Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) You were very nearly dead on Monday.

2) Republicans might think about logging onto this website.

3) It's nice to see they are as fucking loony as ever, and perhaps more so.

4) Poor iddle boombooms, works 100 hours a week to be rich! And I bet he has a housewife who raises his kids and sees them off to school, and yada yada yada, cuz you know what? That's a 168 hour workweek and you don't get three hours to edit a frikkin' crybaby rant, you lousy scumsucking pencilneck!

5) It's as if the entire state of Nevada lost their jobs. 8.1% unemployment. And to think, this could all have been fixed back in 2007 when I was warning people about this.

6) Wild shrimp really ARE wild!

7) Um, Too Much Information?

8) Hang on...you mean you can find sex on Craigslist? And here I was using it to sell old furniture!

9) If you're able to save money, you're hardly "getting by" and shouldn't bill yourself as such.

10) And to take this full circle, we might all be dead next Friday, too.

The Rush To Cluelessness

Lord, I rarely pray for anything for myself, but please, PLEASE, let this come to pass:

Limbaugh, clearly enjoying the attention, upped the ante Wednesday by challenging Obama to a debate on his radio show - while conceding that, yes, he is the GOP's "last man standing." The White House declined to comment.

"If you can wipe me out in a debate ... do you realize you will own the United States of America?" Limbaugh said on-air. "You will have no opposition."

The schadenfreude would be so tasty.

Indeed, I endorse Limbaugh's boast, and second his recommendation.

Rush, since I know you read this blog from time to time, I have the following strategy outlined for you. Now, this is off the top of my head so please pardon the napkin.

OK, so, first, announce your candidacy for the Republican nomination for President of the United States in 2012. This is the only way you'll ever get to debate Barack Obama is if he views you as his equal, because Presidents can't be bothered debating the common private citizen. It might take away from unimportant things like, say, running the country or fixing the mess Bush left behind.

You'll have to resign your radio post, naturally, in order to devote as much time as possible to campaigning, but a rich man like yourself can afford to do this, even if you'll have to cut corners here and there.

Next, it seems your image will require a make-over. Only 11% of Republicans believe you speak for the party and a similar percentage of voters under 30 think you have any relevance in politics.

See, if you don't resign your radio post, other Republican candidates would be entitled to equal air time, plus your radio network would be socked with FEC penalties, since it would be donating to your campaign on a daily basis to the extent of any advertising revenue they share with the stations they give the program to.

That's right: Rush's program is given away to stations, in exchange for a percentage of the ad revenues those stations enjoy. This is common for right wing radions.

So you're not really losing any income, since the radio program per se makes no income on its own merit.

Too, all those advertisers would be forced to stop paying their fees, since those too would be construed as campaign contributions, and while they'll happy pony up ad money to get your listeners' ears, based on that whole "11%" number up there, they sure as heck would run, not walk, away from being seen as endorsing you.

Well, maybe some of the male enhancement products you shill might stick around. After all, three divorces with a fat tub of goo body and a nasty ugly mouth and mind to match, you must have something going on in those trousers.

Like your wallet. I hope you don't think any of your wives actually loved you. Or your mommy, for that matter.

But I digress. Back to campaign advice.

OK, so to make you relevant again, here's what I propose: a sex scandal, preferably one involving illegal drugs. After all, if Barack Obama could win a landslide election after admitting cocaine use in his autobiography, it ought to be a slamdunk for you to abuse, say, Oxycontin with illegal prescriptions.

Or maybe Viagra. Bob Dole uses it, and look what it's done for his political career!

So that takes care of the drug end, but to make doubly sure to make you "hip" we need to get you to put "sexay" back into that swagger. I'm thinking a series of affairs with women young enough to be your grandkids.

Now, I know, in America this would be illegal, and possibly get you married for a fourth time to a kid in a Miley Cyrus T-shirt, so we probably want to import these girls.

Or boys! All the kids experiment with their sexuality, and certainly Larry Craig and Mark Foley weren't tarnished at all by their dalliances in public.

So. Now. Having made you relevant to the kids...we need to find a way to make you stand out from the other candidates. As you've so often pointed out, Barack Obama stood out from the other candidates by the colour of his skin, and I'm thinking that's the way to go here.

I propose we make you the anti-Barack. We paint your skin white...no, I mean even whiter than it is now. Mime white. And to highlight your porcine eyes, so that people won't think you're squinting, we find a good make up artist to put eyeshadow and mascara on you.

Also, blush. There are already rampant rumours after your speech at CPAC that you're dying, and painting you really white will make people think you have lung cancer or something. We need to put some of those rosy cheeks back on you! Also, since pure white tends to flatten and distort contours, I suggest perhaps a fake nose, one that stands out a bit. Maybe round. And red! Yes, that's it!

OK, I see you have the baggy pants thing down. Good. We don't want to frighten women out there with the size of your wallet, or frankly, the dust on it (I hear things). Keep them baggy. In fact, you can go even baggier. There's no such thing as too baggy, you should know.

Your feet, though. Those seem freakishly small and if there's one thing Americans can't stand, it's someone who can't fill the shoes of the man preceding him, and Obama has some big-ass shoes you'd have to fill.

In order to distract people from this, I suggest you wear shoes a few sizes too big. In fact, you could go way over the top here to demonstrate your ability to fill anybody's shoes, and wear like a size thirty.

We'll want to call attention to this outrageous shoe size of yours...you know what they say, big shoes big socks...so the shoes should be really red and make a honking noise or something.

Now, your shirts are usually pretty nice altho I think you want to draw attention away from the fact that your throat usually oozes out of the neckline. I suggest a really broad collar.

