Friday Music Blogging

GWAR - War Is All We Know

This is going out to John McCain (find the lyrics on-line and you'll understand why)

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) Followed by a firming of our defense, a grasp of the problem, and finally, the release from the tension.

2) I guess this had to happen eventually.

3) Another tragedy of the mortgage crisis. Two words: exer. cise.

4) I shouldn't be snarky there. That cat didn't do anything to deserve it and his owners must be heartsick. I'm sorry. I'll make up for it with this heartwarming tale, passed along to me by katrina.

5) And people wondered why I thought Obama couldn't win the election...granted, it's early and granted this is just one lousy poll, but come ON!

6) I got my iPhone today! I'm like a kid at Christmas! In July!

7) Yesterday was the trading deadline in baseball and not surprisingly, the Red Sox dumped Manny Ramirez on Joe Torre and the Dodgers. If Boston was a distraction for Ramirez, I shudder to think how he's going to handle LA and Hollywood.

8) It strikes me this shouldn't even have needed a court to decide. It should be in the Constitution!

9) What's a company have to do to keep the stock markets happy? Make $13 billion in a quarter?!?!?!?!

10) I'd like to meet the man who sucked the hose to start the siphon! Maybe it was a woman. In that case, I probably dated her in the dim dark past...

11) Snakes on a Maine.

12) Obama is playing fast and loose with the race card again. McCain correctly calls him on his shit. He did this same stunt in the South Carolina primary, invoking race indirectly then calling the other guy out for responding, irritating a defense from Bill Clinton when absolutely none was needed, a rare time the ex-President (and Greatest. President. Ever.) was on shaky political ground during a campaign.

The Story Behind The Story

You know, when I saw this flash past on the news this morning, I wondered if I had been in a coma:

The House yesterday apologized to black Americans, more than 140 years after slavery was abolished, for the "fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow" segregation.

The resolution, which passed on a voice vote late in the day, was sponsored by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), a white Jew who represents a majority-black district in Memphis. Cohen tried unsuccessfully to join the Congressional Black Caucus this year.

"I hope that this is part of the beginning of a dialogue that this country needs to engage in, concerning what the effects of slavery and Jim Crow have been," Cohen said. "I think we started it and we're going to continue."

I thought it was odd that only one of two white men representing a predominantly black district was the one to introduce this legislation.

I hate to give credit to a weasel, but Andrew Sullivan came up with the goods on why:

One of the most dramatic congressional races this year is the battle for Tennessee's 9th. Wrapped around Memphis, this overwhelmingly-black district is represented by Steve Cohen (D) -- just one of two white congressmen with majority-black constituencies. In his inaugural '06 bid, Cohen had faced a dozen candidates trying to maintain the district's 40-year streak of black representation. In the end, runner-up Nikki Tinker barely lost to Cohen, 31% to 25%.[...]

As told in a great piece by Jonathan Martin, Cohen had pledged to become the first non-black member of the Congressional Black Caucus upon winning his seat. "He was probably the most liberal white member in the legislature, perhaps even more so than most of the black members," a local politico told Martin. Most of the staffers Cohen hired were black, including his chief of staff. But when a leaked memo circulated by one of the CBC's co-founders made it clear that Cohen's membership was not welcome due of his race, he gave up the effort. Now, two years later, Cohen's fighting to keep the seat against his old rival...

What you've just witnessed is a fairly bold statement made by a man who is pretty desperate to keep his job (although having beaten his rival by six points and having the knowledge that 98% of Congresscritters get re-elected should provide a little more confidence, you would think).

That Barack Obama is running this year for President merely highlights this race as one to watch, and don't think Tinker isn't showing the race card is in her hand:

Her TV ads play up humble beginnings growing up in Alabama with a single mother and disabled grandmother. She argues her campaign is not about race but adds that her supporters hunger for more racial diversity in Congress.

There's a bit more irony than a white Jew apologizing to blacks for slavery that his ancestors probably had nothing to do with in order to win re-election in his district, particularly when you consider it was white northern Jews who stood side by side in Alabama and Tennessee and Mississippi with blacks struggling for equal rights back in the 60s.

That district was represented by Harold Ford, Jr before he ran for Senate in 2006, and lost based on, well, a commercial that played up the old racist stereotype of "black man raping our white women".

Stay tuned. This race could turn into a barnburner.

(thanks, Memeorandum, for showing da love!)

