A La Recherche Du Temps Perot

The Teabaggers are a blip on the radar. Poorly conceived, ill-timed and ultimately as all movements born of anger, doomed to fizzle out.

 

You may recall from the 1990s a similar "movement" gathered force when Ross Perot managed to climb into Presidential politics spending billions of his own money to create what ultimately became the Reform Party. That party scored exactly one coup: electing Jesse Ventura governor of Minnesota. Apart from that, any impact it had on American politics was to exacerbate already existing memes, like stealing more votes from George H W Bush than from Bill Clinton, all but guaranteeing Clinton's election, which was pretty much a foregone conclusion by the time Perot slipped into the polls.

 

That "movement" managed to slide quickly to the fringes despite the fact that it had been well-financed by Perot, and had gathered an impressive percentage of the popular vote in 1992. So abrupt was its decline into irrelevance that, even tho it is still an active party in America, the Teabaggers have refused to even discuss an alliance.

 

This, despite as has been pointed out, the Teabaggers are woefully short of money and woefully short of organization outside of a handful of states where they have managed to cull a few insigificant victories in a few small but strategic elections: convention votes, an underattended primary, and of course, the special election in Massachussetts less won by Scott Brown than lost by Martha Coakley...who promptly turned his back on the Baggers!

 

Tomorrow, Baggers will have opportunities in Nevada and California to gain some momentum. Don't bet on it. While they stand a good chance of stealing a Senate nomination in Nevada, it's no lock and this is Nevada where establishment politicians are despised, right or left. California will likely see the repudiation of the Baggers, an intriguing development from the state that delivered us unto the evil that is Ronald Reagan and is shackled in its bankruptcy by Prop 13.

 

The Baggers represent America at its worst, and while there are parts of the country where the worst is accepted and even applauded, it's to America's credit that this movement remains mired in the bottom of the toilet.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) America is a great nation. I think it is still the greatest nation on the planet, but not by as big a margin as it was in 2000. I don't know if that's the fault of the previous administration, but they sure didn't help and their partisans are still holding us back. We can be greater. We must not fear change. We must not fear progress. America has only been great when it has moved forward, when it has become more inclusive. There is an element in this nation that would turn the clock back, that would deprive, that would recurse.

 

They are wrong. We cannot compete by going back. We must move forward.

 

2) This. Moar, plz? After eight years of people dodging and stonewalling responsibility, first Obama and then a lowly umpire making the Worst. Call. Evah! have owned up to their mistakes. This is a teachable moment, as they say. In a nation filled with people who deny and obfuscate their support of really terrible ideas, and really terrible people, it's about time someone stepped up and told the truth.

 

3) Speaking of bad ideas...

 

4) It looks like the best political races...if you read "best" as funniest...will once again be from California. There's something about super-rich candidates who don't ever get no for an answer being told "no!" over and over again that brings out the "best" in people.

 

5) By the way, as I typed this, the Top Cap was installed in the Gulf. Looks like it will contain most of the leak, but what about the rest?

 

6) Here we go again.

 

7) Add Hungary to the list of European nations on the brink. This is not good, folks. World wars have started for less. Keep in mind that Hungary has a large middle class, low taxes and an austerity budget. In other words, conservative heaven. Which means it has had to borrow to provide even basic services.

 

8) Why the iPhone App store is far and away the best way to buy apps: safety and security.

 

9) Topless men at Delaware Beach cause civil rights stir. Yup. There's a catch! Will moobs (or as I like to call them "bobbletits") be next?

 

10) Ur doin it rong.

Malevolence

Over the past few years, I've warned of two things: the mortgage crisis and the consumer debt crisis. I felt the consumer debt crisis would be the far worse of the two, and would likely drive the economy into depression.

 

One I predicted would come to pass shortly after the other. One has come to pass. So the clock is ticking.

WASHINGTON – The economy trudges ahead yet debt dogs many Americans, stressing them out even as they firm up their own financial foundations. [...]

So why aren't the stressed — and the not-so-stressed — feeling better?

For starters, it just doesn't feel much like a recovery to many people.

Unemployment is stubbornly high — 9.9 percent. The jobless face fierce competition for work. Those with a job are watching their paychecks shrink.

A growing number of people are at risk of falling into foreclosure, and only those with the most stellar credit probably can get a new loan. AP-GfK polls show that only 20 percent say the economy is good, compared with 15 percent last year.

Going into 2008, the total amount of consumer debt-- mortgages, car and student loans, and revolving credit-- was roughly equal to the national debt. The bailouts changed that.

I felt the mortgage crisis would trigger a consumer debt crisis for a couple of reasons:

1) A mortgage crisis shakes the very foundation of the American Dream-- to own a home and to maintain and grow equity in that home as a long term investment that will fund your retirement.

2) A mortgage crisis would automatically force banks to tighten their lending to consumers. Since Americans had been outspending their incomes by sizeable amounts and borrowing against their homes to do so, forcing them to rely on savings they were using to pay down debt would tank the economy. There would be panicked borrowing, refinancings, and even full-on foreclosures as people just gave up. Mitigated, of course, by the awful bankruptcy reform of the Bush years. Consumers are now looking at decades of debt piled up ahead of them and no easy solution to shift the burden away from higher priced debt to lower priced HELOCs and mortgages.

3) In addition to tightening credit to consumers, banks would pressure consumer debt by imposing more fees, higher interest rates and tightening rules, all designed to make debt less convenient. And more profitable, of course. But given that the banks had to scrape knees to get past the mortgage crisis (which by all accounts could have been much worse), its understandable they wouldn't want the other shoe to drop, and so would discourage consumer borrowing.

