. . . .And your point is??

Tuesday September 29, 2009

. . . . .Good morning, and here in the Upper Midwest, it's become fall in 24 hours. For us, that means slate gray skies, a cold, wet wind and needing the flannel sheets again. (I can't wait to get back to work in the Gulf of Mexico)

. . . . .The playlist is a complete change-up. New releases from artists, a lot of whom, you all don't listen to, but should. New stuff from John Fogerty w/Bruce; Kris Kristofferson with a tribute to his friend Johnny Cash, Robert Earl Keen, Cross Canadian Ragweed, The Band of Heathens & Big Kenny. Enjoy, and remember you heard them here first. (And no, you can't have them). If you're reading this on the Facebook notes page, you can go to the external site, The Desolation Angel, and get the podcast with the playlist, the music and embedded videos there.

. . . .I really had to toss around which of the first two I wanted to cover this morning. But, with the Senate Finance Committee vote coming up today on the first marked-up version of the piece of feral pig shit that Max Baucus and the Gang of 6 put together for a Health Care Reform bill, this first one is more important.

. . . .I'm slowly becoming a Dylan Ratigan fan. I listen to him, and read him and realize that he's probably a lot like me, a reformed conservative. Trust me, there's nothing more dangerous to the extreme Right and "values" crowd than us. They destroyed the Republican Party and sucked the last brain cells out of the conservative movement. We know their narrative, their shenanigans and most importantly, and now speaking for myself, not only does it make a little bit of vomit come up in my mouth, I very sincerely see them as a threat to the long-term welfare of this Republic. From his op-ed piece this morning, Dylan Ratigan:

Why is health insurance the only business that has an exemption from the Sherman Anti-Trust Act other than Major League Baseball? If the delivery of taxpayer trillions by our politicians to the banks to support their fraudulently paid bonuses hasn't shown you what our current government's values are, check this link out.

Through the governmental negligence that we as voters allowed, a health care system was created in which a single health care company controls at least 30 percent of the insurance market in 95% of the country, including states like the following:

Maine, where Wellpoint controls 71% of the market.

North Dakota, where Blue Cross controls 90% of the market.

Arkansas, where Blue Cross Blue Shield controls 75% of the market.

Alabama, where Blue Cross Blue Shield controls 83% of the market.

This monopoly, combined with the misaligned incentives that trap people in employer-based health care, is causing the skyrocketing health care costs that are hurtling our nation towards bankruptcy.

I don't know what's worse: that most Republicans seem to be against ending this unfair legal protection for an entrenched industry that is ruining our country with their non-competitive practices, or that most Democrats seem to be threatening this arrangement only as a bargaining chip to push for a meaningless public option that wouldn't be accessible to almost 85% of the population?

Instead of improving our country, through creating and enforcing free and fair markets, our politicians are currently engaging in backroom deals, most of which protect the very companies who profit the most from these disastrous outdated systems -- industries like health insurance and big Pharma.

While we clearly have the ability as a group of 305 million to update the system that is American Health Care and move our country into the 21st century in the process, it's becoming clear that we may not have the leaders to do it.

Instead of seeking answers to the problem of paying for and providing medicine, we are doing the exact opposite. Taxpayers' money is being played with by politicians who are desperately trying to protect the competition-stifling, false security of the monopolistic employer-based health care system and its outdated, over-charging, under-delivering ways. Given the least consideration are those affected the most -- the patients and the doctors who care for them.

This country's founders built an ingenious system of checks and balances for a reason: to ensure that no special interest or group could use government power to commandeer the creative and economic wealth of our nation to their own ends. How much longer must we live in a country where the citizens are subservient to the banks, health insurance companies and any other special interest able to control our government at the expense of our the most basic principles of fairness, our future as a nation and, as a result, our freedom?

. . . .Trust me, should the Democrats pass a bill that has mandated coverage with no public option to provide competition to the health insurance cartels, the Dems will be as done as the Republicans are. It's time for two new parties in this country anyhow, if not at least 4 major parties to accurately represent the philosophical splits in this county's electorate.

. . . .The other one that I felt was important may be a self-justifying, but who cares? It's my blog.
Chez Pazienza, who blogs as Deus exMalcontent, points this one out from Matt Taibbi, who along with Tim Dickinson, is doing some of the most fearless investigative journalism out there.

From Matt Taibbi, probably the single greatest quote about being a journalist I've ever read:

"Let me just say that I’m always suspicious when I see articles about the motivations of journalists. I think they often reflect a misunderstanding of what journalism is all about. Journalists are supposed to be assholes. The system does not work, in fact, if society’s journalists are all nice, kind, friendly, rational people.

You want a good percentage of them to be inconsolably crazy. You want them to be jealous of everything and everyone and to have heaps of personal hangups and flaws. That way they will always be motivated to punch holes in things.

Obviously it would be bad if all journalists were like this, and there is certainly a place for the more gentlemanly school, i.e. those writers and TV reporters who maintain good relationships with politicians and institutions, and work with them to deliver important information to the public.

But the iconoclastic school of journalist should be a difficult person. You know how when you go on the subway, there’s always one asshole on the train who just has to whip a pen out and draw a mustache on the face of the cute blond stewardess in the Jet Blue ad? That’s the kind of person we’re talking about. A pain in the ass on the subway, and in most places (and personal relationships, for that matter), but very useful in this particular profession."

A-fucking-men.

. . . .Now, Taibbi, in his entire piece, goes on to point out the thin, disappearing line between investigative journalism and bloggers, and how they are some of the most important people in politics right now and are more journalistically honest than the cable news channels. Taibbi, from his blog over at True/Slant:

I don’t know. It seems to me that maybe it’s time we all stopped drawing a big distinction between bloggers and mainstream journalists, because, let’s be honest, that distinction doesn’t really count for shit anymore.

The key distinction used to be that mainstream reporters vetted and fact-checked their material before they put it out in public. But the only media outlets that dependably do that anymore, at least in my experience, are feature magazines like Hagan’s.

Daily newspapers are crap for fact-checking now, even the New York Times (hello, Jayson Blair). TV stations, especially the cable news channels, are often even worse than bloggers, because there we’re often dealing with some chattering numbskull like Maria Bartiromo who is literally ad-libbing her “reporting” live and on-air. Bloggers at least have a neurological weigh station or two between their brains and their hands.

. . . .Straight back to health care then, and Michael Moore this morning (gotta love those Michigan boys. Love him or hate him, he isn't afraid to say "it", whatever "it" is. I think it's a Michigan thing, between weather and the economy (and our state road system), we've seen the worst that things can be, and just aren't afraid anymore.) Moore on what's wrong with every health care reform bill on the House and Senate floors right now:

Now we know why they've stopped calling this health care reform, and started calling it insurance reform. The current bills advancing in Congress look more like rearranging the deck chairs on the insurance Titanic than actually ending our long health care nightmare.

Some laudable elements are in various versions of the bills, especially expanding Medicaid, cutting the private insurance-padding waste of Medicare Advantage, and limiting the ability of the insurance giants to ban and dump people who have been or who ever will be sick.

But, overall, the leading bills and the President's proposal are, like the dog that didn't bark, more notable for what is missing.

Here are 13 problems with the current health care bills (partial list):

1. No cost controls on insurance companies. The coming sharp increases in premiums, deductibles, co-pays, co-insurance, etc. will quickly outpace any projected protections from caps on out-of-pocket costs.

2. Insurance companies will continue to be able to use marketing techniques to cherry-pick healthier, less costly enrollees.

3. No restrictions on insurance denials of care that insurers don't want to pay for. In case you missed it, the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee uncovered data on the California Department of Managed Care website recently that found six of the biggest California insurers rejected, on annual average, more than one-fifth of all claims every year since 2002.

4. No challenge to insurance company monopolies, especially in the top 94 metropolitan areas, where one or two companies dominate, severely limiting choice and competition.

5. A massive government bailout for the insurance industry through the combination of the individual mandate requiring everyone not covered to buy insurance, public subsidies which go for buying insurance, no regulation on what insurers can charge, and no restrictions on their ability to decide what claims to pay.. . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . We may be slow learners, but the rest of the industrial world has figured it out: Universal, single-payer or national health care systems. That's the reason why all those other countries cover everyone, have better patient outcomes, cause no one to declare bankruptcy or lose their homes because of medical bills, and spend less than half per capita on health care than we do.

. . . .Catch the entire piece here.

. . . .I'm trying to figure this one out. Now, there was a school bus fight. A fight not unlike a hundred others that occur in this country every day, and happened, gasp, back in the 70's when I was in school. Because the assailants were black, the victim white, this was a "racially motivated crime", and yes, the Skinheads/American Nazi Party/Klan/White Power bunch (wait, how the can the American Nazi Party be in that group? I thought they were all black Democrats now?) holds a rally in Illinois, each step of this given vast overblown, overplayed coverage by Fox News. But, when an honor student is beaten to death, in broad daylight, with 2 x 4's there is no Fox News coverage at all? Perhaps because it was a black on black crime, and thus, not worthy of the same coverage?

. . . .You know what? That was too damn glib and snide, and I left it there on purpose, I am fully capable of screwing up large. What occurred to that young man was a complete and utter tragedy and an unforgivable crime. I cannot even imagine the savage mindset that the 4 perpetrators of this had, and how they could do it. It's incomprehensible, and I just don't get it. My sympathies and thoughts are with that family.

. . . .My friend Matthew is right. Forget everything else. Forget climate change, forget the financial meltdown and banking crisis, forget health care reform. Forget all of it. This, what occurred here, this is what's symptomatic of what's wrong in this country right now, and everything else will be for naught, and will have been for nothing, if we don't figure out how to start valuing one another's lives again.

. . . And this is what the news needs to be covering, the hanging of Mr. Sparkman in Kentucky, this young man's death, this is the real toll that families are paying every day in this country because we've all managed somehow to be completely OK with a total breakdown in civility and somehow or another, we all seem to think it's OK that we slide closer everyday to being some third world country that no longer knows how to have political discourse and disagreement and to respect one another's right to have a differing opinion and a life.

. . . .And here's my problem and what that's leading to next. The team of Fox and Friends (Doocey and the little brown haired one on the other side of the couch who makes a little bit of vomit come up in your mouth, Kilmeade, that's his name) have obviously decided along with that little troll, Michelle Malkin, that endangering kids and inciting their base of viewers to commit acts of violence is right up their alley. I'm not going to belabor their story of the kids and the song. If you've read me the past few days, this is not unusual for a President. What I have a problem with is Michelle doing some truly sub-human slithering to make sure that each kid's name and face was broadcast and the name and address of their school give out, so that the school's principal could now start receiving phoned-in death threats. I have a real, big problem with that.
And, just so everyone on the Right knows, get your phones ready and call Michelle NOW! It's happened again! Cesca:

I wrote about this the other day, but here it is. A group of kids singing directly to President Nixon. At the White House.

We love you president
Oh yes we do
We love you president
And we'll be true

When you're not with us
We're blue
Our president, we love you

Earlier this year when the wingnuts were crapping their cages over the president's (very common) use of a teleprompter, I joked that they would eventually be attacking him for living in that extravagant mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue. You know, the one with the oval-shaped rooms -- oval, which is the shape of an "O" as in the word "OLIGARHY." Get it? Get it?!

That hasn't happened yet, but we're getting closer.

. . . . . . .What's happened over on the Right is that there is no longer any constructive conversation around policy. They proudly are anti-knowledge, anti-constructive and have become an absolute hate machine of destruction. Like a defiant, spoiled teenager, they would much rather destroy what's around them than accept that in a dynamic universe, change occurs. Rove's creation of the Religious Right as a base, Lee Atwater's Southern Strategy, has now become a Mary Shelley creation, a Frankenstein's Monster that will destroy all in it's path over it's anger at being born and awakened. Andrew Sullivan:

Politico surveys the GOP base and finds Palin-mania still strong. I think she perfectly represents a form of protest cultural politics that has no interest in actually governing. And what's fascinating about the various quotes from local GOP machers is that none of them refers in any way to policy. She is not supported because of what she allegedly believes, or what she says she'll do. She is supported because she shares an identity, real or imagined, with white, angry alienated conservatives. She is identity politics personified. And so the loony right's transformation into a mirror image of the loony left of the 1980s accelerates.

. . . .How far does Republican hypocrisy extend? This far, the last 3 Republican Presidents are the ones who raised taxes, tripled deficits, and put budgets in place that 7 generations could not conceivably pay for, yet their base still clings to their "conservative" mantra, without the barest of Webster's Dictionary definitions of understanding of the word "conserve": Conor Friedersdorf in the Daily Beast today on that hypocrisy:

Due to a general's plea for reinforcements, President Barack Obama is under increasing pressure to send tens of thousands more troops to aid American counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan—a potential turning point in that conflict that some are likening to the surge in Iraq.

Escalating a single war can be costly. And were foreign-policy hawks given their way, President Obama would also extend the American campaign in Iraq, construct a missile-defense shield that safeguards Poland and the Czech Republic, persist in aggressive military efforts to eradicate illegal narcotics abroad, purchase a new generation of costly fighter jets, expand the NATO security guarantee to more countries, continue multibillion dollar contracts to mercenary defense contractors, maintain the nuclear arsenal at present levels, and launch air strikes to prevent Iran from securing a nuclear weapon.

These are all demands that movement conservatives have made since President Obama took office less than a year ago—and whatever one thinks about them individually, it is evident that they are collectively unaffordable, and at odds with the strongest anti-Obama critique being offered by the right wing. It is folly, conservatives rightly note, for an insolvent, debt-ridden nation to pursue costly new government initiatives, especially when the American people already feel overtaxed. The national debt will reach $7.6 trillion this year. That's roughly $25,000 for every man, woman and child in the country!

Now that the spendthrift GOP Congress most recently responsible for that tab is out of power, along with the Republican president who enabled it, even the right's most partisan opportunists can join the correct right-of-center consensus that this level of spending is unsustainable. Hence the sensible conservative calls for painful program cuts, intense scrutiny of government waste, and a careful cost-benefit review of almost all federal spending.

Alas, there is an exception: The right hasn't any interest in applying those measures to military spending. Conservatives are right to rank national defense as government's preeminent responsibility. That we maintain the most powerful military in the world, by a sizable margin, is an appropriate use of whatever wealth we produce; only an ahistorical fool would undervalue the peace dividend American hegemony has afforded.

But that isn't any reason to abandon conservative insights about government spending on every matter funneled through the Pentagon.

. . . .Entire piece here.

. . . .How insane are the Repubs right now? This crazy - Republican Representative Trent Franks of Arizona at the wingnut conference over the weekend on "How To Take America Back" -

"Obama. .is an enemy of humanity"

. . . .And that's how bad it really 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.. . . . . .

The storms came in about 2 Am

Monday September 28, 2009

. . . .First up and off the bat, the Senate Finance Committee votes on Tuesday on the first draft of the Health Care Reform package. The members of the Finance Committee and their home states are:

Democrats	REPUBLICANS
MAX BAUCUS, MT JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER IV, WV KENT CONRAD, ND JEFF BINGAMAN, NM JOHN F. KERRY, MA BLANCHE L. LINCOLN, AR RON WYDEN, OR CHARLES E. SCHUMER, NY DEBBIE STABENOW, MI MARIA CANTWELL, WA BILL NELSON, FL ROBERT MENENDEZ, NJ THOMAS CARPER, DE	CHUCK GRASSLEY, IA ORRIN G. HATCH, UT OLYMPIA J. SNOWE, ME JON KYL, AZ JIM BUNNING, KY MIKE CRAPO, ID PAT ROBERTS, KS JOHN ENSIGN, NV MIKE ENZI, WY JOHN CORNYN, TX

. . . .Clicking any name will take you directly to their home website and their contact information, phone number, e-mail etc.

. . . . . .I mentioned last week's Tim Dickinson's fearless work on exposing who the names and wallets were behind trying to derail the health care reform effort altogether. Jamison Foser picks that ball up, and quoting from Dickinson's article takes it further:

Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson reports that Betsy McCaughey's mid-1990s lies about health care reform -- lies that helped torpedo the Clinton administration's efforts to provide universal health care -- were, in effect, the result of tobacco-industry propaganda:

McCaughey's lies were later debunked in a 1995 post-mortem in The Atlantic, and The New Republic recanted the piece in 2006. But what has not been reported until now is that McCaughey's writing was influenced by Philip Morris, the world's largest tobacco company, as part of a secret campaign to scuttle Clinton's health care reform. (The measure would have been funded by a huge increase in tobacco taxes.) In an internal company memo from March 1994, the tobacco giant detailed its strategy to derail Hillarycare through an alliance with conservative think tanks, front groups and media outlets. Integral to the company's strategy, the memo observed, was an effort to "work on the development of favorable pieces" with "friendly contacts in the media." The memo, prepared by a Philip Morris executive, mentions only one author by name:

"Worked off-the-record with [The] Manhattan [Institute] and writer Betsy McCaughey as part of the input to the three-part exposé in The New Republic on what the Clinton plan means to you. The first part detailed specifics of the plan."

Now, it isn't necessarily shocking that a reporter would talk off-the-record with business interests while writing an article about legislation that would affect them. But McCaughey's relationship with Big Tobacco was merely not that of "reporter" and "source."

See, McCaughey was working for The Manhattan Institute at the time. And The Manhattan Institute was funded by -- you guessed it -- tobacco companies.

While Phillip Morris was "working with" McCaughey in 1994, the tobacco giant was also budgeting $25,000 for The Manhattan Institute for 1995. The Manhattan Institute has also taken tobacco money from Brown & Williamson, R.J. Reynolds, and Lorillard.

So that's where McCaughey's dishonest New Republic article -- the article that did more than any other to kill health care reform in the 1990s -- came from. The tobacco companies that funded the "think tank" that employed McCaughey "worked off-the-record" with her to shape the article.

The New Republic eventually "recanted" McCaughey's article, a decade after the damage was done, and apologized for it (though then-editor Andrew Sullivan stands by the decision to publish the article.)

So, now that Betsy McCaughey is again trying to kill health care reform, you have to wonder -- who is paying for her deception this time? And which news organizations will eventually have to apologize for promoting her dishonest work?

. . . . . .Let me very, very clear. The Baucus bill coming out of the Senate Finance Committee as is, stinks like a feral pig turd. The would be absolutely nothing more disastrous to the American people than to mandate coverage, impose a fine for no coverage and leave the current health insurance system as is, allowing the cartel they form to price fix. . . . Absolutely nothing worse, in a country whose economy is in shambles as it is, driving it further into the ground for people that have no income and no job would be sheer idiocy and a betrayal of the American people.

. . . .Now as for some of the other manuevering, going on, there is one person who should be applauded. Before I go into that piece, I will say again, on health care reform, I have skin in the game. On this particular one, especially. I know that one of my Mother's scrips alone costs $600.oo a month here in the U.S. but just 60 miles away across the bridge in Canada, it's $127. Tomorrow morning, before that vote, one Senator plans to blow the lid on the rumored deal between the White House, big Pharma and Sen. Baucus. Reporting on it is Ryan Grim:

A Senate Democratic leader is hoping to blow up the deal reached between the White House, drug makers and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), by introducing an amendment on the floor to allow prescription drugs to be re-imported from Canada.

It's one of the simplest ways to reduce health care costs but was ruled out by the agreement, which limits Big Pharma's contribution to health care reform to $80 billion over ten years.

