Father's Day, Yes. But...

...also Magna Carta Day.

From today's issue of The Writer's Almanac:

On this day in 1215, King John of England put his seal to the Magna Carta, one of the first historical documents to state that subjects have rights beyond the power of their rulers. The right to a trial by jury and the right of habeas corpus, which prevents one from being unlawfully imprisoned, have been extrapolated from the Magna Carta. King John was more or less coerced into agreeing to the document by a group of barons who were upset at his disastrous and costly foreign policy. Although actually a reactionary move by the barons to insure their feudal rights, the Magna Carta took on symbolic significance as one of the earliest instances of the law possessing greater authority than the king. "Magna Carta" means "great charter" in Latin.

Wow. We've come so far, haven't we?!? [IRONY OFF]

Sinking Ship?

Hillary's time may have come and gone, although she and her spokespeople deny it by the minute.

Various pundits (per the NY Times) are declaring the primary race all but over:

“I think there’s an increasing presumption tonight that Obama’s going to be the nominee,” Chris Wallace, the Fox News host, said to Karl Rove, President Bush’s longtime political guru, who is now a Fox News analyst....

A posting on the DailyKos Web site included a mock memo to Mrs. Clinton titled, “To-Do List Before Dropping Out.”

Speaking on CNN, David Gergen, a former adviser to several presidents, including Mrs. Clinton’s husband, said, “I think the Clinton people know the game is almost up.”

Stating it more bluntly, Bob Franken, the political analyst, told the MSNBC host Dan Abrams shortly after 2 a.m. Eastern time, “Let’s put it right on the table: It’s over. It’s over.”

And it picked up again on the major morning news programs in a devastating cascade of sound bites for Mrs. Clinton and her campaign.

Bob Schieffer on the CBS News program “Early Show”: “Basically, Maggie, this race is over.”

George Stephanopoulos on the ABC program “Good Morning America”: “This nomination fight is over.”

Matt Lauer on the NBC News program “Today”: “Good morning, is it over?”

The commentary was punctuated by some brutal morning newspaper headlines: "Toast!” blared The New York Post; “Hil Needs a Miracle” declared The New York Daily News.

Meanwhile, Maureen Dowd does the give-with-one-hand, take-with-the-other routine:

In his memoir, the legendary Elia Kazan wrote about directing Vivien Leigh in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” While he did not think that Leigh was a great natural actress, he was impressed that she would crawl through glass to get the role right.

Hillary Clinton may not be a great natural politician, but traveling across the country on her own Bus Named Desire, she has crawled through glass to get the role right...

Hillary is less Blanche than Scarlett. “Heaven help the Yankees if they capture you,” Rhett told the willful belle at the start of her rugged odyssey.

And heaven help the Democrats as they try to shake off Hillary. On top of her inane vows to obliterate Iran, OPEC and the summer gas tax, she plans “a nuclear option” during her Shermanesque march to Denver. Tom Edsall reported on The Huffington Post that the Hillaryites will try, at a May 31 meeting of the Democratic Rules and Bylaws Committee, to renege on their word and get the Michigan and Florida delegations seated. Addressing supporters here, she urged the counting of the Florida and Michigan votes, noting “it would be a little strange to have a nominee chosen by 48 states.”

“It’s full speed onto the White House,” she said...

It’s hard to believe that this Hillary is the same Wellesley girl who said she yearned for a more “ecstatic and penetrating mode of living.” What would that young Hillary — who volunteered on Gene McCarthy’s anti-war campaign; who cried the day Martin Luther King Jr. was killed; who referred to some of her “smorgasbord of personalities” in a 1967 letter to a friend as an “alienated academic,” and an “involved pseudo-hippie”; who once returned a bottle of perfume after feeling guilty about the poverty around her — think of this shape-shifting, cynical Hillary?

She’s so at odds with who she used to be, even in the Senate, that if she were to get elected, who would voters be electing?

Obama is like her idealistic, somewhat naïve self before the world launched 1,000 attacks against her, turning her into the hard-bitten, driven politician who has launched 1,000 attacks against Obama.

As she makes a last frenzied and likely futile attempt to crush the butterfly, it’s as though she’s crushing the remnants of her own girlish innocence.

I don't know if the race is a lock for Obama, but Clinton's frenzied rear-guard (and back-office) defense actions look tacky as hell. They don't strike me as "scrappy" or "tenacious" -- they strike me as desperate.

