The Killing

Respectable little murders pay/
They get more respectable every day
-- "Sunset Grill," Don Henley

With all of the drama and madness in this Darkest Timeline, with all the gun violence our nation witnesses on a daily basis, it's telling that the shooting of a single person only matters when that person was the uber-rich CEO of a healthcare corporation (via Jake Offenhartz, Michael Balsamo, and Michael R. Sisak at AP News):

New clues emerged Thursday in the hunt for the masked gunman who stalked and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, including possible leads about his travel before the shooting and a message scrawled on ammunition found at the crime scene.

The words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” were found emblazoned on the ammunition, echoing a phrase used by insurance industry critics, two law enforcement officials said Thursday.

The words were written in permanent marker, according to one of the two officials, who were not authorized to publicly discuss details of the investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.

Investigators also now believe the suspect may have traveled to New York last month on a bus that originated in Atlanta, one of the law enforcement officials said...

One of the interesting developments in this story is how quickly social media jumped on the story... by satirizing (if not brutally mocking) the victim's status as an allegedly corrupt corporate boss of a major health care insurer with a known history of massive profits at the expense of denying millions of Americans any affordable health care. As Troy Farah over at Salon notes:

Violence is a strategy that never warrants celebration because it is crude, brutal and ineffective, not to mention immoral. There’s always a better way, even if it’s not as easy or as dramatic. Nonetheless, it’s not bizarre or surprising to see that Reddit is being flooded with memes mocking the murder, or that many on social media are seemingly trying (or failing) to suppress their glee. There’s now even a rush to cash in with merch, such as a ballcap using the company’s logo next to crosshairs and the phrase “We aim to please.” A chart from valuepenguin.com displaying the percentage of claim denial rates by insurance companies, with UnitedHealthcare topping the list, has gone super viral, with one user on Threads captioning it, “To paraphrase Chris Rock ‘... but I understand.’”

The overall justification for this celebration — the New York Times described it as a “torrent of hate” — lies in the widely understood the fact that health care companies inflict violence on thousands of people in this country, if not millions, every single day. Take the announcement this week from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, which couldn’t have had better or worse timing, depending on one’s perspective. That company proposed that its health insurance plans in Connecticut, New York and Missouri would no longer cover anesthesia care if a surgery or operation extends beyond an arbitrary time limit. That seems to have outraged the American Society of Anesthesiologists, which has called on Anthem to immediately reverse this proposal.

On Thursday, Anthem did just that, but the shock remains. If that’s not violence, what is? Whether you’re in an alley or on an operating table, if someone has a knife to you and demands your money, it’s violence. Or consider the innumerable examples that aren’t just proposals but routine policy: the tidal wave of denied or delayed claims, the noose of restrictive networks, costly deductibles, prescription refusals and on and on. There is also convincing evidence this walled garden especially excludes and discriminates against people of color, queer people and women, making this systemic violence not just prevalent, but also disproportionate...

Thompson's murder is not different from the many times a wingnut gunman went storming into a Planned Parenthood clinic to shoot at "baby killers," so celebrating the act would be monstrous hypocrisy for those us angered by Far Right violence towards women and the health care providers they need. If there is any difference, it's that most of those gunmen are pumped up on lies from Far Right media, whereas this gunman can well be acting out direct vengeance. Nearly every observer's comments/viewpoints on "motive" - something the police haven't confirmed yet, because there's a good chance of misdirection - are going by the things Farah highlighted about our nation's broken health care system: This shooter could well have lost a loved one to a fatal illness that Thompson's United HealthCare corporation refused to help.

That is of course pure speculation on my - and a lot of other people's - part. For all we know, the killer could have been a hired hitman: Thompson was under investigation for insider trading, for example.

Ah, as Farah noted: "...But I understand."

This killing brought to the fore news coverage of how hundreds - if not millions - of Americans are rightly angered by how our health care companies routinely deny any affordable health care. Just to share from Selena Simmons-Duffin's report at NPR:

Yolonda Wilson is one of many people who shared painful stories about health insurance gone wrong on social media this week.

Her insurer, UnitedHealthcare, denied coverage for a surgery about two days before it was scheduled, back in January. She finally got it approved, in the nick of time, with a lot of unnecessary stress and tears. "I did not know until Wednesday afternoon whether I would be able to have surgery Thursday morning," she told NPR.

Wilson, a professor of Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University in Missouri, noted that she was telling her personal story, not speaking on behalf of the university.

The shocking, targeted killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson Wednesday struck a nerve on social media, triggering an outpouring of negative experiences with the tangled health care system in the U.S.

Many people shared searing stories of health care denials from health insurers. One person said his mom's scan to check on her stage IV lung cancer was recently denied. In another post, a dad shared the letter UHC sent him denying a wheelchair for his son with cerebral palsy.

"A lot of people are in deep pain, and maybe didn't have anywhere to put that pain," Wilson says.

UnitedHealthcare is the biggest private health insurer in the U.S., with an outsized market share in both the commercial insurance and Medicare Advantage markets. UnitedHealth Group reported $371.6 billion in revenue last year and faces an antitrust lawsuit to block its $3.3 billion acquisition of a rival home health and hospice service.

Americans generally say they're pretty happy with their health insurance, according to survey data from health policy research organization KFF — unless they're sick. Those with "fair" or "poor" health are nearly twice as likely to be displeased with their insurance compared to those with "good" health.

The sick thing about getting sick in America is that the moment you do, those insurers who'd been taking your money all those years suddenly refuse to pay any of it back to you. God forbid they cut into those billions of revenues.

Pam Herd, a professor of social policy at the University of Michigan who studies administrative burdens involved in accessing government services, says barriers to health care access are especially painful.

"It's one thing to be frustrated at the DMV because you have a ton of paperwork to fill out or you have to spend an hour in line," she says. "It's a whole other thing to face those barriers when they are the difference between whether you're going to get life-saving care or not."

Herd's research shows how barriers in the health care system can affect people's actual health — whether it's calling several times to just get an appointment or trying to find an in-network specialist or fighting to get a procedure covered...

For all the Far Right and Libertarian types out there who whine about the federal bureaucracy, the DMV ain't got shit on UnitedHealthcare or the other for-profit corporations out there that work to delay, defend, and deny any help to the people at all. Dealing with the stress of jumping through hoop after hoop and running into brick wall after brick wall is just as sickening as getting a life-threatening-yet-treatable illness.

One of the more shocking stories going public is how UHC under Thompson's reign implemented an AI-based automated process that generated 90 percent error rates while denying their clients the financial help they were supposed to get. That was originally a report from 2023, but only now are people really reading it.

Again: "...But I understand."

As of right now, the other CEOs of large corporations - not just in the insurance business - are hiring more bodyguards and clearing their names off the company websites to avoid getting on anybody's Naughty Lists. They are - obviously - not interested in responding to the growing public outrage towards their ravenous greed: They have, after all, just bought off the 2024 election cycle to guarantee trump and the Republican Party will grant them the massive tax cuts and deregulations they desire to add to the billions they already possess.

The CEOs - the true class-driven elite, the robber barons of the 21st Century - are mourning the death of one of their fellow greedheads while overlooking the body count of thousands of Americans who die because they didn't get their health care approved or covered in time, or worse the thousands who die because they can't get any insurance coverage at all.

THAT is why a lot of people suspect the assassin was acting out of vengeance. 

And yeah, we understand.

Which murders - the shooting of a CEO or the deaths of families and loved ones - get more respectable in the end?

Time to Break the NRA, Now That It's Financially Broke

I hadn't talked about it much, but the National Rifle Body County Association had been facing civil lawsuits in the state of New York - where their organization had been incorporated - and the State AG Letitia James delivered for justice and sanity (again) when the jury came back this afternoon holding the NRA leaders liable for decades of embezzlement, mismanagement, and corruption (via Emma Bowman and Brian Mann at NPR):

A Manhattan jury found three top executives of the National Rifle Association liable Friday in a lengthy civil trial that focused on alleged corruption and the misspending of millions of dollars.

Longtime NRA leader Wayne LaPierre, a key architect in the nonprofit's hardline gun rights agenda who stepped down as CEO last month, was central to New York state's case.

Jurors found that LaPierre "violated his statutory obligation to discharge the duties of his position in good faith."

They concluded that he had caused roughly $5.4 million worth of harm to the nonprofit group's finances — though they also found that LaPierre had already repaid roughly $2 million.

LaPierre is the same sonofabitch who made the decision after the horrifying Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre to double down on the madness of gun proliferation that has led to more guns and more gun violence. He went out there and claimed "there was no way to end the violence" and that the best way to solve it was "good guys with guns." (Guess what, good guys with guns doesn't work) All the while raking in the profits that the NRA succored out of the gun manufacturers - who all had a part of the NRA's leadership - that he then indulged himself.

The executives were accused of misappropriating and mismanaging funds donated to the gun rights group's members. According to New York state Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the lawsuit, their actions led to "the loss of more than $64 million in just three years."

During the six-week trial, state lawyers alleged that LaPierre had spent over $11 million for private flights and approved $135 million in NRA contracts in exchange for yacht access and free trips to the Bahamas, Greece and other vacation hotspots, The Associated Press reported.

All those vacations to overseas nations that have gun control laws in place. Probably made it safe for LaPierre to walk around at night spending more blood money.

LaPierre spent three decades growing the NRA's political and lobbying influence. Even as mass shootings became commonplace, LaPierre rejected attempts to change gun policy, branding gun control proponents as enemies of freedom and using the threat of firearms regulation to fundraise.

His resignation was announced just days before the trial began, with the NRA instead citing health as the reason for his departure.

The NRA's grip on politics has weakened in recent years as it's faced declining membership and revenue, and concerns within the group over leadership's direction and misuse of funds...

There was a moment, years ago, when ties to Russian intelligence exposed the dire financial straits that the organization found itself (It doesn't look like that investigation went far). There had also been power struggles both behind the doors and on the public stage that exposed how corrupt LaPierre had made himself and the NRA. There'd been complaints the organization had been rigging their internal elections for decades.

