Month: January 2008

Well, this is interesting:

While congressional leaders generally don’t make endorsements in presidential primaries, the addition of California Rep. Anna Eshoo to the list of lawmakers backing Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois today may provide clues to where House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is leaning.

Eshoo is one of Pelosi’s closest friends and political allies in the House, as is California Rep. George Miller, who endorsed Obama earlier this month. Rep. Xavier Becerra, hand-picked by Pelosi to be assistant to the speaker when Democrats took control of the chamber, also endorsed Obama this week.

“Barack Obama inspires me. He gives me hope,” Eshoo said in a statement. “He appeals to the best in us, and in doing so he restores the sense of idealism that brought me to public service. He challenges us to dream bigger and reach farther.”

Pelosi, who has already said she will not publicly endorse, acknowledged to her hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, on Tuesday that she was awed by Sen. Edward Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama.

Pelosi has long-admired former President John F. Kennedy, regularly citing him as an inspiration; in her office, she prominently displays a photograph of herself as a young woman standing with JFK.

“Did you ever see anything like that?” Pelosi said to the Chronicle. “Transferring the mantle from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama. It was the most stunning thing. I mean, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. And I didn’t have any time to sit there and watch TV, you know–we had a whole schedule. I just was mesmerized by it.”

She’s probably still a Clinton supporter though, right?

It’s amazing to see all this Establishment hostility oozing out of the woodwork. I thought that Hillary Clinton had done a good job of keeping her head down and doing a good job as a senator. Apparently, these 10 year-old wounds never healed. I think, actually, that they did heal, but the Big Dog ripped off the scab.

We all know that the Netroots is not a representative sample of the Democratic Party. Far from it. Yesterday I wrote Who Were Edwards’ Voters?, wherein I showed that Edwards’ voters in the early primary and caucus contests were whiter, richer, more pro-war, and more moderate-to-conservative than we would expect given the populist, poverty-focused, anti-corporate, anti-war message of his campaign. Looking at the exit polls gave me almost no signs that Edwards’ supporters will break to Obama. So it is interesting to see the results of the most recent Daily Kos poll:

dKos Reader Poll. 1/30/07 9:58 a.m. to 8:27 p.m. PT. 17,995 respondents.

           2008                          2007

           Jan30 Jan24 Jan16 Jan07 Jan02 Dec19 Dec12 Nov Oct

Obama        76    41    41   39    27    27    30    27  16

H. Clinton   11     9    11    7     7     6     8     9   9

Other         5     1     1    1     1     1     1     1   3

No F'ing Clue 6     2     2    2     2     2     4     4   5

-------Out of the race--------

Edwards       -    42    38   43    48    41    39    33  31

Kucinich      -     2     4    4     3     5     8     9   5

Dodd          -     -     -    -     4    11     2     7  21

Biden         -     -     -    -     1     2     2     2   1

Richardson    -     -     -    1     1     1     1     1   2

Gravel*       -     -     -    -     0     0     0     0   0

How did Edwards’ 42% support break among Daily Kos readers? Obama got 35% 83% of them, Clinton 2% 5%, and there was an 8% uptick in undecided voters (probably because Kucinich also dropped out).

I think the disconnect between the Netroots and the party at large can be seen in these numbers from South Carolina:

When asked if they would be satisfied if Clinton won the nomination, 33% of Edwards’ supports said ‘no’. When asked if they would be satisfied if Obama won the nomination 47% said ‘no’.

Now, I don’t think South Carolina Democrats are any more representative of the national party than Daily Kos readers, but the disconnect is staggering. And I think it helps explain why some people simply refused to believe the numbers from the Exit Polls. We’re all living in the same country, but the difference between high and low information voters is simply staggering. I think the only thing that explains it is that the more people pay attention, the less they like Hillary Clinton and her campaign. But there may be other explanations that are escaping me right now.

Don’t let the CNN decide which Candidates you see and hear.

Mike’s going to put the Network feed on a screen, stand in front with a pause button, and interject his answers and commentary. He’ll catch up  during the commercials. Alternative debate live stream 8PM Eastern, 5 Pacific.

Can we maintain our focus on the really important shit?

