Shadowboxing

For those of you who have never read Bob Woodward’s "The Agenda" and David Stockman’s "The Triumph of Politics", they make for an interesting compare & contrast. The first is an account of the Clinton administration, the second is an account of the Reagan administration (written by the same twerp who engineered that whole Reagan-Revolution-that-wasn’t). The second is particularly fascinating because David Stockman was a well-intentioned, totally unqualified, silly little boy who made a couple of spectacularly numpty-headed assumptions when he designed the policy. He then found himself at the center of a crew of politicians who just didn’t know jack shit about economics, budgets, or even basic bookkeeping, and didn’t really want to know. He realized his errors too late and couldn’t explain to the White House what the problem was because they were all big-picture ideologues who disliked facts. But I digress.

What’s fascinating about those two books is that they both essentially tell the same tale, only from vastly differing perspectives. One of the presidents involved was at the vanguard of the NeoConservative movement, and the other was really just a New Dixiecrat. If nothing else, these two books make it painfully clear that nothing in Washington is new, let alone improved. But what is curious about these two radically different administrations is that they both faced the same insurmountable difficulties in designing an economic plan on which to base an actual budget. And neither of them had run the numbers in any meaningful way while on the campaign trail. Their campaigns were based on nothing more substantial than a hunch that the voters would like the sound of their "new" ideas. As a result, both administrations had all the direction of a fart when it came to implementing any of their policies.

The promises they made were simply ludicrous and could not be fulfilled. The plans that seemed so simple were trashed by the facts. Neither president knew the first damn thing about economics although both of them had presided over their own states. Reagan was not interested in learning. Clinton learned quickly. And neither of those facts made much difference. They still couldn’t resolve the inherent conflict between their dreams and the hard, cold facts. So they ended up compromising and lying their heads off until there was little, if anything, left of their original plans.

Here’s the crux of the conflict: The Republicans continually claim that they want to go back to being a capitalist economy. But a true capitalist economy does not tolerate political fixes for economic problems. When an industry is no longer profitable, it fails and is replaced by a new industry that pushes technology forward and creates new jobs and a higher standard of living for the workers who used to be employed by the failed industry. The government does not require the workers to pay higher taxes to support the dying business that can no longer support those workers. In a capitalist economy, Ford and GM would have gone bankrupt decades ago and the workers would have moved on to jobs in a profitable industry. We are not a capitalist economy. We provide plenty of taxpayer-funded subsidies (read: corporate welfare) for virtually every industry in America today. Farmers. Transportation industries from airlines to railroads to shipping and trucking. Real estate developers. Hospitals and drug manufacturers. Insurance companies. You name it. If people are employed there, the company is sucking the government tit. You are paying them substantial amounts of money for the privilege of working there yourself or allowing someone else to work there. And these subsidies will not be removed. Once you give something away for free, even money, it instantly becomes an entitlement in the mind of the recipient. Now it’s one thing when you give little Johnny a lollipop and tell him that tomorrow you’re going to give him another one too. If you renege on your promise, there really isn’t much little Johnny can do but cry and be disappointed. He can’t really hurt you back. Exxon Mobil is quite another story.

The Democrats believe that it’s far too late to return to that old capitalist model, and it won’t work anyway. Capitalism promotes greed and social injustice and relies on a model that encourages predatory behavior, which is antithetical to a monotheistic culture. In Western civilization, every individual life is a unique expression of divinity and carries within it a value that is simply incalculable. The basis of every branch of monotheism is some form of the Golden Rule. You can’t just kick ’em to the curb when they’ve outlived their usefulness. You can’t just enslave an entire population for your own selfish gain. It’s immoral and repulsive. So the Democrats firmly believe in the redistribution of wealth by coercion. They assume ownership of every penny earned by every worker in the country from the outset, and then they adjust the tax code annually to reflect how many of those pennies you will be allowed to keep. But make no mistake about who they assume actually owns your earnings. They take their cut off the top. You will be permitted to keep however many pennies they determine they do not need to redistribute in the form of various social programs.

Government subsidies to businesses are social programs. And damned big ones, too. Democrats and Republicans alike will guard those subsidies like a mama bear guards her cubs and they will cost you a lot more money than just about any program out there other than Social Security and Medicare. They will never be cut in any meaningful way because those special interest groups are organized and they have political access and the money (thank you very much) to provide them with a level of media access that no one else has. You can kill a school lunch program or take away vaccinations for poor people in Appalachia and you’ll be criticized for throwing widows and orphans out into the snow on Christmas Eve. That news story will last until something juicier comes along, like a Britney meltdown. But if you threaten Boeing’s subsidies, you will disappear like Jimmy Hoffa. You’ll become a spook story they tell to politician’s children around the campfire. It doesn’t matter whether you are Democrat or a Republican. You are done. Government welfare programs for businesses aren’t going anywhere, and if you won’t get rid of them you can’t very well throw the widows and orphans out into the street. Well, not in broad daylight anyway. People will think you are mean. So the consequence is a neat little compromise where the government giveaway programs ALL stay intact with annual growth calculated into the tax structure, you foot the bill for it, and Exxon Mobil goes on being a bunch of predatory capitalists in a socialist state.

So basically we have a system where both of the political parties are essentially the same; Republican and Republican Lite. Or Democrat and Democrat with extra jalapenos. They feed you and burn you at the same time. Okay, John McCain will just set your ass on fire with Bic lighter and be done with it. He has a dead peasant policy on you and WWIII to finance. But you get the idea.

What my generation has failed to grasp is that is that all the noise we hear from politicians is just that – noise. There is no real difference between the Republicans and Democrats. There are minor differences; the Democrats are much more likely to scream loudly about those benefits that are principally intended to assist the poor, the elderly, and the working class. But the benefits that go to the wealthy and corporate concerns are the benefits that are jealously guarded and protected by both parties. And they are often disguised to look like benefits for the poor. Here’s a case in point:

The Job Corps is a program ostensibly designed to benefit underprivileged youth by providing job training that will enable them to become self-sufficient employees (and there’s an oxymoron for you). In 1981 Orrin Hatch, the Republican Senator from Utah, fought like a wildcat to protect the Job Corps from budget cuts. He looked like a real champion of the poor. But was he? The fact is that the Job Corps’ largest facility is located in Utah and employed thousands of bureaucrats at salaries of $25K and up. In 1980 they received a federal payment of $12K for each trainee’s annual training. They could have sent each one of those trainees to Harvard for less money than it cost to send them to Utah. No, I’m not kidding. An Ivy League education cost less than $12K a year back then. Those trainees would have emerged from universities with something more valuable than construction skills. For $12K a year they could have gotten a real education and a degree that would have permitted them to enter the labor force in a really competitive way. They could have become business owners themselves. But no. Instead they got the Job Corps and construction skills, the bureaucrats got comfy salaries for pushing papers around and groping their secretaries, and Orrin Hatch got a nice bonus for his state – a huge employer with a nice shiny halo. Tell me again who got the sweet deal?

Here’s another one for you: did you know that Walmart collects state sales taxes, but they do not forward that money to the state’s coffers? They get to keep that money as part of their profit structure. They claim that they benefit the state by employing so many people and keeping their prices low, so the trade-off is that they keep the sales taxes. Otherwise, they’ll have to punish everyone by laying people off, reducing benefits, and raising retail prices. It’s just so much sweeter to take a juicy little cut off the back end where nobody knows about it, than to call the cost what it is right up front. Socialist subsidized capitalism. Ya gotta love it.

My hope is that the internet and 24 hour news programming will somehow evolve to provide the next generation with the resources to understand how the dollar really bounces. The presidential nominees and the PTB in Congress are not going to tell you. But here are a couple of short facts:

You cannot lower taxes and increase spending without creating a massive deficit that will devalue your dollars, creating horrendous inflation and higher interest rates.

