NRA: Tanks for the Memories by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on Buzzflash.com
June 16, 2010

As some of my readers know, I am a public health physician.  I recently had the opportunity to offer some remarks at a conference at the Yale School of Public Health on gun violence and public health.  This Commentary is drawn from those remarks.  I began by noting that when talking about this subject, the National Rifle Association is the 800 lb. gorilla in the room.  I noted at that conference that none of the other speakers, all of whom had government grant-funded research and intervention programs underway, mentioned the words “National Rifle Association.”  All publicly funded, how could they?  If one whiff, not of the gunshots that are so frequent in our society, but of criticism of the NRA coming from a publicly funded program got back to the NRA, giving its totally corrupting influence on the political process in our country, there goes that funding.

“The 15% Solution,” Serialization, 5th Installment: Chapter Four 2002: The Preserve America Amend­ment (30th)

by Jonathan Westminster, Ph.D. aka Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on TPJmagazine
June 6, 2010

This is the fifth installment of a project that is likely to extend over a two-year-period from January, 2010. It is the serialization of a book entitled The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022. Under the pseudonym Jonathan Westminster, it is purportedly published in the year 2048 on the 25th Anniversary of the Restoration of Constitutional Democracy in the Re-United States. It was actually published in 1996 by the Thomas Jefferson Press, located in Port Jefferson, NY. The copyright is held by the Press. Herein you will find Chapter 4.

Chapter Four 2002: The Preserve America Amend­ment (30th)

The GOP’s Rand Paul Problem by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on Buzzflash.com
May 29, 2010

In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited one of the first post-Abolitionism, post Civil War, post-Reconstruction African-Americans, Booker T. Washington, to visit him in the White House. To southern whites this was going too far. One editor wrote: “With our long-matured views on the subject of social intercourse between blacks and whites, the least we can say now is that we deplore the President’s taste, and we distrust his wisdom.”  By the bye, Mr. Washington, born a slave, had a white father.

By the way, if President Obama is a “socialist” according to Savagely Beckoning Le-vinitating O’RHannibaugh, I wonder how they would have contemporaneously characterized the Republican Theodore Roosevelt.  After all he was the first President to reach out to the African-American community.  It was more than 30 years before another one did.  Woodrow Wilson was a racist from Virginia (it was he who, for example, instituted segregation in the modern American military) and the post-TR Republicans had already forgotten about their roots as the Party of Lincoln.  The next President to start trying to deal with discrimination and segregation was TR’s cousin, Franklin.

Stephen Hawking is Wrong by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

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by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on Buzzflash.com
May 19, 2010

The world-famous cosmologist Prof. Stephen Hawking recently declared:

that he believes we would be well-advised to keep the volume down on our intergalactic chatter and do all we can to prevent any “nomadic” aliens moseying our way to take a look-see. Should they find us here tucked away in the inner reaches of the solar system, chances are they’d zap us all and pillage any resources they could get their hands on. Our own history, says Hawking, proves that first encounters very rarely begin: “Do take a seat. I’ll pop the kettle on. Milk? Sugar?”  Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach, says the theoretical physicist in ‘Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking’.

The Exceptional US Constitution by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

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by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on Buzzflash.com
May 13, 2010

As I have noted in a recent Commentary, the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States states: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Fascinating stuff. The “World’s Greatest Democracy,” no? Exceptional, no? Well, no, for the first. There may be a great democracy somewhere, but ours is more of a partial one. For many of our citizens, we surely ain’t it. But exceptional? Well, yes indeed. Why, both the Constitution and its implementation have been filled with exceptions since the document was first written.

The BP Gusher Disaster: Politics and Policy + The Daily Show: Beyond Awful

by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on Buzzflash.com
May 4, 2010

First, let’s call the Black Thing From the Center of the Earth (now there’s a good movie title, no?) what it should be called.  It’s not an “oil spill.”  This is not the Exxon Valdez, with a very large but ultimately known and quantified amount of heavy crude oil spoiling an important but distant and self-limited piece of valuable land and seascape.  It’s not an “oil slick,” although that is a side feature of it in the places where the oil layer on the surface of the ocean is relatively thin.  It’s not some simple “oil leak” (as British Petroleum [BP] likes to characterize it), like the one that dripped regularly from the oil pan of my aged-by-the-time-I-got-it 1956 Jaguar XK150.

