America eats its young - By Garrison Keillor

We're sticking the next generation with debt and an unjust war. Solution: We must cut healthcare for people with "Bush-Cheney" bumper stickers.

Aug. 30, 2006 - It's the best part of summer, the long lovely passage into fall. A procession of lazy golden days that my sandy-haired, gap-toothed little girl has been painting, small abstract masterpieces in tempera and crayon and glitter, reminiscent of Franz Kline or Willem de Kooning (his early glitter period). She put a sign out front, "Art for Sale," and charged 25 cents per painting. Cheap at the price.

A teacher gave her this freedom to sit unselfconsciously and put paint on paper. A gentle 6-foot-8 guy named Matt who taught art at her preschool. Her swimming teachers gave her freedom from fear of water. So much that has made this summer a pleasure for her I trace to specific teachers, and so it's painful to hear about public education sinking all around us. A high school math class of 42! Everybody knows you can't teach math to 42 kids at once, kids doped up on sugar and Coke, sleepy kids, Hmong kids, African-American kids who think scholarship is white bread. The classroom smells bad because the custodial staff has been cut back. The teacher is shelling out $900 a month for health insurance, one-third of his take-home. Meanwhile, he must whip his pupils into shape to pass the federal No Child Left Untested program. This is insanity, the legacy of Republicans and their tax cutting and their hostility to secular institutions.

Last spring I taught a college writing course and had the privilege of hanging out with people in their early 20s, an inspirational experience in return for which I tried to harass them about spelling and grammar and structure. My interest in being 21 again is less than my interest in having a frontal lobotomy, but the wit and passion and good-heartedness of these kids, which they try to conceal under their exquisite cool, are the hope of this country. You have to advocate for young people, or else what are we here for?

I keep running into retirees in their mid-50s, free to collect seashells and write bad poetry and shoot video of the Grand Canyon, and goody for them, but they're not the future. My college kids are graduating with a 20-pound ball of debt chained to their ankles. That's not right and you know it.

This country is squashing its young. We're sending them to die in a war we don't believe in anymore. We're cheating them so we can offer tax relief to the rich. And we're stealing from them so that old gaffers like me, who want to live forever, can go in for an MRI if we have a headache.

A society that pays for MRIs for headaches and can't pay teachers a decent wage has made a dreadful choice. But healthcare costs are ballooning, eating away at the economy. The boomers are getting to an age where their knees need replacing and their hearts need a quadruple bypass -- which they feel entitled to -- but our children aren't entitled to a damn thing. Any goombah with a Ph.D. in education can strip away French and German, music, art, dumb down the social sciences, offer Britney Spears instead of Shakespeare, and there is nothing the kid can do except hang out in the library, which is being cut back too.

This week we mark the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the Current Occupant's line "You're doing a heckuva job," which already is in common usage, a joke, a euphemism for utter ineptitude. It's sure to wind up in Bartlett's Quotations, a summation of his occupancy. Annual interest on the national debt now exceeds all government welfare programs combined. We'll be in Iraq for years to come. Hard choices need to be made, and given the situation we're in, I think we must bite the bullet and say no more healthcare for card-carrying Republicans. It just doesn't make sense to invest in longevity for people who don't believe in the future. Let them try faith-based medicine, let them pray for their arteries to be reamed and their hips to be restored, and leave science to the rest of us.

Cutting out healthcare for one-third of the population -- the folks with Bush-Cheney bumper stickers, who still believe the man is doing a heckuva job -- will save enough money to pay off the national debt, not a bad legacy for Republicans. As Scrooge said, let them die and reduce the surplus population. In return, we can offer them a reduction in the estate tax. All in favor, blow your nose.

Scarborough's fair By Alex Koppelman

The Republican TV host reveals why he launched his "Is Bush an 'idiot'?" segment and why conservatives are afraid to question the president.

Aug. 23, 2006 A member of the so-called Class of 1994, the 54 Republican freshmen swept into the U.S. House by Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, Joe Scarborough resigned his seat in 2001. Now the host of MSNBC's "Scarborough Country," he has recently been the focus of much attention from both Democrats and Republicans for his criticism of the president. On Aug. 15, he aired a segment that asked "Is Bush an 'idiot'?" Salon asked Scarborough what brought him to criticize a man he once bragged he'd helped get elected, and how he's dealing with the reaction.

