, or to any other women. One group of suffragists endorsed the Republican Party’s judgment that the freedmen’s situation was so dire that it required immediate action, and that an attempt to institute universal suffrage would doom the entire enterprise. The other group, led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, saw universal manhood suffrage as the Republicans’ capitulation to exigency and a betrayal of democratic principle. They denounced their old Republican allies and demanded a Sixteenth Amendment to enfranchise women.

And it also reminds me that I wanted to draw your attention to this radio diary at All Things Considered of Victoria Claflin Woodhull, the first woman to run for president (in 1872), of whom Stansell says:

The charismatic, scandalous Victoria Woodhull, the bad girl of women’s suffrage, had entered the presidential race in 1872, running on the imaginary ticket of the People’s Party (sprung unbidden from the mind of Woodhull). But she staged her bid as an outré performance piece, a one-woman show.

and also Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to run for president (in 1972).

I’ll close this post with Stansell’s closing paragraph, written in April, 2007:

In 1914, when Lockwood was eighty-four years old and still lacked the right to vote, she spoke to reporters about American women’s political prospects. She was typically optimistic and even-handed. Women would be elected to the Senate and the House, she predicted with confidence. (In fact, Jeannette Rankin’s election to the House from Wyoming was only three years away.) As for president, that, too, was within reach. “If [a woman] demonstrates that she is fitted to be president she will some day occupy the White House. It will be entirely on her own merits, however. No movement can place her there simply because she is a woman.” Is Hillary Clinton “fitted to be president”? The question will be answered over the next year, as she will be scrutinized for “her own merits.” But whatever voters decide, we owe her, and Nancy Pelosi, and the other female pols across the spectrum gratitude for devising a new plot. The biographies of these women will be composed of the workaday, disenchanted materials of political lives — perseverance, competence, canniness, and, yes, a facility for the quick grab — that Belva Lockwood cultivated and prized.

Where will nutcrackers fit in? Time will tell, I guess.

A friend has written to take me to task for having laid our country’s failing public education system strictly at the feet of conservatives. This correspondent reminds me that liberals should bear their share of the blame.

S/he points out that affluent parents of both political parties are guilty of abandoning public education, pulling their children out into private schools and leaving public schools without “the most vested voice, that of involved, educated parents at the local level.” I agree with this wholeheartedly and have addressed that question here. It’s all part of what Bill Bishop calls The Big Sort.

My friend goes on to point out that, on the subject of subjects such as American History, conservatives have long blamed liberals’ multi-culturalism for the fact that our children now know more about George Washington Carver than they do about George Washington (so to speak). This is an argument that’s been around at least since Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind was published in 1987. I really don’t have any facts or figures with which to counter it but I oppose it on principle. In a way, it was multi-culturalism that caused us to send our children to public school, because we didn’t want to raise our children in an (almost literal) ivory tower. And whatever our failings as a parent, we have raised very tolerant children and I’m proud of them for it.

Again I refer you to The Big Sort.

A third point my friend raised was that of protecting children from violence. It is one of the saddest truths about our schools that they have become scenes of mass murder and that they have become, some of them, as closely guarded as prisons, so much so that it seems to me that the protection is as bad as the danger. (You all know I hate fences.) And then there is the random authoritarian violence of drug-sniffing dogs and searches for weapons. I have no idea what to do about these things.

So while I don’t agree with every point my friend made, I think the major fault s/he caught me out in was indulging in polarized thinking. I have sworn off the easy formulas — if it’s bad it must be Republican, if it’s good it must be Democratic. Turns out that’s as hard as swearing off cigarettes.

__________

And speaking of misconceptions about education in post-partisan America, Morning Edition visited Jakarta to dispell some misconceptions about Barack Obama’s education there:

At the school Obama attended in the Menteng district of Jakarta, a security guard named Adang says he is a little tired of the reporters who come expecting to find an Islamic boarding school and evidence of Obama’s secret Muslim identity — an image encouraged by some of Obama’s political opponents in the United States.