I know you have your own line of ties, and I've seen them. I think they are perfect for what we are trying to accomplish here. They attract attention, they are bright, and they really put your torso into perspective. Keep those.

Now, it troubles me to go here, but...your hair.

I think you might have too much for a white man to run for President these days. It reminds people that Bush had hair, and the last person you want to be compared with is George Bush, at least until history has its say.

I think you need to go balder. OK, you don't have to shave. Maybe a bald wig, or at least a balding wig. With fringes of hair around the side. Yea, that ought to do it. And so that people notice you've lost your hair, I suggest a change from the mousy brown to something bold. After all, you're all about bold, so how about neon yellow or bright orange?

Now I think you're ready to run for President. You'll stand out and truly, you will represent that 11% of a 28% minority of this nation that you claim as your followers!


UPDATE: David Frum, of all people, gets it, and compares Limbaugh of the 00s to Jesse Jackson of the 80s. Clever boy!

Twit-Ters

Twitter is for twits.

I'm not basing this on Jon Stewart's breathtaking analysis of the phenomenon. I'm judging this solely on the seat-of-the-pants reaction I have to a) the concept and b) the fact that the Republicans are treating it as the end-all and be-all of the next wave of politics.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

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The idiotic concept:

Jack Dorsey had grown interested in the simple idea of being able to know what his friends were doing. Specifically, Jack wondered if there might be an opportunity to build something compelling around this simple status concept. When he brought the idea up to his colleagues, it was decided that a prototype should be built.

Now, how many people could possibly be so vain that they think the rest of the entire fucking planet gives a rat's ass about what they are doing on a blow-by-blow basis?

People are dying in wars in Africa and Asia. People here at home are hanging onto their homes by their fingernails. We have a budget crisis unlike anything that's ever come before, coupled with an economic disaster the size of the universe and you mean to tell me the most interesting thing you can think of is some friend missed brushing his teeth this morning????

My god, and then you wonder how the hell the Republican party remains relevant to the national dialogue?

The folks at Twitter will tell you this is just another means of "staying connected".

Right. Maybe that's a really bad idea? Maybe the ability of someone to instantly beam that they've just masturbated to your phone or e-mail is invasive, nasty, and just too much information? Maybe the idea that I need to know what my Congresscritter's thoughts on bass fishing is a bad one?

I'm sure, if used properly, Twitter makes sense. Maybe if you are keeping track of some sales agents in the field or something. But here's the thing: we're humans. We don't USE things properly. We alter them, distort them, and customize them to how we see fit.

And so you have enormous amounts of bandwidth wasted on messages that tell the rest of the planet "Hey! I'm eating pasta for dinner!"

My god, how lonely do you have to be to send that? Worse, how lonely do you have to be to read that?

The Republicans have jumped on the Twitter like flies to shit, and here's why: you can soundbite your way to renown. You don't have to explain, you don't have to detail, you can send messages to your followers, errr, such as they are, without saying a whole lot.

In effect, Twittering is the American Idol of communication. Soft, plump, fluffy, and intrusive and ultimately without any merit or value and likely destructive in the long term. Like a marshmallow Rambo.

If there was no other reason available not to Twitter, the fact that the "Know Nothings" have jumped in with both feet should be enough to give you pause.

Now, I know I've just pissed off a bunch of people who I like and even respect, because I see Twits all over the place. They can consider this an intervention, if they like, a shaking at the shoulders and a slap across the face saying, "Good god, where is your humanity???"

Or if they want to continue in denial, then they can consider this the cranky rant of a crackpot. Either way, it makes no difference. I've got it off my chest, and I could do it in more than 140 characters.

Epic Fail

Often, I hear the accusation from right wingers who visit my humble little blog that I use a quotation from a fictitious character at the top of the page to defend my liberalism.

True. It was a line of dialogue from a character, Matt Santos (played by Jimmy Smits), on the West Wing.

Quoting a fictitious character has one great advantage, however. I don't have to defend his life to anyone:

The conventional strategy in such cases is for the administration in power to avoid talking about a mere radio critic. That would elevate him to the level of the president.

Which, it turns out, is exactly what the Obama team wants.

On Sunday's "Face the Nation," Rahm Emanuel was more than happy to build up Rush: "He is the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party, and he has been up front about what he views, and hasn't stepped back from that, which is he hopes for failure. He said it, and I compliment him on his honesty. But that's their philosophy that's enunciated by Rush Limbaugh and I think that's the wrong philosophy for America."

Rush has this coming, to be sure. He has spent the past thirty years deconstructing, even destroying, good politicians and policies not for the greater good of the nation, but for the greater good of Rush Limbaugh's wallet.

And called himself a "comedian" to boot. Remember, nothing he says should be taken seriously, yet it almost always is by the ignorant rabble that infest this great nation.

I made an observation on another blog yesterday that stupid and evil share a symbiotic relationship. There are sweet spots in this symbiotic relationship which can be and are exploited.

"Wingnut welfare" it's been called: the inability of a certain class of people to get and hold productive jobs has created a class of people whose only job is to mock and tear the rest of us who actually DO produce things of value down.

What do these untermenschen want? To quote from Lance Mannion:

They need an alternative history in which being angry, selfish, resentful, greedy, and defensive of nothing but their own right to be angry, selfish, resentful, and greedy is the definition of patriotism and in which instead of standing in the way of progress it's the way to bring it about.

Hear hear!

The grunt work for this newspeak is done not by the people who most loudly advocate for it, no no! That would be heroic, but it would also mean taking a public stance which would immediately erode their influence!