With any luck, this court ruling breaks all of that. This jury decision will block some of the more corrupt NRA leaders from holding office, hopefully leaving room for reformers to gain meaningful footholds. AG James is looking to install an independent court monitor to oversee the financials, which would go a long way towards clearing out any of the other org leaders unable to bribe or bully their way back into power.

While I am hopeful of all that, whether this will lead to any sanity on the political stage remains unknown. Far too many politicians - cough Far Right Republicans cough - have built their "brands" on being "gun-toting, 2nd Amendment Loving" psychopaths, and they're not going to change their public image any time soon.

It's up to the voters - now without the NRA funneling their blood money into the electoral process - to hear the calls for gun reforms more clearly, and to vote appropriately for the federal and state officials who will do something - banning the assault rifles that make up most of our mass shootings; reinstating gun safety regulations like waiting periods, registration and training; and stopping the intentional market glut of cheap guns; things like that - to stop our streets - and our schools, and our stores, and our churches, and our movie theaters, and our concerts - filling with innocent blood.

Hope you go to Hell broke, Wayne. You earned that.

Violating Emoluments Every Day as a trumpian Way of Life

I have on this blog since the rise of donald trump as a corrupt political force of doom documented how much of what trump was doing was out of greed, needy for money and happy to pander to foreign powers to get as much as he could.

Well, today a number of Democrats on the House Oversight Committee - in order to counter the Republicans' obsession over Hunter Biden's dick pics laptop - presented solid evidence that trump routinely violated the Constitution's Emoluments Clause by taking millions from foreign countries like China, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar (via Luke Broadwater at the New York Times (may be paywalled)):

Donald J. Trump’s businesses received at least $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments during his presidency, according to new documents released by House Democrats on Thursday that show how much he received from overseas transactions while he was in the White House, most of it from China.

The transactions, detailed in a 156-page report called “White House For Sale” that was produced by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, offer concrete evidence that the former president engaged in the kind of conduct that House Republicans have labored, so far unsuccessfully, to prove that President Biden did as they work to build an impeachment case against him.

Using documents produced through a court fight, the report describes how foreign governments and their controlled entities, including a top U.S. adversary, interacted with Trump businesses while he was president. They paid millions to the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.; Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas; Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York; and Trump World Tower at 845 United Nations Plaza in New York.

The Constitution prohibits federal officeholders from accepting money, payments or gifts “of any kind whatever” from foreign governments and monarchs unless they obtain “the consent of the Congress” to do so. The report notes that Mr. Trump never went to Congress to seek consent...

It so happened that in 2017 when this all started that Congress was under Republican control, and the Republicans are too cowardly and too crooked themselves to raise a fuss over trump's open corruption. trump didn't even need to bother Congresscritters who were happy to look the other way.

Among the countries patronizing Mr. Trump’s properties, China made the largest total payment — $5.5 million — to his business interests, the report found. Those payments included millions of dollars from China’s Embassy in the United States, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and the Hainan Airlines Holding Company.

Saudi Arabia was the second-largest spender, shelling out more than $615,000 at the Trump World Tower and Trump International Hotel...

Half of this was stuff we already knew over years of reporting about how foreign lobbyists would check into trump's DC hotel pandering for favors. It's just now, we have a great idea how much money was actually involved.

The frustrating question to ask now - just as I'd been asking since 2017 - is WHEN THE FCK CAN WE CHARGE TRUMP FOR VIOLATING THE EMOLUMENTS CLAUSE?!

Part of me is worried that we may be too late: there is a thing about statute of limitations, that there's a ticking clock to when the legal system can't pursue the matter any further. Granted, trump was doing this all the way up to January 20, 2021: There is hope the clock hasn't run out.

But one of the things that kept coming up in the courts whenever the lawsuits were filed was who had standing to do so (this is from Laurel Wamsley for NPR back in 2019): 

A constitutional challenge to President Trump's continued ownership of his businesses has been ordered dismissed by a federal appeals court.

The case was brought by the attorneys general of Washington, D.C., and Maryland, arguing that Trump had violated the domestic and foreign emoluments clauses of the U.S. Constitution by accepting money from state and foreign governments via his Washington hotel and business empire.

A three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled unanimously that the attorneys general did not have the standing to bring the lawsuit and instructed a lower court to dismiss the lawsuit.

Judge Paul Niemeyer wrote in the opinion: "The District and Maryland's interest in enforcing the Emoluments Clauses is so attenuated and abstract that their prosecution of this case readily provokes the question of whether this action against the President is an appropriate use of the courts, which were created to resolve real cases and controversies between the parties."

One thing that ruling didn't spell out was: If the state AGs didn't have standing, who did? I'm still not sure, other than it being Congress, except that another court ruling in 2020 said the Democrats in Congress didn't have standing either (via Dareh Gregorian at NBC News).

In the ruling, the three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found the members of Congress did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit against the president for violating the clause, which bars federal officials from collecting payments from foreign governments without the approval of Congress.

In their unsigned ruling, the judges cited Supreme Court precedent, noting the 215 lawmakers filing the lawsuit are not the majority of Congress, and that they might have had standing if they had done so as a majority. "[O]nly an institution can assert an institutional injury," the ruling says...

This feels like moving the goal posts on the part of the courts: "Oh, only Congress can charge trump with Emoluments violations! No wait, only a MAJORITY of Congress members can charge trump! No wait, only a MAJORITY of BOTH HOUSES of Congress members can charge trump! No wait, only..."

/headdesk

For all the back and forth, all the debates over all the other crimes trump's been charged with, the one thing we KNOW trump committed - using his businesses to curry favor from foreign powers - is the one thing nobody seems able to charge him on.

What the hell, judges. What the hell, Republicans. You're letting the corruption flow freely anymore.

The only way to hold trump - and his Republican cronies - accountable is to deny him another chance to sit in the White House and violate the Emoluments Clause any further. Stop voting Republican, Americans. Stop voting for the crooks.

The Hypocrisy of Pickpockets in Florida

The government of my country snubs honest simplicity but fondles artistic villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or two.
-- Mark Twain

Some days, you got to remind yourself that the louder and pious the elected official behaves in public, the likelier it is that elected official is a hypocritical pickpocket.

Case in point: This morning the news let out that the Florida state legislator who authored the odious "Don't Say Gay" law that the Far Right Republicans shoved down our throats was charged by the feds for stealing from the federal COVID-19 bailout funds. Via Edwin Rios at the Guardian: 

A federal grand jury has indicted the Florida state representative Joe Harding, the Republican lawmaker who authored the “don’t say gay” bill, for Covid business relief fraud and money laundering, the justice department announced on Wednesday.

Between December 2020 and March 2021, Harding, 35, committed wire fraud when he took part in a “scheme to defraud” the Small Business Administration and obtained Covid-related relief funds for small businesses under false pretenses, according to a federal indictment.

Harding, whose biography lists him as a “home healthcare executive” and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, allegedly “fraudulently obtained” more than $150,000 in funds from the Small Business Administration...

Harding’s home health agency is located in Ocala. After state redistricting created a new electorate, Harding moved to Ocala to be closer to his job and ran for house district 24, according to Florida Politics. He authored the Parental Rights in Education Act, which prohibits educators from talking about matters of gender and sexual identity in schools, a move that advocates worried would “erase” LGBTQ+ students and their history...

It's not mentioned in the article, but I bet you a couple wooden nickels that Harding is one of those happy Christian warriors, the kind who love to claim they follow all of Jesus' teachings and live by every word they can quote from the Bible. The state-level Republicans are full of such Bible Thumpers who enjoy the sadism of thumping everybody else's heads with the thick Bibles in their hands.

Considering how Harding is openly crusading against Gays and Trans identities, he's likely one of those Christian warriors who'll quote the passages against homosexuality and any kind of gender identity they view as deviancy.

I guarantee you Harding will never quote the parts of the Bible where Jesus commanded us to love each other, the open act of Grace that defines acceptance regardless of race or gender or gender preference. 

Based on the federal charges leveled against Harding, he certainly never paid attention to God's Commandments like, oh:

You shall not steal (taking $150,000 that didn't belong to you).

You shall not covet thy neighbor's belongings (a thief in high office tends to covet the trappings of wealth, the cars, the big toys, the even bigger houses).

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor (lying in general - such as falsely claiming workers you never hired - tends to be a violation of ethics as well as faith).

Harding is one of many Republicans who rail on religious grounds against the very existence of gay and trans people, and then hypocritically commit crimes against everyone else thinking that their political and religious status will shield them from accountability.

Well, guess what Harding? Your hypocrisy does not shield you. You are now about to answer to Man's Law with regards to your greed and envy.

Just wonder how you'll excuse all that greed away with the God's Law that you never held true.

P.S. KEEP SAYING "GAY", FLORIDA. Harding doesn't speak for us, that's for damn sure.

Update: That was quick. Harding resigns from his office. It won't change much - the Florida lege is so dominated by Republicans they could lose 20 of them and not blink an eye - but it does suggest he had no room to run.

Mississippi Stealing

Political corruption, sad to say, is as old as politics itself. If you go back to the time of Hammurabi, you'll likely find court officials taking bribes from stone masons to avoid getting punished for racing their chariots through school zones. It doesn't matter which political party, doesn't matter which nation, doesn't matter which gender, doesn't matter the religion of the corrupt official or the race they identify. Greed is universally understood: It gets into anything where money and privilege is involved, and may God have mercy on the victims who suffer when the powerful get greedy.

One of the things in American politics is how the corruption plays out between the federal level and the states. As the dynamics of the Constitution shifted from states having more of the political might and wealth to the federal - it started under the Reconstruction era post-Civil War but by the time of the New Deal (and the Second World War) all the money (and the power) flowed from Washington DC - you saw the shift in corruption as well. If not the federal agencies and elected officials getting caught stealing from the till, it was the state-level officials who were funneling federal aid away from the citizens (who needed that aid) into the officials' own pockets.

A particularly ugly example of that just got revealed to the public this week, when federal and state investigators revealed that almost 77 million dollars meant for welfare programs to the state of Mississippi were diverted to other projects or organizations that directly profited either those state officials or their wealthy benefactors/allies. The story gained national attention from the revelation that famed sports star Brett Favre - football Hall of Famer from Southern Miss - was in on part of the theft. This is one of the few times on this blog I've ever linked to a story from ESPN:

An investigative report by Mississippi Today revealed Tuesday that former Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant helped former NFL quarterback Brett Favre obtain welfare funds in order to help build a new volleyball center at the University of Southern Mississippi.