What prompted you to do the now infamous "Is Bush an 'idiot'?" segment?

Somebody had suggested that we get Linda Ronstadt's quote where she called the president an idiot and do what we've been doing for the past three or four years, where we make fun of a Hollywood star questioning the president's intelligence. It's something we've been doing mindlessly over the past several years, but as I was reading it, I couldn't help but think, "Well, wait a second -- I've been hearing this from conservatives for the past year or so. Why don't we ask a question: whether Linda Ronstadt, Democrats and Hollywood left-wing types are on to something." So we put the question up, and I suppose if our lower third had read "Is Linda Ronstadt right?" instead of "Is Bush an 'idiot'?" in quotes, it would have garnered a lot less attention. But we put it up that way, and it has sparked a firestorm. The White House is unhappy. A lot of conservatives are unhappy. Well, not conservatives. A lot of Republican loyalists are unhappy. But again, the only thing I did was ask publicly what a lot of conservatives have been saying privately since Katrina and the Harriet Miers nomination.

That brings up another question I wanted to ask you -- you've been tough on liberals in the past, and you continue to be tough on them now. With your recent shift in viewpoint, have your feelings on liberalism, and the liberal critics of the administration, changed at all?

Obviously since the things they were predicting about Iraq have been proven to be accurate, or at least more accurate than what the administration was saying back in 2003, you certainly have to tip your hat to them.

At the same time, I believed then, and I still believe now, that what we did in Iraq was worth trying. We've had three democratic elections, and unfortunately the country's still descending into chaos. I suppose the biggest criticism, really, should be leveled at Donald Rumsfeld for trying to win the war on the cheap, like Tom Friedman and others have been saying. But looking back at it, there was no way we could have been successful in Iraq with the troop levels that we had over there. That, in part, is why conservatives like me are charging that George Bush is intellectually incurious, and that he stifles dissent.

I think, really, one of the most telling parts of [Bob] Woodward's book "Bush at War" is when he asks Bush if he talked to Colin Powell about the invasion of Iraq, and he says, "No, I didn't feel the need to, because I knew how we was going to respond, that he was against the war," which sort of sends a chill up your spine, because those are the people you want the president talking to. You want him asking tough questions of aides who actually disagree with him. If you talk to people at the DoD or at the State Department or Capitol Hill, they'll all tell you basically the same thing, that the president is a man who's not only politically incurious, but is also a leader who does not like dissent, and I think that's very dangerous.

And if Don Rumsfeld came through talking about winning the war on the cheap, that's one reason why he needed to talk to Colin Powell, because he's always -- I mean, he said it in the first Gulf War, and he said it in this gulf war -- said that you don't win wars on the cheap: You don't want a fair fight. You use military force very reluctantly, but when you use it, you use overpowering, overwhelming force, destroy your enemy as quickly as possible, and then bring the troops back home. That wasn't done, and I think if the president had asked tougher questions in February of 2003, we wouldn't find ourselves where we are in 2006.

That's a very long yes answer to your question.

Your criticism of the president has been about more than just the Iraq war -- you've criticized the NSA eavesdropping program, you've criticized the bank records program, you've criticized government spending. What's prompted that criticism, and that direction on your show, generally?

You know, it started back in 2004. I wrote a book called "Rome Wasn't Burnt in a Day," which three people read, because when you write books now you either have to be on the left calling the president a liar or be on the right calling people treasonous. I actually took Republicans and Democrats to task and was harshly critical of the president and my Republican colleagues for being so hypocritical ... No tough choices are being made in Washington. You want to have a war? OK, we'll pay for it. You want tax cuts? OK, we'll pay for it. You want a $7 trillion Medicare drug benefit plan? OK, we'll pay for it...