“The 15% Solution,” Serialization, 4th Installment: Chapter Three: 2001: The Real Drug War

by Jonathan Westminster, Ph.D. aka Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on TPJmagazine
May 2, 2010

2001: The Real Drug War

Author’s Commentary

The year 2000 marked the election of President Carnathon Pine, who came to be known as the Last Republican.  A former Republican Senate majority leader, he was known for his sharp tongue, his war‑damaged leg, and over the course of a long and not otherwise dis­tinguished career, his exquisite at­tention to politics rather than policy and governance.  At age 74, he was the oldest man ever to be elected President.

He had run on a platform of “if not her, then me,” “everything they do is wrong,” and, referring to the series of natural disasters which had befall­en America annually since Hurricane An­drew of 1992 and the Great Floods of 1993, “God is pun­ishing America for its sinful ways.”  This theme had be­come increasingly popular for Right‑Wing Reaction­aries since the mid‑90s.  For example, in 1993 Christian Coali­tion lead­er Pat Robert­son said this about the flooding in the mid‑west of the old U.S. (Right‑Wing Watch):

Ulysses S. Grant, Ronald Reagan, and the $50.00 Bill by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on Buzzflash.com
April 20, 2010

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Representative Patrick McHenry, a Republican appropriately enough of North Carolina, has proposed replacing the visage of Ulysses S. Grant with that of Ronald Reagan on the $50.00 bill. This man thus would replace the picture of the man who militarily did more than anyone else to win the Civil War for the Union with that of the man whose current followers want more than anything to tear it asunder. Funnily enough, this man is of course a close namesake of one of the heroes of the American Revolution.  By the time of the creation and the adoption of the US Constitution, Patrick Henry was a strong anti-Federalist.  Indeed he opposed ratification of  the Constitution by his former colony, Virginia.  The Constitution begins with the words “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union” and provides for very significant powers to the Federal government.  Henry was very definitely against it and them, just as many so-called “Tea Partiers” are today.

Big Government, Small Government: It’s All a Matter of Taste by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on Buzzflash.com
April 16, 2010

On April 10, 2010, the erudite columnist Bob Herbert of the New York Times had this to say about the subject of “big government”:

One of the reasons so many conservative [sic] Republican absurdities became actual U.S. policy was the intellectual veneer slapped upon them by right-wing think tanks and commentators. The grossest nonsense was made to seem plausible to a lot of people – people who wanted to believe in a free lunch. When Mr. Reagan told the country that ‘government is the problem,’ the intellectual handmaidens of the corporate and financial elite were right there to explain in exhaustive detail why that was so.  The result, in addition to the terrible consequences of Iraq and Afghanistan and the damage to America’s standing in the world, was the tremendous (and tremendously debilitating) transfer of wealth from working people in the U.S. to the folks already in the upper echelons of wealth and income. The elite made out like bandits – often literally.”  Which of course is why those elites are against “big government” and drag a bunch of common folk who don’t know any better right along with them.

The Male Hierarchy of the Catholic Church: Problems Beyond Priestly Child Abuse by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

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by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on Buzzflash.com
April 9, 2010

All the rage (literally, for some of the victims and some of their parents) is the discussion/controversy in a number of countries over Catholic priests’ sexually abusing children and teenagers over a period that may go back as far as 50 years.  (It may well go back even further than that, but there may be no survivors, folks who would be quite old now, willing and/or able to come forward).  The controversy has two parts: the abuse itself and then the cover-up for the offenders.  Some Catholic dioceses in the United States have paid out very large sums in settlements.  In one instance, a U.S. Cardinal involved in the cover-up has apparently “moved” (fled?) to a position at the Papal Basilica Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome and apparently will never return to the United States.  In recent weeks the controversy has become particularly full-blown because of accusations, some apparently well-documented, that the current Pope Benedict XVI himself participated in one or more cover-ups when he was Cardinal Ratzinger in Germany and then head of the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican.