Instead, the grunt work is done by the commoners, even if those commoners hold fairly respectable positions like Member of Congress, Senator, or even Party Chair. It is they who have to defend him, defend his statements and comments, and ultimately defend his life for him.

These watercarriers genuflect at the altar of the Pronouncers merely because the Pronouncers have a microphone and a network of some sort. Limbaugh has 13.5 million listeners in a single week.

That's not many in a land of 310 million, to be sure, but in a Republican party that has seen its base contract from roughly parity with the Democratic party to being ten percent behind the Democrats after eight years of Bush.

In other words, if I'm Michael Steele, I'm not apologizing, I'm sending Limbaugh packing! But 13.5 million people in a party of less than 28 million, he can't do that easily, without destroying the party itself.

It's hard to believe that less than eight years ago, Karl Rove was talking about a permanent Republican majority.

By putting Limbaugh front and center in the line of fire, Emanuel is doing what a draft board could not do: making Rush pick up a gun and defend himself.

We know from Limbaugh's history that he cannot do this, face to face. Remember the time he was to host the Pat Sajak show in 1990, and when confronted by hecklers for ACT UP, they emptied the studio out and a visibly shaken Rush was forced to kowtow to his guests?

And the clue that he has been married and divorced three times tells us that strength in the face of his rageaholism, ultimately, beats him down, that he would rather fail and give up than fight for something, anything, worth having.

Unless he's going to admit that the women he's "loved" are disposable.

Bring the sad, sadistic little clown out of hiding, and take away his microphone and his little studio, with the thick walls and the lonely little sound board. Put him in front of people and make him answer for his hatred and his terrorism.

It's like popping a big fat pus-filled angry inflamed zit: it will hurt to do, but once it's done, you can bandage up and move on.

Dog Bites Man

And conservatives consume porn faster than liberals:

Americans may paint themselves in increasingly bright shades of red and blue, but new research finds one thing that varies little across the nation: the liking for online pornography.

A new nationwide study of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.

"When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different," says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.

However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.

OK, here's the issue with this.

It's not about moral hypocrisy. People have confessed one faith while worshipping at the altar of others for millennia.

It's about economic hypocrisy. I get the sense that conservatives would like porn to be kept under the covers, errrr, so to speak, in order to monopolize the market on it.

If we lived in a truly free market enterprise society, then porn would likely be the second largest business, right after alcohol and other narcotics (I'm including cigarettes).

Period. Look at, even as tightly regulated as those markets are, how much is spent in America alone.

Porn could be the stimulus package, errrrrrrr, so to speak, that would help America recover its economy.

So what really keeps porn off the free market? Morals?

We send soldiers overseas to kill for us, yet the Bible tells us not to kill, but nothing about looking at naked men or women.

We open shops and businesses seven days a week (mostly) even though the Bible says to keep the Sabbath holy.

Indeed, about the only two outright bans on any sexuality in the Bible are the story of Onan's masturbation and the commandment that states, "Thou shalt not commit adultery," and even that was less a moral statement than a statement not to screw around with your neighbor's wife (a social commentary).

So how is it on the one hand, conservatives can claim moral higher ground in preventing the distribution of pornography, and on the other hand, utilize it so dramatically?

Errr, so to speak.

The only logical reason I can come up with, errrr, so to speak, is to monopolize the market on it, to prevent those who might limit the supply conservatives have enjoyed from obtaining it.

You know, teenagers.

Which brings up an entire other can of worms regarding the attitudes of this nation towards horny teenagers and sex.

But that, I'm afraid, is probably best left to another column. Or to Bristol Palin.

March Snowstorm

snow day 003
Originally uploaded by actor212

Yes. We had a significant snowfall for the first time this season.

No, I did not get a snow day.

Rat fucking bastards...

Buy More Tea

The ridiculous sight of a few dozen assholes corporate sheeple braving the chilly airs off Lake Michigan notwithstanding, it turns out the entire Chicago Tea Party (and the sister movement in DC, as well as others) was a sham, orchestrated and staged by the conservative wing of the Republican party:

What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced. Namely, the Koch family, the multibilllionaire owners of the largest private corporation in America, and funders of scores of rightwing thinktanks and advocacy groups, from the Cato Institute and Reason Magazine to FreedomWorks. The scion of the Koch family, Fred Koch, was a co-founder of the notorious extremist-rightwing John Birch Society.”

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm..,and the proof?

“Within hours of Santelli’s rant, a website called ChicagoTeaParty.com sprang to life. Essentially inactive until that day, it now featured a YouTube video of Santelli’s “tea party” rant and billed itself as the official home of the Chicago Tea Party. The domain was registered in August, 2008 by Zack Christenson, a dweeby Twitter Republican and producer for a popular Chicago rightwing radio host Milt Rosenberg—a familiar name to Obama campaign people. Last August, Rosenberg, who looks like Martin Short’s Irving Cohen character, caused an outcry when he interviewed Stanley Kurtz, the conservative writer who first “exposed” a personal link between Obama and former Weather Undergound leader Bill Ayers. As a result of Rosenberg’s radio interview, the Ayers story was given a major push through the Republican media echo chamber, culminating in Sarah Palin’s accusation that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.” That Rosenberg’s producer owns the “chicagoteaparty.com” site is already weird—but what’s even stranger is that he first bought the domain last August, right around the time of Rosenburg’s launch of the “Obama is a terrorist” campaign. It’s as if they held this “Chicago tea party” campaign in reserve, like a sleeper-site. Which is exactly what it was.