North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan, a member of Democratic leadership, isn't a party to that bargain. "Senator Dorgan intends to offer an amendment to the health reform bill and his expectation is that it will be one of the first amendments considered," his spokesman Justin Kitsch told HuffPost in an e-mail. "Prescription drug importation is an immediate way to put downward pressure on health care costs. It has bipartisan support, and has been endorsed by groups such as the National Federation of Independent Businesses and AARP."

U.S. patients pay far more than the rest of the world for prescription drugs. The Canadian government keeps prices down by using its purchasing power to negotiate for lower rates. Dorgan wants American consumers in on the deal.

A bill to allow re-importation -- S. 1232 - has 30 cosponsors, several Republicans among them, including Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, John Thune (S.D.) and David Vitter (La.).

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill would result in $50 billion in direct savings over the next decade, with $10.6 billion of that being savings to the federal government.

Jim Manley, senior communications adviser to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), said that he sees no reason the amendment won't get a floor vote. "To the extent possible, we intend to have a full and open amendment process," he said. Reid has himself voted to allow re-importation in the past.

The amendment threatens to blow up the deal Baucus and the White House cut with the drug makers. According to the deal, re-importation would not be part of comprehensive health care reform. And if the measure does save $50 billion, that will come from Big Pharma revenue and take it above the $80 billion in cuts it agreed to over ten years. It puts Congress on a collision course with its trade association, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA).

. . . . . . .From Politico, Paul Begala with some perspective on what will be set in motion with tomorrow morning's Senate Committee vote:

The right-wing shouting didn’t work

The conservative strategy of blowing up town hall meetings was must-see TV — as when conservatives shouted down a woman in a wheelchair. But the histrionics didn’t change any minds (Gallup shows support essentially unchanged before and after the August recess), and they didn’t change any votes. I can’t think of a single Democrat who has switched from supporting health reform to opposing it because of the right-wing primal scream strategy. It was, as Macbeth said, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

The train keeps a-rollin’

All five committees involved have, for the first time in history, reported out bills to fundamentally reform our health care system. Previous House committee chairpersons in prior Congresses wouldn’t speak to one another, much less collaborate on three very similar bills, as the Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committees have. Very impressive and very encouraging.

On the Senate side, even the absence of the irreplaceable Ted Kennedy has not stopped the cause of his life. His health committee produced a first-class bill. And the Finance Committee, where every progressive feared health care would die, is in the process of producing a bill that covers 95 percent of Americans, cracks down on insurance company abuses like the pre-existing condition rule, subsidizes coverage for the poor, wallops insurance companies with taxes and fees and actually reduces the deficit.

Sure, most liberals think we can do more and we can do better. But it’s most likely the Finance Committee bill will be the floor, not the ceiling. Even one year ago, a bill as progressive as Sen. Max Baucus’s would have been unimaginable in George W. Bush’s Washington.

Democrats can go it alone

Democrats must accept that bipartisanship is dead. It’s not sleeping, it’s not comatose, it’s not hiding. It is dead, dead, dead. Republicans clearly have no desire to work constructively for a bipartisan bill.

. . . . .Now remember, that up until now, it was Democrats who were the party of scaring the elderly about Medicare cuts. Now that we live in Alice in Wonderland world, of course, the Republicans, at least on this issue, find themselves far to the Left of the Dems. Lori Montgomery in the Washington Post this morning:

After years of trying to cut Medicare spending, Republican lawmakers have emerged as champions of the program, accusing Democrats of trying to steal from the elderly to cover the cost of health reform.

. . . .Now for, at least for me, what constitutes today's excursions in wingnut land. First up, someone please call Fox News right now. There are more children being indoctrinated to sing to a President. Stop it. Stop it right now. From Cesca:

I can't wait until Michelle Malkin goes after the proprietors of Jesus Camp for teaching children to worship the president. Literally.

Source: Tim F.

. . . .More on (moron) singing:

Yesterday on Hardball, Barnicle spent an entire segment debating whether or not a group of elementary school kids should have been singing a song about President Obama.

Pat Buchanan was on the show. Of course. Because you can't have a debate on MSNBC without the Nazi-apologist mastermind of the Southern Strategy. Buchanan's verdict -- and Barnicle kind of agreed with him -- was that public school kids shouldn't be forced to sing about the president because it sounds like indoctrination.

Horseshit.

Here's an example of school kids singing about President Bush.

And coincidentally, I was watching a special on History Channel the other night called "Nixon: A Presidency Revealed" and was shocked to learn that when Nixon triumphantly returned from China, there was an event in the Rose Garden in which a high school glee club of some sort were singing directly to Nixon: "We love you Mr. President, oh yes we doooo. President Nixon weee love yooooou!"

Indoctrination!

Pat Buchanan, by the way, was a Nixon political adviser and speechwriter. Buchanan also accompanied Nixon on the China trip.

. . . .From Andrew Sullivan today:

Do yourself a favor and read Dave Weigel's full account of the just-concluded “How to Take Back America” conference. Headed by Phylis Shlafly, this year's attendance was twice the previous record. Its main focus: Obama's transformation of America as Hitler transformed Germany.

“Kitty has pointed out the parallels between the slow, incremental Hitler takeover of Austria and some of the things that are happening today,” said Schlafly, asked about Werthmann’s “How to Recognize Living Under Nazis and Communists” session. “She’s an expert on that. I see what [Obama] is doing as absolute socialism, as government ownership of the means of production.”

The liberal fascism argument is alive and well on the right. Huckabee showed up, as did neocon Frank Gaffney. The opening speaker was Christianist retired Lt Gen William Boykin, who had in uniform declared the war on terror to be a war between Islam and Christianity. Weirdly, he doesn't credit torture with preventing a second terror attack. His theory is more complex:

“It’s only because of intercessory prayer that we haven’t been hit again since September 11,” said Boykin. “Pray for America for 10 minutes a day. If we can mobilize millions of prayer warriors that can pray for 10 minutes a day, we can open the gates of heaven.”

Of course, the gays were just behind the Nazis and the Muslims in destroying America:

In the halls and from the stages of the conference, there were constant warnings of fascist, anti-Christian campaigns to break down American morals and sovereignty. Rev. Rick Scarborough, a pastor who advised Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign, pounded the podium at his Friday afternoon speech, warning that the president’s pro-gay agenda was endangering Christians who spoke out against gay rights.

“The day the president put his hand on the bible,” said Scarborough, “his minions were changing official White House Website to reflect a whole new understanding of civil rights, to refer to homosexuals.” The Bible, said Scarborough, called these people “sodomites, which no one wants to talk about because it reminds them of their behavior.”

Some activists followed this up with a breakout session on “How to Counter the Homosexual Extremist Movement,” where they learned about transgender awareness days at public schools. And some went to “How to Stop Feminist and Gay Attacks on the Military,” where they were informed that upwards of 200,000 active duty members of the military might quit if “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is repealed.

. . . .And if you need another reason to hate the Religious Right and their attempt to hijack the American political scene with their wholesome family "values", for your thoughts, the meatsacks from the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas, those wonderful folks who like to go to the funerals of fallen warriors and picket with lovely messages like "God Loves Dead Soldiers", took a trip to the big city this weekend, where they picketed a Brooklyn synagogue.

. . . .And finally tonight, with one more cheery note, Krugman on the largest issue facing us as a species:

Every once in a while I feel despair over the fate of the planet. If you’ve been following climate science, you know what I mean: the sense that we’re hurtling toward catastrophe but nobody wants to hear about it or do anything to avert it.

And here’s the thing: I’m not engaging in hyperbole. These days, dire warnings aren’t the delusional raving of cranks. They’re what come out of the most widely respected climate models, devised by the leading researchers. The prognosis for the planet has gotten much, much worse in just the last few years.

What’s driving this new pessimism? Partly it’s the fact that some predicted changes, like a decline in Arctic Sea ice, are happening much faster than expected. Partly it’s growing evidence that feedback loops amplifying the effects of man-made greenhouse gas emissions are stronger than previously realized. For example, it has long been understood that global warming will cause the tundra to thaw, releasing carbon dioxide, which will cause even more warming, but new research shows far more carbon locked in the permafrost than previously thought, which means a much bigger feedback effect.

The result of all this is that climate scientists have, en masse, become Cassandras — gifted with the ability to prophesy future disasters, but cursed with the inability to get anyone to believe them.

And we’re not just talking about disasters in the distant future, either. The really big rise in global temperature probably won’t take place until the second half of this century, but there will be plenty of damage long before then.

For example, one 2007 paper in the journal Science is titled “Model Projections of an Imminent Transition to a More Arid Climate in Southwestern North America” — yes, “imminent” — and reports “a broad consensus among climate models” that a permanent drought, bringing Dust Bowl-type conditions, “will become the new climatology of the American Southwest within a time frame of years to decades.”

So if you live in, say, Los Angeles, and liked those pictures of red skies and choking dust in Sydney, Australia, last week, no need to travel. They’ll be coming your way in the not-too-distant future.

Now, at this point I have to make the obligatory disclaimer that no individual weather event can be attributed to global warming. The point, however, is that climate change will make events like that Australian dust storm much more common.

In a rational world, then, the looming climate disaster would be our dominant political and policy concern. But it manifestly isn’t. Why not?

Part of the answer is that it’s hard to keep peoples’ attention focused. Weather fluctuates — New Yorkers may recall the heat wave that pushed the thermometer above 90 in April — and even at a global level, this is enough to cause substantial year-to-year wobbles in average temperature. As a result, any year with record heat is normally followed by a number of cooler years: According to Britain’s Met Office, 1998 was the hottest year so far, although NASA — which arguably has better data — says it was 2005. And it’s all too easy to reach the false conclusion that the danger is past.

But the larger reason we’re ignoring climate change is that Al Gore was right: This truth is just too inconvenient. Responding to climate change with the vigor that the threat deserves would not, contrary to legend, be devastating for the economy as a whole. But it would shuffle the economic deck, hurting some powerful vested interests even as it created new economic opportunities. And the industries of the past have armies of lobbyists in place right now; the industries of the future don’t.

Nor is it just a matter of vested interests. It’s also a matter of vested ideas. For three decades the dominant political ideology in America has extolled private enterprise and denigrated government, but climate change is a problem that can only be addressed through government action. And rather than concede the limits of their philosophy, many on the right have chosen to deny that the problem exists.

So here we are, with the greatest challenge facing mankind on the back burner, at best, as a policy issue. I’m not, by the way, saying that the Obama administration was wrong to push health care first. It was necessary to show voters a tangible achievement before next November. But climate change legislation had better be next.

And as I pointed out in my last column, we can afford to do this. Even as climate modelers have been reaching consensus on the view that the threat is worse than we realized, economic modelers have been reaching consensus on the view that the costs of emission control are lower than many feared.

So the time for action is now. O.K., strictly speaking it’s long past. But better late than never.

. . . .And that's how bad it really 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.. . . . . .

Friday - It rolls on in

Friday September 25, 2009

. . . Right off the bat, Happy Birthday Bruce Springsteen! (He turns 60 today)

. . . .Somewhere, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich et al are fuming mad, I mean just literally sitting there smoking. They have probably all retreated to some private club somewhere to get drunk as hell together. They wanted so badly for the United States to get attacked again, another terrorist attack, and prove that they were right with their belief that somehow the country was fundamentally not safer under Obama, that only the Right wing could keep everyone safe.

. . . .Seriously, the neoconservatives have to be just squirming. They've been wrong for 30 years on foreign policy and military strategies, and have always insisted that the Dems and a liberal President wouldn't know how to handle it. This Administration, in 9 short months, is picking off Al-Queada leaders, very effectively, and just foiled a major terror plot. Now, they've outed Iran with good covert intelligence work.

. . . .From Andrew Sullivan, on the neocon reaction:

f you believe that the only strategy American can have is bombing, invading and torturing, today's events must be a little disorienting. Here's Goldfarb desperately trying to spin against the administration:

There seems to be real bipartisan support in both the House and Senate for Congressionally-mandated sanctions that are not held hostage to this president's naive focus on diplomatic engagement and the faith this president obviously has in his own powers of persuasion.

Heh. Then this piece of undigested prose from another Kristolite. Jonah Goldberg approvingly reprints the following email:

So let me get this straight, our crack intelligence community knew about this second Iranian nuke plant a year ago (so it couldn't have been that big of secret to begin with) which means our Wonderful and Gracious Dear Leader knew about this second facility and STILL felt the need to reach out to the Iranians as if they were rational actors who could be trusted along with canceling the missle defense site site in Europe?

The sheer simple-minded dumbness of these people never ceases to amaze. Obama has maneuvered these past few months to isolate Iran without seeming to bully or dominate. Because of that, he has a decent chance of getting real sanctions approved by Russia and maybe even China. But this delicate piece of diplomacy and public relations infuriates the unchastened neocon right. They like their foreign policy crude and simplistic and ... well, Cheneyesque. Even after such an approach failed to provide any real results except the occupation of two countries and the nuclear empowerment of North Korea and Iran. Ideology remains entrenched, immune as ever to the facts on the ground.

Obama is more the conservative than they will ever be.

. . . .Zazi, the terrorist that was arrested in Denver, was a trained Al-Quaeda operative. The CIA tracked him to Pakistan where he received his training, he was handed off to the FBI, who monitored him in Denver, monitored his bomb-making material purchases, tracked him to New York, where he planned the largest terrorist attack since 9/11 to coincide with the President's travels to New York to speak to the U.N. The only fly in the ointment was when the NYPD, of all people, through their informant, let Zazi know that the FBI was on to him. Why they would do that, who knows. When he fled to Denver, he was captured there.

. . . He was Afghan born, by the way. This one was true intelligence work, and true procedural work done to thwart it.

. . . .Which lends credence to Joe Biden's pressuring the President to alter the Afghan game plan, not do a troop surge, and instead leave a Special Forces brigade to go in surgically after Afghan and Pakistani Al-Queada cells.

. . . .Surprisingly, I heard the same thing on the radio Thursday night, on Fox News, of all things, on Bill O'Reilly's show, when two of his regular analysts, retired military combat commanders, experienced in the Mideast said flat-out that was the only option that will work. Otherwise the U.S. would have to commit to sending in as many troops as it put into Iraq and do a years-long nation-building exercise, one we can ill afford.

. . . By the same token, pay close attention to a succession of things. Netanyahu laid the moral framework at the U.N. on Wednesday for Israel to attack Iran if the nuclear program continues. This morning's surprise announcement at the Pittsburgh G-20 summit of the U.S., U.K. and France's standing together against Iran's nuclear program, and their revelation that I'm sure took Ahmadenijad by surprise (but no one else) that they knew that he was just months away from nuclear weapons capability.

. . . .Again, listening to those same two analysts, it wasn't surprising, but their outlook was pretty bleak. The best case scenario, again, best case, was that Israel would bomb Iran before the facility was complete, but wouldn't be able to do anything about it, since it was 2 miles underground. They didn't see much hope for the U.S. to do anything about it, since it would involve invading and bombing another sovereign country, and we're stretched too thin as it is, as well, it would mean attacking a country that is friendly with both Russia and China, the big problem being China, who holds all of our debt.

. . . .Now, this really does transcend party lines, it's not about Right vs. Left, Dem. vs. Repub, con vs. lib; this is about all Americans, and if you can't see that, you don't have any place participating in a political discussion.

. . . .Because a lot of you don't have HBO, and don't listen to Bill Maher (and you should be):

New Rule: If America can't get its act together, it must lose the bald eagle as our symbol and replace it with the YouTube video of the puppy that can't get up. As long as we're pathetic, we might as well act like it's cute. I don't care about the president's birth certificate, I do want to know what happened to "Yes we can." Can we get out of Iraq? No. Afghanistan? No. Fix health care? No. Close Gitmo? No. Cap-and-trade carbon emissions? No. The Obamas have been in Washington for ten months and it seems like the only thing they've gotten is a dog.

Well, I hate to be a nudge, but why has America become a nation that can't make anything bad end, like wars, farm subsidies, our oil addiction, the drug war, useless weapons programs - oh, and there's still 60,000 troops in Germany - and can't make anything good start, like health care reform, immigration reform, rebuilding infrastructure. Even when we address something, the plan can never start until years down the road. Congress's climate change bill mandates a 17% cut in greenhouse gas emissions... by 2020! Fellas, slow down, where's the fire? Oh yeah, it's where I live, engulfing the entire western part of the United States!

We might pass new mileage standards, but even if we do, they wouldn't start until 2016. In that year, our cars of the future will glide along at a breathtaking 35 miles-per-gallon. My goodness, is that even humanly possible? Cars that get 35 miles-per-gallon in just six years? Get your head out of the clouds, you socialist dreamer! "What do we want!? A small improvement! When do we want it!? 2016!"

When it's something for us personally, like a laxative, it has to start working now. My TV remote has a button on it now called "On Demand". You get your ass on my TV screen right now, Jon Cryer, and make me laugh. Now! But when it's something for the survival of the species as a whole, we phase that in slowly.

Folks, we don't need more efficient cars. We need something to replace cars. That's what's wrong with these piddly, too-little-too-late half-measures that pass for "reform" these days. They're not reform, they're just putting off actually solving anything to a later day, when we might by some miracle have, a) leaders with balls, and b) a general populace who can think again. Barack Obama has said, "If we were starting from scratch, then a single-payer system would probably make sense." So let's start from scratch.

Even if they pass the shitty Max Baucus health care bill, it doesn't kick in for 4 years, during which time 175,000 people will die because they're not covered, and about three million will go bankrupt from hospital bills. We have a pretty good idea of the Republican plan for the next three years: Don't let Obama do anything. What kills me is that that's the Democrats' plan, too.

We weren't always like this. Inert. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law and 11 months later seniors were receiving benefits. During World War II, virtually overnight FDR had auto companies making tanks and planes only. In one eight year period, America went from JFK's ridiculous dream of landing a man on the moon, to actually landing a man on the moon.

This generation has had eight years to build something at Ground Zero. An office building, a museum, an outlet mall, I don't care anymore. I'm tempted to say that, symbolically, all America can do lately is keep digging a hole, but Ground Zero doesn't represent a hole. It is a hole. America: Home of the Freedom Pit. Ironically, it's spitting distance from Wall Street, where they knock down buildings a different way - through foreclosure.

That's the ultimate sign of our lethargy: millions thrown out of their homes, tossed out of work, lost their life savings, retirements postponed - and they just take it. 30% interest on credit cards? It's a good thing the Supreme Court legalized sodomy a few years ago.

Why can't we get off our back? Is it something in the food? Actually, yes. I found out something interesting researching last week's editorial on how we should be taxing the unhealthy things Americans put into their bodies, like sodas and junk foods and gerbils. Did you know that we eat the same high-fat, high-carb, sugar-laden shit that's served in prisons and in religious cults to keep the subjects in a zombie-like state of lethargic compliance? Why haven't Americans arisen en masse to demand a strong public option? Because "The Bachelor" is on. We're tired and our brain stems hurt from washing down French fries with McDonald's orange drink.

The research is in: high-fat diets makes you lazy and stupid. Rats on an American diet weren't motivated to navigate their maze and once in the maze they made more mistakes. And, instead of exercising on their wheel, they just used it to hang clothes on. Of course we can't ban assault rifles - we're the first generation too lazy to make its own coffee. We're the generation that invented the soft chocolate chip cookie: like a cookie, only not so exhausting to chew. I ask you, if the food we're eating in America isn't making us stupid, how come the people in Carl's Jr. ads never think to put a napkin over their pants?