It’s not true, says Adang, who goes by one name. He points to Obama’s third- and fourth-grade classrooms and says patiently that this is not an Islamic school.

“Yes, we have a mosque,” he says, but at prayer time there are rooms for Christians and Buddhists to pray in, too. Public School No. 1 Menteng is actually among the city’s finest, in one of Jakarta’s most exclusive neighborhoods and home to many of Indonesia’s business and political elite.

Unfortunately, this piece does nothing to dispel the notion that Islamic school = terrorist training ground. Words like “exclusive” and “elite” strike me not so much as proof that the school isn’t Islamic as that we have an inherent prejudice against all that is Arab, and by association, Muslim. Take for example, John McCain’s now infamous recent disclaimer when a woman in his crowd asked him whether Obama is an Arab:

No ma’am, no ma’am. He’s a decent family man, citizen …

Implying, of course, that one can’t be an Arab or a Muslim and still be a decent family man. Now I know that this was a slip of the tongue, but it was telling.

My answer to that question “Is Obama a Muslim?” has been all along the same as Campbell Brown’s:

So what if Obama was Arab or Muslim? So what if John McCain was Arab or Muslim? Would it matter?

When did that become a disqualifier for higher office in our country? When did Arab and Muslim become dirty words? The equivalent of dishonorable or radical?

Whenever this gets raised, the implication is that there is something wrong with being an Arab-American or a Muslim. And the media is complicit here, too.

We’ve all been too quick to accept the idea that calling someone Muslim is a slur.

Islam is the religion of a great many people who are not Arabs. A great many Arabs are not terrorists.

By the way, here’s the NYTimes profile of the man behind the whispers and e-mails that circulate and circulate. He’s quite a piece of work.

From Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (Current Books, 1949):

Poetry will not answer these needs. It is art; it imagines and makes, and give you the imaginings. Because you have imagined love, you have not loved; merely because you have imagined brotherhood, you have not made brotherhood. You may feel as though you had, but you have not. You are going to have to use that imagining as you best can, by building it into yourself, or you will be left with nothing but illusion.

Art is action, but it does not cause action: rather, it prepares us for thought.

Art is intellectual, but it does not cause thought: rather it prepares us for thought.

Art is not a world, but a knowing of the world. Art prepares us.

Art is practised by the artist and the audience. It is not a means to an end, unless that end is the total imaginative experience.

That experience will have meaning. It will apply to your life; and it is more than likely to lead you to thought or action, that is, you are likely to want to go further into the world, further into yourself, toward further experience.

__________
Don’t forget Writing Peace and Justice, a reading tonight by the Affrilachian Poets, 6:30 p.m. Carnegie Center; 251 West Second Street; Lexington. No Charge — All Are Welcome.

Readers include Nikky Finney, Frank X Walker, Ricardo Nazario Colon, Mitchell L.H. Douglas, Jude McPherson, Bianca Spriggs, with emcee Marta Miranda.

This is an impressive program. All these folks are amazing poets and wonderful readers.

And there’s free food.

So don’t miss it.

After reading, in Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side, about the legal smoke screen John Yoo, David Addington, et al. puffed out of various obscene orifices to provide cover for the Bush administration to indulge in behaviors that any sane person could see were not only illegal and unconstitutional, but also morally reprehensible, it is heartening to read this report in the day’s NYTimes:

WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Bush administration to release 17 detainees at Guantánamo Bay by the end of the week, the first such ruling in nearly seven years of legal disputes over the administration’s detention policies.

The judge, Ricardo M. Urbina of Federal District Court, ordered that the 17 men be brought to his courtroom on Friday from the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they have been held since 2002. He indicated that he would release the men, members of the restive Uighur Muslim minority in western China, into the care of supporters in the United States, initially in the Washington area.

“I think the moment has arrived for the court to shine the light of constitutionality on the reasons for detention,” Judge Urbina said.

Amen! Amen! and again Amen!

