Prime Minister Jibril at the White House: Sovereign Appeals to Sovereigns to establish Sovereignty

Today, Mahmoud Jibril, the prime minister of the National Transitional Council (NTC), the interim government in Libya, met with President Obama at the White House to seek recognition of the NTC as the ruling body of Libya (See video here).  Yesterday, the British government was the first to invite the NTC to open a foreign office on its soil.
As someone who spends much of her time considering what makes a political community a community, and thus, what constitutes true regime change, I am intrigued by this appeal of Minister Jibril.  Of course, to call him Minister Jabril is to already grant what he requests, that the body he represents be recognized as the true representatives of the people of Libya and thus the rightful government of Libya.  Nonetheless, the question remains open.  When Aristotle sets himself to the task of defining political life he acknowledges that the question is a pressing one precisely in the context of regime change.  It isn't clear whether the community should be held to its promises and debts incurred in a regime once it is overthrown.  So people want to know what makes the community what it is: the shared territory or the rulers?  If it is the rulers, it seems that the community becomes a wholly other community when the ruling regime changes.  Aristotle will go on to argue that it is the rulers, but that the rulers must be understood to be the citizens, citizens are those who engage in rule.  Changing the regime is changing who is a citizen.  Or, when you change who the rulers are you are changing who the citizens are.
By speaking of the ruler in this way, Aristotle is able to speak about political rule without conflating it to master rule, or tyranny.  This configuration is helpful for understanding the Qaddafi regime, which appears to rule under the clear definition of the tyrant: like the master of a slave, the tyrant rules for his own needs and ends and puts the people to work to achieve them for him.  They are not for themselves, one could say, not setting their own ends collectively, but his.  But while Aristotle's analysis seems like an internal one -- how are the community understood by those within it when there is a change in rulership, today's meeting pointed to the importance within nation-state relations of the external recognition of the government.
There are a number of pragmatic reasons that Jibril seeks recognition from the United States of the rebel governing body at this time.  One reason is that Jibril and the NTC want access to the Libyan governments' frozen assets amounting to $180 million in U.S. banks.  (There was a remarkable story on NPR this morning about the NTC finance minister, Ali Tarhouni, robbing a Libyan bank by tunneling into it.)  But the obvious reason is that recognition of a government as the rightful government of a people by other governments, as we learn from Aristotle, is recognition of a new community.   
In her book, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Wendy Brown explains sovereignty in a way that sheds some light on what is happening here.  She argues that sovereignty has a split personality: it functions one way when it is focused inward and another way when it is focused outward.  Focused inward, sovereignty is the unifying force that joins disparate groups and citizens to form a whole.  Focused inward, sovereignty is not democratic but the power that stands above the will of the people (if that is what popular sovereignty seeks) because it is what judges, determines and executes that will.  Thus, it is situated above the people.  Yet focused outward, in relation to other states, sovereignty is what enables a state to have a democratic relation to other states.  It shows the autonomy of the state and the equality of the state in relation to other states.  Thus it is only between sovereign states that there is true democracy.  Well, of course, even in the international setting, money and military might allow some sovereign states to move more freely across the globe and to pursue their ends with impunity more than others.  But sovereignty as autonomy in relation to others is the states relation to other states, it is not the relation of the people within the state to one another or to the state.  
Yet in light of all of this, what is so striking about this appeal by Prime Minister Jibril is the continued importance of recognition from others in order for one's sovereignty to be acknowledged.  In contrast to a universal democracy, one that is found in various theories of collective action where to be here is to belong, the autonomous sovereignty of states must be won from others.  Moreover, that some states' recognition is more influential than others suggests that some states are more sovereign than others.  An apparent regress ensues wherein the autonomous sovereignty that faces outward still requires the same kind of sovereignty that is at work when the sovereign is faced inward -- there must be some position that is superior that recognizes who is autonomous sufficiently to be included.  So Jibril seeks recognition from the more sovereign state of the United States, just as on the other end of this regress, some bodies are recognized as contributing to popular sovereignty because they are autonomous and others are not.  Brown's inward / outward perspectives collapse into one another on this analysis.  
I'm working on a project now (they're piling up) that aims to show the opposition between sovereignty and democracy based on different conceptions of border life.  Putting the border life element aside for now, this appeal by the NTC illustrates the case that wherever there is sovereignty, there cannot be true democracy, even in international politics.   There is more to be theorized in this appeal for recognition: for example, the revolutionary possibilities in seeking recognition from other states when there has not yet been official abdication of the previous ruler and the implications of the paradoxical situation wherein one must appeal to the undemocractic logic of sovereignty to establish a more democratic community.   I'd like to see others thinking this through.

