A Summer to Simmer

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Charles M. Blow

1 more image

By CHARLES M. BLOW

Published: May 21, 2011

Wow. What a week.

This week we lurched back and forth between the prurient and philosophical, between personal egos and our national ethos, between Schwarzenegger and Strauss-Kahn and President Obama and his considered-but-contentious vision of a new Middle East.

But, interestingly enough, this week's big news, both high and low, has no more legs than last week's fake furor over a rapper reciting poetry at the White House or the week Osama bin Laden was killed in a Pakistani safe house.

The one true constant in this country for the foreseeable future, and the issue that'll likely consume the summer, is the economy. As a Gallup poll reported earlier this week, "Three in four Americans name some type of economic issue as the 'most important problem' facing the country today - the highest net mentions of the economy in two years." Only 4 percent each mentioned "ethics/moral/religious/family decline; dishonesty" or "wars/war (nonspecific)/fear of war."

For the poor and unemployed struggling to land a job and provide some family security, the sexual exploits of rich sexagenarians may provide a moment of socio-economic schadenfreude, but it'll do nothing to salve the long-running, underlying angst.

For the powerless and voiceless making choices between bills and food, articulating a more coherent North African and Mideast policy that doesn't sacrifice our moral standing to our strategic interests may feed the soul, but not the stomach.

For far too many Americans, this will not be a summer for the silly or even democratic existentialism. This will be yet another summer to simmer, yet another summer to wonder when the recovery that now wafts freely between the Temples of Greed on Wall Street will make its way to the half-barren bungalows on Main Street, yet another summer to see just how little regard "job creators" - a favorite Republican term of art for the G.O.P.'s corporate Geppettos - have for the American people who built this country.

Take these recent examples:

As The New York Times reported last Friday, health insurers are reporting record profits for the third year in a row as people postpone or forgo care. Yet the insurance companies are still pressing for higher premiums.

And who among the insured is cutting back on needed health care? Many doing so are seriously ill.

According to a July 2009 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation entitled "Health Care and the Middle Class: More Cost and Less Coverage": "Nonelderly adults with medical debt are almost twice as likely to have an ongoing or serious health problem compared to others with private coverage. Unfortunately, the privately insured who have medical debt are also as likely as the uninsured to postpone care, skip recommended tests and treatments and not fill drug prescriptions - any of which can lead to more serious illness and even disability, which are difficult and costly to treat."

In short, we as a country may pay for these companies' profits later with a sicker population.

Also last week at a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee about oil subsidies, John Watson, C.E.O. of Chevron - which reported last month that first-quarter net income rose 36 percent from the same period last year to $6.21 billion - said that "I don't think American people want shared sacrifice. I think they want shared prosperity." The problem is, Mr. Money Bags, that you and other corporate interests are the only ones sharing in the prosperity. For Americans on the lower end of the income spectrum, it's all sacrifice.

And a USAToday/Gallup poll released earlier this week found that nearly 7 in 10 said that higher gas prices were causing financial hardship, more than half said that they "have made major changes" to compensate and 21 percent said that the impact is so dramatic that "their standard of living is jeopardized."

And lastly, The Wall Street Journal reported last week on some 40 states that use prepaid debit cards to issue payments like unemployment benefits and child support. Turns out, the banks love these cards because "they largely escaped the recent crackdown by U.S. lawmakers and regulators on fees, interest rates and billing practices for credit and debit cards."

So the fat-cat bankers are allowed to fleece the most needy and most vulnerable in the most outrageous of ways. Some charge fees for checking the balance on the card, others charge high withdrawal fees, and the most callous even charge an "inactivity fee" when the recipient doesn't use the card. According to The Journal, one bank executive said of his bank: "Prepaid debit cards and other products will help the company recover roughly half of the revenue likely to be lost from swipe-fee rules being written by regulators." How do these people sleep at night? On pillows stuffed with cash, no doubt.

This summer has the potential to be another turning point for the electorate, and it's not necessarily pegged to the performance of the president. It may hinge largely on the callousness of conservatives and their seemingly inexorable desire to overplay their hand.

This may be the summer that we see more clearly that the working class has developed a lingering sense of disillusionment, that right-wing politicians have developed an unshakeable immunity to empathy and that corporations have developed a taste for blood squeezed from turnips.

And it may be the summer for seeing through the right-wing squawk machine that hopes to distract us from the damage the rich and the right are doing by manically hurling torches at the Obama administration to see if something catches fire.

This week, Representative Paul Ryan, a Republican of Wisconsin, suggested to the Economic Club of Chicago that the president's attempt to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans amounted to "class warfare" and promoted "class envy." Ha! The war is already being waged against the poor and vulnerable, and the envious have-nots didn't start it. The right and its cabal of economic cannibals did.

Before the Rapture

by Bryan Curtis

 

The man who spent his life savings to tell New York the end was near.Plus, your guide to the end of the world, John Avlon on the doomsday unhinged, and Left Behind author Tim Lahaye on the Rapture.

Twelve days before Judgment Day, Robert Fitzpatrick saw a sign. And thank goodness, because he’d paid top dollar for it. Fitzpatrick, a 60-year-old retired engineer, boarded the Staten Island Ferry on the afternoon of May 9. When he reached Manhattan, he walked to a subway station and picked up the Metro, a free newspaper. There it was on page four—one of the spooky, apocalyptic ads Fitzgerald has placed all over town. “Global Earthquake: The Greatest Ever!” the ad read. Below that, in large letters: “Judgment Day: May 21, 2011.”