Here's the kicker -- since 2004, I have been attacked by Republicans, by conservatives, well, actually, more by Republican loyalists than conservatives, by basically the Republican establishment in Washington, for saying the exact same thing that we were all saying in 1995, '96, '97, '98, '99. We were always attacking Bill Clinton's spending levels. Dick Armey called him a Marxist, called Hillary Clinton a Marxist. As I point out in speeches these days, government spending grew by 3.4 percent annually under Bill Clinton the Marxist. Spending has grown by 10.5 percent under George Bush the fiscal conservative. I always say: Give me that choice, I'll take the Marxist at 3.4 percent any day of the week. And so I started in 2004, and when you talk about NSA wiretapping, when you talk about the bank records, my criticisms -- I'm saying the exact same thing now that Bob Barr and David Vitter and myself were saying on the Judiciary Committee in 1999 and in 2000, when Janet Reno was trying to get roving wiretaps without coming to Congress first.

Somebody sent me an e-mail yesterday saying they couldn't believe how much I've changed. That's laughable. I'm saying the exact same thing now that I was saying in 1999, when I was on the Judiciary Committee, that I was saying in 1995 during the Contract with America, that I was saying in 1994 when I was campaigning to be a part of a fiscally conservative Congress. The libertarian strain of Republicanism that was on the rise in the 1990s has been snuffed out by the Bush administration and by Republicans who suddenly adore big government, whether big government in the Justice Department or big government in the Oval Office when they put budgets together. I'm not the one whose convictions have changed. It's the Bush administration and Republican leaders on the Hill whose positions have changed radically since 2001.

You mentioned on your show Monday night that you've been "blasted by Republican loyalists," and of course you're not the first. You mentioned Bob Barr; he, Pat Buchanan, Andrew Sullivan, have been demonized as liberals or "ex-conservatives" for criticizing the president. Now that you're getting a little bit of that, what's your feeling on it?

It is unfortunate for the Republican Party that loyalty to conservative causes has been linked with George W. Bush. I have a friend, an evangelical pastor, who says it's much worse in churches, where a year or two ago, if he ever questioned what George Bush did, his faith in God was questioned!

It goes back to hypocrisy. We Republicans, during impeachment, were so outraged that Democrats would bitch and moan behind the scenes and talk about what a disgrace Bill Clinton was, but then when they went on the House floor and the Senate floor, would fiercely defend him ... We would all scratch our heads and say, 'How could they do that? How could they go out and circle the wagons and say something they didn't believe?'

And yet here we have a Republican administration and a Republican Congress doing basically the exact same thing, where staying in power is more important than staying true to the values that put you in power in the first place. Again, there are more and more conservatives behind the scenes that are voicing concerns, but most of them are afraid to say anything publicly, because they know if they do they'll be branded as traitors to the cause.

Tim Graham, from the Media Research Center, recently referred to your criticism of the president as "Scarborough syndrome" and said that "being a conservative host inside a liberal network -- not to mention a liberal network that has a history of changing prime-time hosts like socks -- might compel you to being [sic] more critical of Bush and conservatives." What's your reaction to that?

I have his boss [Brent Bozell, also of the Media Research Center] on all the time, and his boss doesn't seem to mind it. I think I'm usually on the same side as his boss. It's interesting. Tim had problems with me from the very beginning, when I was with the president 100 percent, because I wasn't on Fox. Sometimes I think he's on Fox's payroll, because, again, just right out of the box back in 2003, when I was the biggest supporter of this war, I was still getting snarky comments from Tim Graham and the Media Research Center. Again, interestingly enough, I get those snarky comments and then they ask me to be the emcee of their yearly event, which I do, and I'm still getting those snarky comments from Tim, despite the fact, again, that Brent Bozell comes on, and again, usually when he's on the show we're in total agreement. Who knows? Maybe he's more of a Bush loyalist than he is a conservative.

I would love for Tim Graham to find one position that I didn't take -- that he didn't take -- in 1999, when Bill Clinton was president, or in 1995, during the Contract with America, or 1994, when we were all campaigning for smaller government. Is he upset that I'm against NSA wiretapping without congressional consent? Is he shocked that I criticized the president for rolling up the biggest deficits and debts in history and not vetoing a single spending bill? What, exactly -- what, exactly -- have I said on my show over the past month or two that I wasn't saying in Congress for eight years or on the campaign trail? The answer is absolutely nothing. I'm saying the same exact thing. So I would redefine "Scarborough syndrome" as remaining consistent to the conservative cause instead of blindly following a Republican president who is more Rockefeller Republican than Reagan Republican.