Proving Miracles: Religion's Own Science

Good Friday being a day to think about things of God and not of ourselves, NPR ran a story about the science of miracles.  In order to be beatified, the Vatican needs to believe that you are responsible for a miracle.  I thought it was three, but the story didn't say.  So John Paul II is going to be beatified next month because, as the story said, "The Vatican declared" that a woman who had Parkinson's was healed after praying to the pope.  But most of the story was about how hard it is to prove that a miracle has happened.  In order to make the case that a miracle occurred, and that a particular person is responsible, you have to show that it is otherwise "unexplainable," and that it occurred because of people's prayers to a particular saint.

So yeah, I can see how that would be difficult.  How do you "prove" that something is otherwise unexplainable?  It seems to me that this is something of a negative proof, a notoriously impossible position.  To prove that something is not true, you have to have all the possible information from every possible perspective, at every possible time.  This became particularly evident in the search for WMD's after the invasion of Iraq.  It's difficult to prove that something is not there, and so claims could continue to be made out of professed ignorance that there was still a possibility that they were there.  And it's true, there was still a possibility, there still is a possibility that there are WMD's in Iraq, and unless we could be everywhere in Iraq at once, we couldn't prove that they aren't there.  We have concluded that there are no WMD's, but we can't prove it.

So to prove that there are no other explanations seems even more impossible.  But this is an even more difficult task, because what we must prove is that what has happened has no cause, no knowable cause, and therefore, must be attributable to the saint to whom we prayed.  It's not just that we can't figure out what the cause is, as so often happens in the medical field, but that we must be able to prove that there is no natural cause to the becoming healthy.  I am reminded of Aristotle (of course, I am) who loved to use doctoring and health analogies to explain nature and natural processes.  In Physics II.1, Aristotle says that nature is like a doctor doctoring herself.  But, he explains, when the doctor doctors herself, she becomes healthy, not as a doctor, but as the patient.  So while the doctor aims toward health, the patient becomes healthy from herself, not from the doctor.  The analogy to nature aside, Aristotle suggests to us about the medical art, that the patient is the cause of her becoming healthy.  The body aims toward health.  Certainly, the medical art can intervene, but it seems like a specifically modern Cartesian notion of cause to suppose that if there is a cause, it is something external that works upon a thing.  What this means for the miracle provers is that since they seem to hold this modern notion of cause, they will be better able to point to a lack of cause if they are excluding the internal cause of health.

Then there is Hume's argument against causation - that causation is a story that we tell because we regularly see x follow y, so we call y a "cause" of x, but we cannot know of any causal power that y has to lead to x.  Hence, miracles for Hume are a disruption to the regular story of x following y, which leads us to say that x must have a supernatural cause, because while it usually follows y, this time it came without y.  Hume, it appears, wasn't so much doing away with miracles, but his dismissal of cause seems like an attempt to show that miracles can be made sense of.  Of course, if we follow Hume, the miracle provers are really out of luck when it comes to proving the other prong of their assignment--that what happened was caused by prayers to the particular person-who-wishes-to-be-beatified--since Hume won't allow us to prove anything is a cause.

But the problem here seems to be the conundrum of proving miracles.  On the one hand, the rigorous process the Vatican demands suggests that it does think some sort of rational explanation, even if it is a rational explanation of a supernatural cause, can be offered for a miracle.  This is a bit mind-boggling, since the Vatican would claim, I expect, following Thomas Aquinas, that the natural world itself is made by God and so is in a sense caused by God.  To say that there is a supernatural cause and not a natural cause, seems to set nature and God at odds, which seems counter to the commitment to the Creator God.  Perhaps the argument is that since the fall, nature has been corrupted, so at times God intervenes to change the course of nature so that it does not lead to suffering.  So this would make a rational explanation for a miracle more consistent--God can be explained, the things that are caused by God can be explained.  But this seems to strangely have defeated the idea of the miracle which in its very essence is that which we cannot explain.  So if we can explain it, ie. prove it, then it is not what it claims to be -- that which cannot be explained.