. . . .Senator Stabenow from Michigan in the Finance Committee hearings yesterday. Go Debbie!:
- Senator Kyl from Arizona on not wanting maternity coverage in his health care policy because "he wasn't likely to use it"
- Senator Stabenow - "I think your Mom did"

. . . . One of the only 5 economists with a brain, Paul Krugman, was on Bill Maher last night. Krugman said, in his own estimation, that while the American Dream is not dead "it's dying pretty fast" particularly in terms of social mobility. "On bad mornings, I wake up and I think that we're turning into a Latin American country, but on good mornings I wake up and I think, well, this is America and there is another FDR right around the corner. I was kind of hoping that Obama was FDR, but maybe not."

. . . .I am so tired of cons, neocons, and the Right being one-trick ponies, beating the same tin drum. I will listen a Rightie yell "socialism" when they've turned off their public utilities, (goodbye showers, flushing toilets and lights), shut off their Internet and cable TV, stopped using the post office, parked their car and not filled it with gasoline that was transported in DOT pipelines, and don't take public transportation to my house over Interstate highways, and walked to my house paying tolls to every property owner's lines they had to cross.

. . . And for those of you Righties, cons and neocons who are thumping your tin drum about schoolkids singing for the President this week, you've got selective amnesia. Your boy, GWB, had a group of kids singing his praises, with a special song written just for them to sing to him in The Fucking White House on Easter weekend, 2oo6.

. . . .Matt Taibbi, my favorite reporter, from his blog, on what I still consider the biggest story and the biggest issue out there:

Alan Grayson: I would like to know whether it is within the Federal Reserve’s legal authority to try to manipulate the stock market or the futures market.

Federal Reserve GC Scott Alvarez: I don’t believe the Federal Reserve tries to manipulate the stock market…(Yoda: Do or do not, there is no try.)

Alan Grayson: Does the Federal Reserve actually possess all the gold that’s listed on their balance sheet.

Scott Alvarez, doing a classic poker body language tell, and taking his time: Yes…

Alan Grayson: Who actually executes the trades for the Federal Reserve in the markets?

Scott Alvarez: The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which executes trades through Primary Dealers.

Alan Grayson: Can you name one Primary Dealer?

Scott Alvarez: JP Morgan Chase

Alan Grayson: Do you mind if we have a GAO audit to see if there has been front-running or insider trading by them? Do you mind? Is that ok with you?

Scott Alvarez: I am not sure if I have that authority…

via “Have The Federal Reserve Or Prime Brokers Ever Tried To Manipulate The Stock Market?” | zero hedge.

First of all, apologies again for being absent from normal posting routine. We are putting to bed a very large story today, so I’ve been nuts.

Anyway, Alan Grayson, Bernie Sanders, Ron Paul and others keep hammering away at this whole Fed-secrecy issue, and every now and then we get some pretty interesting exchanges. Zero Hedge relates this one between Grayson and Fed counsel Scott Alvarez. It’s becoming abundantly clear that at some point we’re going to start to hear details about monstrous front-running operations involving the major banks on Wall Street.

I recommend that everyone watch this clip just for the sheer entertainment value (scroll to the bottom; I’ve embedded it there). I have personal experience with… well, let’s call it the unique personality of Alan Grayson. In his capacity as an attorney he once basically threatened to have me dismembered and have my body parts dumped in a tin canister and fired into the center of a burning supernova. And that’s actually underselling the real language he used. We were having a disagreement about the use of information given to me by a certain source in a story about military contracting, and in the middle of what had been a normal contentious argument between two sane adults, dude suddenly assumed this crazy monster-voice and just went medieval on me. He was roaring into the telephone about how he was going to crush me, how I was going to wish I had never messed with him, how I didn’t know who the hell I was dealing with, and so on. One phrase I remember in particular was, “I am going to strip the bark off of you!” It came totally out of the blue and it was like being on the telephone with a metamorphosing werewolf — the whole performance genuinely freaked me out. I may even have peed a little, I can’t remember.

When I heard Alan Grayson was running for Congress, I remember thinking to myself, That Alan Grayson? The lunatic? It can’t be, I thought. I kept imagining trails of half-eaten sheep leading to his campaign appearances. But it turned out to be true. And when I checked, his platform turned out to be quite sane and even kind of interesting. Then he got elected and I suddenly started seeing his name attached to all of these calls for transparency, various crusades for FinReg reforms, etc.

And now every time I see Alan Grayson, he’s tearing some freaked-out bureaucrat a new asshole in the middle of some empty conference room in the Capitol somewhere. I see the looks on the faces of these poor souls and I know exactly what they’re going through. Which is just hilarious, frankly. Especially since these people all tend to deserve it, like this nebbishy little creep Alvarez quite obviously does.

Now for most of last year Grayson’s public appearances didn’t rate any higher than a five or maybe a six on the craziness scale, but he’s a definite seven in this clip, trending toward eight. Watch Alvarez look around nervously, like he’s not sure whether to say something about how out of control Grayson is. He’s looking around like he expects someone to come out with a butterfly net and capture Grayson, so he can get back to lunch. But no help comes. Very entertaining stuff.

P.S. I should point out — I’ve gotten a couple of letters on this already — that by crazy, I definitely mean Grayson sounds off his rocker when questioning Alvarez. Although the Fed is certainly guilty of almost everything Grayson accuses them of, the line of questioning is just bizarre. What Grayson does here is sort of like asking someone to just admit to being an axe murderer. Just admit it! Admit you murder people with axes. We all know what your denials mean! That said, this doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the suffering of Alvarez in this exchange.

. . . .From the LA Times, via Cesca:

The LA Times:

The legislators' reluctance to control premium costs comes despite the fact that they intend to require virtually all Americans to get health insurance, an unprecedented mandate -- long sought by insurance companies -- that would mark the first time the federal government has compelled consumers to buy a single industry's product, effectively creating a captive market.

"We are about to force at least 30 million people into an insurance market where the sharks are circling," said California Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, a Democrat who served as the state's insurance commissioner for eight years. "Without effective protections, they will be eaten alive."

Healthcare reform with mandates but no cost controls or public option is a corporate takeover of American life. This is how we ought to be defining this. Max Baucus and his ilk are on the record in favor of such a takeover. If we're going to be mandated to buy insurance, which is a goal not without merit, then we need to have a public option so corporations aren't in total control of our health.

Put another way, education in America is compulsory within various age ranges state-by-state. Now imagine if there wasn't a free public school option and, instead, we were all required under penalty of law to send our kids to private schools where tuition is often prohibitively expensive.

. . . .And the Right Wing continues to implode, the war between Joe Scarborough and Glenn Beck continues to heat up:

There’s a civil war going on between two big-shot conservative talk-show hosts and the Republican Party is caught in the crosshairs.

This week, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough called out Fox News’ Glenn Beck for hate speech. He gave 2012 hopefuls an ultimatum. “We’re going to have a conservatives’ honor roll on this show…,” he told the Morning Joe audience. “I’m talking to you, Mitt Romney, and I’m talking about anyone who wants to be president in 2012. … You need to call out this type of hatred.”

. . . But it continues unabated, Goebbles, err, sorry Beck, continues to command attention and is the mainstream media darling:

Beck has made no bones about his desire to shape the media's agenda. He's Fox News' Czar War commander in chief, lead ACORN crusher, resident conspiracy theorist, and favored "rodeo clown," all wrapped into one.

One would think that the mainstream media would be wary of covering stories promoted by a man who, while role-playing as President Obama, pretended to pour gasoline on the "average American" and asked Obama, "[W]hy don't you just set us on fire?" But one would be wrong.

Beck brought to us the 9-12 Project, which served as the inspiration for the 9-12 "March on Washington," when Americans tearfully came together as we did "the day after 9-11" ... to protest taxes, health care reform, government spending, and an African-American who has taken over the White House. Did the media sit out the story of tens of thousands of Beck and Fox News fans invading D.C. to protest these things? Nope. While Fox News claimed that media outlets "missed" the story of the 9-12 protests, as TVNewser.com noted, "those other networks were there" at the 9-12 protests. As Howard Kurtz wrote in The Washington Post, "[T]he other networks indeed covered the protest, which -- like similar demonstrations across the country -- were heavily promoted by Fox, especially talk show host Glenn Beck."

. . . And just what is it that Glenn Beck gives America that is such a precious gift? The AP reports that Bill Sparkman, the single father of two, the cancer survivor, the man who held two jobs; as a teacher and as a census worker, when found murdered in Clay County, KY with the word FED written on his chest; was hanged, gagged, bound and naked when the atrocity occurred to him in 9/12. I'm just so fucking thankful that there's people like Glenn Beck around to keep the real America safe. Quite honestly, I really do hope someone does the same thing to Beck, in front of his children, and tapes it.

. . . . .And the other candidate for giving an alien race a reason for wiping human existence from the galaxy, Rush Limbaugh on his radio program on Friday. (For those of you who have ties to the First Nations people, you'll get this one) -"There were what, 95 million of them? And there's what now, 4 million? We killed 91 million of them? Who cares? They've all got casinos, they're rich."

. . . .And that's how bad it really 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.

Uphill climb

Thursday September 25, 2009

. . . .Straight off into it today.

. . . . .Article 31: "Every citizen has the right to health care. The state takes care of public health and provide the means of prevention and treatment by building different types of hospitals and medical institutions."

. . . .That's straight from the Iraqi Constitution. Follow the link and it will take you straight to it.

. . .So, the logical equation is this. Since George W. Bush sacrificed 4,000 lives, good young American soldiers, and spent billions in Iraq to get that Constitution in place; fully funded and voted for the the majority party in the House and Senate, the Republicans; why is it that a single-payer public option is good enough for the Republican party and the Iraqi people, but not the American people.

. . . .I don't buy a bit of their argument, not one bit of it, and it falls apart when examined closely. If, if as stated, the private health insurance companies are barely making profit margin, and stand to close down, then the public option will not provide a price break for people at all, since it would have to negotiate service prices at near or below cost levels, making it level on the same playing field as the privates. If, if as stated, the private health insurance companies offer good, better or best options, and people will not be forced to switch plans, then they will remain competitive, and just as in, schools of choice, the best will prosper even further.

. . . .If however, the private health insurance companies fear the public option because it would expose their pricing structure and their denial of service structure, the logical equation for what is occurring right now becomes crystal clear.

. . . As well, that small piece of evidence would indicate that the Republican Party is, in fact, not opposed to the public option, but instead, as evidenced, views it as a fundamental part of a nation's first Constitution in it's building of of a democratic Republic.

. . . .Again, sheer logic, and based on evidence, that being behavioral evidence, it would indicate then some forced relationship between the Republican party and the health insurance companies is now happening and driving that behavior.

. . . .I'm just saying.

. . . .Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks, provides evidence as well, that the Republican party does in fact believe in the public option, and has voted for it, on insurance. It was property insurance, and it was retroactive as a matter of fact. When Senator Trent Lott's home was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi, and his private insurance denied his claim, the two Senators from Mississippi went straight to Washington, drafted a bill, and formed a public insurance option for property, and promptly Senator Lott signed up and got his house paid for. Fact check and evidence here.

. . . .This is how bad it is, Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kentucky (more on that lunatic state below) is begging for 72 hours to let the damn lobbyists read the bill! The lobbyists, not us. Senator Jay Rockefeller has had enough, and finally fired off on the Senate floor (why not? Joe Wilson can do it) "The insurance industry is running some people in this mark-up" Check the video here.

. . . .Now, I've been railing on for some time about the Right wing, Republican Hate machine; Representative Michelle Bachmann of Anoka, Minnesota, Glenn Beck's drooling idiocy, Limbaugh's racism on and on ad infinitum, I'm sure to many people's point of saying "enough already". . . .to those of you who said that; screw you, I didn't say it loud enough to you.
. . . The worst has happened. A 51-year old Census worker; a single father of two, a cancer survivor who worked two jobs; who was a teacher and a census taker was found hanged in Clay County, Ky. with the word FED carved into his chest. His truck was found 15 miles away, laptop and personal effects intact inside it. He was found on Sept. 13, the murder occurred on Sept. 12. That's right. . .Glenn Beck's 9/12.
The Feds are now investigating. The story was kept quiet, but finally broke yesterday.
The first thing that the Righties are doing is pointing the finger saying "dope country", "meth lab". . . . .Wrong, dunderheads.
The very last thing that a good dope grower or meth lab owner wants is State and Federal police crawling all over the county doing forensic evidence, going door to door, searching homes and fields. No, if it was a dope farm or a meth lab, there would have never been a body, it would have been fed as slop to the pigs, the truck would have scrapped out into parts within 4 hours, and the laptop would have crushed.
This was one of Beck, Limbaugh, and Bachmann's bunch; the 9/12 Teabaggers who have now been so emboldened, so fired up that they now feel fully justified and righteous. I know that some of you still watch Glenn Beck, that mentally deranged twisted ex-morning zoo FM hack and his twisted Mormon philosophies. . . .if you do, and continue to, you deserve one another.

. . . ."When fascism comes to America, it will come draped in the flag, and carrying a cross"
- Sinclair Lewis

. . . Another word on Beck, from postmodern conservative James Poulos, via Andrew Sullivan.

A word about Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck is the worst. But why? Not so much because of who he distrusts or why. From where I’m standing, Beck is so awful because he theatrically combines and conflates performances of ultimate sincerity with performances of ultimate sarcasm. I think this is a telltale sign of a soul disordered by a confusion of love, power, and resentment. It becomes impossible, in such a person, to tell quite where their selfless solidarity, their egotism, and their hatred borne of weakness begin or end. And the titillating quality of this unstable charisma is precisely what they latch onto and exploit to become less a famous person than a famous happening. Their individual being becomes incidental to the phenomenon they represent. They actually corrode or dissolve their own identity in order to experience some hugeness that seems impossible to experience as a normal, integral human being. Any actual pomocon looks on that kind of allure as troublesome and dangerous, and the kind of person in thrall to it as no pomocon.

. . . .There is a reason that Glenn Beck, the twisted fringe Mormon apostate that he is, called for Tuesday to be his day of "Fasting and Reflection". . . .it was the first day of the Jewish New Year, and Beck, anti-Semite that he is had to make sure to point out that his form of twisted, spiritually corrupt religion took precedence in his acolyte's lives.

. . . And again, the most important issue on our plates, in our nation, gets the short end of the attention.

. . . .From the FDIC chairman: "The FDIC is broke, and taxpayers are at risk." From Bloomberg:

The FDIC’s insurance fund is going broke, and Sheila Bair is wondering aloud about how to replenish it. This means one thing for taxpayers: Watch your wallets.

. . . . . .And this Administration continues to demonstrate that it is a wholly owned subsidiary of Goldman-Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. Top economic advisor Paul Volcker has gone public with his criticism of the President, Geitner and Summers and the fact that they will continue to go with the "too big to fail" pipedream that brought about the disaster that Paulson and Bush foisted on us. From the AP:

A top White House economic adviser says the Obama administration's proposed overhaul of financial rules preserves the policy of "too big to fail," and could lead to future bailouts.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker said Thursday that by designating some companies as critical to the broader financial system, the plans create an expectation that those firms enjoy government backing in tough times. That implies those financial companies "will be sheltered by access to a federal safety net," he said.

In testimony prepared for the House Financial Services Committee, Volcker said emergency measures by the Fed, Treasury and Congress during last year's financial crisis created the expectation that the government would step in to protect failing companies, their bond holders and stockholders.

Volcker said he does not differ with the administration on most of its proposals, and takes "as a given" that banks will be bailed out in times of crisis.

But he said he opposed bailouts of insurance firms like American International Group Inc., automakers' finance arms and others.

"The safety net has been extended outside the banking system," Volcker said. "That's what I want to change." He said the administration's proposal to create a new system for winding down large nonbank companies would make that easier.

The administration should make it clearer that "safety net" will apply only to traditional banks, not investment companies or others, he added.

Volcker, 81, has emerged as one of the administration's internal critics. He serves as head of President Barack Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, but has said the administration should take a slower, more methodical approach to overhauling the financial system.

Volcker served as Fed chairman from 1979 to 1987, when he tamed raging inflation, though at the cost of painful interest rate hikes that triggered a recession.

In recent speeches, he has expressed little enthusiasm for some of the initiatives under discussion in Washington, including regulating bankers' compensation. He has said there is "ample justification" for public anger at pay practices that were "wildly excessive" and encouraged risk-taking at the expense of stability. But he warned against too much political involvement.

In his remarks Thursday, Volcker endorsed a stricter separation between banks that hold deposits and investment banks. He said the "safety net" should be limited clearly to commercial banks, while investment banks should be excluded.

"Commercial banks are the indispensable backbone of the financial system," Volcker said, giving consumers safe deposit accounts and financial advice.

Investment banks take on more risk and face conflicts of interest when they combine consumer financial services with major corporate dealmaking. Volcker said it would be logical to prohibit commercial banks from trading in securities and derivatives.

The House committee is leading the effort to pass Obama's financial overhaul. Its chairman, Barney Frank, D-Mass., on Wednesday agreed to scale down a key pillar of the financial overhaul: A new regulator to protect consumers from unsafe financial products and activities.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner endorsed the less ambitious plans, which would exempt retailers and other nonbank companies from oversight.

Referring to the meeting of global leaders kicking off Thursday in Pittsburgh, Volcker said, "A lot of what needs to be done really does require a certain consistency internationally, because these problems are global."

Leaders including Obama are expected to take up global financial regulation at the meeting.

Volcker also said he hoped the administration would work to create stronger regulatory regime for insurance companies. The White House decided not to take on that issue as part of this year's financial overhaul.

Frank and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., say they will have a bill on financial regulation ready for the president's signature by the end of the year.

Frank's plan is expected to be close to the administration's proposals. Dodd's proposals are expected to give the Fed less authority over the broader financial system and to create a single regulator for all banks.

Volcker said he supported the administration proposal to create a council to oversee systemwide risk, "so long as there's someone who's guiding the process."

The administration has proposed that the Fed have ultimate authority over those issues.

. . . .I'm so damn disgusted today, I just can't keep going.


. . . .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.

And the point would be. . . . .???

Wednesday September 23, 2009

. . . . . .What I struggle with, what really gets to me, is that I know, in my heart and down inside, that this is not the country that I grew up in. Something has radically shifted, and not for the better. It's not metaphor, it's very real. It's not one of those "change happens" things. . . . .. this is not the place we all knew.

.. . . . . . ."Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." - John Adams

. . . . .The playlist is definitely changed up, whole different feel to it. If you're reading this on the Facebook notes page, and want the music, or my voiceover and commentary, switch to the external site The Desolation Angel, that's where you'll get the full experience. Turn it up!!

. . . .On that subject, yes, that's Merle Haggard in there, who is an absolute radical lefty as far as country is concerned, he supported Hillary Clinton, and supports the current President, and is sick and tired of where the Republican establishment took this country over the previous 8 years, and is still one bad ass dude at 72 years old. Check out the latest Rolling Stone print edition (with Megan Fox on the cover) for an in-depth comprehensive interview with and article about an original outlaw, and the closest thing to a brother Johnny Cash ever had. Yes, Toby Keith is in the playlist too, but he needs to remember something real well. Merle and Johnny were bad-ass outlaws long before he was, and lived it, didn't pose it. And yes, you're hearing Kris Kristofferson and Johnny in there too.

