Perry's campaign takes a low road in questioning Obama's love of country

This 2012 campaign is off to a start and its new entry, Gov.   Rick Perry of Texas, is taking the low road already.  We should be having a debate on the advantages of one economic theory and plan to create jobs and reduce debt over another. We got some of that but we also got Perry questioning Pres. Obama’s love of America.   Watch out, Perry. If you want to campaign on that level, you live in a glass house and should not be throwing bricks.

Perry is the same guy who spoke to a Tea Party rally in April 2009 claiming it was permissible for Texas to withdraw from the union if Washington did not start paying attention to them.

Perry:“Texas is a unique place. When we came into the union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that,” Perry said. “My hope is that America and Washington in particular pays attention. We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what may come of that.”

What sort of a loyal American is that?

Not only did the US  fight a civil war over that  attitude put into practice, the Supreme Court  in 1869 ruled Texas could not do that; it could, however, divide into states.

It appears that Perry, who hopes to carry the banner of the Teaparty, a group that pontificates over being the party of constitutional adherence, is selective in his support of its provisions.

Perry represents a popular attitude in Texas. There is a widespread belief there (and rampant in other southern states) that Obama is not a loyal American.  I know. My inbox has been flooded over the past three years sent to me from those quarters with anti-Muslim, birther viral emails. The “getting Bin Laden” and closer scrutiny and certification of Obama’s birth certificate had seemed to dampen that line of personal attack;   However, Perry’s remark may crank it up again.

In spite of that, polls show 16% of Americans still fall for the birther line.  Why? We can speculate in the same way Perry speculates about what is really going on inside a person’s head and the speculation could get very ugly.   In any case, there is something irrational going on there and Perry sent a message to that crowd.

Let’s get off both of these lines and get back to business…a rational national debate on the issues and policies.

Bosnia: domestic violence; human trafficking

My column Wednesday, Aug 10

Copyright 2011 Sky-Hi Daily News. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. August, 11 2011 6:47 am

Felicia Muftic: In Bosnia, some changes come slowly

Sky-Hi Daily News

There are times when the world seems so small and familiar and others when we in Grand County live in a world we cannot imagine.

I came to that conclusion recently on a visit to Bosnia. I was the guest of a director of a nonprofit organization dedicated to addressing the problem of domestic violence and human trafficking in that southeastern European country. 

 The problems those Bosnian nonprofits encountered in counseling victims of domestic abuse were nearly word for word the same as I had heard from staff and volunteers of our own Grand County organization, The Advocates. My Bosnian friend, the director, related the story of a woman who walked into her center, face beaten to a pulp by her spouse, with severe bruising on her arms. As in Grand County, she was asked if she wanted to file charges or legal action against her husband and move to a safe home elsewhere. She declined, giving the excuse familiar to our Advocates' counselors that it was partly her fault, she could not leave her children, and that her husband always acted kindly to her later She just wanted someone to talk with and to get some medical treatment.

Local Bosnian police summoned to the scene wrote up a report, called an ambulance and left it at that. How it will play out is unknown. The hope is that if she survives the next beating, she will follow the recommendations of the counseling agency.

What is remarkable, however, is that there is any attention given at all to the plight of victims of domestic violence in Bosnia. This Balkan country is a patriarchal society. Rebecca West, in her 1941 seminal book on Yugoslav history and culture, "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon," reported that soon after marriage, men often beat their wives for no reason just to establish right up front who would be the boss. Such practices may have become less of a tradition as the Balkans modernized, but attitudes toward abuse being an acceptable practice have lingered.

Bosnia endured a bloody war between 1991 and 1995 as the former Yugoslavia broke apart. About 300,000 died, and parts of the country were pulverized by artillery, rockets, and tanks, and the term “ethnic cleansing” was spawned there. Bosnia is the poorest country in the region. Thanks to rampant corruption, it has been slow to rebuild.

Of 4.5 million people, 500,000 are unemployed and over half of them are women. One positive result has been that the supervising United Nations and peacekeepers have imposed some the Western values on the local police, including giving a greater degree of attention to prosecuting perpetrators of domestic violence.

Bosnia's cultural heritage and aftermath of the war have given rise to a horror that we in Grand County can hardly imagine … human trafficking. Many Bosnian women are lured by advertisements from traffickers who promise opportunities to work abroad and to escape from grating economic circumstances. Later, many against their will are forced into prostitution or slave labor as their fraudulent recruiters and employers exploit them.

Our news reports lead us to believe that is something that happens to uneducated Asians. However, such practices have also haunted Russia, Romania, Moldova, and other Eastern European countries soon after the fall of Communism.

