Another skirmish on the culture wars broke out this week as right-wing Christians have flooded the social and mainstream media complaining that the specialty coffee cup into which the part-time, low-paid servers working for multinational Starbucks pour its overpriced brew in November and December does not sufficiently represent Christmas. This year’s cup is plain red with the Starbucks’s logo. In past years, Starbucks has embellished its holiday cup with icons of contemporary secular Christmas celebration such as ornaments, carolers and snowflakes.

Evangelicals say the Starbucks’s action is part of a continuing “War on Christmas.” For about 10 years now, religious right-wingers and right-wing media such as Fox News have complained whenever big retailers have used “holiday” in their ads and marketing instead of saying “Christmas.” The motivation of the retailers seems clear: to entice those who don’t celebrate Christmas to participate in the potlatch of conspicuous consumption which defines late December in the United States and most other countries whose population is Christian or has a Christian background. Jews fell into line decades ago, turning a minor holiday—Hanukkah—into an occasion for gift-giving, which of course means gift-buying. But what about Kwanzaa and Chinese New Year? And what do retailers do about Muslims, Buddhists, Hindi, Jains and the myriad of other religions practiced by Americans? An ecumenical “holiday” season certainly has a better chance of attracting sales from all these non-Christian groups than a “Christmas” season.

But that’s not how the evangelicals see it. To them, everything that does not directly manifest Christianity in the marketplace in November and December is a direct attack on Christianity. If they cared so much about Christianity, however, their concern would not be that the marketplace is too secular, but rather that the marketplace has taken over Christmas and slowly drained it of any religious meaning.

The big complaint should be that Starbucks trots out its special holiday cups as early as the first week of November, the same time that most retailers install their holiday decorations, which mostly draw from Christmas traditions. We have two solid months in which we are bombarded almost 24/7 with attempts to sell us goods and services to celebrate the holidays. Whether “holiday” means Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, Chinese New Year or whatever, the marketplace and the mass media exhort us to celebrate by buying stuff. Not by following Christian principles. Not by contemplating what some will call holy mysteries and others will call myths. Not by helping others. No, most of the holiday information overload focuses on conspicuous consumption. As is the American way, we relate to others and the real world on Christmas solely as purchasers.

If they really cared about Christianity, right-wingers would protest the commercialization of Christmas. They would advocate that cashiers and store greeters say “Happy Holidays” or give the normal rest-of-the-year greeting, because reducing their religious holiday to conspicuous consumption dishonors the day’s holiness. They would picket stores with Christmas displays, since those displays are merely exhortations to buy, and not reflections of devotion to their god.

Muddying the Starbucks cup controversy is the ignorance of many of the evangelicals, who don’t realize that certain Christmas practices have nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with social customs, many of which predate Christianity, such as bringing greenery inside the home in winter. For example, one prominent evangelical dunce named Joshua Feuerstein wrote on Facebook, “Do you realize that Starbucks wanted to take Christ and Christmas off of their brand new cups?” Of course, he was wrong. There never was a symbol of Christ on the cups, just symbols of secular Christmas.

Those who believe in the War on Christmas do not understand how ubiquitous and potent the symbols of Christianity are in society during the last two months of the year. The Starbucks cup is exhibit A. While plain, the color combination is red and green, traditional Christmas colors. As far as I know, there are no white and blue cups, which would suggest Hanukkah. No cups add black to the color palette, which would symbolize Kwanzaa. None of the cups are red and gold, colors associated with the Chinese New Year.

No, it’s only red and green, the colors of Christmas. Starbucks may proclaim its dedication to diversity, but its special holiday cup references only one holiday. Even those commercials that talk about the “season” exclusively focus on Christmas in the iconography they present—trees, stockings, Christmas-style decorations.  I’ve yet to see a Menorah or dreidel in a Wal-Mart or Target TV commercial. One sometimes sees Hanukkah themes in store decorations—a little Jewish star in a sea of Santas, reindeer, candy canes, ornaments, trees, angels and carolers. That’s why many Jews and other non-Christians feel that the real war this time of year is against every other religion. I understand that retailers focus on Christmas because most Americans are either Christian or of a Christian background. But that knowledge does little to relieve the oppression and alienation that many non-Christians feel as the holiday is shoved down their throats for two solid months.

After making a vague suggestion that people should boycott Starbucks because it only used color to symbolize Christmas and Christianity on this year’s special cup, commercial real estate failure and former reality show host Donald Trump—who, BTW, is running for the Republican nomination for president—said “If I become president, we’re all going to be saying, ‘Merry Christmas’ again. That I can tell you.” Now that’s a declaration of real war, not against Christmas or Christians, but against basic American values. That a major party candidate should make such a statement should send a chill down all of our spines.

Every day we’re learning more about the fantasy world in which presidential candidate Ben Carson inhabits. Carson believes in a curious hodgepodge of fantasies, discredited myths, false ideas and inaccuracies, all of which he seems to have determined a priori, that is, before he considered any evidence outside his own longings or those of his constituencies.

These false beliefs—many self-serving because they justify Carson’s political stands—are cancerous, because they can spread quickly among people through the Internet and social media, infecting the innocent with ideas that are not only wrong but can sometimes harm them, like the idea that more guns in public will keep us safer.

