And September is bound to begin with a bang. . . . .one way or the other

Thursday September 3, 2009

. . . . .More dispatches from the last, lonely outpost of reason.

. . . . ." I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." Thomas Jefferson

. . . . .And the walkabout continues, this one may be a loooonng time before I come back to a defined rigid structure. That's the problem with the world today, people don't give their minds, themselves, that freedom to do that.

. . . .Yes, the playlist continues as is, all Irish. Jeez, none of you figured it out yet? Folks, Rescue Me is now over for this season. It consistently remains one of the most brilliantly written and acted programs on television, and makes my one allotted hour of TV time a week a sheer pleasure. Tommy Gavin remains my alter ego, and I still want to know how Denis Leary follows me around to pull so much out of my life and have it happening on screen to Tommy.

. . . .Which of course, leads me right into my other allotted hour of television now that Rescue Me is done for the season, so it's straight off into Sons of Anarchy, yet another brilliant program. Henry Rollins is a welcome addition to an already stellar cast, and of course, another show with an obvious Irish connection.

. . . .And yes, I'm watching the weather. The hurricane off the Baja is acting like a giant vacuum and pulling Erica over and she's not headed Northward. She may stall out overnight and start to dissipate, or she could hit the warm waters of the Carribean, fuel up and take off like a rocket, and head straight up into the Gulf, just like Labor Day weekend of 2005. Here we sit, right in the middle of it, just like a walnut on an anvil, waiting and watching.

. . . .It's taking a while, but I hope, if you're a regular reader, that you can see where I started to go with the Grand Unified Field Theory of Everything back in July. It's going to take a while to get there, but there really is a "wrapping up of the bows", it's just that it's going to be Christmas or better to get there.

. . . .Why? Because you're smart people, who deserve fact, analysis and reason. You deserve to be able to put the equations together, the symbolic logic where it just all becomes crystal clear and apparent to you. That's the problem with a 24-hour pundit and sound bite driven news cycle that depends on the adrenaline rush of the next thing.

. . . .Think it's easy tying together 30 years worth of Iran/Iraq/Mideastern/Bush43/Hussein/Khameini/Bush41/bin Laden/Saudi Oil history with David Rockefeller and JP Morgan Chase bank. With fact? Think it's a cakewalk to tie together those banks, AIG, Goldman Sachs, Chase, Citi and the Fed into it? With fact and history? Tie in lobbying money, a totally corrupt Congress who's owned by lobbyists and campaign contributions? A completely lunatic media, 3 infotainment stations that masquerade as news, but who are nothing more than entertainers who are competing for ratings the same as any other television show? Tie in health care reform, influenza, and inevitable climatological changes? All without sounding like Glenn Beck? Or some other tin-foil hat wearing MIB conspiracy wingnut?

. . . .Well, we've managed to do it, haven't we? All you have to do is go back and tell someone to dive into the archives and pull up the last 3 months worth of columns, and it's there. With fact and resource.

. . . .God, you all are smart folks.

. . . .So, the President has decided to address a joint session of Congress, the evening after they return to Washington, next Wednesday, on the subject of health care reform.

. . . .The questions, really, are incredibly simple. Will he confront the Republican party over it's lies and distortions, as a group? To their faces? Will he call out Graessley?

. . . .Will he cave into the extreme Left, who are growing hostile, and push for a public option?

. . . .Will he address Congress as the Nation's leader, who has a supermajority, or will he continue to act like a wimpy policy wonk, who so far, has not even manged to get his own party under control.

. . . . .The problem with Democrats is that they always assume that somehow they have to act like a disorganized bunch of people who are coming from a position of weakness, and immediately head off towards the fringes.

. . . The problem with the Republicans is just as simple, they always act as if they're right, no matter how wrong they are, and no matter how they have to lie to do it.

. . . .Which, of course, has brought about this impasse.