(hat tip to Barry Ritholtz for making sure this hit the spotlights)

Which now makes Santelli's fifteen minutes of fame extension (e.g. the claim that Obama's White House was now investigating him based on some really crappy evidence that only a real paranoid, a coward, or a Republican (which by definition is a paranoid coward) would dare extrapolate from.

Just in case, you know, you thought the Republicans were done being rat bastards...

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) Could this be Atlantis? No, not the resort, you knucklehead, the lost city! You know...

Knowing her fate, Atlantis sent out ships to all corners of the Earth.

On board were the Twelve:

The poet, the physician, the farmer, the scientist,

The magician and the other so-called Gods of our legends.

 

2)  Your fifteen minutes of fame are over, Santelli. Shut up and stop being so paranoid.

 

3) A see-through fish has been discovered and photographed. (see also item 8)

 

4) And then they wonder why they lost the election...

 

5) Of course, it's fun to watch Tucker Carlson be the voice of reason...

 

6) This CPAP, excuse me, CPAC conference is a bundle-o-laughs. When I read this, I immediately thought of Kevin Bacon in Animal House, getting run over by the panicked mob while begging them to remain calm.

 

7) Basically, the economy gave Bush a push out the door.

 

8) Bizarre aquatic animal news is not limited to transparent fish this week.

 

9) Apparently, there's a market for worn-out vaginas, in case, you know, you were wondering.

 

10) Run a $750 billion company into the groundand get paid $500 billion for the privilege. Accused of stealing $2 in bottle deposits, YOU'RE FIRED!

Way To Go!

A big shout out and "Attaboy!" to my good blogging buddy, Gort42 for being interviewed by a Dutch newspaper because he was all over the "locking up kids for cash" scandal in northeast Pennsylvania.

If you aren't aware of this story, go read up on it at Gort's place.

Greed Is God

This week seems to be my week to explore humanity and the emotional states underlying our current national crises of the economy and the political atmosphere.

So let's take this from a different perspective and try to tie them together.

Fortuitously, I was reading an article in National Geographic magazine about the burgeoning oil sand industry in Canada.

Lest you think that natural resource exploitation and the ravaging of native lands only happens in tropical climes, you need to read that article. However, it's this quote that caught my eye and got me thinking:

"It's my belief that when government attempts to manipulate the free market, bad things happen," Premier Stelmach told a gathering of oil industry executives that year. "The free-market system will solve this."

But the free market does not consider the effects of the mines on the river or the forest, or on the people who live there, unless it is forced to. Nor, left to itself, will it consider the effects of the oil sands on climate. Jim Boucher has collaborated with the oil sands industry in order to build a new economy for his people, to replace the one they lost, to provide a new future for kids who no longer hunt ptarmigan in the moonlight. But he is aware of the trade-offs. "It's a struggle to balance the needs of today and tomorrow when you look at the environment we're going to live in," he says. In northern Alberta the question of how to strike that balance has been left to the free market, and its answer has been to forget about tomorrow. Tomorrow is not its job. 

Today v. tomorrow. The now v. the then. Hmmmm...sounds familiar...

And this is the struggle that President Obama as well as every other world leader faces today, the juggling of the efficiencies of the free market against the need to protect the environment and the people, to state the general case.

There are no simple answers to be had here, as much as the conservatives would like you to believe. They want you to believe that because in an environment (pun intended) that is bereft of ideas, we cling to the past, to ideas that work sometimes if at all. The simple answer is to let the market sort it out.

I've said before that the power of the market, the real strength of it, is to weed out weakness, to promote a sort of economic evolution.

When it works well, it's extremely good at this. I don't think the market has worked well since the Reagan administration, and I'm not completely sure why.

Certainly, with Reagan, we saw the fledgling crony capitalist markets. The amount of money suddenly available in the junk bond market, the extraction of mythical valuations of "goodwill" and the raping of pension plans for the cash they contained, all combined to create barriers to entry in industries as diverse as banking and retail.

If you're wondering why Wal-Mart is ubiquitous, but you can't find an Alexander's or a Gimbel's (sorry, I'm Noo Yawk oriented), this is why: they were swept up in junk bond mania.

At first, this was an efficiency exercise. Truly there were companies that were wasting resources, paying, you know, salaries and pensions, among other things. The wave of mergers and acquisitions probably, at first, cut a lot of fat out of the marketplace, setting the stage for the enormous growth of the 1990s.

However, all good things become bad in due time, and the wolves howling at the door stopped wanting just fat and wanted the real meat.

The market, rather than be efficient, became cannibalistic.

We've seen this time and time again in America: they call it a "bubble" but in truth, it's the self-feeding cycle of cannibalism, developed through what Greenspan called "irrational exuberance".

Another Reagan-era monstrosity is the flow of corporate money into politics. A nonsensical and absurd ruling (1978 Boston v Bellotti) by the SCOTUS allowed that corporations, which are basically money magnets, have the same free speech rights as persons, and so should be allowed to contribute to politicians and to have a say in the running of the country.

All that money that had been paid out in dividends and re-invested in making the company more efficient and more responsive to their customers now became a cudgel to force legislators to bend the rules of commerce in their favor.

And now we have what we have: a Congress beholden to special interest groups, because the rewards of all that contributed money is more money to spend on advertising, which means the price of campaigning skyrockets, which means the only way a person can afford to run (even Obama) is to suckle at the teat of corporate America.

The Chinese have a saying: all feasts must have an end.