In the last month, Fitzpatrick has done for the Rapture what Dr. Zizmor did for skin care. Fitzpatrick’s ads line subway cars, subway platforms, and bus shelters. The Staten Island Advance carries them, and so does the trade publication Defense News, out of Springfield, Virginia. Fitzpatrick says that “blowing the trumpet” about Judgment Day cost him a sum in the low six figures—his life savings. The mortal certainty of the message made me curious about the certainty of the man who’d paid for it.

Fitzpatrick meets me one afternoon in a building in the Financial District. The sun is shining, and from our perch we can see cars crawling across the Brooklyn Bridge and financial wizards going about their rounds. “Inundated, yeah,” Fitzpatrick says glumly, imagining what downtown will be like after the great earthquake. “This is a low-lying area, and the water will be up here pretty quickly, I think.”

Fitzpatrick is extremely thin, and at certain angles his body seems to vanish inside his blue checked sports coat, as if he has already been raptured. He was born in the Bronx and attended St. Peter’s Boys High School on Staten Island. He has since determined that, doctrinally speaking, the Roman Catholic Church of his boyhood was “a million miles away from the truth.” He tried the New York City Church of Christ but left when a congregant announced he was marrying a divorced woman; only Fitzpatrick thought this didn’t jibe with biblical law. “I was reading the Bible on my own and always looking for the truth,” he says.

In 2006, Fitzpatrick retired from the transit department with visions of moving to Maui and “marrying a pretty Japanese girl.” He’d started work on a book of nature haikus. Then he heard a terrifying proclamation that sounded, finally, like the biblical truth he’d been seeking. He says, “I wasn’t exactly thrilled to learn what I did about the end of the world.”

He heard the news on the radio. Every weeknight at 7:30, the religious chatter on New York’s WFME is interrupted by an octogenarian with a compellingly odd and reedy voice. Harold Camping isn’t a credentialed minister. But since the 1950s, Camping has been harvesting secret messages from the Bible at a clip that would impress Dan Brown. He reveals them on his call-in show Open Forum. Some few years back—no one can pin down the date, strangely—Camping told listeners of his greatest discovery: the date of the Rapture.

I call Camping at his office in California one afternoon in the final run-up to the Rapture. He is hard of hearing, and I have to shout some of the questions. One a scale of one to 10, how certain is he that on May 21 the saved will ascend to heaven and the unsaved will be marooned in a hell on earth? “Oh, it’s 10-10-10-10,” he says. “It’s so solid you can’t even put it on a scale like that.”

Photos: Rapture Across Country

A collection of signs proclaiming that the world will end this May 21, 2011 are shown here.

Camping’s apocalyptic certainty gives him the bubbliness of a high-schooler eyeing his graduation date. “It is absolutely awesome that the whole world is within a few days of coming to an end,” he purrs. “It’s beyond feeling. I just tremble when I think about how tremendous this moment is.

“The Tokyo earthquake was like a Sunday-school picnic in comparison. Everybody will know that this never happened before, exactly what we’re warned about. We’ll know it is Judgment Day, the jig is up …”

Robert Fitzpatrick brings some papers to explain to me how the May 21 date was discovered. It’s not an easy thing to understand. Harold Camping’s calculation includes numbers divined from the founding of the state of Israel in 1948; Jesus’ order to “flee into the mountains” in Matthew 24; and the jubilee year of 1994. From there Camping performs handsprings back and forth through biblical time before ending up, with a great flourish, on May 21, 2011. For Fitzpatrick, the calculation’s outlandishness confirms its rightness. “A genius could not understand this,” he says, “because God has to open your mind to allow you to understand this.”

Fitzpatrick took Camping’s math and laid it out in a self-published book called The Doomsday Code, a soup-to-nuts guide to the Rapture. That cost him a few thousand dollars. He poured the rest of his savings into signage. Fitzpatrick’s belief in the May 21 date has been buttressed by various “proofs.” For instance, it is Camping’s contention that God imbues numbers in the Bible with special meaning. Five means atonement; 10 means completeness; 17 means heaven. If you were to multiply atonement times completeness times heaven and then, for a reason that remains mysterious, multiply that sum by itself again:

(5 x 10 x 17) x (5 x 10 x 17)

You’d end up with 722,500. Fast-forwarding 722,500 days from the date of the crucifixion—at least, the date as divined by Camping—lands you on May 21, 2011, the date of the Rapture. QED.

Rapturenomics has a margin of error. Camping once fingered September 6, 1994, as the possible end of the world, and his followers waited in California for the great ascension. The only calamity reported around that time was a USAir crash in Pennsylvania that killed 132. Camping blames the fact that he was “just seriously getting into the timing of the end” and notes that his book 1994? had a question mark in the title.

Note the punctuation on Camping’s new tract, We Are Almost There! Fitzpatrick won’t be moved from May 21 and is reluctant to discuss much else. He recoils when I ask him what he’s eating for breakfast. “It’s irrelevant. It’s like asking how long I’ve been wearing glasses. We’re talking about the end of the world here!”

I tell him I’m interested in how a man who knows the date of the world’s end would spend its final days. Well, Fitzpatrick allows, he has been trying to send Harold Camping an email. The precise timing of the earthquake is in dispute—after some biblical spelunking, Fitzpatrick believes it will arrive in New York around 6 p.m. ET. Fitzpatrick bought his sister a new cell phone. He’s paying his bills. When I point out this is unnecessary—we’re talking about the end of the world here—he says it is nonetheless the menschy thing to do. He wants to be in Times Square on May 21, so he can pass out leaflets until the end.