Snapping Back To Reality

I was all prepared to post a rant this morning, when I was stopped in my tracks by an e-mail:

United Nations Humanitarian Awards Center
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London United Kingdom




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Stated below are your identification numbers:
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PIN: YM09788

These numbers fall within the England Location file, you are requested to contact our fiduciary agent in Liverpool and send your winning identification numbers to him;

Agent Name: Mr. Leeton L. Smith
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Tel: +447024092941

You are advised to send the following information to your Claims Agent to facilitate the release your fund to you.

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Congratulations!! once again.

Yours in service,
Dr. (Mrs.) Gladys Shawn

I had to laugh, of course.

It seems that this mortal coil is one that I would gladly give up if I knew two things: 1) that if I do, I will live life everlasting in some ethereal plane of existence (I'd settle for Hell, because could it really be worse than George Bush's America?) and 2) I was no longer responsible.

Since health issues have loomed large for me lately, I have been acutely aware of my responsibilities, and while not obsessing, have been pondering what to do going forward in the worst case "if" scenario.

Sadly, last night brought these concerns into sharp focus, and I'm rather angry today.

You see, my mom was checked into the emergency room last night by her cardiologist. I'm not sure why (I was too angry to visit her last night), but my suspicions are she is suffering from congestive heart disease. At any rate, the presenting symptoms was very badly swollen legs, possibly gangrenous.

Why am I angry? My mom has access to some of the finest medical care in the world, gratis, for all intents and purposes. She has an old-line union healthcare plan which will pay for nearly everything, as well as Medicare.

She is deliberately refusing treatment.

Now that is her choice, and from that perspective I cannot argue with her, but she also has a responsibility to her family, most notably to my brother, and she is abrogating that duty.

My brother, for reasons some of you know and reasons I won't get into here, lives with my mother. He's 60 years old and two years ago had open heart surgery to replace an aortic valve.

The running trope in my family is, when my mom goes, I will take care of my brother. Fair enough. He's capable of day to day living, holds down a job and lives a quiet life. Low maintenance, in other words. I can deal with that.

What I am angry about is this "suicide by neglect" course my mom has chosen. By putting her body in peril, she risks failing in her stated attempts to just let go of life, and thus becoming a vegetable or at the very least, bedridden and disabled.

As it stands now, my brother is her primary care giver, and so long as she is able to do some things for herself, that's a fair relationship. To burden him with this kind of nonsense is not only unfair to him, but borders on maltreatment.

I know the underlying reasons for her behavior, which I won't get into. Her motives are repugnant to me, and speak of a self-indulgent spoiled brat (and so now you know who I most resemble).

Thanks for reading this, I needed to get that off my chest.

He's Not Even Pretending Anymore

Why does George W Bush hate America so?:

WASHINGTON — The White House predicted Monday that President Bush would leave a record $482 billion deficit to his successor, a sobering turnabout in the nation’s fiscal condition from 2001, when Mr. Bush took office after three consecutive years of budget surpluses.

The worst may be yet to come. The deficit announced by Jim Nussle, the White House budget director, does not reflect the full cost of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the potential $50 billion cost of another economic stimulus package, or the possibility of steeper losses in tax revenues if individual income or corporate profits decline.

The new deficit numbers also do not account for any drains on the national treasury that might result from further declines in the housing market.

The real chilling part of this story comes a paragraph or two later...

Mr. Nussle predicted Monday that the deficit would more than double in the current 2008 fiscal year — to $389 billion, from $162 billion in 2007 — before shooting up to $482 billion in the 2009 fiscal year, which begins in about two months.

(emphasis added)

Well, the neo-cons got what they wanted. Grover Norquist must be chuckling behind his latte and scone. They've destroyed America.

The combination of enormous budget deficits, which seem to stretch ad infinitum, a recession, which will likely deepen into a Depression, although no one you know will ever admit to it in our lifetimes, and the ghastly costs of an irresponsible and illegal war, which will cost us in ways we can't even begin to monetarize, have created the perfect economic storm.

One that will force harsh choices on Americans in the coming administration. This is the ultimate "scorched earth" policy: spend, spend, spend and leave nothing in the till for the next guy.

It is, in my opinion, no coincidence that the two largest deficits in American history, $413 billion in 2004, and $482 billion next year, come at the nexus of elections that could see the shift of power from Republicans to Democrats.

In 2004, it was possible for John Kerry to win the election-- certainly he was poised to-- and Bush clearly wanted to destroy this great nation in a temper tantrum.