The NPR story mentioned in conclusion that there is someone at the Vatican whose full time job is to try to poke holes in the accounts and arguments of those who are trying to prove miracles.  This person has historically been called the devil's advocate.  So it's the devil who tries to find natural causes, making the devil into something of a natural philosopher.  But what this entire account ignores is that there may be things that happen, evental type things, that have no cause.  They do not become things that we cannot speak of by having no cause, but they do become the things that disrupt the order of things, that institute new orders, new possibilities.  On a day that celebrates resurrection, we should consider what it might mean to be open to radical disruption.

Separation of Church and State: Thoughts on Aporia Philosophy Club Meeting at UTPA

I attended a roundtable discussion yesterday at UTPA sponsored by Aporia, UTPA's Philosophy Club.  I have been talking to my classes about it today, and I think some thoughts on it might be helpful to further the discussion.  The topic as advertised was "What Role (If Any) Should Religion Play in the State?"  The discussion was organized and moderated by Dr. Greg Gilson who also did a great job presenting, so many thanks to him for the provocation that this panel proved to be.

First, I should say none of the speakers addressed the title question directly, which I suppose is fine.  Gilson opened the discussion with some musing on whether humanism, since it is based on belief claims about the power of human beings to address ethical, political and scientific questions, amounted to religion.  The implication of his claim was that if it is a religion then religion has a significant role in our state workings since we assume these claims in our governmental institutions.  Gilson associated Socrates with the humanist tradition since Socrates is the first to call into question the power of the gods to set ethical measures for humankind.  But I think Socrates is even more of a challenge to us, since Socrates calls into question even the human capacity to set these standards.

But reference to Socrates contributes to this conversation about the relation of the church to the state in more significant ways, I think.  I wonder if Socrates is the first secularist (but not secular humanist).  His argument is that the gods can't show us how to live, because we have the same problem interpreting what they hold to be good as we'd have amongst ourselves determining how to live well.  So the problem of interpretation of the gods' will is a political problem, thus the gods solve no problem for us.  This is not to say that the gods don't have a place in our lives, but when it comes to determinations amongst ourselves about how to live communally, we can't resort to the gods as a standard.  Moreover, Socrates aims to ratchet down the religiosity of political discussion (eg. Euthyphro rushing off self-righteously to prosecute his father with no knowledge of the vice for which he is prosecuting him).  The claims of certainty that people make in political life based on their religious commitments leads to great blindnesses in leadership -- I think Bush's unswerving certainty about things for which he had no reason to be certain is an example of this.  Socrates questions the politicians because they think they know what they do not know and they do not know it.  This religiousity is a problem in our leaders because it leads to tunnel vision and to unwillingness to re-examine policies in the face of their failure.

The second speaker, Neil Norquest, an area lawyer who has argued before the Texas Supreme Court, presented three questions for consideration each about the strange division between the way the U.S. Supreme Court treats the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment and the Free Expression clause.  What I was most fascinated, and perhaps troubled by, was his final question regarding the role of the idea of a Creator God in achieving civil rights legislation.  I was underwhelmed by this argument because a Creator God didn't give slaveowners a difficult time holding slaves for a long time (including Jefferson who wrote the line in the Declaration that "All men are created equal," even though the U.S. Constitution went on to count some men as only 3/5ths men) and people who believe in a Creator God continue to make arguments about the varying worth of men and women and straight and gay people.

The third speaker was the most distressing to me because he was supposed to offer the secularist argument and he instead presented a diatribe against religion and those who were religious.  So it seemed that his claim in relation to the title of the panel was that the church had no role in the state because it had no role to play in life in general.  As my students complained in class, he mostly insulted people with religious beliefs.  I found this quite disappointing not because I want to defend religion, but because I think there is a case to be made for secularism, for the separation of church and state, and I think there are important problems that accompany the drive to secularism that we would be well served to address.

I'm going to address three of those questions.  As as side note, before raising these questions, I think it'd be great to have a follow-up panel in the Fall and invite a historian who can give a wider account of this problem as it dates back to the middle ages and also as it works itself out in the early American self-understanding, you know, Puritans and Roger Williams and so forth.