The capper for me came this morning when I caught a brief CNN interview with spokespeople for both candidates. Clinton's, Howard Wolfson, was presented with this fairly pointed question: If you work the numbers, even if you assume that Clinton wins the remaining primaries with a 65-35 margin (extremely unlikely), there is no way she can win the nomination. So why stay in the race?

I didn't work the numbers, but from Wolfson's response -- effectively, "We can still win! People continue to vote for her!" -- I gather they're not in dispute. What really turned me off, though, was Wolfson's slightly more precise justification for staying in the race. I can find neither video nor transcript at the CNN site, but in general it went something like this:

Another reason for the Democratic Party to select Senator Clinton is all the polls showing that Obama voters are more likely to vote for Clinton than vice-versa. Clinton supporters are very loyal.

"Loyal" my sweet patootie. If Clinton supporters wouldn't vote for Obama in a general election, either by not voting at all or voting for McCain, they're not "loyal." They're clinically nuts.

Update, 2008-05-08: The Times's Nicholas Kristof covers this issue today, in a column headlined "The Too-Long Goodbye":

The most terrifying numbers for Democrats in Tuesday’s exit polls should be those showing how many of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters are planning to vote for Mr. McCain in November.

In Indiana, only 49 percent of Clinton voters said they would cast votes for Mr. Obama in November if he were the nominee; in North Carolina, the figure was 47 percent. In both states, a majority of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters said that they would either vote for Mr. McCain or stay home.

Like I said: nuts. And to the extent that the Senator from New York doesn't disavow this kind of talk from her supporters, she's the biggest nut of all.

Smart No More

Let's talk about stupidity -- political stupidity.

Maybe "stupidity" is too harsh a word. I certainly don't mean the charming, they-probably-meant-it-as a joke naivete of whoever named the group which recently conducted a peace vigil here in North Florida, Tallahasseeans Who Believe It's Time to Come Home. Right, that group: the one whose acronym spells out Tallahasseeans Who BITCH.

No, this is a different -- more insidious -- sort of willful ignorance.

The cliché used to be that conservative Republicans were the hard-headed pragmatists and realists who spoke with their brains. Democrats were squishy bleeding hearts who spoke viscerally and simply didn't understand how the real world works.

These days, the cliché has been inverted.

What got me thinking about this was an email message I recently received. It was an email which evidently originated, in the way of most politically inclined email, from an unknown someone in the dawn of prehistory. (He probably painted it on a cave wall.) Not all the names in the chain of recipients had been snipped as the message made its way through the Internet's population. I recognized many of them as those who in the past circulated other emails extolling the folk wisdom of commentators like Mr. Limbaugh and Ms. Coulter.

So I was surprised to read through this message and see that former Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca seemed to have many of the same ideas as those familiar names did.

And really, it was a masterpiece of invective along the lines of the tirade from the fictional Howard Beall in the movie "Network": I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!

The title: Where Have All the Leaders Gone? It took to task big business. It reamed Congress, and (as the expression goes) tore a new one for politicians in general. It even -- whoa! -- referred to "some bonehead on Fox News."

My pulse rate rose. Was I witnessing an exciting dawn of clear-headed thinking? Er, no. I was witnessing another cloudy day along the occluded front which passes for way too much right-wing "thinking."

See, while Chairman Lee did in fact write all those things -- they're from the first pages of his 2007 book by the same title -- they're not the ONLY things he wrote in those opening pages.

Carefully excised from the original are (hold your breath) all references to the President.

For instance, the message includes this quote: "On September 11, 2001, we needed a strong leader more than any other time in our history. We needed a steady hand to guide us out of the ashes."

In Iacocca's book, those two sentences were followed immediately by:

Where was George Bush? He was reading a story about a pet goat to kids in Florida when he heard about the attacks. He kept sitting there for twenty minutes with a baffled look on his face. It's all on tape. You can see it for yourself. Then, instead of taking the quickest route back to Washington and immediately going on the air to reassure the panicked people of this country, he decided it wasn't safe to return to the White House. He basically went into hiding for the day -- and he told Vice President Dick Cheney to stay put in his bunker. We were all frozen in front of our TVs, scared out of our wits, waiting for our leaders to tell us that we were going to be okay, and there was nobody home. It took Bush a couple of days to get his bearings and devise the right photo op at Ground Zero.