And now, with Bush leaving office to either his greatest Republican rival or to the Democrats, and with history's judgement of his administration already weighing in negatively, he's pooped his diaper again!

Even McCain is alarmed by what he has perceived from these numbers: he's being stabbed in the back once more:

“There is no more striking reminder of the need to reverse the profligate spending that has characterized this administration’s fiscal policy,” Mr. McCain said.

$482 billion dollars is a lot, to be sure, and that's just the half of it, newswise. See, the Iraq war is fought off-budget. The coming mortgage crisis package, as half-assed as they are, will add a minimum of $25 billion (and in my estimation, more like $75 billion) to the budget deficit short term.

And this is before the warning shot that the IndyMac bank bailout foreshadows!

For example, the S&L crisis of the Reagan years...funny how these always happen under Republicans...cost the government $125 billion over ten years. This crisis could make that crisis look like a bad day at the track! A March 2008 report said that the subprime mortgage crisis alone could cost the government $300 to $500 billion dollars to solve.

So forget the Iraq invasion. Forget Katrina. Forget September 11, and his cowardly dash to safety.

George W Bush will go down in history as the first President to truly hate his country.

Yeeeeeeeeeeeea, this was probably a bad idea....

Injured vets. Two hours. Cheney pulls a stunt worthy of a diva:

[Chehey's] staff insisted the sick vets be sequestered for two hours before Cheney's arrival and couldn't leave until he'd finished talking, officials confirmed.

"Word got back to us ... that this would be a prerequisite," said the veterans executive director, David Gorman, who noted the meeting hall doesn't have any rest rooms. "We told them it just wasn't acceptable."

No rest rooms, did I forget to mention that?

We're talking about a bunch of men who left pieces of themselves on a battlefield somewhere, some of whom may take two hours just to go to the bathroom, and this idiot is mocking them.

Oh, but wait...there's the cringeworthy response:

Cheney's office acknowledged the security requests, but insisted he is sensitive to combat veterans' needs.

Spokeswoman Megan Mitchell said the two-hour rule is "a recommendation, not a requirement," and "we always work to make sure the bathrooms are within the security perimeters."

"The vice president would never let us do anything that didn't help facilitate the needs of our veterans," Mitchell added.

I dunno, those bedbugs in Walter Reed...maybe they were there in lieu of stitches for the wounds?

OK, But Where Do You Have Cancer Again?

From The Chicago Sun Times:

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Robert Novak said today he has been diagnosed with a brain tumor but says that, “God willing,” he plans to be back at work soon.

Novak said he was diagnosed Sunday with a tumor and will soon begin treatment at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Presumably the surgery will be performed by a proctologist. Of course, noninvasive procedures for this kind of cancer in Republicans exists, including a high fibre diet or an enema.

Which would still count as noninvasive given how often they bend over for their dark lords.

It's interesting that a) this happens less than a week after his run-in with a pedestrian in DC cost him a $50 ticket, plus whatever penalties the judge decides to give in any civil trial and b) this happens hard on the heels of the Ted Kennedy cancer revelation.

In Massachussetts. Mere miles from the Kennedy compound.

Seriously, while the guy is an unprincipled, tea-bagging lying sack of shit who probably ought to have had that overbite looked into years ago, I don't want to see anyone suffering from cancer.

That would be wrong of me.

(whistling..."If lovvvving you is wrong...I don't want to be right"...)

Veni, Vici, V.E. Day

Admittedly, this is The Guardian, which is an avowed leftist newspaper in the UK, but still, this gets a bit embarassing to read:

But, mainly, he simply appeared, and sprinkled that stardust. Gordon Brown could be seen beaming. In the dark. The dark of the hall of 10 Downing Street. Obama wasn't allowed, through protocol, to grasp Mr B's hand outside for the cameras, as he is only a presidential candidate, and it wasn't done for John McCain's visit. But there was an Obama arm swiftly around Gordon's shoulders, and a (rather fluid) returning lower-back pat, before the door shut. Asked, a little later, about Brown's prospects, he said thoughtfully: 'You're always more popular before you're in charge. Once you're responsible, you're going to make some people unhappy.'

Gordon and Barack walked together - a few minutes out at the back of Downing Street around St James's Park. Apparently they talked about economies, global warming, terrorism, Middle East stuff. Obama had been up at about four in the morning to do the same thing at breakfast with a tired-looking Tony Blair. Apparently Obama sleeps for four hours every night.