If the federal government withdraws funding for a program, that doesn’t mean a program will die. The state will simply have to raise local taxes to pay for the program. There are no savings involved. The governor is just much happier when it’s buried in 400,000 pages of federal tax code and budget analysis where it’s harder to see and he’s more likely to emerge with clean hands and a lot of votes.

If you deny people healthcare, they will turn up in the emergency room at some point and you and they will both pay for their crisis treatment at astronomical costs. You will pay in the form of higher taxes, higher insurance premiums, higher interest rates, and higher food costs when they levy another gas tax to cover the subsidies to the hospitals. It spreads out laterally and you can’t follow the money because the truth is buried under two tons of paperwork. But you will pay. You are NOT going to let those people die in the gutter because they can’t pay for their insulin no matter how much the right-wingers tell you that you should. When that moment becomes a reality, you WILL reach out to help those people because that’s what human beings do. Wouldn’t it be smarter to pay a fixed price right up front to make sure that everybody gets their insulin BEFORE they get sick from not having it?

So. Ya want that Democrat with or without jalapenos?

TANSTAAFL

Okay so this drug regimen not only leaves you flat on your ass, it is also well-known for producing insomnia, depression, and general irkiness. A fairly interesting combination, and one well-suited to my general disposition. Might as well just roll with it then. So.

The thing that truly bothers me the most (right now anyway) about the whole Democratic nomination debacle is that once again we have 2 candidates desperately trying to sell us the same old bill of goods. It’s a simple formula, but a time-tested favorite. It relies on only 2 statements:
1.) I’m going to give you (insert whatever it is you want here), and
2.) I’m going to make someone else pay for it

Now I want you to ponder these two statements for a minute. Take your time. No pressure. It’s a happy thought, yes? You get goodies. Someone else buys. Nice. Feels pretty good, doesn’t it?

Now imagine yourself in a car dealership and hear those words coming from the lips of any human being within say 500 yards.

Still feel good? If so, I have a couple of hijacked eBay accounts where I’m selling widescreen plasma TVs for as little as $300 + FREE shipping worldwide. Just go to www.ebay.com/dontbeaf*ingidiot. Somebody must believe that shit because I can pull up a minimum of 300 hijacked seller accounts offering all that and so much more at any given moment. Those guys aren’t bothering to hijack all those accounts for nothing. They are raking in megabucks with those lies.

eBay scammers are not so very different from every Senator and Representative in Congress, on either side of the aisle.

Keep in mind that both of these potential Democratic nominees are US Senators. They know perfectly well how the game is played. You don’t get to the Democratic Convention without being a damn fine player yourself. Which in some ways is a plus. Unlike your typical Governor, they are already quite familiar with the glacial pace of change in Washington. They know for a fact that there will be no earth-shattering change. There will be no serious budget cuts. US Senators know exactly what happens to a US Senator who has to go home and campaign for reelection after s/he has voted to cut school lunch programs, auto manufacturing subsidies, or *gasp* Social Security and Medicare entitlements. The people whose programs you cut won’t vote for you. The corporations that paid for your TV ads promoting all those lies will pay someone else to lie after you take away their subsidies and tax their earnings. There will be no drastic change. There can’t be. If there is, it will only change right back on the next election cycle anyway.

There is no $300 widescreen plasma TV with FREE shipping worldwide. There never was. There’s an acronym well known to economists, however, and that is: TANSTAAFL. There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. There never was. Somebody’s going to pay.

Go back to the car dealership now. Who do you think that somebody is going to be?

Walmart Rapes Head Trauma Victim

Well, that should be the headline. A Walmart employee named Debbie Shank, age 52, was permanently disabled in a car accident. Her health insurance through Walmart paid out some $470K in benefits. She was left in a wheelchair, permanently brain damaged, and will never be able to work again, or even care for herself. Her short-term memory is so poor that though she attended her son’s funeral last summer, every time she hears of his death it is news to her.

So her family sued the trucking company that employed the truck driver who caused the accident. They were subsequently awarded damages of $1 million, of which $417K remained after legal expenses. Debbie’s husband placed that money in a trust fund to care for his wife. And then Walmart sued him to recover their losses of $470K. What Debbie and her husband didn’t know is that the health insurance plan she agreed to contained a clause permitting Walmart to recoup their losses out of any monies awarded to her in a civil suit.

Walmart, who posted profits in excess of $90 billion last quarter, has a legal right to rob this woman of the little money left to care for her for the rest of her life. The State courts have upheld their rights in the matter, and the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear the case. She signed without understanding the fine print and now she must pay.

Remember, Walmart is one of the corporations who engaged in the nefarious practice of taking out life insurance policies on all their employees (often referred to as "dead peasant" policies) and naming Walmart as the beneficiary. So every time an employee died of illness or accident, Walmart got paid for the loss. A stock clerk in Houston netted Walmart $64K when he died of a heart attack, although the family received not a penny. Lawsuits were filed when the scheme was discovered, and most states now have laws on their books preventing the practice.

Let’s do that again. Lobby your state legislature to pass laws preventing Walmart and other rapacious corporations from screwing over their employees by stealing the monies levied in civil matters to provide for their future care. The Debbie Shanks of this world deserve better than to have their jury awards stolen from them by a corporation that offered them supposed health insurance when in fact it was merely a loan. It’s bad enough that the lawyers got such an enormous chunk of it, but for Walmart to take the rest is simply unconscionable. We can’t do anything for Debbie Shank (unless you want to make a personal contribution to her trust fund), but we can stop them from doing this to other trusting employees and their families.

Dubya's Suffering

Dick Cheney is a monster. There, I said it. Fire me. I thought it was pretty amazing when an interviewer reminded him that the American people were not happy with this war and he said “So?”, and that was that. Just tossed that petty objection right in the crapper, where he evidently thinks it belongs.

Of course, we already knew what his opinion of the people is.

But for anyone who still has doubts about the utter contempt of this administration for the human beings who live in this country without jobs or healthcare or even hope, today Cheney told us that the loss of 4,000 troops has been harder on the President than anyone else. Poor Dubya. I never knew that he was the one who was suffering. Glad I’ve been set straight. After all, those soldiers were all volunteers. In case we’ve forgotten, Cheney has now reminded us at least three times in the last two days that it’s those damn soldiers own fault for getting themselves blown up. They were stupid enough to volunteer, eh? And now Dubya’s suffering for it. Damn them.

Talk about spin. I’m simply dizzy from it all.

Just When It Can't Get Any Worse

Hillary. Stop.

Landed under sniper fire and had to run with your head down? Yeah, I know there were reports of gunfights and possible sniper fire in the hills. But if it’s too dangerous to send the President, they send his wife??? What, nobody gets excited when they lose a First Lady? Or they just want to make him look like a wimp sending a woman into harm’s way in his stead? C’mon, that’s what the Vice President is for.

There are things she cannot say about what she did and didn’t do in the White House. I know it’s tough that she can’t tell us what really happened in some of those meetings. There were ugly disputes and deals made. Hostile coalitions. Treachery. A host of enemies, both Republican and Democratic, who blamed her personally for influencing her husband’s decisions to approve or fight their plans and legislative efforts. We never get the real story about what happened inside the West Wing, not from anyone. And I’m not even sure we should. But damn. If you have to resort to fabricating excitement on the tarmac where the President dared not go, that’s just sad.

For a woman who has done so much, and run such a tough campaign, and put the numbers together in ways that actually add up… here’s your Swift Boat. Everybody gets one; the tale of terrorist tarmac is hers. They’ll play that clip all through the fall, and even people who like her will shake their heads and say “Yep. She’ll do or say whatever it takes. A Clinton is a force of nature, not to stopped by petty details like the truth.”

