And so it goes. . . . .

Monday October 5, 2009

"Never try to teach a pig to sing, it wastes your time and it annoys the pig"
- Robert Heinlein, author 1907-1988

. . . . I love sports, I really do. They sometimes can just distill it all down to something essential. Yes, the Wolverines lost on Saturday to arch-rival Michigan State, but Tate Forcier showed again, in the 4th quarter, which is where he's starting to shine that he won't quit. And yes, the Lions lost on Sunday, but the cool thing has to be the Tigers. I know, I know, they were 3 games up with 4 to play and wound up the season tied with the Twins, and forced a one-game playoff on Tuesday, but how cool is that? 182 games for both of them, and two team's seasons boils down one game, 9 innings, 27 outs. Think about that, it that cool or what?

. . . . Yes, I'm getting a ton of responses and passionate ones at that about the last 3 or 4 posts. Seems that (a) a whole lot of people didn't or don't understand Libertarianism, and what it really meant, and sure as hell (b) slept through both Macroeconomics 101 in college and Freshman Philosophy and (c) are slowly wrapping their heads around the fact some people, well, it sure doesn't pay to try and teach some other people to sing!

. . . .See, here's the thing. Boil all the rest of it out, and it comes down to one thing, and to me, it's the most important thing of Libertarian philosophy. All people, repeat that, all people are born equal, born with inherent rights that can't be granted by anyone else, or a piece of paper. All people are born with those rights, and the right to self-determination.

. . . .Anyone who attempts to take those rights away, who attempts to suppress or limit those rights, who attempts to put boundaries on those rights, who actually believes themselves to be in a position to grant those rights, or have a say in how they're applied. . . . anyone who does that is the enemy. Wish I could put it gentler, wish I could put it in less harsh terms, but I can't.

. . . .That's why I can't stand conservatism as it's developed over the last 30 years. Conservatives have completely lost their way as a viable train of thought. Conservatives, the extreme Right, the Religious Right, love power for power's sake, love control. . . .and feel entitled to it, that it's a birthright. That's the inherent poison and corrosion in faith-based politics.

. . . . .As someone who is self-determining, as someone who has fought damn hard to be where he's at with everything, I can't do, be or say anything other than what and who I am. Their tyranny of the soul must be fought, at every turn.

. . . .The wingnuts, the looney tunes who have hijacked the conservative movement and the Republican Party are winning the day right now, but somehow, there are cracks in the armor. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican from South Carolina took some major swipes at Glenn Beck the other day, and he's not backing off. On Beck's on network on Sunday, on Fox News, Graham said "You can listen to him if you like, I choose not to because quite frankly, I don't want to go down the road of thinking our best days are behind us."

. . . .And in terms of how I tried to explain some rudimentary economic theory back on Friday and Saturday, Les Leopold turns in the best explanation yet of how and why the economic policies of the last 30 years have failed miserably; Reagan, Bush1, Bush2, Reaganomics, Trickle-down, the incredible growth of Federal government, spending and deficits, all while cutting the taxes to pay for their growth insanity, the whole damn shooting match. Les Leopold:

It's great to know that during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the wealth of the 400 richest Americans, according to Forbes, actually increased by $30 billion. Well golly, that's only a 2 percent increase, much less than the double digit returns the wealthy had grown accustomed to. But a 2 percent increase is a whole lot more than losing 40 percent of your 401k. And $30 billion is enough to provide 500,000 school teacher jobs at $60k per year.

Collectively, those 400 have $1.57 trillion in wealth. It's hard to get your mind around a number like that. The way I do it is to imagine that we were still living during the great radical Eisenhower era of the 1950s when marginal income tax rates hit 91 percent. Taxes were high back in the 1950s because people understood that constraining wild extremes of wealth would make our country stronger and prevent another depression. (Well, what did those old fogies know?)

Had we kept those high progressive taxes in place, instead of removing them, especially during the Reagan era, the Forbes 400 might each be worth "only" $100 million instead of $3.9 billion each. So let's imagine that the rest of their wealth, about $1.53 trillion, were available for the public good.

What does $1.53 trillion buy?

It's more than enough to insure the uninsured for the next twenty years or more.

It's more than enough to create a Manhattan Project to solve global warming by developing renewable energy and a green, sustainable manufacturing sector.

