I spent much of yesterday morning searching for page 5696 on that date.  No luck.

Photo from columbia.edu/Corbis Bettman

Finally, I threw in the towel and emailed the Library of Congress. I expected I would hear back in a week or so. Twenty hours later, the answer is in my mailbox.

The anonymous Digital Reference Section did what elected officials always want government programs to do: Gave me some help, and then provided the tools for me to do the job myself next time.

The librarian attached Cong Record April 18 1959.  She or he was careful not to rub my nose in this failure, explaining that the 1950s were not available online, and oops! — the page numbers were 6252-53, not page 5696. Next time I know to go to a Federal Depository Library (all cities have ‘em) and get the stuff.

Oh, and the clip I was seeking? It announced an NAACP  youth march in Washington, D.C., in which thousands of young people, black and white, planned to demand equal rights for all.  “And they won’t take no for an answer.”

So, that’s why I won’t complain about taxes.

As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes, it might just happen. Seems the US Navy and Marine Corps  are thinking green. “God Bless Them. The Few. The Proud. The Green. Semper Fi.” as he puts it.

As Friedman points out, Big Oil has such a stranglehold on Congress that there isn’t a chance in hell that any fuel-reducing strategies are going to make it into practice. But the Marines and Navy are figuring out ways to float green ships and keep the lights on in the war with fewer of those hyper-dangerous fuel convoys. Fewer convoys, fewer soldiers killed by roadside bombs.

And that’s the micro view in this war. In the big picture, if we were less oil dependent, it would change the whole political and economic ballgame.

Aside from the enviro benefits and Friedman’s point about a weak-kneed Congress, this campaign reminds me how much our view of the military has changed, especially among young Americans. War is still “not healthy for children and other living things” as the poster on my childhood bedroom wall claimed, but attitudes are very different. I am still haunted by the booing and back-turning that happened when my sister’s friends came home from Vietnam. We sent boys to be killed in the jungle, and punished them more when they came home.

If the military stays on this green path, it will change this dynamic even more. Won’t it be amazing if the day comes when we look around and realize that the biggest eco-heroes are in uniform?

We’ve got a thriving “income defense industry,” which New York Times writer Paul Sullivan defines as “accountants, lawyers and financial advisers employed by the wealthy — and the merely affluent — to manage their financial affairs.”  (See the entire article, here.)

Now, there’s nothing wrong with holding on to your hard-earned gains, but much of what these defenders do amounts to standing on the necks of those living way down the food chain. The money-guarders’ machinations mean more tax dollars are growing interest off in distant accounts, not here at home paying for schools and roads.

Yet some of the tax dollars that are collected end up funding programs that do help the little gal. Case in point (and written about in the same issue of the NYT) is the feds’ 203(k) mortgage program. This little-touted method of borrowing allows us to buy ailing properties with small down payments and then renovate them under what seem like some wisely strict regulations. (Lynnley Browning’s article, here.)

Even when we have a good idea that benefits the worker bee in our society, we seem to make sure it doesn’t fully succeed. (For a start, can’t someone give better names to these tax-status things? Let’s branch out to punctuation marks at least: the 203(!) program would look a lot more upbeat, wouldn’t it?)

What we need is a better income defense industry for the regular folks. That used to be the job of elected officials, but, well, they’re busy elsewhere.

This insight dropped on me this morning like the anvil in the old Roadrunner cartoons. Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times column, “Message to Muslims: I’m Sorry” was the shove.

Kristof makes the point that those of us who fume over the question “Why don’t moderate Muslims speak up against extremists?” should also ask another question:

Why don’t I, a moderate non-Muslim in America, speak up against the extremists in my own country?

Well, let’s see. I guess I’ve decided that Tea Party folks, Fox News, Rush Whatshisname, and followers of Sarah Palin are so absurd that there’s no reason to spend time debating their hateful and demoralizing messages and their flatly untrue “reporting.”

And I guess I’ve shrugged off the Arizona approach to illegal immigration because it seems so patently ineffective that it is beside the point to decry its racism.

And maybe because our tax structure is easily dismissed as slimy self-interested rich people taking care of their own, I haven’t felt much need to point out that it is systematic discrimination and larceny directed at the working poor.

In other words, because it is easier to ask: Why don’t those moderate Muslims stand up for what’s right?

I’ll tell you what: I’ll do better.

As with any new exercise, I’ll start slow. Whenever I hear someone trot out that moderate Muslim criticism, I’ll look up from my full plate in my cozy home long enough to say: Bullshit.

I can do it, I know I can.

(I’ve excerpted, then edited it down. See the whole piece here.)

In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, almost 70 percent of elderly widows lived with an adult child; by 1990, that proportion had plummeted to 20 percent, according to the Census Bureau.

Economists Robert F. Schoeni of the University of Michigan and Kathleen McGarry, now at Dartmouth College, investigated this phenomenon, using more than a century of Census data showing where elderly widows resided…they pinpointed the year the big change began: 1940. After that, the graph depicting the percentage of widows living with children resembles a ski slope: down, down and down some more, until by 1990 more than 60 percent of widows lived ALONE.

