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...

January 20, 2009

"...Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.

And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more. Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions..."

- Barack Obama, as of 12:01 pm Eastern Jan. 20, 2009 our 44th President of the United States of America.

During jaded days, something can happen that restores your faith

I've spent most of today's afternoon writing up that long overview of The Prisoner television show, and ranting towards the end about what the show says about torture... and then I take a few hours to get dinner, and then I switch the channels about on the T.V. seeing what the news is...

And there's a picture of an airplane floating in the Hudson River.

Usually, plane crashes do not end well. Even in the instances when the pilot's able to do something, there's still injured people, fire and flames, the possibility of even a handful of people if not most of the passengers dying in terribly horrible ways.

I'm not a huge fan of flying. I will if I have to, but still...

What has been so amazing about the Flight 1549 crash is how close it all could gone disastrous once the plane collided with what appears to be geese. They had just lifted off at LaGuardia Airport, in Queens. They were flying northbound, then had to turn southwest, and all the while they've got cityscapes all about, no clear spot to land the damaged aircraft other than the two rivers bordering Manhattan. The pilot had to glide the plane - no power once the engines got knocked out, one catching fire by eyewitness report - and still according to traffic control reports was still able to get enough lift for the plane to get in position to the Hudson River. And then, the splashdown. Even without engine power that plane was moving fast, and gravity pulling hard. Hitting the water with that much mass and that rate of speed, it's still like landing on concrete.

The pilot for all intents nails the landing.

Everyone's up and out inside of 90 seconds, getting onto the wings as the plane precariously floats. The pilot's got enough time to check the whole cabin, walking it twice to make sure everyone's out before he's the last to leave. Pilot's name is Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III, ex-Air Force pilot with sh-tloads of experience. He's gonna have babies named after him for the next 20 years, hell they might rename that river in his honor. Sully River. It has a ring to it.

Plane still floated long enough for the nearby ferries to arrive in rescue efforts. Coast Guard, city marine patrols, tugs, everyone on a boat in that river showed up to pick up the survivors within minutes. At worst injurywise is a flight attendant with reportedly a broken leg. Some of the passengers are treated for hypothermia, having gotten wet in the cold January waters. I'll bet nearly everyone is still shaking from the adrenelin rush of knowing they've just walked away from a miracle landing.

I remember being on flights, they do that little spiel before takeoff about where the emergency exits are, what to do with the oxygen masks in case of cabin pressure loss, and most of all about how the seat cushions can be turned into a floatation device. There'd always been a lot of snickering about that with the groups I've traveled with a few times, basically deriding the idea that if the plane were to crash into the ocean that the odds of surviving far enough to use the seat as a floatation device would never happen. Well, I am not ever joking about that again.

There's still not a lot of good things going on in today's world. Wars, with innocent people caught in the crossfire. Economic disasters with families suffering, facing poverty and homelessness in massive numbers. Still a lot of problems that need fixing, need constant attention, need some sunshine and happiness. Today, there's 155 people, and all their families and friends, and a whole city of 8 million people feeling just a little bit better, a little more faithful in the rolls of the dice that God throws from time to time (Sorry Einstein, but God does play dice with the universe. At least a pair of D20).

I am not a Number, I am a FREE MAN

I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered!


The Prisoner was a television program from the late 1960s. Originally offered up as a spy-thriller show, much like I Spy, Man from UNCLE, and Patrick MacGoohan's earlier Danger Man, the show posited a hero British secret agent who angrily resigns from his job only to be captured by some nefarious organization. The organization seems to be run by spies, collecting and interrogating other spies on both sides of the Cold War, placing them all in an idyllic seaside luxury resort known only as the Village. Everyone, prisoners and guards, go by numbers, and no one can tell really who the prisoners are and if the guards are really guards.

Our hero gets tagged as Number Six. He's in the Village for two reasons. The organization thinks even after his resignation that Number Six can become 'part of the team' and work for them. And the organization wants information from him: to know "why did you resign?" It's believed that if Number Six cracks and answers the question, the rest will willingly follow. For his part, Number Six won't talk. And like every other prisoner in the world, he's not going to cooperate... and he's looking for ways to escape.

Thing was, unlike the other spy shows, episodes were not fully resolved. In a regular spy show, the hero would get caught, confront captors, endure some punishment, but then cleverly (usually by seducing a pretty maid) makes a daring escape before the episode ends, during which a) the bad guys blow up from their own sabotaged weapons or b) the bad guys escape themselves so they can re-appear in a fun-packed fan-happy follow-up episode when the rating start to sag.

Not so with the Prisoner. Number Six was stuck: every escape attempt foiled, usually because of fiendishly twisted psychological technobabble. If the hero had any successes, it was because he foiled the attempts of his tormentors (the ever-changing Number Twos) to break him. The show's episodes had three basic story lines: a) the Prisoner tries to escape using a potential flaw in the Village's security; b) the Prisoner resists efforts to force him to reveal why he resigned; c) the Prisoner gets involved within the Village's "community" to unravel an attempt by the Village's secret leaders to collectively punish or manipulate Number Six's fellow innocents.

For complex, behind-the-scenes reasons involving the production of the series, only 17 episodes were ever made (there's evidence there was going to be 26 episodes for what was then a full season, but because of production delays, artistic differences, and the ever-escalating costs of weather balloons), essentially making the Prisoner a prolonged mini-series in which every episode was essential for figuring out what was going on. The problem came with the final episode, knowingly filmed as such, in which the actor Patrick MacGoohan finally takes control of the whole series and presents the Village as a metaphor for modern society, attempting to force rebellious members of society - such as Number Six - to conform. To even try to explain the final episode in any detail would take 40 pages and perhaps even 40 days to comprehend it all, but suffice to say the Prisoner DOES and - this is the mind-blowing part - DOESN'T escape... depending on your point of view. Yeah, trust me, it'll help to make sense of it.

The show's been a cult classic ever since. The final episode was so confounding, so unwilling to spell things out for people, that MacGoohan had to flee England entirely and basically set up shop in Los Angeles for work... which explains why he got so many juicy roles on the Colombo mystery series. But the confounding episode also drew viewers in, forcing audiences to think, to ponder, to draw their own conclusions and also figure out just what the show meant, for themselves. Few other shows lasted for so few episodes could claim such fannish devotion... save Firefly (and Police Squad!).

As viewed today, the Prisoner serves as a parable about civil liberties: the rights of the Individual (the Numbers) as balanced against the needs of the Community (the Village). At what point do the Village elders give us Numbers the liberties to go where we want, when we want, however we want? At what point do we pay a price for the services the Village provides to us (health care, security, food, a home)?

There's one other thing: the show delved, in rather campy ways (this was the 1960s, they couldn't show waterboarding in reality), into the issue of torture. We get it from the beginning episode, when Number Six's first capture by Rover takes him to the Village Hospital. Number Six bears witness to a handful of fellow prisoners undergoing psychological torments, and sees the results (one man is left incoherently singing to a water fountain, another man seemingly mindwiped).

As one watches the show, one learns that the makers were rather unanimous on the value of torture: it has none. All it did was twist people into broken and useless humans (Dance of the Dead shows one example), or drive them to suicide (Hammer Into Anvil). Torture shows only one useful benefit: it breaks people into doing whatever you want them to, makes them into the torturer's pawns (Checkmate).