So once again it’s clear that the only two Democratic candidates left standing are about equally damaged by all the flying debris of a hard-fought campaign. And whichever one wins the nomination will be going into the fall with absolutely dreadful soundbites dogging them. But at least Obama’s belong to some other psycho. Hillary’s are her own, and unfortunately they speak directly to her greatest weakness. Nobody has ever denied that she’s a brainiac policy wonk with a plan and the drive to make it happen. Her weak spot has always revolved around questions of personality and character. She’s always lacked the folksy charm that might otherwise protect her. Her husband had it, but her own personal warmth quotient is somewhere in negative numbers. Any hope of persuading the superdelegates that she is more bulletproof in the general election than Obama has got to be evaporating rapidly. And this time she’s got no one to blame but herself.

But What's In It For Me?

This has not been a good week.

Can we just assume that Barack loves his grandma and at least thinks highly of his country, and let it go at that? I think that’s reasonable.

Can we just assume that Bill Clinton is neither a closet klucker, nor the reincarnation of Joe McCarthy?

Can we just assume that Bill Richardson is not Judas Iscariot? That guy has been dead for a couple thousand years now – can we stop with the Judas bashing? There should be a statute of limitations on this.

News Item: Hillary is not campaigning on behalf of Barack Obama, so stop expecting her to say wonderful things about him. That’s his job. Both of these campaigns are now in full battle gear, and doing what campaigns do. They are trashing each other full bore. While everybody gets all emotionally worked up about who said what and where to buy the best Super Secret Decoder Ring to figure out what the hidden message is, nobody is examining what’s important here. We can all take a nice long snooze now and check back in after the convention.

Whaddaya wanna bet Bill Richardson is the vice presidential candidate at that point? I’d say the odds are excellent. I’m surprised at how little comment I’ve heard about all the political opportunism inherent in his belated endorsement. Bill Richardson simply held out until it became clear that he’d get more from the Obama camp than the Hillary camp. Why? Obama needs the Latino vote and has consistently failed to win it. The tracking polls have noted a spiking trend toward those voters turning to McCain over Obama. He can’t win the general election without them. Richardson as VP may well deliver those votes. There is virtually no chance of Hillary asking Richardson to run with her. Far from delivering anything she needs, he could actually hurt her. So if he’d rather be a VP than have a nice, juicy cabinet post, this is a no-brainer for him. There’s no big emotional struggle involved, except over whether his defection will be viewed as treachery that could seriously hurt his standing among important Democrats (no, that would not be you) if Obama loses either the nomination or the general election. If that happens, Richardson will be isolated and treated like poison ivy for years to come. No self-respecting bigwig will answer his phone calls or be photographed standing next to him. So it’s a risk. But he finally decided that he thinks Obama can pull it off. Calling for Hillary to step down was a bit over the top, but the sooner she gets out of the way, the safer Richardson will be. She’ll have to support him. So long as she’s running she can tear his ass up. They will never be friends again, no matter how many dazzling smiles they display for the cameras. That’s politics for ya.

The scary part is that many of the superdelegates will cast their votes in much the same manner. Everyone is focused on whether they’ll be afraid to alienate the young, new Obama supporters, or whether they’ll see Hillary as more electable if Obama’s polling numbers keep on sliding. But nobody asks what the superdelegates want for themselves. It isn’t about the voters. It’s about winning the election and having your support be seen by the eventual winner as worthy of rewards. Many of the superdelegates stand to gain or lose a great deal personally. Bill Richardson is just an obvious example. There are hundreds more just like him waiting in the wings to see which of these candidates will give them a little extra candy in their stocking.

The Ministry of Toxic Waste

God damn America.

For God so hated gays that he sent a great flood among them.

Bombing Iran will help to bring about the Apocalypse and send all the unbelievers into the eternal fire they so justly deserve.

We’ve all been hearing this kind of nonsense for years, but I just can’t remember when it started. When did our clergy become the Bart Simpsons of the pulpit, saying outrageous and childish things that no one but a cartoon character would ever be allowed to say in public? Even a cartoon character would be boycotted for saying such things. When did it become acceptable for a minister to spew vulgarities and incite hatred? Aren’t they supposed to be telling us to turn the other cheek and offer our enemy our cloak as well? Aren’t they supposed to be telling us that God loves even his wayward children and will set up a greater feast for them when they come home than he will for those of us who never left him? Aren’t they supposed to be reminding us that we aren’t yet perfect enough to throw stones at anyone? Aren’t they supposed to tell us that we are indeed our brother’s keeper? That we’re supposed to house the homeless, clothe the naked, feed the hungry, and nurse the sick? When did they turn to preaching the Book of Mayhem?

It’s fascinating that we now have 2 candidates on opposite sides of the political fence, both trying to disassociate themselves from the comments and attitudes of ….. ministers. Of all the people in the world you wouldn’t expect to be poisonous to a political candidate, wouldn’t ministers be somewhere near the top of the list? Right up there with schoolchildren and grandmothers? Listen, maybe we should be vetting every candidate’s minister and ties to every religious organization before we seriously entertain their candidacy. Maybe we should ask them right up front to fill out a questionnaire setting forth their personal view of how the world began, whether or not they endorse the concept of angels, and where exactly hell is located. Is it under the ground? Out in the farthest reaches of outer space? Is purgatory a legitimate possibility or are those Catholics just a bunch of cultist whores? If so, would it be right and proper to kill them all before they pollute the purest among us? If we had the answers to all those questions, we’d know whether or not these ministers had the right stuff to lead the country out of war and recession, and straight into heaven. Oh wait. We aren’t electing ministers. Damn.

Okay, maybe politics and religion should be separate. There’s an idea. Yeah. The Church and State should maybe be forever separate institutions since they exist to serve entirely different needs (though I’m afraid to contemplate what needs some of these ministers are meeting). Aside from the state not being permitted to interfere in religious matters, maybe any church that uses its pulpit to endorse a candidate or rail against a policy should lose its non-profit status as a religious organization and have to reapply for that status as a political organization. Oh wait. Somebody already thought of that, didn’t they? And then wrapped it up in red tape until we can no longer locate the principle within.

Well. We could always just let our political leaders get back to the business of government, and stop requiring them to rubber stamp our cosmological fantasies as well. We don’t require our scientists, teachers, doctors, artists, or auto mechanics to attend church, subscribe to particular set of fables, or locate the Garden of Eden on a map. I don’t personally give a rat’s ass if my dentist is a Hindu, a Mormon, or an atheist so long as he is qualified to take care of my teeth. Why can’t we allow our politicians to simply shrug and say “I don’t know. I never studied Eden. I was PoliSci major”, and be done with it?

What's Missing From the Speeches

It’s an interesting thing, but I just heard Obama speaking about the power of hope, the generosity of the American people, and their willingness to work hard and sacrifice. And the thing that has been missing throughout this entire election cycle, and indeed throughout the last 8 years of the Bush administration, leapt out at me and smacked me in the head. Sacrifice.

We’ve not yet been asked to sacrifice anything. Oh, we’re making sacrifices. No doubt about that. But we’ve not been asked to sacrifice anything. We’ve just been handed the bill as an afterthought.

Now, if you want the American people to rally around a cause, make something happen, or support an ideal, they will. The can-do spirit of the American people is a force of nature yet to be equaled anywhere in the world. We’re a young nation with a vigorous will and a refusal to believe that we are fallible. We can do anything. But the real leaders who have gone before have always asked us, up front, to count the cost and set our minds firmly on the goal, and make it happen. They didn’t just pay lip service to their belief in us. They didn’t lie to us and tell us that someone else would pay for it. They didn’t tell us that we could just bomb the shit of somebody and it would all be over in 2 weeks with no actual loss of life. They didn’t tell us that we’d get everything we want. They didn’t tell us that it would all be free and easy. They told us it would hurt. They told us we’d have to ration our goods, fend for ourselves, and sacrifice comfort in order to accomplish a larger goal.