In the garden there was something going on. Psychologists have a word for it - mirroring? Transference? Both had dark suits, done up with one button in the middle, and white shirts, and silky reddish ties, their left hands in their pockets, and their right hands gesturing, constantly. Back in the garden, Gordon waved his right hand to show him various trees. Nobody quite knows why. Nor what he was saying. The crueller watchers had it down pat. 'That tree's going to vote for me ... that one's dithering.' That was possibly a little too cynical, because our Prime Minister did indeed seem to be genuinely, sunnily, smiling. Twenty minutes later, Obama met David Cameron in the grounds of the Commons, and Cameron did the same. Waved his arms and showed him shrubs. Don't they have trees in Illinois?

Seriously, gag me.

I get this was an opinion column, not a hard news piece, but the fulsome love-in that was Obama's trip to Europe was getting a bit "over the top" coverage from the foreign media, as compared to other Presidential and senator visits since, well, Bill Clinton's last world tour.

It's clear that Europe has held it's collective breath at the monument to stupidity that is the American electoral process that saw the current Resident elected not once, but twice. I imagine they believed, "How dumb does half that country have to be to not see what this man is all about?", shook their heads and proceeded to drive down the value of the dollar so they could come over and investigate for themselves.

The candidacy of Barack Obama (and the same would have been more true of a Clinton candidacy) is much like the first ray of sunshine on a rainy March day. It holds out hope for renewal, nevermind that we have no clue precisely what form that renewal will take.

The sweet effluent of praise that has been heaped on Obama is pretty understandable given that. It's not about Obama per se (again, Hillary would have been welcomed at least as heartily and probably even more so), but about America coming back to the arms of the family of the world.

That he's a Democrat is not material. That he's black, or she a woman, is not material. That he's truly the NotBush in this election, that's what matters.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that he's young, intelligent and can speak a sentence without stumbling across a word he's not said before, like "the". That just magnifies the glaring incapacity of George W Bush to attain that level of affection after eight years of not only neglecting European society, but practically snubbing his nose at it.

The charge the Republicans will raise in the general election this Fall, that Obama is an elitist, that he's too polished, not the guy you'd want to have a beer with, is going to be made more effective by this messianic (sorry, it's an easier concept to grasp. I'm not trying to pick up a right wing talking point) pilgrimage.

Indeed, recent history has shown that the "Bubba" candidate will win, usually hands down, since JFK was assassinated. And I include Richard Nixon on that list, because frankly, you could outBubba George McGovern and Eugene McCarthy with a toothpick.

That Democrats, noting this, still chose between the two most unlikely Bubba candidates (and one could make the argument that Hillary kept it as close as she did for as long as she did by outBubbaing Obama) is a step in the right direction, and perhaps signals a change in the attitude of this nation, that intellect and rationality is ready to retake the mantle of governance, that reactionary policies and knee-jerk actions are no longer anything but the simple tantrums of spoiled rich kids pretending to be "real".

And maybe it is this, above all else, that Europe has sensed in the Obama candidacy.

The Audacity Of Dopes

As a Hillary partisan, I was surely subjected to my fair share of hubristic shpiel by Obombers. Sometimes it got very personal, but I've got a thick skin.

And I don't write a column that's read by thousands of people or even millions of people a week. I'm lucky if I hit four figures in seven days.

But the New Republic sees some troubling signs on the Obama campaign bus:

Around midnight on July 16, New York Times chief political correspondent Adam Nagourney received a terse e-mail from Barack Obama's press office. The campaign was irked by the Times' latest poll and Nagourney and Megan Thee's accompanying front-page piece titled "Poll Finds Obama Isn't Closing Divide on Race," which was running in the morning's paper. Nagourney answered the query, the substance of which he says was minor, and went to bed, thinking the matter resolved.

But, the next morning, Nagourney awoke to an e-mail from Talking Points Memo writer Greg Sargent asking him to comment on an eight-point rebuttal trashing his piece that the Obama campaign had released to reporters and bloggers like The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder and Politico's Ben Smith. Nagourney had not heard the complaints from the Obama camp and had no idea they were so steamed. "I'm looking at this thing, and I'm like, 'What the hell is this?' " Nagourney recently recalled. "I really flipped out."