The reflex response would be that consumers had this coming, that instead of buying $150 Nike sneakers and $200 iPods, they should have been working to firm up their own houses.

That's partly true, but is a far more marginal factor than many would admit. Elizabeth Warren, Harvard professor and currently the Congressional watchdog on the bank bailout, has studied consumer debt and finds there are three major contributing factors to why people load up: divorce, job loss, and long term health care costs.

Often, two of those three hit the same family at the same time, and in a number of cases, all three swamp a family. That's not to say that there isn't an awful lot of ridiculous spending going on. An entire marketing sector of the American economy thrives on selling us shit we don't need but must have.

But as with fast food and obesity, there comes a point where even the most ascetic among us finds themselves grasping that iPad off the shelf. It's easy, its a quick fix, and most of all, it gives us the illusion of satisfaction. It is disingenous on the part of those who would blame the broke not to fess up to the fact that the entire consumer economy revolves around being made to look foolish if you have the wrong car or wrong hair color or wrong shoes. 

And there is the malevolence of America, and now of the west (seeing as we've infected the planet with our Buymore virus): two sides of the same corporatocracy vying to see which can bankrupt us faster, only we can't file bankruptcy, so we'll be indentured slaves for the rest of our lives. 

The fear they should have, the fear I do have, is what happens when the shit hits the fan? 

 

When "No" Should Mean "NO!"

Bob Herbert has it right:

If a bank is too big to fail, it’s way too big to exist. If an oil well is too far beneath the sea to be plugged when something goes wrong, it’s too deep to be drilled in the first place.

When are we going to stop behaving so stupidly? We nearly wrecked the economy and we’re all but buried in debt. But we can’t break up the biggest banks, and we can’t raise taxes. Now we’re fouling the magnificent Gulf of Mexico and ruining entire communities along the southern Louisiana Coast.

[...]For a nation that can’t stop bragging about how great and powerful it is, we’ve become shockingly helpless in the face of the many challenges confronting us. Our can-do spirit was put on hold many moons ago, and here we are now unable to defeat the Taliban, or rein in the likes of BP and the biggest banks, or stop the oil gushing furiously from the bowels of earth like a warning from Hades about the hubris and ignorance that is threatening to destroy us.

"BAM!," as they say.

There is a moral underpinning to the story of America in the 21st Century, one that ties in the hubris of the Bush wars with the hubris of the Gulf disaster with the hubris of the bankstas.

We just ain't all that. Our reach has more than exceeded our grasp, as Herbert points out. I think that's because somewhere in the late Twentieth Century, we became enamored with the idea that America can do no wrong, that we can never be evil, and that we can do anything.

We're fucking human, folks, not supermen.

There was a time not that long ago that the spirit of "more, more, more" was understandable, as nonsensical as it was. We had seemingly unlimited resources and unlimited space and time to waste them in the pursuit of, well, anything, but especially the almighty dollar. In the Fifties and Sixties, we started to wake up to the horror of our behavior. We started to acknowledge that prices had been paid in this country by innocent people and the very resources we used so wastefully.

And now, we're scrambling. We've given up trying to come up with the richer bounty of our nation in an effort to gather the bits and scraps of what we used to be able to do. We don't want progress, because that's scary. We want what we had, and we want more of it. It's comfortable. It's a known evil. We're used to it.

The problem is, of course, it's running out, and so is our time, unless we change course and start looking forward. We're so desperate to reclaim past glories that we'll build monuments to our greed and stupidity, like 5,000 foot deep wells that no one can fix and banks so big that their income could stabilize Greece inside of three months.

It has to stop. We have to have a meaningful dialogue, one that doesn't involve what we can do, but what we should do. Not what we can accomplish, but why.

Re: Energy Crisis

 

Herbert goes on to talk about the looming energy crisis over America and how he feels the Gulf tragedy will trigger Americans to call for real energy reform.

 

Two points I'd like to make:

 

1) It took effective journalism from the networks and newspapers of the 60s and 70s to trigger an environmental movement. Images of the Cuyahoga River burning, among other emotional appeals (the Native chief standing in a pile of garbage, for one) really got people's attention. I don't see that happening this time around. The pain of the people in the Gulf region, the horrendous impact of the oil slick, the imminent danger of an entire coastline being killed, literally smothered in oil, none of that has really effectively been covered. It has to be.

 

Yes, one sees reports and one-minute "analyses" of the impact, but I'd love to see all three networks pool resources...because goodness knows no one of them would dare risk the profits requirement imposed on them... and create a one-hour special, bringing us live and in person the devastation of this disaster.

 

It took body bags from Vietnam for the antiwar movement to become effective. We need that level of commitment from the people for whom "reporter" is just a way of marketing their books.

 

2) An immediate solution that Herbert neglects to mention, possibly because I seem to be the only person proposing it, is a $1 billion government cash grant to the company that finds a method to generate renewable energy as cheaply and efficiently as fossil fuels.

 

The competitive advantage that fossil fuels have is the effectiveness of power generation: they are filled with energy. The only energy source we've developed to this point that can compete with coal, natural gas or oil is hydroelectric and even that requires power plants that dwarf your average Con Ed facility and require you be near a source of moving water to enjoy the benefits.

 

The competitive advantage that renewables have is their ease of access and resource cost (effectively zero). It is in the conversion to usable energy that renewables are weaker than fossils.

 

Let's make it worth the while of companies and entrepreneurs to ramp up their efforts (do you think BP might jump at the chance to eradicate some of their liabilities, both financial and in terms of image?). A thousand million dollars, cash on the barrel, for a renewable energy source that can be converted to as many BTUs as fossil fuels, but as cheaply, efficiently, and as conveniently.