You were approached to run against Katherine Harris. Why did you decide not to?

A couple of different reasons. The first reason is that my boys are 15 and 18; the 18-year-old is going off to college, and of course he wanted me to run, because he was out of the house, and the 15-year-old didn't want me to run, so that made things much easier for me. But also, politically, look at the landscape -- it would have been very hard for me to run as a Republican with all the problems I was having with the Republican Party and this administration. It would be very hard for a Republican candidate in the state of Florida to be running with a president whose help you'd obviously have to rely on to get elected.

I didn't think the Republicans had a good story to tell in 2006, and thought it was going to be ugly a year ago. I was right. I have several friends who are running for Congress, who I advised against running for Congress because I thought the political environment was going to be terrible in 2006, and it's proven to be just that.

With the way Harris' campaign has gone, what are your feelings on that decision now?

If I were ready to get back into politics right now, it would have been a fantastic opportunity to walk into a Senate seat. And it is very frustrating seeing Katherine disintegrate in front of everybody. If I were ready to get back in to the Senate right now, it would have been a great opportunity, but I'm just not ready personally or politically, and I'm actually enjoying what I'm doing at MSNBC an awful lot, especially now that I've been given the freedom I've been given. There've been so many times when people have talked to me about running for different offices, but at the time I look at what I'm doing.

I talked to John McCain at one point, who told me to stay where I was, that I had so much more influence on events and on the debate than I ever would if I was the junior senator from Florida, and I think he was right -- at least that's been my experience since I've been involved in the news business.

What they went through - By Garrison Keillor

Our countrymen died real deaths on Sept. 11, and we need to listen to their last words.

Aug. 23, 2006 \ It was painful to hear the woman in anguish on the 83rd floor of the World Trade Center, crying, "I'm going to die, aren't I? I'm going to die." Melissa Doi was 32, beautiful, with laughing eyes and black hair. She was lying on the floor of her office at IQ Financial, overwhelmed by smoke and heat, calling for help. And then there was Kevin Cosgrove on the 105th floor, moments before it collapsed, gasping for breath, saying, "We're young men, we're not ready to die." And then he screamed, "Oh my God" as the building started to collapse. It's in their voices, what they went through.

Those were two of the 1,613 calls to 911 released by New York City last week, on almost all of which the caller's voice was beeped out. The city argued that to hear persons in anguish in their last minutes constitutes an invasion of privacy. The truth is that the callers had no interest in privacy, they were desperate to be heard, and censoring them now is a last insult by a bureaucracy that failed to protect them in the first place.

They were people like us; we might have sat near them in a theater or restaurant, asked them for directions on the street. They went to work that fine Tuesday morning and suddenly found themselves facing the abyss, and the first thing we thought, seeing the burning buildings on TV, was "What is it like for the people in there?" We wanted to know.

Then, inevitably, politicians began to seize the day and turn it into a patriotic tableau starring themselves. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who does not appear in a leadership capacity in the reliable accounts of that morning, who was captured on videotape fleeing uptown, soon stepped into the TV lights and put on his public face, and a few days later the Current Occupant mounted the wreckage with bullhorn in hand and vowed vengeance, and the media was glad to focus on the martial moment, the flag waving over the wreckage, the theme of America united -- and the anguished voices from the towers were unheard, the people who fell from high floors and smashed into the pavement were not seen on American TV. The media averted its eyes from the reality of 9/11 and started looking for the message.

The best book on the subject, by the way, is "102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers," by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, two New York Times reporters who fashioned a plain narrative out of thousands of stories that took place in the time between the first strike and the collapse of the second tower. You read it, you're there.