As well, governmental regulation has its good points, and its absurdities. Too much regulation can stifle creativity. Too little regulation, and you get salmonella in your peanut butter. The tendency in this swing of the pendulum is to enforce "just right sized" rules, but eventually, there will be too many and they will be too burdensome.

So which becomes the bigger burden? Too much regulation or too much money floating around?

Neither. Both. And there's the problem.

We'll continue this whipsaw back and forth until someone has the gumption to stand up and say "enough". No more corporate political contributions, get that stupid decision overturned and finally work for the people, the individuals, and not the aggolmerations of capital and political power that have worked to effectively disenfranchise the entire nation.

This is not a Republican issue (altho it tends to affect Republican administrations more than Democratic) or a Democratic issue, but a national issue.

Greed is god in this country, and it's time to tear down the idols and expose the feets of clay.

On The Clock

Each morning, I sit and read my e-mail in the bathroom.

This morning, at precisely six, ThumbPer meowed. He meowed the meow of a cat who was patiently waiting his turn. It was time to go meditate with a cup of coffee and a cat.

At precisely six. I wondered how he knew, what biological mechanism made his clock tick at that exact moment? Can he read a clock? Does he own a watch?

Then I began to think about the world. We're all run on clocks and calendars. Most people in this country, and many more in the world outside it, have to live by a clock. We log into work, we run to catch a train, our TV shows are on at a specific time.

And then I thought about my job, and something odd occured to me: the people who own the company, they aren't really beholden to clocks. Things get done when they want them to get done, on their schedule. Yes, to a degree, where necessary they have to genuflect to time.

But not as often as you might think.

All this leads me to some thoughts about Barack Obama's address last night:

[W]e have lived through an era where too often, short-term gains were prized over long-term prosperity; where we failed to look beyond the next payment, the next quarter, or the next election. A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.

Well, that day of reckoning has arrived, and the time to take charge of our future is here.

He's right, you know, and he didn't single out anybody, didn't exempt you or me, the rich or the poor, the bankers or the brokers (well, maybe the bankers a little), or Democrats or Republicans.

We've all lived as though time was a renewable resource. But it's not. Time is the avenger. Time is what happens when you've lived one way, always looking in the other direction. Time is the wall you run into.

The most curious struggle within life is to balance two things: now and then.

We should all plan for the future and make contingencies for what happens then.

We should all "live in the now," as we say in acting classes.

Funny thing is, we've failed miserably at both.

We've had a thirty year headstart on renewable energy, a fairly simple, logical, and healthier alternative to burning mushed dinosaur soup. We import more of that goo than ever before.

We've had twenty years of warnings with respect to the rising costs of healthcare, and the declining wages to pay for them. Yet here we are, watching an American go bankrupt every thirty seconds because he or she can't afford to pay for the God-given gift of a healthy life.

We've had decades of warnings with respect to global warming and the twin disaster of sudden ice ages (and conservatives? These are not conflicting ideas. The earth can warm up as a whole while we plunge into an ice age in the northern and southern temperate zones), yet our planet is getting hotter and the warmest ten years on record have been the past ten.

And we've sat on our asses and did nothing, except mock Al Gore, mock Jimmy Carter and mock Hillary Clinton.

(Hm. Those are all Democrats! But I digress...)

The Obama stimulus package/budget announcement tries to reconcile these two aspects of time. The stimulus package is for the now. The budget is for the then.

It is a bold and grand vision, to be sure, and the real test comes in a year or two, when the economy has (we hope) recovered and the deficit inches down at first. Can Congress be mature enough to sit on its hands and continue to tinker with the deficit or will the special interests begin to ratchet up the rhetoric, which actually began with Bobby Jindal's amateurish and childish (Fox's words, not mine!)response to Obama's speech last night?

Time waits for no one, and it is on this basis that we, the people, must take control of our country again. It is we who must keep our Congresscritters responsible and it is we who must keep Barack Obama responsible (admittedly, I sense this will be the easier task). And it is we who must keep our local politicians responsible for the funds they receive from the Feds and from our tax dollars.

We have to get off our asses and own our time on this planet. Own the now. Own the then.

If the farm subsidy to Big Agra is about to be snuck through a late night session by the critters from the cornfields, then it's up to us to rally up the rest of the nation to put a stop to it.

If the Defense Department is insistent on buying yet another legacy weapon for a war they fought twenty years ago, it's up to us to call them on the carpet.

It's our future, not our elected officials, who, like my bosses, have forgotten what a clock really is.

A marker in the river of our lives that delineates the now from the then. We live on the clock. We need to act like it.

On The Up Beat

Apropos of my column yesterday about denial and America comes this story:

President Obama's address Tuesday to a joint session of Congress will have a heavy emphasis on the economy and will try to strike an optimistic tone, aides said.

That's a sign Obama has heard the criticism, including from former President Clinton, that he needs to mix sober talk with an upbeat bottom line.

"He believes we will meet these challenges and lift ourselves out of this" recession, one top aide said. "He will say, 'The best days are ahead of us.' "

First, you'll note that this isn't being called a "State Of The Union" address. That will likely come later this year, once the stimulus package has begun to work its way through the economy (figure in May).

More important, comparisons have been drawn between Obama's recent doom-and-gloom speechifying and Jimmy Carter's, which has given a talking point to the mainstream media, beholden as it is to conservative talking points, owned as it is by conservative white men.

A President walks a difficult line, to be sure, which is why we will accept little white lies from him (or her). He can't appear too optimistic or too pessimistic.

Let's take Jimmy Carter as an example. Here was a man who truly was as honest as a President could afford to be. He spoke plainly about the need to conserve energy (the man was a visionary) and to analyze the country's mood, speaking to the general malaise we were suffering.