. . . .It's all about the money people, all about the money, with one notable exception, and I've been running down that road for a few days now, and that would completely deranged mental illness, and yes, I do include letting fever swamp religious insanity in there.

. . . .First off, the money. In that same print edition of Rolling Stone, available at your newstand now, is another hard-hitting investigative piece. Reporter Tim Dickinson, who really is risking something has obtained the memos and documents to prove that this summer's "spontaneous", "grassroots" protest against health care reform were anything but, and were carefully crafted, choreographed, planned and scripted with three major sets of players. First, foremost and most prominent, of course, are Republican Sen. John Boehner and House Republican Rep. Eric Cantor, working in concert with Frank Luntz and Betsy McCaughey, who scripted everything, down to who would speak in what order and yell what at each summer town hall. The funding, the second leg of the stool, was provided by two players, neither one surprising, AHIP (America's Health Insurance Plans), the largest lobbying group for the health insurance companies, and Phillip-Morris, the tobacco manufacturer who funded the opposition to the Clinton's health care initiative. The third leg of the stool are the two well known groups, Conservative's for Patient's Rights, the health care pressure group founded by Rick Scott, an attorney by training and trade, (CPR has hired, for PR and mass media expertise, Creative Response Concepts, the PR firm responsible for Swift Boating), who founded Columbia, the nation's largest health care firm, merged it with another firm, HCA, chaired by Bill Frist's brother, then wound up defrauding Medicare and Medicaid for the largest amount ever known on record. Upon resigning, he established a chain of urgent care clinics, nationwide (and obviously, has a very vested interest in maintaining the status quo); with the other group being FreedomWorks, Dick Armey's lobbying firm.

. . . .The best part in reading the article and acquainting yourself with the articles is the obvious arrogance shown by all of these players towards their base and supporters, and their smug knowledge that if they spread the right lies, used the right words, they could get an uprising going that would derail any meaningful discussion and debate around the nation's broken health care system.

. . . .And why would they do that? I point back to this, the $1.6 billion dollars in lobbying money thrown at these Senators and Representatives over the last 18 months by the organizations like AHIP and FreedomWorks.

. . . .And they are shameless. This morning, from Cesca:

The Republicans loooooove health insurance companies.

Republicans took to the floor of Congress, the Internet and the Wall Street Journal op-ed page Tuesday in a rush to defend a health insurance company [Humana] that used taxpayer-subsidized communication to terrify seniors with the prospect that health care reform will cut their Medicare benefits.

Republican leaders in both houses of Congress ripped Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) for urging the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to put a stop to the insurer's efforts, decrying what they called a "gag order" and reading the First Amendment on the floor of the Senate.

Can you imagine what America will look like if the Citizens United case goes the wrong way? I mean, corporations already have too many privileges -- imagine what will happen when they have unlimited access to campaigns, too. Seriously, it would more or less be game over.

And what about Humana? The Republicans are defending some real bastards.

"Humana was recently featured in a HuffPost story for denying health care due to lack of an enema. In 2005, it settled a racketeering suit for $40 million. It settled a fraud lawsuit in 2000 for $14.5 million. Since 2000, its profits have soared from $90 million to $834 million."

. . . .Over at Andrew Sullivan, he picks up on Tom DeLay's brutal assessment of the current state of the Republican Party:

So who does DeLay see as the GOP's up-and-comers? "No one," he replied in exasperation. "It's all the same old guys who were in leadership with me, and those old guys aren't the leaders the party needs."

. . . .That's all OK. I'd like them to remain this stupid. Sullivan points out that in the rush to cut the funding for ACORN, the legalese required leaves it wide open to cut defense contractors (the lobbying bread and butter for the Repubs) off completely once convicted of fraud.

For legal reasons, that bill against ACORN was written broadly enough that it could defund defense contractors and other recipients of government money charged in fraud cases. AL gloats:

I can't think of a better way of illustrating the double standard at work here. Republicans have singled out a group to demonize based on the supposed bad acts of a few employees. Based on these incidents, we're supposed to conclude that the entire organization is corrupt and unworthy of continued existence. But when you apply that very same standard to defense contractors, they fair no better than ACORN.

John Cole asks: when we can expect to see this story posted at BigGovernment.com?

. . . .And just to be clear, yes, ACORN needed to be cut off. There is something fundamentally wrong with that organization. As large and spread out as it is, yes, one aberrant case could be expected, but . . . .story after story after story??? C'mon.

. . . .How big a feral pig turd is the Baucus mark-up of a Health Care Reform Bill? Big enough a pig turd that no less than 534 proposed amendments have been submitted so far. The guys over at The Wonk Room, have done some excellent policy analysis and I suggest you go over there and look them through. Now, of those 534, some of the leading Republican names submitted their own:

Republicans offered two separate amendments prohibiting funding for ACORN, reduced affordability credits, and eliminated “all industry fees.” Here are some of the most outrageous:

Amendment/Sponsor	Provision	Offset
Kyl 371	Prohibit the federal government’s takeover of health care.	None required.
Ensign 409	Transparency in Czars.	None required.
Hatch 511	Prohibits authorized or appropriated federal funds under the Mark from being distributed to or used by ACORN.	No offset.
Ensign 543	Strike the word “fee” everywhere it appears in the bill and replace with the word “tax” .	No offset.
Roberts 137	To prevent Medicare payment policies which discourage physicians from fulfilling their Hippocratic Oath to maintain the good of their patients as their highest priority, and instead encourage the rationing of health care.	none.
Roberts 144	To ensure that if people like the hometown hospital they have, they can keep it.	To be determined.
Ensign 156	To ensure that the financial well-being of future generations is not compromised by the activities of the current generation.	none.
Cornyn 163	Ensuring seniors have access to physicians beyond 2010.	Strike the premium tax credit for individuals between 300-400 percent of FPL under Title I, Subtitle C of the Chairman’s Mark.

. . . ..Now, seriously, if you support some of these guys, don't you elect them to go to Washington to be smarter than you? Some of these are straight out of Beck's or Savage's mouth. These guys are mouthing a script. They're nothing more than meat puppets with the hand of their lobbyists and campaign contributors up their back making their mouths move.

. . . .While we're on the subject of justice (we really are!). Dylan Ratigan, the host of MSNBC's Morning Meeting:

The American people have been taken hostage to a broken system.

It is a system that remains in place to this day.

A system where bank lobbyists have been spending in record numbers to make sure it stays that way.

A system that corrupts the most basic principles of competition and fair play, principles upon which this country was built.

It is a system that so far has forced the taxpayer to provide the banks with the use of $14 trillion from the Federal Reserve, much of the $7 trillion outstanding at the US Treasury and $2.3 trillion at the FDIC.

A system partially built by the very people who currently advise our President, run our Treasury Department and are charged with its reform.

And most stunningly -- it is a system that no one in our government has yet made any effort to fundamentally change.

Like health care, this is a referendum on our government's ability to function on behalf of the American people. Ask yourself how long you are willing to be held hostage? How long will you let our elected officials be the agents of those whose business it is to exploit our government and the American people at any cost?

As hostages -- was there any sum of money we wouldn't have given AIG?

Why did we pay Goldman Sachs and all the other banks 100 cents on the dollar for their contracts with AIG, using taxpayer money, while we forced GM and others to take massive payment cuts?

Why hasn't any of the bonus money paid to the CEOs that built this financial nuclear bomb been clawed back?

And more than anything else -- why does the US Congress refuse to outlaw the most anti-competitive structure known to our economy, one summed up as TOO BIG TOO FAIL?

It has become startlingly clear that we as a country, and I as a journalist, had made a grave error in affording those who built and ran those banks and insurance companies the honorable treatment of being called capitalists. When in fact the exact opposite was true, these people were more like vampires using the threat of Too Big Too Fail to hold us hostage and collect ongoing ransom from the US Government and the American taxpayer.

This was no unlucky accident. The massive spike in unemployment, the utter destruction of retirement wealth, the collapse in the value of our homes, the worst recession since the Great Depression all resulted directly from these actions.

Even with all that -- the only changes that have been made, have been made to prop up and hide the massive flaws on behalf of those who perpetuated them. Still utterly nothing has been done to disclose the flaws in this system, improve it or rebuild it.

Last fall was an awakening for me, as it was for many in our country.

And yet, our Congress has yet to open its eyes, much less do anything about it. In fact conditions have never been better for the banks or worse for the rest of us.

Why is this? Who does our Government work for? How much longer will we as Americans tolerate it? And what, if anything, can we do about it?

As we approach the anniversary of the bailouts for our banks and insurers -- and watch the multi-trillion taxpayer-funded programs at the Federal Reserve continue to support banks and subsidize their multibillion bonus pools, we must ask if our politicians represent the interests of America? Or those who would rob America of its money and its future?

As a country, we must demand that our politicians stop serving those whose business models are based on systemic theft and start serving those who seek to create value for others -- the workers, innovators and investors who have made this country great.

. . . .And it continues unabated. Eric Kolchnisky, an ex-analyst for Moody's Investors Service is testifying in front of Congress today that the shoody and fraudulent ratings continue, and that many of the Street's securities are still very risky investments and continue to get "AAA" ratings.

Kolchinsky said Moody's "gave a high rating to a complicated debt security in January 2009 knowing that it was planning to downgrade assets that backed the securities. Within months, the securities were put on review for a downgrade.

"Moody's issued an opinion which was known to be wrong," Mr. Kolchinsky wrote in a July letter to the rating firm's chief compliance officer, a copy of which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. In the letter, Mr. Kolchinsky cited other instances in which he believes inflated ratings were given to securities.

. . . .No, I'm not going to talk about Quaddafi's speech at the U.N. today. That man is seriously deranged, got up there, rambled incoherently for a while (big countries are bad! big countries are bad!), looked down every so often, shuffled the papers of the U.N. charter for a while, drooled on them, then went back to his Beck-like ramble. Best part of the visit, his getting kicked off of Donald Trump's lawn. Yes, the Donald offered his estate up so that the Libyan madman could set up his Bedouin tent. There's a zoning restriction, though. No tent, so sorry, too bad.

. . . .And of course, what a perfect lead-in to three of my favorite unmedicated, drooling lunatics.

. . . .Finally, someone with a brain and an audience is calling out Glenn Beck. On his webcast with Katie Couric on Monday, Beck said that "John McCain would have been worse for the country than Barack Obama" (which I personally agree with, given his choice of running mate, though dribbling out of Beck's mouth, it was stunning) and said that Mcain was "this weird progressive like Theodore Roosevelt was". Joe Scarborough has had enough, and on Tuesday's Morning Joe on MSNBC said, in reference to Beck "You cannot preach hatred. You cannot say the president is racist. You cannot say things that have very deadly consequences. I was in Congress in 1995. I know where this can end." Scarborough made numerous references to Beck's "race-baiting" and "wallowing in conspiracy theories". Joe said that he was starting an "honor roll" of conservatives who call Beck out and concluded by saying "Not only is Glenn Beck responsible, but conservatives who don't call him out are responsible".

. . . .Conservative radio host Mark Levin took it a step further excoraiting Beck calling him "pathetic" and "mindless".

There's our 5-PMer, on Fox ... I don't know who certain people are playing to, I don't know why they are playing to certain people ... I think there's enormous confusion and positioning and pandering. It may be entertaining, but from my perspective, it's not. It's pathetic."

. . . .Actually, Beck is easily understandable. All it takes is the magic of digital video, and looking at him on tape. 16 months ago, the American health care system was the worst in the world. Last month is was the best. Back in the fall of 2008, George W. Bush wasn't putting enough money into TARP, last month Obama was a communist for even putting a penny in. He goes on the The View, has a great time, gets along, then goes on the radio to tell that audience what bitches the women were. To his television viewership, Barack Obama is Hitler re-incarnated, but to a webcast, a decidedly different audience, McCain would have been worse. Glenn is an approval whore and an attention whore. This spiritually corrupt fringe Mormon apostate is in absolute mental agony, and I'm sure the demons come chattering in his dreams every night, and he won't be happy until he's taken his audience into the absolute state of fever swamp that he's in and everyone else can share the mental pain caused by his own cognitive dissonance.

. . . .And speaking of cognitively dissonant, Sarah Palin's big speech was in Hong Kong yesterday, unfortunately for her, a tape of her remarks has hit the media, the Wall Street Journal got a copy. Now, this loser and quitter absolutely tore Barack Obama apart for criticizing America on foreign soil. So. . .what's the first thing Wasilla's favorite outcast does? Criticize America, on every policy front. Oh yes, she tired to relate to her audience by telling them that her husband's ancestors probably crossed over the land bridge from Asia (but that was 12,000 years ago, and in her Pentecostal witch-hunting church, the world didn't start until 6,000 years ago!). She repeated her tired, insane, science fiction "death panel" claim, and oh yes, in front of god knows how many Chinese investors in the audience, about the country that holds 75% of our debt said that "China makes us nervous".

. . . The best part of it being pointed out by Michael Cottle, over at The New Republic:

2. In her new role as buck-raker extraordinaire, the darling of wingnut conservatives is pocketing a fat wad of cash from a China-based financial brokerage owned by a French banking conglomerate.

How perfect is that?

. . . .Idiot.

. . . .And we complete today's triumvirate with the naturalized Moldavian attorney/oral surgeon/real estate agent Birther Queen Orly Tait, in recent interview with Tim Dickinson. In which Tait claims that there's "hits" put out on her, that her car's brake system has been tampered with, that people with "vital information" have been found shot, and that a case she'd spoken personally to Chief Justice John Roberts about and was told was "on the docket" was mysteriously "disappeared" and Roberts won't take her calls anymore.

. . .There are your leaders folks, those of you who are Republicans, conservatives, and Right Wingers, your de facto leaders; Limbaugh, Beck, Palin, and Tait.

. . . .Outta here for the day.

. . . .Kiss your kids, tell the ones you love out loud that you do, this rodeo is a one-way ticket and no one gets out alive, so pick a side, make a decision and take a stand.

The Angel

Yes, you're right, it is overwhelming, but it's still real

Monday/Tuesday (Perfect balance between Summer and Fall)

. . . .Everything really is in a balance point right now. You're sitting right on top of it and don't even know it, and every decision you make, whether or not you like it, is political, is economic, is societal, whether your want it to be or not.

. . . .Pick a side

. . . . Hey, more music you should be listening to, but aren't. The Band of Heathens has released their latest effort, One Foot In The Ether, and it's great. I'll get some of it up later in the week.

. . . .The other two releases that I'm looking forward to this fall are Kris Kristofferson's and Roseanne Cash's latest efforts. Roseanne's will be covers of her father's favorite songs, he gave her the list just before his death. That's the one I'm looking forward to.

. . . .Oh, yes, I'd also like to wave a little hello to USAISC, the United States Army Information Systems Command, it's so wonderful living in the age of Big Brother. Hi guys!!

. . . .And a big hello to the folks at Alticor up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the very same folks who brought you Amway, one of the extremist religious Right's biggest campaign donors and puppet string pullers, and the very same family whose son, Erik Prince, is the president of Blackwater, Dick Cheney's private assassins, and the world's largest mercenary army. Nosirree, they don't fight for a flag or a cause, it's dollars they believe in!

. . . .I do keep my stats and take a look at who is visiting. Here I thought I wasn't making any waves in the blogosphere!

. . . .Now, before I even go into the next one, let's get something straight, since it's about religion, and specifically, Christianity. I like your Christ, I even like a lot of the things he had to say according to all those men who wrote that book about him. I don't like a lot of your Christians, and the way they twist what they want out of that book to justify their bullshit. Enuff said about that.

. . . .I think Frank Rich on Sunday in the New York Times captured some excellent points, and summarized, at least for me, why I zero in so much on the wingnuts on the extreme Right that have hijacked our political process and are holding the Republic hostage in a very well equalized piece:

What made the lone, piercing cry of “You lie!” shocking was that it breached a previously secure barrier. It was the first time that the violent rage surging in town-hall meetings all summer blasted into the same room as the president. Wilson’s televised shout was tantamount to yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. When he later explained that his behavior was “spontaneous” rather than premeditated, that was even more disturbing. It’s not good for the country that a lawmaker can’t control his anger at Barack Obama. It gives permission to crazy people.The White House was right not to second Carter’s motion and cue another “national conversation about race.” No matter how many teachable moments we have, some people won’t be taught. (Though how satisfying it would have been for Obama to dismiss Wilson, like the boorish Kanye West, as a “jackass.”) But there is a national conversation we must have right now — the one about what, in addition to race, is driving this anger and what can be done about it. We are kidding ourselves if we think it’s only about bigotry, or health care, or even Obama. The growing minority that feels disenfranchised by Washington can’t be so easily ghettoized and dismissed.Many of those Americans may hate Obama, but they don’t love the Republican establishment either. Michael Steele, who was declared persona non grata at one of the mad “tea parties” in April, was not invited to that right-wing 9/12 March on Washington last weekend. There were no public encomiums for McCain or Bush. No Senate leader spoke to the gathering, and perhaps only Palin and Ron Paul would have been welcome from the ranks of what passes for G.O.P. presidential timber. If there was a real hero to this crowd, it was the protest’s most prominent promoter, the radio and TV talker Glenn Beck.This self-described “rodeo clown,” who wells up with tears for dramatic effect, doesn’t come across as cranky or pompous, like Limbaugh and O’Reilly. A fervent Mormon convert and proselytizer, he is untainted by association with the old Dobson-Robertson-Reed religious right. Unlike Limbaugh, he bonds with his fallible listeners by openly and repeatedly owning up to his own mistakes, including his history of drug and alcohol abuse.Beck has notoriously defamed Obama as a “racist,” but the race card is just one in his deck. His ideology, if it can be called that, mixes idolatrous Ayn Rand libertarianism with bumper-sticker slogans about “freedom,” self-help homilies and lunatic conspiracy theories. (He fanned Internet rumors that FEMA was establishing concentration camps before tardily beating a retreat.) It’s the same crazy-quilt cosmology that could be found in last weekend’s Washington protest, where the marchers variously called Obama a fascist, a communist and a socialist, likening him to Hitler, Stalin, Castro and Pol Pot. They may not know that some of these libels are mutually exclusive. But what they do know is that they need a scapegoat for what ails them, and there is no one handier than a liberal, all-powerful president (who just happens to be black).Beck captures this crowd’s common emotional denominator — with appropriately overheated capital letters — in his best-selling book portraying himself as a latter-day Tom Paine, “Glenn Beck’s Common Sense.” Americans “know that SOMETHING JUST DOESN’T FEEL RIGHT,” he writes, “but they don’t know how to describe it or, more importantly, how to stop it.” This is right-wing populism in the classic American style, as inchoate and paranoid as that hawked by Father Coughlin during the Great Depression and George Wallace in the late 1960s. Wallace is most remembered for his racism, but he, like Beck, also played on the class and cultural resentment of those sharing his view that there wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference” between the two parties. Now, as then, a Dixie-oriented movement like this won’t remotely capture the White House. Now, unlike then, it is a catastrophe for the Republicans. The old G.O.P. Southern strategy is gone with the wind. The more the party is identified with nasty name-calling, freak-show protestors, immigrant-bashing (the proximate cause of Wilson’s outburst at Obama) and, yes, racism, the faster it will commit demographic suicide as America becomes ever younger and more diverse. But Democrats shouldn’t be cocky. Over the short term, the real economic grievances lurking beneath the extremism of the Beck brigades can do damage to both parties. A stopped clock is right twice a day. The recession-spawned anger that Beck has tapped into on the right could yet find a more mainstream outlet in a populist revolt from the left and center.Beck frequently strikes the pose of an apocalyptic prophet, even insisting that he predicted 9/11. This summer he also started warning of domestic terrorism in the form of a new Timothy McVeigh. On this, one fears he knows whereof he speaks. For all our nation’s unfinished business on race, racism is not Obama’s biggest challenge during our unfinished Great Recession. He — and our political system — are being seriously tested by a rage that is no less real for being shouted by a demagogue from Fox and a backbencher from South Carolina.