President Kennedy rallied the troops by telling them he was going to raise taxes and institute social programs because it was the right thing to do. FDR instituted all kinds of rationing to ensure a successful war effort. The founding fathers never once attempted to sell the colonists on the idea that a revolt would be quick, painless, and likely to succeed.

How did Ross Perot manage to secure nearly 1/5 of the popular vote as a third-party candidate? He told the truth. He said we were going to have to reduce the deficit and it would hurt like hell. But he reminded us with every other sentence that the pain was necessary; that it was a sacrifice we needed to make as individuals for the greater good of the nation, and for our children and grandchildren. He told us right up front that we couldn’t have any more goodies until we did our chores. He said we had to do it because it was the right thing to do.

Who in the current race has asked us to make a sacrifice? Behavioral science has known for a long time that people value what they are invested in. The flip side is that they do not value what they have not paid for. If it’s free, it has no value. So why should they pay for it? Maybe this is the mistake that all the candidates are making. It’s a mistake I caution my artist friends against all the time. The need to get your work seen or heard often outweighs the practical necessity of getting paid for your product. But if you give it away, you are saying that you aren’t sure it’s worth charging for. And if you aren’t sure, why should anyone offer to pay? They aren’t likely to volunteer their money, and furthermore, they’ll be pissed when you do decide to charge. After all, they got it for free before. Now they have a sense of entitlement.

It’s a risk to demand that people sacrifice something of value to them in order to acquire whatever you are selling. They may well reject you and move on to the next seller. This is as true for politicians as it is for anyone else. But there’s no use sending them a bill after they’ve agreed to a freebie. They’ll only feel cheated, and they’ll be right.

Poor Ol' Scooter

It’s sad. I actually feel sorry for a Republican, though it’s hard to extend that to a guy named Scooter. I have my limits. I cannot say that name out loud without chuckling. Sometimes I say it just to amuse myself.

Hell, sometimes I watch a dozen or so otters do the Electric Slide across my patio and croon Sinatra songs into a hairbrush. There’s something about an upright otter that is just fundamentally wrong, but it *is* cute.

But Scooter. Dang. I’d have been the first one to take his law license, but just on general principles. A Republican named Scooter needs to do some time in McDonald’s purgatory, and maybe stand before a judge in the other way, before he’s allowed to practice law. It just seems proper. But whaddaya wanna bet he’s probably the only guy in the White House who *didn’t* do anything to Valerie Plame? Do you remember the reports during the dawn of that story? As soon as the White House knew the shit was hitting the fan, Cheney practically locked Scooter Libby out of the West Wing. The skipper’s little buddy. Scooter who? Don’t know ya, pal. Scooter saw the writing on the wall within a half hour after he arrived at work that morning and reports were that he stormed the halls threatening to take every one them down with him if they dared to hang that fiasco around his neck and light it on fire. God only knows what they counter-threatened, but they necklaced poor old Scooter for sure.

See what happens when you snuggle up with snakes, Scooter? Pity you decided to remain loyal to the guys who screwed you over. I’d love to know what really happened. C’mon. You can tell me. This will be better than the otters.

The Politics of Godliness

You know. If Obama hadn’t recognized early on in the game that he’d need to court all the churchgoers if he ever wanted to attain any serious political office, I’ll bet he wouldn’t be in this mess today. He’d have been home on Sunday mornings catching a nap, and working on something worthwhile, and maybe watching the game later on. I seriously doubt that he ever paid a great deal of attention to Rev. Wright’s sermons. I mean really - how many people actually listen to whatever nonsense the joker up there is preaching? Can’t be many. They certainly aren’t living that gospel. But for politicians, regular church attendance remains, unfortunately, a requirement.

So why are we as Democrats, never mind as a diverse population of Americans, still letting a bunch of people who cannot discriminate between facts and fairy tales dictate government policy to the folks who are actually able to grasp that the science of 2,000 years ago has been updated? Isaac Newton put us on the moon. Nice job. Abraham told us how many sheep to set on fire in order to keep God from throwing a hissy fit and raining down bricks and fire on us all. Hmm. I think maybe I can rest my case right there.

I’m thinking maybe Obama attended that church because it was politically a smart move to stay real visible within that community of folks who were his constituents. Probably half the people who go there attend as much to be seen and gossip about those they saw as anything else. But for a politician, church attendance is mandatory. If you can’t prove you’re a good Christian you are toast. You gotta nod your head up and down and murmur the occasional hallelujah when they start going on about virgin births, resurrected corpses, and that vengeful supercop in the sky. I have a hunch that Obama may be a just a wee tad more sophisticated than that, but admitting it would be political suicide.

Now I’ll grant you - he could possibly have found a somewhat less controversial preacher. That is true. But among the folks who were voting for him there in Illinois, those views are apparently not particularly controversial. Or at least, not in a bad way. And the real issue here - so far as I’m concerned anyway - is why on earth do we hire these guys based on their presumed knowledge of the correct number of sheep to set on fire? You hire priests to do that shit. You hire presidents to run the damn country. They are entirely different skill sets, thank all the gods.

Democratic Fatigue Syndrome

It is now Year 6 of the Democratic Primary race, and no end in sight.

I say let 'em draw straws and get it over with. Does it really matter at this point? Like every other election I've ever lived through, this one is all about perception now. Not a single fact is at issue. Just image. And the sad thing is that my sense is that it's been that way right from the start of this particular race. John Edwards could not compete with the cult of celebrity surrounding the whole Clinton/Obama face-off. He was forced to drop out without anyone ever discovering what he had to say.

It strikes me that Americans are just obsessed with simplicity. Or perhaps unwilling to deal with complexity. I blame the media for this, and why not? They are handy. That seems to be how we make judgments these days - whatever is simple and close at hand will do. The media holds up that mirror, we see whatever we want to see, and *poof!* there's your answer.

Case in point: Hillary is quite possibly the most hated woman in America. And why is this? No one really knows. Nor are they willing to examine it. They are content to simply hate her and try to make up a "reason" for it as an afterthought. The truth is, it's just a visceral response and it was there from the very first time they put her on the air. Does anyone remember that night? Bill went on the air with Hillary sitting next to him, defending their marriage in the wake of the Gennifer Flowers mess. Hillary came on screen and focus groups all across America turned that dial waaaayyyyyy down. She hadn't uttered a syllable. They just hated her. His campaign strategists were floored. And horrified. And scared. She could sink his campaign merely by the simple fact of her existence. James Carville was screaming "Get her out of there!!!!" from his hotel room. And when they polled the focus groups, they got no substantive answers. So they went into overdrive to soften her image, lighten her hair, thin her eyebrows. They went with paler lipstick, snatched the harsh black hairband off her head. Gave her some bangs. They tried desperately to make it not her fault that her husband strayed.

I have to tell you - I feel the same way about Barbara Bush. Every time I see her face my instinct is to hiss and spit. I try not to hold it against her, but there it is. Well, you aren't going to like everybody. Some folks just rub you the wrong way every time they inhale. Dubya really pisses me off every time he smiles. I mean I just am totally creeped out by that idiotic smile of his. Other people feel differently about him. He makes them want to chummy up to him. And I have to confess that the first word that crossed my mind when Bill Clinton hit the television screens was "smarmy". But I tend to think that those gut reactions are more a matter of my own internal world of experience than any objective reality. Not that I think I'm "wrong" about them - I don't. But I do assume that they are a good deal more complex than my narrow view of them admits. Hate is just far too strong a word for what I feel. So it's not a question of right or wrong; good or bad. Once I've processed that initial response, I want to start searching for somewhat more objective measures to judge their qualifications and attitudes on.