Consider how those who endured the torture of the Bush/Cheney regime (screw your Orwellian attempts at calling it 'enhanced interrogation.' Torture is torture.) Consider Jose Padilla. During his imprisonment under various and shifting accusations, Padilla was tortured. There's no ifs ands or buts. Padilla was tortured. And the end result wasn't confessions to what he'd been charged with: the end result was a broken man, unable to trust anyone other than the authorities that had tortured him, unable to provide for his own legal defense, and found by experts to be mentally unfit for trial (which still happened and still sent Padilla to jail). Padilla was left convinced that his mother needed to go speak to George W. Bush himself for mercy, that if Bush was convinced Padilla was 'a good boy' he'd go free.

The arguments against torture are all valid: there is no proof that torture extracts useful information. There is no evidence that the torture conducted during the Bush years led to any significant arrests or led us any closer to ending the threat of Al Quada: show me one case where a torture interrogation led to a break against a terror plot (nearly every so-called arrest came from standard police procedures of undercover work, catching the bad guys in the act, and/or an act of stupidity on the part of the culprit(s)). I'm looking online and in databases: I can't find one.

There is evidence that torture makes people more willing to do anything the torturer wants them to do. You torture someone long enough, you torture a poor innocent person from the hills of nowhere who doesn't know anyone and you can get them to state under oath that they've seen Dick Cheney hunt pink unicorns while wearing metal spiked collars and a matching leather tutu. That is all torture is good for: breaking people.

Patrick MacGoohan passed yesterday. The legacy of his show The Prisoner is still with us. The legacy of the damage from Bush's regime of torture is also still with us, until and unless Congress and the new President listen to the growing calls of the American people to do something about it, and bring those who installed torture as our main weapon in the War on Terror to a reckoning.

Be seeing you, Number Six...

New Year's Political Resolutions 2009

While I've got some other resolutions on my mind, these are of interest for meself in the political arena:

1) I hereby resolve to take an active role with Fairvote.org and see if they have a place for me and my ideas on reforming the election process, specifically my hope for a One-Day Primary for the next Presidential election of 2012.

2) I hereby resolve to make a nuisance of myself on such political blogspots as Balloon Juice, The Atlantic's various blog voices, MY Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, Obsidian Wings, Moderate Voice, and a handful of other links I've got over on the side there. Except for some reason Daily Kos is not taking my comments... grrr.

3) Oh, and I hereby resolve to, you know, GET A BLEEPING JOB. Danke.

One last look at 2008

1) I was writing this prolonged, poorly researched rant about the fall of the Republican Party this past November, but as time wore on and as I bore witness to more GOP crazy, I realized my take wasn't really going to cover as much as I wanted. So... I'm thinking different thoughts about the matter, and will hopefully get something pounded off my keyboard by oh the 2010 midterms. :)

2) I cannot understand why Karl Rove is still out there saying such unbelievable crap about George W. Bush being a voracious reader. He apparently hopes we all forgot how George already tried to impress us by reading Camus... which turned out not so well. Why Rove thinks that painting Dubya as some intellectual bookworm will help Bush's legacy is beyond me: Bush's selling points has always been his 'salt of the earth' beer in a bar kinda guy. Bush's legacy as of right now is utter trash, and not even 50 years of attempts at hagiography is going to help.

3) I look back at 8 Bush years, and back at 8 Clinton years, and realize that's 16 years of political partisanship bullsh-t that won't go away. Regrets, I've had a few...

4) Buy my book. No, seriously, I'm unemployed and need the income.

5) Of my New Year's Resolutions, I kept a couple: I found a reform advocacy group (FairVote) that I can see about joining, and I did write a book... albeit during the 3-day Novel contest, massively unfinished but at least 115 pages and pretty much covers beginning and end (everything else needs massive editing and inserted plot points to make things read better). Now, for next year's...

Blago scandal goes DefCon 1 on the Crazy Scale

I think I mentioned earlier that this scandal would be fun to watch in a train-wreck-for-a-guy-who-deserves-it kinda way. Just as long as no one else got hurt in the process.

Looks like someone else is gonna get hurt.

Blagojevich, under 20 different kinds of scrutiny, caught on audiotape screaming stuff like "what's in it for me?" regarding his attempt to sell off Obama's opening Senate seat, fully aware that anyone he now taps to fill Obama's spot is gonna get the hairy eyeball from here on out... still went out and tapped former state AG Roland Burris - by all early accounts a swell guy and kind to animals - for the Senate seat.

This is gonna cause all kinds of crap.

The U.S. Senate is now in a bind: they swore they wouldn't accept anyone that Blago tapped: the ball is now in their court and if there's one thing wrong with the Senate Dems is that their leadership has no spine. Push 'em and they bend however you want. How can they say no to an African American pol with relatively decent creds?

Blagojevich has probably figured out something: for all the crap he's being investigated for, he's still a sitting governor and there's not much anyone can do about it until the actual day of impeachment (which can't come fast enough). The guys at Balloon Juice are noting that even if the Senate blocks Burris, all Blago has to do is call a press conference once a day with a new pick and keep forcing the Senate to block and block and block. And in the process p-ss off a handful of up-and-coming or otherwise solid Dems from a key state.

Which begs the next question: JUST WHAT THE HELL IS BURRIS THINKING??? Burris' excuse is that Illinois deserves full representation, that the Senate shouldn't be short-handed at a time like this, yadda yadda. Oh really? The 2008 primary season showed full damn well the Senate operated just fine with 10-20 Senators off busy campaigning for the White House! A few more weeks of a vacancy on Obama's chair wasn't going to kill anyone!!! You know damn well ANYONE taking a job from Blagojevich with this whole pile of sh-t under investigation is going to be looked at sideways and scrutinized for the rest of his/her relatively short political career. Already people have to be looking at you and thinking "Hey, maybe he's not so clean and respectable after all. He's CERTAINLY NOT THAT DAMN BRIGHT TAKING A TAINTED JOB LIKE THAT!!!"

You could have f-cking waited until after Blago got impeached to take the job offer if it came your way, Burris. This was selfish and short-sighted on your part. For about two seconds I had sympathy for you, but now, having thought it over, you deserve the sh-tstorm that will come your way on this. You're gonna have hundreds of thousands of people asking you day in and day out "How much did you pay for your seat, Mr. Senator?" Right now I expect Jesse Jackson Jr. is on Burris' cell phone screaming "You're dumber than I am!" I have no sympathy for you at all, Mr. Burris. None.

How many other people did Blago talk to before tapping Burris for this? I wonder if anyone's checking on that. I wonder how many other people said "Are you nuts? I'm not taking a Life Savers pep-o-mint from you!" before Burris had a brain-freeze over this.

Just when everyone's just sitting here waiting for Bush to make a few more screwups on the abuse of Presidential pardons... I'm gonna go watch the Philly/Dallas game from the past Sunday and watch the Cowboys pull off a more professional and competent gameplan than what Blago and Burris just did.

The passing of Deep Throat

Mark Felt just died.

From high school on, I studied journalism, thinking to get in a career as a writer/reporter somewhere down the road. Of course, my life path went in a different direction, and even that's been recently derailed, but still I graduated from University of Florida with a Bachelor's in Journalism, so it's a field I know well.

The Watergate scandal was and remains the high watermark of the journalism profession. It justified the need for the freedom of the press and the invaluable service an independent investigatory power could bring to justice and to effective governing. Half the classes we were taught brought up Watergate and the role of the Washington Post (and the lesser roles of CBS and the New York Times), the History Of Journalism, Reporting 101, and also Journalism Ethics that covered the topics of 'public need to know vs. privacy rights of individuals,' potential government censorship and interference, and the use of 'anonymous' or unnamed sources.

