Michael Winship

Hard to break old habits. As is true for so many, I measure the year as if I’m still a student condemned to the classroom. It doesn’t commence January 1, but in September, when summer’s over and school starts.

In recognition of that cycle, this week I was trying to clean the apartment of some old papers and files and stuff, no easy feat for a packrat like myself. The task requires sorting and tough choices. Napalm would do the trick more effectively but the neighborhood firehouse frowns on it and the shriek of the smoke detector upsets the mice.

Interesting items surface: a promotional snow globe from the premiere of the movie “Fargo,” the file on amusement parks I was looking for but couldn’t find when I wrote the column two weeks ago, campaign buttons picked up at the 1992 Democratic National Convention, featuring a picture of William Jefferson Clinton playing the sax and the now unfortunate slogan, “Blow, Bill, Blow!”

And what am I doing with 200, self-adhesive “Hello, My Name Is” badges?

Amongst the wretched refuse in my living room/office, a batch of newspaper and magazine articles from almost exactly a year ago. Pluto was still a planet then, Cindy Sheehan was camped outside the Bush ranch in Crawford, and Katrina was just beginning its deadly ravishment of the Gulf Coast.

Some things barely change at all. Front-page headline from the August 22, 2005, Washington Post: “Democrats Split Over Position on Iraq War.” Fast-forward a year, front-page headline, August 27, 2006, Washington Post: “Democrats Split Over Timetable for Troops.”

Other things change a lot. A year ago, the articles remind me, Israeli troops were unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza and the Jewish settlements there were being dismantled. Many of the settlers were furious, but one Palestinian man told PBS’ Newshour with Jim Lehrer, “Life is going to change. We will be able to live well. We will live in freedom.” A Palestinian woman added, “With God’s will, after the disengagement we will be happy because the roads will be open and they will remove the checkpoints and we can move freely.”

It was not to be. International aid and tax money were cut off to the Palestinian Authority after the radical group Hamas’ success in Palestine’s parliamentary elections, crippling Gaza’s economy. On June 25, on the border with Gaza, Palestinian gunmen killed two Israeli soldiers and kidnapped a third. This triggered a blockade, and artillery and aerial bombardment, including the destruction of Gaza’s power plant, affecting not only electricity but also the water supply, which requires electric pumps.

John Ging, director of operations for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), told Monday’s Washington Post, “Gaza is heading down the tubes. We are down to a subsistence existence… You have children growing up in a violent and uncivilized society, without the things most countries would take for granted as a normal existence.”

But, as the Post reported, “The war in southern Lebanon has overshadowed Israel’s second front, a military and economic siege of the Gaza Strip that is deepening the poverty and desperation in this dense area of 1.4 million people.”

Speaking of children, speaking of Lebanon… in the pile of papers to be tossed from my apartment, a transcript from a discussion the Israeli novelist, essayist and peace activist David Grossman had with Bill Moyers in May 2003. I met him that day. A kind, thoughtful man.

Grossman is a devoted Zionist. Like virtually all his countrymen, he has served in the Israeli military, as have his two sons. “We doom ourselves to this vicious circle, that our children will kill their children and vice versa,” he told Bill. “And we are stuck in this hermetic bubble of animosity. And there is wonderful justification for each side to justify what he does or inflict on the other side.

“But in the meantime, we are all being suffocated in this hermetic bubble. And I want to start to breathe. I just want to start to breathe the air that we should breathe, the air that we deserve to breathe.”

Two weeks ago, I opened the paper to the news that Grossman’s youngest son, Uri, an Israeli tank commander, had been killed in Lebanon, two weeks shy of his 21st birthday.

“He was a man of values,” David Grossman said of his child at the funeral. “In recent years, that word has faded. It has even been ridiculed. Because in our disjointed, cruel, cynical world, it’s not cool to have values. Or to be a humanist. Or to be really sensitive to the distress of others, even if the other is your enemy on the battlefield…

“May we know how to be a bit more gentle with each other, and may we succeed in saving ourselves from the violence and hostility that has penetrated so deeply into all aspects of our lives. May we know how to get our bearings and save ourselves now, at the very last minute, because very hard times await us.”