The news organization reviewed text messages from 2017 and 2019 that were filed Monday in the state of Mississippi's civil lawsuit over misspent welfare funds. The texts were filed by an attorney representing Nancy New, who has already pleaded guilty to 13 felony counts of bribery, fraud and racketeering for her role in the welfare scheme. New was the founder of the Mississippi Community Education Center, which was tasked with spending tens of millions in federal welfare funds to help the state.

State auditors determined nonprofit leaders misspent at least $77 million in welfare funds in the largest case of public fraud in Mississippi history.

The texts show Favre, New and Bryant discussing how to divert at least $5 million in welfare funds to build a volleyball stadium at Southern Miss. Favre played football at Southern Miss, and his daughter was a volleyball player there at the time some of the texts were sent.

"If you were to pay me is there anyway the media can find out where it came from and how much?" Favre asked New in 2017.

After telling Favre that "we never have that information publicized," she circled back to him the next day.

"Wow, just got off the phone with Phil Bryant! He is on board with us! We will get this done!" New told Favre...

Favre not only understood how bad this story would look if it got out, Favre expressed relief in a follow-up text - "Awesome! I needed to hear that for sure" - that he was going to get political cover from Mississippi's governor.

If you need context to understand why this is so disgusting and horrifying an act by Nancy New, Phil Bryant, Brett Favre, and several others: You need to understand that the not-so-great state of Mississippi is one of the poorest states in America. For a little more analysis, let's take a look at this (via Stephan Bisaha at NPR):

This is a tale of two Jackson, Mississippis.

There's Jackson, the state capital, run historically by white conservatives. Then there's Jackson, the 82 percent Black city, run by a mayor wanting to make it "the most radical city on the planet."

February's winter storm and water crisis provided just the latest high profile example of the two Jackson's clashing. State and local governments have made a pastime out of pointing fingers at each other for the city's woes, from crime to potholes to urban blight.

Mississippi leaders say Jackson is just one city and can't hog resources to fix problems found elsewhere in the state too. Jackson leaders say they need more state support and that Mississippi can't thrive while its largest city suffers.

For Jacksonians, it can feel like Jackson the city versus Jackson the capital.

"I don't see this legislative body as representing me," said Jackson State University Professor D'Arby Orey, referring to the Mississippi Legislature. "I don't really expect it to provide support for Jackson..."

That's usually how the relationship goes. Jackson requests state dollars, Mississippi says it will help, but other parts of the state need those resources too.

"We had 78 different systems throughout the entire state that were having and experiencing challenges," Reeves said at a press conference in March. "This is not an issue that is unique to our capital city."

State politicians also often say city leaders need to take more responsibility.

"The prime mover needs to be the city itself. It's the city of Jackson, Mississippi," Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann told the Mississippi Free Press. "How much money is it going to take, and how do you even pay for it? I haven't seen any of that."

Mississippi often places last on state lists for everything from health to income. Jackson also struggles with the same problems, with 23 percent of the city falling below the poverty line.

Jackson's mayor says the fate of the city and state can't be separated – more support from Mississippi for its largest city would mean growth for the rest of the state.

"Without question it can't change without a significant alteration in the relationship with the city of Jackson" Lumumba says. "Ultimately it is not just a Jackson problem. It is a state of Mississippi problem..."

That article was published in 2021. Just this past month August 2022 Jackson Mississippi went into full crisis as their water became too toxic for anything. And the state - which has all the money and power at that level - still doesn't seem to be doing a damn thing to fix it.

What is happening here is racism: Yes, I am going there.

Jackson is Mississippi's largest population center. You would think, rationally, that as the major center the state legislature and governor's office - which work there! - would care more to fund that metro and keep its infrastructure working well, make its schools better, make sure the workplaces are safe, the homes are well-built, the roads working, the pipes flowing. You want your major city to attract good business, keep families living there, grow and expand into a major metro the way southern cities like Atlanta and Orlando and Charlotte grew.

But the state legislature - through decades of political gerrymandering, open hostility to civil (and voting) rights, and constant corruption of social conservatives (who flipped from Democrats to Republicans during the post-60s realignment) - as noted in Bisaha's article is mostly White at 68 percent, while the city of Jackson is 82 percent Black. This is in a state of Mississippi with 58 percent Whites and 38 percent Blacks. Mississippi has the largest percentage of Black residents among all the states (The District of Columbia is higher but doesn't count as a state (yet, which may also explain why DC statehood remains undone)).

The mostly White Mississippi state legislature doesn't care about taking care of their own state, because God forbid any attempts to improve their education, health care, business startups, and/or overall economy may go to "those people". Jamelle Bouie noted this years ago at Slate:

Driven by its high poverty rate, Mississippi ranks low on health and wellness. It has one the highest rates of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes in the country, as well as the highest mortality rate for infants and adults. These ills are worst among its black residents: 43.2 percent of Mississippi blacks are afflicted by obesity and its associated problems and 44 percent live at or below the poverty line, compared with a—still high—30.2 percent obesity rate and 16 percent poverty rate for whites...

We know why Mississippi Republicans refuse to work with the ACA: A hyper-ideological, small government conservatism that disdains social programs and public investment. But it’s worth a look at the history behind that conservatism, which lives strongest in Mississippi but exists throughout the Deep South.

Mississippi has poor social outcomes and a threadbare safety net. It also has—and has long had—the largest black population in the country. And it’s where slavery was very lucrative, and Jim Crow most vicious. This is not a coincidence...

Where they existed, public services were sparse and utterly segregated. Anything public had to be kept separate from blacks, or degraded, if that wasn’t possible. To get a sense of the scale of white resistance in Mississippi, consider this: During the civil rights movement, white supremacists built a network of state and private agencies to wreak havoc on black activists with surveillance, economic reprisals, and extreme violence. One of them was the Mississippi Citizens Council, and it, writes historian Joseph Crespino, “[P]oliced a white racial authoritarianism that ran roughshod over the civil and political rights of white and black Mississippians both. Because of the Council’s influence, no place in the United States … came closer to resembling the repressiveness of apartheid South Africa than did Mississippi.”

More than a half-century later, and all of this is dead. But the ideas and culture it built are not. And why would they be? For nearly 100 years, Mississippi was a white supremacist police state. Of course this made a mark on its culture. Of course these ideas of exclusion—and specifically, of racial hostility to outside interference and public goods—are still embedded in the structure of its politics.

Today, Mississippi is politically polarized along racial lines. Whites are Republicans, blacks are Democrats, and the former controls state politics. Public investment isn’t just disdained, it’s attacked as racially suspect. “The Republican Party has never been the food stamp party, or the party of pork until desperation set in with Thad Cochran’s re-election bid,” said state Sen. Angela Hill during the Mississippi Senate Republican primary, in reference to Sen. Cochran’s outreach to black voters. The state is harshly carceral—jailing more people per capita than almost anywhere in the country, the majority of them black—and has a huge number of all-white private schools while the public school system is largely segregated...

Even after the Civil Rights era brought an end to Jim Crow, Mississippi's power structure merely realigned itself to the task of "Well, if we're supposed to make Them equal, let's make it so shitty there's nothing good about it for Them to enjoy." And so the corruption ignores the needs of the state's biggest city, ignores the need to improve the schools to let children - White and Black (and Latino and Creole and Cajun if you got 'em) - get educations that could make them smart enough for good jobs at decent wages, and ignores the reality that poverty hurts a majority of state residents regardless of race while the rich play around at the Biloxi casinos and whatever upper-class country clubs they have upriver. 

Mississippi has been one of the poorest states for generations, and the actions of these grifters - who I'm willing to bet will tell you that "poverty is a character flaw" instead of it being pressed down upon the poor to keep them poor - are keeping Mississippi broken and impoverished for their own greedy ends.

Every elected official past and present who had a hand in this $77 million dollar ripoff should be in handcuffs facing juries, every millionaire who got money they didn't need off these schemes should be in handcuffs facing juries, even Brett Favre - who was $100 million in net wealth already and could have easily used his celebrity to raise more - needs to hang his head in shame in front of a judge reading back to him the charges of stealing from the poor to make the rich richer.

Racism is at the root of a lot of our nation's sins. Don't be at all surprised Greed and Racism go happily hand-in-hand as we beat down the impoverished for our sins (and not theirs).

Brief Thought on How to Label Rich Jerks

Idiot Billionaire Hoping To Save His Tax Cuts From Impending Progressive Passage of High Marginal Rates Doesn't Like Being Called a Billionaire (via Arwa Mahdawi of the Guardian).

When asked by New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin whether he thought billionaires had become too powerful in American life, the coffee magnate complained that “the moniker billionaire now has become the catchphrase”. Rather than using a word like billionaire to describe a person with billions of dollars, Schultz suggested it may be better to use expressions like “people of means” or “people of wealth”.

Poor Schultz. He was just trying to help us all out; generously digging into his rich vocabulary and spreading the semantic wealth. However, after footage of the interview went viral this week, the businessman has been mercilessly mocked. People of mean spirit have been suggesting their own alternatives to billionaire such as “robber barons”, “cash vampires”, and various other phrases that are probably too rude to repeat...

Yeah, I've probably repeated about twenty rude ones on Twitter just this weekend alone.

But let's play nice, shall we? Let's not go after the super-rich who are failing at noblesse oblige with the vindictive venom of French Revolutionaries.

If we're gonna label Billionaires for what they are, let's keep this professional yet accurate.

Let's call them:

Avarice Americans.

What, Schultz. You don't like that? You don't like getting called out for your greedy tax-dodging stealing-from-the-public ways?

Whadda ya gonna do, pay us to NOT insult you? You should. All of you Billionaires should tread lightly. There's 300 million of us and only 585 of you. I think we can take 'em in a fair fight.

Follow The Money

(Hello again, Crooks and Liars readers visiting from Mike's Blog Round Up! Thank you again, Batacchio, for the link!)