At this point, it feels like it just doesn't matter much anymore. I know that attitude favors Obama, and I'm still far from convinced that he's the better choice. But I've never disliked him. And the fatigue is wearing on me. Mostly because I'm just sooooo sick of watching Anderson Cooper and Keith Olberman display their pathetic little man-crushes every chance they get. It's embarrassing. I know he's sexy. But c'mon. These interviews and commentary start to look like gay porn after a while.

He must have that charisma that Clinton was said to possess. I never met Clinton in person, so I don't know. From where I sat, that charisma looked like a real turn-off. I can't say that I ever "liked" him. I've heard diehard Republicans say that they were instantly overcome by the sheer force of his charm and personality. And this is precisely what worries me. This is no basis for selecting a president. It's just not good enough. I want someone who knows a little something about economics, foreign policy, all that "git 'er done" stuff. J have nothing against good ideas. I just want to see a track record of actual accomplishment, or at the very least a record of actually fighting to accomplish something. I don't care if Hillary is sexy or not. She’s 60 years old, she doesn’t have to be sexy anymore, hmm? I think she's studied the health care issue more extensively and exhaustively than any other human on the planet and she's been asking for universal health care that cuts the profiteering insurance companies out of the loop for many, many years now. She may have lost the battle on the first round, but she never sat down and shut up. She emerged battered and bloody from it, and she’s still in the fight.

But if sexy is what the people want, then fine. Just get it over with and we'll hope that Obama can manage to keep Congress from co-opting his presidency within the first 3 months. I'm betting he can't. If we manage to gain a majority in Congress, there's at least a faint hope. It is not at all a foregone conclusion that a Democratic congressman is a friend to a Democratic president. Not by a longshot. Just have a quick peek at Clinton's presidency for details on that myth. And Clinton was, by unanimous decree, a *very* charismatic president. The sad truth is that this doesn't count for shit down in the trenches of congressional warfare. There is no honor among thieves. Vis-a-vis a new president, those guys are all natural allies. A new administration is up against the wall if it gets into a fight with them.

So hey - I say let him have at it if it means we can be spared the sight of Anderson kneeling before his idol and making slurping noises for the next 8 weeks. I just can’t take any more. I’m still pretty alarmed about Obama's halo slipping these last few weeks. But honestly, now that he’s carrying as much negative baggage as Hillary always has, I’m still too pissed off at Howard Dean and the DNC to want them to have the final say on which of these candidates is the least poisonous.

After all, it really is all about image and spin now. How could either of these two look any worse than that dessicated lizard with the Stepford wife hovering over his shoulder?

Transparency

Good grief. Eight years. $60 million in taxpayer funded investigations. Hundreds of thousands of pages of financial documents, tax returns, contracts, daily schedules, and cancelled checks. And what did Ken Starr finally have to show for all that? A blue dress and a series of illegally recorded conversations between two of the most ignorant sluts who ever managed to evolve into bipeds. Between the two of them, they possessed the collective IQ of a fencepost, and enough personality disorders to populate an entire asylum.

What he discovered about Hillary was exactly nothing. Not one single thing he could even ask for an indictment on. A prosecutor needs only to ask for an indictment. Grand juries will almost always return one if a prosecutor so much as asks. They don’t have to find anyone guilty of anything. They only have to agree with him that the evidence supports the notion that there might be a reason to pay for a trial. So if he finds evidence, he asks them for permission to prosecute the case. And he got nothing. Exactly zip.

Eight years. $60 million. A positively rabid prosecutor who asked for, and received, illegal tape recordings and the investigative power of the FBI to assist him in his search for dirt. And he got nothing.

Is there a single one among us who could stand up under that kind of scrutiny? Most of us totally panic when the IRS sends an audit notice. Just imagine having 20 years of your life, your cancelled checks and credit card transactions, your most private humiliations, your husband’s philandering, your entire career, opened to public scrutiny by a man who is intent on destroying you both professionally and personally. Just imagine having your parenting skills, your sex life, and your personality defects the subject of dinner table discussions all over the country, night and day, for years on end.

The odd thing is that with all the reporters carrying on about how it’s their job to comb through her schedule and see if she was really just getting manicures, all they’ve really fixed on is where she was and who she was meeting with when the Lewinsky scandal hit the fan. Was Hillary in the White House while Bill was leaving stains on dresses? Yes, she was. Does she have a right to black out the name of the person she met with while Bill went on the air to say “I did not have sex with that woman?” Shouldn’t the media be able to question that person about what was said?

They say they want to know if she really did participate in high-level meetings and diplomatic missions. Hellooooo? Considering that the entire time she was in the White House she was vilified for acting like the “co-president”, and considering that people were outraged that she was her husband’s chief advisor and most trusted ally, and considering that Republicans nearly crucified her for taking the lead on health care reform and acting as an foreign ambassador who had the temerity to talk to world leaders instead of just shaking their hands in receiving lines, don’t you think it’s a little odd that they now say she was “just a First Lady” and didn’t sit in on those important policy decisions and meetings? That’s exactly what they spent 8 years complaining that she had no business doing since no one elected her. She was the dragonlady, rumored to be the real brains behind the throne, remember? Congressional Republicans speculated endlessly on who was really running the country.

Is there anything we don’t know about Hillary? And more importantly, is there anything left that we actually want to know?

Will it work?

Well, damn. I managed to miss what may go down in the history of American politics as one of the top ten most important speeches ever made. Right up there with Kennedy and King. And now I have to listen to CNN play little clips and tell me which parts were worth hearing. And whether or not it it will work.

So I clicked to the New York Times and pulled up the entire text of the speech so that I could at least read it for myself. I’m sorry I didn’t get to see him deliver it - Obama is an amazing speaker. He manages to convey a genuineness and truthfulness that is inspiring. But I did at least get to read it, and I recommend you do as well. It is a moving and inspirational speech.

And I hope it works. I really do. I think it might. He did not shy away from addressing the elephant in the living room. The feelings of those historically and institutionally disenfranchised black Americans must be acknowledged in plain terms - they are in fact still suffering from the systemic discrimination that is our legacy. Don’t believe it? Just look at how easy it was to strip them of their votes in the 2000 election. Just look at what happened in New Orleans. But the tricky part for Obama is not only acknowledging that the feelings of black Americans are legitimate and deserve a voice. It is that the feelings of working class white voters must be addressed in plain terms as well; that they feel shut out of the benefits they have worked all their lives to provide for others; that they are tired of being accused of committing injustices they never personally indulged in; that they cannot speak of legitimate grievances without instantly being branded as racists and run out of town on a rail. And he did that. He acknowledged openly that those tensions and resentments cannot be swept under the carpet with a lot of pleasantries that don’t reflect the real feelings of struggling workers who are watching their jobs, homes, and futures disappear. He reached out to those people and asked them not to be afraid. He said he heard them. He said we cannot lie anymore, but we have to all be permitted to speak our truths if we are going to come together and work for our goals as one people. And he’s in a unique position to sympathize and empathize with the plight of all these people who want the whole race issue to go away. Because of who he is, he can say out loud that it won’t just "go away" and we have to be able to talk through it and come together around those same kitchen tables with love and concern for one another. God bless him. He gets it.

For the first time since Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy, I have heard a politician telling the American story and really asking everyone to cut each other a little slack and remember that we all want the same things for our children, no matter how we phrase it. He asked us to join him in keeping that conversation going.

Barack Obama said everything he needed to say, I think. But more than that, he said what we all needed him to say. That is true leadership. I still don’t know that he has the political acumen to lead the country through the economic disaster that is coming, or to end the war, or to negotiate with foreign powers without undermining the power of the Oval Office. I don’t know that he’s any different from any of the other politicians who are better at making speeches than they are at executing their policies. I don’t know that he won’t turn out to be just another corrupt politician who is really just all about what’s in it for him.