Bosnia has only recently become a hot spot for human trafficking. Corruption, increasing poverty, and removal of visa restrictions for Bosnians traveling to the European Union in 2010 have led to more traffickers focusing recruiting efforts in Bosnia. Identification of victims has been complicated by laws that treat children over 14 years of age who are found engaging in prostitution are treated as offenders and punished and not rehabilitated. The patriarchal culture adds to the lack of sympathy toward victims of sexual exploitation. The government has even recently reduced the number of nonprofits tracking and identifying victims and educating the public

Blame the Teaparty for credit rating downgrade

Listening to Anderson Cooper's CNN interveiw of the Standard and Poor's representative, we can  pin the blame directly on the Teaparty. The S&P official said the reason they downgraded the credit rating on 1) debating even whether the ceiling should be raised; 2) failure to heed Bowles-Simpson recommendations on a long term plan.   My observation:  Simpson-Bowles recommended raising some taxes and reforming entitlements...neither of which the compromise did. ...and which were the key components of the Teaparty's opposition and obstinate votes in the House.  The liberal wing of the Democratic party also deserves a paddling for failure to approve entitlement reform, but they at least tied their position to increasing taxes on the very rich which left the door open for some tradeoffs...if you parsed their litany. 

The debt ceiling deal..who were the most irresponsible?

Email Print

Copyright 2011 Sky-Hi Daily News. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. August, 4 2011 8:44 am

Felicia Muftic: Imagine, a bipartisan compromise

Sky-Hi Daily News

Lo and behold … a deal in D.C. on the debt ceiling? It was no surprise that part of the solution was to send the hard decision-making to yet another committee, so that only a few would take the fall for killing off sacred cows and the rest of the elected representatives could go on record and keep their campaign pledges not to compromise on anything.

What was new was the charge to the panel to come up with a solution or face the firing squad of across the board cuts, which would cause pain to both ideological sides. The compromise included cuts to Medicare providers and the Pentagon, but not to Social Security and assistance to poor and vets. Note that the fundamental decisions of what to cut still awaits the bipartisan panel's judgment calls, though parameters were set by the deal.

On balance, the GOP won most of the battle, but they could also lose the war in 2012. Some Teaparty types may lose their seats if they are viewed by enough voters as having been willing to destroy the economy in order to save it, including taking down Wall Street and harming seniors counting on full benefits. Their “my way or the highway” excluded other more rational alternatives offered by their party leaders, think tanks, or nonpartisan commissions.

The Teaparty's uncompromising ways also failed to change the way Washington works other than to make it even more dysfunctional and more partisan than it was before.

The Democrats did not get taxes raised on millionaires or cuts in spending that were less than what the GOP demanded. They did succeed in keeping the agreed upon debt ceiling until 2013 to provide more stability to the economy and cutting defense spending.

The compromise may also have rescued the U.S. from the World's perception that we were incapable of governing ourselves, but the seeds of doubt have been planted. We will be viewed by investors and lenders as more risky than before. Those with whom I have spoken in Europe feared we had been captured by right wing crazies who were willing to destroy both ours and their fragile recoveries and renege on obligations. That may haunt us later with higher interest rates.

To find the most irresponsible players in this drama, we just need to look in the mirror. The minute anyone proposes to hit our pocketbooks, whether through higher taxes or cuts in entitlements, 70 percent of us want our Social Security, our Medicare, our educational institutions, our defense but we do not want to pay for it. Instead, many want a smaller government, less taxes and more fiscal responsibility. We cannot have all simultaneously; there is not enough wherewithal to go around … at least that has been the conclusion of every commission to date. The compromise panel will have to face that reality, too.

There are some who deserve praise for acting responsibly and who made honest efforts to find compromises. Among those were Sen. Tom Coburn (conservative Republican from Oklahoma), who at least was willing to converse with Democrats, and our own Colorado senators Mark Udall and Michael Bennet, both Democrats. In February Udall proposed a constitutional amendment to require the annual budget to be balanced. Democrats approved a FUTURE VOTE ON a balanced budget provision in the compromise. Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, Senate majority leader, credited Udall by name Sunday.

In March Sen. Michael Bennet and Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) wrote a letter to the president asking him to engage in budget negotiations beyond FY2011 that included discretionary spending cuts, entitlement changes and tax reform, to create meaningful deficit reduction. Thirty two Democratic senators (including Udall) and 30 Republican senators signed on to their letter. This became the basis for the last ditch effort of the bipartisan Gang of 6 to work out a compromise within the past month.

Recommend