. . . . . .Now, I firmly believe that Beck is as dangerous as Limbaugh to the Republic of the United States of America, and if anyone is pushing a "Nazi" agenda, one of race purity and blind religious ideological cleaving to a belief system, and acting thus upon it, it is Beck. As always, before I laid out this claim, I had to do some research, and yes, it does tie back to the little tiny hand grenade I laid out in the column over the weekend about The Family.

. . . .Beck's theocratic basis, the book that he constantly pushes and quotes from, The 5,000 Year Leap, which is pushed at Teabagging and 9/12 Project meetings, are from a discredited far Right branch of Mormonism, which is the religion that Beck has converted to, and is an acolyte of. Now Mormonism and the Joseph Smith and The Book of Mormon are all problematic enough on their own and a topic for another day, suffice to say, I'm betting that most Tea Partiers, Teabaggers, and 9/12 Project people have given no thought whatsoever to the fact that they are being indoctrinated into a fringe movement of a fringe branch of Christianity that is repudiated by their Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist and Protestant ministers and Catholic priests, and that because he (Beck) is a media "personality", they won't believe it anyhow, the natural human tendency to deny fact, even when it is presented in black and white form.

. . . Courtesy of Alexander Zaitchik over at Salon, meet Cleon Skousen, the man who changed Glenn Beck's life, and was a right wing crank whom even conservatives despised:

In reality, however, the so-called 912ers were summoned to D.C. by the man who changed Beck's life, and that helps explain why the movement is not the nonpartisan lovefest that Beck first sold on air with his trademark tears. Beck has created a massive meet-up for the disaffected, paranoid Palin-ite "death panel" wing of the GOP, those ideologues most susceptible to conspiracy theories and prone to latch on to eccentric distortions of fact in the name of opposing "socialism." In that, they are true disciples of the late W. Cleon Skousen, Beck's favorite writer and the author of the bible of the 9/12 movement, "The 5,000 Year Leap." A once-famous anti-communist "historian," Skousen was too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, but Glenn Beck has now rescued him from the remainder pile of history, and introduced him to a receptive new audience.Anyone who has followed Beck will recognize the book's title. Beck has been furiously promoting "The 5,000 Year Leap" for the past year, a push that peaked in March when he launched the 912 Project. That month, a new edition of "The 5,000 Year Leap," complete with a laudatory new foreword by none other than Glenn Beck, came out of nowhere to hit No. 1 on Amazon. It remained in the top 15 all summer, holding the No. 1 spot in the government category for months. The book tops Beck's 912 Project "required reading" list, and is routinely sold at 912 Project meetings where guest speakers often use it as their primary source material. What has Beck been pushing on his legions? "Leap," first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recast the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by French and English philosophers. "Leap" argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs -- based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith -- that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined. The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah's George Wythe University, where it has been part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (and where Beck spoke at this year's annual fundraiser). But more interesting than the contents of "The 5,000 Year Leap," and more revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is the book's author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen's own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of "The 5,000 Year Leap." As Beck knows, to focus solely on "The 5,000 Year Leap" is to sell the author short. When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck's bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place. In 1969, a 1,300-page book started appearing in faculty mailboxes at Brigham Young, where Skousen was back teaching part-time. The book, written by a Georgetown University historian named Carroll Quigley, was called "Tragedy and Hope." Inside each copy, Skousen inserted handwritten notes urging his colleagues to read the book and embrace its truth. "Tragedy and Hope," Skousen believed, exposed the details of what would come to be known as the New World Order (NWO). Quigley's book so moved Skousen that in 1970 he self-published a breathless 144-page review essay called "The Naked Capitalist." Nearly 40 years later, it remains a foundational document of America's NWO conspiracy and survivalist scene (which includes Skousen's nephew Joel). In "The Naked Communist," Skousen had argued that the communists wanted power for their own reasons. In "The Naked Capitalist," Skousen argued that those reasons were really the reasons of the dynastic rich, who used front groups to do their dirty work and hide their tracks. The purpose of liberal internationalist groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations, argued Skousen, was to push "U.S. foreign policy toward the establishment of a world-wide collectivist society." Skousen claimed the Anglo-American banking establishment had a long history of such activity going back to the Bolshevik Revolution. He substantiated this claim by citing the work of a former Czarist army officer named Arsene de Goulevitch. Among Goulevitch's own sources is Boris Brasol, a pro-Nazi Russian émigré who provided Henry Ford with the first English translation of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." "The Naked Capitalist" does not seem like a text that would be part of the required reading list on any reputable college campus, but some BYU professors taught it out of allegiance to Skousen. Terrified, the editors of Dialogue: The Journal of Mormon Thought invited "Tragedy and Hope" author Carroll Quigley to comment on Skousen's interpretation of his work. They also asked a highly respected BYU history professor named Louis C. Midgley to review Skousen's latest pamphlet. Their judgment was not kind. In the Autumn/Winter 1971 issue of Dialogue, the two men accused Skousen of "inventing fantastic ideas and making inferences that go far beyond the bounds of honest commentary." Skousen not only saw things that weren't in Quigley's book, they declared, he also missed what actually was there -- namely, a critique of ultra-far-right conspiracists like Willard Cleon Skousen. "Skousen's personal position," wrote a dismayed Quigley, "seems to me perilously close to the 'exclusive uniformity' which I see in Nazism and in the Radical Right in this country. In fact, his position has echoes of the original Nazi 25-point plan." In coming to terms with a movement that has an ever more tenuous relationship with accepted fact, we relearn that perennial lesson grasped even by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Fantasies can have serious consequences.

. . . . .I'm sure that all of you know at least one of two Glenn Beck fanatics, a Tea Bagger or two, and in most cases, they're probably not aware that they're being indoctrinated into a Mormon cult whose precepts are perilously close to Adolf Hitler's 25-point plan, and in the end, are being recruited, unknowingly, into a 4th Reich army whose sole purpose is to fight the New World Order. At least share the facts with them, the facts about who Glenn Beck really is, about what his purpose really is. I personally don't care about making people uncomfortable, once they have the facts, if they continue to make that choice, I'll know what kind of person they really are.
. . . . .From Deus ExMalcontent:

By now, chances are you've seen a supposed picture of last weekend's 9/12 Teabagger rally that shows, from an aerial view, a Capitol Mall choked with protesters. It's been widely circulated among right-wing blogs and news outlets. One problem: It's fake.From the nonpartisan journalistic fact-checking organization Politifact:"'It was an impressive crowd,' Piringer said. But after marching down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol the crowd 'only filled the Capitol grounds, maybe up to Third Street,' he said. Yet the photo showed the crowd sprawling far beyond that to the Washington Monument, which is bordered by 15th and and 17th Streets. There’s another big problem with the photograph: it doesn’t include the National Museum of the American Indian, a building located at the corner of Fourth St. and Independence Ave. that opened on Sept. 14, 2004… That means the picture was taken before the museum opened exactly five years ago. So clearly the photo doesn’t show the 'tea party' crowd from the Sept. 12 protest."
Sorry, Teabaggers -- the number according to the Washington, DC Fire Department still stands right around 70,000. A good amount of people, to be sure -- but not the two-million that Glenn Beck and his minions continue to assert.

. . . .Ass-clowns, morons, imbeciles; there aren't enough adjectives in Webster's for these clowns.
. . . .And because the one over the weekend was just waaayyyy too much fun, yet another video of the 9/12. Now folks, we are talking ultra-concentrated stupidity here, the scary part to me is that many of these people are still able to reproduce:

. . . .Now that we've had that much fun, and simultaneously laughed and sobbed, (at least I hope you did both), at these folks who are being duped and indoctrinated, marching forward, we've got a bit more to cover today.

. . . .That bit is this. It doesn't matter whether or not I voted for the current sitting President, it doesn't matter what I think of his policies. What matters is that (1) he is the current President, elected through Constitutional due process, and as such, is the leader of this nation and (2) there are people, people with an agenda, who have no intention of building the Republic, making it stronger and are intent on tearing it apart, and destroying the Republic.

. . . . .I can truly say that I don't like either party, don't trust either party, but the most important thing to me is the the extreme Right wing, the Teabaggers and Tea Partiers, the neoconservatives and their mouthpieces on Fox News represent the biggest threat to my freedoms, and have no intention in the long run of helping the Republic but wish only to impose their puritanical Christian values on me, just like the Taliban does to people in the Mideast with their extremist Muslim values, and regulate and judge my actions and behavior.

. . . .I firmly believe that the cries of "Fascist" and the pictures of Obama as Hitler are a head fake a feint, so that they can get everyone looking the other way while they attempt to pursue their own agenda, which is more Fascist, more 4th Reich like than any possible thing the current Administration can hope to put forth.

. . . .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.

Who stole the sanity?

Friday September 18, 2009

. . . . . .It is Friday, and the end of another week. I used to say at the end of the week phrases like a really bizarre week, a big week in the news of the weird wingnut world, things like that. I don't anymore, just when I think that things can't be topped, it just gets weirder and worse.

. . . .I'll change the playlist around when I get around to it, where I work, it sometimes gets hard to upload files back and forth. I'll change the order up some, that's about the best I can do.

. . . .And a little note here, if you're reading this on the Facebooks Notes page, I'd switch over to the external site http://anidiotsravingsattheedge.blogspot.com, and catch it there. There's a video embedded that, of course, will not show up in the Notes page, and can only be seen on the external site, and it is hilarious and worth switching over to.

. . . . I get to see some amazing sights where I work, sunset and sunrise out over the open Gulf of Mexico is an incredible thing to see. Do you know the one creature that sharks are just absolutely scared to death of? Bottlenose dolphins, that's the one creature that can make a shark quiver and pee all over itself. Think about it, now a dolphin has zero interest in eating a shark, it's just not part of it's food chain. A shark, if it could, I'm sure would eat a dolphin. I've seen sharks eat boat cushions, wrenches, hard hats, you name it, a shark will stuff it in it's mouth. Dolphins? They're not scared of sharks, period, and the way I've seen dolphins at work, it isn't some desperate struggle for survival, dolphins just plain like to beat sharks up for fun. They will beat a shark to death, just ram it over and over until it's in a daze, and use their voices to drive the very sensitive sonar receptors that a shark has right over the brink. Once a shark stops moving, is just floating in a coma after being beaten to death, it dies. That's the nature of shark biology, they have to move to live. Dolphins do it to sharks because they can, and because someone has to. Someone in the food chain has to remind the shark that there will always be another creature that has their number, and just running around with their mouth open showing their teeth and scaring the hell out of every other marine creature just doesn't cut it some days, and most importantly, a dolphin isn't afraid to die, he or she isn't encumbered by someone's dogmatic beliefs about what may happen.

. . . .I say all the time in my closing about what I don't believe in. I don't believe that the alien bodies are hidden at Roswell, I don't believe that precisely at Midnight on Dec. 22, 2012 the alien spaceships will show up, I don't belive the sky will open up. I don't believe any of it. I also don't believe in your Rapture, your Armageddon, your Ragnarok, your Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds. I don't believe in any of it all.

. . . .That, all of that, is driven by fear, a very basic human emotion. The fear that we truly are unique and alone, the fear that our brief time in existence is really just that, a very brief time. The fear of accepting the knowledge that we're the 6th major species to rule this planet, and understanding that there'll be another one after us. It's the fear of death, that fear of oblivion that drives everything.

. . . .There are things I do believe in. I've led a fantastic life, met fascinating people. I've worked with a man that spent long years in the Amazon, some time as a graverobber, not of the Mayan civilizations, though, yes, he did that, and I've seen some artifacts that would blow your mind. He wound up further in, and going through the graves of the pre-Mayan civilizations, the mound builders before them. The things I've been privileged to hear. . . wow. . . and see. So yes, I believe in things, but they're mine to believe in, and I don't live in fear. Some of the worst things that I can imagine have happened to me in this life already, and I'm still quite alive and rocking and rolling.

. . . .I don't fear death, and I've found here in this stage of my life, that once you truly don't fear death, and don't have to live your life by someone else's dogmatic beliefs, there is very little that you fear. I don't fear other people's opinions, nor what they might think, it's of very little consequence to me. I don't fear the boogeymen, the "ism's", I don't fear someone being upset or uncomfortable or disagreeing, in a democratic Republic, we're supposed to. I don't fear the same things other people do.

. . . .What I do fear is ignorance, a lack of knowledge. I fear blind faith and dogma. I fear not questioning and not striving to find fact and truth. I fear blindly following some elitist, like the

. . . .The following is absolutely awesome, courtesy of Laura Clawson, via Bob Cesca, proudly I give you The Teabagger Socialist-Free Purity Pledge, please feel free to copy and paste, perfect for viral e-mails, like the ones the wingnuts send around, and a wonderful forward for your friends to read.

I, ________________________, do solemnly swear to uphold the principles of a socialism-free society and heretofore pledge my word that I shall strictly adhere to the following:

I will complain about the destruction of 1st Amendment Rights in this country, while I am duly being allowed to exercise my 1st Amendment Rights.

I will complain about the destruction of my 2nd Amendment Rights in this country, while I am duly being allowed to exercise my 2nd Amendment rights by legally but brazenly brandishing unconcealed firearms in public.

I will foreswear the time-honored principles of fairness, decency, and respect by screaming unintelligible platitudes regarding tyranny, Nazi-ism, and socialism at public town halls. Also.

I pledge to eliminate all government intervention in my life. I will abstain from the use of and participation in any socialist goods and services including but not limited to the following:

• Social Security
• Medicare/Medicaid
• State Children’s Health Insurance Programs (SCHIP)
• Police, Fire, and Emergency Services
• US Postal Service
• Roads and Highways
• Air Travel (regulated by the socialist FAA)
• The US Railway System
• Public Subways and Metro Systems
• Public Bus and Lightrail Systems
• Rest Areas on Highways
• Sidewalks
• All Government-Funded Local/State Projects (e.g., see Iowa 2009 federal senate appropriations)
• Public Water and Sewer Services (goodbye socialist toilet, shower, dishwasher, kitchen sink, outdoor hose!)
• Public and State Universities and Colleges
• Public Primary and Secondary Schools
• Sesame Street
• Publicly Funded Anti-Drug Use Education for Children
• Public Museums
• Libraries
• Public Parks and Beaches
• State and National Parks
• Public Zoos
• Unemployment Insurance
• Municipal Garbage and Recycling Services
• Treatment at Any Hospital or Clinic That Ever Received Funding From Local, State or Federal Government (pretty much all of them)
• Medical Services and Medications That Were Created or Derived From Any Government Grant or Research Funding (again, pretty much all of them)
• Socialist Byproducts of Government Investment Such as Duct Tape and Velcro (Nazi-NASA Inventions)
• Use of the Internets, email, and networked computers, as the DoD's ARPANET was the basis for subsequent computer networking
• Foodstuffs, Meats, Produce and Crops That Were Grown With, Fed With, Raised With or That Contain Inputs From Crops Grown With Government Subsidies
• Clothing Made from Crops (e.g. cotton) That Were Grown With or That Contain Inputs From Government Subsidies

If a veteran of the government-run socialist US military, I will forego my VA benefits and insist on paying for my own medical care

I will not tour socialist government buildings like the Capitol in Washington, D.C.

I pledge to never take myself, my family, or my children on a tour of the following types of socialist locations, including but not limited to:

• Smithsonian Museums such as the Air and Space Museum or Museum of American History
• The socialist Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson Monuments
• The government-operated Statue of Liberty
• The Grand Canyon
• The socialist World War II and Vietnam Veterans Memorials
• The government-run socialist-propaganda location known as Arlington National Cemetery
• All other public-funded socialist sites, whether it be in my state or in Washington, DC

I will urge my Member of Congress and Senators to forego their government salary and government-provided healthcare.

I will oppose and condemn the government-funded and therefore socialist military of the United States of America.

I will boycott the products of socialist defense contractors such as GE, Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Humana, FedEx, General Motors, Honeywell, and hundreds of others that are paid by our socialist government to produce goods for our socialist army.

I will protest socialist security departments such as the Pentagon, FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security, TSA, Department of Justice and their socialist employees.

Upon reaching eligible retirement age, I will tear up my socialist Social Security checks.

Upon reaching age 65, I will forego Medicare and pay for my own private health insurance until I die.

SWORN ON A BIBLE AND SIGNED THIS DAY OF __________ IN THE YEAR ___.

_____________ _________________________

Signed Printed Name/Town and State

. . . .Now as for this piece, Max Blumenthal took a little walk through the Washington Mall on 9/12 during the little (very little, Michelle Malkin still thinks that 70,000 equals 2 million, a very strong argument for education reform) Tea Party. Folks, in all it's glory,captured forever on video (if you can't see it you're reading the Facebook notes page, and have to go to the external site, see the opening paragraphs) here's neo-conservative extreme Right wing stupidity gone absolutely supernova.

. . . .I literally am afraid of these idiots gaining any type of power. They are so simplistic and so easily swayed. The best example being Dick Armey, the ex-congressman, and founder of FreedomWorks, the sponsor and founder of the Tea Parties. Armey lives an elite life of absolute privilege, money and power, and has spent his life working for universities, as an elected official and as a lobbyist. He is ultra-rich, and oh, by the way, has absolutely no clue what it is the people he organizes are protesting against, as a retired Congressman, he enoys, has always enjoyed, state-funded health care (boo, hiss, socialist!) the "Cadillac of coverage". Bill Moyers:

"Dick Armey is the epitome of those people with power and privilege who are insured against the vicissitudes of life and want no government assistance for any suffering except their own,"

. . . Tea Partiers. . . .that's your founder

. . . . . .I have very little use for what passes as conservatism anymore, that should be obvious to anyone who reads this regularly.

. . . .Why?

. . . .I find conservatism, and it's adherents; conservatives, neoconservatives, and Republicans in general to build their belief system out of outdated and outmoded beliefs. What they are able to summon up is not political philosophy or coherent contributions to America's political process anymore; they cannot build a logical argument, but instead cling desperately to a simplistic, evangelical quasi religious/political ideology which rejects rational thought and reason, avoids logic, fact and data at all costs and relies entirely on the concept of their side somehow "winning" and far from being banner carriers for liberty and freedom, are intent on inflicting their Christian Taliban regime on the citizenry.

. . . .I find that conservatives, neo-conservaties, the Right on the whole tend to be a desert dry of original idea or thought, intellectually bereft, and most comfortable when parroting what their party's media mouthpieces told them to say, and spitting today's bilious talking point back.

