Remember Randy Hopper, the Republican state senator in Wisconsin who was recalled and defeated in 2011 — and later in the year was arrested and charged with drunk-driving? He and his lawyer are now presenting their defense in the trial: It’s all a political conspiracy by the unions.
The Appleton Post Crescent reports, Hopper and his attorney Dennis Melowski are presenting a case that public employee union members in Fond du Lac County, the place he formerly represented and where he was arrested for alleged DUI, have been out to get him for his support of Gov. Scott Walker’s legislation that eliminated most collective bargaining rights for public employees. (Police and firefighters were exempted.)
Interestingly, though, Melowski did still say in court that Hopper drank as many as three and a half beers at a Green Bay Packers game on October 16, 2011, before driving home to Fond du Lac with his girlfriend, Valerie Cass…
Hopper explained that he refused to take a breathalyzer test at the county jail, because county employees had threatened him in the past. A preliminary test that jail staffers were able to take showed a blood alcohol content of 0.13%, above the 0.08% limit, but this is not admissible as evidence in the trial.
“The day everything broke loose in Madison, I had members of the union in my office who said, ‘If you don’t support us, we are going to destroy your life,’” Hopper said. “We’re going to picket your kids’ schools, we’re going to tear apart your reputation, we’re going to have you recalled.”
Also, according to the Fond du Lac Reporter, Hopper and Melowski targeted the arresting officer, Deputy Nick Venne, for having earlier in the year signed one of the petitions to recall Hopper, and also for having not administered a full blood test to Hopper at the police station.
For his own part, Venne confirmed that he signed the petition, but said this played no role in the arrest — that Hopper smelled of alcohol, and gave other suspicious signs in a field sobriety test.
Was there ever a whinier bunch of supposed tough guys than Republican elected officials? They seem to have a hard time taking personal responsibility for their actions.
Tucson resident Adena Bank Lees confirmed that she sent state Rep. Terri Proud (R-Tucson) an email in early March asking Proud to oppose a bill outlawing abortions in the state after 20 weeks. The email was prompted by an email blast from the pro-choice organization NARAL asking members to lobby Arizona legislators to vote against the bill…
Proud’s email to Bank Lees, dated March 5 and sent from her state email account read:
Personally I’d like to make a law that mandates a woman watch an abortion being performed prior to having a “surgical procedure”. If it’s not a life it shouldn’t matter, if it doesn’t harm a woman then she shouldn’t care, and don’t we want more transparency and education in the medical profession anyway? We demand it everywhere else. Until the dead child can tell me that she/he does not feel any pain – I have no intentions of clearing the conscience of the living – I will be voting YES.
And yet, in this case, nothing. No impassioned appeals for loosening the gun laws so that ordinary Americans could go to the store in the evening to buy some candy and an iced tea without getting stalked and shot by some unhinged vigilante. No solemn op-eds about the dangers for average Americans when venturing unarmed into the streets of their own neighborhoods. No fiery speeches from Wayne LaPierre insisting that if only everyone in the neighborhood had been armed with submachine guns they could have run outside and started firing immediately upon hearing the screams for help. Nada. Why do you suppose that is?
Update: Last night I saw Zimmerman’s friend on CNN defending him in a very revealing way:
During an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on AC360, Taaffe said that a problem could have been avoided if Martin had been “up front and truthful” with Zimmerman.
I guess it has escaped him that in America it isn’t a capital offense to refuse to answer a stranger’s questions on the street. In fact, the kid had a right to tell this self-appointed “watchman” to go fuck himself if he wanted. Why under Florida law he would have been completely justified in killing the guy under those circumstances, right?
This friend has also said that he’d do the same thing in Zimmerman’s place. Even now. Luckily for other kids in that neighborhood, this vigilante doesn’t carry a weapon.
Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate… it will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people – Andrew Mellon
[A] paper presented Friday at the Brookings Institution warns that recessions may do lasting harm, like an untended house that not only needs a good dusting, but has also started to rot.
The term for this possibility sounds perfectly harsh: hysteresis. (The definition is more benign; it simply means that the past affects the present.)