But for the first time since his campaign began, I’m willing to give him a shot at it.

Bear Stearns and the Bailout

And from March 17: The Bear Stearns Bailout


So CNN and all the other purveyors of cornflakes are asking the critical question: Who should we bail out; the lenders or the homeowners?

If you are not getting any good answers, it’s usually because you are asking the wrong questions.

Look. Bear Stearns is going to be bailed out of the mess they’ve made. The larger economy cannot afford to let them go down. To do so is to guarantee that this country will sail headlong into a depression. The global consequences are even more mind-boggling. The question runs a lot deeper than whether or not to salvage the financial institutions that engaged in a decade’s worth of high-risk predatory lending practices that they clearly knew were a recipe for disaster. We’ve seen it before. There’s history here, and that history is called The Great Depression. What you see in the newspapers today is exactly the behavior that preceded that last horrific economic tsunami.

So how did we manage to let this happen again? Ah, there’s an interesting question. A free market economic system guarantees that ONLY the most predatory businesses on the planet will thrive. I know that sounds like a sweeping generalization. I assure you that it is not. And here’s why: a capitalist system relies on profit. There is a finite amount of capital in the world. A business that makes a profit this year, has to repeat that feat again next year. In order to do that, they are going to have to cut into someone else’s profit because they can’t simply create new capital out of thin air. The company that gets their hands on another company’s profit will thrive. The one that loses profit will die.

A free market system is a laissez-faire system that insists that only the marketplace determines success and failure. Government regulation interferes with the market and must therefore be abolished. Proponents of the free market theory insist that it is Darwinism at its finest, and that it is only right and proper that poor businesses become extinct. They are not fit to compete. The only problem with that theory is that doesn’t take long before a half dozen Walmarts, McDonalds, and Citibanks own the entire freakin’ world and the world’s population has effectively become their slaves in perpetuity unto the 70th generation.

This is precisely why we do not have a free market economy here in the United States. We have a mixed market economy that has always relied on its government to institute regulations that protect the workers from the predatory corporations that would eat their own young if it put another dollar into the profit column. We The People agreed long ago that we needed such protections and we asked the federal government to oversee that process on our behalf. And then we turn around and vote for Republicans who systematically dismantle the laws that govern those corporate monsters on the theory that a free market economy is good for everyone. It ain’t good for you. It ain’t good for the people in Bolivia whose water supply was taken over by international mega-corporations with the help of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. This Libertarian approach to economics has been co-opted by the Republicans, largely through the person of Alan Greenspan, but don’t think that the Democrats haven’t been complicit in that global rape. The only difference between the Republicans and the Democrats on this issue is that the Dems are sneakier about it and don’t try to tell you that deregulation is good for you. They insist that the laws they will institute will actually protect you. Listen. If they’re giving it to Bolivia right up the old keister, they’ll do it to you too. You ain’t special.

Listen to what happened in Bolivia: The World Bank demanded that in exchange for the loans that would allow them to lower their inflation rate and encourage investment, they had to acknowledge that local governments were rife with corruption. They could not be allowed to manage their own infrastructure. So the obvious solution was to allow their public services to be administered by private corporations that had the management expertise to run those facilities on a paying basis. In exchange for their loans, Bolivia had to sell its utilities to foreign corporations. They did. The first thing that happened was that the foreigners fired 1/3 of the work force. In many instances, the workers who knew the water and sewer systems intimately were the only source of information about where they went and where the trouble spots in these aging lines were likely to be. So they lost 1/3 of their knowledge base. Maps were either lost, nonexistent, or out of date. And so many city households relied on those wages that the people were thrown into economic trouble right off the bat. But no matter. They’d find other jobs, right? Uh huh. But that was just the beginning. It was quickly determined that the real problem with the water supply was that the people weren’t paying enough for it. So they instituted a rate hike that amounted to more than 1/5 the average monthly income of a family in Bolivia. Imagine that. Imagine water suddenly, overnight, costing more than you spend on food every month. Just imagine it. For a minimum wage earner, the cost of water was more like 1/3 of their monthly income. Now imagine being unemployed (if you were say for instance a former municipal water worker) and having the cost of water skyrocket to 1/5 or 1/3 of your now-imaginery income. Not cool. And then guess what happens when those aging systems that have been patched together with duct tape for decades suffer their usual endless breakdowns and the workers can’t repair them for weeks on end because no one is left to do the work and none of the current workers have so much as a map of the system? A fairly clear picture is starting to emerge here, and it ain’t pretty. It ended with protests in the streets and the government shooting the protesters. Massively uncool.

And I tell you this story why? Because it has long been understood by corporations and governments alike that this is precisely what happens when the public utilities and services are taken over by private interests and not subject to government regulation. THIS is why we do not and never have operated under a free market structure. But remember - if they will do it to Bolivia, they will do it to you too. You ain’t special.

Still want to let the Republicans privatize education here in America? You still think they have your best interests at heart? There’s a reason why those public utilities and services are regulated by the government for the common interests of the people who use those utilities and services. Whaddaya wanna bet they own the very corporations that will be running your schools as if the object of the game were not to educate your kids, but to make a profit at it? Did you get a lower phone bill when they deregulated the communications industry? No, you did not. You got a higher bill. Did you benefit when they deregulated the banking industry and allowed every self-styled "businessman" on the planet to open a savings and loan? Why, no. You did not. In fact, you’re not even finished paying for that little debacle (which btw, Neil Bush benefitted greatly from and he thanks you for all your hard-earned dollars).

The bottom line is this - no responsible economist has ever suggested that a free market economy is a good thing for the humans that must live with them, that supply-side economics ever benefits anyone but the wealthy, or that deregulation will lead to anything but a greedfest.

So, yes. We have to bail out Bear Stearns. But we should be demanding the heads of the shareholders and CEOs on a platter right now. Ken Lay managed to die before he got to see the inside of one of the prisons those Republican fuckheads are so fond of. So let’s make the penalty for getting caught with your hand in the collective cookie jar death. Ancillary figures will simply be stripped of every nickel they ever owned, branded as thieves with a tattoo across their foreheads, and sent back to a minimum wage slow death job from which they can pull themselves up by their own goddamn bootstraps. No appeals, no 10 years of litigation. We’ll make it a high-stakes game with some real penalties for fucking up. If their egos and standard of living require a solid gold platter on which to display their remains I’ll be happy to chip in for that.

The Red Pill Primer

Okay, time to update. I've been busy writing and posting elsewhere, but there's been so much going on! So from March 10 here's the Red Pill Primer:


The Iraq war is bankrupting this country. No doubt about it. We have been borrowing astronomical sums money from China and W's friends in the Middle East to pay for carving that country up and letting W's pals make a killing (sorry) on it. But that money comes at a fairly steep rate of interest because after all, if we're going to have friends in high places in China and the Middle East (who are growing their own middle classes right now even as we snooze, so don't think that "cheap Chinese imports" are going to be your problem for much longer – pretty soon you won't be able to afford Chinese manufactured crap), we have to scratch their backs too. So in essence, we are simultaneously carving this country up and giving it away to W's other pals whose names we cannot pronounce, in countries we cannot locate on a map. Most people actually cannot point to Kuwait on a globe. Nor do they have any idea where Singapore is located or how much of the United States they actually own. Not their political leaders. Their businessmen. That's who really owns everything. Politicians are just the former and future board members who sit in the executive dining rooms and decide how much your grandchildren will pay their grandchildren for the privilege of working for them. What, you thought it was the other way around? Think again, my friend. As long as you cannot locate or identify the players, it's fairly easy to lie to you. Do you really think these guys are too morally pure to refrain from lying to you just because they oppose the murder of fetuses? Oh babe. They don't care about your damn fetus. They just want to make sure YOU care about all those fetuses. That way you aren't paying attention when they rob your pension fund and raise the CEO's salary to $100 million. Nope. It's the fetuses, stupid. They feed us (didja catch that?) the ten minutes of daily hate that George Orwell predicted and we lose all reason. Take the red pill, hon. You are being lied to.