I don't know about you, but that is what I call incisive commentary. It sure boosted Lee Iacocca in my esteem. And it's only one of the many passages naming Bush which were likewise stripped from this email message.

What a shame that someone -- an unknown someone, to be sure -- decided that the President needed to be shielded from Iacocca's inconvenient opinions.

What a shame that that someone decided his original correspondents' fragile sensibilities needed to be shielded as well.

And what a shame that none of those correspondents, all down the line, took it upon themselves to actually look into the veracity of what they had swallowed but simply passed it along, clucking their tongues.

What a shame that this is what passes for political wisdom among too many people. None of those I know in the addressee list, by the way, is the least bit stupid. They're engineers, attorneys, business owners, government officials. They're nice people, to boot. People with loving families, with senses of humor.

But man: present them with a political issue and their wits just abandon them. Taking -- it must be said -- their hearts with them.

Great Old Protest Songs Never Die, They Just Recycle (Over and Over and Over Again)

"Eve of Destruction," says Wikipedia,

is a grave warning of imminent apocalypse, and considered by some to be the epitome of a protest song.

Oh yeah. It's all that, and then some.
On one of public TV's recurring orgies of '60s-music-driven pledge drives, last night I caught Barry McGuire (now 40 years older, of course) performing it in a voice which, if anything, is even more drenched in an agony of disillusion than in the original recording. (Time does some things right, especially to some singers' voices.)
The Wikipedia article linked above includes a 30-second sample -- not much. I'll try to give you a little more later, when I'm at a desktop better equipped for audio processing. For now, here are the song's lyrics:

Eve Of Destruction
(as recorded by Barry McGuire, 1965)

The eastern world it is explodin',
violence flarin', bullets loadin',
you're old enough to kill but not for votin',
you don't believe in war, what's that gun you're totin',
and even the Jordan river has bodies floatin',

but you tell me over and over and over again my friend,
ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction.

Don't you understand, what I'm trying to say?
Can't you see the fear that I'm feeling today?
If the button is pushed, there's no running away,
There'll be no one to save with the world in a grave,
take a look around you, boy, it's bound to scare you, boy,

but you tell me over and over and over again my friend,
ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction.

Yeah, my blood's so mad, feels like coagulatin',
I'm sittin' here, just contemplatin',
I can't twist the truth, it knows no regulation,
handful of Senators don't pass legislation,
and marches alone can't bring integration,
when human respect is disintegratin',
this whole crazy world is just too frustratin',

and you tell me over and over and over again my friend,
ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction.

Think of all the hate there is in Red China!
Then take a look around to Selma, Alabama!
Ah, you may leave here, for four days in space,
but when you return, it's the same old place,
the poundin' of the drums, the pride and disgrace,
you can bury your dead, but don't leave a trace,
hate your next-door-neighbour, but don't forget to say grace,

and you tell me over and over and over and over again my friend,
ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction.

Aside from some of the dated references (Red China, four days in space), the sonofabitch holds up pretty well, doesn't it?
Truth be known, it's a little depressing to consider how readily the content still fits. Are the problems that intractable? Can so many people see, so easily, what the problems are in the first place, be so committed to fixing them, and yet be so incapable of breaking the old patterns?
This is one of the most important things fueling the Obama campaign's success. I have yet to make up my mind about him, 100% (I was an Edwards fan). But the harping by critics on what they deem an inappropriately style-over-substance appeal misses the point. That point is: Enough. We've had enough.
I don't say his opponents should roll over and let him take it without a fight, but I am saying they're supremely misguided. If their cynicism masquerading as "hard-nosed practicality" and "realism" comes to triumph over Obama's strange amalgam of charisma and goose-bumping rhetoric and plain old hope, it's a safe bet you'll see "Eve of Destruction" pop up its desperate head in another couple-three-four decades.

Update 2019-02-15:
The Internets being what they are, none of the original means I'd provided to listen to the song now work reliably -- or at all -- anymore. So why don't we do this the easy way: here's Barry Maguire on Youtube.

The Jailhouse-Snitch Sweepstakes

You probably thought (foolish child) that government's fascination and affiliation with gambling went no further than state-sponsored lotteries, or that the nadir of this affiliation had been reached with the current misAdministration's "Most-wanted Iraqis playing cards" of 2003.

Not so.