The latest “Carsonoma” is the revelation that 17 years ago, Carson told a group of graduating college students that the Egyptians built the pyramids to store grain under the direction of the Biblical character of Joseph. Since Buzzfeed first reported this fantasy, Carson has defended his statement with an even greater stupidity: “Some people believe in the Bible, like I do.” It’s a greater stupidity, because the Bible does not mention storing grain in the pyramids, nor does it say anything about Joseph initiating the pyramid construction program.

Media outlets are furiously looking to find a new Carsonoma that tops the last revelation of Carson’s ignorance. I’m quite certain the Bush and Clinton campaigns, and perhaps others, are aiding journalists as they pore over every piece of video or written comment the benighted Carson has ever uttered.

For those who think I’m exaggerating the extent to which Ben Carson lives in an alternate reality, let’s review some of Ben’s greatest hits. Some of these are quotes, and some paraphrases based on quotes and media reports:

• Homosexuality is a choice because people go into prison straight and come out of prison gay.
• The theory of evolution is a fraud promoted by the “forces of evil.” Evolution is a theory from Satan.
• Obamacare is like slavery.
• Jews could have defended themselves against Hitler if they had guns.
• Without Fox News, the United States would be like Cuba.
• A Muslim shouldn’t be president.

But wait, there’s more! Carson said that when he visited federal prisons, he was “flabbergasted by the accommodations,” and he worries that we are “creating an environment that is conducive to comfort where a person would want to stay.” Yes, Carson believes that people are committing crimes for the privilege of rotting in a Texas or Alabama prison.

Behind each of these statements is either a political stance or an appeal to Carson’s main constituency, fundamentalist Christians. He is in favor of loosening gun control laws even more than they are now. He doesn’t like it when the government helps the poor or the elderly. He wants to establish Christianity as our state religion.  To prove his point, he either makes stuff up, or believes the half-cocked, already disproven theories of others in the reality-challenged community.

Besides looking for new verbal boners, the media is hot on the trail of Carson lies, and it’s about time.

Like all Republican candidates, he tells the standard lies like you cut taxes to stimulate growth and Social Security is in trouble. And again, like all the other republican candidates with the possible exception of Rand Paul, Carson tells special lies related to his own past and/or present. He has certainly lied about his role in promoting Mannatech, which sells nutritional supplements, skin care products and weight management products, all using multilevel marketing, which essentially builds a pyramid of sales by having sales people recruit other sales people in whose commissions they share.  He claims not to have been tied to Mannatech, yet his name and image have been used extensively in marketing the company’s products.

The latest allegation of Carson lying comes from CNN-TV, which could find no evidence that Carson was mean, prone to violence or a bully in interviewing people who had gone to school with Carson. None could remember any of the incidents of violence that Carson touts in his book.  As is typical of politicians who try to pretty up their past, Carson had no reason to pretend he started as a bad seed. The very fact that he went to Yale and became a prominent neurosurgeon is admirable in and of itself. Carson gilded the lily, probably because the myth of the reformed sinner plays so well with his constituency. It took years, but he was finally caught in the lie.

And let’s not forget about the inherent lie underlying Carson’s campaign. Although Carson is raising a lot of money, he’s spending a higher percentage of what he takes in every month than every other candidate except Hillary Clinton. A typical campaign spends money on traditional and online, rent, payroll and travel, spending that enables the candidate to build a real campaign infrastructure for the long haul. By contrast, virtually all of Carson’s money is being plowed back into raising more money. In other words, Carson doesn’t really have a campaign, but a fund-raising machine built almost exclusively on direct marketing.

The chance of any future embarrassment leading to Carson’s decline is minimal, since lots of people in his core constituency believe a lot of stuff he says. But his fantastical statements and fibs about his past and present will prevent other Republicans and most independents from supporting him. I don’t think we need fear Carson being elected president, or even being nominated by the Republicans.

It seems as if the United States often flirts with candidates who are living in a dream world and build their campaigns almost entirely on lies, myths and fantastical notions, but we never elect them. That’s right…there was Ronald Reagan and that Bush II fella. Make that almost never.

I wonder whether the Obama Administration has been watching too many superhero movies. You know, the kind in which a team of three or four superheroes take on armies of the powerful.

How else can we account for the administration’s assertion that embedding 50 specially trained soldiers into Kurdish and certain Syrian rebel forces will make a difference?

These must be 50 very talented individuals.

Especially when you consider that President Obama has predicted that Russian actions in Syria would lead to a quagmire. Russia now has 4,000 troops in the country, or 8,000 boots on the ground, as military pundits like to write. Before Russia began bombing ISIS, and perhaps rebel, positions a month ago, there were only 2,000 Russian troops on the ground.

What difference does it make? 4,000 or 2,000, with or without the air strikes—that’s nothing compared to 50 red-blooded Americans. We’ll get the job done while avoiding both the quag and the mire.

Obama’s initial announcement said the 50 troops would provide strategic and tactical advice. Now it turns out, that they will also go out on raids. But since they’ll be fighting less than 50% of the time, the mission is classified as “non-combat.” It sounds as if some professor of Newspeak left over from the euphemistically inclined Bush-Cheney Administration thought up that logic. I lost some respect for the President for telling this big white lie.