Mr. Giuliani is still flying around giving speeches on leadership, knocking down a hundred grand per shot, getting standing ovations everywhere as a stand-in for the police and firemen who died in the towers. He has never faced up to his failure to prepare for the attack, even after the 1993 bomb explosion at the World Trade Center, when it was shown clearly that police and fire couldn't communicate with each other by radio. Eight years passed, little was done, and then came the 19 men with box cutters. The 911 operators took thousands of calls and had no information to give. Police helicopter pilots, who had a clear view of the infernos and could see that the buildings were going to collapse, couldn't get word to fire chiefs on the ground, who, unable to see the fire, sent their men up the stairs to die. Official bungling cost those men their lives.

In the end, what we crave is reality. The woman crying on the 83rd floor was real. Our countrymen died real deaths on a warm September morning, and then, to avenge them, even more have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. In our hearts, we know we're on the wrong road, the road to unreality, but the man says to stay the course. And now as November nears, congressmen who have supported the war, no questions asked, find it convenient to admit to having "questions" about it. "We are facing a difficult situation," they say. They are "troubled."

The woman who cried on the 83rd floor was more than troubled. She saw death. It is indecent for New York to stifle the voices of the people in the towers. The congressmen who deal so casually with life and death ought to sit down and listen to those phone calls.

From Broadsheet - 65 pregnant teens = One canceled abstinence-only progrqam

It became near impossible for the Canton school board to ignore the unintended by-products of its abstinence-only program when 13 percent of Timken High School's female student population became pregnant last year. Thanks to Feministing for pointing us in the direction of this ridiculous-but-true story about an Ohio school board which has, to its credit, finally seen the light of sex education.

Of course it took 65 of the 490 female students becoming pregnant within a year to adequately deliver that message, but as Jessica of Feministing queried, "I guess better late than never?"

Sure, we can throw them that bone. The board decided Monday to include safe sex education into the curriculum, while continuing to promote abstinence. They also plan to replace a few well-worn health textbooks that are "older than some students," according to WYFF 4 of South Carolina. Patty Rafailedes, a physical education teacher in the district, told the station, "If we had math books from 1988, reading books from 1988, as a parent, I would be furious."

Susan Ross, coordinator of health services for Canton schools, admits the district was well-behind the times. "Our sex education curriculum was really outdated," Canton told the Associated Press. "It was about 18 years since it was revised. With kids, having good and updated knowledge is critical." Sounds to me like the adults were the ones lacking "good and updated knowledge." Let's hope their recent enlightenment spreads to the rest of Ohio.
-- Tracy Clark-Flory

Charles Bukowski - Don't Try

Citizen Just Doing It's Job - Printed in Laconia Citizen 8-8-06

Editor, The Citizen:

In an article entitled "Newspaper criticized for lawsuit" I learned The Citizen recently filed a Right-to-Know suit against the town of Tilton when, to quote the article, "... the town refused to release a taxpayer-funded independent assessment on the practices of the office of the town clerk."

Because of this suit Scott Davis, a member of the search committee to select a new town administrator, is asking the Tilton Board of Selectmen to no longer use The Citizen for help-wanted ads, or legal notices, etc.

Mr. Davis said, "Under no circumstances should we spend money [with The Citizen]." Sour grapes Mr. Davis?

Listen, The Citizen is a newspaper. Last I knew one of the things that you do when you're a newspaper is a little thing called reporting the news. I know it's a pretty unpopular idea these days. But there have been, as you are now fully aware, laws passed to protect the people's right to know as well as freedom of the press. These laws are also in place to promote as transparent a government as can be reasonably had.

That being said, I don't think The Citizen will go out of business without Tilton's business. So, good luck with that. (Sour grapes!)

Apparently 59,054,087 Americans are STILL dumb

Half of U.S. Still Believes Iraq Had WMD
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By CHARLES J. HANLEY AP Special Correspondent
August 07,2006 -- Do you believe in Iraqi "WMD"? Did Saddam Hussein's government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003?

Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.

People tend to become "independent of reality" in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull.

The reality in this case is that after a 16-month, $900-million-plus investigation, the U.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in 1991 under U.N. oversight. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the work of U.N. inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals in Iraq.

Despite this, a Harris Poll released July 21 found that a full 50 percent of U.S. respondents -- up from 36 percent last year -- said they believe Iraq did have the forbidden arms when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, an attack whose stated purpose was elimination of supposed WMD. Other polls also have found an enduring American faith in the WMD story.

"I'm flabbergasted," said Michael Massing, a media critic whose writings dissected the largely unquestioning U.S. news reporting on the Bush administration's shaky WMD claims in 2002-03.
"This finding just has to cause despair among those of us who hope for an informed public able to draw reasonable conclusions based on evidence," Massing said.

Timing may explain some of the poll result. Two weeks before the survey, two Republican lawmakers, Pennsylvania's Sen. Rick Santorum and Michigan's Rep. Peter Hoekstra, released an intelligence report in Washington saying 500 chemical munitions had been collected in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.

"I think the Harris Poll was measuring people's surprise at hearing this after being told for so long there were no WMD in the country," said Hoekstra spokesman Jamal Ware.

Conservative commentator Deroy Murdock, who trumpeted Hoekstra's announcement in his syndicated column, complained in an interview that the press "didn't give the story the play it deserved." But in some quarters it was headlined.

"Our top story tonight, the nation abuzz today ..." was how Fox News led its report on the old, stray shells. Talk-radio hosts and their callers seized on it. Feedback to blogs grew intense. "Americans are waking up from a distorted reality," read one posting.

Other claims about supposed WMD had preceded this, especially speculation since 2003 that Iraq had secretly shipped WMD abroad. A former Iraqi general's book -- at best uncorroborated hearsay -- claimed "56 flights" by jetliners had borne such material to Syria.

But Kull, Massing and others see an influence on opinion that's more sustained than the odd headline.
"I think the Santorum-Hoekstra thing is the latest 'factoid,' but the basic dynamic is the insistent repetition by the Bush administration of the original argument," said John Prados, author of the 2004 book "Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War."

Administration statements still describe Saddam's Iraq as a threat. Despite the official findings, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has allowed only that "perhaps" WMD weren't in Iraq. And Bush himself, since 2003, has repeatedly insisted on one plainly false point: that Saddam rebuffed the U.N. inspectors in 2002, that "he wouldn't let them in," as he said in 2003, and "he chose to deny inspectors," as he said this March.

The facts are that Iraq -- after a four-year hiatus in cooperating with inspections -- acceded to the U.N. Security Council's demand and allowed scores of experts to conduct more than 700 inspections of potential weapons sites from Nov. 27, 2002, to March 16, 2003. The inspectors said they could wrap up their work within months. Instead, the U.S. invasion aborted that work.

As recently as May 27, Bush told West Point graduates, "When the United Nations Security Council gave him one final chance to disclose and disarm, or face serious consequences, he refused to take that final opportunity."

"Which isn't true," observed Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a scholar of presidential rhetoric at the University of Pennsylvania. But "it doesn't surprise me when presidents reconstruct reality to make their policies defensible." This president may even have convinced himself it's true, she said.

Americans have heard it. A poll by Kull's WorldPublicOpinion.org found that seven in 10 Americans perceive the administration as still saying Iraq had a WMD program. Combine that rhetoric with simplistic headlines about WMD "finds," and people "assume the issue is still in play," Kull said.
"For some it almost becomes independent of reality and becomes very partisan." The WMD believers are heavily Republican, polls show.

Beyond partisanship, however, people may also feel a need to believe in WMD, the analysts say.

"As perception grows of worsening conditions in Iraq, it may be that Americans are just hoping for more of a solid basis for being in Iraq to begin with," said the Harris Poll's David Krane.
Charles Duelfer, the lead U.S. inspector who announced the negative WMD findings two years ago, has watched uncertainly as TV sound bites, bloggers and politicians try to chip away at "the best factual account," his group's densely detailed, 1,000-page final report.

"It is easy to see what is accepted as truth rapidly morph from one representation to another," he said in an e-mail. "It would be a shame if one effect of the power of the Internet was to undermine any commonly agreed set of facts."

The creative "morphing" goes on.

As Israeli troops and Hezbollah guerrillas battled in Lebanon on July 21, a Fox News segment suggested, with no evidence, yet another destination for the supposed doomsday arms.

"ARE SADDAM HUSSEIN'S WMDS NOW IN HEZBOLLAH'S HANDS?" asked the headline, lingering for long minutes on TV screens in a million American homes.