“Living with this idea, it’s not easy,” Fitzpatrick says. Even an ad buy of biblical proportions doesn’t calm his thoughts. He stands in the subway handing out Gospel tracts and each day sees dozens—no, hundreds—of the unsaved. He knows these poor souls will die in the earthquake, or else cling to life before the whole universe is vaporized on October 21. “That’s one of those things that could really get to you if you let it,” he says. Fitzpatrick’s mother has dementia, and he’s not sure if God will make a special dispensation for her.

Knowing the date of the judgment is only half the Rapture equation. The other half is knowing whether you’ll be among those who will “meet the Lord in the air,” as it says in 1 Thessalonians. When I ask Fitzpatrick if he’s sure he’ll be raptured, I notice that his confidence takes a small but perceptible hit. He can’t say for certain. He uses the words “strong suspicion,” lawyerly language he would never use about the date of the Rapture.

You might think of Robert Fitzpatrick’s dilemma like this. He knows that on May 21 the very last train is leaving the station. But he has only a strong suspicion that he has a ticket. It’s the kind of existential fear that might make you spend your life savings on subway ads, or pass out leaflets until the final seconds before the great earthquake. Fitzpatrick tells me, “I’m still praying, let’s put it that way.”

Bryan Curtis is a national correspondent at The Daily Beast. He was a columnist at Play: The New York Times Sports Magazine, Slate, and Texas Monthly, and has written for GQ, Outside, and New York. Write him at bryan.curtis@thedailybeast.com.

 

10 Steps to Defeat the Corptocracy

By Bruce E. Levine, AlterNet
Posted on May 20, 2011, Printed on May 21, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151018/10_steps_to_defeat_the_corptocracy

Many Americans know that the United States is not a democracy but a "corporatocracy," in which we are ruled by a partnership of giant corporations, the extremely wealthy elite and corporate-collaborator government officials. However, the truth of such tyranny is not enough to set most of us free to take action. Too many of us have become pacified by corporatocracy-created institutions and culture.
Some activists insist that this political passivity problem is caused by Americans' ignorance due to corporate media propaganda, and others claim that political passivity is caused by the inability to organize due to a lack of money. However, polls show that on the important issues of our day - from senseless wars, to Wall Street bailouts, to corporate tax-dodging, to health insurance rip-offs - the majority of Americans are not ignorant to the reality that they are being screwed. And American history is replete with organizational examples - from the Underground Railroad, to the Great Populist Revolt, to the Flint sit-down strike, to large wildcat strikes a generation ago - of successful rebels who had little money but lots of guts and solidarity.
The elite spend their lives stockpiling money and have the financial clout to bribe, divide and conquer the rest of us. The only way to overcome the power of money is with the power of courage and solidarity. When we regain our guts and solidarity, we can then more wisely select from - and implement - time-honored strategies and tactics that oppressed peoples have long used to defeat the elite. So, how do we regain our guts and solidarity?
1. Create the Cultural and Psychological "Building Blocks" for Democratic Movements
Historian Lawrence Goodwyn has studied democratic movements such as Solidarity in Poland, and he has written extensively about the populist movement in the United States that occurred during the end of the 19th century (what he calls "the largest democratic mass movement in American history"). Goodwyn concludes that democratic movements are initiated by people who are neither resigned to the status quo nor intimidated by established powers. For Goodwyn, the cultural and psychological building blocks of democratic movements are individual self-respect and collective self-confidence. Without individual self-respect, we do not believe that we are worthy of power or capable of utilizing power wisely, and we accept as our role being a subject of power. Without collective self-confidence, we do not believe that we can succeed in wresting away power from our rulers.
Thus, it is the job of all of us - from parents, to students, to teachers, to journalists, to clergy, to psychologists, to artists and EVERYBODY who gives a damn about genuine democracy - to create individual self-respect and collective self-confidence.
2. Confront and Transform ALL Institutions that Have Destroyed Individual Self-Respect and Collective Self-Confidence
In "Get Up, Stand Up, " I detail 12 major institutional and cultural areas that have broken people's sprit of resistance, and all are "battlefields for democracy" in which we can fight to regain our individual self-respect and collective self confidence:
    •    Television
    •    Isolation and bureaucratization
    •    "Fundamentalist consumerism" and advertising/propaganda
    •    Student loan debt and indentured servitude
    •    Surveillance
    •    The decline of unions/solidarity among working people
    •    Greed and a "money-centric" culture
    •    Fear-based schools that teach obedience
    •    Psychopathologizing noncompliance
    •    Elitism via professional training
    •    The corporate media
    •    The US electoral system
As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, "All our things are right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike."
3. Side Each Day in Every Way With Anti-Authoritarians
We can recover our self-respect and strength by regaining our integrity. This process requires a personal transformation to overcome our sense of powerlessness and fight for what we believe in. Integrity includes acts of courage resisting all illegitimate authorities. We must recognize that in virtually every aspect of our life in every day, we can either be on the side of authoritarianism and the corporatocracy or on the side of anti-authoritarianism and democracy. Specifically, we can question the legitimacy of government, media, religious, educational and other authorities in our lives, and if we establish that an authority is not legitimate, we can resist it. And we can support others who are resisting illegitimate authorities. A huge part of solidarity comes from supporting others who are resisting the illegitimate authorities in their lives. Walt Whitman had it right: "Resist much, obey little. Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved."
4. Regain Morale by Thinking More Critically About Our Critical Thinking
While we need critical thinking to effectively question and challenge illegitimate authority - and to wisely select the best strategies and tactics to defeat the elite - critical thinking can reveal some ugly truths about reality, which can result in defeatism. Thus, critical thinkers must also think critically about their defeatism, and realize that it can cripple the will and destroy motivation, thus perpetuating the status quo. William James (1842–1910), the psychologist, philosopher, and occasional political activist (member of the Anti-Imperialist League who, during the Spanish-American War, said, "God damn the US for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles!") had a history of pessimism and severe depression, which helped fuel some of his greatest wisdom on how to overcome immobilization. James, a critical thinker, had little stomach for what we now call "positive thinking," but he also came to understand how losing belief in a possible outcome can guarantee its defeat. Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), an Italian political theorist and Marxist activist who was imprisoned by Mussolini, came to the same conclusions. Gramsci's phrase "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" has inspired many critical thinkers, including Noam Chomsky, to maintain their efforts in the face of difficult challenges.
5. Restore Courage in Young People
The corporatocracy has not only decimated America's labor union movement, it has almost totally broken the spirit of resistance among young Americans - an even more frightening achievement. Historically, young people without family responsibilities have felt most freed up to challenge illegitimate authority. But America's education system creates fear, shame and debt - all killers of the spirit of resistance. No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top and standardized testing tyranny results in the kind of fear that crushes curiosity, critical thinking and the capacity to constructively resist illegitimate authority. Rebel teachers, parents, and students - in a variety of overt and covert ways - have already stopped complying with corporatocracy schooling. We must also stop shaming intelligent young people who reject college, and we must instead recreate an economy that respects all kinds of intelligence and education. While the corporatocracy exploits student loan debt to both rake in easy money and break young people's spirit of resistance, the rest of us need to rebel against student loan debt and indentured servitude. And parents and mental health professionals need to stop behavior-modifying and medicating young people who are resisting illegitimate authority.
6. Focus on Democracy Battlefields Where the Corporate Elite Don't Have Such a Large Financial Advantage
The emphasis of many activists is on electoral politics, but the elite have a huge advantage in this battlefield, where money controls the US electoral process. By focusing exclusively on electoral politics at the expense of everything else, we: (1) give away power when we focus only on getting leaders elected and become dependent on them; (2) buy into the elite notion that democracy is all about elections; (3) lose sight of the fact that democracy means having influence over all aspects of our lives; and (4) forget that if we have no power in our workplace, in our education and in all our institutions, then there will never be democracy worthy of the name. Thus, we should focus our fight more on the daily institutions we experience. As Wendell Berry said, "If you can control a people's economy, you don't need to worry about its politics; its politics have become irrelevant."
7. Heal from "Corporatocracy Abuse" and "Battered People's Syndrome" to Gain Strength
Activists routinely become frustrated when truths about lies, victimization and oppression don't set people free to take action. But when we human beings eat crap for too long, we gradually lose our self-respect to the point that we become psychologically too weak to take action. Many Americans are embarrassed to accept that, after years of corporatocracy subjugation, we have developed "battered people's syndrome" and what Bob Marley called "mental slavery." To emancipate ourselves and others, we must:
    •    Move out of denial and accept that we are a subjugated people.
    •    Admit that we have bought into many lies. There is a dignity, humility, and strength in facing the fact that, while we may have once bought into some lies, we no longer do so.
    •    Forgive ourselves and others for accepting the abuser's lies. Remember the liars  we face are often quite good at lying.
    •    Maintain a sense of humor. Victims of horrific abuse, including those in  concentration camps and slave plantations, have discovered that pain can either  immobilize us or be transformed by humor into energy.
    •    Stop beating ourselves up for having been in an abusive relationship. The energy  we have is better spent on healing and then working to change the abusive system;  this provides more energy, and when we use this energy to provide respect and  confidence for others, everybody gets energized.
8. Unite Populists by Rejecting Corporate Media's Political Divisions
The corporate media routinely divides Americans as "liberals," "conservatives" and "moderates," a useful division for the corporatocracy, because no matter which of these groups is the current electoral winner, the corporatocracy retains power. In order to defeat the corporatocracy, it's more useful to divide people in terms of authoritarians versus anti-authoritarians, elitists versus populists and corporatists versus anticorporatists. Both left anti-authoritarians and libertarian anti-authoritarians passionately oppose current US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Wall Street bailout, the PATRIOT Act, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the so-called "war on drugs" and several other corporatocracy policies. There are differences between anti-authoritarians but, as Ralph Nader and Ron Paul have together recently publicly discussed, we can form coalitions and alliances on these important power-money issues. One example of an anti-authoritarian democratic movement (which I am involved in) is the mental health treatment reform movement, comprised of left anti-authoritarians and libertarians. We all share distrust of Big Pharma and contempt for pseudoscience, and we believe that people deserve truly informed choice regarding treatment. We respect Erich Fromm, the democratic-socialist psychoanalyst, along with Thomas Szasz, the libertarian psychiatrist, both passionate anti-authoritarians who have confronted mental health professionals for using dogma to coerce people.
9. Unite "Comfortable Anti-Authoritarians" and "Afflicted Anti-Authoritarians
This "comfortable-afflicted" continuum is based on the magnitude of pain that one has simply getting through the day. The term comfortable anti-authoritarian is not a pejorative one, but refers to those anti-authoritarians lucky enough to have decent paying and maybe even meaningful jobs, or platforms through which their voices are heard or social supports in their lives. Many of these comfortable anti-authoritarians may know that there are millions of Americans working mindless jobs in order to hold on to their health insurance, or hustling two low-wage jobs to pay college loans, rent and a car payment, or who may be unable to find even a poorly paying, mindless job and are instead helplessly watching eviction or foreclosure and bankruptcy close in on them. However, unless these comfortable anti-authoritarians have once been part of that afflicted class - and remember what it feels like - they may not be able to fully respect the afflicted's emotional state. The afflicted need to recognize that human beings often become passive because they are overwhelmed by pain (not because they are ignorant, stupid, or lazy), and in order to function at all, they often shut down or distract themselves from this pain. Some comfortable anti-authoritarians assume that people's inactions are caused by ignorance. This not only sounds and smells like elitism, it creates resentment for many in the afflicted class who lack the energy to be engaged in any activism. Respect, resources and anything that concretely reduces their level of pain is likely to be far more energizing than a scolding lecture. That's the lesson of many democratic movements, including the Great Populist Revolt.
10. Do Not Let Debate Divide Anti-Authoritarians
Spirited debate is what democracy is all about, but when debate turns to mutual antipathy and divides anti-authoritarians, it plays into the hands of the elite. One such divide among anti-elitists is over the magnitude of change that should be worked for and celebrated. On one extreme are people who think that anything is better than nothing at all. At the other extreme are people who reject any incremental change and hold out for total transformation. We can better unite by asking these questions: Does the change increase individual self-respect and collective self-confidence, and increase one's energy level to pursue even greater democracy? Or does it feel like a sellout that decreases individual self-respect and collective self-confidence, and de-energizes us? Utilizing the criteria of increased self-respect and collective self-confidence, those of us who believe in genuine democracy can more constructively debate whether the change is going to increase strength to gain democracy or is going to take the steam out of a democratic movement. Respecting both sides of this debate makes for greater solidarity and better decisions.
To summarize, democracy will not be won without guts and solidarity. Risk-free green actions - such as shopping from independents, buying local, recycling, composting, consuming less, not watching television and so on - can certainly help counter a dehumanizing world. However, revolutions that truly transform fundamental power inequities and enable us to feel like men and women rather than children and slaves require risk, guts and solidarity.
Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist. His Web site is www.brucelevine.net.