Later that afternoon, Nagourney got permission from Times editors to e-mail Sargent a response to the Obama memo. But the episode still grates. "I've never had an experience like this, with this campaign or others," Nagourney tells me. "I thought they crossed the line. If you have a problem with a story I write, call me first. I'm a big boy. I can handle it. But they never called. They attacked me like I'm a political opponent."

I'm guessing there was some operative in Obama's campaign who got a little overenthusiastic.

Except...

Obama's press liaison, Robert Gibbs, has built a particularly large reservoir of ill will. David Mendell, who covered Obama's Senate campaign for the Chicago Tribune and authored the 2007 Obama book From Promise to Power, wrote about Gibbs as "the anti-Obama" and described him as "Obama's hired gun, skillfully trained to shoot at reporters whose coverage was deemed unfair. Mendell tells me, "if [Gibbs] feels you're necessary to achieve a campaign goal, he will give you access and allow you in. But, if he feels you're not going to be of help, he can just ignore you." Mendell has his own specific gripe: Apparently, the Obama team was less than pleased with his biography, on which they cooperated, and Gibbs has since refused to help with the second edition.


One reporter sniffs that Gibbs, a native Alabaman and veteran of John Kerry's 2004 campaign, is the "communications director who doesn't communicate." "If you're getting an interview, and they say ten minutes, it's ten minutes," adds Time's Karen Tumulty, who scored an interview with Obama in June. "Robert Gibbs will cut it off."

Now, as the article points out, this could just be the stress and strain of a long campaign with reporters jockeying for stories. What concerned me was this bit:

Still, the campaign hasn't helped itself, approaching reporters with a sense of entitlement. "They're an arrogant operation. Young and arrogant," one reporter covering the campaign says. "They don't believe in transparency with their own campaign," another says.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, yes, young and arrogant. Almost hubristic.

That's a trope I'm very familiar with from the Obombers, as is anyone who has spoken even faint praise of Hillary Clinton before June.

The problem is, if you piss off someone who buys ink by the barrell (I think that one was Harry Truman's), you tend to pay for it large time in the end. The press had given much of Obama's life story a miss during the primary, since it was clear a) it would ruin a good story to find out Obama was not who he claimed he was, and b) Hillary was going to be the whipping boy girl of the primaries.

During the early part of the primaries, Obama gave good press: good access, full interviews, lots of face time in the press plane/bus/room.

Later, he contracted that.

Now, he practically doles out press time as if it was precious gold. Or oil.

That's not a real bright strategy this early in the campaign.

Friday Music Blogging

Death Cab For Cutie - I will Possess Your Heart

I'm not sure which is the creepier stalker song, this one or this one:

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) The Big Shitpile just got ranker.

2) The answer seems pretty simple: he knows John McCain is well-liked and well-respected across the pond (despite what we liberals might think about him), and while Europeans don't vote, they do speak up. Too, as much as we know little about him, the Europeans know even less, and what they know is filtered through our MSM. Would you want to be defined by FOX and CNN?

3) Our atmosphere is exploding. Don't laugh once you read the article. There's the potential for yet another renewable energy source here.

4) Did you ever really wonder why Tony Blair quit? We need something like this here. We could have been rid of Bush two years earlier!

5) Wanna bet that Obama is shaking in his boots right now over this vote? The lessons of 2006 should not be ignored in the run up to the election of a "progressive candidate for change". The Congress, despite its new clothing, is still the same old whore it's always been.

6) You wanna know how bad this movie likely will be? When I started seeing the TV commercials for it, I thought it was the DVD release!

7) Oh dear! Didn't Obama win these states in the primaries? Well, except Michigan, the state he screwed out of delegates...

8) The Terminator or the Outsourcer-rator?

9) Children, clap your hands really hard and maybe there will be no torture!

10) What was HE thinking?

It Depends On What Your Definition Of "Is" Is....

Of all the idiotic things for the campaigns to suddenly get bogged down in, this has to rank right up there:

Senator John McCain was chiding Senator Barack Obama for “a false depiction of what actually happened” in Iraq in a television interview this week. But in giving his chronology of events in Iraq, Mr. McCain gave what critics said was his own false depiction.

OK, not so bad in its own right, but...

“I don’t know how you respond to something that is such a false depiction of what actually happened,” Mr. McCain told Katie Couric, noting that the Awakening movement began in Anbar Province when a Sunni sheik teamed up with Sean MacFarland, a colonel who commanded an Army brigade there.

[...] The Obama campaign was quick to note that the Anbar Awakening began in the fall of 2006, several months before President Bush even announced the troop escalation strategy, which became known as the surge.