And just give me 10 seconds here to get this one thing off my chest: for all you clowns who thought Dubya wanted to have a beer with you too, nice going. Of course you will someday be invited to dine at that table in the executive dining room and sneer at all the losers you can now step on. Sure. You just keep on obsessing over whether or not your neighbors are having gay abortions and we'll fix ya right up. You didn't get your invitation to the golden feast? Musta got lost in the mail. Ya fuckin dumbass. People who vote with their eyes squeezed shut tight and their fingers firmly plugged into their ears are the very reason the DNC decided to institute the seating of "superdelegates". The entire purpose of this little strategic gem is to ensure that the party bosses retain control of the nomination process and relieve you of the necessity of exercising your presumed stupidity in any meaningful way – like say voting. Essentially, they aborted the entire electoral process, and just left the show up and running on CNN for entertainment purposes. They pulled this stunt in 1984, but nobody noticed until now. At this point, the DNC calls it "tradition". It is not. It's a new invention designed for the sole purpose of robbing you of your vote. I would posit that robbing you of your voting rights is not the best solution to curing the "uninformed voter" problem. There's a better way. Stop inhaling all that lovely hate, no matter how intoxicating it is, and go take a good long hard look at where all the money is flowing. Take the red pill babe. You are being lied to.

Are ya with me? Good. Thomas Jefferson feels for you. He really does. I have no doubt but that he is writhing in agony in his grave. It took this country 12 years from the signing of the Declaration of Independence to ratify a Constitution, largely because the rights of the unwashed masses were important to him and his pal James Madison. The landed gentry, who had actually studied history and knew a little something about the underpinnings of western civilization, were very much opposed to letting a bunch of uneducated farmers run anything but their farms. They saw no need to provide any Bill of Rights or offer specific protections against federal intrusion into the private lives of the citizenry. On the contrary, the Federalist position was that the idiots who comprised the bulk of the population were largely unable to tell their ass from their elbow and needed a firm governing hand lest they begin refusing to provide sufficient income for their betters. (Don't you be fooled. Those farmers back then were better educated on average than your typical college graduate today. But that's another story.) The Federalists understood that our entire economy has always been based on the slave trade and so long as you think someone else is the slave, and that this is perfectly okay, they've gotcha. For Jefferson, your right to live free from the encroachment of a tyrannical government was a matter of simple principle. And I will say that I applaud that principle, even though it hurts. It is the same principle that permits each and every one of you to own a handgun. I know this is a very unpopular view among the liberals who have bought into the rationale that they are obligated to protect idiots from themselves by applying parental controls. But for those who wish to keep and bear arms, Jefferson was your man too. The right of the people to keep and bear arms was his last and non-negotiable line of defense against the tyranny of the wealthy who would usurp all of your fundamental rights if they could. He did not care if your militia was an army of exactly one. He supported your right to kill those bastards if they set one foot upon your farm against your wishes. He would not be happy with the way things are going these days. The landed gentry has in fact taken over your farms. And your political parties, cities, schools, future, and everything else, constitutions be damned. Oh, they tell you that it's your decision, your future, your property, and your life. After all, you have a vote. Take the red pill folks. You are being lied to.

So. Here we are, and the DNC has a bunch of delegates you didn't elect deciding who the Democratic candidate will be. That's because you have given up your right to think and accepted the ruling class' determinations about what is good for you and your children. They took over the education of your children over a century and half ago, on the theory that you are not competent to manage that task. They did this for the simple reason that they could see what they were going to need from your children – a large and compliant labor force to keep their factories producing the goods that would someday provide $100 million annual salaries for the CEO's of those businesses. The Industrial Revolution needed employees. And to this day many people actually believe that they should leave the herculean task of educating their children to the "experts", who do such a spectacular job that the cash registers at McDonalds now sport pictures of the various food items so that the kids will know which button to push. Do you really think they intend to let those kids vote in a free and fair election? Do you really think they would willingly teach those kids to follow the bouncing dollar and see where it lands? Forget about fetuses folks. If the school systems are producing workers who don't know what Jefferson wrote, you may be absolutely sure that this is precisely what they intended to produce. This stuff doesn't happen by mistake. It's time for the red pill. You are being lied to.

Do you still think you could do a worse job of raising your children than an overblown and self-serving bureaucracy that spends more money on its administrators than on its teachers or buildings or materials? Do you really believe that the folks in charge of your children's so-called education have only your little darlings' best interests at heart? Have you ever actually seen a bureaucracy that existed to serve the best interests of anyone but itself? Do you really think that training children to please authority by circling the "correct" answer and filling in the blank with the word that the teacher told them to use is a good substitute for teaching them to think, criticize, and discuss? Listen. Nobody will ever love or care for your children more than you do. Nobody wants a better life for them than you do. Nobody is looking out for their best interests like you will. Wake up and get busy. There are millions of books in the world, and a network of public libraries that will make them all available to you at no cost. Forget the predigested "history" books that the authorities have approved out of their deep concern for your best interests and their low regard for your intelligence. Read what Jefferson himself had to say. It is not secret knowledge. Just because they think that you are too stupid to understand it, does not mean that you have to agree with them. Surprise yourself. Take the red pill. You are being lied to. And you are smarter than you realize.

Now here's the saddest part. I know this is going to hurt, but I believe you can take the pain. I have faith in your fundamental intelligence. The Democratic Party is a hoax. Hillary isn't worried about your problems. She just wants to win the election. Obama is not your new best friend. He's a politician, just like Hillary. He's just the shiny new model equipped with a whole new slew of slogans. He's going to tell you whatever it is he thinks you want to hear. He thinks you want to hear that he doesn't need experience because he is going to give this country back to You The People. He thinks you want to hear that fixing the looming economic disaster before us is no more difficult than organizing a soup kitchen. He thinks a lot of feel-good rhetoric about how he believes in you is going to work to secure the most powerful office in the land for ….. HIM!!! Do you really think Bubba's going to help him figure out how to lower the key long-term interest rates and stabilize the bond markets while he creates money out of thin air by *not* taxing the shit out of the rapidly dwindling middle class? Let me tell you something. Bubba thought "creative" and "financing" looked real good when you put them together. Bubba is a dumbass. All he knows is that somebody lied to him. Lotta somebodies in fact, but he isn't even sure how many. What do you think Bubba knows about the Treasury Dept., the Federal Reserve, or even what word "dollar" means? He just wants somebody to bail him outta this mess that they all made. And bail him out they will. But not because they care about Bubba and his dim understanding of how he got into this mess. They'll do it because it's cheaper in the long run. But you're the one who's going to foot the bill for it either way. You and your children and your grandchildren. So it would be in your best interest to find out just exactly what the plan is for reducing the deficit, stimulating the economy, and creating jobs for the folks who are about to start losing them in record numbers. Whichever candidate you vote for, at least take the time to find out what s/he intends to do, and see if that plan makes sense to you. Remember that if they're pumping money into a program, every dollar has to come from somewhere – we don't actually own any dollars. Remember that the first time s/he tells a Senator that s/he's going to cut funding for some pet project, that Senator is going to fight tooth and nail and he'll have every other Senator fighting right beside him because they know their pet project will be next on the hit list. That could cost them their own elections. Ain't gonna happen. Remember that the president is thinking 4 years out, but the investors who make this economy run are thinking 30 years out. When they start jumping ship, taking all their enormous profits and investing them in foreign markets, we start spiraling into a massive depression. Reducing the deficit is critical. You know the single most important thing that FDR did to put this country back on its feet? He threatened to issue new money. Yes, he did. He gathered all the Morgans, Rockefellers, and DuPonts and told them that if they didn't return 1/3 of their capital to US investments, he'd start issuing redbacks instead of greenbacks on Monday, thus rendering all their greenbacks worthless. They were livid, but they couldn't be sure that he was just bluffing. They were afraid he actually meant to do what he said. So they caved. He also did a lot of other things that I could take issue with, but that's another story. The White House cannot just "tax the rich", cut porkbarrel spending, and solve the problem. It helps, but it is not enough. Your next president had better be prepared to play hardball, and had better have enough clout to make it real. Clout matters. Take the red pill, my friend. You have nothing left to lose by taking the red pill. You are being lied to.