The authors, Lawrence H. Summers, a former adviser to President Obama, and J. Bradford DeLong, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, see evidence that the recession is eroding the capacity of workers and of equipment:
Reduced capital investment, reduced investment in research and development, reduced labor force attachment on the part of the long-term unemployed, scarring effects on young workers who have trouble beginning their careers, changes in managerial attitudes, and reductions in government physical and human capital investments as social-insurance expenditures make prior claims on limited state and local financial resources. […] The proper antidote to hysteresis, the authors write, is an increase in government spending.They write that under current conditions there is a good chance such spending would be self-financing, as tax revenues from resulting economic activity would outweigh the cost. But there is little prospect that Congressional Republicans will revisit their opposition to stimulus this year. Which means that our current experiment will run to completion: If hysteresis is real, we will know it by its consequences.
Indeed we will. And one can only imagine the consequences of a turn to austerity instead.
The House’s second-ranking Democrat on Monday said that a bipartisan group of lawmakers from both sides of the Capitol was preparing to begin yet another effort to reach a “grand bargain” on deficit reduction – and that the fruits of negotiations could emerge within weeks.
Speaking to the centrist group Third Way, Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the Democratic whip, sought to bury the widely held belief that any deal on taxes and deficits would have to wait until after the November election.
“Contrary to what some believe, we cannot afford to set this work aside,” Mr. Hoyer said, according to the prepared text of his speech. “I’m here to give urgency to the pursuit now of an agreement designed to achieve fiscal sustainability over the long term,”
Congressional aides confirmed that the so-called Gang of Six in the Senate – now up to eight – has reconvened and is trying to move a bipartisan deficit reduction plan from a broad framework to detailed legislative language. Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader, has told the group he will not move forward until he sees real language and real momentum.
I’m guessing even Andrew Mellon wouldn’t argue that throwing the countryback into recession. But then he was a softie compared to our current “tough love” politicians.
Not a day goes by without Republicans decrying the budget deficit. But its biggest driver is Big Money’s corruption of Washington. One of the federal budget’s largest and fastest-growing programs is Medicare, whose costs would be far lower if drug companies reduced their prices. It hasn’t happened because Big Pharma won’t allow it. Medicare’s administrative costs are only 3 percent, far below the 10 percent average of private insurers. So it would be logical to tame rising healthcare costs by allowing any family to opt in. That was the idea behind the “public option.” But health insurers stopped it in its tracks.
The other big budget expense is defense. The US spends more on its military than China, Russia, Britain, France, Japan and Germany combined. The “basic” military budget (the annual cost of paying troops and buying planes, ships and tanks—not including the costs of actually fighting wars) keeps growing. With the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, the cost of fighting wars is projected to drop—but the base budget is scheduled to rise. It’s already about 25 percent higher than it was a decade ago, adjusted for inflation. One big reason is that it’s almost impossible to terminate large military contracts. Defense contractors have cultivated sponsors on Capitol Hill and located their facilities in politically important districts. Lockheed, Raytheon and others have made national defense America’s biggest jobs program.
“Big government” isn’t the problem. The problem is the Big Money that’s taking over government. Government is doing fewer of the things most of us want it to do—providing good public schools and affordable access to college, improving infrastructure, maintaining safety nets and protecting the public from dangers—and more of the things big corporations, Wall Street and wealthy plutocrats want it to do.
Some conservatives argue that we wouldn’t have to worry about this if we had a smaller government to begin with, because big government attracts Big Money. On ABC’s This Week a few months ago, Congressman Paul Ryan told me that “if the power and money are going to be here in Washington…that’s where the powerful are going to go to influence it.” Ryan has it upside down. A smaller government that’s still dominated by money would continue to do the bidding of Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, oil companies, agribusiness, big insurance, military contractors and rich individuals. It just wouldn’t do anything else.
Or if charts are more your thing, there’s always this classic:
Of course, it won’t do much good. Digby highlighted recent discussion of the conservative moral ethic, but I would argue that only two things really drive conservative morality: is us versus them, and punishment and reward. Worship of free markets, psychological dependence on dualistic religious schemes of heaven and hell, and even their apparent mass lack of empathy is really all about punishment and reward. If you didn’t get rich enough with the right job, you deserve to be poor and die of untreated medical conditions. If you didn’t keep your legs crossed, you deserve to be forced into childbirth. If you did anything to bring yourself under government suspicion, you deserve to be subject to police brutality and torture. The rest of the racial and religious aggression and resentment is just a function of tribal us versus them mentality. Sanctity, loyalty and authority aren’t core values of the conservative mind, but simply functions of the principles of punishment and reward, and us versus them.