The Grand Unification Theory of All trump Scandals:

It's about the MONEY. As Charles P. Pierce at Esquire points out:

It simply comes down to money: the Russians, the meetings that mysteriously slipped everyone's minds when they were testifying before Congress or filling out disclosure forms, the vanishing tax returns, the emoluments mess, the bizarre attraction to wealthy overseas authoritarians, the unshakable presence of Michael Flynn. All of it, simple American greed magnified by a culture of celebrity and, through a fluke presidential election, dropped like a dead squirrel in a chimney into the world's greatest democracy—and, as a result, stinking up the entire joint.

There are other motives for why trump is in this game: Revenge against Obama's humiliations of him; Pride and Ego of being a God-Emperor Dictator in the Oval Office; The Infamy of being in the history books as a President Loser Of the Popular Vote. But really, it's all down to his goddamn greed.

He'll still be in this to get the big tax cuts for his income bracket, of course. trump is likely trying to figure out a way of robbing the Treasury as much as possible before he's forced out by the Russia investigations and pending Obstruction charges. And trump - through his son-in-law Jared and the rest of the trump crime family, for God's sake, he STOLE SOME OTHER FAMILY'S COAT OF ARMS - is shaking down foreign countries for political access as fast as the private meetings can be arranged.

This is all the last big con for trump. His casinos have failed, his steak and wine brands have failed, his hotels are failing, his fake university failed, everything except his inflated celebrity status has failed. Being President was the biggest scam he could hope for.

The Republicans let him play the game because they thought they could control the scam. But trump is better in one regards: he's a better con artist, and he tricked them for all it was worth.

And we're all paying the goddamn price.

Is Trump Even Really a Billionaire?

This is a legitimate question, which is becoming increasingly necessary to ask as more details about Trump's failed online university business scheme come out. Via Matt Ford at The Atlantic:

“Based upon my personal experience and employment, I believe that Trump University was a fraudulent scheme, and that it preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money,” said Ronald Schnackenberg, a sales manager at Trump University in 2006 and 2007.

Those declarations and other internal Trump University documents depict an aggressive, ethically dubious business model that targeted potential customers’ financial fears and socioeconomic anxieties and offered Trump’s personal brand as the solution—a strategy later echoed in his presidential campaign...

Via the Rude Pundit, who quotes from a 2006 (!) article from a Canadian reporter Kelly Roesler, the whole "Trump University" plan reads like a Ponzi scheme - relying on "Other People's Money" - than on genuine training over how to use real estate to earn success:

Roesler was subjected to everything that you've read: the hard sell, the "OPM" idea of using your credit cards to finance the expensive bullshit Trump U was flinging, the unrealistic promises of wealth. Roesler isn't part of the class action lawsuit because she saw through the screen of lies. Check it out and spread this around. It's contemporaneous evidence of what an unethical buffoon the Republican nominee is...

What strikes me is the sense of urgency, the push within the Trump University organization to bring in as many victims "students" as possible and have them all pay huge expenses towards anything and everything that organization could throw at them.

It's not so much that Trump is greedy - we know that, he brags about it - it's that Trump seems even back in 2006 so desperate for "Other People's Money" that there's more of a NEED for that money instead of a WANT.

The Balloon Juice people linked to an article from a site called HeatStreet, so let us check in with article writer Rick Wilson about what he knows:

By August of last year, I was working to convince major donors that Trump would be a destructive force and likely throw the race to Hillary Clinton. One moment from that period sticks with me as a turning point in my thinking about Trump’s money; a major Wall Street donor laughed when I told him we’d need to mount a serious and fully-funded effort to take on Trump if he chose to self fund.

My friend scoffed at the very idea that Trump was worth even a quarter of the mythical $10 billion, much less that he was liquid to the tune of more than $200 million. “He’s not a billionaire. I’m a billionaire. He’s a clown living on credit.”

While Wilson or his Wall Street friend didn't provide specific evidence, they are pointing at some very obvious clues: Trump's primary source of income is supposedly in real estate, a market known for its over-reliance on loans and credit based on the "value" of the property itself.

Trump's income surely isn't from his failed airline, failed food services, or failed casinos.

If anything, we're finding out that Trump owes money to a good number of banks. Wall Street Journal has him owing $250 million across the board, while he's in debt to $100 million to an overseas bank that can prove to be a serious Conflict Of Interest should Trump become President.

Okay, I'm asking here: if you were truly worth $10 billion, wouldn't you use some of that money cashed out - in hand - to pay off said debts? I mean, $100 million is less than a percent of $10 billion: you could pay off that debt and still have $9.99 billion to your name. Done and done. One less thing to worry about.

One of Trump's selling points during the Primary campaign was that nobody could "own" him because he was so independently wealthy. But if he's in this much debt to banks - debt he hasn't paid off with a portion of billionaire wealth he's supposed to have - how can he claim that? Those banks surely own him: what would happen if they started calling in that credit he owes?

And even Trump is admitting his so-called self-funded campaign is broke. What sustained his primary drive to victory was getting nearly free advertising from a fawning/terrified mass media industry that couldn't turn away from the clown show Trump was giving them. But now he's at a point where the Presidential nominee has to start footing the bill for all the fund-raisers and down-ballot candidates... and he's claiming now he doesn't have the cash he claimed he had.

Something stinks here, and we're nowhere near Denmark.

This needs to be an ongoing question at every press gathering, at every time Trump is at the podium: Is Donald Trump even really a billionaire?

Because all the evidence is pointing to him being a con artist instead.

 

Predicting Character: Trump As Humbug

I got to be honest: how the hell can anyone predict the Presidential Character of a complete charlatan and con artist?

Whatever disdain I have for the likes of Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, I at least recognize that these are guys who at some level take politics and governing seriously.  I don't trust them with office, and I see them as being as deceitful and self-serving as your average thief, but still they are not total clowns.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, is clearly not someone who takes politics or governing with any level of seriousness.  To him, it's all a means to shill his brand name, to keep his ego on display.  When we're talking about the clown car that the Republicans are putting together, the first name everyone pictures in a rainbow wig and red nose is the Trumpster, showing off in the center ring as always.

Because that's all Donald Trump has ever been: a salesman whose only product is Trump(TM).

There are so many things bad to say about Trump, most of which you can find on this Balloon Juice thread.  But let's delve a little deeper by bringing in Charles Pierce from Esquire to comment:

He is the inevitable result of 40 years of political conjuring, mainly by Republicans, but abetted by far too many Democrats as well. He is the inevitable product of anyone who ever argued that our political institutions should be run "like a business." (Like whose businesses? Like Trump's? Like Carly Fiorina's Hewlett Packard?) He is the inevitable product of anyone who ever argued why the government can't balance its books "the way any American family would." He is the inevitable result of the deregulated economy that was deregulated out of a well-cultivated wonder and awe directed at the various masters of the universe. Sooner or later, all of this misbegotten magical thinking was going to burp up a clown like Donald Trump.

Simon Maloy at Salon gets a little more specific:

But I’ve made the case previously that if Trump wants to play this game, then we should treat his platform and policy positions as we would any other candidate for the presidency. One problem with this approach, as made clear by Trump’s announcement remarks, is that he’s largely incapable of expressing coherent ideas when it comes to policy. He seems to believe that it is the policy of the Mexican government to send all its drug dealers, criminals, and “rapists” over the border into the United States. He’s in undisguised awe of China’s economic central planning but also claims to be a small-government conservative. On Obamacare, he said this, which… I have no idea what this is: “You have to be hit by a tractor, literally, a tractor, to use it, because the deductibles are so high, it’s virtually useless.”

So yes, Trump is a lunatic braggart who parades his insecurities around in a vain attempt to slake his unquenchable thirst for attention, but that’s not anything we didn’t know... 

...But by taking the next step, Trump officially made himself eligible for inclusion in the GOP primary debates. The party and Fox News have said that, given the sheer volume of candidates this cycle, participation in the first scheduled primary debate in August will be determined by polling strength, with the top ten candidates making it to the big stage. Right now, Trump is in the top ten – he’s actually polling higher than Rick Perry and isn’t too far behind Chris Christie. That means Priebus and honchos at Fox News are faced with the dilemma of having a cloddish reality TV star stand on the same debate stage with the GOP’s top-flight candidates...

Trump is essentially in the same category as the likes of Fiorina and Carson: an outright political amateur who's never held elected office.  His only point of contention on his resume is that he's been a business CEO, but that's it.  We've had business-background Presidents before - Hoover, Bush the Lesser - and candidates with similar business pedigree - Romney, Willkie - but each of them at least had experience with government either elected to lesser offices or serving as Secretary in Presidential Cabinets (Willkie had the less experience of them all, but was active in opposition to FDR's New Deal policies in a serious, legally experienced way).  And yet, because of his name recognition among the Fox Not-News viewers - who have seen Trump be an Obama-basher the last 6 years - Trump is going to be on the serious stage debating with the adults while more honestly qualified figures like Gov. Kasich and even Rick Perry (whom this blogger views as almost as low-intelligent as Trump) are sitting outside the arena kicking dirt.

Trump's Character - as we use Professor Barber's model of World-View - is repeatedly viewed by others as "clownish" and for good reason.  His attempts at discussing policies and matters rarely rise to the level of expert, revealing a person unable to perceive much of the complex nature of anything outside of working a television stage.  When discussing immigration, Trump jumps straight into stereotype and insult: what he said about Mexicans during his announcement was cringe-worthy.  To refer to Paul Waldman over at The Week:

The elements of Trump's style — from his jingoism to his willingness to present all kinds of weird ideas as facts to his obsession with right-wing shibboleths (remember how much time he spent trying to convince everyone that President Obama was born in Kenya?) to his relentless oversimplification of complex issues — are all what you get when you take a typical Republican politician and make him a little dumber and more extreme — but just a little. Take, for instance, this passage from his announcement Tuesday, where he elucidates his ideas about foreign policy and national security:

"I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will have Mexico pay for that wall, mark my words. Nobody would be tougher on ISIS than Donald Trump. I will find within our military, I will find the General Patton, or I will find General MacArthur. I will find the right guy. I will find the guy that's going to take that military and make it really work. Nobody, nobody will be pushing us around. I will stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, and we won't be using a man like Secretary Kerry that has absolutely no concept of negotiation, who's making a horrible and laughable deal, who's just being tapped along as they make weapons right now, and then goes into a bicycle race at 72 years old and falls and breaks his leg. I won't be doing that..."