And got hammered for both.

In Obama's case, his emphasis on looking forward will be a tonic against the whining, mewling little children on the right wing, who talk about deficits and debt as if it was something they suddenly discovered after 8 years of Bush spending us into oblivion. After all, what's a trillion dollars to help your countrymen, when you spent at least that much on a nation 6,000 miles away that you will never visit populated by people who don't particularly like you much.

That's not to say that the deficit is nothing important...even if Dick Cheney said we could safely ignore it. It is, and Obama is correct to address the need to tighten belts.

There are, however, precious few places where one can cut spending much and have a measurable effect on the deficit as a whole. In 2008, entitlement spending, apart from Social Security and Medicare-- both of which are funded off-budget under their own trust funds, but which represent roughly 43% of tax revenues, about $1.3 trillion-- is roughly 27%, of which about 2/5 is mandatory. Interest on outstanding debt is another 10% (and rising).

Leaving defense spending of 21% (absent the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which have always been unbudgeted, until the Obama administration).

So factor in the defense budget of $626 billion, plus another $500 billion for the wars, and you see that defense spending rivals and might even exceed the budget for any other individual entitlement.

US defense spending is twice the combined defense spending of the rest of NATO. The US spends roughly 47% of the world's defense spending, meaning that if we avoid pissing the entire world off, we have more weapons than we could possibly need. Ever. Right now.

That's not to say that we should stop finding more and better means of defending ourselves. It just means that we can make do with what we have for a while, and do not need shiny new aircraft carriers every year or spanking new planes every quarter.

It means, in short, making Federal spending fall more into line with the actual revenues received from the various states. Fortunately, most of the governors who lined up against the stimulus package have been from states who net more in Federal spending than they contribute in taxes!

They don't want the money? Fine. No problem. We'll leave that money on the table, and cut defense spending, close bases and cancel contracts. I got no problem with that.

We are, quite literally, at a place where we can and must choose butter over guns. You can't eat a bullet, unless you intend, you know...

A Spoonful Of Sugar

Frank Rich has a column today which spells out the trouble with Americans and how that directly plays into the current economic crisis.

 

In a word, denial:

"I don't want to pretend that today marks the end of our economic problems," the president said on Tuesday at the signing ceremony in Denver. He added, hopefully: "But today does mark the beginning of the end."

Does it?

No one knows, of course, but a bigger question may be whether we really want to know. One of the most persistent cultural tics of the early 21st century is Americans' reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news. We are plugged into more information sources than anyone could have imagined even 15 years ago. The cruel ambush of 9/11 supposedly "changed everything," slapping us back to reality. Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable. Obama's toughest political problem may not be coping with the increasingly marginalized G.O.P. but with an America-in-denial that must hear warning signs repeatedly, for months and sometimes years, before believing the wolf is actually at the door.

"Shocked by the foreseeable" is a phrase I wish I had said. 

 

I'd give Americans more credit that Rich does, in that I'd go so far as to say they DO foresee the foreseeable, but get reassurances from the powers that be that things will be OK. The real trick comes in that, when the PTB are wrong, which happens with alarming frequency, they are also usually in control of enough of the mainstream media (including, I'm afraid, your own paper, Mr. Rich) that they manage to elide the rough patches, and keep people firmly convinced of their authority with doublespeak. 

 

The Bush administration was the master of elision. Even after your example, the WMDs in Iraq and the exposure of the fraud by Joe Wilson, enough people, particularly in the talking-head sector, bought the administration story that Wilson had an agenda, that his wife set up an anti-war sham of an investigation.

 

Which lasted until Katrina and the shameful embarrassment that was the Bush administration was finally uncovered. Suddenly, Joe Wilson looked like a saint in the eyes of America. Suddenly, Scooter Libby and by extension, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney looked like flim-flam men. 

 

Usually, you'd assume a President will lie, a little. Like a lie about a blow job. That we can live with. Or a lie about selling arms to Iran to gain the release of hostages. Again, not an unlivable lie, although that one's taking us into dark territory.

 

Here's the problem with the wholesale betraying of American trust: now we are in a position where we have no choice but to trust our President at a time when even he can't be sure what he's doing will work, at the most critical juncture in our nation's history since at least the Civil War.

 

Literally, this crisis could do what slavery could not: tear us asunder.

 

And you hear this unease with respect to Obama's hand on the wheel in the whines and gibes of both conservatives and bankers (a large overlap to be sure).

 

The Congressional Republicans who, to a man, boycotted any bipartisanship on the stimulus package and now speak of refusing funding from the bill are idiots, of course. The bill dropped specific provisions that the Republicans objected to, and if you look at the rest of what they were whining about, it amounted to a hill of beans in the overall cost of the bill. Meanwhile, many spoke with great pleasure at the money they were bringing home to their districts.

 

I mean, the Democrats were sending to their districts.

 

An artful compromise, to be sure, and yet the GOP conservatives are whining about it.

 

Similarly, as Rich points out, the bankers who are in denial about what they stand to lose (basically, everything they personally have at stake in their banks, which ain't much!) are worried about, well, nationalization.

Nevermind that what's best for the country might very well BE that nationalization, at least for the now. Nevermind that 310 million Americans stand to benefit from the security of knowing the government really will step in and help. This handful of a thousand, checkbooks open, pens at the ready, will attempt to wrest the good of the nation out of the greedy clutches of the people.

 

And that's sad.