Israel Or Not?

This weekend's tragic encounter on the Mediterranean certainly brings into sharp focus, once again, the Middle East's most intractable conflict: Israel v. the Palestinians (including the Arab Muslim world).

 

Forget what got us to this point, because that way lies madness and a nest of competing claims and counterclaims: view this incident strictly in its cocoon.

 

You have a vessel, presumably bringing humanitarian aid and supplies from an ally to a beleagured people, confronted by a military force of a neighbor who has good reason to suspect the vessel is not what it appears.

 

Now put this in a different context: say a ship from Saudia Arabia is steaming towards Nova Scotia with commercial goods, but the American Coast Guard suspects there might be opium supplies on board. Interdiction agreements between Canada and the US allow the USCG to board the vessel and inspect it. Similarly, contained in the interim Israeli-Palestinian accords, Israel has a similar right to control the airspace and waters around Gaza.

 

So a few questions remain just within this context of isolating this incident: Why did the Israelis board at night? Why did the people on the "peace" ship attack the soldiers immediately as they rappelled down? Who gave the order to use live fire against pipes and rods?

 

Now we can expand the context: Why did Israel have an embargo and blockcade in the first place? There is, of course, the stock answer that Gaza contains Hamas militants (as did the boat), but that answers really nothing about the blockcade. After all, much of the land around Gaza is actually Egyptian territory. A blockcade around Gaza wouldn't stem the flow of armaments and terrorist operatives. Egypt would not tolerate any such behavior on its lands, but then we don't tolerate illegal immigration, yet it still happens.

 

In other words, a blockade is ineffectual at best, and tragic at worst. And it seems that the Gazans are dying, rather than leave or submit to Israel.

 

Too, a blockade, as has been seen countless numbers of times over the centuries, is rife with opportunities for just such a tragic encounter as yesterday's boarding.

 

There's going to be, over the course of the next several days, an awful lot of overheated rhetoric, so here's what you need to know: Both sides were wrong, both sides acted irresponsibly, and therefore both sides deserve condemnation in about equal proportion.

Thank You

I had a brother at Khe Sahn, fighting off the Viet Cong.
They're still there, he's all gone

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) Serial killers dehumanize their victims. You see this most notably in "Silence of the Lambs" when Jame Gumb says the immortal line "It puts the lotion on." In times of war, psychologists recommend dehumanizing the enemy to repress compassion in order to kill another human being. So, all that said, what does it say when BP executives speak of their own employees as "little piggies"?

 

2) Remember that "record setting hurricane season" rumoured for the last two years? It's here. No. Really. El Nino has subsided and shows no signs of firing up again, and indeed, La Nina is already gathering strength, on top of record warm waters in the Gulf (probably aided by the fact that oil does not radiate energy easily, and absorbs more solar radiation that plain salt water). Folks, it will be a nasty season in the Gulf. Count on it.

 

3) Instead of Teabagging the US, maybe those knucklehead "libertarians" ought to fight the power?

 

4) Perhaps the single most anticipated regularly scheduled speech by steve Jobs is the keynote for the World Wide Developers Conference, this year to be held June 7-11. So, what does Apple do for a follow up to the iPad? iPhone for Verizon? The leaked iPhone 4G? Or something even bigger?

 

5) Of course, no sooner does speculation of a Verizon iPhone heat up than Verizon decides to change the game and make it harder for its customers. As odious as AT&T is, at least I know what I'm paying. My big complaint about Verizon is, you can get lost trying to comb thru their plans, and that confusion is designed to make you lazy and them fat and rich.

 

6) I suspect Simon Cowell is smarter than I give him credit for. The rats may be the first to abandon a sinking ship, but doesn't that make them the smart ones?

 

7) Nonstory.

 

8) Another nonstory.

 

9) Sadly, he decided to do extra credit work for his Ph D. Three women are now dead.

 

10) I do not think this is the Cap'n Jack Sparrow kind of piracy.

Poor Little Rich Girl

You have to pity Sarah Palin.

 

OK, not, but the deep horizon of comedy that she provides has not even hoved into view yet, but look just this week so far:

 

1) The BP oil gusher is still a-gushing, despite what are likely her best efforts to pray them away. Among these prayers, no doubt, is a quick note to God to make people forget "Drill, baby, drill!".

 

2) She blows into South Carolina, eager to endorse a woman ethnic candidate, stamping her with the tramp stamp, I mean, endorsement of the Teabaggers, only to have that explode in her face as allegations of a torrid extramarital affair are slowly leaked to the press, truly putting her "family values" totem in the trash bin.

 

3) A Teabagger went down in Idaho...to a Latino named Labrador! Idaho! White potatoes! This happened just days after Palin made a frantic appearance to shore up his poll numbers. Ironically, she stands a chance for a twin killing as the Democratic opponent in the general election, walter Minnick, is the only Democrat formally endorsed by the Teabaggers. It couldn't have helped Vaughan Ward that he thought Puerto Rico was a sovereign state.

 

4) Next finds Sarah Palin lookin' out her front door...you know, the one she sees Russia from, all the time?... and finding journalist Joe McGinniss has moved next door. McGinniss has announced his intention to write an unauthorized biography of Palin and her family. Her reaction? Smear McGinniss as a pedophile peeping Tom, and build a spite fence.

 

5) And finally, after Teabagger Rand Paul's ill-advised and flubbed appearance on Rachel Maddow's television program, Palin puts on her "kway kay ladee" hat again, and shrilly smears Maddow for having a "prejudice", as if taking the Devil's Advocate position on any issue is ever going to be objective. Rand Paul himself acknowledges indirectly the drubbing he's taken in the media for his outrageous comments. Sarah Palin might take a page out of his book, lest she herself be smeared with the tar of bigotry and racism, drops of which have already clung to her.