At least these 50 soldiers don’t have as their goal the one thing that U.S. troops have consistently shown they are able to do: Get the local military anywhere from weeks to months away from being ready to go it alone. Wasn’t that the assessment of the situation for months, and sometimes years at a time in Iraq, Afghanistan and Viet Nam? Turns out that our armed forces never were able to complete that job anywhere.

We’re not on a training mission, and we’re not on a combat mission. What then? Some have characterized what our troops are doing in Syria as offering guidance: Let’s hope, then, that we’re talking about group therapy, because one-on-one sessions can get to be expensive. Or will we get into the heat of battle and our guidance be to show the Kurds/rebels how to fire their shiny new American-made weapons? First we load, then we aim, then we push this button. Gee that was fun, let me show you again.

The sarcasm of these comments is meant to hide a large, gnawing fear that Syria is going to become the next Iraq, Afghanistan or Viet Nam. At this point, it structurally resembles Viet Nam in that we are starting with a small contingent of crack troops whose job is to train and advise the locals. Our troops in Viet Nam ballooned from a few hundred advisors to a half a million soldiers in what those who lived through it probably remember as a blink of the eye—but what was really just a few years. The difference of course is that this time we’re supporting two of three rebel forces and not the official government. That’s Russia’s role in this increasingly bloody farce.

Syria is a mess, and for a change, it’s not entirely America’s fault, as the mess in Iraq is. But like Iraq and Afghanistan, there is nothing that we can do to fix the Syrian situation. Four forces are fighting over a territory jerry-rigged between the 20th century’s two world wars and at least two of the forces would be delighted to rule over a part of the whole.  No side has distinguished itself for its humanitarianism or its dedication to free-market democracy.

The only skin we should have in this game are the Syrian people themselves. And there can be little doubt that the Syrian people will suffer from the Administration’s policy of a slow water-torture kind of ratcheting up of our military involvement, and will suffer even more from the Putin and Republican solution of making a major commitment to the fighting.

If we care about the Syrian people, we should withdraw all military aid to all parties involved in the Syrian free-for-all. We should sell no more arms to any of these forces, nor to any other country in the Middle East, including Israel and Saudi Arabia. Instead, we should lead a massive relief effort to get humanitarian aid to the refugees and place them in other countries throughout the world. We should be prepared to take a hundred thousand Syrians ourselves.

The war will go on, but wars have a way of ending when resources are depleted, and withdrawing our military support from the region will accelerate that depletion process by years. Our withdrawal from an active role in the Syrian melee will, of course, position Iran and Russia to become the major foreign players in Syria—more of a poisoned pawn than an honor, based on the experience of various powerful nations in Viet Nam, Chechnya, Iraq, the occupied Palestinian territories and Afghanistan.

After the smoke clears, we should provide economic but not military aid to the two or three governments that will control parts of the former Syria. That aid should be conditioned on those governments having free elections and refraining from the worst sorts of human rights violations now practiced by Assad and ISIS. We forgave Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat for their terrorist pasts and consider the only countries to attack our shores—Great Britain and Japan—as best of friends. I don’t believe it’s inconceivable that we will be doing business with ISIS if and when they mature into a legitimate government.

Or not.

What isn’t conceivable is getting into another war in which American soldiers are lost and tens or hundreds of thousands of innocents are killed, injured or displaced. I fear going from 50 to 5,000 or 500,000 troops on the ground much more than I fear a few beheadings.

Do Americans want a “Big Brother” figure involved in their intimate relationships?

That’s what eharmony.com, one of the largest dating sites in the world, seems to be saying in a commercial that it aired two years ago and recently resurrected with some fresh vignettes.

Underlying the imagery is a sleazy subtext that suggests the possibility of a wholesome threesome involving a man and a woman and a sage-looking elderly gentleman, who happens to be EHarmony founder, Neil Clark Warren.

Here are the vignettes that visually dominate the current versions of the ad:

• A man and a woman take a romantic ride in a horse carriage. As the carriage moves past the screen, we see that Warren is sitting with them in the open cab.
• A man and woman are getting cozy on a couch, about ready to watch TV when Warren sits down between and the woman offers him a large bowl of popcorn and starts munching.
• At the beach, a woman gives a man a drink with a little hat or umbrella in it and turns to her other side and gives a drink to Warren.
• My favorite because it is so overtly sexual: An African-American man gives his African-American girlfriend a ring at a fancy restaurant, then she reaches across the table to show the ring to Warren, who comments about his role in the selection. At the end of this vignette, the black man and Warren bump fists, much as they might after cackling about conquests.

In all of these vignettes, Warren has intruded on a romantic moment that typically leads to a sexual experience, turning the scene into symbolic ménage a trois. In all cases, Warren enjoys the romantic activity with the couple, which of course, implies that he will also enjoy what comes later. It’s pretty smarmy, whether you conceive of Warren as participating or merely watching.

Meanwhile, the voice over makes a completely grandiose and mendacious claim: “Chances are behind every great relationship is eharmony.com.” “Chances are” means probably or almost definitely. The explicit statement here is that eHarmony.com is responsible for a large part of all great relationships (at least between men and women). Even if we believe the eHarmony website that 438 members get married every day, plus the implication that they marry other eHarmony members, that’s not a lot of marriages. Experts predict that there will be about 2.2 million marriages in the United States in 2015. An average of 438 members married a day makes eHarmony responsible for about 80,000 marriages a year at the very most, or about 3.6% of the total.  That’s a long way from “every great relationship.” It’s also worth pointing out that not every marriage involves a great relationship. The claim in the TV ad goes far beyond exaggeration. It’s an outright lie.