Prosecuting attorneys consider one of their best resources in investigating major crimes to be the use of so-called "jailhouse snitches." The idea behind this resource is that prisoners go to jail and, eager to establish a respectable place in the prison pecking order, boast among themselves about their exploits. When a particularly thorny major crime comes up for which the evidence is insufficiently convincing, a prosecutor can turn to the prison population for help, then. Help us convict this guy, goes the argument, and we'll see if we can get your sentence reduced (or conjugal visits arranged, or whatever the inducement might be).

You can probably see the potential for abuse here. If you reward people for telling tales on one another, people will tell those tales whether they're true or not -- particularly if the institution from which you've recruited is housed in penitentiaries (not exactly the most trustworthy bunch to begin with). Indeed, defense attorneys often will attack the prosecution's case if it relies overmuch on such "and then he whispered to me" sources. Which doesn't count for a whole heck of a lot, of course, if the jury believes the prosecutor's version of events.

Anyway, we here in Florida are nothing if not blessed with ingenious solutions to the complicated problems attendant on criminal investigations. Thus, some wizard in the Florida Department of Law Engorgement, er, Enforcement has come up with the Florida Cold Case Homicide Card Deck -- an idea long overdue.

The (ha ha) deal is to print up, on playing cards, descriptions of various unsolved cases which have otherwise run into a brick wall of one kind or another. Distribute 100,000 decks of these cards among Florida's currently more than 90,000 state prisoners. For each tip leading to an arrest, the source can receive between $1,000 and $50,000. (The lower end is what the state alone will pay; anything above that is made up for from other sources, like the victims' families. The tips themselves are submitted in a way which keeps the source anonymous, while still enabling them to be identified through a third party in order to receive the reward.)

A column (fee may be required in order to view the whole thing) in today's Tallahassee Democrat says:

Since the first decks of cards were distributed to inmates three months ago, 72 tips have already come in to the tip line from correctional institutions statewide , but quite a few more clues have come in... bypassing the reward and going directly to law-enforcement officials, including state attorney's offices.

“It has surprised us how many tips have come in from inmates who just want to do the right thing,” said [Wayne] Cross [director of the Florida Attorney General's Heartland Crime Stoppers program].

I'm surprised, too, and skeptical that the sole reason inmates would tip off authorities and bypass a reward would be for altruistic purposes. Maybe they don't trust the system to keep them anonymous when they collect their reward (though it's actually a pretty good system involving a secret code and a trusted friend), or maybe being in the good graces of a state attorney's office is worth more than the reward -- but I've probably been watching too many reruns of “The Wire.”

The bottom line is any tips gleaned from the prison population, or the general public, might help take a murderer off the streets and help a victim's family find some peace of mind.

Aside from my trouble with the word "might" in that last sentence, I also have difficulty with the idea -- as presented in the column, anyhow -- that rewards are available not just for convictions (problematic enough), but for simple arrests.

The FDLE page about the cards includes a quote from Voltaire: "To the living we owe respect; to the dead we owe the truth." It's a good quote, but we'd do well to remember to respect the living -- including those arrested on the basis of this program -- as well as to offer true, honest-to-God truth (and not some hired weasel's version of it) to the ghosts and survivors of the dead.

Interested in owning your own set of the cold-case cards? Purchase here. Two different decks available!

Update, 2:45pm: More information about the program is available at -- where else? -- the Poker Pro Magazine site.

"Pogo" Speaks

Thanks to Walt Kelly, a goodie from days gone by which is almost painfully relevant now:

Now is the time for all good men to come to.

I almost want to get this tattooed on my forehead.

Congressional Dems and Principles

Once again, the Democratic majority in both houses of Congress has the opportunity to do "a right thing." And once again, it appears to be on the brink of folding because of (perceived) political expediency (emphasis added):

Two months after insisting that they would roll back broad eavesdropping powers won by the Bush administration, Democrats in Congress appear ready to make concessions that could extend some crucial powers given to the National Security Agency.

Administration officials say they are confident they will win approval of the broadened authority that they secured temporarily in August as Congress rushed toward recess. Some Democratic officials concede that they may not come up with enough votes to stop approval.

As the debate over the eavesdropping powers of the National Security Agency begins anew this week, the emerging measures reflect the reality confronting the Democrats.

Although willing to oppose the White House on the Iraq war, they remain nervous that they will be called soft on terrorism if they insist on strict curbs on gathering intelligence.