Here [Romney] is in keeping with what has become almost a blood oath among Republicans. The conservative movement’s fanatical determination to achieve this goal — through the courts, through the election, through sabotage of its implementation by denying funds and refusing to confirm administrators — reveals an even higher level of commitment to the principle of denying health insurance to the undeserving. It is one thing to simply ignore the problem of the uninsured, by failing to act on it when you have power. But to actively crusade to throw vulnerable people off their newly-won health insurance is a higher sin, a sin of commission rather than omission.
In every other advanced country, the provision of universal access to medical care is a public responsibility. In every other advanced country, this principle has been accepted by the mainstream conservative party. Only in the United States does the conservative party uphold the operating principle that regular access to doctors and medicine should be denied to large chunks of the population. This sort of barbarism is unique to the American right.
Barbarism is exactly what it is. Blind tribalism and reliance on indiscriminate cosmic punishments are barbaric. They always have been, and always will be.
Well I guess this proves it: conservatives are more moral than liberals. In fact they are twice as moral as liberals — or at least they have twice as many “moral values” as we do. Nicholas Kristof reports:
Conservatives may not like liberals, but they seem to understand them. In contrast, many liberals find conservative voters not just wrong but also bewildering.
One academic study asked 2,000 Americans to fill out questionnaires about moral questions. In some cases, they were asked to fill them out as they thought a “typical liberal” or a “typical conservative” would respond.
Moderates and conservatives were adept at guessing how liberals would answer questions. Liberals, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal,” were least able to put themselves in the minds of their adversaries and guess how conservatives would answer.
Now a fascinating new book comes along that, to a liberal like myself, helps demystify the right — and illuminates the kind of messaging that might connect with voters of all stripes. “The Righteous Mind,” by Jonathan Haidt, a University of Virginia psychology professor, argues that, for liberals, morality is largely a matter of three values: caring for the weak, fairness and liberty. Conservatives share those concerns (although they think of fairness and liberty differently) and add three others: loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity.
If loyalty is blind and respect for authority and sanctity mean adhering to archaic notions of patriarchy, colonialism or chauvinism in general, then guilty as charged. After all, if everyone had always held to that set of “morals” without question, even slavery would still be legal and I’m not ashamed to be against that or any of the other traditional hierarchies that conservative “values” would have kept in place (and seek to reinstate wherever possible.)
Kristoff was especially intrigued by the ideas set forth in the research that seems to imply (I’m not entirely sure) that conservatives are more concerned with taboos than liberals.
Of course, political debates aren’t built on the consumption of roadkill. But they do often revolve around this broader moral code. This year’s Republican primaries have been a kaleidoscope of loyalty, authority and sanctity issues — such as whether church-affiliated institutions can refuse to cover birth control in health insurance policies — and that’s perhaps why people like me have found the primaries so crazy.
Another way of putting it is this: Americans speak about values in six languages, from care to sanctity. Conservatives speak all six, but liberals are fluent in only three. And some (me included) mostly use just one, care for victims.
He can speak for himself about that. My moral language is far broader than care for victims, fairness and liberty. I like to think of it as social and economic justice, which the last I heard was considered to me the height of immorality by most people who call themselves conservative. So maybe we are dealing with a problem of semantics.
But let’s talk briefly about taboos, shall we? Is there a taboo against torture? Well, I think there used to be. At least among people who consider themselves civilized, if not exactly moral. And yet conservatives by a large margin are more affirmatively for it than liberals. Again, I guess it all depends on what the meaning of “moral” is.
Here’s where my alarm bells really go off:
“Moral psychology can help to explain why the Democratic Party has had so much difficulty connecting with voters,” writes Haidt, a former liberal who says he became a centrist while writing the book.
Yeah, sure he was.