I’m saving his words. I’ve got a sad feeling they’ll come in handy.

copyright 2006 Messenger Post Newspapers

_________________________

All newspaper editors want to know what their readers like. If you would like to read this feature in your local newspaper, please do not hesitate to share your enthusiasm with your local newspaper editor.

The New York Times has a great review of the Rev. Billy’s stage show in NYC. Rev. Billy has been a frequent guest of mine, preaching on the possiblitiy of Wal Mart in Wiscasset and on the evil of Starbucks.

The second part of an interview with Dr. Harlan Ullman. Ullman was a teacher and mentor of sorts to Colin Powell and came up with the concept of “schock and awe” which, he says, the current crowd in Washington has screwed up as badly as everything else they’ve screwed up. This guy is pure Washington establishment, and although he’s a friend of many in the administration, he doesn’t seem to be a fan of the way they are running things.

…and a window opens that you can jump out. Is that the saying?

I’m sad to say that my show on WGAN has ended. The details aren’t important but what I do want to be clear about is how much I like and respect many of the people I’ve worked with. As I’ve often said on the air, I’ve been amazed at all the creative and talented people who have enthusiastically contributed to the program, with no expectation of anything in return. The best radio shows were ones in which I felt like little more than a bystander, while others did all the heavy lifting.

And now on to the Next Big Thing…..

Michael Winship

Early last Wednesday morning, along a roadside, insurgents detonated an improvised explosive device (IED) as a United States Army Humvee passed. The vehicle lurched and stopped, smoke and fire pouring from the wreckage. A crowd of Iraqis gathered as ambulances arrived to take away the dead and wounded.

“Oh my God, where’s my leg?” one soldier screamed from a stretcher. “I can’t feel it anywhere. Somebody help me!”

Moments later, a sniper opened fire from a nearby rooftop. And to make a bad situation worse, a car bomb exploded. Then another.

Welcome to a typical day in Medina Jabal, a busy Iraqi desert outpost. But it’s not in Iraq. Medina Jabal is one of a dozen mock Iraqi villages at the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California, built to train and test United States soldiers as they prepare for service in the Middle East.

The villages aren’t exact replicas, although there are mosques and the sound of muezzins singing the call to prayer. In the sun and sand, plywood buildings and sheds and truck containers are used to approximate reality, sort of like the set for a surreal, Mesopotamian episode of “Deadwood.”

Some of the Iraqi townspeople are real, others are Americans dressed in keffiyehs and dishdashas. Fake news crews representing a CNN-like network called “INN” and Aljazeera tape the action, reminding troops that the whole world may be watching what they do.

And the wounded GI? A plastic, anatomically correct dummy, his cries for help pre-recorded and blaring from a tiny loudspeaker hidden under the stretcher.

Last week, while working on a television documentary that will air next year, I spent a couple of days in the heat and dust of the Mojave at the National Training Center with the men and women of the 4th Brigade Combat Team, First Cavalry Division. They leave for Iraq in just a few weeks.

As always when I’ve been in the presence of active military, I came away impressed and moved by the dedication and hard work they put into their job and staggered by the youth of those who put their lives on the line in the service of their country.

I also was struck by how the military seems to be doing its damnedest to cope with and adjust to the unprecedented nature of the insurgency they’re fighting, while severely handicapped by troop and equipment shortages.

Artillery and tank soldiers are at present trained to perform foot patrols and house-to-house searches just as infantry are. As one captain told us, “We’re a Swiss Army knife now.”

In the lawless world of today’s Iraq, like it or not, every soldier’s a cop. And because a suicide bomber or sniper can come at you anyplace and anytime, there’s no such thing as “behind the lines” anymore. In fact, if nothing else, many said, the circumstances of this war have proven that women, often relegated to support roles in the past, can handle virtually any combat assignment.

But the sad truth is, for all the military’s valiant, dangerous efforts, it isn’t working. And in private, many of the brass at the top will tell you that. As hard as it may be to swallow, they say, we need to start getting out now.