Basically, in that part of his speech, Trump dog-whistles every Far Right talking point of the "failures" of an Obama administration as though those incredibly "simple" solutions are there all along.  Putting up a border wall as though that will solve all our immigration issues (and forcing Mexico to pay for it?  Way to start an honest-to-God border war again, boss).  Degrading Kerry's work as State Sec as though diplomacy doesn't work (when in fact Kerry's work has kept our allies focused and our foreign opponents dealing with us).  As though all we need is a fighting General like Patton as if that will fix our military (where the problems are that we're wasting trillions on planes that won't fight and failing to support the troops that do all the dirty work).

All Trump has ever really done is market himself.  He's the host of a television show where all he does is grade other people's abilities to suck up to him for their jobs.  He shills books about himself more than develop any actual innovation in business or finance.  His trick in land development has been to attach his name to various construction developments as though it adds cachet, and then avoids putting any actual money into those developments that then fall apart leaving hundreds of people on the hook for useless unfinished condo towers.

We're talking about a "successful" businessman who's been to bankruptcy court roughly four, no wait five times.  (Businessman Jeb Bush by comparison has been involved in only one bankruptcy of note, and while it's a doozy - Lehman Brothers - he didn't seem to be a primary catalyst or player in that collapse)  This is a guy who lives recklessly on junk bonds and inflated values, looking to be put in charge of the American economy and the federal budget.

Of his personal habits - the series of bad marriages and divorces that rivals Gingrich, exaggerations that slide easy into big lies, the flaunting of an extravagant lifestyle - they all point to a man self-serving and elitist far beyond any level of narcissism any political figure ever displayed in American politics.  Nixon and LBJ were never this bad, Kennedy and FDR and John Adams were never this bad, Harding and Grant and Buchanan and Tyler were never this bad.  I can't think of anybody else who were either egotistical enough to qualify as a narcissist or bad enough to be a disaster, which is what Trump is going to be if he ever reaches the White House.

Every other political figure - even our Passive-Negative Presidents who never honestly pursued the job as a means to resolve their ambitions - had within themselves a vision of America: as it was, as it could be.  It could have been a vision for themselves and their own (Active-Negatives), it could have been a vision for every American they wanted to serve (Active-Positives and Passive-Positives).  This is arguably the first time a serious "candidate" - there's still an "if" because Trump hasn't really filed to run yet - is showing up with even a slim chance to win a nomination who doesn't have a vision, just talking points and a brand name.

The conventional wisdom is that Trump is really only doing this to keep his name in lights, to shill for his TV show and his defaulting empire.  If he doesn't make a serious go of this, and enough people buy his snake oil, we are in serious trouble.  Because it means the legit candidates - and I'm kicking myself for even calling them that - like Walker and Bush and Rubio aren't winning over the rabid GOP voting base...

That said, to give Donald Trump his evaluation - and here I pity David Graham at The Atlantic because it's his paying gig to do this - it's gotta go like this:

Donald Trump - Shill, New York
Positives: He gives Jon Stewart a legitimate excuse to un-retire from The Daily Show.
Negatives: What part of "con artist" are you overlooking?  Trump has no legislative or elective or executive experience in politics.  His business expertise has been to file for bankruptcy every 5-8 years.  For all his posturing, has few real political allies to back him up.  He's openly hostile to immigration as an issue, has a "bomb 'em all" mentality that makes even Jeb Bush and Lindsey Graham seem cautious and diplomatic, and promises everything while delivering nothing.
Chances: Impossible.  While he's arguably able to fund his own campaign well into 2016, if he becomes even a minor threat to either of the marquee leaders for the nomination it's a given the party proper will nuke Trump from orbit before his brand can damage THEIR brand (well, damage it further than what Mitt did in 2012).  And given Trump's lack of self-restraint and wisdom, he's bound to pull a bonehead move that could turn away even the die-hard wingnuts who are - God Help Us - backing him.
Character Chart: Trump fulfills a few of the traits that defines Active-Negative.  He deploys power (wealth in particular) as a means of self-realization, he shows pessimism with regards to policy issues, is obsessed with success (measuring himself as "the richest of us all"), and has Compulsive habits.  However, he is one of the most extreme A-Ns ever to show up on the grid: he shows disdain for anything that cannot serve his own needs and does not even consider the effects his actions has on others.  Where other A-Ns at least showed interest in politics and policies, Trump shows neither.  He just wants his ego stroked.  In that regards, he can't fit Barber's Character Chart because Trump has no real character worth charting.

Final link: this is seriously NOT SAFE FOR WORK, so please do NOT click on this link, but Rude Pundit's takedown of Trump is the nastiest yet most brilliant takedown of any political target I have read in years.

What The Hell Is He Hiding?

This is a thing.  Rick Scott is "shielding" about $200 million in assets from required state disclosure forms that he had to report to the federal oversight (Securities and Exchange Commission (the OTHER Sec)) people (via the Tampa Bay Times):

Gov. Rick Scott has failed to report more than $200 million in assets on his state financial disclosure form in violation of the Florida Constitution, Democratic attorney general candidate George Sheldon alleged in a lawsuit filed Wednesday...

...Sheldon is asking a judge to order Scott, Florida's wealthiest governor, to "immediately and accurately disclose all assets he owns or controls," and to declare the governor's "blind trust" in violation of the blind trust law he signed.

"The lawsuit asks the court to remove the blindfold that Rick Scott has put on the people of Florida so that they cannot see what is going on with his personal assets,'' Sheldon said at a press conference. "The governor likes to talk about how much he has disclosed. The lawsuit is about how much he has not disclosed."

The Florida Constitution requires elected officials every year to make a "full and public disclosure" of their assets and liabilities "in excess of $1,000" so that the public can monitor any potential conflicts of interest...

The complaint follows a Times/Herald story published Sunday that raised questions about the completeness of the governor's financial disclosure in light of the blind trust he created, numerous trust accounts he has established, and the differences in which he reports his finances to the federal government and the public...

...Sheldon's suit argues that a lawsuit is necessary because the Florida Ethics Commission, which oversees the financial disclosure law, does not have the power to compel the governor to file a complete return, only to fine him after the fact. By contrast, he notes, failure to accurately report financial information to the federal SEC or IRS could result in jail time.

Four things:

• Let's be fair and note that Sheldon - the plaintiff - is a major Democratic candidate for office this year, going against Scott's major political ally Pam Bondi (for state AG).  Let us also note that the only ones who would notice Scott was BS'ing his disclosure statements would be his political opponents (one of the advantages of a multi-party government system over a single-party authoritarian regime: there's someone in a position to actually complain about the high-powered corruption).
• This isn't some minor blip on an Excel spreadsheet, where someone types in the wrong digit and OOPSIES 200 million bucks just disappears.  It takes effort to ignore all that money in one report filing and then remember it for another report filing.
• This is money tied into - directly or with his so-called "blind trusts" - corporations doing business here in Florida and doing business with Scott's office and governor's departments.
• This has got to be f-cking against the law. (Oh, it is!)

Remember what I said before kids: Rick "No Ethics" Scott is only in this for Rick Scott.  He's not interested in serving the public trust: he's interested in taking as much money from the public for himself and his cronies as he can get away with.

For the LOVE OF GOD VOTE THIS CROOK OUT OF OFFICE.

And What Does All That Money Buy?

Just to get you up-to-date about an election cycle that's still half-a-year away.  Rick "All I Need Are Rich Friends" Scott may be down in the polls but he's raking in record contribution funds:

Scott's political machine, Let's Get to Work, raised a whopping $4.6 million in the first three months of 2013, raking in cash at the rate of $50,000 every day while chasing a goal of up to $100 million to fund his 2014 re-election campaign.  It's an unheard of sum even in Florida politics, where money has always been critical.
Individual checks of $10,000 or more flood Scott's campaign daily, many from businesses and individuals with a heavy stake in legislation, from Blue Cross Blue Shield to U.S. Sugar to an array of law firms with rosters of lobbying clients at the Capitol...

So you see, it doesn't matter to Rick "What Part of Medicare Fraud Will Voters Forget Again in 2014" Scott if he's polling about as popular as Marlins' owner Jeff Loria in Miami/Dade (which is about as popular as bird flu).  All that matters is that there's a ton of deep-pocket corporations and financial entities plugging in enough money for Scott to buy every TV ad spot, enough radio air time, enough campaigners to swamp every voter in Florida into thinking he's the Second Coming of Ronald Reagan.

...Governors typically raise money for their political parties between elections, but Scott is the first Florida governor to keep his personal campaign apparatus permanently up and running...

Dear Florida voters: please try to recognize that anyone getting campaign support from Donald Trump isn't working in the best interests of the state of Florida.  At all.  EVER.

...Driving Scott's need to stockpile millions is the expected candidacy of Crist, a Republican-turned-Democrat who has a big lead over Scott in early polling and who is known as a highly effective fundraiser.
Scott can accept checks in unlimited amounts because his campaign fund is an electioneering communications organization, or ECO, that's not subject to the $500 contribution limit that typically applies to candidates. The only limitation on activities by Let's Get to Work is that it can't "expressly advocate" Scott's re-election by using words such as "vote for" or "elect."
Edwards, a Treasure Island businessman and entertainment mogul who operates St. Petersburg's Mahaffey Theater, recently wrote Scott's campaign its largest single check, for $500,000. That's nearly as much as the $600,000 Edwards paid last year to erect a vertical gateway sign on Interstate 275 in St. Petersburg...

And what do you think all that money is buying?  This isn't campaign fundraising: this is legalized bribery.  The ultimate quid pro quo racket, because they don't even need to hide it anymore.

While the current polling shows Crist thumping Scott in a 2014 match-up with numbers at 50 - 34 (at 34 percent he's bound to be losing even Republican voters), never underestimate Money's power to buy enough negative ad time and buy enough bullsh-t for the media to consume to get those numbers in favor of Scott.  I'm terrified of the possibility that there's enough money to create an ad that has Scott hugging rabbits and painting rainbows and getting enough out-of-state actors to smile while standing next to him, rather than in-state residents being forcibly prevented from punching him in the nose.