And here's my favorite: It's more than enough to endow every public college and university in the country so that all of our children could gain access to higher education for free, forever!

Instead, we embarked on a grand experiment to see what would happen if we deregulated finance and changed the tax code so that millionaires could turn into billionaires. And even after that experiment failed in the most spectacular way, our system seems trapped into staying on the same deregulated path.

Instead of free higher education, health care and a sustainable economy, we got a fantasy finance boom and bust on Wall Street which crashed the real economy. We have our 400 billionaires, and we have 29 million unemployed and underemployed Americans. We have an infrastructure in shambles. We have an environment in crisis. We have a health care system that would make Rube Goldberg proud. And we have the worst income distribution since 1929.

. . . .And you know what? According to the wingnuts, it's all one man's fault! In 9 short months, a man who holds an office that doesn't have a vote, can't either take away or give one penny, one dollar of money and is term-limited has destroyed the entire world. Yes, Obama Derangement Syndrome is rampant, Matt Osborne from his blog Osborne Ink:

In other words, it helps them avoid facing facts. "Belief" replaces facts, such as this one: to date, no one has quoted Obama claiming to be God. In his speeches, calls to divine authority have been limited to scriptural allusions on such issues as reducing poverty. None of them posit a special calling for himself. Indeed, he has yet to claim any special powers of communication with the divine.

On the other hand, right-wing conservatives make exactly these claims all the time. Michele Bachmann, for example, has been courting the teabagger demographic. In an interview with the arch-birther website Wing Nut Daily World Net Daily, Bachmann claimed -- amidst quotes about abortion, "death panels," and the moral danger of compact fluorescent bulbs(!) -- that God had "called" her to run for Congress and might yet "call" her to run for president.

Bachmann, who regularly infuses her rhetoric with blood imagery and overwrought religious hyperbole, came to office via the message-machine of the evangelical church. Railing against the "attitudes, values and beliefs" of the Goals 2000 program, she was invited by other right-wing education activists to run for Congress.

. . . .So, in that light, off we go, onto the topics of the day.

. . . . .Anyone who's read me for even a day out of the last 4 months knows that I've been saying all along that the only winners, no matter which bill passes, no matter whether or not a bill even passes will not be us, the people, it won't be the President, it won't be the Republicanists, or the Dems, it'll be the lobbyists. Finally, someone in the press with a much wider audience is saying the same thing; Frank Rich in the New York Times:

IN the annals of American excess, there often arrives a moment when those with too much money, too much clout and too much hubris just can’t stop themselves from tempting the fates. They throw an over-the-top party in public, or parade their wealth and power before the press, and the next thing you know their world, and sometimes ours, has crashed.

It’s in this context that you have to wonder what some of the Obama era’s most moneyed and White House-connected lobbyists were thinking as they preened before a Washington Post reporter recently for two lengthy articles. We’re not even nine months into the new administration, yet these swaggering, utterly un-self-aware influence peddlers seem determined to prove that nothing except the party affiliations has changed in the Beltway’s pay-for-play culture since Tom DeLay. If these lobbyists were stocks, I’d short them.

One of the articles focused on Heather Podesta — “The It Girl of a New Generation of Lobbyists” — who lobbies for health care players like Eli Lilly, HealthSouth and Cigna. Podesta is half of what The Post has called a “mega-lobbying” couple. Her husband, with his own separate (and larger) lobbying shop, is Tony Podesta, the brother of John Podesta, the Clinton White House chief of staff who ran the Obama transition. Back in November, Tony Podesta told The Times that only “very unsophisticated” clients would hire his firm because of his brother’s role in assembling the new administration. That encyclopedic and ever-expanding list of “unsophisticated” clients includes Amgen and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity — and that’s just among the A’s. His business was up 57 percent from last year in the first six months of 2009. Heather Podesta’s was up 65 percent.

When we first meet Heather Podesta in The Post, she is being bussed on the cheek by Charles Rangel at his August birthday party at New York’s Tavern on the Green. In keeping with the usual pattern of blowback, it took only one day after the article appeared for The Times to report that Rangel, the ethically challenged chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, was guilty of yet another lapse: He’d neglected to list at least $500,000 in assets on his 2007 Congressional disclosure form. As if that were not karmic retribution enough, Tavern on the Green filed for bankruptcy just days after that.