Aparisim Ghosh reported in the August 6 issue of Time Magazine, “The sporadic spurts of violence between Shi’ites and Sunnis have given way to a steady stream of blood… Caught in the middle, the U.S. military is unable to halt the bloodshed…

“… Crime continues to soar, especially the booming business of kidnapping for ransom. U.S. officials say as many as 40 Iraqis are kidnapped every day. Ransom demands range from thousands of dollars to millions; many victims are never heard from again. Services are a cruel joke. As summer temperatures climb to 120 degrees, there has been no perceptible improvement in electricity or the water supply.”

We’re resented by the Muslim world as occupiers, not liberators, and to claim that this has not become a civil war is risible. Increasingly, the president’s protests to the contrary become higher and shriller, sounding more and more like a teenager insisting the family car he wrecked wasn’t his fault.

Instead, take the money — we’re already committed more than $300 billion to Iraq, according to the National Priorities Project — and build goodwill by finally making a sincere, all-out effort to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure, from power and water to schools and hospitals. Use the remaining military to protect such sites and to assist and train the Iraqi military and police.

Take the money and fight the real war on terrorism, both at home and abroad. Take the money to change the hearts and minds of the Islamic world with persuasion and positive deeds instead of preemptive war.

And negotiate. Diplomacy is key. Work harder to get the various Iraqi factions around the table. Do the same with the Palestinians and Israelis, the Israelis and the Lebanese, the Israelis and the Syrians. Start talking to Syria, start talking to Iran. Everything relates.

As former President Jimmy Carter told the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel last week, “You never can be certain in advance that negotiations in difficult circumstances will be successful, but you can be certain in advance if you don’t negotiate that your problem is going to continue and maybe even get worse.”

In a comprehensive report in Sunday’s Washington Post, succinctly titled, “What Next?” Daniel Byman of Georgetown’s Center for Peace and Security Studies and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution added, “Washington will have to devise strategies to deal with refugees, minimize terrorist attacks emanating from Iraq, dampen the anger in neighboring populations caused by the conflict, prevent secession fever and keep Iraq’s neighbors from intervening. The odds of success are poor, but, nonetheless, we have to try.”

We slowly approach 3,000 Americans dead, 20,000 wounded. One in three returning home seek mental health care; one in six shows signs of anxiety, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder. Last month, the United Nations reported that the number of Iraqi civilian dead had quadrupled from just June to July.

In the face of all the overwhelming evidence, upstate New York Republican Congressman Randy Kuhl, one of President Bush’s staunchest supporters, recently returned from a four day congressional visit to Iraq. “Most of the country is very, very safe,” he insisted.

According to the Canandaigua Daily Messenger, Kuhl reported that, “From his vantage in a helicopter, he… took in such peaceful scenes in the lush countryside outside Baghdad as farmers working in their fields with tractors.

“Kuhl said he saw evidence of advances in Iraq, such as the construction of schools and sewer and water systems. He was impressed with the comfort of U.S. bases, invariably air-conditioned and served by top-notch cafeteria services.”

Apparently, Rep. Kuhl received the Willy Wonka Golden Ticket tour of Iraq. Which makes me think that, in an odd way, out in the California desert, I saw a truer picture of Iraq than he did.

copyright 2006 Messenger Post Newspapers

_________________________

All newspaper editors want to know what their readers like. If you would like to read this feature in your local newspaper, please do not hesitate to share your enthusiasm with your local newspaper editor.

Michael Winship

Twenty-one years ago this summer, Roseland, the amusement park alongside the lake in my upstate New York hometown, closed down. Like the day the music died, with it went a certain innocence. Its passing marked the loss of a lazy, laid-back source of entertainment and joy far more low-key than the high impact whizbang of plasma TV’s, brutal video games, Internet surfing — the overall carpet bombing of our senses in the mad pursuit of pleasure.

At a time when Canandaigua, in New York State’s Finger Lakes, was more rural and less the bedroom and resort community it is today, that amusement park was a startling and delightful part of our small town, like a gaudy, costume jewelry ruby in the navel of the girl-next-door.