More disturbing than this false claim, which most will easily see as self-serving puffery, is the hidden message that eHarmony makes by injecting its founder—a white male dressed in a traditional formal suit—into the happy relationships it shows in the ad. The elderly well-dressed white male has been a symbol of authority since humans began conjuring symbols. EHarmony could have just as easily built put a computer or another representation of its survey questionnaire into the ad as the “third party” (of “secret sauce,” as eHarmony says on its website!).  As a sort mechanism, the eHarmony questionnaire  probably works as well as joining other dating services or singles clubs, bar-hopping, attending singles dances, asking friends for fix-ups, taking cruises, or going to adult activities such as Scrabble clubs and singles nights at the symphony.

But the ad is not saying, use us as a tool. It’s saying: interject us—as represented by our white male Christian founder—into your life and your relationship. Let our “key dimensions” of compatibility be your guide, your guru, your teacher, an integral part of the relationship with your significant other. Put us directly into the world you build with your significant other.

Here’s where it gets creepy! Warren is a Christian theologian who first marketed the eHarmony dating site on Christian websites and in other Christian media, touting eHarmony as “based on the Christian principles of Focus on the Family author Dr. Neil Clark Warren.”  EHarmony now claims to be secular and advertises everywhere, plus it has affiliate websites for Asian, black, Christian, senior, Jewish and Hispanic dating.

The hidden message in the ad, however, reflects an authoritarian Christian outlook. One of the main principles of many right-wing Christian denominations and Catholicism is that god is part of the marriage, almost a third person in the relationship. Whether taken on a literal or figurative level, “god in the marriage” represents both the person of god and the principles of action that supposedly lead us to god.

One traditional image of god is as a wise old man. Moreover, a genial grandfatherly man has served as an image for pastors, rectors, priests and other human figures of religious authority for centuries. The hidden message of the ad then is that eHarmony will bring god (or the religious and ethical values god represents) into the relationship.  It’s easy to make the assumption that the god in question is Christian. Moreover, Warren has made the round of mainstream and religious talk shows in the past, and so many will recognize him as an authority figure who promotes Christian values in relationships. So men needn’t fear—that other guy in bed with you and your woman is not another guy—it’s the kindly (and fun-loving) white male god who rules over and protects all of us.

The commercial unfolds so slickly—a few story lines, a voice over delivering the uplifting message and feel-good gospel pop music in the background. Like all TV commercials, it goes by so quickly that we are unaware or only vaguely aware of the subliminal messages. But make no mistake about it—the ad is meant to appeal to those who want someone to tell them what to do, whom to love, how to get it right. Warren and his key dimensions of compatibility are a stand-in for an authoritarian, right-wing church.

Why is it so hard for those who want to defend the rights of Christians to infringe on others to understand that when someone acts as an employee or representative of a public organization, he or she absolutely cannot wear their religion on the sleeve?

The latest attempt to assert a new religious right based not on the freedom to practice but the freedom to make a public display involves an assistant high school football coach for a public school district who was suspended from his job for praying at a game. He had done it before and been warned of the consequences of continuing to promote one religion while in the employ of a public school district.

But don’t feel sorry that Joe Kennedy has lost his job. He has a new one—as the latest poster boy for the religious right. He defiantly has told the news media that he is prepared to take his fight to manifest his Christianity while on the clock all the way to the Supreme Court. With a little help from his friends, who include the lawyers of the Liberty Institute, a pro bono law firm that specializes in helping Christian individuals and groups (and occasionally Orthodox Jews) use the First Amendment to assert their rights to encroach on secular institutions. I couldn’t find anything online yet, but it’s only a matter of time before we learn that donations for Kennedy are pouring in from a crowdsourcing website or that the religious right is taking care of Kennedy’s economic needs in some other way.

An enormous photograph of Kennedy already dominates the Liberty Institute home page less than two days after the suspension. Either they move quickly or they had already coordinated Kennedy’s defiance of the school district’s direct order not to continue praying on the sidelines. I’m thinking the latter.

Call me cynical, but I’m wondering whether Kennedy has already negotiated his remuneration for serving as the test case. It would be no different from the hoard of PhDs taking money from right-wing think tanks to write claptrap against the minimum wage and public unions.

The self-proclaimed mission of the Liberty Institute is “to defend and restore religious liberty across America—in our schools, for our churches, inside the military, and throughout the public arena.” In the past, the Liberty Institute has defended the right of a student to distribute candy canes with a religious story attached at his school’s holiday party; filed a lawsuit against the Department of Veteran Affairs alleging it had censored prayers and the use of the words “God and Jesus”; and established the “Don’t Tear Me Down” campaign to fight challenges against veterans memorials with Christian symbolism.

