Cartoon du Jour

Jim Morin/Miami Herald

Dr. Ron Paul Has A Heart Of Stone. And Plenty Of Company In Today's GOP.

KENT SNYDER AND RON PAUL

There was a special moment during the CNN/Tea Party presidential debate on Monday evening when moderator Wolf Blitzer threw out a red-meat hypothetical: What do the candidates think about the case of a young man who could afford health insurance but chose not to buy it and became gravely ill? Should the state pay his bills?

"That's what freedom is all about; taking your own risks," replied Ron Paul. "This whole idea that you have to take care of everybody--"

Paul's response was drowned out by cheers from the audience, as well as shouts of "Let him die! Let him die!"

The response and applause was a defining moment for today's Republican Party, which has been hijacked by right-wing zealots who are so twisted that they are pro-life when it comes to abortion but pro-death when it comes to health-care reform.

Ron Paul, however, is even more twisted than his ardent acolytes. You see, Ron Paul is a medical doctor and knows first hand what happens when young people don't have health insurance: In 2008, Kent Snyder, his friend and former campaign manager, died of complications from pneumonia at age 49.

Snyder was relatively young and seemingly healthy when the illness struck. When he died on June 26, 2008, two weeks after Dr. Paul withdrew his first bid for the presidency, his hospital costs totaled $400,000. His mother was incapable of paying the bill.

"Let him die! Let him die!"

The issue that defines America and its people in coming years will not be reducing the federal budget deficit or what to do about income taxes. It will be health care.

Health care is an inalienable right. Other industrialized countries recognized this years ago. Only the U.S. stands alone in letting tens of millions of its citizens, including many children, go without adequate health care or the insurance to pay for that care.

The rights of insurance and drug companies and for-profit hospital chains trump those of Joe and Jane Sixpack, and Dr. Paul and virtually all of the Republican presidential field are just fine with that.

"Let him die! Let him die!"

Why I (Now) Feel Sorry For Dubya

Perhaps I am going soft in my dotage, but I felt a twinge of sorrow for George Bush as he stood next to Barack Obama during the 9/11 anniversary ceremony at Ground Zero on Sunday morning. There was that familiar facial expression somewhere between a smirk and bewilderment, and a reminder that his greatest legacy will forever be launching the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time on the pretext that Saddam Hussein was behind the terrorist attacks. Yet I found that the anger I had long felt for the frat boy from Crawford has pretty much evaporated.

It also occurred to me that things might have been different -- perhaps very different -- had Dick Cheney not be Bush's vice president, the guy whom he refers to as "Uncle Dick" in Pat Oliphant's powerfully biting political cartoons of the era, a guy who we are re-reminded in his recently published memwow never made a mistake and, it turns out, never learned from all the mistakes that he never made.

So despite the fact that Bush screwed up nearly everything he did, some of it without the help of Uncle Dick, and left Obama with a steaming stable of offal to shovel out from Day One, putting all that Hope and Change stuff on hold, he really had the deck stacked against him.

Bush, after all, got into politics in the first place because he was a failure at everything else (thank you, Poppy Bush and Karl Rove). Then he had to figure out what to be and became a compassionate conservative whose heart, I have come to believe, was in the right place but he had a big hole where the ideas were supposed to germinate. Not to worry, sociopathic Uncle Dick and the malodorous Neocon Brain Trust took care of that and before you could say Mission Accomplished they had beaten every last shred of compassion from his agenda.

Then Bush felt the buzz saw of what Sarah Palin, in a recent unguarded moment of actually saying something intelligent, referred to as the "permanent political class" that governs the U.S. that is drawn from both parties and is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people.

Finally, Bush let down the Family Values crowd, which eventually sensed that he was not really one of them, accelerating the great schism that characterizes today's Republican Party with the moderates pretty much locked in the superintendent's office and the inmates running the asylum.

That has gifted us with one of the three leading GOP presidential wannabes believing that Social Security is a giant con game and another claiming that Obama is going to open Soviet gulag-like reeducation camps, while the third is suffering the slings and arrows of political adversity because he engineered a landmark health-care reform law with the help of Democrats and Republicans and Catholics and Protestants alike that has left a national low 5 percent of Massachusetts residents uninsured. For shame!

There has been only one president in my life whom I hated and that was Richard Nixon. (My mother trained our collie to growl when he heard Tricky's name.) That hatred, in part engendered because of the friends who made one-way trips to Vietnam because of Nixon's lies, has never dissipated. You see, he was on my Enemies List, but even during the darkest days of the Bush administration I never hated Dubya.

Anyhow, I remarked to an acquaintance over a cold one later on Sunday that I felt sorry for Bush, thereby breaking one of the cardinal rules of the things I never discusses in bars (politics, religion and whether O.J. was guilty).

"What? You feel sorry for a war criminal?" he shot back, uttering perhaps the first political statement in our 35 years of friendship, as well as a rare display of anger.

"Okay, forget about it," I replied. "The next round's on me."

Photograph by Justin Lane/Getty Images

Cartoon du Jour

Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate
(ca. 2007)

Behold The Pro-Cancer, Let The Elderly Eat Catfood Republican Presidential Field

It should be made clear from the jump that the winnowing-out process to determine which Republican faces Barack Obama next year is working as intended even if at times it more resembles the making of sausage than democracy in action. After all, the 2008 Democratic field had no fewer than eight would-be worthies at the starting gate, including Christopher Dodd, Mike Gravel, Evan Bayh, Dennis Kucinich, Tom Vilsack and some guy by the name of Biden.

While a few of these Democratic wannabes had policy positions outside the mainstream, they were only slightly so and virtually indistinguishable from one another. By the mainstream I mean views held by a majority of voters, and in offering this definition I acknowledge that the mainstream has shifted toward the conservative side in the new millennium.

Many of the policy positions of the candidates in the Republican field also are indistinguishable except that these candidates have views well outside the mainstream. In fact, views well beyond the right field bleachers.

Allowing for flipping (being strident) for the benefit of your primary voter constituency and flopping (moderating that stridency) for general election voters, any of the Republican candidates are capable of the chameleon-like behavior commonplace among politicians of all stripes. But if the eventual nominee is not Mitt Romney or John Huntsman, the election is Barack Obama's to lose and the GOP will have blown an historic opportunity to take back the White House.

Fourteen months out, the only scenario that I see in which Obama would become a one-term president is if voters in sufficient numbers blame him for not pulling jobs out of his presidential hat, a blame that in fairness must be shared with obstructionist congressional Republicans and most especially big business.

* * * * *

As the dust settles from the Republican presidential debate in Los Angeles last week, it is increasingly difficult to not see Perry as the frontrunner among the party's Tea Party faithful and Romney as the frontrunner among the party's shrunken moderate base.

Michele Bachmann, doncha know, is in free fall, and when she lands it will be with less with a splat than a thud as she plows into an increasing large pile of also-rans that includes Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum.

At least the party has Rudy Giuliani waiting in the wings. "I might get into the race if I think we are truly desperate," America's mayor says. Democrats hope that is so.

* * * * *

Perry's biggest problem as the nominee will be his wackadoodle views on stuff people care about. That is to say the mainstream.

It is one thing if Perry believes in the Tooth Fairy, but for him to repeatedly hammer home his view that Social Security is "a giant con game" will win him no friends among senior citizens, some of whom are Republicans and 57 percent of whom recently told CNN pollsters that they don't want major changes to the program. Then there are the all-important Independents, nearly 70 percent of whom oppose major changes.

You can bet your 10-gallon hat that Obama is smiling. And that we will see video clips over and over during the president's re-election run of Perry dissing a retirement benefit that has paid out nearly $6 trillion dollars -- sometimes the difference between eating cat food and a reasonable standard of living -- to everyday Americans in this decade alone and will pay trillions more to future retirees.

* * * * *

Compared to Bachmann, Perry seems almost, uh . . . button down when attacking Washington, a sure-fire applausegetter on the stumpbut even a cursory examination of the reality behind his attacks reveals him to be Bachmann-esque in his ability to obfuscate.

Exhibit A in this regard is the Texas governor's assertion the reason that an astonishing one-fourth of his state's population has no health insurance is because of "government interference." Never mind that the 49 other states have to contend with the same "interference."

And in what state are the most residents covered?

Massachusetts, where only about 5 percent of the population is uninsured because of the passage of health-care reform when Romney was governor, a factoid that should be a cause for celebration but one that he now tries to run away from because it is an object of scorn to Tea Partiers, who apparently never get sick nor will ever need the largesse of Washington when they retire.

* * * * *

As is often the case, the also-rans beat up on the presumed frontrunner of the moment at the L.A. debate.

And so you had the sight of Bachmann, Paul and Santorum heaping scorn on Perry for an initiative to get girls in Texas inoculated against cervical cancer, a leading cause of which are STDs.

Because, you know, the margin of victory for a long shot Republican candidate might be their being against cancer prevention.

* * * * *

The debate was at the Ronald Reagan Library. And despite the many differences I had with the Gipper, he has never seemed better compared to the current crop of crackpot Republican wannabes.

Oh, one other thing: The major parties have nominated only two ideologically extreme candidates in modern history -- Barry Goldwater and George McGovern -- and we know what befell them come Election Day.

Cartoon du Jour

Mike Luckovich/Atlanta Journal Constitution

Stop Presses! Sarah Palin Makes Sense!

I have long thought that I would never have anything nice to say about Sarah Palin until she announced that she was sparing the nation the agony of her running for president. But I was wrong, because the former half-term governor gave a speech in Iowa the other day on the parlous state of Washington that, the usual invective aside, made great sense. And which the "lamestream media," as she calls it, dutifully ignored.

I would not have had a clue about the speech -- the centerpiece of which was her dead-on view that the U.S. is now governed by a "permanent political class" drawn from both parties that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people -- had sometime New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas not rescued it from the dustbin.

The Day That Everything Changed

September 11 is perhaps the third date in American history requiring no year, July 4 and December 7 being the others. It also is the only of the three that I lived through and like virtually everyone touched by the horrific events of that day, found my life changed forever.

That is perhaps a rash statement for someone who was 75 miles from Ground Zero on that gloriously sunny morning and was blithely unaware that the earth had moved until I walked into the mountain retreat where I found my love cowering in bed, head between her legs and arms around her ankles, as the man on National Public Radio said something about a second plane crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center and that the South Tower, where I had taken my young children and out-of-town visitors to the observation deck, had collapsed.

We didn't have a television at the mountain retreat (and still don't have one), so it was impossible -- bloody impossible -- to picture those two immense totems to capitalism crumbling into the ground. It wasn't until that evening when we joined Michael, an English friend who as a child had endured the London Blitz, that we saw on CNN that the towers had indeed collapsed. The Happy Hour crowd at this bar, equal parts bikers and businessmen, watched the same video clips over and over in stunned silence. Michael and I tried to get drunk but failed.

A day later my love and I were preparing to sell her late parents' home in northernmost New Jersey, which is about 10 miles from the George Washington Bridge. Even that far from Ground Zero, the air was redolent with the stench of the toxic cocktail that we have since come to understand that a jetliner laden with 10,000 gallons of highly volatile aviation fuel meeting a 110-story skyscraper can produce. Like the napalm I inhaled in war, it is a smell that I shall take with me to my grave.

Air Force fighter jets sortied overhead as we swept off the back deck and otherwise made the grounds tidy for a real estate agent. As evening fell, we could bear it no longer. We had to see for ourselves. We passed through the George Washington tolls and took the bridge's upper deck as we always do when going into the city. Even though the World Trade Center is a goodly distance away, its towers still dominate the Manhattan skyline.

But when we turned to look down the Hudson River as we had countless times before, the towers were not there. The towers were gone!

* * * * *

I vaguely knew one person who perished on 9/11. Then there was our friend Phil, a stockbroker who worked in the shadow of the towers and, along with tens of thousands of others people, stumbled from his office building into streets choked with pedestrians blindly trying to find their way to safety.

In one of the countless acts of kindness that day, the skippers of the ferry boats tied up at the Hudson piers blew their foghorns, the only compass point in the clouds of dust and debris that had blotted out the sun. Phil followed the foghorns until he reached the river. He turned uptown and walked 120 blocks to his apartment in Morningside Heights. Somewhere along the way he lost a shoe. He keeps its mate on the mantle of his fireplace as a reminder.

* * * * *

When I took up blogging six years ago, two of my primary focuses were the 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq, which of course are attached at the hip because of two men -- Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. It was not enough that over 3,000 people died on 9/11. Many tens of thousands more, including 6,500 American men and women, were to be slaughtered in Iraq in the following years because of their mendacity, and the blood continues to flow.

There is another overarching connection between 9/11 and Iraq -- the torrent of lies that Rumsfeld, Cheney and George Bush told in all their hubristic glory.

I have written often of these lies, as well as the abuses of power and the eager adoption of torture because, you know, the democratic principles and rule of law that had gotten American through countless crises and wars over the last two centuries were somehow just not up to the job.

But on this day all thoughts of mendacity and hubris are to be put aside. Today is for the victims of 9/11 and their loved ones. Please take a moment to remember and honor them. And give your loved ones a big hug.

Katie Day Weisberger for The New York Times

One Of The Biggest 9/11 Lies Is Debunked Not By The Media, But By Law Students

Of the many lies told by Bush administration officials in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, few were larger than the assertion of Vice President Cheney -- who history will show is probably the biggest and boldest liar to hold high office in the U.S. -- that Air Force fighter jet pilots in hot pursuit of the hijacked airliners were poised to carry out an order from President Bush to shoot them down.

In fact, no such order was readied and one was belatedly given by Cheney himself after all four aircraft had crashed. In fact, a mere four fighters -- one of them unarmed -- had been scrambled. In fact, military commanders did not know of the identities of three of the four airliners until after they had been crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a farm field in Western Pennsylvania. In fact, the fighters pursued an aircraft out in the Atlantic that was not connected to the attacks.

In fairness to air traffic controllers and military commanders, a mere nine minutes elapsed from the time controller radars locked onto the first aircraft and it crashed into the south tower, but the vice president nevertheless spun an elaborate yarn that was repeatedly embellished on in the days after the attacks to create the illusion that an administration that had long known about the possibility of them but had been preoccupied elsewhere, had done everything possible to prevent them once the "surprise" attacks were underway.

The outlines of this enormous lie have been known for years and some audio of the conversations of confused and then alarmed controllers has been made public. But this week the entirety of the 9/11 Commission findings on this aspect of the attacks, as well as all of the recordings, is being published for the first time by the Rutgers Law Review. Sections of it are available online at The New York Times.

That's right, a bunch of law students and not the news media has finally provided a complete and unvarnished real-time account. In fact, as noted here, the news media for the most part has been disinterested in getting to the bottom of the major unanswered questions about the seminal event of the new millennium and because of that was complicitous in the elaborate, many tentacled Bush administration cover-up of its failings.

The account in the law review of efforts by controllers at the New York air traffic control center to locate the second airliner headed into the WTC is harrowing:

"Hey, can you look out your window right now?" the caller said.

"Yeah," a radar control manager said.

"Can you, can you see a guy at about 4,000 feet, about 5 east of the airport right now, looks like he’s —"

"Yeah, I see him," the manager said.

"Do you see that guy, look, is he descending into the building also?" the caller asked.

"He’s descending really quick too, yeah," the manager said. "Forty-five hundred right now, he just dropped 800 feet in like, like one, one sweep."

"What kind of airplane is that, can you guys tell?"

"I don’t know, I’ll read it out in a minute," the manager said.

There was no time to read it out, and in the background people can be heard shouting: "Another one just hit the building. Wow. Another one just hit it hard. Another one just hit the World Trade."

* * * * *

Although the Rutgers Law Review does not address ancillary questions, release of the entirety of the 9/11 Commission files on this aspect of the attacks begs a very big question: In the years leading up to September 11, 2001, there had been between 70 and 110 "successful" interceptions per year following distress or other calls, successful in that the aircraft was intercepted and its intentions identified.

Why not on 9/11?

In the instance of the four hijacked airliners, there were breakdowns in both the air traffic control and air defense system pretty much from top to bottom, as well as an arguably belated response from the White House. Which increases the magnitude of Cheney's lies.

Regarding air defense system failures, an August 2006 Vanity Fair article is by far the best.

9/11/01: Remembering Father Mike

Some 3,017 people died in New York, at the Pentagon and in a farm field in western Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, and save for the hijackers all were heroes in their own way. But as the anniversary approaches each year I always recall the story Mychal Judge, a 68-year-old priest and New York Fire Department chaplain.

Father Mike, as everyone called the beloved Benedictine, was uptown at the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, where he ministered to the wealthy and homeless alike, when the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on that gloriously beautiful morning. He donned his FDNY chaplain's uniform and rushed to the towers, where he briefly paused to pray with Mayor Giuliani before running over to a firefighter and a woman who had fallen on the firefighter after jumping from the North Tower.

Father Mike had removed his fireman's helmet to administer the last rites and was anointing Firefighter Danny Suhr and the woman with holy water when he was struck in the back of the head and mortally wounded by a chunk of falling debris.

You may not realize that you knew who Father Mike was until you reflect on the image above. Reuters photographer Shannon Stapleton's photograph, one of the most gripping images to come out of that horrific day, is a modern day Pietá. Yes, that's Father Mike on the makeshift gurney.

You also probably didn't know that Father Mike was an acknowledged homosexual. And so beloved that his death certificate bears the number 00001 – the first official World Trade Center casualty.

The collision between religious orthodoxy and social reality can be ugly, but the mess the Roman Catholic Church has made of its two biggest 21st century controversies -- pedophile priests and homosexual priests -- is enough to make Job spin in his grave.

You see, as inspiring as Father Mike's life may have been, not to mention his bravery on 9/11, he would not have been welcome in today's church, which according to its policy believes that gays "have no social value" and, moreover, "no moral virtue." That truly is a sin.

May Father Mike rest in peace.

9/11/01: Remembering Betty Ong

Betty Ann Ong, who was born to Chinese-American parents in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1956, began her career as an American Airlines flight attendant in 1987. Her professionalism and hard work later earned her the position of a purser, or head flight attendant.

Ong had a knack for making people feel comfortable and putting them at ease. Her love for children and senior citizens made her an ideal purser, and she often gave away trinkets from her travels to children in her Boston neighborhood.

On 9/11, Ong assigned herself to AA Flight 11 at Boston's Logan International Airport so she could return to Los Angeles and then go on vacation to Hawaii with her sister. During the hijacking, Ong called in to the American Airlines emergency center and alerted a supervisor that the aircraft had been hijacked.

The call was the first indication that something was seriously amiss on that September morning, and eventually led to the shutdown of all flights nationwide and diversion of incoming flights from Europe to Canada.

Along with fellow flight attendant Madeline Amy Sweeney, she relayed seat numbers of the hijackers. She reported that none of the crew could open the cockpit door, that two flight attendants and a passenger had been injured, and one of the hijackers had sprayed mace in the first class cabin.

The call lasted 23 minutes. It was terminated when the Boeing 767 crashed into the North Tower.

Book Review: 'Mightier Than The Sword,' The Book That Ignited The Civil War

SIMON LEGREE BEATS UNCLE TOM

It is said that when Harriet Beecher Stowe was greeted by Abraham Lincoln at a White House reception in December 1862, the president looked down at the diminutive author of Uncle Tom's Cabin and said "Is this the little woman who made this great war?"

Whether the statement is apocryphal or not hardly matters. The influence of the anti-slavery novel, the best selling book of the 19th century after the Bible, was immense and 200 years after Stowe's birth it remains a lightning rod for controversy, praised by white scholars for its far-reaching influence and more often than not disparaged -- unfairly, in my view -- by many blacks, for whom the name Uncle Tom is an epithet for the submissive black man.

That controversy will never be settled, but there is no question in the mind of American Studies professor David S. Reynolds that Uncle Tom's Cabin, in mobilizing public opinion against slavery, helped Lincoln get elected and in doing so lit the spark that plunged the nation into civil war.

Reynolds is the author of the just-published Mightier Than The Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle For America, which vigorously explores the world in which Stowe lived, the inevitability of the Civil War and, most interesting for me, the capacity of a white woman to understand the feelings, beliefs and desires of blacks, and in doing so redefining American democracy on a more egalitarian basis.

* * * * *

The pious Stowe, who throughout her life went through periods of metaphysical angst and deep skepticism about her faith and later became interested in spiritualism, would later tell people that there was a simple explanation for the success of Uncle Tom's Cabin: God wrote it. She emphasized the visionary nature of the book, telling a friend that "It all came before me in visions, one after another, and I put them down in words."

Uncle Tom's Cabin was written amidst an American literary renaissance. But Reynolds notes that unlike Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson and other Transcendentalists, she wanted to connect religion closely to common life and everyday language.

Reynolds writes that Stowe:

"[T]ook advantage of an alternate characteristic of the American spirit: democracy and social equality. Walt Whitman noted that the great paradox of America was that it bred radical individualism and, at the same time, democratic union and love. Harriet used the latter impulses to change her relationship to those around her and to God."

That is reflected in Stowe's earliest writings and religious themes, of course, are central to Uncle Tom's Cabin. (See the plot synopsis in the sidebar below this post.)

Reynolds:

"Eva is both a Virgin Mary figure and a female Christ, whose death redeems others. The repentant Cassy, who tends to the wounded Tom, is the novel's Mary Magdalene. Tom is the male Christ who willingly endures great suffering as an example of self-sacrificing love. The Passion resonates in the text. As Tom nears death, he reads about Jesus's last days."

For Stowe, blacks exhibited religious qualities she believed many whites lacked, and Reynolds writes that one of her goals was to show the wrongheadedness of whites' contempt for them. She imagined a future civilization in Africa where Christian blacks would form the "noblest" society on earth, exhibiting "the highest form of the peculiarly Christian life" based on simplicity and surrender to God.

Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852, grew out of 10 fictional magazine sketches of slaves, including Eliza, Cassy and Uncle Tom himself. It sold a mere 5,000 copies in the first year but nearly 300,000 the second and over a million copies in Britain, where slavery had been abolished in 1772 and in its colonies in 1833.

Timing, of course, is everything, and Uncle Tom's Cabin appeared as what was the inevitable march to civil war accelerated.

The great black orator Frederick Douglass, among others, declared Stowe had "baptized with holy fire myriads who before cared nothing for the bleeding slave." (Reynolds says that it probably was Douglass who first used the term "Uncle Tom" as an epithet.) Meanwhile, Stowe's indictment of slavery through the brutal slave owner Simon Legree was seen as an attack on all things Southern in the South even though Stowe strove to present Southerns as favorably as possible even as she condemned "their peculiar institution."

* * * * *

Stowe's view of blacks seem like racial stereotyping in a contemporary context, but it was progressive for an era when 12 American presidents had owned slaves and even the most committed antislavery proponents expressed racist views, including Lincoln, who often referred to black as "niggers." That truth has become blurred beyond comprehension because Uncle Tom became a staple of American popular entertainment, as well as jigsaw puzzles, dolls, card games, and such.

Reynolds traces the ebb and flow of the novel's reputation, which peaked during the Civil War years and bottomed out when Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell's highly romanticized view of the antebellum South, became a bestselling book and a hit movie.

No matter how one views Uncle Tom's Cabin, it is an important part of our heritage and Mightier Than The Sword is a masterful overview of the life and afterlife of arguably the most influential book in American history.

'Uncle Tom's Cabin': A Plot Summary

The complete title of Uncle Tom's Cabin is Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly.

The book opens with Arthur Shelby facing the loss of his Kentucky farm because of debts. Even though he and his wife Emily have a benevolent relationship with their slaves, he decides to sell two of them to a slave trader: middle-aged Uncle Tom, who has a wife and children, and Harry, the son of Emily's maid Eliza.

When Eliza overhears the Shelbys discussing plans to sell Tom and Harry, Eliza runs away with Harry, leaving a note of apology to her mistress..

Uncle Tom is sold and placed on a riverboat which sets sail down the Mississippi. While on board, the slave meets and befriends Eva, a young white girl. Eva falls into the river and Uncle Tom saves her. In gratitude, Eva's father, Augustine St. Clare, buys Tom from the slave trader and takes him to his family home in New Orleans. Uncle Tom and Eva become close because of the deep Christian faith they share.

During Eliza's escape, she meets up with her husband George Harris, who had run away previously. They decided to try to reach Canada but are now being tracked by Tom Loker, a slave hunter. Loker and his men eventually trap Eliza and her family, prompting George to shoot Loker. Concerned that Loker may die, Eliza convinces George to bring the slave hunter to a nearby Quaker settlement for medical treatment.

Back in New Orleans, St. Clare debates slavery with his Northern cousin Ophelia who, while opposing slavery, is prejudiced against blacks. St. Clare, however, believes he is not biased, even though he is a slave owner. In an attempt to show Ophelia that her views on blacks are wrong, St. Clare purchases Topsy, a young black slave and asks Ophelia to educate her.

After Uncle Tom has lived with the St. Clares for two years, Eva grows gravely ill. Before she dies she experiences a vision of heaven which she shares with the people around her. As a result of her death and vision, the other characters resolve to change their lives, with Ophelia promising to throw off her personal prejudices against blacks, Topsy saying she will better herself, and St. Clare pledging to free Uncle Tom.

Before St. Clare can follow through on his pledge, he dies after being stabbed while entering a New Orleans tavern. His wife reneges on her husband's vow and sells Uncle Tom at auction to Simon Legree, a vicious plantation owner who takes him to rural Louisiana where Uncle Tom meets Legree's other slaves, including Emmeline.

Legree begins to hate Uncle Tom when he refuses Legree's order to whip a fellow slave. Legree beats Uncle Tom viciously. He resolves to crush his new slave's faith in God, but Uncle Tom refuses to stop reading his Bible and comforting the other slaves. He meets Cassy, another Legree slave who had been separated from her son and daughter when they were sold. Unable to endure the pain of seeing another child sold, she had killed her third child.

Meanwhile, Loker has changed as the result of being healed by the Quakers. Eliza and Harry have obtained their freedom after crossing into Canada. Back in Louisiana, Uncle Tom almost succumbs to hopelessness as his faith in God is repeatedly tested by hardships on the plantation. He has two visions, one of Jesus and one of Eva, which renew his resolve to remain a faithful Christian. He encourages Cassy to escape, which she does, taking Emmeline with her. When Uncle Tom refuses to tell Legree where Cassy and Emmeline have gone, Legree orders his overseers to kill Uncle Tom.

As Uncle Tom lays dying, he forgives the two overseers who savagely beat him and both men, humbled by the character of the man they have killed, become Christians. George Shelby, Arthur Shelby's son, arrives to buy Uncle Tom’s freedom, but finds he is too late.

On their boat ride to freedom, Cassy and Emmeline meet George Harris' sister and accompany her to Canada. Once there, Cassy discovers that Eliza is her long-lost daughter who was sold as a child. Now that their family is together again, they travel to France and eventually Liberia, the African nation created for former American slaves. There they meet Cassy's long-lost son. George Shelby returns to the Kentucky farm and frees all his slaves. George tells them to remember Uncle Tom's sacrifice and his belief in the true meaning of Christianity.

Cartoon du Jour

Ben Sargent/Universal Press Syndicate

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

Indian youths make a human pyramid to reach and break the Dahi Handi, an earthen pot filled with yoghurt, as they celebrate Janmashtami, the anniversary of the birth of the Hindu god Krishna, in Mumbai

Photograph by Rafiq Maqboo/The Associated Press

Courtesy Of The GOP, Jim Crow Is Back In A Nat'l Voter Suppression Campaign

Our democracy is under siege from an enemy so small it could be hiding anywhere.

~ STEPHEN COLBERT

Having stolen the 2000 presidential election courtesy of the Supreme Court, the Republican Party is gearing up to try to steal the 2012 election by suppressing the voters who helped elect Barack Obama in 2008. They are, not coincidentally, the traditional enemies of the party and include minorities, the elderly, immigrants, college students and ex-convicts who represented an historic number of first-time voters in that watershed election.

Unlike past voter suppression efforts that were on a haphazard state-by-state basis, Rolling Stone and other media outlets are reporting that this campaign is being centrally coordinated.

Retaking the White House will be a long shot even with resorting to thuggery, although the GOP has shown in the new millennium that there is nothing it won't do to further cheapen the brand of a once-proud party, most recently trying to hold hostage the victims of Hurricane Irene and other natural disasters. Tactics, you see, have trumped principles.

The big gun behind the campaign is the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who have bankrolled the Tea Party.

With ALEC and party operatives pulling the strings, some 12 states have approved new obstacles to voting that are reminiscent of Jim Crow laws such as literacy tests and poll taxes that were used to keep black Southerners from voting. The efforts vary with the states. Texas, for example, has made it harder for the League of Women Voters to register new voters, while Maine has repealed Election Day voter registration and other states have cut short early voting periods that make it easier for the elderly and students to vote.

The typical Republican Party reply to criticism of its voter suppression efforts is that they are attempts to crack down on rampant voter fraud. The problem is that there is extremely little voter fraud, and from 2002 to 2007 the Bush Justice Department was unable to prosecute a single case. This has not stopped the GOP, and in 2006 the Justice Department fired two U.S. attorneys for refusing to pursue trumped-up voter fraud cases.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a former high-ranking Bush Justice Department adviser, is typical of the anti-voter zealots.

Kobach has adroitly played to anti-immigrant fears in successfully fighting for a new law requiring proof of citizenship in order to vote even though Kansas has prosecuted only a single voter fraud case in the last five years. He also has railed against dead people voting and cited a Kansan named Alfred K. Brewer as a typical culprit. There was only one problem: Brewer was alive and well, and the Wichita Eagle found him working in his front yard.

"I don't think this is heaven," Brewer told the paper. "Not when I'm raking leaves."

Cartoon du Jour

Tom Toles/Universal Press Syndicate

Cartoon du Jour

Tom Toles/Universal Press Syndicate
(2003)

The Terrorists Lost, But Who Won?

Frank Rich, writing in New York magazine:

"The hallowed burial grounds of 9/11 were supposed to bequeath us a stronger nation, not a busted one. We were supposed to be left with a finer legacy than Gitmo and the Patriot Act. When we woke up on September 12, we imagined a whole host of civic virtues that might rise from the smoldering ruins. The New ­Normal promised a new national unity and, of all unlikely miracles, bi-partisanship: The still-green president had a near-perfect approval rating for weeks. We would at last cast off our two-decade holiday from history, during which we had mostly ignored a steady barrage of terrorist threats and attacks. We would embrace a selfless wartime patriotism built on the awesome example of those regular Americans who ran to the rescue on that terrifying day of mass death, at the price of their own health and sometimes their lives.

"What arrived instead, sadly enough, was another hijacking—of 9/11 by those who exploited it for motives large and petty, both ideological and crassly ­commercial. The most lethal of these hijackings was the Bush administration’s repurposing of 9/11 for a war against a country that had not attacked us. So devilishly clever was the selling of the Saddam-for-Osama bait-and-switch that almost half the country would come to believe that Iraqis were among the 9/11 hijackers. No less shabby, if far less catastrophic, was the milking of 9/11 for the lesser causes of self-promotion and product placement by those seeking either power or profit. From the Bush-reelection campaign ad with an image of a flag-draped stretcher carrying remains at ground zero to the donning of flag pins by television anchors and pandering politicians, no opportunistic appropriation of 9/11 was too sleazy to be off-limits. T-shirt hawkers and Scientologists rushed downtown to merchandise their wares; NBC re-branded its prime-time entertainment by outfitting its ubiquitous peacock logo with stars and stripes. (G.E., the network’s owner, had defense contracts to tend to.) Nor should we forget the preening architect Daniel Libeskind, who posed for an Audi ad to celebrate winning the contest to design the World Trade Center site (“the commission of the century,” as the copywriter had it).

9/11 Health-Care Work Had Limits

Among the many first responders rushing to Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks were mental health workers. While they meant well in trying to soothe the survivors and people traumatized by the attacks, a study to be published this week on the 10th anniversary of the attacks found that some of the treatments proved to be harmful and the number of survivors with lasting emotional distress was much smaller than had been estimated.

The report, appearing in a special issue of the journal American Psychologist, also found that:

* Experts argued among them selves over whether watching an event on television could produce the same kind of traumatic reaction as actually being there.

* The standard approach involved urging a distressed person to talk through their experiences and emotions, but it backfired for many people who plunged even deeper into anxiety and depression when forced to relive their experiences.

* People are far more resilient than experts thought, and the number of people exhibiting post-traumatic stress was far lower than the epidemic proportions -- an estimated 100,000 people -- that had been predicted. Later studies found rates closer to 10 percent for first responders and lower for other New Yorkers, while the prevalence in children was slightly higher.

* One upshot of the experiences has been to caution against applying theories so readily to real life, and crisis response teams now take a much less intense approach called psychological first aid, teaching basic coping skills and having victims recount experiences only if it seems helpful.

The Search & Rescue Dogs Of 9/11

Moxie, now age 13, arrived at the World Trade Center site on September 11 and began working the next morning. Although she is trained to find survivors, she identified six bodies and many body parts during the eight days she worked there. Since her owner retired her at age 7, she has hunted and spent time on the Winthrop, Massachusetts waterfront. She is one of the dogs featured in Retrieved, a book by photographer Charlotte Dumas to be published next month.

Photograph du Jour

Photograph by T. Hoepker/Magnum

O'Donnell's 15 Minutes Of Fame Is Over

Christine O'Donnell's 15 minutes of fame is officially over. Politico reports that the Tea Party darling, who deftly blew a guaranteed Republican Senate seat pick-up in Delaware last November, has been stricken from the guest list at an Iowa event being headlined by Sarah Palin, whose 15 minutes of fame has been extended but soon also will expire.

Fame, of course, can be fleeting for even the most stalwart of politicians and celebrities, but O'Donnell's flameout is a case study in what is wrong with today's GOP.

She upset longtime Congressman Mike Castle in the primary to see who would run against Democrat Chris Combs to fill Joe Biden's old Senate seat and then went on a spectacularly self-destructive spree, bloviating about the ills of masturbation and same-sex marriage (Delaware passed a pro-gay marriage ballot initiative the day she lost), hybrid mice-humans with super intelligence, and my favorite, that people should not lie to the Nazis if they knocked on your door and asked if you were hiding Anne Frank. She also displayed an amazing ignorance of the Constitution.

Despite Combs having little experience, he thumped O'Donnell, who had even less experience as well as trouble holding jobs, in the general election. But she failed to take the hint and sought a teevee contract (no go) and then penned a memwow (that has sold extremely poorly and invoked the wrath of Delaware Republican bigs for its serial lies and obfuscations).

In pink-slipping O'Donnell, Tea Party co-founder Charlie Gruschow acknowledged that she no longer was a good fit with "the movement" and that he had received a flood of angry emails from party acolytes upset that she would share the dais with the former half-term Alaska governor.

Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out, Christine.

Musings On The Indefatigable 'Chuck

The American woodchuck is more properly known as the groundhog (or even more properly as Marmota monax), but by any name is a big bellied pest with an insatiable appetite for everything and anything in the backyard garden. Except perhaps for hot peppers.

Don't try telling me that they're cute. I've seen 'chucks who probably weighed as much as 30 pounds, although half that weight is the norm. Come to think of it, Norm on Cheers looked a bit like the 'chuck who used to patrol our backyard until Jack and Nicky, brother-sister chocolate Labradors, arrived on the scene.

* * * * *

So how did the Woodchuck . . . er Groundhog Day tradition get started?

Blame the Celts, who believed that animals had supernatural powers at certain times of the year and if groundhogs and bears came out of hibernation too early they would be frightened by their shadow and retreat back inside for four to six weeks.

* * * * *

We have a neighbor whom, you might say, is sometimes a little too smart for his own good.

Both his dogs have passed on. 'Chucks were digging under his garden fence and making mincemeat of his veggies. He dug a trench around the garden and laid 18 inches of fence below ground and another 18 inches above ground, but the 'chucks, despite their sizable girth, figured out how to climb over and in. Climbing over and out was harder with full bellies, but they did it.

'Chucks, for those of you who don't know, live in underground dens. These dens typically have two entrances, or an entrance and an escape exit, if you will, and our neighbor deduced that their tunnel system ran parallel to a treeline that separated his property from the folks next door.

The neighbor hatched a plan: He would light and push a gasoline-soaked rag down one hole and wait with shotgun in hand until the 'chucks bolted from the exit hole.

They did and he got them. But then he smelled wood burning and realized he had set ablaze the root system of his trees. He had plenty of garden hose to reach the 'chuck hole but it was in sections hither and yon. He raced around his house pulling and coupling hose together and finally was able to extinguish his a-little-too-smart blaze.

* * * * *

If a woodchuck could chuck wood,
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck,
If a woodchuck could chuck wood?
He would chuck, he would, as much as he could,
If a woodchuck could chuck wood.

* * * * *

I lived on a farm for many years with an enormous unfenced garden and a seemingly endless supply of 'chucks despite the fact that our golden retrievers made great sport out of chasing down and killing them.

Their usual technique was to grab them by the neck and shake them until their necks broke, although Ruffie enjoyed repeatedly throwing them up in the air until they expired.

* * * * *

We also bred goldens at the farm and most of the pups were sold to families who would arrive in minivans that would disgorge a father, mother and two and a half children.

One such family showed up on a picture-perfect summer Saturday afternoon. They were escorted to a fenced-in area above the garden where the mother would retire with her pups after they were a couple of weeks along. There was a shed in the back of the pen where they sheltered when it rained and steps at the front so that the mother could climb in and out of the pen.

This litter was especially cute and everything was going swimmingly. A couple of pups had been sold and the last half dozen were bound to go quickly. The two and a half children were kneeling outside the fence and petting the pups, who licked their hands and faces as they whispered sotto voce "Buy me, I'm only eight hundred dollars." The father announced that the only thing to be decided was whether they would head back to suburbia with one or two pups.

"Two! Two!" the two and a half children cried in unison.

Then there was a commotion. The mother of the pups had appeared on the steps, an enormous and enormously bloody 'chuck grasped in its jaws. The mother screamed. The two and a half children screamed.

And the father said, "Maybe we'll come back some other time."

Cartoon du Jour

Mike Luckovich/Atlanta Journal Constitution

Good Night Irene. And Good Riddance.

And so Irene passes into history having been an unusual hurricane that fortunately did not live up to its potential.

Meteorologists were predicting a storm of the century, but by the time Irene hit the metropolitan New York area it more resembled, in the words of one wag, an overweight jogger. There were a number of explanations for this, but the most significant is that the storm -- while immense and a huge rainmaker that took at least 16 lives in six states -- failed to undergo an expected eyewall transformation.

Forecasters had expected that a spinning band of clouds near Irene's center, called the inner eyewall, to collapse and be replaced by an outer band that would then contract, causing the hurricane to strengthen. Irene never completed that cycle.

The fact there were "only" 16 deaths is attributable to state and local emergency preparedness plans that planned for the worst and included mandatory evacuation orders in coastal and low-lying areas. In years past, hurricanes of comparable strength would have caused many more deaths. Mass transit shutdowns and power outages -- and at one point over 9 million people were without power -- seem like a relatively small price to pay.

Most media attention was on New York City, but it got off relatively unscathed while the suburbs and New England experienced the worst flooding.

We rode out Irene at the mountain retreat. Power and Internet service was uninterrupted despite high winds and torrential rains, which gave us the opportunity to follow the storm closely. We have no television, so we went to The New York Times early and often over the weekend.

Its coverage, which included maps, graphics, photos from pros and readers alike and in-depth articles, was superb. The full-screen interactive map of Irene as she made her way up the coast was hugely informative.

The Weather Channel gets no such praise. Better safe than sorry, and all that, but it was obvious to this amateur on Friday morning that Irene was falling apart as it neared the Outer Banks of North Carolina. A conversation with a retired Air Force meteorologist whom I knew confirmed that was the case, but as late as 6 a.m. on Saturday when I departed for the mountain retreat, Al Roker and his posse were in full overhype mode.

The bottom line: It could have been worse.