It was, in fact, a touchstone for my entire generation of upstate baby boomers. All over the world, when I’ve told folks of a certain age that I come from Canandaigua, if they recognize the name, chances are they’ll exclaim, “Roseland,” and smile at the memory.

When I was five years old, we still lived in an apartment over my father’s first drug store on Canandaigua’s Main Street. My parents were building the house in which their children would grow up and my mother would live until last fall, when she was moved to a nursing facility in Syracuse.

Each day, my father would come upstairs for lunch and after we’d eaten, he’d give me an option: should we visit the house construction site or Roseland? It was a tough choice for a little boy. Bulldozers and steam shovels digging a deep hole were heavy competition for kiddie rides. Still, Roseland held the edge.

No matter what your age, it was a wondrous place, a swirl of sights and sounds, the summer smells of popcorn, cotton candy and sizzling, grilling meat. There were pint-sized boats and automobiles that catered to the tiniest tots; even a junior-sized rollercoaster for incipient daredevils still limited to trainer wheels.

For bigger kids and adults there were the thrill rides like the Skyliner, a very fine, wooden roller coaster to be sure, but there were more genteel pastimes, too, like Skee-Ball. That consummate game of skill challenged the competitor to roll wooden balls up a ramp into a set of ever smaller concentric rings. We played for hours.

Tickets were awarded for points scored and when enough were amassed you traded them for stuffed animals or novelty eyeglasses or pins that bore catchphrases that had gone out of fashion decades before, like, “Oh You Kid” and “Tell It to the Marines.”

But the piece de resistance was Roseland’s magnificent merry-go-round, the Philadelphia Toboggan Company’s Carousel #18, built in 1909. Forty-two painted horses in perpetual spin. In my memory, they forever gavotte to the tune of “Sugar in the morning, sugar in the evening, sugar at suppertime,” played by an amazing mechanical organ in the 30-ton machine’s innards, its drums and cymbals clanking away like a Rube Goldberg version of a one-man band.

Then Roseland shut its gates, an anachronism in an age of giant corporate-owned theme parks, spiraling liability insurance rates, and all too valuable waterside real estate. My then-wife and I came up from the city for the final weekend to shoot a feature story for her television news show; odd to be covering your own hometown as if it was someplace foreign and other.

Community organizers mounted a gallant attempt to keep the merry-go-round, but in the end couldn’t come up with the wherewithal to hold the horses. On those rare occasions when antique carousels are sold at auction, bids are taken on all the individual pieces. Then they add up the highest bids, add 20% to the total, and put the entire, intact merry-go-round up for auction at that newly established price. Roseland’s sold for $397,500.

Now, she resides at the Carousel Center shopping mall in Syracuse, NY. During my mother’s last days, one afternoon, my sister Tricia and I paid a visit.

As much as I resented it being moved away from Canandaigua, I have to admit the Roseland carousel has been lovingly and faithfully restored, even though its setting, amidst struggling boutiques and a Hooter’s, now make the old tarted-up lady seem like a dowager queen by comparison.

In my Manhattan apartment, next to the fireplace, resides one other remnant, bought when the merry-go-round and the other pieces of Roseland were auctioned off. It’s one of the old ticket boxes, slapped together from pine and held together by hinges and coats of bright orange and aquamarine paint. There are still tickets at the bottom of the chicken wire cages inside.

I’d rather have it than a Faberge egg or a Chippendale chair.

copyright 2006 Messenger Post Newspapers

_________________________

All newspaper editors want to know what their readers like. If you would like to read this feature in your local newspaper, please do not hesitate to share your enthusiasm with your local newspaper editor.

Michael Winship

Two years ago, my friend Anne and I were in northern Israel, where, for the last month, Hezbollah missiles have been falling and killing. We’d just had dinner at a Chinese restaurant in the coastal town of Tiberias and were driving back to the kibbutz bed and breakfast at which we were staying for the night.

It was dark and we got lost. Finally, we saw a light on the side of the road. I got out and walked up to the dilapidated guardhouse of what claimed to be — I am not making this up — a paintball camp.

I explained our plight to a grizzled old man in a beret. He looked at me with a mixture of contempt and incredulity. You know, he said, you’re almost in Lebanon. It’s less than half a mile away.