Goddamn but this torques me.

What's going on here is not that they will justifiably be called soft on terrorism. They will be called that, sure. (And their fears that it will prove politically dangerous speak volumes about the so-called Liberal Mainstream Media, eh? If it's so damn liberal then where's the danger?)

The problem is that they are willing to accept the framework of debate which the MisAdministration and its media stooges have constructed since 2001. There is no real danger of being called "soft on terrorism," you idiots, if you make a point of clarifying that this kind of shit has nothing to do with protecting us from terrorists.

The NSA Concedes: It's Stopped Beating Its Wife

We see today in the New York Times (and other news outlets) that the National Security Agency doesn't do warrantless wiretapping. Er, anymore.

The National Security Agency has not conducted wiretapping without warrants on the telephones of any Americans since at least February, the nation’s top intelligence officer told Congress on Tuesday.

Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, told the House Judiciary Committee that since he took office that month, the government has conducted electronic surveillance only after seeking court-approved warrants... Mr. McConnell’s testimony Tuesday was the first time he has publicly said that the warrantless wiretapping of Americans has actually been ended.

Thanks, Mike. I must have missed your first public admission that it had ever started in the first place. It feels so much better to know you've at last come clean. Guess it's all right to believe you from now on!

[SARCASM OFF]

Department of Funny Coincidences

I don't mean "funny coincidences" in the sense of suspicious coincidences. No, it's just that in an 86-year-old document, I've found reminders of how far we in this fair country have not come. It's from H.L. Mencken's The American Language; in particular, it's Mencken's recasting of the Declaration of Independence into plain old everyday English. While he plays it heavy-handed in spots, and his intent overall is jocular, and allowing for the differences in the precise situations (us vs. England then, the nation vs. W now), it's amazing how clearly the ironies pop out when the ideas are made so plain. Or maybe it's not a case of how far we've not come, but rather a case of the battles which we continue to refight...

Excerpts (ellipses omitted), from the famous list of grievances against the king:

The administration of the present King, George III, has been rotten from the start, and when anybody kicked about it he always tried to get away with it by strong-arm work. Here is some of the rough stuff he has pulled:

• He vetoed bills in the Legislature that everybody was in favor of, and hardly nobody was against.
• He wouldn’t allow no law to be passed without it was first put up to him, and then he stuck it in his pocket and let on he forgot about it, and didn’t pay no attention to no kicks.
• When people went to work and gone to him and asked him to put through a law about this or that, he give them their choice: either they had to shut down the Legislature and let him pass it all by him-self, or they couldn’t have it at all.
  
• He give the Legislature the air, and sent the members home every time they stood up to him and give him a call-down.
  
• He tried to scare people outen moving into these States, and made it so hard for a wop or one of them poor kikes to get his papers that he would rather stay home and not try it, and then, when he come in, he wouldn’t let him have no land, and so he either went home again or never come.
• He monkeyed with the courts, and didn’t hire enough judges to do the work, and so a person had to wait so long for his case to come up that he got sick of waiting, and went home, and so never got what was coming to him.
• He got the judges under his thumb by turning them out when they done anything he didn’t like, or holding up their salaries, so that they had to cough up or not get no money.
• He made a lot of new jobs, and give them to loafers that nobody knowed nothing about, and the poor people had to pay the bill, whether they wanted to or not.
• He let grafters run loose, from God knows where, and give them the say in everything, and let them put over such things as the following:
  
  • Making us pay taxes without asking us whether we thought the things we had to pay taxes for was something that was worth paying taxes for or not.
  • When a man was arrested and asked for a jury trial, not letting him have no jury trial.
  • Chasing men out of the country, without being guilty of nothing, and trying them somewheres else for what they done here.
  • He busted up the Legislatures and let on he could do all the work better by himself.

Now he washes his hands of us and even declares war on us, so we don’t owe him nothing, and whatever authority he ever had he ain’t got no more.

He stirred up the Indians, and give them arms ammunition, and told them to go to it, and they have killed men, women and children, and don’t care which.

Every time he has went to work and pulled any of these things, we have went to work and put in a kick, but every time we have went to work and put in a kick he has went to work and did it again. When a man keeps on handing out such rough stuff all the time, all you can say is that he ain’t got no class and ain’t fitten to have no authority over people who have got any rights, and he ought to be kicked out.

Read the whole thing here.

...and the Bridges Came Tumblin' Down

One of the absolute dumbest phrases in the US political lexicon is "taxpayers' money." (Of course not excepting all its synonyms -- hot-button catchphrases like "my hard-earned tax dollars" and such.)

Why dumb?

Let me begin by agreeing that yes, it is literally true that money paid to and ultimately spent by the government (local, state, federal) in the form of taxes indeed does come from the pockets of taxpayers (and other sources). So in that very narrow sense, yes, it is "taxpayers' money." It's also true that a violation of public trust is qualitatively different from one of private trust.

The dumbness lies not in the phrase itself, nor in the special nature of the social contract between taxpayers and public servants, but in the implication that "taxpayers' money" is somehow different from consumers' money.

All other things being equal, do you howl savagely when (say) the manufacturer of your computer, television set, combination lock, automobile, sneakers, whatever -- when that manufacturer spends $1 more for some product component this year than they did last year... and then passes the cost on to you? Do you write letters to the editor about the scandal, establish lobbying groups of like-minded consumers united in outrage, pontificate on radio call-in shows about how the bums are ill-using you? Do you go over corporate budgets with a fine-tooth comb, circling in gleeful red every expense that might have been shaved, or cut out altogether? Perhaps you do, in which case I owe you an apology. But odds are you do not. Yet for some reason it seems not only proper but nearly obligatory to holler about how much is spent every year on government -- on public works, however you want to define that term.

So let's hear it for the American Society of Civil Engineers. Granted, they have a vested interest in public spending. But it's still an unpopular stance to embrace openly. That's why their recent study is notable, pointing out as it does that thanks to cavalier American attitudes about the roads, bridges, wastewater facilities, and other components of the public infrastructure, it will take an estimated $1.6 trillion, spread out over five years, to bring that infrastructure up to snuff.

A good portion of this money is already allocated to existing budgets, true. On the other hand, "existing budgets" are one area most likely to be raided as political expediency demands that Peter needs money this year and the hell with Paul, or vice-versa. Furthermore, the $1.6 trillion figure assumes that the US population will remain unchanged over that period. (Yeah, right.)

(All of this is in the news now, unsurprisingly, following the rush-hour collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis a couple weeks ago.)

As a New York Times article recently noted:

Finding money to maintain infrastructure has become increasingly difficult as public officials keep pledges not to raise taxes, said Robert Dunphy, a senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute. "We have an impending crisis with infrastructure, but it is easy to ignore until you have a catastrophe."

Highways buckling and potholing; railways springing out of alignment like paper clips under stress; busted street lights, bullet-holed stop signs, and yes, the collapse of bridges: catastrophes all, at one level or another. The scary thing to me is that these are just the most visible catastrophes -- that our social infrastructure is being held together by tape and staples and rubber bands. The money for replacing all of it comes from taxes, duh.

Welcome to A Dog Starv'd

As you can see from its description, I've cribbed this blog's name from William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence." This is the long (by contemporary standards) poem which begins, famously:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

Not quite the smiley-faced hymn to all things beautiful and miraculous that these opening lines prepare us for, the poem as a whole is a savage indictment of a society which places way too much stock in the wrong things. The complete text can be found numerous places around the Web, including this page from the Academy of American Poets, and -- as you can see there -- is often presented as a single massive block of 132 lines. More readable versions (like this one) break it up into couplets and/or quatrains, which makes it easier to absorb the force of Blake's vision -- and its relevance to early 21st-century America. E.g.:

A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.
...
The strongest poison ever known
Came from Caesar's laurel crown.
Nought can deform the human race
Like to the armour's iron brace.

And so on.

These lamentations and warnings alternate, roughly, with assertions more in keeping with the tenor of the opening four lines -- assertions such as these:

Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
...
One mite wrung from the lab'rer's hands
Shall buy and sell the miser's lands;
Or, if protected from on high,
Does that whole nation sell and buy.

Despite my choice of epigraph, I'm not going to use ADS as a soapbox strictly (or even mostly) for political pronouncements. I've tried that before (as you can see, in all its broken-imaged glory) and found it impossible to sustain this kind of single-purposed howl across more than a few months at a time. But Blake's poem does provide a good sense of proportion for me and, I hope, for ADS: outrage, balanced with wonder; finger-shaking, countered with embraces; things that I hate, as well as things that I love.

We'll see how it goes.