Seriously, anyone who has paid attention to the Bush administration realizes that it is absurd to think that the surge started after he announced it.

Think about it: on September 12, 2001, the Bushies were already planning to hit Saddam Hussein. Even during the surge, we were warned that the limit of 20,000 additional troops would be breached and it turned out to be nearly 50% higher.

Who is going to believe that Bush had not already very quietly shifted troops deployments and rushed stop-loss orders to inflate the number of troops in what was admittedly already a tenuous and crucial province in the invasion aftermath?

Too, one has to look at the "off-sheet" military, the mercenaries, who were far easier to deploy with little to no announcement. Think of it as a transfer to a branch office.

So Obama's criticism here might be better off muted. It's a silly nitpick, and sounds somewhat desperate. This is a criticism that would be better levelled at Bush, if he makes an incredulous statement like McCain did.

The bigger issue, the one both Obama and McCain seem reluctant to discuss, is whether the surge worked. There's the meat of the debate, and naturally, the basic premise of the entire invasion rests on how effective our military strategies for restoring Iraq have been.

As a military strategy, it seems pretty clear it worked, at least the way a bug bomb works: throw enough materiel quickly at the pests, and you have a lot of dead and dying bugs.

But it's not preventative, and here I think is where the surge breaks down: the political will of the Iraqi people is not focused on defeating Al Qaeda in Iraq or the other insurgent groups, but in getting the real irritant (irritant, in this sense, meaning that which incites violence) out.

Meaning us. That Maliki's government is nearly unanimous in their praise of Obama's stated withdrawal plan-- I still don't trust him to put it into play. His big financial backers have too much at stake.-- is indicative that their focus lies elsewhere.

Getting to the bottom of that is the key to "winning" this invasion.

Hump Day Comedy Blogging

I'm John McCain, and I approve this message:

Best. Response. Yet.

Senator McCain, Respctfully, STFU!

Well, now here's an intriguing little political performance art piece:

The Ad: (Narrator) Gas prices -- $4, $5, no end in sight, because some in Washington are still saying no to drilling in America. No to independence from foreign oil. Who can you thank for rising prices at the pump?

(Chant) Obama! Obama!

(Narrator) One man knows we must now drill more in America and rescue our family budgets. Don't hope for more energy, vote for it. McCain.

(transcription of John McCain ad, via the WaPo)

Now, John McCain himself has opposed off-shore drilling and some of his Republican gubernatorial friends oppose it, like Arnold Schwarzenegger. It has only been recently that McCain has called for drilling offshore. He still supports a ban on drilling in ANWR.

You've all heard the reasons to debunk this trope: it will take no less than ten years for that oil offshore to reach American consumers, by then gas will be $15 a gallon anyway, and no one will be driving cars, and that means there will be windfall profits for oil...oh. Yea. That.

Hm. Offshore oil exploration, hell, ANY oil exploration, is a near-losing proposition when oil is cheap. You milk, errr, pump, the cash cow you have for all its worth when oil is around $20 a barrel, which means you have shortfalls when prices rise rapidly, as they have over the past ten years.

This is why, in 1998, you actually started to see advertisements on TV from ExxonMobil talking about how hard it is to find new oil, but they'll expend the money now to bring you more in the future. Their long-range forecasts had clearly shown that gas and heating oil prices would start a precipitous climb.

As early as 2001, I recall reading market analysts' reports that showed gasoline selling at $5 a barrel by 2009 (we're close), and $15 a gallon by 2015.

This was back when gas was $2 a gallon and that was consider inflationary. A barrel of oil in 2001 sold for $23 (in 2001 dollars). Now, it's $100 more expensive.

Forget that this is about oil companies continuing an unbroken string of profits that make Donald Trump green with envy. This is Big Oil's last hurrah in the US: "cheap" oil that will be a ready source when oil becomes almost as valuable as silver, ounce for ounce.

In other words, oil will be selling in "precious metal" commodities territory.

Naturally, none of this would help you today, tomorrow, this week, this month, this year, or this lifetime. To suggest otherwise is ludicrous. By the time this oil is extracted and refined, most of us will be riding bicycles to work like the Chinese, who will have our oil anyway!

Not a bad thing, in my opinion, since I just bought this little honey yesterday... :-)

Why The Right Wing Needs An Enema

First, let me say this: I have no desire to see Mamma Mia!; I did not want to see it (despite having had an offer for opening night tix) on stage and likely will not see the movie unless I'm sick or something and it's on cable.