For the second time this month, Britney Spears was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Early Thursday morning (January 31), according to reports in the Los Angeles Times, Spears, 26, was physically removed from her home by police and put into an ambulance at around 1 a.m., then escorted to the UCLA Medical Center by a phalanx of more than a dozen motorcycle officers, two police cruisers and two police helicopters. The singer is resting at the hospital, her mother, Lynne Spears, confirmed to reporters on Thursday, according to CNN.

The action came as a result of yet another call for a “5150” hold for a mental-health evaluation, which means that Spears is considered a threat to herself or those around her, authorities told the paper. The motorcycles and a Los Angeles Fire Department ambulance swept through the gates of Spears’ hilltop home in Studio City, California, shortly after 1 a.m., with a police helicopter hovering overhead, and removed the singer eight minutes later. Officers inside the home reportedly radioed to commanders that “the package is on the way out.”

According to the Times, the winding street leading up to Spears’ home, the Summit, was jammed with paparazzi vehicles for several hours prior to the arrival of the police.

On January 3, Spears was placed on a 72-hour mental-health evaluation hold when police were called to her house after she would not give up custody of her two children to a representative for ex-husband Kevin Federline, who had come to pick them up; she was released two days later. Unlike that incident, during which Spears’ trip from her home to the hospital was swarmed by paparazzi, this time officials blocked vehicles from following them.

I am sick and tired of how we constantly get sidetracked.

The rate cut came and went.  Stocks fell.  Barring a major surprise, this month is going to go down as the worst January in market history.  They are up right now as MBIA says it’s going to magically keep its credit rating…for now.

As we go into the last trading day of the month, the Nasdaq and S&P are already having their worst January in history.  The Dow is not far behind and is currently having its worst January since 1978.

And 1978 wasn’t exactly the best year for the Dow.  Things continue to unravel.  How long can the monolines last?
Another sign that the game is up is the latest consumer spending and jobless numbers.

Consumers, battered by harsh economic crosswinds, spent less in December than at any time in the past 15 months while applications for unemployment benefits soared last week, two more signs the economy is weakening.

The Commerce Department reported Thursday that consumer spending edged up just 0.2 percent in December — the year’s peak shopping season — down sharply from a 1 percent gain in November. It was the weakest performance in this area since spending fell by 0.1 percent in September 2006.

Meanwhile, the Labor Department reported that the number of laid off workers filing applications for unemployment benefits soared by 69,000 to 375,000. That was the highest level for jobless claims since the week of Oct. 8, 2005, when the economy was dealing with the disruptions caused by Hurricane Katrina and the other Gulf Coast hurricanes.

The numbers keep getting worse, even the highly padded employment figures are lousy, which means the raw numbers are terrible.

The market of course is going to expect more rate cuts from these lousy numbers.  Inflation now is secondary to the market…but then again anyone who has had to buy gas, milk, or bread in the last 6 years already knows that.

Bush doesn’t care.  We have literally the worst CEO in history as President right now.  He only cares about personal power.  Presidency for him is a trophy, not a duty.  The economy reflects that.  We’ve deficit-spent our way right back into stagflation, possibly even deflation and depression.

The monolines are still hemorrhaging blood like a John Woo movie.

an. 31 (Bloomberg) — MBIA Inc., the world’s largest bond insurer, posted its biggest-ever quarterly loss and may raise more capital after a slump in the value of subprime-mortgage securities.

The fourth-quarter net loss was $2.3 billion, or $18.61 a share, raising concern that the Armonk, New York-based company will lose its top credit rating. The loss came a day after FGIC Corp.’s insurance unit became the third financial guarantor to be stripped of its AAA grade by Fitch Ratings.

MBIA Chief Executive Officer Gary Dunton is trying to shore up capital and retain a AAA rating for the company’s insurance unit by selling stock and bonds. Without the AAA stamp, MBIA’s business would be crippled and ratings on $652 billion of securities would be thrown into doubt. That threat prompted New York State insurance regulators to call a meeting of banks last week to discuss a rescue.

Again, MBIA says it’s keeping that AAA rating for now…but for how long?  Think about that for a second.  One monoline — just one — is responsible for the confidence of $652 billion in securities products.  And it is just one of the monolines that is coming close to imminent failure.  Total, the monolines are responsible for trillions and trillions of dollars in paper wealth.