The second Post article, on the front page two weeks ago, described the scene, as well as the rabbit ragu, at Ristorante Tosca, the lobbyists’ hangout on F Street in downtown Washington. The Post did not mention that it is just four blocks away from the location of the now defunct Signatures, the restaurant whose owner, Jack Abramoff, was the go-to fixer of the DeLay “K Street project” before scandal brought him down.

The stars of Tosca’s “Power Section,” we learned, include the Podestas, Tom Daschle (“not technically a registered lobbyist” but, as The Post put it, “a ‘special policy adviser’ — wink wink”) and Steve Elmendorf (who “eats lunch out only at Tosca”). Elmendorf was chief of staff to the former Democratic House leader Dick Gephardt. A quick visit to opensecrets.org reveals that Elmendorf Strategies’ client list includes Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, among other players in the coming battle over financial regulation reform. Then again, as The Nation details in its current issue, Gephardt has also lobbied for Goldman, among many other corporate clients in opposition to the populist policies he once championed.

The public is not wrong. The administration’s legislative deals with the pharmaceutical companies were made in back rooms. Business Week reported in early August that the UnitedHealth Group and its fellow insurance giants had already quietly rounded up moderate Democrats in the House to block any public health care option that would compete with them for business. UnitedHealth’s hired Beltway gunslingers include both Elmendorf Strategies and Daschle, a public supporter of the public option who nonetheless does some of his “wink, wink” counseling for UnitedHealth. The company’s in-house lobbyist is a former chief of staff to Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader. Gephardt consults there too.

But it’s not as if the Republicans now have the public’s back. DeLay may be reduced these days to violating public taste rather than the public trust on “Dancing With the Stars,” but back on Capitol Hill, his successors keep the K Street faith. In their campaign to kill the public option, G.O.P. leaders often cite data from the Lewin Group, a research company, which has projected that 88 million Americans might quit their private insurance plans if given a government alternative. (The Congressional Budget Office puts the figure at the far less earthshaking 10 to 11 million.) Lewin, which repeatedly insists it’s still a nonpartisan outfit, was actually bought by a subsidiary of UnitedHealth in 2007. The Huffington Post reported in August that John Boehner and Eric Cantor — who use Lewin’s findings to scare voters about a “government takeover” of health care — are big recipients of UnitedHealth campaign cash.

Next up will be the overhaul of financial regulations. With job seekers now outnumbering job openings 6 to 1 in America, many still wonder why most of the big-dog culprits who helped speed the national meltdown — from lying and gambling bankers to shyster subprime mortgage packagers to executives at delinquent ratings agencies — have not shared their pain. In his speech marking the anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ failure, Obama chastised Wall Street for having taken irresponsible risks. But of course it is already back doing exactly that.

Meanwhile, we’re hearing of behind-the-scenes Congressional softening of perhaps the most promising component of the White House’s modest financial regulatory package, a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Real-estate brokerages are being exempted from its purview, and banks will not be required to offer “plain vanilla” mortgages. As in health care, the question of what the White House will really fight for in financial reform remains open. While the ostentatious daily predators’ ball at Ristorante Tosca is a bad omen, we don’t know yet whether that omen is for the lobbyists, or the Obama administration, or both.

. . . .And from the Washington Post, David Hilzenrath:

Any health-care overhaul that Congress and President Obama enact is likely to have as its centerpiece a fundamental reform: Insurers would not be allowed to reject individuals or charge them higher premiums based on their medical history.

But simply banning medical discrimination would not necessarily remove it from the equation, economists and health-care analysts say.

If insurers are prohibited from openly rejecting people with preexisting conditions, they could try to cherry-pick through more subtle means. For example, offering free health club memberships tends to attract people who can use the equipment, says Paul Precht, director of policy at the Medicare Rights Center.

Being uncooperative on insurance claims can chase away the chronically ill. For people who have few medical bills, it is less of a factor, said Karen Pollitz, research professor at the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute.

And to avoid patients with costly, complicated medical conditions, health plans could include in their networks relatively few doctors who specialize in treating those conditions, said Mark V. Pauly, professor of health-care management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

By itself, a ban on discrimination would not eliminate the economic pressure to discriminate.