I had enough of ABBA music in the 70s, thank you. I wouldn't, for example, want to see a musical based on Phil Collins' music, either.

However, I think there is reviewing a movie on its merits and reviewing a movie self-referentially. To-wit, Pajamas Media

Firth keeps saying things like, “I’d quite like to freshen up” and “Might I be shown my room now?” and “There wouldn’t by any chance happen to be a trouser press down here?” No doubt you are correcting me in your mind: “Not gay. Just British.” I’ve forgotten so please remind me: what exactly is the difference?

There are times when Mamma Mia makes Hairspray seem like Magnum Force by comparison. I have no reason to suspect Meryl Streep is a gay man, but did RuPaul write her dialogue? Wielding a power drill, she is asked if she’s “getting any,” at which point she powers up the drill and says, “Down boy!” She also worries about “A crack in my courtyard,” but do we really want to hear about her crack?

Much of the talk is far worse. Did I really hear the words, “I won’t be muzzled by an ejaculation?” And, “Harry’s talked Tanya into water sports!” and “He’s all mouth and no trousers” and “Get the meat out of the heat”? Still, I could praise all of this and more if only the movie had provided me with a warning to avert my eyes before it provided a shuddery glimpse of Skarsgaard’s butt cheeks.

The Streep character and her battle-ax friends (Julie Walters, Christine Baranski) sing into vacuum cleaners and hair dryers in Dancing Queen, then strut around in pyramid formation. Everyone and everything is “fabulous” or “gorgeous” or “a little minx,” and at a, well, climactic moment a geyser busts out of the floor and bare-chested boys revel in it, in slow motion. Walters is definitely onto something when she says, “It’s very Greek.” Really, what kind of movie borrows its plot from the 80s miniseries Lace? All that is missing is a scene in which the bride asks, “Which one of you three bitches is my father?”

OK, class, now let's count up: I see two overt accusations of "teh gay", one RuPaul, cross-dressing reference, one reference to a Freudian image of a woman castrating a man (with a jackhammer, no less), and several presumably straight (pun intended) faced schoolboy jokes about double entendres and innuendoes (again, pun intended). Not to mention having to drag Dirty Harry (pun intended) Callahan's monster gun into it.

And then it gets worse: poor Kyle, apparently he's never been inside a locker room at a country club (or the airport restroom in Minneapolis), because the sight of an aging male ass has him practically quivering with delight anxiety! An orgasm of outrage fairly explodes out of Smith's keyboard (typing one-handed, probably)!

The denouement, the afterplay, if you will, speaks of sex toys and "fag-hagging" (really, Kyle, you can say it! No one likes you anyway...).

*WHEW*

I'm spent just having read my critique of his review!

Whatever Happened To Summer Vacation?

Wow. I mean, wow. When did you start reading about a political campaign in earnest before Labor Day?

Items in the news today:

Obama heads to Iraq - Well, you sort of knew this was coming. I mean, McCain is going to hammer Obama on his Iraq votes and his lack of experience, so why not inoculate yourself a bit?

Giuliani and McCain attend Yankees game - Speculation is rife that Rudy is on the short list. This ticket would be a dream come true for Obama. Imagine Rudy being forced to answer questions regarding racism in New York (Amadou Diallou, Patrick Dorismond and Abner Louima happened on his watch) in the context of running against a black candidate.

James Dobson to endorse McCain? - Certified wingnut & living room gibbon James Dobson, who once famously said "I cannot, and will not, vote for Sen. John McCain, as a matter of conscience," has apparently sold his conscience off.

In a related story, McCain and Obama agree to meet in megachurch forum - It's not so much a debate as sequential interviews with the minister, but it's close enough to the first debate you'll see between the two.

Netroots Nation (aka YearlyKos, aka Don't Bother Attending This Circlejerk) was shunned by Obama This Year - Again, a sign that Obama is abandoning his faux-liberal stance and his faux-liberal buddies at the Great Orange Satan. Hell, even Nancy Pelosi had the cojones to show up!

No more Electoral College? - Not quite, but there is a movement afoot by states to have their electoral college votes endorse the national popular vote winner. There's nothing unconstitutional about it, either, as the states clearly have the right to apportion their electoral votes as they see fit.

This last one might make for some intriguing possibilities come November 4...

Nobody Asked Me, But....