It’s called habeas corpus. Produce the defendants.

At a time when Suburban Guerrilla is speculating about a coup like the one planned against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934, I don’t like to see articles like this:

Senator Patrick Leahy is concerned about the Pentagon’s decision to designate an Army unit to Northern Command.

On October 1, the Pentagon, for the first time ever, dedicated an Army force specifically to NorthCom, which is in charge of securing not some foreign region but the United States of America.

The unit it assigned is the 3rd Infantry, First Brigade Combat Team, which has spent three of the last five years in Iraq. It was one of the first units to get to Baghdad, and it was active in retaking and patrolling Fallujah. One of its specialties is counterinsurgency.

This marks a change for NorthCom, which was established on October 1, 2002. Its website still says it “has few permanently assigned forces,” and that “the command is assigned forces whenever necessary to execute missions, as ordered by the President and the Secretary of Defense.”

Leahy “asked for a briefing from his staff” on this development and “wants to monitor the situation,” an aide to Leahy said.

Leahy was instrumental in getting Congress to repeal the “Insurrection Act Rider” in the 2006 defense appropriations bill. That rider had given the President sweeping power to use military troops in ways contrary to the Insurrection Act and Posse Comitatus Act. The rider authorized the President to have troops patrol our streets in response to disasters, epidemics, and any “condition” he might cite.

Leahy said last December that this rider “made it easier for the President to take over the Guard and to declare martial law.” In a Senate statement on April 24, 2007, he cautioned against inserting the military “into domestic situations.” As he put it: “One of the distinguishing characteristics of the United States is that we do not use the military to patrol our communities and neighborhoods.” A few months before that, he warned that we must ensure that “the military is not used in a way that offends and endangers some of our most cherished values and liberties.”

The repeal of the rider was signed by Bush on January 28, though Amy Goodman reports that “Bush attached a signing statement that he did not feel bound by the repeal.”

Patrick Leahy is not some winger kook.

And Bush’s signing statements are an outrage against the rule of law.

Most of the Bush administration has been an outrage against the rule of law.

Matthew Rothschild, author of this article, concludes like this:

The Pentagon’s decision to dedicate the First Brigade Combat Team to NorthCom has raised alarms, especially in the context of the current economic crisis. In Bush’s National Security Presidential Directive 51, he lays out his authority in the event of a catastrophic emergency. In such an emergency, “the President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government” and will coordinate with state, local, and tribal governments, along with private sector owners of infrastructure.

NSPD 51 defines a catastrophic emergency as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government function.”

Notice the use of the word “or” above. In our current circumstances, it might be more relevant to read the definition this way: “any incident . . . that results in extraordinary levels of . . . disruption severely affecting the U.S. . . . economy.”

President Bush could declare a catastrophic emergency today. And he’d have the 3rd Infantry, First Brigade Combat Team, well trained from its years patrolling Iraq, at his disposal here at home.

Speculation about a coup may be paranoid thinking brought on by eight years of a lawless government, but to station an army on our own soil at the disposal of any president, any president, is asking for trouble.

Consider the prospect of Sarah Palin with a domestic army at her command. You betcha!

In response to Rosalie’s comment, I have reconsidered this last remark. It was a cheap shot, and it violates my own standards: of not demonizing Sarah Palin or indulging in sexist attacks. I saw that done to the most accomplished woman politician of our time and I don’t want to do it myself to another of whatever stature.

And for that matter, it amounts to using scare tactics, which I despise. (Same as demonizing, I guess.)

When my in-box is flooded with Palin attacks, it’s difficult not to succumb, to go along. So it may also work for all those folk bombarded with “Obama is a Muslim.”

While it is easy for one of my convictions to view Palin as the worst case — in effect, putting her in office as Rosalie says — the truth is that Obama is also an unknown here. The President of the United States of America has an obscene amount of power. I do not want McCain, Palin, Obama, Biden, McKinney, Nader, or Ron Paul to have command of a standing army within our borders.