"It would probably increase the incentive for cherry-picking," Pauly said. "I'm strongly motivated to try to avoid you if I'm not allowed to charge you extra."

. . . .But in one of the most singularly disingenuous moments, former Senate Majority Leader, Republican Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee, now retired, takes a pretty solid jab at his own party and the wingnuts both, all around health care, Cesca:

Former Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist surprisingly announced his support for the public option and threw the fringe under the bus in the process:

"Clearly, the death panels and public plan arguments have been overblown," he says. Frist noted that Republicans themselves voted for a Medicare prescription drug bill that would have established a version of a public plan--with the government negotiating directly with drug companies--if private-sector competition had failed to materialize. That is similar to the approach that Republican Senator Olympia Snowe is taking with her amendment to establish a public option with a "trigger."

Granted, Bill Frist is hawking a new book on health care and simply assessed American's support for the public option (Attn: John Boehner). I'm sure if he were still in the senate, he'd demand a provision that nobody pulls the plug on a family member without him using his Jesus powers to determine if they're truly brain dead, or just faking it. Which makes me wonder why he hasn't given Sarah Palin's family the green light yet. Ba doom sha!

. . . .Because in the end, it really is all about the money. This weekend marks the one year anniversary of the bailouts, and the crisis that threatened to take the world down. While you were busy with everything else, the financial crisis got worse, and it really will take us all down. The most important thing we're not talking about right now, Nomi Prins, from the Daily Beast:

Any 5 year old who plays with Legos or blocks could address the issue of "too big to fail" with more logic than most of Washington. What do you actually do about things that are too big and could fail? Well, if you build too high a Lego tower, it has a greater chance of collapsing. So you divide the tower into smaller parts. Same blocks. Different construction. Less crash risk. Simple.

This reasoning remained lost on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, as he testified before the House Financial Services committee last week. Sure, he took a bit of blame for the Fed’s role in not protecting consumers enough. But despite the seismic failure of the Fed to see or do anything about the financial train wreck as it barreled forward at warp speed, Bernanke concluded that the Fed was “well suited to serve as the consolidated supervisor." (Code for, "Keeping the really big banks from tanking the economy again.")

This is the same Fed that didn’t think big banks were big enough going into last fall’s crisis, so decided to make them even bigger. Here J.P. Morgan Chase, you take Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual. Bank of America, you take Merrill Lynch. And Wells Fargo, you take Wachovia. Bernanke chose to approve them for marriage, rather than send them to therapy.

. . . .Read the rest of it here.

. . . .And with the final word today, Bob Cesca's ace investigative reporter, Elvis Dingledein:

I’m no kind of religious person. I think The Bible® is HIGH-larious family fun, if you live in the Third Century and list “punching women in the uterus” and “the stonings” as favorite hobbies. And I loathe nothing more than Teabagging Christian Wingnuts trying to force their bullshit Hobbit stories on us Nones, the ones who like our Democracy Jesus™-free the way The Founders explicitly set us up by Oh-So-Purposefully nixing the words “God” and “Jesus” from the Constitution.

Having said that, I’ll get down on my knees and start praying to any Angry Magical Cloud-Lord who will listen if this actually pans out when McDonald v City of Chicago hits a Supreme Court near you:

A finding that the Second Amendment protects individuals’ right to own a gun could therefore have the unexpected outcome of also providing more solid ground for recognition of the right to abortion, to sexual privacy, to gay marriage, and to a wide variety of other rights that conservative justices on the court and “originalist” constitutional scholars have long opposed.

Oh, please Flying Spaghetti Monster! Oh, I beseech thee, Freakishly Disneyesque Indian Elephant God! Let me rub thy fat, fat belly with oils, Buddha You Fat Bastard! I shall tithe what little I have left after paying for healthcare and two bullshit wars, O Mangar-kunjer-kunja, whatever the fuck you were! Just let this be so!

Honestly, I will have an ironygasm and take a month off from work to do nothing but drive around Republican neighborhoods pointing and laughing and possibly waving my genitals at AARP members if this happens. Finally a SCOTUS case we can all believe in, as long as it swings our way. With our Activist Judges and whatnot.

. . . .And that's the way it is:

. . . . .. . . .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.. . . . . .