I will have to read the book. I’m sure it’s full of interesting data that could be useful in understanding our ideological divide. But let’s just say I’m a little bit skeptical of an author who characterizes his work that way. After all, the country is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans and we have a Democratic president who serves as a living symbol of liberal accomplishment. Are we to believe that the only voters who matter are those who don’t vote for them? They seem to connect quite well to certain parts of the electorate:
Barack Obama’s lead over [Mitt] Romney is attributable in large part to his wide advantage among women, younger voters, and nonwhites. Women favor Obama over Romney by 20 points – virtually unchanged from a month ago – while men are divided almost evenly (49% Obama, 46% Romney). This gender gap is particularly wide among voters under age 50. Women ages 18-49 favor Obama over Romney by nearly two-to-one (64% to 33%), while men the same age are split (50% Obama, 46% Romney).
But then those are the very people who tend to reject traditional values such as “loyalty”, respect for authority and sanctity since these values have tended to marginalize them.
Update: Here’s some of that conservative morality right now, particularly their alleged equal concern for the weak:
I guess it’s not just the sluts who are asking for it when they dress in a provocative way:
BRIAN KILMEADE (co-host): Let’s talk about the Trayvon Martin case and what’s going on in Florida right now.
GERALDO RIVERA: Well, I have a different take, Brian, on that. I believe that George Zimmerman, the overzealous neighborhood watch captain should be investigated to the fullest extent of the law and if he is criminally liable, he should be prosecuted. But I am urging the parents of black and Latino youngsters particularly to not let their children go out wearing hoodies. I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was.
JULIET HUDDY (guest-host): What do you mean?
RIVERA: When you, when you see a kid walking — Juliet — when you see a kid walking down the street, particularly a dark skinned kid like my son Cruz, who I constantly yelled at when he was going out wearing a damn hoodie or those pants around his ankles. Take that hood off, people look at you and they — what do they think? What’s the instant identification, what’s the instant association?
STEVE DOOCY (co-host): Uh-oh.
RIVERA: It’s those crime scene surveillance tapes. Every time you see someone sticking up a 7-11, the kid is wearing a hoodie. Every time you see a mugging on a surveillance camera or they get the old lady in the alcove, it’s a kid wearing a hoodie. You have to recognize that this whole stylizing yourself as a gangsta, you’re gonna be a gangsta wannabe? Well, people are going to perceive you as a menace. That’s what happens. It is an instant reflexive action. Remember Juan Williams, our colleague? Our brilliant colleague? He got in trouble with NPR because he said Muslims in formal garb at the airport conjure a certain reaction in him or response in him? That’s an automatic reflex. Juan wasn’t defending it. He was explaining that that’s what happens when he sees these particular people in that particular place.
When you see a black or Latino youngster, particularly on the street, you walk to the other side of the street. You try to avoid that confrontation. Trayvon Martin’s you know, god bless him, he’s an innocent kid, a wonderful kid, a box of Skittles in his hand. He didn’t deserve to die. But I’ll bet you money, if he didn’t have that hoodie on, that — that nutty neighborhood watch guy wouldn’t have responded in that violent and aggressive way.
DOOCY: What about the fact that — I mean, the people of New York, a couple of nights ago, they had a “Million Hoodie March.” You’re not helping.
RIVERA: You can not rehabilitate the hoodie. You’re not going to — I understand that the reaction might be overzealous or even irrational in some extent, I mean, when you look at the statistics. It may be. But you’re not going to rehabilitate the hoodie. You’re not going to —
DOOCY: Just stop wearing it.
RIVERA: Stop wearing it! Don’t let your kid — you know the old Johnny Cash song, don’t take your gun to town, son. Leave your gun at home. There is some things that are almost inevitable. I’m not suggesting that Trayvon Martin had any kind of weapon or anything, but he wore an outfit that allowed someone to respond in this irrational, overzealous way and if he had been dressed more appropriately, I think unless it’s raining out, or you’re at a track meet, leave the hoodie home. Don’t let your children go out there.
HUDDY: Perception is reality.
Whatever. He’s been an idiot for years. I do have to say that he fits in well on the Fox morning moron show. He should be a regular.
First, years after I first heard Dean Baker raise the idea, a major bank has introduced an “own-to-rent” program that would enable homeowners at risk of default on their mortgages to keep living in their homes.