 

One imagines the family barbecue this weekend: moose steaks on the grill, kids joking around on the lawn, Joe McGinniss perched high in his new tree house...and Sarah Palin sitting on the porch, rocking back and forth, muttering to herself.

Speaking Truth To Power(less)

Points to Obama for engaging the Republican Senate caucus.

 

Megapoints from the GOPudwhustles for missing the point.

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s luncheon Tuesday with Senate Republicans was not televised like a similar session earlier this year with the House opposition, but evidently it would have made for captivating theater.

By nearly all accounts, pent-up frustrations boiled over as the president and the very lawmakers who have consistently opposed much of his agenda engaged in spirited and at times confrontational exchanges over immigration, spending, White House tactics and other issues during a private 75-minute session.

In particular, note this bit of idiocy from Bob "Put A" Corker "In It".

And Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee suggested that the administration had been less than sincere in trying to seek a bipartisan deal on the financial regulatory overhaul, which was passed last week with just four Republican votes.

“To come in on the Tuesday after it all occurred and to now talk about seven or eight items he wants to do in a bipartisan way, I just asked him how he could reconcile that duplicity,” Mr. Corker said. “I was very aware that we were props today as we move into an election cycle.”

I may be wrong, but it's incumbent upon the minority party, the loyal opposition as it were, to force compromise that can be accepted. Clearly, the Democrats have postured a little, but at the end of the day, if the Republicans want their voices heard, it's up to them to speak intelligibly.

 

The Democrats, Obama in particular, have signaled time and time again a willingness to roll up sleeves and work with the Party of No. For the Nyetskis to whine now that they aren't being heard, dammit! is not only silly, but a measure of payback for the ridiculous attitude they and their leadership took in the six years they held both the Congress and White House hostage while screwing the nation over and over again.

 

The hubris necessary now to complain about being shackled...and there's an ugly image...is monumental.

 

Look, you want to sit on the sidelines and hope you can gain a few seats in Congress is a fine election strategy that will allow you to gain momentum and force a gradual evolution of control. I have no problem with that. The problem I have is, this nation is in a crisis, and as bad as most of the idiotic proposals you've put forth-- greed masquerading as policy, and solutions that offer no relief-- are not helping. If there was ever a time for forceful, vigorous debate in Congress over realistic and comprehensive solutions that not only correct past abuses and problems but address prevention, that time is now.

 

So shut up, man up, nut up, and play ball.

The Korea The Problem

The recent flare-up between the Koreas has me pondering the probability of this being the flashpoint for World War III.

 

Hyperbolic? Perhaps, but sinking a naval vessel is a pretty outrageous act. China's response, or rather lack of, is interesting and I mean "interesting" in diplomatese: it's disturbing.

 

We've fought wars by proxy before. Indeed, last century was filled with passive-aggressive conflicts on our part, culminating in the decades-long "Cold War" with the Soviets (and China).

 

In those conflicts, the Communists were recovering from the brutality of World War II fought on their soil, and were ill-prepared to engage us in actual warfare. Neither had the economic stability of decades of peace behind them.

 

Those tables are now turned. It is the US which is in dire economic straits battling a war fought on its soil by private armies as well as two wars overseas, and Russia and China are both clicking along, at least better than we are. Neither has real troops on the ground fighting anywhere in the world, too.

 

The bully has become the victim.

 

For this and no other reason, for no reasons of world comity or any other diplomatic consideration of diminishing the appearance of American Exceptionalism demonstrated by the previous administration, it is incumbent upon President Obama to engage these two nations in dialogue and cooperation in Iran and North Korea. Forget what the right-wing nimrods who would have us go it alone will tell you: we can't bully anymore. We could conceivably unilaterally wage limited naval war with North Korea, but from a military/domestic standpoint, we can't afford to get into a full-on battle to protect Seoul.

 

Seoul knows it. Kim knows it. And Hu and Medvedev know it. A war with North Korea would probably engage China in open conflict. So that's off the table.

 

Add to this that China has deliberately remained a blank slate in its dealings over Korea (as well as Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela, and any number of other nations). This means we can either project the best or the worst of motives on their actions, and behave accordingly. We can infer their intentions as best we can, entice them to reveal more, but at the end of the day, China will remain a cypher (Russia less so).

 

We can't afford to make mistakes now. Unfortunately, we will.

An Appeal

Spiked to the top until 5/25


I consider myself fortunate, in that I can pay my own way through life. I don't need to borrow much money, and when I do, I can pay it back easily. So I don't need friends for that, and my friendships are based on mutual attraction and emotional support.

I consider myself doubly blessed to have access to information on a scale that my forefathers and foremothers could never have imagined. It's easy in any organized society to lose track of what's going on around you and when your interest encompass the world, it is infinitely harder to sort out truth from rumour and fiction.

This is why I consider alternative media to be among the most critical resources an American citizen can have. We get spoonfed our CNN, and have FOX News' point of view injected under our skins from our encounters with the great unwashed and disintellectuals that surround us.

The past twelve months saw the demise of Air America Radio, one of the biggest progressive media outlets available. AAR served its purpose: it let liberals in red states know they are not alone, that the radios glued to Rush and Hannity did not mean that America was against them. As Barack Obama said, there are no red state or blue states, just United States. But you'd never know that from commercial, for-profit media.

Indeed, when Erick Erickson becomes a pundit on CNN, well, you can only count the weeks before the braodcast news from mainstream media sources yet again turns incrementally fascist.