Briefly, though, the Pilgrims and the Puritans left England because they wanted to find a place to practice their religion freely.  They weren't always so interested in other people's right to free expression, though.  The framers saw this problem at work about a hundred and fifty years later and sought to avoid the problems of the influence of religion in political life or discrimination of some for their religious commitments (Quakers for example), so the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights says that the government should "make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."  Jefferson, writing of these clauses, explained that a wall needed to be set up between the church and the state.  But here's the problem, if I have religious commitments, I don't cease to have those commitments when I enter into political life.  Even if I say I'm committed to this separation, I remain committed to some position outside of my commitments to the community (strangely, this is the opposite structure of Socrates who appears to be a traitor to the city by NOT being committed to its gods).  Because, I would maintain, reason cannot be pure, uninfluenced by my desires, beliefs and prejudices, my thinking about political life will be influenced by my religious commitments. So as a leader of a community, I will have brought my beliefs into the state in my determinations of what is right and good for the community.  So it seems that the separation of church and state is impossible in the person of both those who believe and those who strongly do not believe since both are influenced by those beliefs in their determination of what is good for the community.

Second, I think the outright critique of religion fails to account for what Rousseau calls the binding power of religion.  Religion, it is becoming more and more popular to remind people, comes from the Latin, religare, meaning, "to bind."  Rousseau argues that to form a people we need a civil religion that holds us together, and evidence for this is the historical power that religion has had in binding a people together in both the east and the west.  However, it is clear, Rousseau, acknowledges that religion poses a problem because instead of "binding the hearts of the citizens to the state" it detaches them from it and from earthly things in general.  So there are two problems: religion seems necessary in the state, according to Rousseau, to bind the people to one another and the state, but also the separation of church and state seems inevitable since those committed to the church are not committed to the earthly matters of the state.  Or if not inevitable, those with commitments to religion seem committed to something beyond the state.

I've gone on too long.  I will post soon about my third point: the problem with supposing that God takes the side of nations (If God wasn't a Tarheel fan, then why is the sky blue?).

Cesar Chavez Day: Fighting For People

I have had a five month hiatus from this blog, but I thought Cesar Chavez Day would be an appropriate day to return.  One reason for returning now is that what has kept me away has been a frustration and pessimism about the treatment of the Mexican and Mexican-American population in Texas, specifically in the area of education and higher education, and the sense that nothing can be done.  Chavez is a good example of someone who didn't entertain that sort of pessimism, but just kept fighting and today we have the continued work of the United Farm Workers as a result of his vision.  Unfortunately, we still have the need for the UFW.

As many of you know, Texas Governor Rick Perry has used the current budget downfall of close to $27 billion dollars as an excuse to cut funding at public institutions of higher education across the state.  Naomi Klein speaks of disaster capitalism (see a review of her book in The Guardian) as the occasion that those in power take in the face of disaster--hurricanes, budget shortfalls, whatever--to privatize public services.  Klein described the situation in Wisconsin as an instance of "disaster capitalism" on "Democracy Now!"  

My university, the University of Texas, Pan American, which is already chronically underfunded, is having $46 million cut this year.  That's 19% of the budget.  About seven years ago, the university went to a three-three teaching load for tenure-track and tenured faculty in order to justify higher research expectations and to attract better faculty.  I came to the institution with the understanding that this was the direction in which it was moving.  Now there is talk of raising the teaching course load and / or raising the already high caps on humanities courses.  The thing is, I'm not so much pissed off because I feel like this is a bait-and-switch, though it is.  I'm pissed off because I know that this will mean a lower quality of education for my students who need the best education and the best attention they can get.  If I am teaching more courses, I cannot assign as many papers.  If I am teaching more students in those courses, I cannot give attention to student writing in the way that they need it.  I try to assign two papers in every lower division course because I think students need a first go and then feedback and then an opportunity to try again.  I like to assign reading questions that I carefully read and comment on in order to improve student writing and thinking as often as possible, but I will not have the time to do this if teaching loads are increased.  The more obvious impact on students is the cutting of Texas grant money to low-income students which is expected to make it impossible for 2000 of our students to return in 2011-2012.  This is it - this is their opportunity for higher education, and the State of Texas is actively taking it away.