Bank of America Corp. is launching a pilot program that will allow homeowners at risk of foreclosure to hand over deeds to their houses and sign leases that will let them rent the houses back from the bank at a market rate.
The pilot will be quite limited, offered to only 1,000 homeowners in Arizona, Nevada, and New York. That’s smart—it should quickly become clear if homeowners want to take advantage of the offer and how effectively the bank can implement it (Fannie has a similar program but it’s hardly been tapped).
Homeowners facing foreclosure will turn their title over to the bank in exchange for the right to rent their home for three years at market rents. The bank may sell the home to an investor but that person will have to agree to continue the rental agreement, at least for the three year period.
What’s in it for the homeowner? They can stay in their home/neighborhood, sustain less damage to their credit rating, and come out from under an unsustainable loan.
What’s in it for the bank? They own the property without going through the long foreclosure process and the avoid the risk of a foreclosed property sitting out there on the glutted residential home market, losing value and bringing down the value of neighboring homes.
There are potential downsides, of course, which Yves Smith points out. If the banks won’t eat second liens, then the reach of this would be limited, which has been true of virtually every foreclosure mitigation program. And there’s still the problem of having a bank as your landlord, or whatever property management companies they use.
But if this does work, it would represent the fact that the banks have screwed up so royally, particularly BofA, that the only way out is one that accidentally benefits the homeowner in the process. Hopefully some other banks will join BofA in this effort.
At this point virtually everything good that happens seems to be the result of accident or ineptitude. So here’s to accidents and ineptitude.
President Barack Obama waded into the growing national controversy of the killing of an unarmed black teenager in Florida, saying the nation should do some “soul-searching to figure out how something like this happens.”
“I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this and that everybody pulls together, federal state and local, to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened.”
Obama said Trayvon Martin’s death particularly resonated with him as an African-American parent.
“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” Obama said in brief remarks outside the White House.
I can imagine that after the Gates controversy, the administration probably didn’t want to wade into any individual issues like this anymore. But he had to do it and for the reason he cited. It could have been his son. The stories I’ve been reading from African American parents who have to teach their kids “the rules” about how to avoid attracting the “wrong” attention and worry themselves sick about something like this happening are heart breaking. (It shows me my own white privilege that I haven’t been especially tuned into that before.)
We talk about racism all the time, but I think we tend to focus on the wrong thing. This fear of young black men among a certain sub-group of the population runs deep and it’s exploited and manipulated by politicians and groups like the NRA who feed into the stereotypes. These people do not think of themselves as racists — they think being a racist means that you consciously believe racial minorities are inferior. But it isn’t just that, although that’s often a part of it. It’s also this irrational fear of “the other” which some people just can’t or won’t let go of when it comes to African Americans.
But it’s not just racism, although it certainly seems to be a factor in Trayvon Martin’s death and many death across the country. It’s also this insane gun culture, which is killing people every day for no good reason. The NRA has been holding this country hostage for decades now, insisting that the more people carry guns the safer we are. Unfortunately, the people who tend to buy that swill are would-be cops and vigilantes like George Zimmerman.
And the armed good guys who will step up like some sort of Western heroes and gun down the bad guys? Well, this is how it happens in real life. Remember the Gabby Giffords shooting?
“When everyone is carrying a firearm, nobody is going to be a victim,” argues the state’s top pro-gun legislator. Beyond Arizona, at least two members of Congress say they’ll brings guns while traveling their districts.
The new poster boy for this agenda is Joe Zamudio, a hero in the Tucson incident. Zamudio was in a nearby drug store when the shooting began, and he was armed. He ran to the scene and helped subdue the killer. Television interviewers are celebrating his courage, and pro-gun blogs are touting his equipment. “Bystander Says Carrying Gun Prompted Him to Help,” says the headline in the Wall Street Journal.
But before we embrace Zamudio’s brave intervention as proof of the value of being armed, let’s hear the whole story. “I came out of that store, I clicked the safety off, and I was ready,” he explained on Fox and Friends. “I had my hand on my gun. I had it in my jacket pocket here. And I came around the corner like this.” Zamudio demonstrated how his shooting hand was wrapped around the weapon, poised to draw and fire. As he rounded the corner, he saw a man holding a gun. “And that’s who I at first thought was the shooter,” Zamudio recalled. “I told him to ‘Drop it, drop it!'”