This is why I feel lucky to have DISH Network for my television viewing needs. There's a reason the competition between cable and satellite providers is heating up: people are growing tired of having corporate America rammed down their throats anytime they want to watch TV. The only lifeline on cable for an interested populace is public access, which sometimes broadcasts true progressive programming like Free Speech TV and LinkTV.

On DISH, these are twenty four hour networks. DISH provides progressive programming that no cable outlet, and not even DirecTV, provides.

But I'm not here to sell you a dish. I'm here to sell you on information.

Free Speech TV is a true progressive network that survives solely on viewer donations: no commercials, no grants from the government. You make it work, which means you have a voice, and it means you get to make decisions about what you see.

Here's the good news: while FSTV is available (for now) on DISH only 24/7, you can view it streaming on the Internet. So there's really no excuse for missing programming like Democracy, Now!, GRITtv, or Greg Palast's important reports from troubled areas like Haiti or New Orleans or the Amazon basin. He's currently following an interesting story of American and western "vulture" capitalists preying on Liberia in the wake of world debt forgiveness, and he's doing this for BBC News.

So it's not like he's got no street cred. Why he's not on American television is reprehensible.

LinkTV is just what the name implies and what its slogan says: "Television without borders." Not only do you get full documentaries on a variety of subjects from the comparison of the human and gorilla genomes to the battle for the soul of the Anglican Church worldwide, you get hours of world music videos, scads of news programs from Al Jazeera and Middle Eastern sources from like Israel, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority, Deutsche Welle from Germany, and movies from around the world like 35 Shots Of Rum, an engaging look at five relationships, set against the backdrop and involving the Paris Metro.

LinkTV is available on DISH, of course, but also on DirecTV, so if you feel uncomfortable throwing off your quilt of corporate media dominance, you can upgrade to Murdoch's finest.

Either way, both of these networks provide important and informative programming, most of which is available on-line for free. What is that kind of programming worth to you each year? You pay $10.99 each month for the HBO multiplex, and still won't learn as much as you learn here. Yet, that same $10.99, just once, will make you feel like you've got a voice in the world around you.

I urge you to give now. I know I have.

Dumb And Dumberest

This latest FOX News, Sarah "Failin'" Palin trope annoys me:

Sarah Palin, who popularized the "drill, baby, drill" slogan as the GOP vice presidential candidate, criticized President Obama's efforts to clean up the Gulf oil spill.

The former Alaska governor, speaking on "Fox News Sunday," questioned whether there's "any connection" between Obama's campaign donations from oil companies and him "taking so doggone long to get in there, to dive in there, and grasp the complexity and the potential tragedy that we are seeing here in the Gulf of Mexico," the Los Angeles Times reports.

Palin said she remains a "big supporter" of oil drilling but "these oil companies have got to be held accountable."

First, a small digression: Obama accepted $900,000 in donations from Big Oil. Palin accepted $2.8 million. So if she's pointing that finger, then maybe she ought to realize that precisely three more of her own fingers are pointing right back at her.

Next, if you choose to believe in the freedom of an oil company to explore and drill for oil with minimal government oversight, as her former President George W. Bush believed AND as Sarah Palin obviously believes, then you have to also believe, hand in hand with this idea, that when the shit hits the fan, it's up to the corporation you've allowed to rape the environment to clean it up themselves, without governmental assistance.

You can't privatize profits and socialize costs, in other words.

Sarah Palin is running scared, desperately scared, to the Nanny Statist position in order to distance herself from her own whorish attitudes.

Accidents happen. The problem is, there's a big difference between me falling over a turned-up carpet in my home and a large, wealthy (there's the keyword here) multinational petroleum producing country, one especially that has attached itself so closely with trying to be "green" (Beyond Petroleum, indeed!) admitting it was underqualified to attempt such a well in the first place, as it had zero experience with a spill at those depths.

That's not an accident, that's criminal negligence! It's a little like letting your kid have the car to drive to the mall, and finding out later he crashed it into a building 1,000 miles away. There's a deliberate, almost malicious, hubris involved.

The economy of the Gulf, so badly battered by Hurricane Katrina, and so crippled by the recent housing bubble burst, is now officially dead. There is no coming back from this. Homes that cost a million dollars or even a hundred thousand dollars just six years ago will be worth pennies on the dollar. Tourism, dead. Fishing, dead for the foreseeable future. The wetlands that protect the coast from hurricanes will not recover in time for the hurricane season, creating enormous devastation if even a small hurricane or tropical storm slams into that coast.

If you're going to focus on governmental responsibility, focus on the "oil men" who ran this country for the past decade or so, the ones who rubber stamped nearly every drill permit request.

The idiots who somehow believed that drilling in the Gulf would demonstrably lower the prices of oil in the United States. The same idiots who either somehow blindly missed the truth of commodity markets-- that all crude goes onto the exchange, unless you nationalize the oil industry like Venezuela has, which is socialist, and skim your needs first, then try to sell the rest on the markets-- or decided to hoodwink the entire nation, especially the low-normals of the Republican party who swallowed their shit, hook line and sinker.

The fuckheads who approved this license for BP. Those are the people you should be pointing fingers at. They ought to be strung up.

 

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) In the true spirit of this weekly item, for the handful of you who hang on my every word and worried what happened to my post yesterday, work has been an absolute bear this week. Pity because I had the funniest, most incisive and insightful post on the planet written, but of course, that's not going to happen.

 

2) Cavemen grunted. Cavewomen moaned. As funny as this item is, think about the implication of this: it means that masturbation did not just happen, but was encouraged, as was sex play. It also means that women and men experimented with sex, continuing the behaviors seen in lesser primates. Further, it means that a sense of morality, which likely existed back then, was not universally shared. There's a lot more to human behavior than meets the eye.