If the monolines go down, it’s over.  And the monolines are not long for this world.  If the monolines keep having to be bailed out in a panic, and they lose their credit rating, they are done.  It doesn’t matter how much of a bailout they get if their credit ratings are lowered.  They’re out of the game.

When they all get out of the game, the game ends, and along with it our economy.  How bad is it?  The whole reason monolines exist is to pay off when companies default.  As long as companies don’t default, everything’s fine, it’s a great scam.

but the companies are defaulting.

The risk of companies defaulting rose as negative ratings actions by Standard & Poor’s on $534 billion of mortgage-linked securities and a record loss at bond insurer MBIA Inc. reinforced concern that financial markets will worsen.

Contracts on the benchmark Markit CDX North America Investment Grade Index rose 2.5 basis points to 110 at 10:23 a.m. in New York, according to Deutsche Bank AG. Europe’s Markit iTraxx Crossover Index jumped 27 basis points to 477, JPMorgan Chase & Co. prices show. In Asia, the Markit iTraxx Japan index rose 6 basis points to 70.

S&P said its review of debt securities linked to home loans sold to people with weak credit may cause bank losses to exceed $265 billion and have a “ripple impact” on financial markets. MBIA, the biggest bond insurer, reported a fourth-quarter net loss of $2.3 billion, fueling concern that it will be stripped off its AAA credit rating, throwing doubt on the value of $652 billion of securities the company guarantees.

“A lot of investors remember what happened the last time we had a pretty broad-based downgrading of those securities,” said Ashish Shah, head of credit strategy at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in New York. “We fully expect to see more writedowns.”

Downgrades last year of subprime mortgage-linked securities caused the world’s biggest banks and securities firms to announce at least $133 billion in credit losses and asset writedowns.

Like a focused explosion inside a nuclear device that compresses the nuclear material into a critical mass, the subprime crisis was just a trigger for a much larger market explosion.

Debt trading is what the modern market survives on.  Without it, there’s no market.

And the truly frightening part is that when the monoline nuke goes off, it’ll only trigger an even larger event as the hundreds of trillions in derivatives disintegrate, and take the global markets with it.

It’s bad now, we’re seeing losses in the billions.  It’s going to get worse.  Losses in the hundreds of billions are coming when the monolines fracture.  And after that it’s going to get into truly fucked territory…trillions, maybe tens or hundreds of trillions will vanish.

We’ll become a third world country and we’ll have quite a bit of company.  

Right now I’m not really seeing any indication from the Presidential candidates that they even begin to comprehend what the next President is in for.  Who knows what kind of election 2012 will be, because I guarantee you whoever does win in 2008 will get the Jimmy Carter/George H.W. Bush treatment when they go to be reelected (if we still have elections and aren’t under martial law by then).

No amount of finagling MBIA’s credit rating will hide the rest of the collapse.  It’s just prolonging the inevitable.

And we’ll see what February brings.

Apparently, ABC News got their mitts on some tapes of old Wal-Mart board meetings and aired a nasty piece on Hillary Clinton on this morning’s Good Morning America:

In six years as a member of the Wal-Mart board of directors, between 1986 and 1992, Hillary Clinton remained silent as the world’s largest retailer waged a major campaign against labor unions seeking to represent store workers.

The substance of the charge is that Hillary was mute in meetings where union busting was rigorously discussed. I think it is important to put this is some perspective.

President Clinton defended his wife’s role on the Wal-Mart board last week after the issue was raised by Sen. Barack Obama in a CNN debate.

His wife did not try to change the company’s minds about unions, the former Arkansas governor said.

“We lived in a state that had a very weak labor movement, where I always had the endorsement of the labor movement because I did what I could do to make it stronger. She knew there was no way she could change that, not with it headquartered in Arkansas, and she agreed to serve,” President Clinton said.

The tapes show that Hillary advocated for more environmentally-friendly business practices and better treatment for female employees, but it turns out she wasn’t particularly effective as an advocate.

Critics say Clinton’s efforts produced few tangible results, and Wal-Mart is now defending itself in a lawsuit brought by 16 current and former female employees.

“I don’t doubt the sincerity of her efforts, but we don’t see much evidence that conditions for women at Wal-Mart changed much during the late 1980s and early 1990s,” said Joe Sellers, one of the lawyers suing Wal-Mart on behalf of the women.

Personally, I am not particularly disturbed by this news. It seems to me to be a lot of quibbling that takes too little account of the circumstances of the time. What I find more disturbing than Hillary’s time on the board of Wal-Mart is her ongoing relationship with the company.

According to the New York Times, Sen. Clinton “maintains close ties to Wal-Mart executives through the Democratic Party and the tightly knit Arkansas business community.” The May 20, 2007 article also reported that her husband, former President Clinton, “speaks frequently to Wal-Mart’s current chief executive, H. Lee Scott Jr.” and held a private dinner at the Clinton’s New York home in July 2006 for him.

It’s one thing to maintain old contacts, it’s quite another to hold private dinners at your home for union busting CEO’s. It reminds me of a couple of other tidbits I’ve seen recently.

Asked whether his infidelity is hypocritical, in light of his political commitments, [Richard Mellon-Scaife] refers not to a moral principle but to his own personal history. “My first marriage ended with an affair,” he says, amused. And monogamy is not, he continues, an essential part of a good marriage. “I don’t want people throwing rocks at me in the street. But I believe in open marriage.” Philandering, Scaife says with a laugh, “is something that Bill Clinton and I have in common.”

Those are surprising words indeed to hear from a man who spent so lavishly to uncover Bill Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes and to advance the movement fueled by family values. But it would be a mistake to read the saga of Richard Mellon Scaife’s divorce as simply a story of moral hypocrisy. His treatment of women, especially his first wife, suggests a high regard for his own gratification…

…Scaife speaks of a “very pleasant” two-hour-and-fifteen-minute private lunch with Bill Clinton at the former president’s New York office last summer. “I never met such a charismatic man in my whole life,” Scaife says, glowing with pleasure at the memory. “To show him that I wasn’t a total Republican libertarian, I said that I had a friend named Jack Murtha,” a Democratic member of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania. “He said, ‘Oh, Jack Murtha. You’re talking about my golfing partner!’ ”

And who can forget this CBS News headline: Rupert Murdoch Loves Hillary Clinton: Conservative Media Mogul To Host Fundraiser For Liberal N.Y. Senator?

To call them a political odd couple would be a rash understatement.

Conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch will host a fundraiser for liberal New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, the Financial Times reports.

The mating ritual of the unlikely allies has been under way for months. Clinton set political tongues to wagging last month by attending a Washington party celebrating the 10th anniversary of Fox News, the cable news channel owned by Murdoch.

The Financial Times quoted one unnamed source as describing the Clinton-Murdoch connection in this way: “They have a respectful and cordial relationship. He has respect for the work she has done on behalf of New York. I wouldn’t say it was illustrative of a close ongoing relationship. It is not like they are dining out together.”

It’s only in this larger context that I find Hillary’s work for Wal-Mart to be disturbing. It’s not that she didn’t quit the board way back when, it’s that she and her husband don’t seem to know who the enemy is, despite all their experience dealing with them.

So Ralph Nader has launched an exploratory website, looking at the possibility of running another vanity campaign. Ralph, please don’t. As much as I’m disappointed in the choices left for president, another Nader campaign will only help the Republican candidate.
I would love to have a viable progressive third party candidate, but Nader isn’t one. My view might be different if Nader spent the years between elections building a party or supporting a movement. Instead, he only shows up in time for the election touting his activism from decades ago. There’s no hard work, only a very large ego looking to be stroked.
Here’s the basic problem with a third party candidate in a two party system: they usually draw votes away from the more popular candidate, and help the less popular candidate. This presidential election will be (I’m afraid) much closer than many people seem to think. The Democrats are not a sure thing, no matter how it looks right now. Nader’s entry will only help the Republicans.
Don’t do it, Ralph! (I’ve sent him that message, and I hope you will too).

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing

click to enlarge
There has been a lot of rage, tears and way to much “idiot Edwards supporter” language going on. Yes, I would have liked it if he kept going but he has gone far and beyond what most of us do to push this democracy forward.

From some dusty piece of paper…

Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Just saying…

     The thing that makes the war on drugs so insidious to me as a black man is not the fact that it has increased the number black felons or that it has turned our neighborhoods into war zones. No to me the one factor that has caused the most damage to us as a people is how it has removed us from the process of democracy. I think that this was its original intent and it has not failed to deliver. The United States is the only democracy in the world that does not allow its citizens the right to vote after they have served their sentences. In America, it is once a criminal always a criminal. To understand the racist nature of these laws all one has to do is to examine their historic beginnings.

Felon disenfranchisement was sometimes used as a tool by the states to disenfranchise blacks. Some Southern states passed laws disenfranchising those convicted of what were considered to be “black” crimes, while those convicted of “white” crimes did not lose their right to vote. For example, South Carolina disenfranchised criminals convicted of “thievery, adultery, arson, wife beating, housebreaking, and attempted rape,” but not those convicted of murder or fighting. Mississippi modified its broad, earlier law–which disenfranchised convicts of “any crime”–to specifically target “black” crimes.
Goliath

     The laws allowing for the disenfranchisement of criminals can be traced back to the ancient Greeks and first appeared in America as early as the 1600’s. So for anyone looking to disenfranchise a group of citizens the groundwork was already laid. If felons forfeited their constitutional rights all one would have to do is to construct and create laws to make more felons and then through a bias application of the laws exclude the majority population while ensnaring the targeted group. This of course is a broad statement and on its own proves nothing. In order to verify its validity there would have to be a statistical anomaly between the number of people in the criminal justice system from the targeted group and the percentage of that group in the national populace that cannot be explained by happenchance. Is there such an anomaly?

Although the incidence of crimes committed by blacks has not increased, the number of black prisoners has tripled since 1980. Approximately 13% of black males have lost their right to vote due to felony convictions, or around 1.4 million persons (Sentencing Project, 2000). The primary theoretical tool used to explain LFD legislation is the racial threat thesis (Behrens et al., 2003). The idea is that the presence of a high proportion of African Americans creates a threat that can be temporarily reduced by sentencing a large number of blacks to prison…Yet we will demonstrate that through policies that have been explicitly and are now “implicitly racial, state institutions organize and enforce the racial politics of everyday life” (Omi and Winant, 1986: 77). Goliath

     I would say a tripling of black inmates is such an anomaly. Are we to believe that the increased number of black inmates is due to better police tactics or that more blacks are committing more crimes? No, there has been a concerted effort to marginalize black men and exclude them from the democratic process. In a democracy people must have free access to its instruments to affect effective change in their lives and in the lives of their children. The black man has never been given full access to those instruments. The results of that denial of access can be seen in the deterioration of the black community. If you can’t vote, you have no voice in the direction of your community or its resources. If you can’t vote you can’t elect people who are accountable to your interests. You in effect become invisible. And that is what we have in America millions of invisible black men, who are only seen when their faces are flashed on the television screens on the nightly news. They are never heard from,
they have no voices.

     I believe that the rise in hip-hop and “gangsta-rap” is a direct consequence of that loss of voice. If your voice is not heard through traditional methods, if your concerns are ignored then you are left with few choices. We have millions of young black men who have never voted and never will vote, ever. They have no concept of the democratic process because it does not apply to them. They have seen no improvements through traditional methods. The violence of the past to acquire the right to vote has no influence on them, they could care less. They don’t care because for many it is a “right” they will never get to exercise. The following is a representation of Florida, multiply these numbers across the country and you begin to see the pattern.

Recent interest in LFD laws springs in great part from the experience in Florida (Johnson v. Bush). Florida’s disenfranchisement law kept in excess of 600,000 citizens with felony convictions from voting in 2000 (Rapoport, 2003), of whom one-third were black (Wagner, 2001). Thus, Uggen and Manza (2002) argue that the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, as well as of several other presidential elections and U.S. Senate elections, would have had different outcomes if disenfranchised ex-felons would have had the vote. Florida’s part in the 2000 presidential election has become infamous since the Supreme Court proclaimed George W. Bush as president. Before the election, state officials waged a $4.3 million campaign to purge Florida’s felons from the voter rolls (Palm Beach Post, 2001). Goliath

     You may have noticed that I have not used the “C” word or mentioned Republicans, because it isn’t just them. Unfortunately, there are some Democrats who allow these injustices to take place. It not only helps the Republicans to disenfranchise so many blacks, it also helps some white Democrats as well. If you live in a city with a substantial black population and you are a white politician it would be in your interest to suppress the black vote regardless of your Party affiliation. Remember, all politics are local and in local elections it isn’t always good to have a large bloc of voting blacks, especially if they are independently minded. We all know that these laws are disenfranchising millions of black voters, so why have they not been repealed? This is the question that the Dems have to answer as well as the Republicans.

In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved. – Franklin D. Roosevelt

The Disputed Truth

The ad in question stung me to my core. It was a heartrending experience, and I mean that. To the narration of the beautiful and eloquent Sarah McLachlan, my TV screen displayed pictures of unimaginable horror. Scarred faces, broken bodies, eyes that had been deliberately blinded and thousand yard stares we recall so well from photographs of the victims of atrocities. Not your usual public service advert, but one that exposed the raw cruelty of humankind and gently, implicitly demanded we do something about to correct it.

Still, the more I watched, the more troubled I became. Because I knew these pictures would touch many of my fellow Americans in ways that most public service announcements do not, and would no doubt increase contributions to the organization who had made the ad. Troubled not because I have anything against the fine organization which is running this ad. It’s a fine charity, one that is doing noble work to end the suffering of innocent victims of human cruelty.

No, what troubled me was the fact of the photographs themselves. For you see, the organization in question was the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, or ASPCA for short, and the pictures it displayed of suffering victims in need of our help were of dogs and cats, not people, not human beings.

Don’t misinterpret or misunderstand my point. I am against cruelty to animals, especially the type of cruelty I witnessed on my television last night, and I support the ASPCA. No creature should have to endure the forms of physical torture and abuse I witnessed in those photographs. No what bothered me was that I knew that this would be a very effective ad, one that would elicit an emotional response from thousands, perhaps millions of my fellow citizens.

People who are untouched by the plight of millions of children without health insurance, or by the anguish of people who have insurance but have been denied coverage for treatments that might have saved their lives. People who are immune to the vast suffering of the Iraqi people, who live under the threat of death from a myriad of sources every day. People who would just as soon shoot an “illegal alien” (or say they would), as offer to help them provide for their families. People who think millionaires deserve a tax cut of $287,000 while children in poverty deserve the equivalent of only $20 per child for their education.

People who think torture is acceptable and necessary, as long as it isn’t happening to them but to some unknown, nameless, faceless “terrorist” and who believe we should not look too deeply into those who conduct such torture on our behalf. People I know. People in my own family.

People who are unconcerned that American planes last week bombed a village in Iraq with over 100,000 pounds of explosives, a not uncommon occurrence these days. Bombing people from 10,000 feet above the ground is somehow perfectly acceptable behavior these days, even when it kills innocents, yet similar attacks delivered by our enemies without the benefit of military aircraft is somehow a heinous act.

I sometimes wonder why we don’t have a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Human Beings. But then, I imagine that even if we did, we’d never see an ad like the one ASPCA is running. No television network would run it, and if they did I doubt it would elicit the same level of sympathy that the ASPCA ad does. As a nation we can weep at the suffering of animals we keep as pets, but collectively it seems too many of us have hardened our hearts to the suffering of members of our own species, for whatever reason. We don’t blame the dogs and cats who suffered such abuse for their misery, so why do so many of us blame the victims of abuse, violence and neglect merely because they happen belong to that sub species of hominids referred to as homo sapiens sapiens?

Once upon a time a wise man told us “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” Supposedly we are a nation which was founded in part on the moral and ethical teachings of this man, a nation many of whose citizens worship him as the Son of God. Yet we ignore his teachings. We love our pets. We feel sadness, even grief, and are moved to action at the sight of abused animals. We feel their pain. Why are so many Americans, even Christian Americans, so unable to transfer those same empathic impulses to their fellow human beings?

I have no answers. I wish the ASPCA all the best with their new ad campaign. I suspect it will be very effective. I just wish we lived in a world where the the human victims of abuse, violence, abandonment, poverty and cruelty evoked a response among all Americans at least equal to that which the pictures of these abused animals engender within us.

And I wish I understood all those who seemingly lack that empathy for the misery of their fellow human beings, even as they weep at the sight of these abused pets. I wish I understood those who call themselves Christians yet ignore on a daily basis the greatest commandment Jesus Christ ever gave us.

Maybe I expect too much.