1) Al Gore. Who would have figured I would be ahead of HIS curve on greening? A few weeks back, I mentioned that America should commit to an Apollo-like project on renewable energy sources, and here's the Should-Be President picking up my idea and running with it!

2) In fairness, most of McCain's have to take Viagra before polling.

3) Now if he'd only speak out for the poor of Zimbabwe.

4) MEMO to Benedict XVI: we could start in the southern United States!

5) It is safe, I repeat, it is SAFE to eat tomatoes again!

6) Unless you believe the Bush administration is a bunch of political hacks who will do just enough to get by and no more.

7) Maybe if they'd have bothered catching the bastard, people would care more.

8) Compared to this, losing $2 billion in a quarter don't sound so bad!

9) Obama raised $52 million in June. That's the good news. The bad news is, by his own campaign's admission, he will need between $250 and $300 million to win the general election and that means he'll need to raise about $150 million in the six to eight weeks after Labor Day.

10) He's going to find it especially hard if he keeps dissing places like Florida.

11) Obama's probably going to have to spread himself thin this fall, or risk ending up having people introduced at rallies like "And now, here is the brother of the tailor of Barack Obama's advance strategy chief!"

12) How does a state, any state, live with itself when one-quarter to one-third of its residents are grossly overweight???? I'm sorry, that's utterly disgraceful!

13) Or udderly, for you wiseasses out there...

No Taxation Without Presentation

Let's talk about money for a moment.

A government is reliant on money. This generally comes in the form of taxes of some sort.

So taxes are a necessity, a necessary evil.

There's a fairly comprehensive, if anecdotal, body of evidence that suggests our current income tax system is not only ineffective, but possibly illegal.

As your NotPresident, I have a simple yet elegant solution, one that will lower taxes for most of us, yet re0jigger the tax liability so that it is more equitably distributed amongst the people who most benefit from our nation's freedoms.

After all, they have more freedoms than you or I. Look at how OJ Simpson got off!

Income is easy to tax and even easier to account for: you get a check, it gets deducted ahead of time, if you earn a salary. But that's not the problem. The problem comes from all those non-wage earnings: dividends, sales proceeds, and so on.

The disincentive of an income tax is to avoid spending money until after you've settled your debt to society. Withholdings make this bit easy, but the first time you get a lump sum from, say, the sale of a stock, you are clueless as to what to do regarding your taxes.

My tax system would avoid all this. Rather than focus on income, I would focus on wealth.

You are free to earn as much money as you can, legally, illegally, I don't care. What I DO care about is how much you keep out of the economy. And there's the difference.

Simply put, I would tax any investment that, in turn, did not create more income. No more tax shelters. No more idle rich sitting on their arses, collecting dividend checks. No more squirreling away money that you earned on the backs of the working and middle classes so that your kids can go to Choate and Harvard.

It's really very simple: the incentive in this tax system is to spend money, actual cash money, and the more you can afford, the more you should spend.

Naturally, there will be some baseline "minimum wealth" figure under which no one would be taxed. It's not fair, for example, to tax someone who owns a $100,000 home for four people, struggling by on an income of $30,000. I'd have to run the numbers a bit, but my suspicion is I would exempt anyone who owns less than $500,000 in assets.

Net of a home mortgage, to boot.

Eveerything else above that is fair game, and yes, I would tax your retirement savings. But notice something: every dollar you draw down after retirement is 100% tax free.

The tax rates would be graduated. It's not fair to ask someone who owns, say, $500,001 to pay the same rate of tax as someone who owns 500,000,001. If your hogging your wealth, you're going to get hit with a penalty, a big penalty.

Admittedly, this plan would need a lot of fleshing out (actually, it's already been fleshed out, but after Senator McCain stole my idea for a cash prize for alternative energy, I'm laying just enough cards on the table to show my hand without putting my chips in completely.

You want it, Barack? John? Come buy it off me!

I even promise to spend the check!

The Gamut with Amy and Naomi

SO MUCH here in this interview with Naomi Klein by Amy Goodman.
Klein's book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" is out
in paperback and, as usual, Amy's interviews are great because she asks
the questions and then stfu so you get the most out of the person being
interviewed. Great insight into government policies being pushed through,
"Obama's Chicago Boys", her recent trip to China and the boon to military
contractors going on there, suing the government for spying on
(real) journalists like her, oil prices, climate change, housing and more.
Well worth the time. You can read, listen or watch.