Financing Fascism, Part II by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on Buzzflash.com
Mar. 30, 2010

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

As I noted at the beginning of my Commentary No. 135 that appeared on BuzzFlash last week,fascism may be briefly defined as: “A politico-economic system in which there is: total executive branch control of both the legislative and administrative powers of government; no independent judiciary; no Constitution that embodies the Rule of Law standing above the people who run the government; no inherent personal rights or liberties; a single national ideology that first demonizes and then criminalizes all political, religious, and ideological opposition to it; the massive and regular use of hate, fear, racial and religious prejudice, the Big Lie technique, mob psychology, mob actions and ultimately individual and collective violence to achieve political and economic ends; and corporate domination of economic, fiscal, and regulatory policy.”

Financing Fascism, Part I by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on Buzzflash.com
Mar. 25, 2010

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Fascism may be defined briefly as: “A politico-economic system in which there is: total executive branch control of both the legislative and administrative powers of government; no independent judiciary; no Constitution that embodies the Rule of Law standing above the people who run the government; no inherent personal rights or liberties; a single national ideology that first demonizes and then criminalizes all political, religious, and ideological opposition to it; the massive and regular use of hate, fear, racial and religious prejudice, the Big Lie technique, mob psychology, mob actions and ultimately individual and collective violence to achieve political and economic ends; and corporate domination of economic, fiscal, and regulatory policy.”

“The 15% Solution,” Serialization, 3rd Installment: Chapter Two: Fascism in America: An Overview

by Jonathan Westminster, Ph.D. aka Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on Buzzflash.com
March 20, 2010

This is the third installment of a project that is likely to extend over a two-year-period from January, 2010.  It is the serialization of a book entitled The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022.  Under the pseudonym Jonathan Westminster and fictitious biography, the book is purportedly published in the year 2048 on the 25th Anniversary of the Restoration of Constitutional Democracy in the Re-United  States.  It was actually published in 1996 by the Thomas Jefferson Press, located in Port Jefferson, NY. The copyright is held by the Press.  Herein you will find Chapter 2.

Chapter Two

Fascism in America: An Overview

Why Washington “Doesn’t Work” by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on Buzzflash.com
Feb. 24, 2010

This week’s cover of Time magazine screams “Washington is Frozen.”  The New York Times News of the Week in Review for February 21, 2010 tells us that “Washington doesn’t work.”  Evan Bayh of “Bayh, Bayh-Partisanship” tells us that he is leaving at the end of his term because there is just “too much partisanship in Washington” that leads to “nothing getting done” and is the fault of “ideologues on both sides.”  Nevertheless, on that score Bayh tends to finger (or is it give the finger to) the “far left” in preference to any sort of GOPer.  (Would that there were a “far left” in Washington, but that’s another matter.)  So it’s just all of that partisanship that’s the matter.  Why people aren’t even civil to each other anymore.  And again, that’s the fault on both sides.

“The 15% Solution,” Serialization, 2nd Installment: Chapter One: The United States in 1995: Setting the Stage for Fascism

by Jonathan Westminster, Ph.D. aka Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on Buzzflash.com
Feb. 23, 2010

This is the second installment of a project that is likely to extend over a two-year-period from January, 2010. It is the serialization of a book entitled “The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022.” Under the pseudonym Jonathan Westminster, it is purportedly published in the year 2048 on the 25th Anniversary of the Restoration of Constitutional Democracy in the Re-United States. It was actually published in 1996 by the Thomas Jefferson Press, located in Port Jefferson, NY. The copyright is held by the Press. Herein you will find Chapter 1.

Section I: Setting the Stage

Chapter One

The United States in 1995: Setting the Stage for Fascism

Author’s Note

The story of fascism in the old United States in my view begins with the accession to the Presidency of Carnathon Pine, The Last Re­pub­li­can, in the year 2001. And thus the drama as we will see it in some detail begins in earnest in the next Chap­ter, constructed around that personage’s Inau­gu­ral Address. However, before dramas can pro­ceed, the stage must be set.