The most frustrating thing about this situation is that the state does not need to be in a fiscal crisis, so the decision to "balance the budget" at the expense of a better education for UTPA students, 87% of whom are of Mexican descent, suggests that the state of Texas doesn't care so much for this population or for these students.  Let me explain.  The federal government has designated $830 million dollars for Texas, but Governor Perry refuses to take it because the money is earmarked specifically for education and Perry doesn't want to use it that way.  Moreover, the state refuses to use the resources it has to make up the so-called deficit, like I don't know, having an income tax!  So while the oil and gas industry has a tax incentive, which has amounted to $7.4 billion dollars in tax breaks since 2004 (which Obama's budget for 2012 ends and which of course Rick Perry thinks is the end of the world), the budget is being balanced by firing elementary and secondary teachers in the poorest areas of the state and undoing years of progress and development at regional institutions such as UTPA.  Note that when Texas first began recommending these education cuts, the stock of Valero, one of the biggest oil companies in the state, hit their 52-week high.  The only tax that has been even momentarily considered is another sales tax, the burden of which is always disproportionately placed on the poor.

Today at UTPA, students are protesting with a teach-in, walk-out against the recommendation of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) to cut the Mexican-American Studies Major.  While UTPA President Nelson has agreed to find a space for Mexican-American Studies, to give the director a course-reduction and to give funds for the establishment of a Center over the next three years, THECB maintains that the major, which has never been funded up to this point, has too few majors and so should not continue, even though this is a major that costs no more money than the university is already spending.  They have their accounting machinations that suggests because students would be taking up spaces in those courses instead of in others, it does cost money, but it isn't as if the courses wouldn't be taught without the major.  It appears more to be an opportunity to eliminate the places and resources for genuinely considering the effects of colonization, the prospects for decolonization, and the true empowerment of the population of the Rio Grande Valley.

Cesar Chavez said in fighting for the farm workers, "The fight is never about grapes or lettuce.  It's always about people."  Indeed.  Indeed.

Institutions Against Themselves: Can This Really Happen?

We all know by now that the Tea Party has changed the shape of the Republican Party and the Republican Party has won the House with its new "mandate" to slow down and shrink government. As a headline in The Washington Post declared today, "Republicans Map Out Agenda of Less."  Despite the contradictory logic of the electorate who announced loudly that they were voting on the basis of the economy, thus stating that they do think the government is responsible for their woes, and hence, for solving them, this same electorate has swept into office a group of politicians who think the solution to the country's problems is less government. This amounts to saying that our newly elected Congress thinks that the government needs to get out of the business of solving problems in order to solve the problems. This approach does appear to be mind-boggling, since the shrinking of regulation, ie. government, permitted the kind of trading that led to the housing and then immediately following, the banking crisis.  


Because of my ongoing work on the relation of the contest of politics to the instituting of politics wherein the instituting of politics is always conservative, I am looking forward to watching this Congress to see if their claims to shrink themselves, to give themselves less work, will come to fruition. When I say that the instituting of politics is conservative, I do not mean that it is fiscally responsible. I mean that by stabilizing the law that is the result of the contest that amounts to politics, institutions aim to preserve themselves, to preserve the law, to preserve the way things are. Rousseau explains in The Social Contract that the government is the setting into work the will of the people. What happens, Rousseau says, is that power sediments in government because it is more concentrated there. So the government becomes really good at protecting itself even at the expense of giving up its responsibility to put the will of the people to work.  


The current political situation is just begging to be taken as an experiment in institutions.  The first thing Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn) has done after winning election is to run for the fourth-highest ranking position in the House. And already she has encountered the politicking that goes on to win such posts. What this suggests is that it is much easier to win on an anti-government platform than to govern on an anti-government platform.  So I look forward to seeing whether the need to keep their jobs calls into question their capacity to remain "anti-government".  Really, what I am interested in seeing is whether one can be critical of an institution by joining the institution, or if joining the institution gives one a stake in the furtherance of the institution and a person's own involvement in it such that the criticism becomes necessarily blunted.

The Girl Who Played With Fire: The (Swedish) Movie

The second movie made from Stieg Larsson's Millenium series is now available to watch instantly on Netflix. I encourage you to see it partly because the Swedish version gracefully avoids the Hollywood pitfalls of characters too beautiful to imagine in real life scenerios and too tough to really be sympathetic to them.  What Noomi Rapace accomplishes is a toughness that comes from a place of vulnerability, a perspective that seems necessary to play Lisbeth Salander well.  The New York Times calls her performance an "intense rightness," and I agree.