All things considered, it’s hard not to be “almost” in Lebanon anywhere in Israel. Unlike the United States, drive three hours in any direction in Israel and chances are, you’ll be in the custody of somebody else’s army.

It’s a pocket-sized country, usually referred to in the press as “approximately the size of New Jersey.” And Lebanon is about the size of Connecticut. Amazing that two such relatively small pieces of the planet can be the focus of so much carnage, hate and international consternation.

Trying to make sense of it in the even teenier space of a column such as this would be a fool’s errand (hey, pal, I heard that). Nonetheless, watching and reading about the current fighting between Hezbollah and Israel, two or three, random observations occur.

In anticipation of various grinding axes hurled in my general direction, let me preface them by saying Israel’s right to exist as a democratic, Jewish state is not in question. But for it to continue as a democracy requires an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, and not the proposed, isolated, non-contiguous “cantons,” that are more like the apartheid era Bantustans of South Africa.

Nor can Israel continue to enjoy the goodwill of other free nations if it insists on responding to Hezbollah’s undeniable terror with such an asymmetric excess of violence. Overkill has caused the death or displacement of innocent civilians and destroyed the infrastructure of Lebanon’s messed-up attempt at democracy. And it happened just as that nation was getting back on its feet after a decade and a half of reconstruction.

The damage and pain done to Israel in lives and property and the fact that Hezbollah often hides among the Lebanese population are indisputable. But these realities don’t excuse the bombing — accidental or otherwise — of so many civilian targets. Israel cannot win this way. It turns enemies into heroes and eats the soul.

Given the legendary superiority of Israeli intelligence, it’s surprising how they underestimated the ability of Hezbollah to fight with such ferocity, strength and resilience. One could argue that, lulled into complacency by its equally renowned military strength and the frequent haplessness of the Palestinian resistance, Israel has been blindsided by how well-armed and trained (yes, by Syria and Iran, among others) Hezbollah has proven to be.

Yet an obsessive nationalism contributes to the problem, too. As Henry Kissinger once said after a meeting with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, “We see in Israel a society so traumatized by a generation of war that its leaders are no longer capable of making strategic judgments about their country’s survival.” Nationalism, former Middle East correspondent John Barry wrote in Newsweek, “has blinded Israel to the long-term consequences of a campaign that is practically guaranteed to fail, no matter what level of military effort the country commits.”

They are abetted by our own country’s ignorance, misinterpretation and avoidance of the issues. As Israel behaves without restraint, we look the other way and in the name of spreading democracy and fighting terrorism give our tacit approval. We do so at the peril of the entire world.

Some say that if we’d paid more attention and hadn’t been so preoccupied with Vietnam in the period following the Six Day War in 1967, Israel wouldn’t have been so confident about hanging onto all the territory it seized during its fabled, lightning round of fighting; the source of so much grief.

Now it’s happening again, as our obsession with Iraq and the war on terrorism has distracted and blinded us to reality. By lumping all forms of Islamic resistance into one great “Islamo-fascist” threat, making little or no distinction among Hezbollah, Hamas or al Qaeda, we create the very monolith we fear. We succeeded in doing so in Iraq: we’re in danger of repeating the mistake in Lebanon.

In his book “America at the Crossroads,” erstwhile neoconservative Francis Fukuyama writes, “Before the Iraq war, we were probably at war with no more than a few thousand people around the world who would consider martyring themselves and causing nihilistic damage to the United States. The scale of the problem has grown because we have unleashed a maelstrom.”

A popular joke at the time of the ‘67 war has an Israeli sniper opening fire from a hilly hideout on a large company of Arab soldiers. One by one, the soldiers climb the hill to remove the sniper and one by one they vanish.

Finally, one mortally wounded Arab stumbles down from the brush and gasps to his comrades, “Go back! It’s an ambush — there’s two of them!”

This time it’s the pair Israel and America that are stumbling into an ambush, one that’s largely of their own making and hazardous to the very health of each.

copyright 2006 Messenger Post Newspapers

_________________________

All newspaper editors want to know what their readers like. If you would like to read this feature in your local newspaper, please do not hesitate to share your enthusiasm with your local newspaper editor.