So what happened in 1940? The economists, testing various hypotheses, found a far simpler explanation.

In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. In 1940, the monthly checks began to flow. And even those tiny checks — Ida May Fuller of Ludlow, Vt., got the first one, for $22.54 — were enough to allow widows, who had historically high poverty rates, to remain in their homes. As Social Security benefits rose and reached a larger proportion of the elderly, the trend toward remaining at home accelerated.

The single greatest factor driving this immense cultural shift, in other words, was economic. Once elders no longer had to move in with their children to survive, most opted not to.

“When they have more income and they have a choice of how to live, they choose to live alone,” Ms. McGarry said. “They buy their independence.”

Our machine did indeed turn out to be one of the few with the defect. I’d used the thing almost daily for over a year unknowingly risking my life. I tell you, this housewife thing is like combat.

The machine was fixed by a nice man who stuck around to share half my almond-butter sandwich and chat about the risks of wayward appliances and the politics of recalls. We wondered what people get paid when their washer turns on them. We wondered if recalls could be a way to manipulate stock prices. It was the sort of enjoyable conversation that two strangers have when neither one knows anything about the topics discussed. Sort of like a Tea Party gathering, only we weren’t blaming the government for high taxes, cellulite or anything else that has ruined our lives.

I wish the story in yesterday’s New York Times had appeared earlier. It was  headlined “Johnson & Johnson Recalls Hip Implants” and it would have been fascinating to kick around that development with the washer guy. Maybe some other customer will mention it to him.

The Sunday New York Times tells me:

1. Half of the 14.6 million people out of work have been that way for more than six months.

2. A group of senior Republican senators wants to revisit the 14th Amendment, which allows American-born children citizenship, regardless of their parents’ status. And, across the country there is frantic railing against plans to build Islamic mosques–especially a proposal for one near the World Trade Center’s graveyard.

Regardless of how you feel about people who come here following the ideal of freedom or those here who insist that they should be able to worship who/what/where they wish–you’ll surely agree with this:

If the Republican senators  put their considerable energy, taxpayer-provided resources and powerful media platforms to work on solving the unemployment problem, they could do it. If the likes of mediagenic Sarah Palin, a vocal opponent to mosque construction, joined in…even better.

Instead, they are repeating mistakes of the past that will exact a price far greater than we can afford.

Keep your tired, your poor...

We perfected this behavior long ago, when the Civil War ravaged the Southern economy and led to a new kind of racism and segregation. The period called Reconstruction promised a lot to African Americans. Almost all of those promises were broken within a few years. Then, as now, citizenship was something to be denied, then granted, then denied again by the ruling class.

It took the South a century to recover and begin to thrive economically after legislation and social mores forced “free” blacks to the back of the bus and denied them the basic rights that came with citizenship for their white neighbors.

Along with the xenophobic and racist policies, the region got a culture that worked white mill workers (including their children) literally to death, and ensured they’d die in debt to the company store. Citizens and de facto slaves alike woke up to a land stripped of coal, timber and other resources by the same folks who promised that segregated mills would lead the South out of its poor past. Fast forward a few decades and see how it played out: The images seen around the world of dogs and fire hoses being used to govern are still synonymous with “the South” and “civil rights,” despite the enormous progress of the last 60 years.

We’re out of work, we’re broke, we’re scared and we’re going to fix it all by putting our collective foot on the necks of whomever we can keep down.

It won’t work this time around either.

(NYTimes stories: “Jobless And Staying That Way” by Nelson D. Schwartz and  “I’m American. And You?” by Matt Bai. Also, “Across Nation Mosque Projects Meet Opposition,” by Laurie Goodstein.)

This isn’t unique to Portland, and in fact the Rose City is better off than most. But everywhere I turn, I hear or read people grumbling about taxes and bloated government. (What is it with old high school boyfriends on Facebook who turn into such right-wing whackjobs?)

Let’s not simplify this to the point of idiocy. Taxes are not evil. We should reserve our ire for politicians who make entire platforms out of promises to cut taxes. Cutting waste and shifting priorities is vital, but that doesn’t mean putting on a blindfold and heading out to the weedy garden with a machete.

This New York Times column, “America Goes Dark,” by Paul Krugman hits it on the head:

How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.

The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.

(PS: If you need to rail at someone or something about huge waste and routine gouging of the little people…Big Banks present plenty of opportunities. Check this out. Wells Fargo is not the only bank defending its practice of charging customers big fees for small services.)

Byrd himself exemplified that change, moving from membership in the Ku Klux Klan as a young West Virginian to a supporter of civil rights measures as a seasoned statesman.

The comment no doubt gave a lot of other people pause as it did me. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I would have thought longer and deeper about the thesis had the footage of Byrd not been followed by a live studio shot about the oil spill.  On the set was one of the new news-hotties stretching her long legs from a tall chair facing the camera, chatting with Phillipe Cousteau Jr, grandson of the revered Jacques Cousteau.

Yes, Senator Byrd lived a long life. Long enough to die on a day when “news” comes from a nitwit in snakeskin high heels schmoozing a low-wattage, high-ancestry bullshitter about one of the worst environmental disasters on record.