2012 Flip-Flopping Olympics

by Jill Lawrence

Romney, Gingrich, Huntsman, and Pawlenty are outdoing one another with policy backflips. Jill Lawrence on how they’re running from their records.

These are heady times for Mitt Romney, and not just because he raised $10.25 million in one day. After a long reign as the Republican presidential field’s top flip-flopper, he’s been left in the dust by Newt Gingrich.

Romney could not ask for a better foil. He looks like “the Rock of Gibraltar of consistency” compared to Gingrich, says political scientist John Pitney, who observed the former House speaker at close range as a GOP congressional aide. Even if Gingrich is a short-timer in the 2012 race, Romney should not despair. All of the plausible Republican hopefuls have major flips on their resumes.

Like Romney, most of them have jettisoned inconveniently moderate parts of their pasts as they prepare to face a very conservative primary electorate. Gingrich is in a different category—on pace to set a record for the most and fastest reversals by a White House contestant, with little discernible pattern or strategy.

Earlier this year, for instance, Gingrich berated President Obama for not intervening in Libya against Muammar Gaddafi. Then when Obama established a no-fly zone, Gingrich said he would not have intervened. The former speaker is currently in the throes of trying to explain why he described conservative Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan in terms lifted straight from a liberal playbook: “radical change” and “right-wing social engineering.” It was actually the second phase of what is so far a triple flip: from telling Time magazine he would have voted for Ryan’s plan, to criticizing it harshly on NBC’s Meet the Press, to asserting there is little daylight between him and Ryan and any ad quoting what he said on Meet the Press would be false.

“Gingrich Was for Ryan’s Budget Before He Was Against It,” read Time’sembarrassing headline. Shades of John Kerry, who handed Republicans a lethal weapon when he said during the 2004 presidential campaign that he had voted for a war-funding bill before he voted against it. It helped them brand Kerry a flip-flopper and, by implication, a man of doubtful character, untrustworthy in these dangerous times. Yet Kerry has not been particularly inconsistent during his 26-year Senate career. “He got an unfair rap,” says Bob Shrum, who was Kerry’s senior campaign adviser. By contrast, he says, this year’s GOP field is awash with recantations, as problem-solving former governors try to forge a path to the nomination.

Pawlenty recorded a 2008 ad with Democrat Janet Napolitano—then governor of Arizona—urging Congress to “cap greenhouse gas pollution now.”

Clockwise from top left: GOP candidates Tim Pawlenty, Jon Huntsman, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney. (Getty Images (4))

The flip-flop label is most effective when used against politicians who have not yet defined themselves to a national audience. That’s what happened to Kerry and what Democrats are now attempting with former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman. “Which Huntsman will we actually see?” former Democratic Congressman Richard Swett asked Thursday in the Concord Monitor as Huntsman arrived in New Hampshire for his first visit. The New Hampshire Democratic Party circulated a press release called “Will Jon Huntsman Be the new Mitt Romney?” As in rich, handsome and Mormon? Not exactly, judging by the “handy checklist” the party provided for keeping track of Huntsman flip-flops.

Huntsman’s very entry into the race could be viewed as one big flip-flop, since he resigned less than a month ago as Obama’s ambassador to China. He has praised Obama’s leadership and his ideas on health care. According to the Democrats’ checklist, Huntsman is also pro-stimulus, pro-TARP and pro-gay rights—all stands the Democrats say bear watching as Huntsman courts conservatives who revile them.

A common flip-flop these days involves cap-and-trade. Conservatives once enthused that cap-and-trade would unleash market forces to control carbon emissions and slow global warming (pollution permits would be traded under an overall emissions cap). Now “cap-and-tax” is anathema to them and some even reject the scientific consensus that the Earth’s climate is changing. This is quite awkward for people like Huntsman and former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who once praised the approach and signed up their states for regional cap-and-trade systems.

Pawlenty recorded a 2008 ad with Democrat Janet Napolitano—then governor of Arizona—urging Congress to “cap greenhouse gas pollution now.” But at a GOP candidate debate this month in South Carolina, Pawlenty apologized for his “mistake.” Huntsman said in a 2008 gubernatorial debate that “we must put a value on carbon,” ultimately through a cap-and-trade system. This month, however, he told Time that “Cap-and-trade ideas aren’t working.” Gingrich not only seemed supportive of cap-and-trade in the past, he made a TV ad in which he and then Speaker Nancy Pelosi (!) called on Congress to find a solution to global warming. He now says he’s not convinced it’s a problem and denies any past affection for cap-and-trade.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels has not been a cap-and-trade fan, but he will still have some explaining to do if he gets into the race. He appears to have flipped on federal stimulus money—signing on with other governors last year to ask for more of it to help with Medicaid costs, then slamming a bill that would provide the money. Also, Daniels recently signed a bill cutting off Medicaid funds to Planned Parenthood clinics in his state. It was a well-timed reassurance to social conservatives angered by his suggestion last year that the two parties call a temporary truce on social issues while they work together to avoid a debt-driven national fiscal meltdown. Truce or no truce? That is the question.

It’s a rare politician who shifts in a direction that will hurt rather than help him. George H.W. Bush did it by reversing his no-new-taxes pledge and Obama did it by accepting the individual mandate, requiring almost everyone to buy health insurance under his new law. Romney’s shifts, like the U-turns his rivals have made on cap-and-trade, fit the more common pattern: Whatever the motivation, they serve his ambitions of the moment. An opponent of gay and abortion rights, he supported those rights when he was running for office in liberal Massachusetts. A proud signer of the Massachusetts health care law, he’s now holding it at arms’ length—but not quite rejecting it outright—because it was the model for the “Obamacare” law despised by conservatives. “People are still trying to assess what’s inside these folks and on that dimension he’s quite vulnerable,” leadership expert Marty Linsky, a longtime faculty member at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, says of Romney.

The difference for Romney this year is that much of the field is vulnerable for the same reasons. Instead of being mocked as a shape-shifter, maybe he should be hailed as a pioneer.

Jill Lawrence is an award-winning journalist who has covered every presidential election since 1988. Most recently, she was a senior correspondent and columnist for PoliticsDaily.com. Her other positions have included national political correspondent for USA Today and national political writer at The Associated Press.

India's First Gay Prince

by Roja Heydarpour

In the last decade, Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil got married, got divorced, came out of the closet, and talked to Oprah Winfrey—and now, he's spreading awareness about a spreading HIV crisis in India.

Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil, the first openly gay prince in India, took to a makeshift stage in a swanky Indian restaurant in New York last week. Clutching the microphone with two hands, he could hardly be heard over the din of guests on their fourth round of free Absolut.

“As we say in India, Namaste,” he smiled.

“Yeeaaa! Namas-TAY,” screamed a woman, swaying from side to side.

Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil prepares for AIDES Gala Dinner on November 27, 2010 in Paris, France. (Pascal Le Segretain / AIDES & Link / Getty Images)The soft-spoken prince of Rajpipla took it all in stride, seeming to enjoy himself—and even inviting everyone in the room to his pink palace. “It is like a strawberry shortcake with icing. And you are all welcome. I mean it. You can come see royalty.”

The crowd had gathered to raise money for the prince’s charity, the Lakshya Trust, an organization founded by five men in rural India dedicated to raising awareness of HIV/AIDS. The disease is spreading quickly in India—2.4 million people are living with HIV there, according to the World Health Organization. The guests—mostly Indian, gay, or gay Indians—mingled nervously at as the evening began. A protocol sheet on how to treat a prince was passed around.

“One should wait for the prince to extend his hand, before you go to shake it.”

“Do not turn your back on him as he moves on.”

By the end of the night, guests were joking freely about how they would treat the prince.

Sequestered in a dimly lit corner in the back, the prince saw people in 10-minute intervals, freely discussing his sexuality and the AIDS crisis in India.

“I am still single and need to mingle.”

“In India, HIV has been a blessing in disguise,” he said. “HIV gave us a platform to empower ourselves. A lot of my friends are getting infected.”

Gohil, 45, first came out to his family in 2002, after a nervous breakdown. He couldn’t hide his sexuality anymore at that point. He had been married to a woman in 1991, but only a year later, without ever having consummated the marriage, he got a divorce. He still lives with the guilt of hurting his wife. By 2006, he officially came out when he gave an interview to a local paper. Relations with his family became strained, and have yet to be fully repaired. Since then, he has taken his story all over the world, even appearing on Oprah twice.