 

There are harsh realities in the world, and that Pollyannas are at the helm of the minority party and their fiscal overlords is disturbing. That there's this belief that somehow Americans can be lulled back to sleep at this point seems unlikely, and yet, tax and spending cuts seem to be the order of the day, like yesterday's spaghetti which didn't quite sell well enough then might somehow become the staple of the thousands who walked past the diner yesterday.

 

Face it, Republicans, bankers, we've moved on.

Heer's Two A Berry Fien Qat, Indeed

Mess you, budd! Dere beddah bee a stait fooneral, or Ah scartch Obamers ize out!

Friday Music Blogging

Peter Gabriel - Shaking The Tree

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) Curiously, I was just down there this past weekend, and my college career started there just after the student unrest of the 70s. I must be a bad influence!

 

2) I'm not sure about the political demands of the students, but I can certainly get behind the "more transparency" bit. Having had more than my fair share of run-ins with the university administrators...I know, what? Me? A troublemaker?...the whole veil of secrecy annoyed me more than anything else.

 

3) By all means, South Carolina! Please save us the money! But don't come running to us after the next hurricane!

 

4) No retraction, eh? Ol' Johnnie Mac must have been tapping that!

 

5) The word "moron" shall now be redefined as "Santelli". Imagine thinking that what diminishes your neighbor is none of your business! I think it's about time the corporatocracy realize the free ride is over.

 

6) My church did something I can be proud of.

 

7) Something on the order of two-thirds of the country lives near an urban center. It's about time we had a President who understood this.

 

8) They really should just be sorry, full stop.

 

9) The Oscars are this weekend. And while I think Sean Penn will win for Best Actor, Mickey Rourke probably ought to be invited on stage for his moment in the sun as well. I don't normally make Oscar pics, but I think it will be Penn, Winslet, and Slumdog.

 

10) OhmyGod, the old sight gag is TRUE!

Opt Out Privacy

There's an interesting decision in the case of a couple suing Google for invasion of privacy:

A ruling issued Wednesday by Judge Amy Reynolds Hay in a Pennsylvania district court states that Google's Street View mapping service is not an invasion of privacy. Judge Reynolds has dismissed a lawsuit against the search giant and has denied a request for injunctive relief that sought to block Google from publishing Street View imagery.

The lawsuit was filed last year by Aaron and Christine Boring, who contend that Google violated their privacy when a Street View camera car drove past a "private road" sign in their driveway in order to take pictures of their house.

Google countered that there was already a public record photo of the house, filed by the county tax assessor's office, and said this proved that "complete privacy does not exist." Perhaps that's a point, altho I would argue strongly that being forced to file with the county is not the same thing as having a private enterprise drive up your road. This would be much like claiming that, because you get US mail, you should be forced to accept each and every stinking flyer that a car wash decides to litter your property with.

 

Here's where the argument gets interesting: Google claims (and they're probably right) that they protect privacy on an "opt out" basis, that if you ask them, they will eliminate your house from Street View.

 

Um, what?

 

It strikes me that privacy is a little like virginity: once you've lost it, you can't exactly ask for it back. If anything, then, privacy shouldn't be an opt-in right, but an opt-out right.

 

In other words, Google, no matter how benevolent or benign your purpose may be, it seems to me that the polite thing to do, particularly when it comes to driving onto someone's property, is to ask permission.

 

The judge's rationale for this boorish invasion by Google? In two words, utterly ridiculous:

Judge Reynolds sided with Google and concluded that the Street View service doesn't meet the criteria for an unlawful intrusion. Case law precedents define an actionable intrusion as one that causes "mental suffering, shame, or humiliation to a person of ordinary sensibilities." Reynolds doesn't believe that sufficient evidence was provided to demonstrate that Street View can cause such damage.

"While it is easy to imagine that many whose property appears on Google's virtual maps resent the privacy implications, it is hard to believe that any—other than the most exquisitely sensitive—would suffer shame or humiliation. The Plaintiffs have not alleged facts to convince the Court otherwise," the Judge wrote in the decision.

The Judge also pointed out that the Borings have not taken steps to have the images removed from Street View through Google's opt-out process and have, in fact, decreased their own privacy by drawing attention to themselves with the lawsuit. They did not file the suit under seal, which would have minimized exposure.

Judge Reynolds, now arguably the stupidest jurist in the States (privacy suddenly looks pretty good, Judge, don't it?), has clearly made a brutish and Neaderthalic interpretation of the law, very much akin to the rape victim being told, "well, hell, don't dress like that, beeyatch!"

 

Amy Reynolds has compounded the heartache that the Borings (intriguing name, by the way) now feel by basically telling them, "No no, you didn't read my mind and you got the wrong answer."

 

"Minimized exposure"? By filing a lawsuit, the Constitutional method of handling these things (unless you want us to fly to Google headquarters and picket or worse), the Borings availed themselves of the legal recourse open to them, but that recourse has been held against them because it wasn't perfect enough.

 

As for the whole case law precedent that "mental suffering, shame, or humiliation" must accompany an invasion of privacy, isn't the simple act of exposure a mental suffering? We're talking about a violation, severe enough that the Borings took it upon themselves to fight back. That act alone ought to qualify as evidence of a mental suffering, unless you are going to claim that somehow this couple is masochistic enough to take on one of the biggest frikkin' corporations in the world and is enjoying their moment in the spotlight.

 

Judge Reynolds, maybe you need to be back in traffic court!

 

 

On The Margins

We all know or have heard of people who live on the margin: it might be by circumstance or by choice, but they tend to live a hand-to-mouth existence, or carefully marshall their resources to survive, day to day, paycheck to paycheck, but turning their backs on society.