 

3) Germany finally comes to its senses.

 

4) Think you had a bad day yesterday? Look at Lance Armstrong's day. There's probably some fringe element that thinks he deliberately crashed his bike to get out of the Tour of California, I'd bet, but he risked an awful lot to duck a blood test and reporters' questions.

 

Lance claims that he has undergone the most stringent testing of any athlete in any sport in the world. Not only does he submit to every random test without hesitation, he claims to volunteer the results of his own testing online. It would be easy to dismiss these as window dressing. On the other hand, as with Gary Hart in 1988, there's always someone laying in wait. By now, I suspect he'd have been tripped up on such a bold claim. On the other other hand, maybe his doping is just that far advanced. But here's the thing: he doesn't have anything really on the line in this incarnation of his comeback. Altho he is clearly in top form to win races, he hasn't. He placed third in the Tour de France, his game lifted by the competition with Alberto Contador. In the Tour of California, he was in or near the top ten until he fell yesterday, but he had an enormous disadvantage to overcome in that he was not the team leader (Levi Leipheimer is) and was working in support of him. His stated goal in this comeback was to raise awareness of cancer, which he clearly has accomplished. It would have been foolish of him to risk it all for the sake of taking chemicals that haven't given him an advantage over everyone else.

 

But people have done dumber things for less, so...

 

5) Proof of intelligent design.

 

6) It's a bill, such as it is.

 

7) Meat isn't the only thing being smoked in your favorite restaurant. Makes me want to head over to the CIA for lessons.

 

8) Me, I'd drive off with her.

 

9) Because Rhode Island also shares a border with Mexico, I presume.

 

10) Introducing the newest PeTA spokesman for spaying and neutering....Octomom!

I Rand So Far

Well, I think we'd have to call yesterday good news for Democrats, bad news for establishment Republicans, and horrible news for the Teabaggers.

In Pennsylvania, there were two races of note: Congresscritter Joe Sestak defeated Arlen Specter (R...I mean, D-PA) in the Democratic promary for Specter's Senate seat. I won't lament Specter's loss beyond this: he was a decent man stuck in an indecent time. His failing was, when given a choice to grow a spine in the 1990s and stand up for his principles against the party machinery that chose the dark path initiated by Lee Atwater, he put on a dark cloak.

The other race of note was the special election to replace Congressman John Murtha, who died suddenly earlier this year. Democrat Mark Critz defeated a challenge from Republican businessman Tim Burns in a race that directly reflects on the Presidency of Barack Obama and the work that Congress has done to advance his centrist agenda. Apparently, the people of western Pennsylvania, not liberal by any means--they voted for McCain in 2008-- rejected the politics of hate and extremism and found shelter in Critz. The race should have been a lot closer than the 8 point margin Critz won by.

This is a stunning blow to the Teabagger insurgency, altho you won't hear Republicans or Teabaggers talk about it, and adds a new dimension to primaries in Arkansas and Tennessee Kentucky.

In Arkansas, Democrat Blanche Lincoln barely survived a Democratic primary to fight another day against Lt Governor Bill Halter in her attempt to retain her Senate seat. You'd never know it to listen to her afterwards, where she latched onto the Clinton mantle of "comeback kid". Ewww.

And finally, in Tennessee Kentucky, the red flags were up for the GOP establishment after Rand Paul (R-Galt's Gulch) easily defeated his mainstream opponent, Trey Grayson. In an attempt to retain the seat long held by Jim Bunning, Republicans lined up behind Greyson, from fellow Tennesseean Kentuckian Mitch McConnell to, well, the janitor at RNC headquarters.

Paul, endorsed by such notable bastions of sanity as child-abusing James Dobson of Focus on Family, aborted Alaska governor Sarah Palin, and Napoleon Bonaparte the XIV, ran as a Randian (hello! That first name is a dead giveaway!) and garnered 59% of the vote.

That's...a bitchslap.

And it should also be welcome news to Democrats. I have a theory which I've espoused more times than I care to mention, that Republicans run roughly thirty years behind Democrats. Right now, the Republicans are running about the era of Reagan in terms of being the party out of favor with the American people. There's a battle for the soul of the party, and that means the focus will be internal, not external.

Much like the Ted Kennedy faction of the Democratic party battled the Jimmy Carter faction in the late 70s and early 80s, which gave us such memorable Presidential candidates at Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. It also set up the Gingrich insurgency.

So we have a long time to bask in the glory of Democratic victories, but I digress. There's still work to be done. We have to close the deal on a progressive agenda. Getting rid of deadwood like Lincoln and Specter will help us accomplish that, and the more Teabaggers that manage to kick GOP deadwood to the curb, the more energized progressives and Democrats will become.

And the more independents will flock to us. When the alternative is militancy in America, Americans climb into bed with the nearest warm body.

That's nothing to be proud of, however, but it gives us a chance to work with America, and isolate the nutbaggers.

Tangled Web

Civil rights are a sticky wicket. On the one hand, no one should ever be denied due process and full rights of citizenship, assuming they've earned them and have not forfeited them.

 

On the other, well, there have to be some exceptions. I'm just not sure this is wholly appropriate:

A 7-to-2 majority of the Supreme Court ruled today that Congress has the authority to pass a law allowing federal prisoners who have been deemed "sexually dangerous" to be held beyond the date of their original sentence.

The law, a provision of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act, was passed in 2006. A lower court had ruled that Congress overstepped its boundaries in passing the law.

But Justice Stephen Breyer, writing for the majority, found that the Constitution grants Congress the authority to enact the law.