. . . .At one point in time, the conservative movement in the Republic was vital and alive, when minds like Irving Kristol, George Will and William F. Buckley held sway, and upheld the Republican tradition of Eisenhower. That day is long gone, Andrew Sullivan on the death of conservative thought:

James Warren recalls the good old days of intelligent conservatism. what he doesn't say, understandably, is that, as neoconservatism became a dogma, and support for general common sense morphed into the loopiest fundamentalism and know-nothing populsim, Kristol retained his Trotskyite political sense. No enemies to the right was his motto. Beck's ignorant, know-nothing, populist bile is the tiger neoconservatism rode. And you cannot write a history of neoconservatism without understanding that it became corrupt, cynical and so divorced from the reality it once championed that it unraveled itself. Bruce Bartlett has a good take, as usual, on the decline of the right under Irving's son Bill:

There is still a need for serious conservative social science research that has no other publication outlet. Commentary is now just a highbrow version of National Review, which is just a glossy version of Human Events, which has become a slightly less hysterical version of nutty websites like WorldNetDaily. The Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Weekly Standard, founded by Kristol's son Bill, just parrot the Republican Party line of the day. The intellectual bankruptcy of conservatism today is even greater than it was when Irving Kristol founded The Public Interest in 1965. What passes for a conservative movement these days wears its anti-intellectualism as a badge of honor.

My own interactions with Kristol and his wife were always cordial; he was a gentleman and a sharp mind. In the end, he surrendered the worst elements of Republican foreign adventurism and fiscal insanity. But, unlike with his son, there was once a core of intellectual courage and independence.

. . . .I find that same group these days, the extreme Right and neoconservatives, as a whole, to be anti-knowledge, anti-education, anti-anything that conflicts with their simplistic, child-like fantasy world-view and paradigm. They have a depth of thought that runs absolutely millimeters deep. Everything is always a personal wrong caused by anyone else who isn't the same race, the same color, the same religion or the same nationality. It's always feminists, hippies, union members, dark-skinned people, liberals, commies, socialists; always someone else from a group that's different than them. Always, always, those other people are evil, and bad, and have no qualities whatsover that make them human. Every ounce of energy is expended to marginalize, disenfranchise and delegitimize those "others", because without that, the position that those of the extreme Right, the zealots, the lunatic fringe takes cannot stand on their own merits. Reading, and understanding, are beyond their capabilities. They refuse to read a bill or piece of legislation for themselves and use their own minds, instead wasting that gift on the uber-drivel that spills from the mouths of drooling lunatics like Beck and fascists like Limbaugh. Fact and reason are beyond them, and when presented with fact, they resort to mouthing one word responses, spitting and drooling, "socialism", "communism", "Nazi", without even bothering to understand those definitions. Telling yesterday that a new poll came out that 3 out of 4 High School students in Oklahoma cannot identify the 1st President of the United States, or the author of the Declaration of Independence.

. . . .I have a problem when sign-carrying, t-shirt wearing teabaggers, who apparently just woke up yesterday fully grown in America and are completely ignorant of political process take on this week's latest cause and mouth the "party line". From the Washington Post today, David Rivkin and Lee Casey:

The White House czars are presidential assistants charged with responsibility for given policy areas. As such, they are among the president's closest advisers. In many respects, they are equivalent to the personal staff of a member of Congress. To subject the qualifications of such assistants to congressional scrutiny -- the regular confirmation process -- would trench upon the president's inherent right, as the head of an independent and equal branch of the federal government, to seek advice and counsel where he sees fit.

This raises a second point in the Obama administration's favor: Some of the positions many are now criticizing have existed for years. As The Post reported this week: "By one count, Bush had 36 czar positions filled by 46 people during his eight years as president." Historically, presidents have turned to special advisers.

However much the czars may drive the policymaking process at the White House, they cannot -- despite their grandiose (and frankly ridiculous) appellation -- determine what that policy will be. The Constitution's "appointments clause" requires that very senior federal officials be appointed with the Senate's consent, though lesser appointments can be made by the president, agency heads or the courts, as Congress provides. Well-established Supreme Court precedent holds that an "officer" subject to these requirements is one who exercises "significant authority pursuant to the laws of the United States."

This is the critical difference between the White House czars and federal officials who must be confirmed by the Senate. In the absence of legislation (such as that creating the Office of Drug Control Policy, whose director is the "drug czar"), the only power exercised by White House czars comes from their proximity to the president and the access this provides. Yes, as many will note, that truly is power. But it is not significant authority under U.S. law -- which only the Constitution or Congress can confer.

Far from undermining the separation of powers, however, the president's right to organize his White House policymaking apparatus is protected by constitutional principle.

. . . . And just to make a point, the two authors of that piece in the Post above were Constitutional attorneys for respectively, Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush.

. . . .I also find that when presented with fact which refutes any position that members of the extreme Right may hold, they will stubbornly cling to their original position, fly in the face of logic and refuse to provide fact or data that may indeed support their position, since it doesn't exist, but will retreat to a position that is completely untenable, all the while wildly throwing accusations out.

. . . .I will give them that, they are well-trained pit bulls and attack dogs, who will snap on word commands, and immediately spring into action, but like all dumb animals, when confronted and attacked back in exactly the same fashion by someone who is willing to meet force with force, immediately slink back off into the dark and will "mark the turf" to remind themselves to not stray near it again.

. . . . The best charade is when these extremists try to label themselves as Libertarians, they don't have the slightest concept, the least education or the barest exposure to true Libertarian thought. If they did, they'd know that 90% of what pours out of their mouths is totally antithetical to Libertarian thought. A true Libertarian understands that there is no place whatsoever in the political process for religious thought or precept whatsoever, and understands that Jefferson, Adams, Paine, Madison, Franklin founded this country as a secular country, based on Greek and Roman political priniciples that could not be found in Europe.

. . . .Now, this is not a defense of Democrats or liberals at all, merely some points on why I detest and loathe the conservatives and Republicans so much. Republicans, the conservative movement lately gives Democrats and progressives the guns and load the damn things up with bullets for them, but liberals will inevitably, form that big circular firing squad and do their damndest to fire wildly away on one another and any other bystanders.

. . . .The other problem with liberals and Democrats is that somehow, they just cannot get away from the thought that somehow they know what's best for everyone else, and how everyone else should act and be, that government is somehow supposed to act as a nanny-state parent.

. . . .But back to the original point. The Republican party, the conservative movement has been hijacked and held hostage by the extreme religious Right. I don't have a problem with Christianity, I do have a problem with mixing organized religion, any religion, at all into the American political process.

. . . .I have a real problem with a party, the Republican party getting into bed with an infotainment network like Fox News, who willingly become sweaty bed partners and trysting lovers in their attempt to subvert the Republic, deliberately lying, and attempting to overthrow Constitutional process in their attempt to maintain racial purity and singular dogmatic belief in an altered history and a homogenous belief in absolute inanity.

. . . .I have a problem when an unmedicated, lying sack of crap like Beck reaches his lowest point yet, just as I believe that this wingnut conspiracy theorist who is a victim of the mental health system cuts and must wander the streets, instead of being locked up, resorts to deliberately lying about a sitting President of the United States, parsing and cutting his words, to fit his (Beck's) Goebbel's-like propaganda agenda. Cesca:

So, yes, Glenn Beck is crazy and a race-baiter and all the rest of it.

But now he's deliberately editing audio of the president -- I mean, wholesale reconstruction of the president's thoughts about the Constitution in order to make it sound like the president hates that founding document.

This could be Beck's lowest moment. He's spent many months deceiving his ignorant viewers, but this is easily his most egregious and obvious deception. Media Matters fully documents the fraud, but here's the shorthand:

What Glenn Beck aired:

OBAMA: The original Constitution [edit] I think it is an imperfect document, and I think it is a document that reflects some deep flaws in American culture -- the colonial culture nascent at that time. [edit] I think we can say that the Constitution reflected a enormous blind spot in this culture [edit] and that the framers had that same blind spot. [edit] It also reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day.

What the president actually said in 2001 (cut lines noted):

OBAMA: Well, you know, I think it's a remarkable document. I think --

HOST: Which one?

OBAMA: The original Constitution, as well as -- as well as the Civil War amendments, but I think it is an imperfect document, and I think it is a document that reflects some deep flaws in American culture -- the colonial culture nascent at that time.

African-Americans were not -- first of all, they weren't African-Americans. The Africans at the time were not considered as part of the polity that was of concern to the framers. I think that, as [program co-panelist] Richard [John] said, it was a nagging problem in the same way that, these days, we might think of environmental issues or some other problem that, where you have to balance, you know, cost-benefits, as opposed to seeing it as a moral problem involving persons of moral worth.

And, in that sense, I think we can say that the Constitution reflected a enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day, and that the framers had that same blind spot. I don't think the two views are contradictory to say that it was a remarkable political document that paved the way for where we are now, and to say that it also reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day.

The president was speaking about the 3/5 Compromise -- an embarrassingly racist line in the Constitution that defined African-American slaves as 3/5 of a person. John Santore at Media Matters writes:

Does Beck really believe that such original elements of the Constitution should not be considered imperfections -- imperfections that were indeed the product of a cultural "blind spot" shared by the 18th century individuals who authored it?

So now there are millions of wingnuts going around thinking the president hates the Constitution. And Glenn Beck can just do this and get away with it, and the people who ought to be seriously offended are the wingnuts who are tricked into believing it.

Remember in the 1950s when Congress investigated fraud in the quiz shows? That was awesome.

. . . .I have a problem when the unemployment rate reaches it's highest point in 70 years, when 94 banks have failed so far this year, when the only winners in the health care reform debate will be the insurance companies and the lifetime appointment mercenaries for hire masquerading as Congresspeople all stealthily take their lobbying money, and we wind up with worse coverage, more folks being denied coverage and dying (45,000 a year from lack of insurance) and a larger chunk out of our wallets, with Max Baucus serving up a dog turd of a bill and everyone starts high-fiving and chest-bumping over a victory at keeping the public option out, those people who did, didn't even pay attention to the fact that we've now locked the insurance companies, thanks to the $1.6 billion in lobbying money that they threw at both parties, all members of Congress, into being mega-corps and ultra-wealthy (just like JP Morgan Chase and Goldman-Sachs). That's what I have a problem over.

. . . .I have a problem with it because to me all of it is real. I've been an I.B.E.W. member and a U.A.W. member, I've lived in Michigan my entire life, and won't leave. I've watched an enormous number of very good people, people who only wanted to work and support their families, get the raw end of the deal, as union labor in construction and the domestic automotive companies absolutely got screwed, and we've now become the state with the highest unemployment in the nation.
. . . .I've got a problem with it when I know that my Mother's health care cost out of pocket last year after Medicare Part D, after insurance was more than some people are trying to even live on right now; when one of her medications costs $600 a month, and I know the cost in Canada, I live close enough to the border.

. . .So none of this to me is academic, or just musings. It's real. I work based out of New Orleans, a city and region whose mortality rate is now worse than North Korea's, my entire life is surrounded by people who are just trying to do the best they can to get by, and it's not getting any easier.

. . . .How big a piece of feral pig turd is the Baucus plan. Well, how about this list of points (Republican points by the way) that Baucus made sure to write into it. Courtesy of The Wonk Room:

after nine months of bipartisan negotiations, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) released the Senate Finance Committee’s health care bill without attracting any Republican support. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the $774 billion proposal would not add any red ink to the deficit and would actually “result in a net reduction in federal budget deficits of $49 billion over the 2010-2019 period.” Nevertheless, Sen. John Thune (R-SD) falsely stated on Fox News, “This bill continues to spend trillions of dollars.”

For months, Republicans have complained that Democrats were pushing a partisan government-takeover of health care that would only add to the deficit and bankrupt the nation. They insisted that any health care reform bill must exclude a public option, allow Americans to purchase coverage across state lines, exclude funding for abortion and ensure that illegal immigrants are note eligible for coverage.

But once presented with legislation that met many of these demands, the GOP demurred, refusing to meet Baucus half-way:

REPUBLICANS ASKED FOR – NO PUBLIC OPTION: “I urged the President to take the public option off the table because it’s universally opposed by all Republicans in the Senate…it is a roadblock to building the kind of consensus that we need to move forward.” [Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), 9/13/2009]

BAUCUS BILL – NO PUBLIC OPTION: The Baucus bill replaces the public option with a network of consumer driven cooperatives. As the Congressional Budget Office explains, “The specifications include provisions to establish health care cooperatives that would provide insurance coverage and operate as nonprofit organizations.” [pg. 32-38 in Baucus mark]

REPUBLICANS ASKED FOR – POLICIES ACROSS STATE LINES: “Interstate competition allowing people to buy insurance across state lines.” [Sen. John Thune (R-SD), 9/8/2009]

BAUCUS BILL – POLICIES ACROSS STATE LINES: Starting in 2015, states may form ―health care choice compacts to allow for the purchase of individual health insurance across state lines…. Once compacts have been agreed to, insurers would be allowed to sell policies in any state participating in the compact.” [pg. 12]

REPUBLICANS ASKED FOR – HIGH RISK POOLS: “Senator McCain has a proposal sometimes called high-risk pools at the state level…These are efforts I think we can have bipartisan agreement on and deal with the question of pre-existing conditions.” [Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), 9/10/2009]

BAUCUS BILL – HIGH RISK POOLS: “Within a year of enactment, any uninsured individual who has been denied health care coverage due to a pre-existing condition can enroll in a high-risk pool….The high-risk pool will exist until 2013,” until the Exchange is established. [pg. 2]

REPUBLICANS ASKED FOR – VERIFICATION OF CITIZENSHIP: “Because what the Republicans want was some verification between illegal and documented.” [Michael Steele, 9/10/2009]

BAUCUS BILL – VERIFICATION OF CITIZENSHIP: “In order to prevent illegal immigrants from accessing the state exchanges obtaining federal health care tax credits, the Chairman‘s Mark requires verification of the following personal data…” [pg. 21]

REPUBLICANS ASKED FOR – NO PUBLIC FUNDS FOR ABORTION: “I’m not going to do anything that allows a health care bill to make more abortions permissible. And if I had my way, I would do something to make them less permissible, because I’m pro-life. And I believe that the — life is pretty important.” [Sen. Chuck Grassely (R-IA), 8/6/2009]

BAUCUS BILL – NO PUBLIC FUNDS FOR ABORTION: “No tax credit or cost-sharing credits may be used to pay for abortions.” [pg. 26]

REPUBLICANS ASKED FOR – HIGH DEDUCTIBLE POLICIES: Ways for “individuals and businesses could purchase high deductible policies, create a fund for their first dollar benefits could be greatly expanded.” [Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), 6/28/2009]

BAUCUS BILL – HIGH DEDUCTIBLE POLICIES: A separate ―young invincible policy would be available for those 25 years or younger. This plan would be a catastrophic only policy in which the catastrophic coverage level would be set at the HSA current law limit, but prevention benefits would be exempt from the deductible. [pg. 21]

Republicans, in other words, have moved the goal posts on reform. Despite Baucus’ many concessions, the GOP is still arguing that the proposal “simply leads to more government, more spending and more taxes” and “spends too much.”

“The chairman’s health care proposal (known as the “chairman’s mark”) that was released by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) in advance of next week’s Finance Committee Markup is just more of the same big government policies that have been proposed by this Congress and this administration for months,” Sen. Jim Demint (R-SC) wrote on his website.

. . . .I agree with Cesca:

The Wonk Room details the long list of Republican items in the Baucus Plan. There are many. It's really a Republican plan with a few concessions to centrist Democrats.

And yet somehow there's no Republican support.

What does this tell us? Baucus and the Finance Democrats will probably allow more Republican amendments to be included during markup and an already shitty bill will become way more shitty. But because increased subsidies will also be added, the Republicans won't vote for it anyway.

And around and around we go.

. . . .My biggest problem? When a group of sheep-like, bovine, mouth-breathing, screaming morons try to blame it on an administration that's 9 months old. That's my problem. For 30 years, the American people have been getting royally screwed, and it wasn't a secret, but I didn't see any of you hitting the streets when Reagan, George Bush Sr. and George Bush Jr. raised your taxes. I didn't see you hitting the streets when Bush Sr. uttered the words "New Economic World Order" and started the process of turning us into the United States of Goldman-Sachs with every drop of debt this country has being held by the The People's Republic of China and the Royal Saudi Emirate. I didn't see you htting the streets when Bush Sr. and Clinton sold every manufacturing job in this nation to Mexico, Central America and South America. I didn't see you hitting the streets when Reagan signed an offshore drilling ban to pay off favors to the Royal Saudi Family. I didn't see you hitting the streets when Bush Jr. and Cheney abandoned the hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan and decided to invade a sovereign country on false pretenses, leaving the mess for someone else to clean up. I didn't see you Tea-baggers hitting the streets when George Bush Jr. suspended your 1st and 4th amendment rights and Posse Comitatus and activated a U.S. Army Combat brigade for urban unrest duty within the continental borders of the United States.

. . . .None of you hit the streets then, nor raised your voices in protest. Instead, as I wrote about that, I was called un-American or un-patriotic.

. . . .So, the reading list:
Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party by Max Blumenthal
-An excellent exploration of how the Religious Right hijacked the Republican party and how they allowed themselves to be hold hostage, with any intelligent leadership finally forced out in the quest to establish a dominant, Christian power structure at the top of the American Republic.
Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles P. Pierce.
- An excellent piece on how America has become the land of the uninformed, where ignorance and stupidity are virtues, where swallowing whole every lie foisted on people by the media is swallowed whole and regurgitated as common wisdom, and the ability to think rationally and critically analyze somehow became "commie" and un-American.
Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of it Back by Frank Schaeffer
- An autobiography by one of the evanglical Right, who helped undermine the American political process and usurp the Republican power structure to get the Christian right to the "seats of power", got a good look at what he'd done, what he'd wrought, and his efforts since to undo much of the damage he helped create.
The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics and Religion by Matt Taibbi
- Taibbi is an extraordinarily witty writer, with a great sense of black humor as he explores the natural human tendency to deny the truth, even with presented with fact and instead resort to a combination of Intenet-fueled emails and rumors, New Age mysticism and warped personal belief systems.
The Death of Conservatism by Sam Tanenhaus
- Possibly the most studied work, and the most intellectual, and an epitaph for the conservative movement, it traces the movement's history and long decline from Edmund Burke to it's current incarnation in Rush Limbaugh and company. It makes the strongest and most logical argument yet that the conservative movement anymore is not a philosphical political ideology that wants to build or conserve anything, but strains everyday to top itself in what it can destroy in the American Republic.

. . . .And all of those are a prelude to The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. - by Jeff Sharlet
- Sharlet found himself inside the "invisible" power structure of the fundamentalists and evanglicals that have worked and wormed their way into Washinton. You've all heard of the prayer breakfasts and meetings that some Congressional members attend. Organized into small "cells" much like other (!!?) organizations around the world, the members as they come in are told they are there "to learn how to rule the world". Called formally, The Family, it's roots extend back to 1935 where they were organized to fight and subvert FDR's New Deal and organized labor and trade unions (sound familiar?).