 

I thought about this as I read a follow up to the California budget crisis I discussed yesterday:

 

California Republicans oust leader amid budget lockdown

 

As California Senators were literally locked in a budget debate overnight, the chamber's Republicans overthrew their leader because he had agreed to a budget deal with billions of dollars in tax increases.

Dave Cogdill, R-Fresno, was ousted as Senate leader in favor of Dennis Hollingsworth, R-Murietta, who made it clear he opposes raising taxes to balance the budget which is more than 15 weeks overdue.

Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, made good on his promise to lock senators inside the Capitol after another vote on a budget compromise fell a vote short again overnight. Steinberg said he is prepared to keep the chamber in "lockdown" as long as it takes to approve a budget.

If it lasts long enough, California will soon have a second major fossil discovery. But I digress...

 

It's been interesting to watch the GOP return to the same failed stance that got us into this mess in the first place: cut taxes, cut spending, and find some way to hope the deficit doesn't balloon while praying this time the economy will boom. Meanwhile, companies across the land are struggling, homeowners in every state in the union are having a really tough time making ends meet, and the worst is yet to come.

 

After all, if you thought the mortgage crunch was bad, wait until consumer credit hits the fan. Give it another couple of months, I figure.

 

Now, you know the Republicans have some people who actually have a brain, if only a few, and those voices, while probably being ignored for the grandstanding going on, have some weight somewhere in the smoke-filled rooms of not only Sacramento, but Washington, DC and every other political power center across this land.

 

So the question is, in the face of the worst economic meltdown in history (not yet, but I have little doubt it's going to happen) and after an election in which they were all but run out of the nation on a rail, why would the Republicans suddenly stiffen their backs and start throwing reason and caution to the wind?

 

It confuses me, frankly. Yes, you can make the case that the GOP is beholden to the Limbaugh-cheesers, who stink up the place while adding little flavor to anything they touch. But look, even George W. Bush, a man who was about as conservative as they come, considering how he was cheered on by the same knuckleheads who are determined to sink the ship of state(s), repudiated the ultimate conservative playing card: let this shit stink the place out, while the roaches take over.

 

Even Bush couldn't stoop that low. Even he saw his legacy in peril. Even Bush saw the degradation of a once-great land at the hands of people like Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh and the frightened reactionaries of the Republican party, and stopped short of going there.

 

The grace of American politics is it runs top-down: things that happen at the Federal level tend to trickle down to the states and then the counties. A repudiation in Washington of failed policies and mean-spirited political hackery will eventually make its way to the rest of us.

 

Too little, too late, as they say.

If Anyone Denies The Need For A Stimulus Bill...

Tell them to read the news today:

 SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — After a frustrating holiday weekend that failed to yield the one vote needed to end California's budget stalemate, the state is poised to begin layoff proceedings Tuesday for 20,000 government workers.

In addition to the layoffs, the state also plans to halt all remaining public works projects, potentially putting thousands of construction workers out of jobs.

"We are dealing with a catastrophe of unbelievable proportions," said state Sen. Alan Lowenthal, a Democrat from Long Beach and chairman of the Senate transportation committee.

Senate leader Darrell Steinberg announced late Monday that lawmakers had failed to find the final vote in his chamber as Republicans refused to support tax increases. He called a session for Tuesday and said he would put the tax provisions of the budget proposal up for a vote, even if they would not pass.

"Sure," they'll say, "it's just 'Tax-and-spendifornia'! The bastion of liberal thinking and left-wing values!"

 

Eh. Not so much:

TOPEKA | Kansas tax refunds, employee paychecks and money for schools are all on hold after a showdown erupted Monday between Republican legislative leaders and Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius.

The game of political chicken places state taxpayers, workers and schoolchildren squarely in the middle of a politically charged battle over massive budget cuts.

Republicans, who hold majorities in both chambers of the Legislature, blocked Sebelius' proposal to borrow $225 million from healthy state funds to cover shortages in accounts used to meet the state's payroll and issue tax refunds.

So Kansas may end up selling apples out of carts any day now, as well.

 

Keep in mind, when it comes to California, the ridiculous "Prop 13" and how that is now echoing down the corridors of bad governance. For instance, Proposition 13 has probably contributed mightily to the teetering housing market in California, by far the largest state with a continuing depressed housing market that has not responded at all to any of the Bush/Paulson bank bailout.

 

Too, the ludicrous Prop13 has raised sales taxes and user fees and taxes by exponential amounts in the thirty years since its passage.

 

Furthermore, it has had the bizarrely liberal effect of giving the centralized state government more say in how cities and localties can structure their taxes and fees, as well as property values. As an example, if a town wants to raise its school tax, it has to do so by a 55% supermajority (this used to be a two-thirds vote).

 

In Kansas, we have a very different picture. There, the Republican-controlled legislature is trying to prevent the governor, Kathleen Sebelius, from shifting state funds as she sees fit, in order to cover some entitlement obligations and of course, payroll. Clearly, the Grover Norquist school of governance is alive and well and terrorizing Kansans to this day.

 

Sebelius' reaction ought to be interesting. There are roughly $10 million available and $24 million in payroll, mostly schools and hospitals, and another $20 million in Medicaid payments due this week.

 

Will she take a page out of Bill Clinton's book and shut down the state, including the legislature? Stay tuned!

 

Best In Show

 

A belated congratulations to Ann Coulter, for winning Best In Show at this year's Westminster Kennel Club show.

...and a big hello to my new found friends at Margaret and Helen's place. Go visit. To say this blog is unique is an understatement. And a hat tip to Nomi for linking me in comments.