Now, I don't personally care if you vote for Obama. If he's the Democratic candidate I'll probably vote for him myself. But only because it is clear that McCain thinks WWIII is our best hope for future prosperity. He is already selling that idea and selling it hard. McCain needs to take the green pill, which will make him calm and sleepy. I will not vote for Obama because I actually believe any of the horseshit he's spouting. In fact, I'm a little insulted by it. Insulted, but not surprised. Listen, Obama has no earthly idea what he's going to do about Iraq. I can't say I blame him. But making wholesale promises about pulling the troops out and leaving the women and children to fend for themselves when the men take to the streets in a full blown genocide and blaming it all on the failure of the Iraqi government to do their jobs is just plain criminal. Same goes for any other candidate who has a plan to just "bring the boys home now". It is irrelevant that Obama is not to blame for the war. The war is here. Well, technically it's there. Leadership is not a matter of fixing the blame. It's a matter of fixing the problem. Yes, he's correct when he says we should never have gone there. But he's lying his ass off when he tells you that the pretty little speech he made was politically courageous. It was totally self-serving and it cost him absolutely nothing. Vote for whomever you like, but don't be a sucker. Take the red pill people. You are being lied to.

Obama or Hillary? Barring the appearance of Mother Theresa on the White House lawn, one of these two will be the Democratic nominee. Because we've been asleep at the switch, we will not get to decide which one. Howard Dean and his friends will use their superior judgment to make that call on our behalf, and I'm afraid we actually deserve that. We've earned it through our own neglect. But whichever candidate has the sobering responsibility of sending McCain back to Arizona to complete his tanning sessions, the day will come when it's time to hold their feet to the fire. If you want to take back your country, then you have got to stop being dazzled by all the pretty colors and make those bastards answer you when you talk to them. Put 'em on notice.
And tell Howard Dean to wipe that shiteating grin off his face and explain to the voters just exactly who wrote the rules that stripped them of their vote? We have our rules???? What the fuck kind of answer is that? I can't see any difference between the DNC and those corporate warlords in the White House. Tell me again how that flaming asshole Dean or any of the clowns lined up next to him are all about change? Listen. You want your country back? Demand some accountability from all of the sheep who went along with that plan to just ignore the voters in Florida and Michigan because they're breaking Howard Dean's precious rules. That would include both Obama and Hillary. Where was the outrage? Where was the stellar judgment? Where was all that concern for the struggling middle class? I said it then and I'm saying it now - if they all agreed to that little conspiracy, what on earth makes you think they respect your rights? They'd drop your vote in the shredder with not so much as a wince if it served their personal agendas. Yah, Obama too. He's not the Second Coming, and the sooner everybody groks that little gem the better off we'll all be.

Take the red pill folks. It's your only hope.

Lordy, Lordy

Okay, deep breath. 12 steps backward.

Now. Does anyone really believe that Obama is a reverse racist who hates white people and hates his country?

Well, yes. There are some who will believe that, but they were going to believe that anyway. But seriously, does any reasonable person believe all that nonsense? I don't think so. This is not a question of Obama's personal worldview. Don't think that will stop the Republicans from painting it with exactly that brush.

There's a huge swath of the American voting public who will be swayed by the Swift Boat campaign that is definitely coming. They are Hillary's base - the working class folks across this country who also happen to be the natural enemy of any and all "special interest groups" that they feel they must compete with for jobs, housing, and college educations. This is not new - that group of people has been arguing "reverse discrimination" for decades now, and Affirmative Action is almost dead as a result. The Supreme Court signalled very clearly on the last round that they will not continue to uphold Affirmative Action. They have heard the voice of the people, and that group of nine justices who cannot be voted out of office is responding to it.

Don't think for one minute that the Republicans will not do everything they can to exploit the feelings of these folks. And remember that these voters feel they have been very effectively silenced. They cannot so much as say the word "race" without being accused of being bigots. Jeremiah Wright, however, can spew invective at his whim and that's okay - it's understandable (and yes it is, actually). But this is exactly why Hillary saw Geraldine Ferarro as the best choice to tap into that simmering undercurrent of resentment. And it worked. Hillary is perfectly willing to take a lot of media heat for it - she knows that the tactic works no matter what people say about how much they hate it. It works. It proves that she is in touch with the feelings of her voters; in a word , they feel scared. They’re watching their actual incomes dwindle while the price of basic necessities skyrockets. They are losing their homes. They can’t send their children to college. It doesn’t matter how Keith Olberman feels about it. He’s nice and comfy and his future is secure. Negative ads generate votes every time, without fail, just like sex and violence generate huge box office and advertising revenues. And Hillary knows perfectly well that people who feel that they have no voice will take it to the polls where nobody can criticize their feelings or call them names for it. They can silently agree with Geraldine and cast their votes accordingly. It's no mistake that Pennsylvania is looming ahead. Timing is everything.

But the bigger picture here is that there's a general election that is at stake. I said from the outset that running an entire campaign on "integrity" and "judgment" is an incredibly risky proposition. It doesn't take proof to destroy it, it only takes a series of questions. At this point, Obama is starting to look like he's managed to surround himself with some extremely bizarre figures who just continue casting doubts on his integrity and judgment. He didn't know Tony Rezko was a shady character? C'mon. The guy has a reputation of many years standing as being "the fixer" in Illinois politics, trading in huge sums of money and last-word influence. He never heard Rev. Wright say such things? Over 20 years, he managed to remain completely oblivious to what many working class white voters will hear as "hate speech" aimed directly at them? The guy has been selling videotapes of his sermons for decades, just in case you missed them. Even Michelle Obama’s words are being used to suggest that she hates America, hates white people, and feels alienated although she's a Princeton and Harvard educated attorney who lives in a $1.65 million mansion that she got through her husband's connections to a crook. Oh, Lordy.

McCain is going to have a field day with this and it will go on nonstop throughout the fall, trying to win over Hillary's working class base - the Reagan Democrats who have no hope of attaining either a Harvard law degree or a ritzy mansion. He's wrapped himself in the protective mantle of Ronald Reagan from the very beginning of his campaign, hammering on his credentials as a Reagan-loving New Republican. There's nothing new about McCain or any of his policies - if you want to know what they are, you need look no further than the last 8 years. But if Obama looks like an Angry Black Man with an Angry Black Wife surrounded by Angry Black Voters and Angry Black Preachers, Reagan Democrats will vote for McCain. The job of the Republicans and all their 527's is to paint him as exactly that.

Obama is not any of the things that the Republicans will swear he is. But swear it they will, loudly and often. And it will resonate with people who feel that they've been cut out of all the benefits that they are taxed unto death to pay for. That's how they feel about it. And feelings, right or wrong, do matter. People don't vote for a candidate because of his/her policies. At the end of the day they vote for the guy they like. That used to be Obama. I'm not at all sure it will stay that way.