. . . .The reason is simple, you're in a war, and we're all pawns. What you are seeing everyday is the footsoldiers in it, unwittingly in many cases, playing it out. It's not just me; bloggers, investigative journalists, authors, writers; many of us have gone over the turf of the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, JP Morgan Chase and Goldman-Sachs and their ownership of the United States Government and Treasury and the fact that they were Obama's biggest campaign donors. What you are seeing played out everyday is a war for power, one or the other will win; The Family (Bush(es)/Cheney) or Goldman-Sachs/Chase/CFR (Obama/Clinton). It's being played out everyday all around you.

. . . .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.

Thursday A.M. Edition

Thursday September 17, 2009

. . . . .Good morning Wonderland! How are all of you today? Just checking. It's Day 241 of America Held Hostage to the merry band of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the wingnuts.

. . . .Since the readership is split evenly down the middle, yes, yesterday's last posting about race did stir up a couple of folks, got them pulled away from listening intently to Alex Jones, breathing heavily in their basements, pulled from their Glenn Beck induced couch stupor.

. . . .Now, there is plenty about this Administration's policies to be highly critical of. The handling of the still-ongoing financial crisis; caving in to Big Pharm and the Health Insurance companies on health care reform and Iraq (which we're not out of yet) and Afghanistan, where the goals and objectives, the policy is still muddled.

. . . .Those are policy issues, and ones which need to be considered carefully, as they will have generational effects, the current attack dog phase that the extreme Right wing, the fringe that now runs the Republican party, where non-elected officials, lunatics like Beck, traitorous pigs like Limbaugh, 5th column hacks like Malkin all speak for the Republican Party, that my friends, that is simply insanity, and has pulled this country into a complete and total breakdown of the political process. Somewhere Abraham Lincoln, the founder of the Republican party, is retching on himself. Jefferson, Adams and Madison have turned their backs in disgust and walked away from what they bled and fought for, and we've shamed their memories, allowing these maniacs, these idiots, these complete fringe lunatics to hijack the Republic's political process and hold it hostage.

. . . .So let me get this straight. When Glenn Beck called the President a "racist", a segment of the population silently raised their arms in triumph, smiled knowingly at their brethren-in-arms and said to themselves "finally, someone is putting that man in his place". When Rush claimed that Colin Powell's opinion was based solely on race, they all forwarded yet another e-mail to their cousins and friends. However. . . .when Jimmy Carter says it about Joe Wilson, they, and their mentors, lords and masters; Beck and Limbaugh, get all tea-bagger insane, spit all in one another's faces shouting and screaming, and then dismiss it. . . . .Oh, that's right, I forgot in wingnut land fact and perspective are meaningless and only one set of paranoid, insane voices rule. . . . .I'm just saying, you know?

. . . .If you've not heard of Sojourners, or Jim Wallis, their founder and the author of a blog called Godspolitics, you should. Sojourners, a Left group, believe it or not, that believes that Christianity and it's precepts, it's inherent morality and ethics are not the exclusive province of the Right or the Republicans. On the overall subject of race, racism and politics, he's written one of the most balanced pieces, one of the most thoughtful, that I've read on this very heated, very covered subject in the last few days. In whole:

Here we go again. Some people raise the issue of race (this time about the ways some other people are talking about or treating the first black president of the United States) and the media goes crazy. "What racism?" many of the pundits cry, "Didn't we just elect this black guy president?" (Implying: "Doesn't that prove that racism is over in America?").

So let's all just take a breath here -- as we always need to do when talking about race in America.

A few simple points:

First, on November 4, 2008, the United States did what only one other country that I know of ever has ever done -- elect a president from a minority race in a country with a different majority race. (Peru is the only other country I can think of to have done that, electing as their president Alberto Fujimori, of Asian ethnicity, in a predominantly Spanish country.) That a still predominantly white U.S. would elect a black man as head of state was stunning to many -- and, I must admit, to me. Frankly, it made me think that the country was better than I thought it was. That historic accomplishment is a sign of great progress and a hope of better things to come for racial equality and justice in the United States.

Second, the majority of Americans, and even of white Americans -- whether they voted for Obama or not -- seemed to feel proud and positive that the nation had finally reached this amazing milestone. Inaugurating Barack Obama on that January 20th Inauguration Day made most Americans feel good about themselves and about their country. The new president's approval rating climbed up to 70 percent in the week after the Inauguration, which obviously meant that even some of those who voted against him were impressed by how he was handling his job at the outset.

Third, there are many people, most of whom voted against Obama, who have basic disagreements with the president on substantive political issues. And to disagree with a black president on policy questions does not mean that you are racist. The people who initially approved of the president's job performance, but now disapprove, did not suddenly turn into racists. And my conservative friends who admire Obama personally but disagree with him politically can hardly be called racists.

But fourth -- and importantly -- there was, and is still, a hard core of racially-motivated white people in this nation who did vote against Obama because he is black, and who virulently oppose him as president because he is black. And that racist core of angry white Americans resides on the extreme political right of U.S. politics. The far-right wing in America has never supported racial equality. Their political representatives voted against both the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, and most have never repented of it. And, let's be honest, the loudest voices of right-wing talk radio and cable television appeal directly to that core with subtle and not-so-subtle racial messages, as has the right-wing of the Republican Party for many years.

If you were paying attention, you could see signs of that underlying racism at the most heated town meetings this summer. Of course, not everybody who attended, or even was mad about health care or the government at those meetings, is a racist -- most of those people weren't; but some of them clearly are. There were blatant signs of racism at some of the town meetings and, indeed, many signs that carried overtly racial messages.

I see those racial sub-texts in the intensity of the attacks on Obama -- not in the disagreements per se, but in the viciousness of the rhetoric. Racism is often about disrespect, and many African-American citizens are now feeling that the black president in the White House is being disrespected. I also see it in the supporters of the new "birthers" movement, who stir up doubts about Obama's citizenship. I see it in the furor over the president of the United States speaking to the nation's school children about studying and working hard. And, agree with me or not, I saw it in the disrespect shown toward a black president by a white Congressman from the South, whose less than enthusiastic apologies have now turned him into a fund-raising martyr, cheered on by a defiant rebel yell against the man (or is it "boy"?) in the White House.

We have all witnessed or experienced situations where someone has "played the race card" in inappropriate or unfair ways. And racism is not the cause or explanation of every social problem. Nor are legitimately different points of view obvious signs of racism. And President Barack Obama has not played the race card, expecting only to be treated as a man -- not a "black man"-- and to be judged as a president and not as an "African-American president."

But let's be honest. We all know that racism still exists in America today. We know that there is a hard core of our white fellow citizens who simply will not accept their black or brown brothers and sisters -- especially one in the White House. So while we should not call every disagreement an issue of racism, it is time call out the racism that indeed does still exist -- that wounds our soul as a nation, and that obstructs the promise of the United States.

. . . .At least one conservative voice and mind with some sanity and ability to reason and is breaking from his cohorts and standing up and saying something. Rod Dreher, a religious conservative and columnist from Belief.net:

How low will these people go? Look, I think it's important to talk about black male violence, or at least as important as it is to talk about any other important social trend. I don't think we should be squeamish about discussing it in a responsible and fair-minded way, despite what the politically correct say. But good grief, Limbaugh is up to something wicked. He's plainly trying to rally white conservatives into thinking that now that we have a black president, blacks are rising up to attack white kids! Christ have mercy, what is wrong with these people?

I won't have anything to do with it, not even tangentially, which is why I took down the post. I can't see this as anything other than Limbaugh deliberately trying to whip up racial fear and loathing of the president. This goes far, far beyond tough criticism of Obama. Does that man Limbaugh have any idea what rough beast he's calling forth?

. . . . . .Megan McArdle, a conservative columnist over at The Atlantic, in commentary of Dreher's column above:

This is possibly the first time I have ever heard the word "wicked" deployed in a public debate, and boy, is it on target. It is perfectly true that if the races had been reversed, Al Sharpton would probably be out there saying this was a symptom of America's lynching culture, and also perfectly irrelevant. The response to Al Sharpton's antics is not to emulate them. Race-baiting is not a team sport that anyone should want to join. And I assure Limbaugh, from vivid memory, that horrible bullying also took place in Ronald Reagan's America, and every other America since at least 1978.

The only decent thing for me to do now is apologize and note that at the time, I really did not think it was possible for me to like Rush Limbaugh any less. Now I realize that I was mentally excluding all sorts of activities from the realm of the possible, like murdering boatloads of Guatamalan orphans, or this sort of vileness. It won't be the last time I'm wrong, but I certainly hope it's the last time I'm that wrong about talk radio's capacity for socially destructive quasi-populist virulent nonsense.

. . . ..And, one of the most respected, reasoned, well-thought conservative voices in the realm, Andrew Sullivan, on Limbaugh as a vile race-baiter:

Limbaugh will enjoy the scorn. But he's a disgusting opportunist and racist. And his acceptability - indeed total dominance - on the right is one reason decent people will steer clear of the GOP for the foreseeable future. There is no nuance or doubt here. This is a man who wants a race war. Until the GOP throws him out, they deserve oblivion. He's a racist through and through, and if no one on the right stands up to this, they are complicit

. . . .Which is precisely my point, and why I refuse to identify myself as a conservative. Lunatic children of Glenn Beck's, Rush Limbaugh's, and Sean Hannity's ilk have hijacked that philosophical strain of politics, hold the Republican party hostage with their insanity, their treason and their desire to split this country in two and start another civil war. There is guilt by silent assent, and until those of you on the Right start to stand up and silence these lunatics, quit letting them be your leaders and your lords and masters, the voice and face of your movement, then they are who you are, and are your identity. Limbaugh's traitorous, treasonous race-baiting; Beck's unmedicated, drooling, facile, false Mormon 5,000 Year Leap theology that he wishes to replace real religion with is as bad as any tin-foil hat wearing Grays and Reptoids fanatics deep seated belief that the alien bodies are hid at Roswell. Hannity's outright lies and treason, his little pulsing forehead vein and his desire to have his all-white, country club America back is disgusting and vile. This 5th column of media that the Right uses is as bad as anything that Goebbels or Goerring ever put together in their own desire to have their pure, all-white, one religion, quasi-spiritual/political ideology put in place and "save their country". Heil Glenn, Rush and Sean. . . .Heil.

. . . .Because Glenn.....Rush. . . . .this is the path that you've made a very conscious choice to follow, and where it leads is this.. . . .on Tuesday, down in Morrow, Georgia a man beat an Army vet, Tasha Hill, senseless, pummeled her, in public, in front of her 7 year old daughter, in front of a Cracker Barrel restaurant, hurling racial epithets and obscenities at her while beating her.

"The man slung open the door pretty hard and fast and I had to push my daughter out of the way. I turned to the man and I just said, 'Excuse me sir, you need to watch yourself you almost hit my daughter in the face.' And from there it just went downhill," said Hill. At that point, West became enraged and began to beat the victim in front of her 7-year-old daughter, according to police. Hill said she told West she was an Army service member and she did not want any trouble.cWest threw her to the ground and hit her in the head with his fists and feet, police said. During the exchange, witnesses said West could be heard screaming racial slurs towards the victim.

According to Hill's report, and confirmed by many witnesses, West screamed out racial slurs before punching her in the face. "He said, 'You're an fucking black nigger bitch,' is what he said," said Hill.

. . . .At least someone has some sanity in the Deep South, though I expect him to get run out of town before sundown. A Federal Judge (a Bush appointee by the way, just to get that out of the way) in Georgia not only threw Birther queen Orly Tait's lawsuit out of court yesterday, he also handed her a stern warning not to appear in his court again. Tait was representing Capt. Connie Rhodes, and her argument that she should not be deployed to Iraq, since her Commander-in-Chief isn't legitimately in office. (What doesn't she get about the fact that you put the uniform on, you take orders, period?) His judgment, here in part:

"She has presented no credible evidence and has made no reliable factual allegations to support her unsubstantiated, conclusory allegations and conjecture that President Obama is ineligible to serve as President of the United States...

Acknowledging the existence of a document that shows the President was born in Hawaii, Plaintiff alleges that the document 'cannot be verified as genuine, and should be presumed fraudulent.' In further support of her claim, Plaintiff relies upon 'the general opinion in the rest of the world' that 'Barack Hussein Obama has, in essence, slipped through the guardrails to become President.' Moreover, as though the 'general opinion in the rest of the world' were not enough, Plaintiff alleges in her Complaint that according to an 'AOL poll 85% of Americans believe that Obama was not vetted, needs to be vetted and his vital records need to be produced.' Finally, in a remarkable shifting of the traditional legal burden of proof, Plaintiff unashamedly alleges that Defendant has the burden to prove his 'natural born' status. Thus, Plaintiff’s counsel, who champions herself as a defender of liberty and freedom, seeks to use the power of the judiciary to compel a citizen, albeit the President of the United States, to 'prove his innocence' to 'charges' that are based upon conjecture and speculation. Any middle school civics student would readily recognize the irony of abandoning fundamental principles upon which our Country was founded in order to purportedly 'protect and preserve' those very principles ....

Plaintiff’s complaint is not plausible on its face. To the extent that it alleges any 'facts,' the Complaint does not connect those facts to any actual violation of Plaintiff’s individual constitutional rights. Unlike in Alice in Wonderland, simply saying something is so does not make it so."

. . . .Since this lawsuit was heard in Columbus, Georgia, I expect to hear soon that Judge Land was tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail, or at the very least, a brick thrown through his window anonymously at night, with the note attached telling him that "y'all need to git out of town before sundown".believe that Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ for sure, 15% are "well, maybe . . . ??". Now, wher

. . . .Judge Land further went on to warn Orly Taitz, the Birther Queen who is an attorney, a real estate agent and a dentist (???) that bringing any further frivolous actions in front of his court would result in sanctions for her.

. . . .Orly Taitz looks, and acts like, the demon offspring of Barbie and a French poodle . . . . on meth.

. . . .By recent Gallup poll, 14% of Republicans in New Jersey believe, for absolute certain that Barack Obama is the anti-Christ, 15% are in the "well, maybe. . . .??" category. Where is Tim LaHaye when you need him, hunh?

. . . .Given everything above, those of you on the Right wonder why I can't do anything but laugh at you? Why I can't take anything that spills out your mouth, anything you say seriously? These are your spokespeople; Beck, Limbaugh, Tait. This is who speaks for you, is your voice, your conscience, your philosophy, writ large and out loud. These are the faces you've chosen as your leaders.

. . . .In following the very same tactics, the very same path, that the National Socialist party used in Germany in 1939; by following the same tactics and ploys that Goerring and Goebbels used, the extreme Right will out themselves, will eventually trivialize themselves and people will begin to see them for the cartoonish jokes that they've become, as they marginalize what it means to be an American, and shuffle and slouch foward like the beasts they are in their march towards duplicating the very same "race purity" and "nationalism" and "love of country" that Goerring, Goebbels and the National Socialist party took Germany towards on it's march towards oblivion.

. . . .Now, on the important issues, those issues which have substance and are real, there's plenty to discuss and worry about.

. . . .And let's get straight to Health Care Reform. Now, most of the time, I'll leave Bill O'Reilly out of the equations and accusations, because on occasion, he makes a tremendous amount of sense, and shows real common sense. The real problems with Health Care Reform have been all along plans that did not include a public option. Now, despite my own misgivings about the ability or inability to pay for it right now, it is the only thing, repeat only thing, that can keep health insurance companies honest and force them to keep their premium prices down. On his program, Bill caused jaws to drop when this came out his mouth, proving once again, that Bill Maher is right, that on occasion, Bill O'Reilly can make a lot of sense and isn't afraid to show it:

O'REILLY: The public option now is done. We discussed this, it's not going to happen. But you say that this little marketplace that they're going to set up, whereby the federal government would subsidize insurance for some Americans, that is, in your opinion, a public option?

OWCHARENKO: Well, it has massive new federal regulation. So you don't necessarily need a public option if the federal government is going to control and regulate the type of health insurance that Americans can buy.

O'REILLY: But you know, I want that, Ms. Owcharenko. I want that. I want, not for personally for me, but for working Americans, to have a option, that if they don't like their health insurance, if it's too expensive, they can't afford it, if the government can cobble together a cheaper insurance policy that gives the same benefits, I see that as a plus for the folks.

. . . .Bill isn't stupid, he can see where it all is going, and it's not going to be pretty if Baucus's Senate plan is adopted, and only the health insurance companies will be better off.

. . . .Why? Read this ABC News report on health insurance companies delaying treatment. "They are just playing with my life."

. . . .Or this case from South Carolina, where an insurance company revoked retroactively the insurance policy of a 17-year old who was diagnosed as HIV-positive. As soon as the diagnosis came in, the policy was mysteriously revoked:

Mitchell learned that he had HIV when, while heading to college, he donated blood. Fortis then rescinded his coverage, citing what turned out to be an erroneous note from a nurse in his medical records that indicated that he might have been diagnosed prior to his obtaining his insurance policy.

Before the cancellation of the policy, an underwriter working for Fortis wrote to a committee considering whether or not to rescind his policy: "Technically, we do not have the results of the HIV tests. This is the only entry in the medical records regarding HIV status. Is it sufficient?" The underwriter's concerns were ignored and the rescission went forward.

. . . . .And on another subject that I'm still highly critical of this Administration over, it's handling of Wall Street and the still current, still toxic financial and credit crisis that this nation faces. Here we are a year later, and as the country's joblessness rate rises, as more and more people are out of work, as more companies close, as more homes are foreclosed on, as more and more people go bankrupt, Wall Street is right back at it with credit default swap derivatives, the same instruments that caused the meltdown to begin with:

. . . .Bloomberg:

The cost to protect against a failure by New York-based Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America Corp., and 12 of the other biggest derivatives dealers dropped 66 percent in the past six months, according to an index of swaps compiled by Credit Derivatives Research LLC. While the U.S. struggles with the slowest recovery since 1945, the market where investors protect themselves from default and speculate on corporate debt shows confidence is the highest since June 2008.

. . . .I've written a lot about Credit Default Swaps here, if you don't understand them, this explanation may help, from Matt Taibbi. (Published last spring and recapped here then,too)

The CDS was popularized by J.P. Morgan, in particular by a group of young, creative bankers who would later become known as the "Morgan Mafia," as many of them would go on to assume influential positions in the finance world. In 1994, in between booze and games of tennis at a resort in Boca Raton, Florida, the Morgan gang plotted a way to help boost the bank's returns. One of their goals was to find a way to lend more money, while working around regulations that required them to keep a set amount of cash in reserve to back those loans. What they came up with was an early version of the credit-default swap.

In its simplest form, a CDS is just a bet on an outcome. Say Bank A writes a million-dollar mortgage to the Pope for a town house in the West Village. Bank A wants to hedge its mortgage risk in case the Pope can't make his monthly payments, so it buys CDS protection from Bank B, wherein it agrees to pay Bank B a premium of $1,000 a month for five years. In return, Bank B agrees to pay Bank A the full million-dollar value of the Pope's mortgage if he defaults. In theory, Bank A is covered if the Pope goes on a meth binge and loses his job.

When Morgan presented their plans for credit swaps to regulators in the late Nineties, they argued that if they bought CDS protection for enough of the investments in their portfolio, they had effectively moved the risk off their books. Therefore, they argued, they should be allowed to lend more, without keeping more cash in reserve. A whole host of regulators -- from the Federal Reserve to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency -- accepted the argument, and Morgan was allowed to put more money on the street.