The Liberty Institute and other Kennedy defenders assert that his public prayer is protected by the First Amendment, forgetting that the First Amendment also protects against the establishment of one religion over the others. As a football coach, Kennedy is paid to be a figure of authority. His prayers can make the students who aren’t the same religion feel very uncomfortable, very left out.  Believe me, I know. I was on the football team of one of the five high schools I attended. (I’d like to say I “played football,” but I never entered any game for even one play!)  We always had a prayer session conducted by a member of the local clergy before every game, always ecumenical, with no prayer specific to one religion read nor any particular rite mentioned. We had about 80 kids on the team, all of whom were Christians of various sorts, except for three Jews, myself and two boys who were all-city. One time, the religious figure talked about Christ in the pre-game prayer. All three of us felt humiliated, bullied and unwanted. We told the coach how angry we were, and our parents probably did as well. The coach apologized immediately and assured us that it would never happen again. And it didn’t, at least as long as I went to that high school.

That was 1966 in Miami, Florida, long before evangelical groups decided that it wasn’t enough to have the right to practice one’s own religion in peace, but that they had to make sure that America was branded as a Christian nation that abided by Christian laws.

Even then I questioned the need to have any sort of prayer before football games, ecumenical or not. I understand that football and religion tend to go hand-in-hand in many places. It makes sense, because the same kind of belief in a higher order that helps if one is trying to follow the many rites and beliefs of an organized religion also can serve as the personal justification for putting oneself through painful practices and risking life-threatening injuries on every play. For similar reasons, military organizations often promote religiosity as a stabilizing and motivating element.  No one stops to think that perhaps one or more deities are rooting for the opponent, be it an athletic competition or a war.

Religion is an integral part of the football mentality. The ideal, of course, would be if everyone on the team were fighting for the same religion, so that the individual team members would feel even more bonded to each other and more ready to make sacrifices for victory. Unfortunately, professional teams, those affiliated with public schools and organizations and the armed forces are unable to enjoy the benefits of religious unity. There are just too many different religions around. Plus we have all those atheists.

Channel surfers exercise their itchy thumbs for three reasons: 1) To see what’s on TV; 2) To avoid commercials; or 3) To watch two things at one time.

It was to this last group I belonged last night when I clicked between the musical openings of the World Series and the third Republican debate, televised on CNBC. I must have flipped between the two montages to music eight times during the thirty or so seconds these grandiose introductions simultaneously unfolded.

Suddenly I had an epiphany—not the kind of epiphany when you see something new for the first time, but the epiphany is which something you already understand in an intellectual way reveals itself personally to you with raw emotional power.

The epiphany came as I pondered how similar the two openings were: The producers of both the World Series and the debate were saying practically the same thing using precisely the same visual, narrative and rhetorical techniques:

• Heroic and uplifting music that crescendos at the end.
• Montage of the people involved, in close-ups mostly taken at a low angle up to make the figure seem more daunting and powerful—a typical photo technique used to photograph rulers of authoritarian nations.
• Quick cutting between shots, with an acceleration of the pace of new shots as the piece progresses.
• Short, provocative statements from the people shown.
• Special effects that I would call “techno-corporate” in style, with rows of columns and architectural allusions, blocks of video and straight lines running across the frame.
• A ponderously stiff and stately attitude, as if the viewers are about to see history being made.

Aficionados of televised professional football games will recognize this approach to trying to get the audience excited about what they are about to see. It’s been used to introduce every televised professional football game for decades.

The epiphany then was the realization of how much the news media presents our political debates as an entertainment spectacle.  To the mass media, a political debate is no different from a baseball or football game or a reality show based on a competition. The issues don’t matter, only the battle of wills between two, or in the case of the Republican debates, nine larger than life figures.

These nine candidates, however, are not titans, but little minds dedicated to enriching their larders and those of their sponsors. The debate itself was a dreary affair, except for those who like to see moderators or event leaders lose control, which happened a few times. The moderators once again tried to pit one candidate against another, and for the most part the candidates refrained from taking the debate bait. Two candidates did go after their peers. At the beginning, Kasich begged voters not to support the crazy amateurs, by whom he meant Trump and Carson. Jeb Bush lectured Marco Rubio like a stern high school teacher on Rubio’s poor Senate attendance. Rubio’s answer was evasively punky and pissy—that Jeb never went after McCain for his poor attendance—what you’d expect from a teenaged boy. But the media and the audience liked it.

The dreariest part of the debate was the tedious comparisons of the various tax plans.  In every case, the candidate went out of his way to assure us that the rich were going to pay their fair share. An analysis of each plan, however reveals that all the candidates want the rich and the ultra-rich to pay significantly less in taxes than they do now.

Besides telling the same bold-faced lie that the wealthy will pay their fair share under their plans, the candidates make the same two conceptual mistakes. First, they assume that people who earn a million pay their fair share when they pay the same percentage of their income in taxes as do the middle class and poor. They forget that the government is providing the wealthy with more goods and services. Some examples: The middle class and poor don’t need the government to protect and assure the safe operation of financial markets and they don’t need the court system for commercial litigation. When the police protect property, they are protecting more of the property of the wealthy. Intellectual property law enforcement actually hurts the poor, while securing the rental rights of the wealthy.

The second fallacy is one of the fundamental principles of right-wing economics: If we lower taxes, the economy will grow. At this point, there have been so many studies disproving this false theory you’d think the Republicans would stop trying to present it.  What’s so irritating about the Republican insistence that lowering taxes helps the economy is that it goes against common sense. To agree with the Republicans you have to believe that rich folk grow the economy more by investing in stocks, real estate and art than the government does when it spends all the tax dollars it collects on needed goods and services or gives it to organizations with employees for various other goods and services. The wealthy remove money from the economy, government pumps it in.  Higher taxes for spending always help to grow the economy.