. . . .There isn't any one of us out here who does not realize that (a) the health care system in this country is incredibly broken, killing an average of 20,000 people a year, dooming them to death due to to pre-existing conditions or dropping their coverages (b) that the insurers are now, and will continue to be, the big winners in all of this, and are running the show (c) that the savings necessary to pay for anything can be, in large part, achieved with streamlining and improving simply administrative issues and paperwork, serious malpractice and tort reform and capping health insurance administrative fees at the levels they were at before Reagan lifted them and turned killing the American public into a for-profit business.
. . .In truth, the public option would, at best, given Medicare's example, only marginally successful, and like Medicare, would soon prove to be too costly a burden to bear.

. . . .The reality is that we need to reform the health care system in this country, but if we do so without two things in mind (1) crafting some changes into the system that make people responsible and accountable for their own personal choices in their life and in their own health and (2) doing so in a way that is fiscally responsible; then everything will have been nothing more than a joke, and may well turn out to be exactly what I wrote about here over the last two weeks, a complete win for the 535 lifetime money sluts in the Capitol building, a lifetime win for lobbying money, a crazed media, a party who has become totally obstructionist, whose interest are completely antithetical to the long-term welfare of the American people; and most importantly, a lifetime win for the insurers, the Top Dog of whom will turn out to be United Health, who's been written about in U.S. News and World Report, Time and here.

. . . . . .Ezra Klein over at the Washington Post weighs in on next weeks' joint address to Congress:

This is health-care reform's endgame, or close to it. Next Wednesday, Barack Obama will give a prime-time address before both houses of Congress. But that's not all he's giving Congress. The administration is going to put a plan down on paper. The question is what it will say.

Conversations with a number of White House officials make it clear that, at this point, even they don't know. The argument was raging as recently as last night, and appears to have hardened into two main camps. Both camps agree that the cost of the bill has to come down. The question is how much, and what can be sacrificed.

The first camp could be called "universal-lite." They're focused on preserving the basic shape of the bill. They think a universal plan is necessary for a number of reasons: For one thing, the insurance market regulations don't work without universality, as you can't really ask insurers to offer standard prices if the healthy and the young don't have to enter the system. For another, it will be easier to change subsidies or improve the benefit package down the road if the initial offerings prove inadequate. New numbers are easier than new features. Creating a robust structure is the most important thing. This camp seems to be largely headed by the policy people.

The second camp is not universal at all. This camp believes the bill needs to be scaled back sharply in order to ensure passage. Covering 20 million people isn't as good as covering 40 million people, but it's a whole lot better than letting the bill fall apart and covering no one at all. It's also a success of some sort, and it gives you something to build on. What that sacrifices in terms of structure it gains in terms of political appeal. This camp is largely headed by members of the political team.

. . . . . .Entire article at the jump here.

. . . .So there's a supermajority in the Senate, a Dem in the White House, Repubs are in the minority and there isn't even a consensus on the one major issue that he campaigned on? I'm just asking?

. . . .But why should there be? After all, the opposition to health care reform has been so coherent, so intelligent, so grounded in fact. After all, if you didn't believe them about "death panels", about "pulling the plug on Grandma", then this one will surely get you thinking right. Michelle Goldberg over at the Daily Beast reports on the latest smear/lie/distortion to come from the Repubs and the Right, that health care reform will kill women with breast cancer.

Perhaps it’s a sign of progress that the right’s latest line of attack against health-care reform is far subtler than the “death panel” smear. The new conservative talking point is aimed at women rather than seniors, and it has a kind of surface plausibility that may make it particularly effective. Put simply, the right is claiming that Democratic plans to reform health care will lead to more women dying from breast cancer.

This meme has been around for a while; back in June, Sean Hannity claimed that, should health-care reform succeed, “we’re going to have a government rationing body that tells women with breast cancer, ‘you’re dead.’” Now, though, there’s a systematic effort to publicize the argument. The Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative group, is spending over $2 million to broadcast a commercial in eight battleground states, including Colorado, Indiana and Nevada, in which breast-cancer survivor Tracy Walsh warns that health-care reform could kill women like her.

. . . .Complete article at the jump here.

. . . And of course, we can't leave Betsy McCaughey out of it, the face of stopping reforming health care dead in it's tracks. This woman is unbelievable and bold. It's too bad she's not an elected official, I'd love to get a hold of her records if she was to see how much lobbying money and campaign contributions that she was receiving. Her latest, on CNBC, was to claim that "the legislation that's now in Congress will force everyone that's under the age of 65 to buy the same one-size-fits-all government plan." Of course, patently untrue, but it never seems to bother her.