But just last week, as Gohil arrived in New York to raise awareness, and discuss how difficult and taboo homosexuality is in India, two Americans in the public eye caused a stir when they came out. First there was the president of the Phoenix Suns, who came out in an interview with The New York Times. Then, Don Lemon, the CNN anchor, told the world he was gay on Twitter.

The prince didn’t seem too surprised that homosexuality was still somewhat of an issue in the States. “Religion has played a role in many issues, and also in homosexuality, so even America hasn’t been spared from that,” he said. “I think it’s important for people who are known to come out of the closet.”

That said, the prince has a long way to go. Being raised in a society—and a family—where homosexuality was not even an option seems to have had its effect on him. Nearly 10 years after coming out to his family, the prince still doesn’t have a partner. And the nightlife isn’t for him. “I’m not used to the party culture because I come from a royal family.” He visited a gay bar while in America, but didn’t exactly blend in. “I don’t feel very comfortable in the gay bars,” he said. “I am always in formal attire.”

Still, the life isn’t completely foreign to him. When asked if he was still single, he smiled almost mischievously. “I am still single and need to mingle.”

Roja Heydarpour is an editor at The Daily Beast. She has reported for the The New York Times and The Times-Tribune.

U.S. weather extremes show "new normal" climate

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent – Wed May 18, 5:14 pm ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Heavy rains, deep snowfalls, monster floods and killing droughts are signs of a "new normal" of extreme U.S. weather events fueled by climate change, scientists and government planners said on Wednesday.

"It's a new normal and I really do think that global weirding is the best way to describe what we're seeing," climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University told reporters.

"We are used to certain conditions and there's a lot going on these days that is not what we're used to, that is outside our current frame of reference," Hayhoe said on a conference call with other experts, organized by the non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists.

An upsurge in heavy rainstorms in the United States has coincided with prolonged drought, sometimes in the same location, she said, noting that west Texas has seen a record-length dry period over the last five years, even as there have been two 100-year rain events.

Hayhoe, other scientists, civic planners and a manager at the giant Swiss Re reinsurance firm all cited human-caused climate change as an factor pushing this shift toward more extreme weather.

While none would blame climate change for any specific weather event, Hayhoe said a background of climate change had an impact on every rainstorm, heat wave or cold snap.

"What we're seeing is the new normal is constantly evolving," said Nikhil da Victoria Lobo of Swiss Re's Global Partnerships team. "Globally what we're seeing is more volatility ... there's certainly a lot more integrated risk exposure."

CHICAGO'S SEWERS

In addition to more extreme local weather events, he said, changes in demographics and how materials are supplied make them more vulnerable.

"In a more integrated economic system, a single shock to an isolated area can actually end up having broad-based and material implications," da Victoria Lobo said. For example, if a local storm knocks out transport and communications systems, "someone 1,000 miles away is not receiving their iPad or their car."

Aaron Durnbaugh, deputy commissioner for natural resources and water quality for Chicago, said adapting to climate change is a daunting task.

Citing the down-to-earth example of Chicago's 4,400 miles of sewer mains, which were installed over the last 150 years and will take decades to replace, Durnbaugh said accurate forecasting of future storms and floods is essential.

The city of Chicago's cost of dealing with extreme weather events through the end of this century has been conservatively estimated in a range from $690 million to $2.5 billion, Durnbaugh said, with the cost to homeowners and local businesses expected to be far higher.

Globally, da Victoria Lobo said the annual average economic losses from natural disasters have escalated from $25 billion in the 1980s to $130 billion in the first decade of the 21st century.

(Editing by Eric Walsh)

Brzezinski: Obama speech should have gone further

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Alan Grayson: Republicans Show True Colors About Medicare

Uploaded by RepAlanGrayson on May 21, 2011

Former Congressman Alan Grayson (D-Orlando) comments about the Republican plan to eliminate Medicare. He calls the Republicans "cruel and heartless." The interview took place with Cenk Uygur on MSNBC on May 20, 2011.

First lady to West Point: 'Your family will be your rock'

By theGrio 9:50 PM on 05/20/2011

 First lady Michelle Obama talks to graduating cadets and their families at the U.S.Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., on Friday, May 20, 2011. (AP Photo/Mike Groll)

MICHAEL HILL,Associated Press

WEST POINT, N.Y. (AP) -- First lady Michelle Obama urged more than 1,000 cadets Friday night on the brink of graduating to keep in mind the families of the soldiers they will lead.

Obama addressed the white-clad cadets and their families gathered in the U.S. Military Academy's castle-like mess hall for a graduation-eve banquet. It marked her first visit to the storied academy and dovetails with her recent work on behalf of military families.

She noted that more than half of service members are married and 40 percent have two or more kids.

"You'll be helping your troops deal with the joy of a new birth and the disappointment of not being in the delivery room," she said. "You'll be helping a soldier cope with a family emergency halfway around the world."

Obama is the only first lady to address cadets at their graduation banquet -- a rare occasion for them to wear their dress whites and dine with their relatives. The mess hall was filled with thousands more family members in suits and dresses dining on filet mignon and garlic mashed potatoes.

Obama reminded cadets that they not only must support their soldiers' families, but that their families helped them to this point in their careers.

"So graduates, I want you to know that while this country is asking so much of you once you pin on those gold bars, we're not asking you to do it alone. You have your families that are with you today and every day."

Obama saluted the cadets for sticking through four grueling years at West Point during a time when their older classmates routinely packed off for Iraq and Afghanistan -- some to never return. The cadets and the West Point families stood and clapped after Obama's speech. A cadet later presented her with a black-plumed military hat to remember her visit.