Carly Fiorina was the only one not to offer a plan to cut taxes, preferring to say that all the plans had merit, but what was needed was someone who could actually push a plan through. Carly implied that she was the gal to do it. After all, Fiorina was able to sell a very savvy board of directors on making one of the worst corporate acquisitions in American business history, so it should be a walk in the park for her to convince both houses of Congress to create a taxation system that is simpler and results in the wealthy and ultra-wealthy paying even less than the historically low amounts they now pay.

Unlike the World Series game, in which the Royals trounced the Mets, I’m not sure if there was a clear winner among Republicans in the third debate. I am suspicious of media speculation that Rubio or Cruz won. The mainstream media like Rubio and Cruz because they can’t like Jeb Bush anymore. Jeb almost disappeared from the proceedings, leaving these two first-term Senators from Southern states as the most prominent and highest ranking contenders not named Carson or Trump. But “highest ranking” doesn’t mean either is popular with voters.

Civic leaders and large institutions often use language to color or misshape reality, thinking that through the use of words they can turn chicken feathers into chicken salad. Most of the time, their attempts are chicken shit, as the public has become wary of the various ways that politicians and corporations distort reality. Most people laugh derisively when a bank brags that 1.05% interest on a passbook account will help a family accumulate assets for retirement. And people get suspicious when corporations call a product recall a “quality withdrawal.”

But what if the organization or speaker deliver the lies not with words and phrases, but baked into the relationship between the parts of speech? Ellen Bresler Rockmore, a lecturer in rhetoric at Dartmouth presents a truly odious example of using syntax and grammar to tell a lie in an article titled “Texas History Lesson” in The New York Times.    Rockmore provides a complete analysis of the following paragraph in a United States history book that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) publishes for Texas schools (I refuse to write, “for the Texas school market”!):

Some slaves reported that their masters treated them kindly. To protect their investment, some slaveholders provided adequate food and clothing for their slaves. However, severe treatment was very common. Whippings, brandings, and even worse torture were all part of American slavery.

As Rockmore ably details, when talking about what the text book is trying to present as the positive aspects of slavery, the sentences have “subjects” like masters who do good things and “objects” such as slaves to whom good stuff happens. Forget the fact that most of this good stuff never occurred since life was brutish for most slaves most of the time. The writers handle the “brutish” aspects in the second part of the paragraph, entirely without attribution. When it comes to whippings, brandings and torture, which historians know occurred far more frequently than kind treatment, we never learn who did it and to whom it was done. By draining both the actor (subject) and the acted upon (object) from these sentences, the writers make the actions abstract, almost dehumanized, which in this sense, means devoid of human activity or intervention. Of course we know which human beings did commit torture, whippings, brandings and other atrocities—it was the slave owners.

Later in her very learned article, Rockmore gives an example of the most common means by which writers use syntax and grammar to deform the truth: the passive construction.  Her example, “Families were often broken apart when a family member was sold to another owner” contains two passives: “were broken apart” and “was sold.” If we replaced these parts of speech which active versions of the verbs, the sentence might read, “Slave owners often broke apart families by selling a family member to another slave owner.” Removing the passive removes attribution and makes it seem as if the action of breaking apart and selling are abstract and perhaps even natural processes. FYI, conservative economists currently use the same approach when they blame lower wages on the fact that “jobs in unionized older industries have been replaced by jobs in newer non-unionized industries.”

Corporations will often use these inherently squeamish forms of speech even when they are not talking about anything controversial. Lawyers and accountants pretty much always write in the passive voice, as a means not to attribute cause or action, and that predilection infected marketing departments and the rest of corporate America decades ago.

I have made an excellent living for more than 25 years advising clients on crisis communications issues, and in every case part of my advice has been to turn some sentences written in the passive construction into active voices:  My staff routinely turns sentences such as “The fight was broken up in five minutes” and “A dozen people will be laid off” into the more direct, “Security broke up the fight quickly with no one injured” and “We will lay off a dozen employees.”  My theory is that by accepting blame, the company will establish its credibility in fixing the problem and assuring the public that everything is back to normal. By speaking directly, the company comes off as open and honest, instead of projecting the deviousness and concealment of the passive voice. Between crises and technocrats who want the public to understand them (instead of “want to be understood”), we do a pretty good business merely turning passive constructions into active ones.

When a corporation speaks in the passive voice and in other ways use syntax and grammar to distort meaning, they do it almost always for one of three reasons:

1. Bad writers
2. A desire to make something seem more abstract or scientifically based
3. To hide something bad.

In the case of the HMH writers of the Texas American history book, we know they are good writers from the many finely-wrought sentences we see in the text book. Why then, do they resort to these devious rhetorical devices when talking about slavery?

We know the answer: They are cravenly putting money ahead of integrity by giving into the desire of Texas school boards to whitewash slavery.

But why do the Texas school boards want to whitewash slavery? None of the people on the school boards nor any of their parents or grandparents owned slaves. Slavery ended in 1865 (although a good case can be made that the denial of civil and economic rights to blacks after the brief Reconstruction era continued the spirit of slavery).