What I do not understand is the decision by director Daniel Alfredson and writer Jonas Frykberg to excise all of the obviously anti-women vitriol from the story.  This is a change in directorship and screenwriter from the first film, and it seems obvious in the shift away from the focus on the "Men Who Hate Women" theme that was Larsson's obvious focus.  In the second film, there is no anti-lesbian cop - a subplot that ran through the book and resulted in the woman cop, Sonja Modig, standing up for herself and for Lisbeth against this corrupt anti-woman cop who has been pulled into the conspiracy against Salander.  This subplot is important for showing the misogyny and patriarchy that underlies the corrupt institutions that wish to dispose of Salander.  The media circus is similarly underplayed, which is especially noteworthy because the media's speculation about Salander's sex life, sanity, and competency further contributes to the anti-woman sentiment that Salander must fight in the second novel.

Without this element in the film, the cohesiveness of the trilogy falls apart.  The common thread between the first and second novel is obviously violence against women, and also the covering up of this violence.  To downplay this violence in the second novel is to lose the cohesiveness of the trilogy and I think, to do Larsson a misservice.  The third novel returns to this theme making Salander's defense of herself a defense of women's rights, led by a women's rights attorney.  I'm concerned that the director will similarly play down this theme for the sake of intrigue and excitement.  Such an oversight would be unfortunate, because while Larsson's trilogy is not great literature it does raise important questions about the relation between the patriarchy of institutions and violence against women.  It'd be a shame if those questions were forgotten to make the movie more exciting.

Fiscally Conservative? Ha!

Through this election cycle, and now in the wake of their "historic" victory, Republican leaders are suddenly thrilled to cut spending and shrink the deficit.  Mitch McConnell, the Minority Senate leader, is all for it.  John Boehner thinks this is the new approach the country needs. Due to the shyness of Republican congresspeople to actually name and commit themselves to particular cuts, the Heritage Foundation went ahead and did it for them.  They propose funding oversight agencies such as the Food Safety and Inspection Service with user fees -- yes, because we saw how well that worked for the oil industry.  They want to completely cut the Community Development Block Grant fund, because surely our communities are doing fine without government support.  They want to eliminate both the Appalachian Development Authority and the Delta Authority, which is practically unconscionable since these are some of the most needy and underdeveloped places in the country.  Of course, they want to trim education spending, by reducing Pell Grants and Head Start funding, and "scale back the Education Department bureaucracy" which is a euphemistic phrase for eliminate the Education Department a la Sharon Angle style.


But seriously, despite the worries that these cuts raise, I find it comical that Republicans are once again claiming to be the fiscally responsible ones among us.  Dick Cheney told Paul O'Neill, Bush's first Treasury Secretary, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter," and Republicans have been spending as if they really think that is true.  Zfacts.com reminds us that Reagan got elected just as these Republicans did, by claiming that the deficit was out of control, and then preceding to drive up the deficit, because really they think that deficits don't matter.  Reagan went on to cut tax rates for the very richest and then drive the debt up higher than it had ever been.  It is clear that the present deficit / debt crisis is Bush's legacy and has been years in the making as the New York Times explained last year.  The budget surplus that the Congressional Budget Office estimated (when Clinton was leaving office in 2001) was going to be $800 billion a year from 2009-2012 has become a $1.2 trillion deficit!  That didn't happen because of anything Obama did but because Bush cut taxes, including for the top two percent of income earners, and deregulated a number of industries who have wreaked havoc on the American economy.  Bush was able to cut taxes because Republicans abandoned the budget rules put in place in 1990 so that they could cut taxes without constraint.  The result was a continuous string of budget deficits under George W. Bush.  As Rachel Maddow said on "Meet the Press," this summer: "If Republicans want to run as this fiscally responsible party, it's neat, but it's novel.  It's not the way they've actually governed." 


Somehow the Republican Party has convinced Americans that it is fiscally responsible, that they pay their bills on time, in contrast to those spendthrift Democrats.  But as AmericanProgress.org has shown, the Republican "Pledge to America" will drive up the deficit and accelerate the growth of the national debt.  I'm not an economist, and I know that people have arguments for both trickle down prosperity and for tax and spend policies, but either way, I know that initially both spending AND cutting taxes affect the deficit and we just have to be honest about that.  That is what annoys me most.  When I was a Republican, I thought that Clinton had the best spin campaign of any politician I had ever seen and I thought, oh, how wonderful it must be to be a Democrat.  But when I became a Democrat, it seemed like the Republicans won over the spin machine.  I'm not saying we have to get back to facts, surely there are only interpretations, but puh-lease, there are certainly more believable interpretations than others and I'd just like my fellow Americans to see that, too.