Though she's known for her campaign against childhood obesity, in recent months Obama has tried to shine a spotlight on the plight of military families and their problems such as frequent moves or raising children by themselves.

Last month, she and Vice President Joe Biden and wife Jill launched Joining Forces, an initiative to help military families who face challenges such as frequently moving and having a parent or spouse at war.

"Your family will be your rock," she told cadets, "whether they're right next to you or across an ocean."

Using the blueprint from her childhood obesity effort, in which she urged businesses, non-profits and schools to fight the issue, Obama plans a similar effort for Joining Forces. Companies that have agreed to take part include Best Buy, Sears and Walmart.

Obama's visit to West Point and another on June 3 to Quantico Middle High School on the Marine Corps Base in Virginia underscores her commitment to the military, the White House said.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is to be the graduation speaker at West Point's commencement Saturday morning.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.

Egypt's First Woman President?

by Ursula Lindsey

The talk-show host has rattled religious conservatives, the state-owned media and now the army, too. Ursula Lindsey interviews Buthayna Kamel, Cairo’s most outspoken woman.

When Buthayna Kamel announced she would be the first woman to run for president of Egypt, it was a challenge to religious conservatism and social expectations here—to the widespread belief that women aren’t meant to wield high authority. Now, for good measure, she’s decided to take on Egypt’s state-owned media and its ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces too.

Last week, Kamel was on a talk show on Egyptian State TV when she began criticizing the actions of the council. The director of State TV himself called to order the program interrupted. The flustered TV presenter announced that the show was being pulled off the air and told viewers, “I may not see you again.” Now Kamel is charged with the crime of “insulting the army.”

“I respect the Egyptian army,” says Kamel. “But we all have the right to criticize the policy of the military council. They are in a political position. Democracy tells us we must be transparent, we must hold accountable the politicians. That’s what I did. Criticizing doesn’t mean insulting.”

Egypt’s first female presidential candidate has a warm, engaging manner and the talent for interacting with the public you might expect from a TV-personality-turned-activist: In the lobby of the hotel where we meet, she discusses politics attentively with several members of the wait staff.

She is passionate about her politics, wearing her beliefs, quite literally, on her sleeve. She sports a cross-and-crescent necklace (to signify solidarity between Muslims and Christians—Kamal herself is Muslim), a Make Poverty History bracelet and a pin that reads “Egyptians Against Corruption.”

She, like women across the country, was an enthusiastic participant in the January 25 Revolution.

“Women are always at the front of revolutions,” she says. “But then men want to take all the results.”

But, she insists, “I’m not just women’s candidate. I am a candidate for all of Egypt.” She is running for “the peasants, the workers, the women, the handicapped, the Copts, the Nubians, the Bedouin”—all of whom are marginalized, all of whom have been denied their rights. To change women’s status requires changing all of Egyptian society, she says, learning to “accept others and accept criticism.”

“He told me: ‘You know what would make Egypt better? A woman president. Because women worry about the future.’”

Kamel has a long history of raising uncomfortable subjects and rattling the authorities. In the 1990s, she hosted a late-night radio show, Night Confessions, in which callers discussed their social and sexual problems frankly. The show became a hit among young people. In 1996, it was suspended, on the advice of a committee of religious scholars and government officials, for “damaging Egypt’s reputation,” because it featured young people discussing “sinful relations.”

In recent years, Kamel Hosted Please Understand Me, a late-night TV show in which she was joined by a psychologist or other specialists and together they take calls from viewers. Kamel focused on subjects such as sexual harassment, domestic violence, even—after arguing with management—abortion. The show was canceled by its Saudi-owned satellite channel in February.

Kamel had already been dismissed from her job as a State TV news broadcaster – now, she’s no longer welcome there even as a guest.

Kamel was also one of the creators of the activist group Shayfeen.com (”We See You”). Back in 2005, when President Mubarak announced the country’s first multi-candidate elections, Kamel and two other women formed the group to be an on-the-ground monitor of the supposedly democratic process (which turned out to largely be a sham, and got Mubarak handily re-elected). She is also a member of Kifaya, the activist group that first called for an end to the Mubarak regime.

The idea of running for office dates back to a casual conversation, several years ago, with an old man outside a polling station. “He told me: You know what would make Egypt better? A woman president. Because women worry about the future.”

That turned out to be true. Last month, Kamel decided to run partly out of concern over the emergence, post-revolution, of Islamic fundamentalism. “I saw that society could go back to something even worse than under Mubarak,” she says.

Kamal, 49, describes herself as a social democrat and will run as an independent in the presidential elections scheduled for the end of this year.

Women are active participants in Egyptian society, but they rarely occupy top leadership positions. At the moment there are a handful of female judges; one female minister; and no female governors. Many here believe that men are better suited to leadership positions, and that Islam itself proscribes women from holding authority over men.

But Kamel says the people she’s met campaigning—in a village in Southern Egypt and in the Sinai Peninsula, among other places—have accepted her. “Until now I haven’t faced any rejection from the people because I’m a woman,” she says.

“Everywhere I go, I ask people…what are your demands? I’m trying to know what Egyptians want,” she says. What she hears will inform her platform as a candidate. Her aim is to be a model and to “raise the ceiling of people’s expectations,” she says. “Even if I don’t win, even if my electoral program isn’t implemented right now, those demands will be out there.”

Ursula Lindsey is a Cairo-based reporter and writer.