We all read "All the President's Men," written about the Washington Post's investigation of the Watergate burglary and the whole viper's nest of slush funds, illegal break-ins, and ultimately bribery and obstruction charges. Meeting the colorful characters like Segretti, Hunt, Liddy. Tortured guys like Hugh Sloan, the one honest man in the whole affair. And the mystery man, Deep Throat.

Woodward's deep cover source was the one who admonished "Follow the money." He provided vital tips and pointed the Post reporters to where they needed to go. And because Woodward and Bernstein wouldn't reveal his name or his job title, the aura of mystery heightened everything about the guy (that link is to Thomas Mann's Atlantic article published in the 1990s. IT'S A MUST-READ). Even in a book with crazy-ass guys like Liddy, Deep Throat's character bio on pg. 131 was snarky cool:

Aware of his own weaknesses, he readily conceded his flaws. He was, incongruously, an incurable gossip, careful to label rumor for what it was, but fascinated by it. He knew too much literature too well and let the allurements of the past turn him away from his instincts. He could be rowdy, drink too much, overreach. He was not good at concealing his feelings, hardly ideal for a man in his position...

Trying to figure out who Deep Throat became a guessing game to those in poli sci, journalism, history, and those of general curiosity. Names like Ben Stein and Pat Buchanan, totally unthinkable when you consider these guys still carry Nixon's water. People like Al Haig and Diane Sawyer kept getting fingered. Mann in 1992 was the first to make a persuasive argument that DT had to be someone from the FBI, an organization that would have key information on the break-in and the cover-up, and also an investigation that was fighting the politicization that the Nixon administration had been enforcing on the Executive branch. Under J. Edgar, the FBI may have been bastards, but they answered to their jobs and not their politics: however, Hoover's recent death just made the FBI vulnerable to a White House takeover, and Mann noted that career guys like Mark Felt (and a few other possible sources) were getting passed over for the Directorship by guys like L. Patrick Gray, a political appointee.

This was one of the reasons why people were trying to figure out who Deep Throat was: why? Why did a career bureaucrat provide information to Woodward about Watergate: what was in it for him? Sheer patriotism couldn't have been it: those guys don't like to hide in the shadows, they announce their pride and duty from the rooftops. It couldn't have been out of honesty: that was Sloan, and while his identity was kept quiet during the paper's investigation that was due to legal reasons (Sloan was investigated for his roles in CReeP, and was having problems finding employment - there's a sad track record of honest whistleblowers getting screwed over in life). Once Watergate was effectively over and the book was written, it was safe to reveal his ID. Only Deep Throat didn't come clean, not for another 30 years.

Mann figured Deep Throat didn't come clean because he himself was covered in dirt. And Felt did have dirt: while a top man at the FBI, he was involved in some illegal break-ins of his own. Felt went to trial and grand jury investigations on some of those (and one grand jury in 1979 saw him freeze up when the prosecutor asked if he was Deep Throat, under oath! The judge let him off the hook and said he didn't have to answer, but that was the Real first time his identity was revealed...) And Felt, in his own biographies, admitted he coveted the top dog job at the FBI, and when he didn't get the job (Gray first as a temp appointment, then when Gray couldn't secure the Senate nomination because of the troubles with Watergate it went to Ruckelshaus) he retired.

Some people wanted to know so they'd know who to blame. Nixon loyalists like Buchanan and Liddy, for example. Guys still in the public arena. Read their quotes about Deep Throat. Buchanan: "...I think Deep Throat is a dishonorable man...William Mark Felt was a traitor to Nixon and America! What he did caused 53,000 American soldiers to die for nothing in Vietnam!" G. Gordon Liddy: "...This, that if Mark Felt was Deep Throat, he is no hero. He is someone who behaved unethically..." To them, Felt was a betrayer, a backstabber, and a villain.

But then, what right do they have to mark him the traitor? Nixon's administration was breaking the law. His re-election campaign was conducting illegal break-ins. That's why Liddy's got a prison record! You want unethical behavior, G. Gordon? LOOK IN THE DAMN MIRROR. And Buchanan, arguing Vietnam over this? Uh, Pat? The persons who caused 53,000 American soldiers to die for nothing were LBJ, McNamara, and the geniuses at the Pentagon and Langley who couldn't figure out how to fight a counter-insurgency. All Mark Felt did was expose a criminal enterprise being operated out of the Oval Office that led to your boss and demigod Nixon fleeing in disgrace. SO SHUT UP.

I've been reading some of the blog forums out there today on Felt's death, and the same argument against what he did comes up: oh, he shouldn't have been sneaking about in dark garages snitching on his White House bosses! Oh, he should have let an official investigation do its job! Oh, this and that and piss on it.
To all those writing those comments: DID ANY OF YOU NOTICE that there WAS an official investigation going on? DID ANY OF YOU NOTICE that there WAS A MASSIVE COVER-UP attempt going on? DID ANY OF YOU NOTICE that when push came to shove, Nixon did his damnest to STOP THE LEGAL INVESTIGATIONS and protect his own ass? Felt didn't have much of a choice, did he? Nixon wasn't promoting him to fill Hoover's spot in the first place, so Felt had no way to guarantee there would be a legal and confirmable investigation! How else was he going to get the word out that something was rotten in Denmark?
This Oh, he shouldn't be snitching excuse is one of the reasons honest whistleblowers still have a difficult time of things. Even with federal laws in place to protect whistleblowers, they still lose jobs, still lose trust with co-workers (why? If a man tells the truth, and abides by his honor, and does the right thing to stop an illegal act, why can't you trust him?), still suffer. Anyone who whistleblows deserves our respect, no matter what. They have my respect. After all, I'M not doing anything illegal.

Still and all, Felt is not as much as a hero as I'd like him to be. He commited crimes of his own accord. With regards to Watergate, he did the right thing, and I respect him for that. I know they're not gonna build statues of him any time soon (not until Liddy dies, then I plan on sneaking in to his gravesite and putting up a statue of Felt pissing on his tombstone, heh).

Do take this moment to respect what Felt did. And above all, what Hugh Sloan did. And what Mark Klein did. And Robert MacLean. And Joseph Wilson. And Colleen Rowley. And the informant tipping off Patrick Fitzgerald about Blagojevich's ethical lapses. And...

Annual Pagan Praying for Saturnalia 2008

Dear Saturn:

Once again, I call upon thee using my Unitarian powers of open-mindedness to see about getting me all the cool fun toys and the wicked cool political reforms that Santa simply won't send my way. That cruel bastard just won't take any letters not done in crayon, which is prolly why he still listens to Dubya and not the rest of the fed-up planet...

Anyhoo: my wish list for 2008 and well into 2009:

1) I WOULD LIKE A thorough and legal accounting for all those in the Bush Administration responsible for condoning and promoting the use of torture during the so-called War on Terror that ended up more a War on Justice. How can the United States claim to be the standard bearer for the Rule of Law when we allow Bush, Cheney, Yoo, Rumsfeld, Addington, and a handful of others to walk away untouched from their violations of the Geneva Convention treaties, their violations of our own Eighth Amendment, their violations of COMMON HUMAN DECENCY! This Bush the Lesser Administration has been one prolonged effort to avoid accountability for anything and everything they've done, every law broken, every rule violated, every code of conduct mocked covering EVERY aspect of our nation be it from business to health to education to governing to the general welfare of every citizen however humble. They walk on this, no nation will ever respect us. EVER.

2) I WOULD LIKE A constitutional amendment assuring that no copy of anything written by Ayn Rand gets anywhere near an economics college ever again.
2a) And a guarantee that the napkin that hideous Laffer Curve was drawn on gets used as a toilet wipe and flushed down as it so richly deserves.