"The statute is a necessary and proper means of exercising the federal authority that permits Congress to create federal criminal laws, to punish their violation, to imprison violators, to provide appropriately for those imprisoned, and to maintain the security of those who are not imprisoned but who may be affected by the federal imprisonment of others," he wrote.

Clearly, there are some menaces to society: an uncontrollable serial killer would be one, a legally insane person who is unable to distinguish right from wrong and acts accordingly would be another. As I oppose the death penalty in all cases, these are people for whom a prison cell or hospital room (as the case may be) should be the next and last residence. These are people for whom due process presumably has been carried out and an impartial judge or jury has established the forfeiture of their civil rights.

The issues become muddled beyond that. The issue at bar in yesterday's SCOTUS was whether the Federal government could pass a law that superseded state laws with respect to a class of criminal. The issue that SHOULD have been at bar, in my opinion, was whether a "sexually dangerous person" could be detained indefinitely, even after he or she had served a sentence imposed after a trial.

The wonder of American jurisprudence is, once you've served whatever penalty you've incurred as the result of your criminality, the system deems you a whole citizen again. That may not work in practice as nicely as it sounds, of course. You still have a black mark on your record, and that can work against you in job-seeking, or future criminal investigations, as well as societal stigma. None of that is illegal, and none of that should be prevented at law.

In this case, for sex offenders, it seems we have to truncate that right. 

The question that springs to mind, then, is what is the definition of "sexually dangerous" and moreover, why is that person's sentence raising into question whether he or she can be released back into society? If we presume, as many death penalty advocates do, that a sentence is a deterrent to the commission of a crime, and people are still committing that crime, and afterwards, must continue to pay a systemic price for this crime, then perhaps the sentence itself has failed, and we can avoid trampling a civil right by simply doing the right thing in the first place, and making the sentence harsher?

 

If you make "sexually dangerous" a state of being as opposed to a behavior that can be rehabilitated, it's not a long stretch to imagine other behaviors that will suddenly morph into criminality: drug use, for example, or listening to dangerous thoughts.

 

And if behaviors can suddenly become criminal states of being, what about states of being that don't fit easily into the American mainstream, like atheism, or homosexuality?

 

There's the real danger in this spider web.

Radar Love

It never ceases to amaze me when the mainstream media can't even shoot itself in the foot for want of aim.

 

To-wit: Howard Kurtz in today's Washington Post fumbles fretfully for explanations of why the flooding in Nashville was such small potatoes, deploying the usual suspects: flyover state, too many bigger stories (the Times Square bomber and Gulf oil leak), the prompt response from the Federal government, even the lack of a right wing/left wing row to be created over a flood in a city in a red state since it affected mostly white, mostly middle class citizens.

 

And as can be expected, he totally missed a larger issue and an opportunity to discuss it.

 

Admittedly, the bombing attempt in tourist-rich Times Square and the millions of gallons of oil infiltrating the reef systems and shores of the Gulf coast will have a far greater impact on the rest of us than Keith Urban's flooded basement. Too, the number of dead (30) and the amount of monetary loss (estimates range around $5 billion, maximum) seem small compared to the fresh-in-our-memories Katrina (1,500, and $300 billion), much like the earthquake in Chile seemed small compared to Haiti.

 

None of this is the point, however. The point is, the news and the media that covers it is now a profit center. And therein lies the tale that Kurtz, in the service of his corporate overlords, refuses to cover. He bemoans the fact that his own paper, the Post, had to rely on Associated Press stringers to provide their news coverage. The New York Times sent a reporter, but never had the floods on the front page of the paper. Indeed, only CNN devoted much attention to the story, and that was when Anderson Cooper showed up 6 days after the flood. Even the obligatory telethon was held on only one network (CMT), where the Haiti telethon was wall-to-wall on cable.

 

For most outlets, it was a one-day story, with a few human interest follow ups.

 

Why? It costs money to send a reported down to a city and to dig up stories. And those stories have to sell ads. And let's face facts: pictures of white middle class Americans filing insurance claims and getting assistance from FEMA officials is not a particularly compelling story, even if the Grand Old Opry had ten feet of water in it and was in danger of actually skipping performances.

 

But there are stories to be told out of Nashville, stories that will take a little time and effort. Stories like, why did Nashville flood so badly? Was it the once-in-a-milennium rainfall into an area prone to some minor flooding or did the Army Corps of Engineers screw it up yet again? What went right in the response to the Nashville floods that we can learn from for future flood disasters that seem likely based on global warming?

 

Boring. I know. But important stories nonetheless and it would be nice if the media treated these stories like they were important, instead of relying on YouTube videos for a few laughs and a couple of shocking moments of heroism.

 

Not only won't they tell you these stories, they won't be honest about why they won't tell you these stories.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) The world's greatest reason for cutting fossil fuels out of our energy policy continues unabated. Really. When BP and its contractors applied for the drilling lease, was the "In Case Of Accident" plan "Make shit up as we go along"? If you've never tried capping a well at 5,000 feet, then maybe you shouldn't be drilling the fucking thing in the first place. Of course, if you're going to ALLOW a 5,000 foot deep drilling, you might, you know, want to make sure it won't kill the economies of the people who elected you in the first place...

 

2) A 46 year old Robin Hood? In a prequel? No thanks. No. Really.

 

3) If you buy a car, you know the price before you've even sat down to discuss terms. Why is the same not true for healthcare, even after reform?

 

4) We can thank healthcare reform for one thing: we still have a live president.

 

5) Yogi claims he's lived 70 years without food or water. Garbage? He spends two weeks under "careful" scientific scrutiny and survives.