. . . .And by the way, would all of the wanna-be libertarians and patriots please, please take a moment to do something way out of the box and read a book! Just one book, any book, that gives definitions and gives some U.S. History and Civics that they slept through in 7th Grade. The phrase "We the People" is not "socialist" or "communist" and not "Big Government", it's the opening phrase of the preamble to the United States Constitution, another document that they might want to actually read in full, and not parse.

. . . .Which of course, leads to my favorite lunatic, Glenn Beck, who, seriously now, just cannot get up in the morning, look in the mirror and actually believe some of what pours out of his mouth. 11 more advertisers have jumped ship on his program, which brings the total up to somewhere over 50, and none of them are small names.

. . . .Ya know, I reflected the other day on the length of a generation, 40 years, and the jump between 1969 and 2009. Is it any wonder that the generations that came after us Baby Boomers can't stand us? We can't get out of our own way, and get one damn thing accomplished that will benefit the generations after us. It's still all about us, individually, and what we can profit from individually in all of it.

. . . .Doesn't matter, we're leaving them broke anyhow. I still don't believe that there's a recovery anywhere in the near future. Recovery means jobs for the 7+ million that have been thrown out of work, and not TARP-funded banks reporting profits and paying bonuses.

. . . .Matt Taibbi, one of the most brilliant, savage, investigative reporters around, at his blog, Taibblog:

It was inevitable that the same people who pushed through the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street would come out later on and tell us what a great idea theirs turned out to be, in retrospect and under the light of evidentiary examination. And we’re getting that now, with a pair of reports, the above one in the New York Times and another in the Financial Times, telling us the bailout is working because the government has made some money on TARP. They came to this conclusion by quoting Fed officials, who apparently calculated how much interest the Fed earned on TARP investments above what it would have earned on T-bills. The amount so far, according to these worthy gentlemen: $14 billion.

This is sort of like calculating the returns on a mutual fund by only counting the stocks in the fund that have gone up.

. . . .Entire piece at the jump here.

. . . .I'm tired, long day, longer one tomorrow, outta here, I'll talk to you then.

. . . .We can salvage this shipwreck of a Nation. It will take all of us working together. It will take all of us understanding the concepts of the Great American Experiment, the political process of the Republic. It's amazing, I don't see eye-to-eye on every issue with my friends, but we respect one another's opinion, share information, share facts, and we don't talk over one another or at one another, we talk with one another. It's amazing what happens when a group of people who share the common goal of leaving a better country for their children and grandchildren can do when they sit down with one another as human beings, and realize that we each have power, and together, we are unstoppable.

. . . .I'm going to ask this of you for the next 30 days. Turn your TV off, turn your radio off. Start to use that beautiful mind that your Creator gave you, that your underpaid, underappreciated High School teachers tried to develop. If you hear something, if you read something, if someone sends you an e-mail that says "this bill will do this", or "this politician says this", I'm asking you to check it out. Check it out this way, use some of the following fact-based sites, who exist solely for the purpose of data and fact-checking.
- If whatever you've heard or read concerns a bill in Congress, use the following -
- Open Congress, it's non-partisan and devoted to a complete tracking of every bill in Congress, both houses. How a bill is developed, who is sponsoring it, what the riders are, what the discussion around it is.
- GovTrack, again non-partisan, non-commercial and open source; devoted to the same things, tracking Congress.
- Open Secrets, one of the most important ones, it tracks the lobbying money and campaign contributions flowing to your congressperson, and most of the time is a pretty good predictor of how they'll vote.
- Political Party Time, non-partisan, devoted to solely tracking political fundraisers, and letting you know exactly what parties your Representative and Senators are throwing for fundraisers and who is attending and how much money they're throwing at them to gain influence.

. . . .If someone sends something to you saying "this is so" or "that is so" or "the President/Senator/Representative said this" use the following:
- Fact Check, non-partisan, designed to separate fact from bullshit and fiction
- Snopes, devoted to the same thing.
- Politifact, devoted to getting to the truth, and separating out the lies that are spread.