The only solution is to defeat Rick "HE'S A CROOK" Scott.  Make all those millions of dollars get wasted for nothing.  Stop making elections about those who can raise the most money and make it about those who honestly will do the right things in office.

Saying it now: Vote Crist for Governor.  Don't Vote for Scott.  For the love of GOD do NOT VOTE Republican.  Not for the next ten generations.

Income Inequality

This is something that has been posted a few months back but only now is circulating the blogosphere:

The problem of income inequality in the United States has been with us for a long time: for at least the last ten years (if not the last thirty or more) wages have been frozen for most American workers, while the top one percent of the employment bracket (the CEO level) continued getting raises and bonuses and comp packages and Golden Parachutes (even when those CEOs were screwing up their companies: SEE the Twinkies company going down in flames while the executives paid themselves off).

Just to note: it used to be as recent as 1978 that executive (CEO) pay was only 35 times that of the average employee.  Today it's roughly 380 times, partly because average employee wages haven't grown but mostly because executives have been paying themselves (via friendly boards or manipulated systems) more and more without consequence (politicians are bought, media are bought, unions are crushed).

The argument for high wages for high-level jobs (like CEO, or high-priced attorney, or esteemed doctor) is that it motivates people to work and empower themselves to achieve great things: the carrot rather than the stick as it were.  While that is a valid argument, there's a question of "how much is really enough?"  At what point does GREED become too much of a motivating factor rather than equitable compensation for good effort?  Where's the sense of proportion when it comes to taking a $5 million bonus while 2,000 other employees of your company gets a wooden nickel each for working as hard or even harder than that CEO?

There ought to be a way to fix this in a fair and equitable manner.  I'd argue for a wage cap on CEOs tied to their employees: that CEOs of large companies be paid no more than 35 times (like in 1978) than their average non-administrative employees.  Said cap to be phased into action over a five-year period, dropping from 380 times to 150 times in Year One, to 98 times in Year Two, all the way down to that 35 times by Year Five.  In the meantime, require that the average wage of those non-admin employees to go up, as a way of making that "35 times more" deal for the upper management less painful (so that it would make the CEOs more like 50 times paid more if those employees hadn't gotten raises).

The math might not be there, I know.  But somehow we've got to raise the wages for a majority of working Americans out there.  And we've got to make CEOs less greedy (based on that video's report, that One Percent of the populus has got 40 PERCENT of the nation's money.  THE F-CK?!)

This isn't communism (something for nothing).  It might be socialism: forcing the richest to take less so that the poor can get more.  Except for the fact we're talking about improving the wages of poor WORKING Americans, not some "handouts" to a nebulous "moochers and takers" society.  But what's the alternative?  Doing nothing, sitting back and basking in the "It's all Capitalism baby learn to love it" belief system is not the solution... The current system is broken: there's no judge, no force of accountability against the GREED that's corrupted our financial institutions.

Seriously, what is the alternative to capping CEO wages?

These Questions Are Retroactive

These are my questions about Mitt Romney's role at Bain Capital, and Bain Capital in general:

1a) If you, Mitt Romney, were not really CEO of Bain Capital from 1999 to 2002 as you claim today, then who was CEO during that time?
1b) Can we speak with that person to verify that he or she was CEO of Bain Capital, and/or the person responsible for most business decisions?
1c) Was there a press release given to the business media back in 1999 or between 1999 to 2002 that announced who this replacement CEO is/was?

2) If that other person was CEO during that time, why did the company's SEC filings still list you as CEO?  And why were you still signing that paperwork as well as other business filings?

3) If you had retired from Bain Capital in 1999, why were you still receiving a base salary of at least $100,000 well into 2002?  Most retirement plans I've known do not work that way.  Were you receiving a salary for a no-show job?

4) If you had cut all ties from Bain Capital as you claim on your 2011 campaigning forms by 1999, why did you tell Massachusetts election officials under oath in 2002 that you were still regularly involved in Bain's business dealings to justify your residency requirement to run for Governor?

'Cause I'm with Andrew Sullivan on this one:

But responsibility for Bain? Think about it. No one disputes that Romney co-founded Bain, hired most of its staff, and honed its methods and strategies from 1984 to 2002. No one can dispute that he was paid at least $100,000 from 1999 to 2002 for being CEO. There is no massive difference between the kind of strategies Bain pursued from 1984 to 1999 when Romney was managing full-time and from 1999 to 2002, when he was managing part-time and by his own lawyer's assertion that his Bain activities "continued unabated just as they had." Is Romney saying that nothing that happened at Bain after 1999 is his responsibility but that everything that happened after January 2009 is all Barack Obama's fault?
Yep, that's what he's saying. It's a pathetic double standard argument from a suddenly pathetic and panicking campaign...

Romney's had the image problem already with being a habitual flip-flopper; getting nicknamed as the "Etch-A-Sketch" candidate whose ideology/talking points can change with a shake of a toy; of neither being conservative or liberal or even moderate, that he simply has no core belief and says whatever he needs to say at that moment to get what he wants.  Now he's trying to avoid responsibility for something that he claimed with pride back in 2002 to run for Governor, but now refuses to acknowledge as it's embarrassing as hell in 2012.

Now he's on record as being a liar, either lying in 2002 to get what he wanted (Governor of Massachusetts), or lying now in 2012 to get what he wants (President of the United States).

And making it worse for him is the fact that the campaign forms he signed to run for President in 2011 carry with them a penalty of perjury... which is a felony at the federal level.  How long will it take for someone in a position to do so file a criminal complaint to have his signed statements investigated?

These questions aren't going to go away with the next news cycle, Mitt.  If you don't answer, people will assume the worst.  Unless of course the answers are somehow worse...  In which case, the Republicans need to start looking for another candidate...

Amendment proposal on greed

This. Is really. Pissing off more people. Than the Randian con artists thought it would. Kinda figured it was gonna happen back during the meltdown crisis when Bush's economic team (AND STOP BLAMING OBAMA he wasn't in charge back in September 2008!) pretty much doled out bailout money without any common sense restrictions on it all: that the greedheads who incompetantly drove our entire financial/banking industry into the ground would use the bailout to pretty much line their pockets like always. Color me not so shocked.

The one good thing from this AIG bonus fiasco is that it utterly highlights how CORRUPT, STUPID and WRONG the entire concept of laizze-faire, hands-off, greed-is-good capitalism really is. Regulated capitalism, yeah that works well: when the market forces are required to answer to somebody, when the captains of industry are held accountable, when there's a balance between Capital (owners and bankers), Labor (employees), and Consumer (represented by government and advocates), things work. Hence, this amendment proposal to bring some accountability back into our economy:

• Greed is now a capital offense.
• Anyone caught lining his/her own pockets, or the pockets of their business associates, at the expense of the taxpayer or company for which they work especially if said company received a federal bailout geared toward stabilizing the market and not geared toward the greedheads' checking account, shall immediately be tarred and feathered. And then they go to trial looking like that. The person(s) if found guilty of greed will then go to Pound-Me-In-The-Ass federal prison for a set period of time, and then taken from that place to Death Row where he/she/they will then have 50,000 volts shooting out their ass(es).
• Any person charged with a financially-related crime such as fraud, embezzlement, fiscal negligence, or any other element that would have lead to an economic disaster for a company or an entire nation, will have all financial accounts frozen and inaccessible to be able to pay for a legal defense. The damn greedhead will have to rely on a public defender working Pro Bono, no exceptions. You get the same legal protection as poor people, you sons of bitches.
• Anyone in the media attempting to defend greedheads, the greed-is-good snake-oil scam, or any Randian ideology will be immediately forced to "Go Galt" like they want others to: and by "Going Galt" that means leaving their cushy six-figure salary and limo service existence to go work the midnight shift at any 24-hour bowling alley that exists between Toledo, OH and Boise, ID. Minimum wage, no health benefits. See how you enjoy living like the rest of us.

Odds of this amendment even getting looked at: ludicriously low. Odds of people getting pitchforks and rioting in the streets if the greedheads keep up their dumbass "taxpayers are suckers" routine: ludicriously high.

Why Bush the Lesser Was a Failure

So there I was, driving down to the Palm Harbor Krispy Kreme because, you know, it's Inauguration Day and they were offering a free donut, which of course p-ssed off the pro-lifers because if there's one thing we've learned is that the wingnuts hate donuts so I wanted to provide some moral support and see if the mobs were massing for food fights on an epic scale this day.

Instead it was rather quiet, few people there actually, and no rioters, so I got a blueberry cake and headed back out to the car to go drive off and study for a few hours on this A+ Cert exam I've got in a few days. I end up flipping through the radio channels trying to get the inauguration coverage, and instead I get on a talk radio channel with some shill whose voice I don't recognize who at that moment was ranting about one of the Austin TX newspapers having a front page editorial declaring George W. Bush's tenure as President a failure. The shill scoffed at it, calling the editorial garbage. At that point I turned off the radio and fumed.

You know, there's been a bit of that going about. All this legacy crap about Bush's administration, and all these hacks trying to defend his two terms. Well, I've got my answer for that. Nine of them, in fact.

Nine Reasons Why George W. Bush AKA Bush The Lesser Was a Collosal Monstrous Failure

1) He failed to capture Osama Bin Laden.
Get any neocon chickenhawk bragging about Bush's "successes" in his military misadventures, and just bring this one little point up and then watch that damn chickenhawk stutter and cough out fifty different excuses why America's Public Enemy Number One is still sleeping somewhere safe these past seven years. BUSH HAD ONE JOB AFTER 9/11 AND THAT WAS TO BRING THE CULPRITS RESPONSIBLE BEFORE A COURT OF LAW AND ANSWER FOR THEIR CRIMES. The best he could do was one fat guy we caught looking like he was sleeping off a cough syrup hangover. This is the deal: every day Bin Laden stays free is another day he gets to mock our nation's ability to bring evildoers to justice. And that was supposed to be Bush's big deal, his Good vs. Evil spiel. Every day is another day Bin Laden could die in the comfort of his own bed of old age or illness: every day gone and evildoers get to believe they can share his fate rather than ending up in jail or a dirt grave.

2) Bush presided over one of the most egregious spendthrift governments in American history.
This was worse than what's considered the benchmark for spendthrift, the LBJ years. And this wasn't money that actually seemed to go anywhere. I'm talking deficits going into the billions and towards the end trillions of dollars... and we've got millions of Americans standing around without jobs in neighborhoods with decaying schools and collapsing roads and bridges all asking "Where the f-ck did all that money go?" The money certainly didn't go into infrastructure, nor to actually improving our schools (No Child Left Behind? It may have boosted test scores but where'd the damn money go to actually improve our kids' educations?), and towards the one thing that truly blew up our annual budgets - the two-war front of Afghanistan and Iraq along with all the national security spending on the overall War on Terror. But all that money - trillions spent - entire billions of dollars just upped and disappeared.
The spending with the Iraqi-Afghani wars and occupations is an all-too-easy example of what went wrong during the Bush years: the Bush admin insisted on all these spending projects and private no-bid contracts to go out, and the Republican-led Congress signed off on all of it without raising any eyebrows or insisting on any oversight. And in the other direction regarding domestic spending, the Congressional Republicans wanted all these payoffs to their pet projects and friendly lobbys and the Bush admin didn't care one whit how much of it was unneeded pork. Combine all that with the Republican tax-cut mantras that cut too deep into the government's ability to, you know, actually afford any of these billion-dollar boondoggles, and you've got deficits up the goddamn wazoo. And to hell what Cheney thinks: deficits DO matter. And we're now paying the price for the last 6-8 years of Republicans spending taxpayer dollars like they were drunken high-schoolers wasting their parents' credit cards. On top of other financial disasters...
I don't see how any Republican can ever claim the GOP supports fiscal responsibility to the next ten generations. They've just proven they can be WORSE than Democrats when it coming to spending taxpayer dollars. And tax-cutting ISN'T being responsible: it's being blind to how government or any other structured entity exists. Where businesses and corporations generate revenue through products and services to create payrolls and profits, governments have to generate revenue through taxation (and once upon a time through tariffs although I'm not sure if we still do have tariffs on the books) in order to create payrolls and provide public services. Do you think Republicans want corporations to cut the prices of their services to 35 percent and in the process crimp their own ability to operate in the black? Hell No. But they want to do it, repeatedly and recklessly, to the federal and state governments. But I digress...

3) The Best and the Brightest? No, the Lackey and the Incompentest
I know that's not a word, but there's no other way to describe this portion of my rant other than to rail against a series of questionable and in some cases outright insane personnel choices that Bush the Lesser indulged in during his two terms.
Oh, he started off well. Part of his pitch to the American people was that he was going to let the "grown-ups" into the room and build a cabinet coalition made of respectable types: Powell at State, Rumsfeld at Defense, O'Neil at Treasury, etc. And he did bring on guys and gals who for the most part were considered by the DC Establishment and by the people at large as go-to and take-charge compentent types.
But a few things happened, sometimes in ways that it shouldn't have. O'Neil quickly got crowded out at Treasury because he (rightly) questioned the Bush/Cheney push for more severe tax cuts at a time (post 9/11) when spending was clearly going to go up. This was when Cheney made that famous quip that "deficits don't matter." Powell's foreign policy gravitas went from successfully handling a spy plane incident with China into a half-hearted and half-assed attempt to sell the U.N. on faulty intelligence on Iraq having WMDs that proved post-invasion to be flat-out wrong. Powell departed by the end of Term One, for the most part driven out by the more radical neocon elements in the White House. And then there was Rumsfeld. Commanded the task to streamline the military, he stayed focused on that ideology at all hazards well after 9/11 signaled greater needs, even when his generals (retired or otherwise) were letting him know he needed far more troops to invade and even more troops to occupy a place like Iraq as the Afghanistan operations were still underway. "We go with the army you have not the army you want," said he. Unbending, inflexible in thought, unable to adjust... and in the end forced from office long after he lost his usefulness. And those three were the high-quality guys.
Past all that, nearly every office in Bush's two terms were filled with ideologues, partisans, and old friends whose loyalty were proven and unquestioned (in other words, lackeys and yes-men). I could go through a list of them, with the most horrific - Gonzales, Meirs, Bolton, Doug Feith, Wolfowitz, "Heckuva Job" Brown - and even considering it could have been worse - Kerik, for one, as Homeland Security? ye gods - so be grateful. Of the loyalists, I'd put Condi Rice in as the most competent of the bunch, but even she could never bring herself to fix what was broken, never say No when it needed to be said. As for the rest, these could never be consider "the best of the best" that this country could have offered up for these positions. They merely went in there because they'd let Bush remain Bush, never challenging, never proffering better options, never pushing for what needed to be done. A cronyist style government not based on merit, but based on who you knew and which secret handshakes worked. And cronies placed in positions of power where they had no genuine experience, nor interest in running things smoothly.

4) A regime of torture and war crimes.
Abu Ghraib. Bagram. Waterboarding. Black sites in Eastern Europe.
And these were not the work of a "few bad apples." This was authorized. People were trained. All Lawyer-tested. Approved at the highest levels of the Bush Administration. Bush himself signed off on it. AND THE BASTARD LIED to boot.
And this all took place while the Geneva Conventions were part and parcel of the U.S.'s commitment to treaties and agreements with foreign powers. Every conceived lawyerly excuse the Bush administration came up with wouldn't even last three seconds in a court of law. If only the incoming administration and congress would do something about it...

5) A systematic refusal to uphold the Constitution.
I can go to one thing: Signing statements. These were actions that Presidents over the years used to "redefine" a piece of legislation sent by Congress to get the Presidential signature of approval (lest it be vetoed or passed without signing). Before Reagan, there were about 75 such statements... total. Then under Reagan through Bush the Elder to Clinton to Bush the Lesser, these signing statements exploded. But even then under the other Presidents, these signing statements conflicted with relatively few laws: Under Bush the Lesser, his 157 statements conflicted with 1,100 or so statutes, practically a record. And under Bush the Lesser, his signing statements basically allowed the executive branch to ignore entire duties and responsibilities not only to Congress but to the rule of law, to the Constitution itself.
And no one called him on it. Even when he made a signing statement ignoring a No-Torture law passed by a vast majority of both House and Senate (almost unheard-of veto-proof counts even at a time of Republican majorities).
But that wasn't all. At nearly every step, the Bush administration pushed on every front on the idea of a Unitary Executive - that the President can basically do whatever the hell he wants - and was doing it well before the War on Terror was even a consideration. Oversight into operations and decisions being made in the White House? Never. Following the rules regarding saving all communications and memos re: the Presidential Records Act? Ha. Answering to Congressional subponea? Answering any questions during Congressional hearings? Don't even need to invoke a writ of douchebaggery. Or else you can pretend to lose your mind and forget everything you've ever done.
And this didn't even apply, as I noted earlier, to the War on Terror. Across the board, the Bush administration was relaxing regulations, ignoring required duties, turning in such sloppy and uneven work that would make you question whether anyone was really working at all. Unless it was work that would have gone against those far right ideologies, such as climate science reports, in which case the ideologues put into positions of authority worked overtime to rewrite, shred, or flat-out squash anything that would have gone against their worldview.
And don't forget the violations of FISA, unwarranted phone taps, programs to infiltrate anti-war groups, the creation of "Free Speech" kennels in which to shove protesters to where they couldn't be seen... Oh, yeah, almost forgot about all of that. I still for the life of me can't understand how a group of Quakers would be under investigation... actually I can understand, but the thought sickens me.

6) The War in Afghanistan.
And this was a winnable war. The Taliban that had seized power in Afghanistan were despised across the globe (except in Pakistan and a few other rogue nations who liked the company). Hell, even the Iranian mullahs thought the Taliban were too extremist. When Bin Laden's crew pulled off 9/11, nearly every country in the world sided with the United States, joined us in a massive military endeavor into Taliban country to drive them out and capture all Al Qaeda elements hiding in the Afghan mountains. Within months, faster than anticipated, we had our success, and installed a more moderate leadership in Afghanistan, and promised massive improvements to the landscape.
It's now been seven years. We still have troops in there, trying to maintain stability. The Taliban came back across the Pakistani border and are continuing a program of blowing up schools, killing and torturing women, and plotting a return to power. It's gotten so bad the Afghan government is seriously looking at some way of letting the Taliban into their system (which is NOT a good idea). As for Al Qaeda, well they got away. See point 1) about Bin Laden: there's serious evidence we had him at Tora Bora and we let him get away.
Because of Iraq. Because Bush and his neocon buddies didn't think Afghanistan was a priority in promoting their Middle East policy of crushing any nations threatening Israel, which because of political complexities in that region meant getting ridding of Saddam and meant bombing Iran first chance they could get. So our resources got diverted at a time they shouldn't have, and our interest in Afghanistan disappeared once Iraq turned into an occupation quagmire.
Ever see Charlie Wilson's War? It's a good movie, I got my parents to see it back on New Year's Day. We've never really done right by the Afghani people, as the movie ends with a real quote from the real Charlie Wilson - "We f-cked up the endgame," as it relates to how we left that country to its own fate after the Soviets left - it reminds me of how Bush and his people left Afghanistan today: we're still f-cking up the endgame.