3) I WOULD LIKE A girlfriend. Oh Lord, O Saturn, ye of the God of Time, you know full well it's been 20 years (!) since I last went out on a real date, back in high school, that Christmas party at the Allens' place, and there was that small bonfire in the backyard with noone sitting there, and Suzie and I sat on a log and looked up at the night sky, all those stars, and she and I talked some pleasant stuff about all the inconsequential stuff, and then I looked down and saw a scorpion crawl up my leg OMFG and then we realized why noone else was sitting on a log covered in scorpions and Suzie and I ran back into the house and that was pretty much that. Thanks, God. Thanks a bunch. Twenty years now, I would very much like a little help here in the dating department. All I ask is, yes someone cute, with a sense of humor, centrist politics, Keynesian, oh and a love of football and comic book movies. And all I ask is you get inside my head and make me less of a bleeping geek spaz, okay? Please and thnkxkbye.

4) I WOULD LIKE TO see the Tampa Bay Rays make it back to the World Series in 2009. This time against the Cubs. So that I know we'll win. ;-)

5) I WOULD LIKE A rule that makes any media blowhard who makes wishy-washy statements using 'strawmen' to make an argument, and who claims that there's a controversy when the only ones making the controversy are other blowhards, be forced to leave the media echo chamber and work the night shift at the nearest available 24-hour bowling alley. Because it's for their own good: they need to get away from their empty-headed soulless colleagues in the media and actually get out and meet actual people struggling with their lives and maybe just maybe those blowhards will see what's really going on out here outside of those damn studios of theirs.
But I doubt it. There's a reason these idiots worked and backstabbed each other in order to get inside these hermetically sealed media studios in the first place.

That's all I can think of for now, Saturn. Oh, and for the annual sacrifice of the Mithras bull, send the bill to Bill O'Reilly as always.

Why Blagojevich will be fun to watch for the next few days...

Because I'm with Christy Hardin Smith on Firedoglake about the sheer brazenness, the sheer cluelessness of Blago and his crew trying to pull this crap EVEN WITH THE KNOWLEDGE HE WAS FACING CRIMINAL CHARGES (the complaints show him openly pondering how putting HIMSELF in as Senator could help him avoid Fitzgerald's investigation). I'm with Christy, and about 100,000 other bloggers (view here, and here, and here): the stupid, it burns...

Because this is the Christmas season, when the year is ending and the winter doldrums set in, of grey skies and long dark nights, when work seems to be more of a drag than ever (if you've still got work). Because Christmas is a time to enjoy some heaping hot cups of SCHADENFREUDE, of watching idiots like Blagojevich and his crew twist in the Chicago winter winds.

Because it's been awhile since we've seen our national hero Patrick Fitzgerald back in the spotlight. Ahhh, Fitzmas. We've got, by the way, all the conservative blowhards who were running around calling Fitzgerald an unbalanced partisan hack back when he was investigating Bush/Cheney/Rove/Libby are now hailing him as a great nonpartisan seeker of justice now that he's nailed a prominent Democrat (especially since they've salivating at the thought of this all damaging Obama).

Because, amazingly enough, this is gonna end up looking great (well okay not great but at least fine) for Obama. For all the yelling and screaming from the far right blowhards that this is BAD NEWS for Obama, all the evidence coming to light shows that Obama WASN'T paying Blago off, that he WAS shaking off the feelers from Blago's crew for favors and money, and that indeed Blagojevich was pissed off about it. Having the crook say "F-ck Obama" prominently and often on all the transcripts makes Obama the victim of Blago's shakedown efforts. The worst that's going to happen is that this will look bad for the Democrats in general, for Illinois politicians (yes, ANOTHER governor going to jail!), and for anyone Blagojevich tries to name as Obama's Senatorial successor (if anyone takes it from Blago, he/she is dumber than Blago!). But there are greater issues at stake, and greater scandals to resolve, and this isn't going to dent Obama at all. All it's going to to is let the far right insult machine putter itself into its own deepening mudhole.

So for now, this is fun to watch. This is like a train wreck where the only people who got hurt were the crooks who ran it off the rails. This could all change, of course, if other people less involved and more innocent of wrongdoing do get hurt, so here's hoping the damage stays on Blago.

By the by, the smart move, the only move for Blago? Resigning. But we know now, he ain't that smart. He's probably even going to try that dumbass gambit of making himself Senator... just to let the Democrats in DC shoot his sorry dumb ass down... man, what a year this has been...

The unwashable stain

Just when you think it was safe to go back into Illinois politics...

Reporting in right now that Ill. Governator Rod "Greedy Dumbass Mofo" Blagojevich has been taken away in handcuffs by the Feds on corruption charges, mostly relating to his attempts to sell off Obama's now-open Senate seat to the highest bidder.

I call this the unwashable stain because we keep seeing this in politics: the greed; the quid pro quos; the unbelievably massive amount of greed; the self-serving ego-driven destructiveness; oh and the GREED of it all. And it's not all Republicans (cough, DeLay/Ted Stevens/Ney/Cunningham) and it's not all Democrats (cough, William Jefferson/Robert Torricelli/now this bozo), and I hate generalizing it like that, but this is where we're at. Politicians not interested in serving the public trust: politicians interested in lining their own pockets and letting their friends do the same.

Amendment Idea #418 - Talking Heads Reform

The traditional media is all atwitter over:
1) how the election really means the country is "center-right" when in fact the results show a sizable majority is center-left;
2) "OMG the CLINTONS ARE TAKING OVER OBAMA'S CABINET," along the lines of "Ohhh, we get to Hate Hillary and Bill some more," disregarding the fact that Obama's got few places to go to find qualified experienced people... like McCain wasn't going to pull his Cabinet from the failed cronyists hacks that made up Bush the Lesser's administration???
3) Obama needs to be "bipartisan" and allow the Republicans enough input to continue screwing the country over, even though most of the nation voted out Republicans in droves and willingly gave the Democrats greater control of both Houses of Congress AS WELL AS control of the White House.

In other words, the traditional media types are all in this cocooned little world of theirs where they don't see past their own tight circle of friends to realize the rest of the planet doesn't think like they do.

Hence this amendment, it's kinda like one I think I've suggested before:

• Mandatory Term Limits for Talking Head Morons on the g-dd-mn cable news shows. Yeah, even for Jon Stewart and Colbert. I'm sorry, but every two years you self-absorbed bastards need to get out of those cubicles, those soundstages, stop hanging out with sycophants and your ever-shrinking circle of friends (how many freaking times are you gonna have a loser like Newt Gingrinch on your damn shows?) and get out in the REAL WORLD and mix with you know REAL FRICKIN PEOPLE who do their own hair and shop at Wal-Marts for their shirts and shoes and who struggle with $50k or less salaries something you idiots don't have to worry about with your book contracts and your speaking fees and God knows what else, when was the last time you had to worry about balancing your checkbook, Mr. O'Reilly and Mr. Olbermann??? And stop talking like you're experts on EVERYTHING, some of you morons didn't even finish HIGH SCHOOL! You're not Experts, you're not qualified to talk about half the things you pretend to be knowledgeable, just SHUT UP, get a real job, and PROVE YOUR WORTH! Gaaahhh!!!

Reactions to the 2008 Elections

1) My home of Florida had state-level amendments to vote on, including the nationally-relevant Amendment 2 that would block gay couples from marrying or even having civil unions.

Amendment 2 passed with 62 percent of the vote. Due to the rules on amendments, a successful amendment has to be over 60 percent (simple majority of 51 percent won't do). So there we have it. Here in Florida, 62 percent of the voting population are a bunch of homophobes.

Amendment 1 was a tad more shocking. It was set to remove antiquated and discriminatory property limits against the Japanese that had been put into the state constitution back in the 1920s. 52 percent of voters went NO on that. The state doesn't even have a statute in the books to overturn, no law was ever directly written because of it, and it never really went into effect. It just needed to get edited out of the document. AND PEOPLE VOTED NO TO THAT? What the hell is wrong with this state (well, other than being filled with a bunch of crazies)???

The only other amendment getting shot down was No.8, the one allowing counties to raise their own local sales taxes to generate additional income for their community colleges. That was also rejected by about 56 percent of voters. The only thing I can think happened here was that people didn't want government to raise more taxes...

2) I'm running into people on the street this morning who didn't watch the news last night. How refreshing. ;-)

3) Note to Liddy Dole, former Senator from North Carolina: calling your opponent - a woman who volunteered to work as a Sunday school teacher - "Godless" was obviously a REALLY BAD IDEA. Enjoy the defamation lawsuit.

3a) Note to the Republican campaigning 'experts': the cultural identity politics you bastards have played since, hell the Nixon years, ain't gonna fly well when the economy's in the crapper, the military is stretched to the breaking point, and the most you can do against your opponents is call them Marxist, Communist and/or Socialist. Considering there's an entire generation born after 1989 now able to vote who slept through their high school history classes not caring about that crap, and considering there's a slightly older generation of Gen-Xers like myself who witnessed Marxism/Communism/Socialism collapsing on themselves, those words are not as scary as they used to be.

3a.1) And the race card? Done and gone, for the most part. There will still be idiots who campaign (and sadly vote) on such matters, but this giant hurdle has been passed, and this should signal that a solid majority of voters are going to look past skin color. Done, and gone, and good riddance.

4) Also done and gone with the election loss of incumbant Chris Shays is the presence of House Republicans from the New England states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Conneticut (New York apparently is the firewall protecting the rest of the country from Bostonian accents). That's right folks. One of the two regions that brought us the Republican Party (the Midwest/Great Lakes states were the other) back in the 1850s no longer wants them. You can view this as a result of the so-called "Southern Strategy" deployed by the GOP from the late 1960s on: when the party realized its' social conservatism worked well with the social conservatism of disgruntled Southern whites who were abandoning the Democratic party over the 1964-65 civil rights laws. So the Republicans got the social conservatives, and slowly drove the more moderate elements out. No more northeastern RINOs. No more representation from a large population voting block. And considering how New York and Pennsylvania (and now Maryland and Virginia) are slowly switching from purple-red to purple-blue, there's a lot more North (and Mid-Atlantic) that can switch to and stay solid Democrat. Combine this with the loss of the entire Pacific coast at a national level the last 4-5 elections, and the inroads the Democrats are making in the Mountain West and places like Colorado, the Republicans are becoming less a national party than ever before. Good job, Rove, on that permanent majority, ya? And O Irony: the Party of Lincoln went acourtin for the Southern vote, and now the Old Confederate South is pretty much the only home they've got.

5) The biggest deal outside of the Presidential election was how the Senate was going to shake out: would the Democrats get a filibuster-proof majority (this is really a moot point: the GOP will figure out ways to delay legislation if they want to...)? Even by this morning, about three Senate elections are still unresolved: Minnesota, Oregon, and Alaska. Let's just say that the Dems will get 56-58 seats and the GOP 40-42 (with two seats held by Independents who caucus with the Dems). That's still a sizeable number to the Democrats, well enough that they can boot Lieberman from his prize chairmanships on key committees and not feel bad about it (if Joe switches to the GOP, it's one less headache for the Democrats, as well as Lieberman finding out his Republican buddies won't like his moderate/liberal positions on everything outside of Israel/War on Terror).

5a) If Alaska returns Ted Stevens to office... SHAME ON YOU! Regardless of his court conviction, Stevens was one of the worst politicians in government. Shame, Alaska. SHAME.
UPDATE: Stevens did lose in a close contest. Still, that it was close even with his felony conviction? It proves that incumbents have too much of an advantage in getting re-elected, and that voters are too eager to call other politicians outside of their district/state crooks but unable to view their own that way. Tsk.

6) Wither the Republican Party at this point, in the face of a massive Democratic victory? That's gonna take a longer article to write about. Give me a few days.
UPDATE: Give me a few weeks. NaNoWriMo is taking a toll on meh...

6a) And to all the political commentators and Republican blowhards now calling for "bipartisanship" and "let's govern from the center"... where the hell were you bastards when Bush/Cheney/Rove/DeLay were running roughshod over everybody from 2002 to 2006??? Where was your bipartisanship then?

Why is this night different than all other nights?

I noted this back in June.

Why is this night different than all other nights? Because on this night, after 260 plus years of slavery, 100 years of segregation, 40 years of battling over civil rights, a black man is President of the United States.

Let us be realistic. This is not going to end racism, or even improve race relations. That work is ongoing, and will last long into our future generations. But this settles a long-fought argument: it means everyone born in this nation has a chance to lead.

So. What happens next?

Next, I go to sleep. I'll write more stuff tomorrow. Especially about the future of the Republican Party. I need to say a few things on that.

Tomorrow is Election Day 2008

And I want to make sure all 9 people who've read this blog remember to VOTE DAMMIT.

A good poll-tracking site to check is FiveThirtyEight. Watch out the results are turning out, see how things go tomorrow.

Any predictions from me? Like I'm any good at that. But still here goes.

I'm thinking the Democrats are going to secure about 22 seats for the House. From what I've read both parties are convinced the Republicans are losing ground with Representatives - at least 10 to 15 seats from that article I've linked. I've seen projections where Democrats could get up to 28 new seats, although I'm having a hard time locating those, this is currently the closest article I can get on that. From the vibes I'm getting from people coming into my workplace... from the feeling on the street... and with the knowledge that a lot of Republicans retired this term leaving a lot of unprotected seats open... this is REALLY a bad year for the GOP in the House. If the Republicans can staunch the bleeding to just 15 lost seats, consider that a victory for them (that IS how bad it is...).

For the Senate, a lot of buzz on the liberal blogs (hi, Kos!) are pushing for getting a filibuster-proof 60 seats; but even with how Holy Joe gets handled by the Democrats post-election, I doubt the Democrats would gain more than 5 new Senate seats. It would still give the Democrats enough breathing room to boot Lieberman from his chairmanship(s) on key committees, but past that the Republicans still have other ways than filibusters to make the Democratic majority suffer the next 4 years...

For the BIG ONE, the Presidency... polling still gives Obama an edge on McCain, either 51-to-44 percent to 52-47. When you look at FiveThirtyEight's site, however, the numbers look more intimidating when you see the Electoral College counts. All Obama has to do is secure every state that voted for Kerry in 2004 and then pick up at least 3 mid-sized states that voted for Bush the Lesser... which is why Colorado and Virginia turning solid Blue means doom for McCain. Having Nevada, Ohio and Florida turn light Blue (signaling a Leans-Obama) doesn't help. McCain's only chance is for 3 things to happen: 1) the majority of the polling services are flat-wrong/biased and he's really winning states like Ohio, Florida, Colorado, Virginia and gee pretty much everywhere else, 2) he pulls off an upset in Pennsylvania while confirming Ohio and Florida, and 3) Russia invades Colorado before Tuesday morning.

That all said: never underestimate the Bucs' ability to lose a game... Yeah, what I said.

Universal voter registration is a must

It's an idea I've been musing about for a long time, considering the need for election reform where it's needed most: getting people fairly registered, getting people able to cast their votes, and getting those votes to count.

I was in Broward County FL in 2000, Ground Zero of where and when our nation's antiquated and fragile election system collapsed on itself. With all the arguing over who actually won the major election (President Gore or President Bush?), the real issue got ignored: the problems with how we Americans cast our vote, and with who actually gets to vote.

Oh, we tried to fix the HOW problem, and in some cases made it worse. Election officials jumped quickly to the fancy touch-screen equipment, sadly ignoring the many flaws that system had and still has. Optical scans have gained in use this year's election: fewer flaws to it (still has security issues), although it really needs a receipt system so people can be comforted that their choices can be confirmed in case of a recount. And still the big problem of WHO gets to vote hasn't been fully addressed.

With the Republicans this year (same as 2004 and 2006) screaming about voter fraud with groups like ACORN submitting questionable registration forms, we may finally approach that issue. As law professor/blogger Rick Hasen noticed in a recent Slate article:

When it comes to charges of "voter fraud" and "vote suppression," each election is worse than the last... These charges and countercharges are the real danger to the fabric of our democracy. If people are not convinced their votes will be accurately counted, they are more likely to view election results as illegitimate and, therefore, the government less worthy of our respect and willingness to abide by the rule of law.

What can be done about it? Though there are many things that can be done to improve our election system—from nonpartisan election administration, to a uniform ballot design for federal elections, to improvements in our voting machinery—the most urgent fix is needed for our system of voter registration... Right now, voter registration takes place primarily on the county level, and it requires a lot of effort on the part of outside groups such as ACORN, the political parties, and others... This is where a lot of the registration fraud comes from. Even for workers not paid by the card, a low-wage worker doing voter registration may be tempted to falsify information to keep his or her job, going so far as to register names in the phone book or cartoon characters...

Hasen's idea for fixing this and getting the Dems and GOP to stop ranting (well, more than they usually do)?

The solution is to take the job of voter registration for federal elections out of the hands of third parties (and out of the hands of the counties and states) and give it to the federal government. The Constitution grants Congress wide authority over congressional elections. The next president should propose legislation to have the Census Bureau, when it conducts the 2010 census, also register all eligible voters who wish to be registered for future federal elections. High-school seniors could be signed up as well so that they would be registered to vote on their 18^th birthday. When people submit change-of-address cards to the post office, election officials would also change their registration information.

This change would eliminate most voter registration fraud. Government employees would not have an incentive to pad registration lists with additional people in order to keep their jobs. The system would also eliminate the need for matches between state databases, a problem that has proved so troublesome because of the bad quality of the data. The federal government could assign each person a unique voter-identification number, which would remain the same regardless of where the voter moves (PERSONAL NOTE: This might bring up privacy red flags, but why not the person's Social Security number?). The unique ID would prevent people from voting in two jurisdictions, such as snowbirds who might be tempted to vote in Florida and New York...

This is close to what's known as Compulsory registration: the idea that once you hit the legal voting age (18) WHAMMO you not only got the right to vote but you could vote without going through the hoops of filing for it. Even with the ease of registering today thanks to the Moter Voter Law, people still have to go out of their way to do it. With compulsory registration, that's long gone: No paperwork, no muss, little fuss. A lot of countries in Europe have something like this: Denmark, Finland and Germany have something where the government automatically takes care of the right to vote along with putting the citizen on their health care/tax/mailing address national register, and they simply mail their citizens a voting ID postcard.

Hasen's idea has merit: We already have the U.S. Census keeping track of people (they have to, Congress has to figure out every 10 years how to gerrymander their districts), so why not use them to keep track of their right to vote and ensure they've got it? And Hasen solves one problem of what happens to people who move: it's called the U.S. Postal Service. Any updates to a person's mailing address can be simply uploaded to the Census' databases from one government office to the next.

Another problem not addressed: privacy rights. What about those people who don't like the idea of the government or anyone else tracking them. Solution: laws and constant enforcement of laws to ensure protection of the data from any abuse. Constant vigilance: Heck, we need that anyway to ensure our privacy rights against those abusing them...

This is a must, a Thing To Do regardless of how Tuesday's vote goes: we need the next President, the next Congress to enact laws to provide universal voter registration. It doesn't need to be an amendment: the Constitution alreadys grants Congress to make the laws regarding their elections, and since state and local level elections follow how the national-level elections go, getting them to conform is a non-issue. Make universal registration simple. Make it effective. Protect the info. Get it done.

One group I'd like everyone to start contacting on this is Fairvote.org: see what they've got lined up to promote universal voter registration. Let's see if we can get Congress's attention before the next election cycle... Oh, AND VOTE PEOPLE! November 4, 2008! Or early voting if you've still got a few days to do it!

Early voting in Florida 2008

It's time. Voting has begun for the general election, and dang is the turnout hot!

I know I'm gonna be missing the people who did the early voting this Monday and today, but what the hell, I'm gonna go over with you the Florida state amendments being proposed this November 4th and yes I will make my recommendations about how you should vote on em dammit!

Amendment 1: a Declaration of Rights to remove an outdated law in the state constitution that banned certain ethnics groups (the Japanese?) from owning property in the state. No law really ever came of it and it's so discriminatory that it would never hold up in any court, but the passage still needs to be removed and this is the cleanest way to do it. A no-brainer to vote YES on this.

Amendment 2: the Florida Marriage Protection Amendment. It states that a marriage can only exist between a man and woman, and that any other form of union (between gays, between farm animals, between Disney cartoon characters, between congressmen and their pages) be invalid.
This is the cultural war at work here. There's already a regular law on the books, but groups opposed to gays having equal marriage/union rights want this passed to make it harder for federal courts to legalize gay unions.
My view on this? I'm single, lonely, virgin, never getting married anyway. Directly, this law does not affect me (it doesn't MANDATE I get married) one way or the other. However, I view this law as a sham, a violation of the rights of those who want to marry, co-habitate, what have you. They call this amendment a Marriage Protection act??? What a joke! This law doesn't protect people or society from the forces that DO threaten the sanctity of marriage: it doesn't stop adultery, it doesn't stop domestic violence, it doesn't stop divorce. There are hundred of gay couples looking to get married. There are THOUSANDS of hetero couples getting divorced every year. Divorce affects families by screwing up income, by breaking up households, by dividing and weakening parental responsibility regarding raising children. (In a nice irony, in the states that are allowing gays to marry we are already seeing gay couples file for divorce just like the heteros). If this amendment was doing something to cut the rate of divorce, if it was doing something to crack down on domestic violence, I'd buy the whole "We're protecting the sanctity of marriage" sthick. But it's not: it's a blatant attempt to deny a very small minority from being able to share access to legal rights that hetero couple get. There's even a chance this amendment could affect the rights of hetero couples by limiting their access to legal rights, for example hetero couples living in common-law (non-certified) marriages could find their current ability to share health care costs denied for themselves and any kids they might have.
This is a discriminatory amendment. I'd vote NO.

Amendment 3: This amendment allows the Lege to limit state Property Appraisers on appraising real property that has received hurricane wind protection upgrades and energy-saving upgrades. People were complaining that attempts to upgrade their homes to qualify for insurance coverage discounts were nailing them the other way with higher appraisal taxes. The most obvious benefit of this amendment is that it could encourage improvements to houses to withstand hurricane damage, which could go a long way to reduce insurance costs and improve our state's attempts to keep people insured. The most obvious consequence is that counties and cities will see a reduction in the property tax revenues they'd otherwise be getting: calculations on that appear minimal. I'd vote YES.

Amendment 4: This amendment is similar to A-3 in that it limits Appraisers again, but this time regarding property being 'protected' for green/conservation purposes. The gist is, keep your land 'green' and never pay property tax on it. At all.
Environmental groups are all for it: it encourages land owners to keep certain properties undeveloped and eco-friendly (places like wetlands, for example). Other properties being used but having conservation value can still be taxed, but only for current use value and not based on potential use (which is a tactic some Property Appraiser offices use to keep some landowners honest... and some offices use to squeeze more tax revenue out of other landowners...). Critics fear that land owners could figure out loopholes in the definitions of 'current use' value or 'in perpetuity', and end up getting tax-free land that they would then use to generate greater profit.
The questions about the law are valid, but the chances this law could improve the state's environment (which has been threatened) and better define property development are valid as well. I'm erring on the side of YES.

Amendment 5: no longer exists.

Amendment 6: Another Property Appraiser limiter, this time applying to waterfront/beach property. Properties to be appraised for 'current use' rather than 'potential use.' Property and business owners in waterfront/beach areas were complaining their rates were going up for developments and improvements in their area that they did not directly contribute to (for example, a marina's fish/tackle store getting hit for 'potential use' improvements done to a boat pier built for a condominium down the street). The Appraisers are fighting back on this one, noting that area development upgrades do affect other properties and businesses much like a fancy new home improves the value of the surrounding neighborhood. For the most part, I'm siding with the businesses: they shouldn't get taxed for things they're not doing. However, this amendment is too narrow: it protects marinas and commercial fishing businesses, but not local hotels and stores that are also getting hit hard by the 'potential use' appraisals. I'm thinking NO, until a better amendment gets passed.

Amendment 7: no longer exists.

Amendment 8: Provides counties with the opportunity to create a local sales tax to fund their county-level community colleges. It allows the county residents to vote on the sales tax, and limits the tax to five years, at which point it 'sunsets' out and the voters would have to vote a new one if needed. The deal is, schools and colleges should already be getting funding from the state to stay operational, and they still will: this amendment is an attempt to supplement more funding. The question becomes, will this give the state an excuse to cut back on their funding if/when the counties start their own funding? Otherwise, I kinda like this law: it gives each county the choice of improving their own local systems of higher education, and community colleges are where a lot of low-income residents go to improve their education and work toward higher degrees that translate into better-paying jobs. I'd go YES on this one.

Amendment 9: no longer exists.

There we go. Have at it.

2008 Write-In Vote Suggestion

Screw AL Manager of the Year. Joe Maddon for President!

Go RAYS!

James Fallows' amendment idea

From a week ago, give or take a few hours:

"No Person shall be elected President or Vice President without accepting a session of questioning by the press, such session to last no less than one hour and to be open to normally accredited members of the press in the same fashion as at Presidential news conferences. The questioning shall occur and the results shall be made freely available to the public at least one week before an Election is held."

I read it, chuckled a bit about who(m?) it was referencing. Sarah Palin's refusal to directly confront the mainstream media in open question session has been annoying a lot of the online and mainstream writers and opinion-makers, such as Andrew Sullivan. But you couldn't fault her or the McCain crew on that: her scripted and hermetically-sealed interviews were unmitigated disasters anyway.

I felt the need to email Fallows and give him my take on the amendment idea: that it was an emotional response to an unlikely situation (McCain selecting Palin as Veep) that could never really happen again:

... (it) doesn't really cover many of the sins being seen in this 2008 election. It focuses completely on the McCain-Palin refusal to make available Palin for give-and-take sessions with the media that journalists have long taken for granted as part of the electoral process. I honestly don't see how this amendment will correct any similar problem in the near future: this was a perfect storm of an impulsive candidate (McCain) selecting a Veep (Palin) that was so clearly unvetted and unprepared for national campaigning. Given how the GOP ticket has been slipping, almost all of it due to McCain's ADD-like lack-of-focus and the public's growing awareness that Palin could be a heartbeat away from the Presidency, I don't think any future campaign is going to be this stupid again...

I then added my suggestion for the best possible 28th Amendment: basically my "Lying is not protected speech/any politician caught lying get to be tarred and feathered" Idea.

God bless him, Fallows emailed back, letting me know he knew full well his idea was more of a vent than a serious suggestion:

Mine was a more modest and sarcastic attempt to focus on Palin's apparent attempt to win election having NEVER ONCE had a press conference.

I emailed back, apologizing for my rant and noting that for all my attempts at snark and witticism here (which isn't much), my political humor switch burned out back in 2003. And that was pretty much that.

I've forwarded some LOL Cat photos to Sullivan, in the meanwhile, but the bastard's a dog fanatic so I don't think I'll be hearing from him. ;-)

I'm at that point I want to see it fall to Zero

The last few days, watching the stock market completely collapse, knowing full well I am watching the doom of my own nation, and the whole global market... it brings out the anarchist in me, the part of me that wants to build a bonfire and dance around it like a tribal shaman-warrior summoning up the gods of destruction.

It's because a part of me is sick of the scam, the con job the financial elites all tricked us with over the past 30 years, always crying out "Deregulate and let the free markets save us!" "Cut all taxes and the wealth will trickle down!" "Greenspan knows what he's doing!" Yeah, choke on it.

It's because I really do genuinely want to see this all collapse down to zero while George W. Bush is still in office, so this albatross gets wrung around his neck as his ultimate legacy (I wonder which part of his library think tank is gonna contain a memorial to the 2008 financial meltdown).

It's because when it happens, I want to travel to what's left of the place. Whatever ruins the city of New York becomes, I want to hobble over the debris and stand in front of Wall Street, stand upon the piles of fallen jumpers, and shout to any survivors "ARE YOU GETTING IT? ARE YOU LEARNING YET YOU GREEDY BASTARDS? ARE YOU LEARNING WHY WE NEEDED REGULATIONS AND LAWS TO PREVENT YOU FROM DOING THIS TO YOURSELVES AND TO EVERYONE ELSE? ARE YOU FIGURING OUT THAT GREED IS THE ENEMY OF ALL FINANCE? THIS IS ALL ON YOU! ALL ON YOU! VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS MY ASS! NOW DIE!"

And then I will walk home and try to find a job, which will be very hard to do with the entire economy wiped out. To all you Bush-worshiping neocon greedheads, welcome to the reality-based world. I hope to see you all (well except for the ones in jail for war crimes violations) on the unemployment lines too. So I can punch you in the face and get away with it, 'cause no jury will convict me.

And all the things leading up to tonight's debate

...there's a couple of things I wanna go over.

• Since my post about Gov. Palin's selection to be McCain's veep, I have gone from underwhelmed by her choice to utterly horrified. Her Troopergate scandal has blown up with stonewalling, contempt for subpoenas, and outright lying. She compares so well now to the current Veep and his contempt for the rule of law. More shocking, she's supposed to have spent at least a week or two with high-level 'experienced' tutors covering need-to-know topics such as foreign policy, national and global economics, what have you. All that tutoring and she turns in three interviews in a row with Gibson, Hannity and Couric that progressively show WORSE performances than the last. And the polls are reflecting that: she's dropped from the high 60s approval to around the mid-40s. She's obviously wowed the GOP base, which helped McCain's convention bounce, but now she's killing him among the Indys and Undecideds who, you know, actually grade people by performance. From what I've seen of Palin's interviews... trust me, she makes Dan Quayle look like a MENSA member.
  
• I'm still upset with McCain, but this week just made things worse. His reactions to the Wall Street meltdown and to the Sh-tpile Bailout Sec. Paulson was trying to sell to Congress since last Friday have been haphazard and ill-informed to say the least. Then, Wednesday, McCain pulls a huge stunt (and it was a stunt) by 'suspending' his campaign so that he could go back to DC and make himself look important at the bailout deals the Congressional Ds and Rs were already close to completing. And what happens? He shows up, says little, and inside of 40 minutes the deals fell apart and everyone walked away pissed.
• AND McCAIN DOESN'T EVEN PULL OFF THE SUSPENDING BIT! He lies to David Letterman to cancel out his Wednesday night appearance by claiming he had to hurry right away to the airport and to DC: Letterman finds out McCain had sneaked off to interview with Couric instead (AND CAUGHT HIM LIVE ON CAMERA DOING IT! Watch the video up to 7:32 on the timer, you can tell how pissed off Dave is by then) All day Thursday, by the way, McCain was busy meeting people, pressing palms, working the fundraisers, what have you, up until the White House session to hammer out a deal that got squashed instead. And as part of the 'suspending' the campaign, he tried to worm his way out of tonight's scheduled debate, trying to move it back to the Oct. 5th date scheduled for the Veep debate (which was becoming more and more apparent to observers to be a looming disaster for Palin: rumors that McCain's maneuvering was really to cancel her debate altogether). The attempt to cancel the debate failed: now McCain looks more desperate and unwilling to face voters than ever before.

For myself, I'm not watching the debate. My mind's made up. I know you're not supposed to vote AGAINST people, you're supposed to vote FOR people. But let's be honest. There is right now so much I hate about McCain and what he's done to himself. There is so much I hate about the Republican Party. Whereas any qualms I have about Obama's lack of experience or the Democrats' tendencies to be just as hypocritical as the GOP pale by comparison.

One other thing: McCain, you really shouldn't have pissed off Letterman like that. He's got a history of carrying grudges. And his fans vote.

It's not just me... it's nearly every other American

I'm not the only one bugging about the hideous new Bush plan to waste $700 billion (at least) on a Wall Street bailout that a growing number of economists are saying isn't even needed:

The Flick Filosopher - my Matron Saint of the Movies - is pretty pissed about it too.

She compares the current fiscal crisis to her own personal financial crisis of a few years back. Like the banks and investment firms had, she had put too much on credit and was facing massive debt. Bankruptcy loomed, she considered credit consolidators, and finally went with Option Three to knuckle down, work extra jobs, pay off her loans as best she could and stop living the high life on money she didn't have.

And now, she looks at these financial wizards, these CEOs and Captains of Industry who have created a massive Sh-tpile on Wall Street... and has no sympathy for them, and I completely agree with what she says:

I'm a good citizen. I literally help old ladies cross the street. I call police officers "sir" even when they look like they're 12 years old and I wonder if their mothers know they're out on the street playing with guns... and even when they're violating my civil rights with their warrantless, no-cause searches of my belongings in the subway. I replaced all the bad old-fashioned lightbulbs in my apartment with green low-wattage fluorescent ones. I recycle. I use mass transit, even though the fares keep going up and the service keeps getting worse and the trains keep getting more crowded.

I've adopted homeless animals, for Christ's sake.

And now, George W. Fucking Bush, after spending the last seven years wiping his ass with the Constitution, wants to finish his simultaneous looting of the American economy for his pals by taking $700 billion $1.8 trillion of money we never had for universal health care, better schools, researching new forms of low-carbon-emitting energy, cleaning up our environment, giving body armor to our soldiers and taking care of them once they come home, finding Osama Bin Laden, rebuilding Lower Manhattan, evacuating poor people from New Orleans, shoring up levees so New Orleans wouldn't have needed to be evacuated in the first place, curing AIDS and cancer, making college affordable for whomever wants to attend, creating an intercity train network that actually works, and a million other progressive things that would make life better for everyone, and give it to people who lied, cheated, stole, exercised poor judgment, and bitched about paying taxes on the small percentage of their ill-gotten gains that they weren't already hiding -- legally and illegally -- from the IRS. And he wants to give them this money with no oversight, no transparency, not even any demands that it be used in any particular way.

It's not just me. And it's not just her. The last two days at the library where I work, nearly every patron has griped about the bailout, griped about the corporate overlords who are about to take more money they didn't earn, griped about how unfair the whole scam is turning out to be.

The best thing I can tell people, I can tell you: stay angry. Please contact every elected official you have. Please rant to them that you want accountability. Please remind them that these people they're about to give money to are crooks and liars and incompetents. Please remind them that you have the power to vote their lazy asses out of office if they fail to hold Bush and his Wall Street buddies accountable for what has happened these past 8 years.

PLEASE. DO IT NOW!

Yet Another Bailout... and Yet Another... and Yet Another...

Sigh. I've said it before I'm saying it again... this sucks.

We bore witness this week to Lehman Brothers collapsing, Merrill Lynch getting bought by Bank of America, and then AIG (American International Group, a major player in the insurance racket) getting taken over by the U.S. government in an unprecedented act that effectively nationalized the company (something free-market capitalists like the Republicans in charge would consider a supreme act of evil... if a Democrat did it).

Pile this all on top of the previous government actions involving Bear Sterns, and total in about ten other large-scale banks failing inside of one year which is more than the total number of failed banks we've seen from 2000 to 2006. Let's be blunt, we are witnessing the biggest financial crisis since the Savings and Loans scandals of the 1980s. Only this is waaaaay bigger, where the S&L mess cost us $150 billion this subprime mess is going to cost $1 TRILLION! We're talking, yes we are, a Depression-level economic collapse, especially as you can throw in the high gas prices affecting inflation, the rising unemployment, and about fifty more economic factors that scream DISASTER.

I said it then, I say it now:

Why do we keep doing this? Why do we keep letting these financial institutions ramp up the greed and corruption until they choke on their own disasters, only to have US, the people who got ripped off in the process, to pay the damn bills? They get us coming and going.

I'll tell you why. Because these financial fat cats buy off the politicians on both sides of the aisle - Republicans and Democrats both - to do nothing until it's too late. Freaking legalized bribery.

Nothing this week has convinced me otherwise. From all that I've read, most of this current disaster points back to one law: the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999. It allowed disparate economic institutions - banks, insurers, investing firms - to merge, compete, merge, make back-alley deals, develop questionable investing practices, perform acts of creative accounting, and allow themselves free parking at all the football games. It repealed an earlier law that had been introduced in 1933, Glass-Steagall, which had placed regulations and restrictions on banking and investing to curb the excesses of the 1920s that had led to the Great Depression. Now we see why. Thank you Phil Gramm.

The politicos are bending over backward now, especially regarding AIG, to make sure the entire stack of cards for our economy doesn't completely collapse, by stabilizing the top-end of the economy. Those of us at the bottom-end of the economy - the workers, the taxpayers, the people who played by the rules and the people who got played by the con artists running our markets - are going to get stuck paying the bill. AGAIN.

And this ISN'T OVER YET. The economists and political observers are all still muttering that the damage done by the crazy subprime mess and shifting financial trickery by the major institutions hasn't been fully contained yet. There's still a lot of damage yet to occur. There's still also the economic backlash to occur with all this public debt getting bigger.

All because the Republicans wanted to deregulate banking and investing, and all because the Democrats played along because the money was too good. All because of unchecked greed.