 

6) Turkey and Greece burying hatchet? This would be like Al Gore and Glenn Beck sharing a beer. But Turkey needs admittance to the EU (which Greece can block) and Greece needs access to Turkey's economy.

 

7) Of course, Greece could make significant inroads into its problems by just surveying swimming pools and luxury houses.

 

8) The youngest person to circumnavigate the world solo is nearly home.

 

9) And pick up your eyeballs with your last paycheck!

 

10) They're called "knobs" for a reason.

Strange Bedfellows

The battle over the recent Arizonan attempts to dehumanize immigrants is beginning to take form. Already, boycotts have been announced, particularly targeting the 2011 Major League Baseball All-Star Game to be held in Phoenix.

 

But, interestingly enough, the protest may have an ace in the hole of an unusual nature: evangelical Christians.

Tea Party activists and other conservatives are planning rallies next month in support of Arizona's tough new immigration law, which has come under attack from Democrats, Latino groups and some maverick Republicans.

But a growing chorus of conservative evangelical leaders has broken with their traditional political allies on the right. They're calling the Arizona law misguided and are attempting to use its passage to push for federal immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

The group, which includes influential political activists such as Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention's public policy wing, and Mathew Staver, dean of the Liberty University School of Law, will soon begin lobbying Republican leaders in Washington to support comprehensive immigration reform under President Obama.

Huh?

It does my heart good, as a liberal Christian of long standing, to see some of Jesus' teachings finally make it into a large segment of Christianity. It does beg the question, "what took you so long?" because frankly, any progress from marching lock-step with the elements of hatred in this nation is a good thing.

But the question will have to be asked at some point.

The question that cannot be begged at this point is why? What is it about this issue that finally got someone wearing a backwards collar, or at least pretending to, to sit up and take notice that Jesus would likely demand better treatment for these people.

This nation, this great and bountiful nation, not even half full, has plenty: plenty of room, plenty of resources, plenty of energy, plenty of moxie. We can afford to take more people in.

Hell, given immigration's role in the bounty that is America, right now we NEED immigrants. Immigration, first generation Americans who brought families and friends over to America, are the single biggest economic engine in American history. No other factor, anywhere or anyone, can be shown to have created as much wealth as our simple act of stamping a passport and letting someone work.

So we need people who aren't afraid to walk down a street to earn a paycheck, to pay their fair share of taxes, and to enjoy the rights and privileges of an American in full.

You'll notice nothing in that paragraph talks about illegal immigration. That's because if I had my way, there wouldn't be any. If you wanted in, and were willing to work towards your citizenship, you're legal. Period. And if you're here to commit crimes, you're out. Period. It's just that simple. Any other standard is a standard of fear.

And I don't engage in fear.

And you'll notice that the only moral component of that argument is the motivation to crime of the person in question. None of this speaks to the objections of anti-immigrant forces in the land, about fairness or legalities or discrimination. To me, these arguments are precisely why religious leaders of all stripes need to pick up the banner. World history tells us that most immigrants have been persecuted in other nations and that most persecutions have occured either as racial or religious discrimination, sometimes both.

If they can be tarred with hate, the thinking should go, then I'm next. Again, we look to history and the French Revolution to understand the zealotry fomenting in the far right Teabaggers. It can, and will, go to extremes if it is not combatted and halted at every turn.

If we can tear the evangelicals away, even a little, we can do a world of good for our nation. It starts here.

Eating Our Own

I consider myself a Democrat by default.

 

Well, let me clarify that: I'm a Democrat of forty years standing who has stuck by his party through thick and thin, but if I was brand new to the scene, I would still choose the Democratic party. By default. I find the forces at work shaping the Republicans to be more than odious: I think they ultimately will destroy that party and if the timing is just right, could bring down the nation.

 

That's a different post, tho. Today, I'm going to credit the Teabaggers and their minions for some good: they've forced the Democrats to stop making deals with the devil.

 

The anti-incumbency furor that the Teabaggers have aimed at Congress (and to a degree, Obama's re-election, but that's going to gather momentum) has energized Democratic challengers. For example, Arlen Specter, who jumped parties a few years back to avoid just the problem he's facing now, has his hands full with Representative Joe Sestak.

 

Specter, in exchange for his switch, received the endorsements of nearly every bigwig in Pennsylvania. Sestak came from double-digits down to close within a margin of error.

 

Similarly, Blanche Lincoln (D-Arkansas & WellPoint Health) is sitting in the middle of a fire fight with a liberal challenger.

 

All this reveals itself against a backdrop that even FOX News is saying has shifted from a strong GOP bid to unseat Democratic incumbents to a "too close to call" battle to the wire.

 

Politics in the United States seems to be shaking off the rigid structure it has enjoyed for nearly thirty years of loyal blocs of opposition into more fractious and raucous pools of support, gathered under the banner of a political party that they generally support.

 

We started to move in this direction just after the Nixon administration: Democrats battled internally between the moderates and the far left, while Republicans battled between the Goldwater/Reagan faction and the more moderate Northeast and West Coast partisans.

 

This battle is so pervasive, it threatens every incumbent, right up to and including the two Senators from Maine, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, who must contend with a new party platform that, frankly, is Van Goghish in its self-destructive insanity.

 

Democratic incumbents are not quite in that much danger from within. Specter is an odious creature and probably should have simply resigned for his own good, but a tip of the hat for switching parties and helping us get healthcare reform. Alan Mollohan, the fourteen term incumbent Congressman voted out yesterday, had a rap sheet of ethics scandals and dubious pork-barrell projects as long as your arm.

 

Good riddance, says I. Evolution is survival of the fittest and apparently his strategy ran its course. For me, all this instability means "pass the popcorn!"