I was sitting with a friend the other day talking about life, work, families, children…and boats. I haven’t spent a lot of time with this guy, but more often than not the conversations have dipped below the surface of polite chit chat to something a little more substantive–enough so that I know this man to be thoughtful, kind, and thoroughly decent. Not a saint, and not without flaws, but he’s someone who cares about being a good person and doing work that makes a difference. He’s a priest and has worked hard to bring a sleepy congregation to life and provide a spiritual home to an increasing number of people. I know there are certain social and political issues we disagree on–gay rights would be a good example–but I also know he is not motivated by anger or hatred but by love and faith. More importantly, it seems that he sees his business–religion–as having a lot more to do with human relationships and growth than it has to do with politics and ideology. He seems unwilling to let a divisive issue like that steal the show from the fundamental mission of his work.

As we watch the product of religious conflict in the Middle East, we should be reminded of the dangers of mixing politics and religon. Yet the Republican Party continues its sellout to the Religious Right and fundamentalist Christians continue to abandon the teachings of their faith to prop up their friends in conservative politics. That’s why it is encouraging and refreshing to talk to people like my friend the priest and hear about evangelicals like Gregory Boyd, who was profiled in the New York Times last Sunday.

Part one of a never-aired interview I did with Dr. Harlan Ullman, the guy who came up with the concept of “Shock and Awe.” This guy is close to lots of administration types, starting with his friend Don Rumsfeld. But he doesn’t think they’re doing a very good job.

Michael Winship

Maybe, like me, you were totally distracted by the president having that photo op with the finalists from “American Idol.” Especially that moment when he mistook Simon Cowell for Tony Blair.

Don’t laugh. According to Monday’s Washington Post, last spring, at a White House meeting to discuss immigration, President Bush confused New Jersey Democratic Senator Robert Mendendez with Florida Republican Senator Mel Martinez, his former secretary of housing and urban development.

As the president would say, s*&# happens.

But, seriously, it’s your civic duty to pay attention and not let yourself be bamboozled by photo ops and other manifestations of the administration’s sleight of hand. They’re performing diversionary card tricks even as Mr. Bush’s popularity hits the iceberg and the Marine Band strikes up “Nearer My God to Thee.” We’re sinking while the White House, aided and abetted by Congress, plays three-card monte on the poop deck.

Not that the president always deals Congress a fair hand, either. We’ve seen that most drastically and egregiously in the president’s penchant for “signing statements.” Those are the interpretive documents — more than 800 now — he attaches to congressional legislation after he signs it. As he, Vice President Cheney and their lawyers see it, the statements allow him to pick and choose which parts of the law he feels like obeying, circumventing the House and Senate.

Last week, a blue ribbon task force appointed by the American Bar Association (ABA) issued a scathing report attacking President Bush’s unprecedented volume of signing statements and urging Congress to pass legislation allowing judicial review of their constitutionality. As a result, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter has introduced a bill that, if passed, would allow Congress to sue the president over the statements’ legality.

“This report raises serious concerns crucial to the survival of our democracy,” ABA President Michael Greco said. “If left unchecked, the president’s practice does grave harm to the separation of powers doctrine, and the system of checks and balances, that have sustained our democracy for more than two centuries. Immediate action is required to address this threat to the Constitution and to the rule of law in our country.”

There are many other ways the administration subtly is subverting the people’s will for ideological gain. On July 23, Charlie Savage, the same Boston Globe reporter who first broke the signing statement story, reported, “The Bush administration is quietly remaking the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, filling the permanent ranks with lawyers who have strong conservative credentials but little experience in civil rights…

“Only 42 percent of the lawyers hired since 2003, after the administration changed the rules to give political appointees more influence in the hiring process, have civil rights experience. In the two years before the change, 77 percent of those who were hired had civil rights backgrounds.

“In an acknowledgment of the department’s special need to be politically neutral, hiring for career jobs in the Civil Rights Division under all recent administrations, Democratic and Republican, had been handled by civil servants — not political appointees. But in the fall of 2002, then-attorney general John Ashcroft changed the procedures.”