But the man with the gun wasn’t the shooter. He had wrested the gun away from the shooter. “Had you shot that guy, it would have been a big, fat mess,” the interviewer pointed out.
Zamudio agreed:
“I was very lucky. Honestly, it was a matter of seconds. Two, maybe three seconds between when I came through the doorway and when I was laying on top of [the real shooter], holding him down. So, I mean, in that short amount of time I made a lot of really big decisions really fast. … I was really lucky.”
That’s the reality. An average citizen got “really lucky” when he didn’t shoot the wrong guy in the midst of a melee. Thanks to the NRA many parts of America are now a shooting gallery where whether you are packing or not, you pretty much have to just duck and hope you don’t get mistaken for a bad guy or caught in the crossfire when the shooting starts. It’s like something out of a bad movie — where most of the dead are young males with dark skin and nobody outside their families even knows their name. Trayvon Martin stands for all of them.
David Roberts over at Grist posted a stimulating twitter/email exchange between himself and former NPR producer Wen Stephenson. The whole thing is interesting, but this in particular from David Roberts was masterful:
To be a Very Serious Person is to echo conventional wisdom, safe in the knowledge that even if you’re wrong, so is everyone else — at least everyone else who’s serious! One good indicator of a VSP is that he/she claims to be unbiased and non-partisan, occasionally “centrist.” To VSPs, being on “a side” is a sure path to illegitimacy; one must always be above all that, moderate and reasonable. Again, this has nothing to do with accuracy or facts, only with where the herd is located at the moment…
For instance, when, say, John Broder at the NYT covers the failure of international climate talks, he doesn’t say, “the failure to develop serious global climate policy raises the already-high probability that humanity will experience widespread disruption, suffering, and die-off later this century.” He might know that it’s true, on some level — I don’t know. But he doesn’t say it, because it sounds extreme. Saying that the status quo guarantees mass suffering makes you sound “partisan,” like an “alarmist” (and guarantees that right-wingers will hassle you and your editor). Again, this has nothing to do with the truth of it, only with the norms of Very Serious writing. Saying stuff like that is like farting at a cocktail party…
It’s quite instructive to compare coverage of climate with coverage of the deficit. I would argue that, on the factual merits, climate is a much bigger, more severe, and more urgent problem. The deficit isn’t a short-term problem at all, as most professional economists agree. Quite a few economists argue that it’s not a mid-term or long-term problem either! (That’s one of those deviant perspectives you never, ever see represented in mainstream media.)
Yet everyone in elite media, punditry, think tank, and political circles “just knows” that the deficit is a looming, awful threat that will crush our grandchildren and their puppies. An “objective” reporter can say that without fear of being accused of bias. Indeed, the deficit is mentioned not just in stories about the deficit but in almost every story about economics or government, period! You can recommend economic austerity measures that are absurd to professional economists and never, ever get your reputation dinged. There is no social risk to over-worrying or talking too much about the deficit; there’s only upside, reputation- and career-wise. It is the paradigmatic Very Serious issue, divorced from the facts but reinforced by herd behavior.
Climate is the mirror image. The facts support a far more alarmist case, but not only can objective journalists not take that for granted — they’re barely allowed to take the existence of climate change for granted. Even the mildest of carbon-pricing schemes is deemed radical, unrealistic, bad politics. “Everybody knows” we’re going to keep accelerating through oil, gas, and coal until they’re gone. To say otherwise is to be un-savvy, the cardinal sin for VSP.
There will come a day in the future when regular people look back at us, thunderstuck. “Deficits? That’s what these idiots cared about? Their big political arguments were about paying back deficits on bonds held by bankers the government bailed out, right during the middle of a recession, while ignoring the impending climate change disaster? Not only ignoring it, but desperately trying to figure out how to extract more oil? Just how stupid were these people, anyway?“
And the answer will be: we weren’t all stupid. Just the Very Serious People were. Let the blogs stand as testament to the fact that some of us did cry out, like voices in the wilderness.