7) The War in Iraq
This is going to be a sticking point with a lot of Bush apologists, who are going to argue that Oh, the war was necessary, that Oh, we brought democracy to the region, that Oh, the Surge worked and thus we won the war and you should be grateful to our Commander in Chief yadda f-cking yadda.
Here's the deal. There were no connections between Iraq and Al Qeada as it relates to 9/11. Saddam wasn't building nuclear weapons, and it turns out they didn't have weapons of mass destruction by 1998, much less 2002-03. Nearly every piece of evidence used by Bush to excuse us going into Iraq was twisted out of context, or worse fabricated. We went in with not enough overseas support from our allies. We went in with half as many troops as we needed. We went in with a half-assed exit strategy: oh, despite the hindsight we have now where it looks like there was no exit strategy, there was the strategy of placing our so-called ally/puppet Chalabi on the throne of power and prop him up as a government, whereupon we would have left. Except for the fact that Chalabi was totally unacceptable to the Iraqis and also turned out to be in cahoots with IRAN (!!!), which kinda ruined the whole exit strategy. What happened was we didn't have a f-cking Plan B.
Which led to four years of kicking about from Bremer's disastrous regime of nation-building that alienated everyone. And four years or more of declining military enrollments which led to other distastrous policies such as Stop-Loss, redeployments, and lowering of recruiting standards to allow idiots, criminals, and other undesirables (that weren't gay). Which led to increases in PTSDs, numbers of seriously wounded vets putting a drain on vet care and other resources. And it wasn't anything else getting Bush's ass on fire until the 2006 midterms destroyed the Republican party's hold on Congress, at which point Bush had to pretend to follow the recommendations of a so-called bipartisan Iraq Study Group. But really all Bush followed was the idea of a Surge, to increase more troops anyway. Everything else proposed by the Study Group? Not so much.
By the way, nearly everything else on this list of Fail for Bush - the cronyism, the deficit spending, the torture regime - all of these problems are touched by Iraq.

8) That under Bush, we went from relative financial stability to a series of financial crises that rivals the whole Great Depression.
Again, the Republicans should never be allowed to claim they are the party of fiscal responsibility. Not ever again.
In a way, the Bush years were a good thing: they allowed us to bear witness to a full eight years of supply-side economics, a socio-economic theory once derided by Bush the Elder of all people as Voodoo Economics. The whole idea of combining massive tax cuts alongside cuts in federal regulation of industries and finances, allowing the free market led by the Captains and CEOs of Industry to work with a free hand to spread the wealth, improve services, and cure all ailments (well, that how those bastards keep selling it).
You see, we never really had a full Presidential term of supply-side. When the first few years of it under Reagan didn't produce the right results, Reagan was realistic enough to tweak the system and raised taxes here and there, before reforming the whole tax code outright in his second term. Bush the Elder was forced by a recalcitrant Democratic Congress to renounce the tax-cut portion of the ideas midway through his term, which was enough to alienate the Club for Greed people and hurt Bush's numbers at the polls in 1992.
Ahh, but under Bush the Lesser, there were no constraints, and no pragmatic view of things that even Reagan displayed. Bush never wavered in his belief of tax-cutting, of privatization of government services (to the point he pushed a disastrous plan of putting Social Security onto the stock market... even his fellow Republicans in Congress balked at that), of relaxing any oversight or regulation of business and finance during his tenure. He made deeper tax cuts almost exclusively benefitting the upper class (basically anyone above $250k). All on the belief that it would make our economy that much stronger.
Well, eight years we see the results. Broad and undefined tax cuts didn't lead to the spreading of the wealth: instead the upper class, the even-less-than-one-percent uberrich, got more of it and it did not trickle anywhere. Deregulation didn't make the markets more efficient: it made everything tied into everything else, and the collapse of one aspect of the markets cascaded into other branches leading to near-global collapses in every corner of finance. We didn't see constant job growth: job creation vacillated here and there until these past two years when unemployment started going consistently up (Bush entered with a 4 percent unemployment rate, he left with 7 percent and growing). Wages for those who kept their employment stagnated for anyone not working upper management on Wall Street. And speaking of: Rather than being a friend to Wall Street, Bush instead presided over perhaps the largest collapse of financial giants ever, bigger than even anything seen in 1929-30.
And this all made the mess over Enron and Worldcom back in 2002 look like penny ante stuff.
Alan Greenspan, Randian acolyte and the spokesperson of the whole deregulatory practices for the last 25 years, finally admitted to Congress in the midst of the global financial meltdown that "I have found a flaw." Oh, you think? You're right you found a flaw. Deregulation didn't lead to more efficient markets: it allowed GREED to drive our economics to the brink of disaster. It amazes me how economists never input the greed variable into their theories: nearly every economic system from the Pharoahs on down were vulnerable to it. Serfdom, Mercantilism, Capitalism, Socialism, Communism... every conceivable system is vulnerable to greed. It's only Capitalism - which is the only system to actively separate government from economic decision-making - that allows for any effective oversight (a force independent from the Captains of Industry) to ensure GREED doesn't take over. But government under Bush the Lesser turned a blind eye to it. And everything went to the Big Sh-tpile.

9) The one failure that most Republicans are gonna have to choke on for the next 20 years: Bush's failure of party leadership across the board.
I mean, let's face it. The Bush years were a grand time to push the agendas for the (religious) Social-cons, the (foreign policy) Neocons, and the (financial) Con-artist-cons. All three groups that make up the solid base of the Republican Party got what they wanted - for the most part. Social-cons got judges who fit their pro-life agendas, a stem-cell policy that discouraged ova harvesting, a sex-ed program that ignored common-sense stuff for an abstinence-only ideology. The Neocons got their wars in the Middle East. The Con-artist-cons got both their massive tax cuts for the upper classes as well as near-lax oversight of the financial sector covering the stock markets, the banks, insurance firms, various funds, what have you.
So of course, all three are still horribly dissatisfied with what they still haven't gotten. Even though a majority of Americans have come to the point where they will disagree with all three groups on what they still want.
But the leadership problem is going to make that more difficult for the GOP. Usually the party's done a decent job - as you look back into history - of creating and grooming players in the party for leadership roles down the line (both parties do, but the Dems have a bigger history of relative unknowns stepping into the limelight at the expense of more 'serious' would-be leaders). Consider Eisenhower the starting point of the modern Republican Party as FDR's extended rule covering two major moments of American history kinda makes a Chinese Wall of "Before And After". Eisenhower's tenure saw the birth of Buckley's intellectual conservatism and brought forth future roleplayers like Nixon and Rockefeller. Goldwater's conservatism of the early 1960s echoed downward through the likes of Reagan. Nixon in power begat the likes of Cheney and Dole. Ford was just... well, he was a long-time Congressional bigwig. I'd put him in the Eisenhower lineage. Bush the Elder could also be considered part of the Nixon crew, but really rose to prominence in the party as Reagan's understudy. Reagan begat the likes of Kemp and Gingrinch, and indeed a lot of Republican heavy hitters who got their starts in the 1980s owe it all to Reagan's enviable coattails. Bush the Lesser oddly enough doesn't reflect his own father as much as he reflects that of his VP, Cheney, which makes him more a political descendent of Nixon than anything else.
But today? Did Bush create anything of a legacy, and bring into office with him either in the White House or in Congress that could, post-administration, rise up to challenge the Democrats and lead the party in 2012 and beyond?
No. A lot of it has to do with self-destructive scandals that wiped out the major players in the GOP from 1998 on up. Newt Gingrinch's failure to use Clinton's scandals to win more seats in 1998 drove him into exile. DeLay, the guy who drove his mentor Newt out, was himself driven out by lobbyist scandals. Piece by piece, every possible major player (Ney, Foley, Frist) got caught in scandal or overpushed an extremist position to where they were losing support back home. The grooming of replacements got harder as fewer potential candidates rose to the challenges. More and more, the Republican Party kept getting raging mediocrities or raging extremists to fill positions that made the party less palatable to the public at large.
Those who weren't mediocrities or extremists found themselves driven out by a party that no longer wanted them. The likes of moderate Lincoln Chafee, for example, kept facing primary challenges by the Club for Greed or the pro-life factions (and sometimes both), which either left the extremist winning the primary or else allowing the challenging Democrat to highlight how dangerous Republicans were which still led to the moderate Republican's defeat(s). Here's a tidbit to chew over: THERE ARE NO REPUBLICAN CONGRESSPERSONS FROM NEW ENGLAND LEFT. None. There's I think three Republican Senators from New England. Almost no governors I think except Conneticut. That's actually a heavily-populated region of the U.S. with almost NO Republican representation. Not considering the heavily-Democratic New York, the leaning-Democratic Atlantic region with once-hard-right Virginia sliding to the left on a daily basis. In fact, in the last election the only places where voter turnout for Republicans improved were in the rural South and Appalachain regions. The Republican Party is literally shrinking, with fewer younger voters supporting the party than ever before (the under-30 vote is leaning so far Democrat that the Republicans might get outnumbered by whatever's left of the Reform or Green Parties in that age bracket within the next 4 years). A shrinking party means fewer electable candidates, meaning fewer leaders.
Look at the current make-up of the Republican Party. Who can you point to as the standard bearers now? McCain? He's getting older, and there's gonna be parts of the party that will always hate him no matter what. Romney or Giuliani? They couldn't win against McCain, for pete's sake, do you know how unpopular you have to be among the GOP base to do that? Huckabee? So far only a regional flavor, but given time perhaps... Sarah Palin? Oh Lord. Oh God. Despite all the starry-eyed worship she's getting from the talking heads and the far right wingnuts that make John Birchers look sane, Sarah Palin makes Dan Quayle look like John Foster Freakin Dulles. Americans would rather turn to Tina Fey for leadership (and damn right too, I still think she got that chin scar from fighting a rogue time-traveling Klingon). Jindal? Too new to the scene to tell. Now keep looking. Seriously. Anybody among the party leaders in the House and Senate: can you even name them right now? Try the governors. Other than Palin or Jindal, who else is setting the political arena on fire with rhetoric or ideology or sound leadership skills? Honestly. Who else is there? And who in their right minds are gonna vote for a party based on ever-increasing extremist views on the economy, on foreign policy, on social issues?
This may well be Bush the Lesser's truest legacy: poisoning the political field against the Republicans to where no one coming of age since 2000 will vote for the GOP.
I honestly do not believe the Republican Party is dying. The electorate is set up for a two-party system, and we've rarely been a one-party nation (briefly we were between the fall of the Federalists and the rise of the Whigs, which led to Know-Nothings, which led to the Republicans). But the Republicans are fast becoming a regional political power with reducing national prestige... pretty soon the so-called Southern Strategy won't be a cornerstone of a broad election policy, it will be the only platform left.

And there you have it. Nine items that I can come up with to list Bush the Lesser's tenure as an Epic FAIL among failed Presidencies. U.S. Grant... Franklin Pierce... Warren Harding... congratulations, guys, you're all off the hook. Except for you, James Buchanan, you still suck. And John Tyler, you're still an ass...