. . . .I keep doing this not because I don't have faith, but because I do have faith. I have faith in the ultimate triumph of the spirit, intellect and heart of the American people. I have faith that the people I know want to leave something better for future generations, and know that something is terribly wrong, and want to do something about it. I do it because Paine and Jefferson were brilliant, unique singularities and were right.

. . . .I keep doing this because I don't believe in big imaginary friends for adults, I don't believe in alien conspiracies running the Government, I don't believe the Roswell bodies are at Wright-Patterson, I don't believe that a big portal will open up on Dec. 21, 2012, I don't believe that the spaceships will show up.

. . . I do believe that the people who have fucked everything up are greedy, avaricious human beings who have been able to steal from the American people, to harm them, who have run unchecked because no one calls it out for what it is. I believe that if we shine the light of day on it, if the people of this country have had enough, we can change it, and change it for the better.

. . . . I keep doing this because I do believe that people, human beings, unchecked will continue to do what they've done throughout history, and throughout the history of this country. Together, they will find the solutions and provide better for their children and grandchildren.

. . . .I believe in us, I believe in people. I believe in the beauty, power and grace of the individual.

. . . .I do this for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of knowing what they do, what they believe, what they know is right. I do it for everyone who's ever walked that lonely road of faith, hope, love, hate, justice, war and peace.

. . . .I do it because I believe in justice, in all it's forms.

. . . .I do this everyday for the people and kids who are tattoed, pierced and inked and keep getting told to get "into the mainstream". I do this everyday for those guys who wear black that you don't understand, you just know there's something about them, and that when the chips are down, when you have to walk down a dark alley somewhere, and you know what's waiting for you at the end of it, and you can only take one person with you, that's who you want walking with you, because you know you'll come back out alive, and that guy doesn't care what it costs him.

. . . .I do this everyday for the outcasts, the misfits, the ones who don't fit and who will turn their back on you and walk away when you try to make them fit into a mold. I do it everyday for everyone who does it their way, knows that they're paying a high price for it, but the freedom is worth the cost.

. . . . I do this everyday for outlaws, cowboys, renegades, pirates and fallen angels. I do it everyday for the people who understand that rock and roll can save their soul, that redemption can be found in a 3-chord lick from a vintage Les Paul. I do it for the men and women who aren't afraid to turn it all the way up, who keep looking for an 11 setting on a volume knob that only goes to 10, who know that rock and roll's got nothing to do with age.


. . . .If right now, you're doing something you don't want to do, stop it. If you've surrounded yourself with people who want you to do or be something other than who you are, walk away. If you've got people around you who actually let it slip out that they think you "should be doing (fill in the blank here)" and it involves your life, your future, your existence as an individual, walk away, right now, and don't look back. You don't owe anyone anything. Live fearlessly. If the people around you can't accept it, can't accept you as you are, really are, they aren't and weren't friends anyhow.

. . . .Don't march to anyone else's drumbeat, don't drink the Kool-Aid, anyone's. Right, Left, conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan. Use your own mind, that's why you were given one. Examine, question, do what's right for you first, everything else will fall in place from there, quit looking for the path, you're already on it.

. . . .Come out of the gate each morning with both barrels blazing, pedal-to-metal, full-tilt boogie, all-in and balls-out, what's stopping you? Do you want to live forever? That'd be boring.

. . . .Got your back. somewhere out there in the night

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do. Seize the precious moments before they're ripped away from you. This rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one, absolutely no one gets out alive. There aren't a lot of second chances, and we don't get to dictate terms and circumstances of how the ticket gets punched. This ain't no dress rehearsal, and the curtain's gone up, it's real and right now. It's not about yesterday or tomorrow. It's about right fucking here, right fucking now. This, what you're reading, what you're hearing, is the proof, the words, the sounds and the sights of someone changing his own life and his own world and not being afraid to put it out there. What have you done for yourself lately and why are you waiting? Do it now.

The Desolation Angel
from somewhere halfway to Heaven, and just a mile out of Hell

You know someone like me, there's still a few of us left. If we have to, we'll stand at the gates of Hell and hold the last train home for you.