You don’t see positive references to Hitler or Nazism in the German history textbooks. The Germans as a nation and a civil society accept the horrifying fact that their ancestors participated in or condoned one of the worst atrocities in recorded history. Virtually every town of any size in Germany has a holocaust or a Jewish museum that reminds Germans of this indelibly monstrous stain on German culture and history. Instead of trying to hide the awful facts, Germans own up to their past and make sure everyone knows that what they did was unforgiveable. It’s a good start for ensuring no reoccurrence of the Nazi era.

What would be so wrong with Texas history books explicitly admitting that slavery was an inhumane foundation for an economy and society? Instead of trying to play down the worst excesses of slavery, Texans, other southerners and the United States in general should admit how horrible slavery was. The attitude of the text books should be “Yes we did bad stuff, and we learned not to do it again.” Denying the full horror of slavery only serves to justify it.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sunk to a new low in shamelessness when he said that a Palestinian leader gave Hitler the idea for the final solution which, it is always instructive to recount, involved gassing and incinerating millions of people because they were Jewish.

This egregious rewriting of history, which came in a speech Netanyahu gave to Jewish leaders, was immediately lambasted as false by a wide range of Holocaust scholars and survivors. Many pointed out that believing that a Palestinian developed the idea for the final solution played into the hands of Holocaust deniers, because it absolves Hitler and the Germans of some responsibility.

Netanyahu was trying to demonstrate that Palestinian hostility towards Israel predates the 48-year Israeli occupation. Instead he hurt his own credibility, while insulting the memory of millions of victims and their families.

And what did Netanyahu hope to gain by telling a scurrilous lie? Even if Palestinian hatred of Jews extended back decades, it would not justify the brutal and unfair way in which Israel treats Palestinians in the occupied territories today. A large majority of Palestinians living in West Bank and the Gaza strip have only known Israeli rule. It’s the bloody incursions and retaliations, the illegal settlements and the discrimination that shape contemporary Palestinian attitudes towards the Israeli government and Israelis, not some decades or centuries old antipathy to Jews.

The similarity between Netanyahu’s faux pas and the stupidities routinely uttered by American conservatives is obvious. The question is, will Netanyahu’s reputation and political viability suffer as has so many of the Republicans running for office who have uttered inanities?

Over the past few years, we have seen a wide range of Republican elected officials suffer after saying stupid things, some lies, some distortions and some even the true but embarrassing statements. For example, the campaigns of Michele Bachmann and Todd Akins fizzled immediately after telling absurd lies about medical issues, e.g. vaccinations and rape. Mitt Romney shot himself in the foot when he presented a distorted statistic—the 47% of takers who would never vote for him; those 47% of takers referred to the percent of citizens getting some kind of check from the federal government and included veterans who had put their lives in danger fighting our endless succession of ill-wrought wars, retirees who paid for their cash benefits with payroll taxes and the disabled. The most absurd example of a Republican elected official suffering from stupidly telling the truth is Representative Kevin McCarthy, who lost a chance to be Speaker of the House when he admitted that the purpose of the House Benghazi committee was to embarrass Hillary Clinton.

I keep writing about elected Republicans losing because they said something stupid because it doesn’t matter how many stupid things the never-elected Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina say. It doesn’t seem to affect their popularity among likely Republican voters. Bachmann was drummed in the Iowa race after lying about vaccinations, but Trump told the same lie in the first debate and saw his popularity increase. Fiorina’s lies about Planned Parenthood didn’t sink her, nor has Carson’s obnoxious statement that the Jews could have fought Hitler if they had guns or his denial of basic science outside his area of expertise.

Our decisions about the economy and society suffer when they are based on lies, distortions and character assassinations. It should go without saying (but I’ll say it anyway!) that when an elected official or candidate tells a lie or says something stupid not related to his or her personal background, it invariably supports a policy that is harmful to the economy or imposes a religious restriction on what is supposed to be a secular society. Romney wanted to fund further tax cuts for the wealthy by curtailing spending on social service programs. Bachmann and Trump used false science and a lie to pander to vaccine deniers. Carson wanted to justify looser gun controls, while Netanyahu wanted to justify an increasingly immoral policy of oppression and de facto apartheid.

It remains to be seen whether Netanyahu will get the free pass so far given to Trump, Carson and Fiorina. Let’s hope that he suffers the fate of Romney, Bachmann, McCarthy and others. Perhaps then Israel will elect a government willing to end the bloodbath and make the compromises needed to establish a Palestinian state.

Progressives are delighted about the results of the first debate between the declared candidates for the Democratic nomination for president, but they shouldn’t be too happy. Sure, the candidates all expressed concern about income and wealth inequality, all favored paid family leave, all supported women’s reproductive rights and all want to do something about the high cost of college. Their biggest dispute, other than over gun control, was over whose proposals were tougher on errant banks and bankers.

That makes Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley far to the left of Republicans, but not necessarily progressives. All their proposals are quick fixes to a broken system. None of the candidates advocate radical change, not even the self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders. They all avoid proposing real structural change.