The report adds, “At the same time, the kinds of cases the Civil Rights Division is bringing have undergone a shift. The division is bringing fewer voting rights and employment cases involving systematic discrimination against African-Americans, and more alleging reverse discrimination against whites and religious discrimination against Christians.”

Pretty sneaky stuff, huh? But wait, there’s more. According to that same day’s New York Times, “The federal government is moving to eliminate the jobs of nearly half of the lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service who audit tax returns of some of the wealthiest Americans, specifically those who are subject to gift and estate taxes when they transfer parts of their fortunes to their children and others…

“Six I.R.S. estate tax lawyers whose jobs are likely to be eliminated said in interviews that the cuts were just the latest moves behind the scenes at the I.R.S. to shield people with political connections and complex tax-avoidance devices from thorough audits. Sharyn Phillips, a veteran I.R.S. estate tax lawyer in Manhattan, called the cuts a ‘back-door way for the Bush administration to achieve what it cannot get from Congress, which is repeal of the estate tax.’”

Maybe they can’t get total repeal, a notion unpopular with the public, but they’re doing their best to sneak up to it. Last week, the White House and congressional Republicans attached a huge, $62 billion a year, partial elimination of the estate tax to a long overdue increase in the minimum wage. As Kevin Drum noted, tongue-in-cheek, in his Washington Monthly “Political Animal” blog, “Clearly, the Republican Party is the party of common sense. After all, if you give a few hundred dollars a month to the poorest of the working poor, it’s only fair that you also give several million dollars to the richest of the idle rich.”

Although the legislation passed the House (at 1:40 a.m., Saturday, after circumventing normal floor rules), this unholy coupling is having trouble in the Senate. But here’s the really insidious part. As the Times buried deep in its coverage, the minimum wage hike “would allow tips to be counted toward minimum wage increases in states where that is not now allowed.”

In other words, the law would preempt state minimum wage laws in states where it’s been ruled that tips can’t be counted as salary — a ploy many service industries like fast food restaurants have used to pay below acceptable minimums.

According to Nathan Newman, policy director for the Progressive States Network, a non-profit lobby group, “Not only would it hurt tipped workers, it would set a precedent for conservatives to try to preempt all minimum wage rates higher than the federal level… just as they recently preempted state class action laws and just as they have preempted state health care and environmental regulation.”

“Play the cards fair,” goes the old joke. “I know what I dealt you.”

The deck’s stacked. And the jokers run wild.

copyright 2006 Messenger Post Newspapers

_________________________

All newspaper editors want to know what their readers like. If you would like to read this feature in your local newspaper, please do not hesitate to share your enthusiasm with your local newspaper editor.

Recently Written

• 1968: Always Something Next
• ‘Tis the Season to Plead Ignorance
• Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?
• Rudy’s Numbers Don’t Add Up
• Last Night’s Viewing and Other Afflictions
• “The Weak Slat under the Bed of Democracy”
• Behind Closed Doors, “The Big Ask”
• Tomorrow’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose
• California: Fear, Fugue and Fantasia
• Iraq: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

Categories

• Michael Winship
• Show Audio
• Uncategorized

Archives

• January 2008
• December 2007
• November 2007
• October 2007
• September 2007
• August 2007
• July 2007
• June 2007
• May 2007
• April 2007
• March 2007
• February 2007
• January 2007
• December 2006
• November 2006
• October 2006
• September 2006
• August 2006
• July 2006
• June 2006
• May 2006
• April 2006
• March 2006
• February 2006
• January 2006
• December 2005

Blogroll

• Common Dreams
• Entertainment Resources
• Maine Humanities Council
• NYT's Andy Revkin
• Rev. Michael Elliott
• The Photo Album

Admin

• Login
• Wordpress
• XHTML

Search

• del.icio.us
• Digg
• Furl
• Netscape
• Yahoo! My Web
• StumbleUpon
• Google Bookmarks
• Technorati
• BlinkList
• Newsvine
• ma.gnolia
• reddit
• Windows Live
• Tailrank

E-mail It

• To Address:
• Your Name:
• Your Address: