I was going to post about something else, but this blog is concerned about the harsh treatment of pirates

I'm still working on my next thought about how screwy the Republicans are re: Obama, but I couldn't leave this unchallenged.

The past week saw American interests over the rise of Somali piracy heat up when pirates seized an American-manned cargo ship and hold the crew hostage. Normally, the pirates would wait, negotiate for a ransom, take the money and flee back to Somalia. This time, however, the crew fought back, causing enough problems until the ship's captain offered himself up as a hostage to ensure the safety of his crew.

The U.S. Navy was quick enough on the scene, and a tense stand-off over 5 days took place. Meanwhile, the media back home - especially the conservative bloggers and blowhards - were ranting and raving about how Obama was failing his first big test of an international crisis, that oh something's gotta be done, oh we gotta go bomb Somal...

SEALs snipers coordinated with the American captain to where he jumped off the pirate's ship and the snipers shot the three pirates guarding him (the fourth was on the Navy ship trying to negotiate and is now in custody). Done and done. Obama let the Navy do its job, gave out the congrats, made a follow-up speech that the world needs to resolve the piracy issue, and moved on. The conservative critics were left slackjawed and in some cases bitch-slapped.

My problem with the issue is that, while I know Somali piracy is a problem (and it's far worse in Southeast Asian waters), as a Floridian and Tampa Bay Bucs fan and as a Unitarian who recognizes the religious beliefs of Pastafarianism I'm a little concerned about the bad rap pirates are getting in this day and age.

Sure, pirates are robbers, and raiders, and not the kind of guy you'd invite 'round to dinner to meet the folks. But I like to think of the kinder, gentler pirate, the one more interested in rum, buried treasure, rum, women, rum, and maybe a spot of gambling in port. Ah, the fun pirate, the pirate who looks back at 40 and goes, "damn, I should have gone into a Poli Sci career."

The problem is now how the Obama fanatics are drawing up charts highlighting the effectiveness their boy wonder is in killing pirates (not like Obama was one of the damn snipers after all). There's now a chart showing that compared to the likes of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Obama is something of a wuss.

What are we heading for here? Are we as a society going to call on our elected leaders to suddenly with force and without legal niceties to start hunting down poor pirates across the seven seas? Will the 2012 election be decided by who captures Calypso and defeats the undead krewe of the Black Pearl once and for all? To this I say, Parley! Let us not lump all pirates into one dreaded column of evil and bloodlust. Let us calmly and rationally ensure the safe passage of those pirates whose sole interest in this world is rum, women and song. For the sake of the pirate children, I implore you...!

The one thing driving Republicans crazy

You can kinda see it in the blogs, and on the FOX Not-News, and in the pro-Republican papers (the ones still alive that is). This desperation to attack President Obama for every little thing he does. This need by the Far Right Noise Machine to shred and humiliate a President (and political party) they despise to the nth degree.

And you can kinda see how crazy they're all getting when the polls and general public reaction to it all - even two months into Obama's first year in the White House - is a "We Hugz Barack!"

The polls keep showing Obama's approval above 60 percent, even as the economy remains mired and job losses keep increasing. Polls show that a majority of voters are willing to blame a lot of people - Corrupt CEOs, the Bushies, GOP Congress - for the major recession but not Obama. CNN just ran a video on how the public still loves Obama (even comparing him to another Teflon Prez, Reagan) even as the media and political elite with Washington DC continues to act hostile toward him. And while those inside that insular Beltway echo chamber are starting to wake up to the fact that the public aren't buying their anti-Barack angst, the GOP leadership is still convinced they've got a winning strategy of waging a war of personal attacks on a President who's about 50 points more popular than they are.

And why not? That platform - Making the Political Personal - worked before so many wonderful times. Especially on the last Democrat to hold the high office.

With the Clintons, the war of personal destruction - of slander and damaged reputations - could work. For all of Bill Clinton's political skill and savvy, he could never sell sincerity and was too slick even for his own good. Hillary was so clearly ambitious it rubbed people the wrong way. The Republicans could attack them, attack them personally, attack them mercilessly, and simply wait for the right time (Lewinsky) to try and topple them. The only thing that really saved Slick Willie's presidency was a majority of Americans could recognize a screwed-up partisan witch-hunt when they see one: for all the hype about the Clintons' criminal misdeeds the best the GOP could do was blowjobs? It also turned out to be something the Republican leadership could also get caught being hypocritical about: sexual misconduct by GOP leaders quickly popped up and caused a few of Clinton's harshest attackers out of office (Will Ferrell as almost-Speaker Livingston screaming "What the hell happened?" remains the satirical high point of those scandal-ridden days). Even years later, Republican hypocrisy related to that scandal keeps popping up.

And so with that campaign strategy, they kept working that policy of Personal Destruction. They criticized Gore for being stiff, boring, a fibber about "inventing the Internet", a half-crazed hypocrite about environmental issues. They went after Kerry (swift-boating was the term, yet another fancy synonym for mudslinging) for being a soft-on-war paper soldier who didn't deserve his Purple Hearts. Those times, it worked.

But nothing can work on Obama. Labeling him 'liberal' doesn't work as an insult in an era where 'conservative' is the new 4-letter word. Calling him 'Socialist' or even 'Communist' isn't going to work either, and I've got a separate blog thought coming up about that. Going after him for his tax-and-spend policies doesn't work when your own party can't provide any viable alternative (What part of Tax Cuts Don't Work are the Republicans ignoring?). I'm serious, the Republicans' budget proposal from last week was so weak - IT HAD NO NUMBERS outside of a blatant tax-cut-for-the-rich scheme! All it had were fancy flowchart circles promoting vague "underwear gnome" catchphrases - that even their far-right cheerleader blogs couldn't defend it. The GOP leadership's follow-up proposal - the aptly named "April Fools Budget", I swear doesn't the GOP P.R. guys read the calendar and plan for a better release date? - has more numbers but is more laughable. Sullivan, who's looking harder than I am, can't find anyone on the rightie blogs speaking up for it. Like I said earlier, the Republicans can't attack Obama on policy when their own party has trouble defining their own policy. In some respects, it's not that Obama is Teflon: it's that his attackers are toothless.

The problem for the Republican Party is that they've relied on the Politics of Personal Destruction for so long that they can't think of more pragmatic means of promoting policy and organizing followers around coherent theories. All it is for them is ATTACK ATTACK ATTACK, even with growing evidence that a majority of Americans (and a growing majority of their own own GOP base) has grown weary of that crap. It's getting to the point where the GOP leadership - Cantor, Limbaugh and Coulter and their noise-machine wannabes - are gonna confirm my Obama Shoelace Hypothesis: that at some point, the Republican Party and their media allies are gonna wage a full-scale propaganda war against the way Obama ties his shoelaces (even if Barack starts wearing loafers). And Obama's popularity will probably bounce up to 70 percent when they do.

ADDED: One other point to make about Obama's "Teflon" image. One reason why he compares a lot to Ronald Reagan's popularity is due in part to how Washington DC really is disconnected from the rest of the nation. The Beltway mentality truly is about 15-20 years behind the rest of America. The political party leaders are guys and gals who have been long-time incumbents in safe secure districts meaning the ideological beliefs they came into office (say, 1988) are the same ones they have now. The same thing goes for the media elites and political commentators who come into the spotlight at a particular ideological era: for example Ben Bradlee, powerful news editor for the Washington Post in the 60s through the 80s, came into the media upper echelon at the time a close personal friend (John Kennedy) was heading into the White House, and had a career throughout the post-FDR era where even Republicans accepted the New Deal (Hi, Ike!) in some way. For Rush Limbaugh, he came into talk radio at the height of the Reagan Era. Which is why for him every aspect of his worldview is based on that Era... even when it's been 20 years since then and everything else in America has changed.

The thing is, in the 1980s the Washington establishment - both political (and in both parties) and media - were still thinking in terms of FDR/JFK/LBJ where government was the solution and business needed oversight. Meanwhile, a majority of voters - even the now-legendary 'Reagan Democrats' - fell in love with Reagan's cheery pro-business anti-government platforms (even as Reagan turned out to be pragmatic enough to not fully embrace such platforms), because by then all voters could see were the negative consequences of calcified Keynesianism (stagflation, steady job loss, psychological ennui). Reagan caught a lot of flack by the Beltway types, but his popularity never waned (not until the Iran-Contra scandal, but even he bounced back from that).

And now here we are in the 2000s. The Washington establishment is now made up of players (both Republicans and Democrats) and talking head media darlings who came of age during Reagan and still think those heady days of tax-cut mass-deregulation could still sell well to voters. But voters - including enough so-called RINOs - are turned off by the end results of Randian laizze-faire (massive corruption and incompetence in both finance and federal gov't, massive job loss and failing wages). Obama is catching a lot of flack now by the Beltway types, but again don't be surprised that popularity won't wane (well, not until his own Iran-Contra scandal... so whatever happens, Barack, don't make any deals between Iran and Central America, GOT IT???).

And I mentioned before I have some additional thoughts on how the GOP and the Far Right media are trying to attack Obama's ideological core beliefs... but not as well as they hoped. That's for another time.

Amendment proposal on greed

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

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

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

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

A request to President Obama Feb.12, 2009

Mr. President:

I am writing to offer my condolences that NH Senator Judd Gregg has withdrawn his name today for nomination to the post of your Secretary of Commerce.

I am also writing to offer my resume and my name for the post of Secretary of Commerce.

I have many years of experience handling government statistics, patent requests, and census materials as a librarian, so I am well aware of the output that the Commerce Department creates. I also am aware of the department's focus on promoting "job creation and improved living standards for all Americans." As someone currently unemployed, I know all too well the importance of job creation and this nation's need for improved living standards.

I would also like to point out that, unlike your last two attempts at filling the spot of Secretary of Commerce, I am NOT going to bail on you. I'm not going to be the focus of a federal investigation like Mr. Richardson, and I'm not going to renounce your stimulus package as part of a GOP herd mentality like Mr. Gregg. I am going to go full throttle on the nomination process, Mr. President sir, because DAMMIT I need this job dude!

And if you have any concerns about any legal improprieties... I have 3 traffic violations, one for an expired license tag, one for not fully stopping at a stop sign (there was oncoming traffic, the cop was just sitting there waiting for any excuse to issue tickets! Damn quotas!), and one for speeding on Memorial Day last year (okay, I fully own up on that one, caught dead to rights). That's it. Clean as a whistle.

Please contact me at your earliest convenience for my resume, college transcripts, and copy of my self-published collection of short stories (Library of Congress won't take PoDs). Thank you, good day, and God Bless the United States!

Proof the Republican Party is Screwed Up and Doomed

Linkage here to an article by Sullivan, but check out the polling numbers regarding the stimulus:


Meanwhile over on Balloon Juice I see this:

The country will “pay dearly” if it executes the president’s stimulus plans, Sen. Richard Shelby says.

“Everybody on the street in America understands that,” said Sen. Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee. “This is not the right road to go. We’ll pay dearly.”

Dear Sen. Shelby: 31 percent is NOT EVERYBODY. Don't drag me and 62 percent of this country into your (wrong) side of the argument.

Sullivan in his article has a point: The Republicans "are feeling better about themselves is that they managed to turn this debate into one about ideology in a vacuum. That's how they governed for many years; it's what they know; and since they have no shame, they feel no need to square their newfound fiscal conservatism in a depression with their record of massive spending and borrowing in a boom."

The Republican leadership truly exists inside this hermetically-sealed echo chamber of theirs, where all they know is getting onto the talking head shows on FOX, CNN, MSNBC and elsewhere, spout their BS, hang out with like-minded media hosts and their handlers, and never ever really recognize just what the hell is actually happening outside of that damn Beltway mentality of theirs. They say "everybody knows" when in fact that's just another unverifible strawman they're pointing at: that Gallup poll shows 62 percent siding with Obama, 48 percent siding with the Democratic Congress. 31 percent with the Republicans? They've capped out to that 1/3 of the electorate, which points to just their GOP Far Right base supporting them. JUST THEIR BASE. No one else is buying the GOP BS.

This is where I think Sullivan is getting it wrong: "The gerrymandering of the past decade also means the Republican rump is secure - with 31 percent approval - even when resisting adequate fiscal stimulus in a deflationary spiral." The gerrymandering of districts isn't going to protect the GOP in Congress, or even at the state level. Republican representation in the House is already lopsided: The Dems hold a 37 seat advantage there. Who thinks 2 more years of possible job losses and economic collapse is going to drive more voters towards an obstructionist Republican Party that caused this economic crisis in the first place? And will be held responsible (re-read that Gallup Poll: people are not favoring the Republicans right now because they know what that party is doing is wrong!) if the Republicans succeed in wreaking this stimulus or any other economic platform Obama tries to pass?
And that's the House. The Senate isn't gerrymandered. And as this economy collapses, more states will feel the hurt, more angry voters will rise up. And they're not gonna blame Obama and the Democrats (again, the Gallup poll is showing the voters side with them) who are trying to pass these bills: they're gonna blame the vote-blockers.
And that's the federal level. At the state level the Republicans have got be scared sh-tless. A lot of states are facing massive deficits: Florida and California are two prime examples. States will feel the economic pinch more because 1) a lot of states have constitutional requirements to balance their budgets at some point, meaning they either cut services or raise taxes or a balance of both; 2) a lot of states have restrictions on how they can raise taxes... if ever; and 3) the Republicans and the "centrists" in the Senate just cut billions of dollars that were going to the states for deficit relief. The state-level Republicans are about to face the consequences of decades of pushing anti-tax policies to appease their Club for Greed overlords: an inability to respond to a nationwide economic disaster because they've had to cut back truckloads of social services in order to budget-balance against massive revenue shortfalls. I'm surprised we're not hearing about Gov. Crist getting on the phone to yell at the Republican Senators "DAMMIT WE NEED THAT $40 BILLION!" Do you think voters at the state level are going to favor Republicans when it comes time to vote for governorships and state leges? Do you think voters are going to forget that it was Republicans who cut back on schools, on health care, on jobs programs, on transit, on everything just so the Republicans could save their precious tax cuts?

The Republican Party is truly doomed, because they don't care. Their leadership are all stuck in the television sound booths, mouthing off platitudes and lies that they already believe and reinforce on each other, and they don't see outside of their windowed little world of theirs. They're not going to win in 2010 like they think they will if they succeed in torpedoing this stimulus or any other stim package. Who is going to keep buying their b-llsh-t when there's no one left with any money to buy it?

More Schadenfreude, More Insanity

For my political fix, I circle about 8 or 10 blogs for regular viewing: Sullivan, Balloon Juice, Obsidian Wings, Yglesias, Atrios. Moderate Voice, NeoMugWump, Charging RINO (dude, update more), and Hullaballoo. I also read some of the more extreme sites like Daily Kos and My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, although for both I usually catch myself shouting "Lighten up, Francis!" at the monitor for each. And for the guys at Vast Right Wing, sorry but I don't wanna livechat American Idol...

What I caught this morning from Balloon Juice gave me my schadenfreude fix for the day:

Michael S. Steele, the newly elected chairman of the Republican National Committee, arranged for his 2006 Senate campaign to pay a defunct company run by his sister for services that were never performed, his finance chairman from that campaign has told federal prosecutors.

Federal agents in recent days contacted Steele’s sister, a spokesman for Steele said yesterday.

[....]

The recent allegations outlined four specific transactions. In addition to the payment to Steele’s sister, Fabian said that the candidate used money from his state campaign improperly; that Steele paid $75,000 from the state campaign to a law firm for work that was never performed; and that he or an aide transferred more than $500,000 in campaign cash from one bank to another without authorization.

The bank transfer was made against the explicit wishes of other Maryland Republicans

Now, the usual rule here is that It's OK If You Are Republican (I speeled this out), but remember, it’s often not okay if you are a Republican who is distrusted by the real wingnuts in the party (just ask Harriet Miers), as Steele is.

Now this is, of course, just an investigation, there's no criminal charges right off the bat. But guys like Daschle and Sansom can tell you, this doesn't ever look good. Guys like Blago, of course, are too crazy to care...

Meanwhile, some of the other things popping up on Balloon Juice, and indeed on all of the blogs I read, is the economic crisis we're in, how bad it's shaping up, and how the proposed Stimulus plan being pushed by Obama is doing in Congress (which, by the by, isn't doing very well). And indeed one thing keeps popping up on these blogs, a chart issued by House Speaker Pelosi's office:

You see anything? The blue line is the 1990 recession period and the number of months (30 months) it took to curve upward again. The longer deeper red line is the 2001 recession and how long it took THAT to curve upward (45 months!) again. That green line is the current recession we're in, how deep it's already gone compared to the other two. Makes you wonder just how deep and long the unemployment valley is going to be for this recession (are you kidding me? This much job loss in this short a time? This. Is. A Depression. Screaming is mandatory).

One of the things the proposed stimulus package is supposed to do is generate jobs: the spending portion of it, anyways. The tax cut portions are supposed to ease the financial burdens of the taxpayers, the middle class, the poor, etc. One of the other things about the proposed stimulus is that Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress are trying to make this stimulus a bipartisan effort, meaning they want the Republicans to provide input.

We're talking about a Republican Party that remains in thrall to the likes of Grover Norquist and the Club for Greed. The political party that nearly every time they've been in power since 1980 have tried for massive tax cuts as part of a Randian obsession with the Laffer Curve and Supply-Side/Trickle-Down economics. The political party that pushes all these cuts in revenue but then increases spending like they were drunken teenagers in possession of their parents' credit cards. The political party that causes massive government deficits, massive government waste, massive financial fraud. So what do the Republicans do when presented with an opportunity to aid and provide input on the stimulus bill?

They yell and scream for more tax cuts. They yell and scream about the "wasteful spending" that the Democrats are doing, mindless of the wasteful spending they themselves are responsible for. They insist on gutting out sections of the stimulus package that would go towards jobs, green eco projects, state funding that would aid a lot of deficit-threatened states (like Florida and Pennsylvania and California and oh about 40 others) in keeping existing jobs intact. Oh, and did I mention that yelling and screaming for more tax cuts? Multiply that by every GOP Senator and Congressperson, and then multiply it by every goddamn talking head on FOXnotthenews, ClulessNN, and the other media outlets, and then add six. And then bang your head against the wall because there's no way any sane person could understand why the Republicans are this out of touch with reality.

We've HAD massive tax cuts already. We've had 8 years of them. We've seen what tax cuts do for job growth (nada), we've seen what tax cuts do for wage increases (not a damn thing). Tax cuts didn't help the majority of Americans facing increasing health care costs, energy costs, and overall costs of living. Right now, this entire recession (DEPRESSION!) is tied into nearly every aspect of our economy: our purchasing power, our homes, products and services, our financial stability, our ability to start up new businesses and new projects... For all I know it's affecting our nation's ability to trade, to conduct commerce, to do a lot of things that makes our economic engine run. The one thing we can do, the one thing that ties in the most to all of this that we can create to stimulate (there's that word) the economy again is with job creation. With jobs, people earn money. With money, they buy things, they pay off debts. The things they buy, services and products, means other people are working. The engine revs up, power increasing to the wheels of industry. So we need jobs. A lot of them. We need to stop the growing unemployment placing huge drains on our nation's and our states' social services. But the private sector can't create these jobs, not right now: there is no sign that banks and financial institutions are putting out loans and funds that businesses need to start and grow. So it's up to the public sector, to the government, to do something about job creation.

And the Republicans don't see that. They don't want to talk about that. They view that type of spending as "Wasteful." All they want are more tax cuts. Permanent tax cuts. Tax cut this, and tax cut that. I swear to God, they won't take any other proposal seriously.

This comes again from Balloon Juice, from one of the primary guys there, John Cole, and it's been quoted all across the political blogs like it should be the Quote of the Year (or at least winner of Sullivan's award named after Yglesias):

I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.

Because this is what the Republican Party is now: Insane. Forget the so-called "centrists" and self-declared "moderates" trying to compromise on the stimulus, who are basically gutting it of programs and funding that we're going to need dammit, because we've seen what's going to happen next in the Senate, same way it happened in the House: The Republicans are going to force the Dems to compromise, and then once the bill is on the floor for the vote the Republicans are all going to vote against the bill and claim victory because they forced the Dems to weaken the package into irrelevancy, and at the same time provide political cover for themselves if/when the stimulus fails by saying "Ooooh, we all voted against it. So vote for us in 2010 and we'll take you all back to the glory years of 2001-2008!"

I made a few links to entries in Obsidian Wings over the past few weeks, wondering where I could fit them in on my blog to highlight my concerns about the economy, and about how screwed up the Republicans are in dealing with the crisis at hand. I highly recommend you (yes, all 4 of you) bookmark Obsidian Wings and glance through it from day to day, it's one of the more worthy blogs I read. The links covered in some detail why tax cuts (and trickle-down) don't work, and why the Republicans are NOT acting in good faith about the economy. Go read 'em. And like me, you might weep.

Because despite the fact that they got thumped in the 2008 national elections, despite the fact that their golden calf Rush Limbaugh is polling unpopular compared to other conservative news outlets, despite the fact that they've had 8 years of tax cuts that didn't work, the Republicans are dictating what is happening with our nation's stimulus bill. This is not going to end well, for anyone...

More moments of Schadenfreude 2009

Schadenfreude: It's one (am I speeling it right, btw?) of my favorite words - esoteric being the other - and while I do cringe at myself for taking such delight in the misfortune of others I try to take comfort from the knowledge that the ones suffering totally f-cking deserve what they're getting (hence the huge glee I had with Blago, which shows no sign of ending any time soon).

To wit:

• Here at home, with the decline and fall of a rising GOP power, now-former State Speaker Ray "Quid Pro" Sansom. Who started off his Speakership with a brand-new part-time job that was never advertised and paid $110k per for a small college that just happened to receive $35 million in state money in the previous budget thanks to Sansom. Who had a private meeting with that school's trustees, only for it later revealed to have violated the state's Sunshine laws requiring such meetings be public, and also revealed that no notes were taken during said meeting with a comical attempt after-the-fact of someone writing up notes for said meeting. Who had a hand in getting a $6 million training air field facility for that school set up in the exact size shape and color that a business buddy of Sansom's wanted for years at that locale. Sansom tried to weasel his way out of the growing scandals by "recusing himself" from Speakership duties, but it was only temporary and it was clearly obvious that he was hoping for the dust to settle before reclaiming the Speakership while no one was noticing. His own party had to force the issue and ousted him from the top spot, although he's still a sitting Representative awaiting the pending criminal investigations. Maybe he and Blagojevich can work the casino town in Missouri as a comedy duo, you know like Abbott and Costello, only dumber.
• Back in DC, where former Senate leader Tom "Taxes? What Taxes" Daschle was forced to drop from his nomination for Health and Human Services Secretary cabinet spot. It had a lot to do with the fact he had, after his fall from the Senate office in 2002, gotten a cushy job with a limo driver from a friend or twelve. The job and driver actually weren't the problem: Daschle's failure to realize he still has to pay taxes on them to teh IRS was, and the $146k bill that hadn't been paid until this January was the kind of thing that p-sses off a lot of the middle and lower class Americans out there. While I don't want to stand with the crowd of Republicans who are crowing over this example of Obama Fail (And It Only Took Two Weeks is the new label on Balloon Juice), I still side with Jon Stewart on this: PAY YOUR F-CKING TAXES!
• And now, with the CEOs of the various banks, investment firms, and other financial institutions who all had driven their corporations into bankruptcy, and had and are still coming to the government with their hands out like street beggars. Obama's made it clear that from now on, CEOs looking to the taxpayers to bail them out of their own stupidity and greed will have to take a massive pay cut and work for $500k a year without additional benefits. And with this, I definitely stand with Obama: "We all need to take responsibility...And this includes executives at major financial firms who turned to the American people, hat in hand, when they were in trouble, even as they paid themselves their customary lavish bonuses. As I said last week, that's the height of irresponsibility. That's shameful. And that's exactly the kind of disregard for the costs and consequences of their actions that brought about this crisis: a culture of narrow self-interest and short-term gain at the expense of everything else." I was never a fan of golden parachutes, even when they came at the expense of companies being driven into the ground by fast-buck con artists posing as genius CEOs.

More schadenfreude acomin, you think? Well, the year is young...

An Open Letter to Senator Feingold

Dear Senator Feingold:

I hope this reaches you in good spirits. I wanted to contact you about your recent proposal for an amendment that would take the authority of selecting a replacement Senator from that state's governor and provide for special election so a state's electorate can choose instead.

I have a pretty good idea why you're doing this: not only the scandal involving Blagojevich's scheming to use Obama's vacancy to either enrich himself or try to use that Senate seat to escape his growing problems at home, but also the arguments over the New York and Delaware vacancies where issues of nepotism (Biden's son gets his dad's job? Caroline Kennedy or Andrew Cuomo? Or do you put in another lady whose dad is a major player in New York politics?) over merit made this too hard to ignore.

On the merits of your argument, I approve this attempt to amend the Constitution. As the law requires that vacancies in the House be filled by special election, so too should the Senate. After all, we directly elect our Senators now, and that also took an amendment to ensure the people have a say in whom they want to represent their state.

But I call you to task, sir, as this one amendment idea you're pushing alone will not fix the overall problems our nation have with our political leadership:

• We still will have a problem with questionable representation due to hideous gerrymandering of our congressional districts, which favors parties but does not reflect the real populations of the states or the nation.
• We still will have a problem with our elections process, especially with a primary system that is uneven and disproportionate, with rules that change from state to state, and with the states racing to get at the head of each primary season to the point of prolonging an already drawn-out process.
• We still have a problem with people who still act and believe that the President of the United States is above the law, and that even out of office the criminal actions committed by that President and his underlings are protected and should not be prosecuted. And sometimes, when someone does get caught and convicted, or someone is under serious investigation for criminal wrongdoing, the President simply waves his hand with a pardon or commuting of sentence, and the crime goes unpunished.
  

Senator Feingold, I call on you to answer these three problems I just mentioned. I call on you to introduce more amendments to a vote, amendments that are more truly needed than just a simple correction of how Senators get chosen. We need:

• An amendment that eliminates gerrymandered congressional districts, by making it illegal for any district to be designed based on party affiliation, by ensuring a district conforms to population density and to boundaries both natural (rivers, lakes, mountains) and man made (city limits, county lines), and by establishing a non-partisan committee system in the states to review and redraw district boundaries per each ten-year census.
• An amendment that forces parties to define their primary systems to a uniform code so there is no confusion from state to state, that requires a One-Day Primary like the majority of Americans want so ALL states get an equal say at the same time who they want representing their parties.
• An amendment that spells out, in specific terms, THAT THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES IS NOT ABOVE THE LAW, and that there will be no protection for anyone committing crimes while in service to a corrupt President's office (for example, barring a President from pardoning or commuting the sentence of any person who worked for his administration at any level).

Each of these amendment proposals I send to you, sir, would go a long way in restoring the people's trust in our electoral system, and in our elected leadership.

I am posting this on my blog, and I am copying and emailing this to your office (which I hope your website's email system can copy/paste). I would like to see a reply, preferably in the form of these proposals showing up on the floors of Congress.

Thank you for your time, and hopefully next year the Bucs will beat the Packers in the 2009-10 NFC Championship game.

(edited for geographic content: I thought Feingold was from Minnesota, found out he's Wisconsin instead, ach)

Well, We Won't Have Blagojevich to Kick Around Anymore...

Breaking news, within the past hour: The Quarterback is TOAST.

I watched Hardball as it took place. My God, it was a unanimous vote too, 59 to zero, in favor of impeaching now-former Illinois Gov. Rod "This Is F-cking Golden" Blagojevich for becoming a shameless embarrassment for the state, the Democratic Party, and Americans across the board. He couldn't even get one sympathy vote, or at least a guy sneaking out to light up a fattie in the bathroom and end up abstaining.

The charges on the proceedings - abuse of power, attempts to extort campaign contributions, an attempt to bully the Chicago Tribune into forcing out Blago's critics - are actually pretty minor penny ante stuff, but still they were plentiful and powerful enough to give the state senate the excuse to kick the bum out. The impeachment only means that Blago is no longer governor, and that he can no longer run for elected office out of the state of Illinois (he can always carpetbag to New York and try there). His REAL problems of course are still out there in the form of the best prosecuting federal attorney of our day - FITZ! - readying a federal criminal trial for Blagojevich's misdeeds. The impeachment came before the criminal trial mostly because impeachment doesn't operate like a criminal trial: you can get impeached for committing acts that courts wouldn't even consider illegal but would make it difficult for government to function. The impeachment process had even speeded up once Blago pulled the Burris stunt and caused more chaos for everyone involved, all because he certainly didn't want to resign and showed with that one maneuver he was going to make everyone else miserable on his way out.

This isn't over yet: Fitzgerald still has his corruption trial for Blagojevich to start, and there's a good chance Blago's got more crazy sh-t under that moose rug of his. But for all intents the circus is over, it's done, and good riddance.

Now we need to see about impeaching Rush Limbaugh...

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.