Here is a short a list of proposals that should be part of the basic progressive platform that none of the Democrats would dare to support:

1. Institute a graduated annual tax on net wealth of more than a certain threshold, similar to what exists in France. For example, at the end of each year, the federal government could assess a half of one percent tax on all household wealth of more than $5 million, one percent on all household wealth of more than $20 million, and five percent on all household wealth of more than $50 million.
2. Remove the cap on income that is assessed the Social Security tax (AKA “payroll taxes”), which currently is a paltry $118,500.
3. Tax all inheritance income of more than $10 million at 100% and dissolve all trusts of more than $10 million at the death of the trust founders and funders.
4. Place a steep new tax on gas and use all proceeds to fund mass transit within and between metropolitan areas.
5. Equalize what is spent on every student by placing a tax on all private school tuition and taxing wealthy school districts and giving proceeds to poorer school districts so that every school district in each state spends the same average amount of money per student.
6. Place high tariffs on countries that do not meet our standards of employee, consumer and environmental safety and do not pay substantially the same wages and benefits as are paid in the United States.
7. Unilaterally dismantle all U.S. nuclear weapons.
8. End all private prisons and military outsourcing of personnel and services.
9. End all right-to-work laws and force charter schools to hire teachers in teachers’ unions, if the public school system is unionized. Force all private schools—religious and secular—to unionize if they want to receive public funding, e.g., busing and participation in public school gifted programs.
10. Limit the salary and benefits to all corporate executives to 30 times the average employee’s compensation package.
11. Allow the federal government to negotiate with drug companies and establish single-payer healthcare administered by a number of competitive commercial and not-for-profit insurance companies.
12. Limit all political campaigns to three months of primary campaigning and two months of election campaigning. Note that the Democratic candidates generally favor passing legislation to overturn the Citizen’s United

Many of these proposals fund the nebulous plans that all the Democratic candidates have to make college less expensive, increase the social safety net for children, the poor and the elderly, invest in new energy technologies and rebuild our aging infrastructure of roads, rails, bridges and mass transit systems. To a large degree, the Democrats are telling us how they will spend money while concealing how we’ll pay for it. For years, we paid for what the Democrats want to do with higher taxes. That was before Reagan.

Other proposals on this list of progressive ideas that mainstream centrists looking left consider “untouchable” directly address inequality of wealth and income by preventing accumulation or reset our relationship with the rest of the world such as unilaterally destroying our nuclear weapons.

This list does not exhaust the list of proposals that would have the federal government manage the economy—much as it always has—but for the benefit of the people, not the weapons, automobile, real estate, oil and utility industries. Implement greater environmental regulations with strict caps instead of carbon trading. Develop a federal set of standards for voter registration and voting, including automatic “motor voter” registration.  End all development of fully automated weapons systems. Deny aid to any university that gave an admissions break to “legacies.” Withdraw aid to Israel unless it works towards a two-state solution. We could spin “unacceptable” ideas all day long.

And how do we know whether an idea is unacceptable to mainstream liberalism? If it truly addresses the vast inequalities that exist in today’s United States and the world.

No new gun control laws have been passed recently, but we may finally be seeing the limits of the gun madness that has gripped the country for the past few decades.

For a while now, every year has seen Republican state legislatures pass laws that loosen gun controls and Republican judges strike down existing gun control laws. Some of these new laws allow people new rights to carry guns in public—on university campuses, in restaurants and in employers’ parking lots. Other new laws give gun-toters new shooting rights, for example, stand-your-ground laws, which give people the right to protect and defend their lives against threats or perceived threats. These laws usually replace laws that require individuals to retreat from danger. Individuals have used these new laws to ostentatiously display guns and use them at will.

This week, however, saw what may be the beginning of a move to stem the slow but steady erosion of societal control on gun violence that these new laws have engendered.

In an important case in Milwaukee, a jury is making a gun shop pay more than $5 million in damages to two police officers severely wounded with a pistol purchased in the store by what is called a straw buyer. A straw buyer is someone qualified to buy a gun who purchases it for someone who isn’t qualified, in this case, for an underage male who fired his illegally purchased firearm against police a few weeks later.

Meanwhile, in Auburn Hills, Michigan, police are charging a woman who shot at a fleeing shoplifter posing no immediate danger to her or anyone else. The shoplifter hadn’t even pilfered anything from the shooter. Police in Elkhart, Indiana said they were considering filing charges against a man who did pretty much the same thing. In both cases, the shooter had absolutely no skin in the game. What was the motive then? I can only conclude that, like the legendary Bernard Goetz who went hunting muggers on the New York City subway in 1984, these people were wishing and hoping for an opportunity to take their guns out and shoot another human being.

The good news is that these cases suggest that America is finally drawing a line in the sand as to how much we are willing to endanger our population to accommodate the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) incessant need to expand gun rights.

The bad news is that we are drawing the line at a very dangerous place. We won’t allow obviously false gun purchases, while still accepting the ease at which people can purchase multiple guns, including military grade firearms, and as much ammo as they want. There are still stand-your-ground laws that allow stone cold killers like George Zimmerman to shoot freely whenever they say they feel threatened. Many states still allow people to carry guns on college campuses and in restaurants and other public places.

I would thus not yet consider these three cases of constraining gun proliferation as a watershed or turning point. Rather what we’re seeing are gun fanatics testing and finding the limits of their new freedom. Tragically, their freedom, based on a flimsy constitutional framework, endangers all of us and comes at the cost of tens of thousands of gun deaths a year.