. . . . .I'm going to point the obvious out again, and point to Goldman-Sachs as owning the United States Treasury, and the United States, the Fed, and now, every penny on Wall Street, it doesn't matter whether or not the market goes up or melts down, Goldman wins.

. . . .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

Wednesday Evening

Wednesday September 16, 2009

. . . .Personally, I think that the President needs to have more "jackass" moments. In case you've been living in a cave, he said it off the record, but was overheard by a reporter, in reference to Kanye and his rude, obnoxious stunt on Sunday night during the MTV VMA's. He pulled it on Taylor Swift.

. . . . .It's not been that long ago now that Facebook was launched. It's founder, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had gone from 150 million active users, to over 300 million, in 9 months, a speed record that would equal Usain Bolt's. Bear in mind that it took him 5 years to get to 15o million. It also is cash-flow positive, well ahead of schedule, and proof positive that the marketplace, if run in a truly free enterprise fashion works. For those of you who are users, but don't know how advertising works on it, it's a bid system, but based on placement it also does a good job, and excellent job of letting suppliers find out right away if there is a demand for their service, product, website, movie, book, etc. It's been a while since I touched on anything in this column remotely like technology as sociology/anthropology, but this is fascinating. I wrote earlier this year about Zuckerberg's plans for Facebook, and what his 5 year plan was, (which he absolutely obliterated in terms of pace). He is following the plan, as he laid it out in the article in Wired I read, to the "T". His next move? He's going after Google, and he wants Microsoft and Apple coming to him first before launching software. 24 years old, a billionaire, a damn smart businessman, and most importantly, a born intuitive for knowing what people want and how to package it. That's what fascinates me, Facebook, and yes, I am a very active user, as most of you know, is beyond a phenomenon. It's size now makes it equal to the population size of the U.S. For those of you who are active users, you'll understand it when I say that Facebook is it's own egalitarian democracy, and is an example of self-rule done right. Friends, ideas, links, news; it all rises and falls on it's own merits, dependent entirely on the population viewing it and clicking "share" or "like". It has become it's own society, and is actually pretty well far more reflective of the "real" world than any of the infotainment channels; Fox (Faux) News, CNN or MSNBC.

. . . . I started out this morning talking about Max Baucus's Senate Finance Committee draft form of his "Gang of 6" Health Care Reform Bill. . . .Bob Cesca -

Anyway, the Baucus Plan has arrived and, as predicted, it's terrible. So terrible in fact that he's basically lost all Republican support and possibly up to half of the Democrats on the Finance Committee.

Actually, you could say that the plan is bipartisan -- insofar as members of both parties hate it.

. . . . .The full PDF version of the draft can be found here. Yes, I've downloaded and will read it tonight, start to finish. If I were you, I'd do the same, otherwise, any discussion that you want to have with me about it will be pretty one-sided and short.

. . . .Your new hero should be Wendell Potter, as a former Communications VP for CIGNA (boo, hiss, one of the bad guys) he served as a flack for one of the country's largest health insurance companies, but in an Ebenezer Scrooge moment, decided to change his life, get a little good karma going and make up for his past sins:

Speaking before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee Tuesday, former health insurance industry executive-turned-whistleblower Wendell Potter warned that if Congress "fails to create a public insurance option to compete with private insurers, the bill it sends to the president might as well be called the Insurance Industry Profit Protection and Enhancement Act."

Potter also struck back against one of the key arguments made against the public option: that it would have an unfair competitive advantage over private insurers.

'Contrary to the misinformation being disseminated by the health insurance industry and its allies, the public insurance option would not have a competitive advantage over private plans," Potter told the committee. "It would have to meet the same benefit requirements and comply with the same insurance market reforms as private plans. "

Potter, who was previously a vice president of communication at Cigna, also sharply criticized Democratic Senator Max Baucus' health care reform bill in a conversation with reporters Monday, calling the plan an "absolute gift to the industry."

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/15/wendell-potter-public-opt_n_287733.html

. . . .More Wendell Potter, from Politico:

Potter said the proposal would not provide affordable coverage. It gives the industry too much latitude to charge higher premiums based on age and geographic location, fails to mandate employer coverage, and pushes consumers into plans with limited benefits, Potter said.

. . . .More from the transcript of his remarks:

Other legislative proposals, including the "Baucus Framework" being considered by the Senate Finance Committee's "Bipartisan Six," would benefit health insurance companies far more than average Americans.

The practices of the insurance industry over the past several years have contributed directly to the growing number of Americans who are uninsured and the even more rapidly growing number of people who are underinsured.

Other proposals, by providing financial incentives for employers to offer barebones plans with lousy benefits and high deductibles, would actually encourage them.

Unlike H.R. 3200, those proposals would not require employers to provide good benefits or even to meet minimum benefit standards. They also would permit employers to saddle their workers with the entire amount of the premiums in addition to the high out-of-pocket expenses, escalating the already rapid shift of the financial burden of health care from insurers and employers to working men and women.

The Baucus plan also would allow insurers to charge older people and families up to 7.5 times as much and younger people, impose big fines on families that don't buy their lousy insurance, and would weaken state regulation of insurers.

As a consequence, these proposals would do little to increase affordable coverage for those currently insured, or stop the rise in medical bankruptcy. They would, however, ensure that a huge new stream of revenue--much of it from taxpayers who would finance the needed subsidies for people too poor to buy coverage on their own--would flow--"gush" might be a more appropriate word--to insurance companies. And much of that new revenue would ultimately go right into the pockets of the Wall Street investors who own them.

Over the past several weeks, I have repeatedly told audiences around the country that the public option should not just be an "option" to be bargained away at the behest of insurance companies who are pouring money into Congress to defeat substantial and essential reforms. A public option must be created to provide true choice to consumers or reform will fail to truly fix the root of the severe problems that have been caused in large part by the greedy demands of Wall Street.

By creating a strong public option and restricting the insurance industry's ability to enrich executives and investors at the expense of taxpayers and consumers, H.R. 3200 will truly benefit average Americans.

The Baucus plan, on the other hand, would create a government-subsidized monopoly for the purchase of bare-bones, high-deductible policies that would truly benefit Big Insurance. In other words, insurers would win; your constituents would lose.

It's hard to imagine how insurance companies could write legislation that would benefit them more.

. . . . .Still like the system the way it is? Want the "government" to keep it's hands off health care reform? Ezra Klein in the Washington Post:

The Kaiser Family Foundation's latest Employer Benefits Survey is out, and they've got some numbers worth remembering.

The average cost of a family health insurance policy in 2009 was $13,375.

Over the past ten years, premiums have increased by 131 percent, while wages have grown 38 percent and inflation has grown 28 percent.

If health-care costs grow as fast as they have over the past five years, the average premium for a family policy in 2019 will be $24,180. If they grow as fast as they have over the past 10 years, premiums in 2019 will average $30,803.

No one quite knows when, or how, the system will crumble. But make no mistake. At this rate of increase, it will, eventually, crumble. Want more numbers? They're here

Quote of the Decade

History is what matters and being on the right side of history is what’s important when it comes to the legacy we leave on this planet. You don’t want people to look back on you as a Benedict Arnold, as a traitor to America. You don’t want people to look back on you as a media whore, as playing the role of being loyal opposition to sucker legitimate and growing grass roots opposition to the new world order.

Your agenda is to put out a dual message – to discredit and polarize the conservative movement to the benefit of the establishment left and the elite. Your bizarre and clownish antics of fake crying, which you proved were staged when you replicated them on demand for a GQ photo shoot, are doing nothing but reinforcing the stereotype that the conservative right is insane.

Your entire 9/12 project has nothing to do with uniting America and everything to do with reinforcing neo-conservative rhetoric about how we should relinquish our rights and accept the police state because terrorists want to attack us and Saddam Hussein has WMD’s and yellowcake.

- Completely batshit crazy Left wing wingnut conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in an open letter to completely batshit crazy Right wing wingnut conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck.

. . . .For those of you who know who both of the lunatics in question up above are, I'll give you a moment to quit laughing and spitting coffee all over the computer screen.. . . .OK, time's up.

. . . .Now, I think it's important to point out a couple of things. Beck claims that he's a recovering alcoholic/addict, I don't know. As someone who is, it's not my place to claim or decide for him if he is or isn't. My point, if you're not in the recovering community, please don't judge us by two very notable exceptions. that being Beck and Limbaugh, who also claims to be in recovery. Now, as for Beck's theology, his spiritual worldview, he does have one, and it's basis is about as far out as you can get. From Andrew Sullivan:

This I should have known, but didn't. And it does reveal some of the contours of the latest rebellion against modernity and embrace of fundamentalist religion at the heart of the American right:

"Leap," first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recasting the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by the French and English philosophers. "Leap" argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment ... The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah's George Wythe University, where it has been part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (and where Beck spoke at this year's annual fundraiser).

Fascinating. The author, Willard Cleon Skousen, has a long history in the annals of conspiracist far-right. I figured it would get worse on the right before it got better. But this trend - a combination of theoconservatism, American exceptionalism and populism - is truly disturbing. Mormonism is its natural religious base: the supremely American religion.

. . . .All of which leads me to very bottom of the bottom feeders, Limbaugh and Drudge. Now, before we launch off into a discussion of race and racism, I'm going to put some of my bona fides out there. I am white, Irish, as a matter of fact. My great-grandfather on my father's side was a Canadian Dakota who had come across the Detroit river, and left my great-grandmother pregnant (yes, people did have sex in those days). However, my former brother-in-law is black, as are two other former brother's-in-law, on my former's wife's side. On that side, most of my nieces and nephews are mixed-race. The best man at my wedding, still a friend, is black and gay. For 25 years, I lived in SE Mich, in Ypsilanti, which along with Belleville and Romulus, form one of the most racially mixed areas around. A couple that were one of my former wife's good friends was a mixed race couple. A good number of the kids, who are still friends of my sons, and walked in and out of my house through the years were black. I worked in an automotive plant, with a workforce that ran about 50/50. I spend a good deal of my time out on the Rosebud Reservation, and can count a good number of First Nation and Natives as my friends, good friends. What that leads up to is simple. I'm not black, so I can't know what it's like to be black, or to have that experience. I do know what it's like to walk onto the reservation and immediately be a minority. I say all that to point out that race was not something I was conscious of, or ever drew a distinction about.

. . . .I have zero tolerance for racism. Racism, to me, is nothing more than small-mindedness, intolerance, bigotry, ignorance and obstructionism; all willful characteristics that are a very conscious choice.

. . . .I say all that, to be sure that you know where I'm coming from when I take this next topic on, because I've said it, without providing basis, and I'm sure that I've raised some eyebrows, but Limbaugh and Drudge the last two days have now put it out on the table for absolutely everyone to see and hear.

. . . .It's easy to be subtle about racism, and to provide covert information. As in. . .I don't want to call Joe Wilson a racist, and say that's why he yelled "You lie" and wouldn't have done that if a white President was standing there, but I will say that it was Strom Thurmond, a well-known racist, segregationist and friend of the Klu Klux Klan who mentored him and schooled him. . . .See how easy it is to box that in?

. . . .I'm not going to go there about Wilson anymore. I believe that the rebuke and admonishment that the House gave him today was petty and did nothing more than add fuel to the fire and continue to make him a wingnut folk hero. I believe that the two public military reprimands that were handed to him last week and were published in this column were rebuke enough in and of themselves, I believe that knowing that he broke the Rules of Decorum that he swore to follow when he was elected a Representative and seated will turn around and bite him.

. . . .Jimmy Carter and Maureen Dowd disagree with me, that's their perogative.

. . .Drudge and Limbaugh are another matter, altogether. Both are despicable human beings, who are doing the best they can right now to ignite a race war in American and split the country in two. Will Bunch -

Except that ever since President Obama's largely successful speech to Congress last week, the message from Drudge and from the conservative echo-chorus that is conducted daily by Rush Limbaugh has become increasingly less subliminal and more shrill, and their toxic tone is one that should alarm all Americans. It can be summed up: "Black people are running amok in Obama's America - emboldened by an African-American in the White House, they are now here to beat up white folks, cheat them out of their hard-earned money, and impose 'black nationalism'! White people need to be very afraid."

I don't believe that allegations of racism should be tossed out lightly, and I've cautiously watched this narrative unwind over the past couple of weeks. Today, there can be no doubt. The lead story on the Drudge Report for the entire day until about 2:30 p.m. - on a day in which two tabloid evergreen stories, the murder of a beautiful young Ivy League college student and a round-up of terrorists in New York City just after the 9/11 anniversary, were in the news - is about a fight on a school bus. A non-fatal (thankfully) fight on a bus, that happened to involve black kids beating up a white kid, and was captured of course on video.

Drudge's typically sedate headline: "White Student Beaten On School Bus: Crowd Cheers."

Now, I noted that the story was removed as a lead item right around 2:30 - coincidentally, the story also changed from an original version in which the police declared that the fight was racially motivated. It's still a fluid situation, but right now, the world of America's newsrooms has been "ruled" (in the famous words of ex-ABC/Time's Mark Halperin) for most of today by a kids' fight on a school bus. The article also gets into racial history of Belleville, Ill., which is probably not the part of the story that Drudge was interested in hyping:

Belleville has had a long history of racial turmoil, with a past that includes police harassment of black motorists, cross burnings and discrimination in city hiring.

The divide began a century ago, in 1903, when a black man was lynched by a mob of 5,000 people in the town square, set on fire and dismembered.

No matter -- let's not let history interfere with Drudge's "Blacks Gone Wild" narrative for the day, his layout of stories and photos that might seem willy-nilly but in fact usually has all the deliberate care of a $10,000 wedding planner. Thus, right below the screen shot of punching black students, we see the headline "POLITICO: So far, Obama's failing miserably," which is in fact an opinion piece, which it would have to be since the actual news of the day (not linked on Drudge) is that the president's approval rating is climbing again. But as you ponder Obama's alleged failure, it is the photo of rampaging young blacks that you see.

On the left. we have a medley that includes a campus rape (the suspects are black), mixed in with a story about a principal in trouble for not showing Obama's speech, leading up to a photo of a black man, Kanye West, disrespecting a white woman, Taylor Swift, brought full circle by Obama again calling West "a jackass" (which he, in fact, was).

Drift back to the center for a series of increasingly hysterical headlines about the ACORN scandal, which involves a few rotten employees of a community organizing group (Obama was a community organizer, remember?) caught giving tax-cheating scam advice -- did I mention the ACORN workers were predominantly black? Do you remember all the fuss in the right-wing media about million-dollar, white collar tax-cheating advice-givers at banks like UBS? Me neither.) Clearly, today's Drudge Report is a narrative, and that narrative is all about race, and a social fabric that Drudge and his readers are convinced (based, of course, on a series of scare headlines) is coming apart.

Think I'm a little paranoid? I still probably wouldn't be reading about this if I hadn't spent a little time in the car this afternoon, enough time for Rush Limbaugh, the de facto leader of the Republican Party who has worked tirelessly to infuse race into discussions about Obama, playing tag team with Drudge, as he so often does. As I started the engine, the radio host and his caller were prattling on about the all-important school bus assault, and Limbaugh said the story is a perfect illustration of what he called "Obama's America."

That alone would be beyond outrageous, the allegation that the mere presence of a black president -- who just last week spoke to students urging them to study and act responsibly -- is encouraging kids to fight on a school bus. But that was just a small part of Limbaugh's show today, which was all about race. He harped on a Newsweek article that he claims shows that racism is pre-determined (just as liberals always argue that homosexuality is pre-determined, don't you see...so...I guess racism is OK, after all -- all-righty, then), and of course the massive left-wing conspiracy that is ACORN, the corn-rowed people who are the real ones trying to rob the middle class, and not the Wall Street types who so rarely get even a mild rebuke from Limbaugh, except when they vote for Obama. I thought he was done -- but then Limbaugh said "remember how I asked earlier today if Obama's brother is still in the hut" (not making this up) and read all of a lengthy article about Obama's relatives in Kenya.

Look, there's a lot to talk about with a new president such as Obama, who has a lot of policy proposals on complicated issues like health care or climate change, and so there's a lot there for a thoughtful, conservative critique. But that's not where the conversation is going right now -- it's all about the shiny black object.

Fox News and its out-of-control Howard Beale, the seriously un-anchored Glenn Beck, have spent most of the last several weeks focused on two issues: ACORN, and mid-level Obama officials like now-departed so-called "green jobs czar" Van Jones. Jones -- did I mention that he is black? -- and ACORN have both shared a common mission: bringing a dose of political power to poor, mostly urban people who have not had power. And make no mistake, what really scares Beck, Fox News and the vast right-wing media is not the petty fraud of some ACORN employees or a few nutty things that Jones said in his more radical past, but the fact that they will succeed in their legitimate mission of empowering American citizens.

There's something else that the right wing finds alarming, and that is Obama's relative success in speaking to the American public in a calm and persuasive manner, as he did last week. I think it is this frustration, the worry that while it's mostly a vast work in progress that the president may not be "failing miserably" as Drudge and some Politico op-ed writer allege but showing signs of success, that have led to the new more overtly racial tone, dragging the current discourse to a low level that didn't seem possible. And so -- like Maureen Dowd concluded, also reluctantly -- I can't help but feel there was a racial edge to ex-Strom Thurmond acolyte Joe Wilson and his exasperated "You Lie" at the president. It plays right into the toxic narrative that is building on Drudge and talk radio and Fox like a tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico.

Obama's post-racial America? Good grief, were we really that naive, and so recently? I can honestly say that America right now, on the ides of September 2009, feels more racial, at least to me, today than it has any time in a generation, now since I was living in New York City in the era of Do the Right Thing. And the "Racial America" of Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and far too many of their millions of "dittoheads" is going to keep getting even more racial -- if we don't call them out.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/drudge-limbaugh-and-the-s_b_287939.html

. . . .What has me so worked up about Limbaugh?

"In Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, 'Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on... I wonder if Obama's going to come to come to the defense of the assailants the way he did his friend Skip Gates up there at Harvard."

. . . .Andrew Sullivan's response:

I'm sorry but this is outrageous. The story was a classic schoolbus bully incident; it could happen anywhere any time and has happened everywhere at all times with kids of all races, backgrounds and religions. To infer both that it was racially motivated and that this is somehow connected to having a black president is repulsive. I know that is almost de trop with Limbaugh, but sometimes you have to regain a little shock. This man is spewing incendiary racial hatred. He is conjuring up images of lonely whites being besieged by angry violent blacks ... based on an incident that had nothing to do with race at all. And why, by the way, does someone immediately go to the racial angle when looking at such a tape?

These people are going off the deep end entirely: open panic at a black president is morphing into the conscious fanning of racial polarization, via Gates or ACORN or Van Jones or a schoolbus in Saint Louis. What we're seeing is the Jeremiah Wright moment repeated and repeated. The far right is seizing any racial story to fan white fears of black power in order to destroy Obama. And the far right now controls the entire right.

Do they understand how irresonsible this is? How recklessly dangerous to a society's cohesion and calm? Or is that what they need and thrive on?

. . . .And what does Michelle Malkin, Limbaugh's submissive little geisha (see how ugly it is and how easy it is to do with the right words?) respond to an incident that wasn't racially motivated, and was quickly dismissed by the police as nothing more than a "couple of bullies"?

the black-on-white student beating was completely unprovoked and racially motivated. Watch as many students cheer the attack — and the bus driver is nowhere to be seen:

. . . .Her correction later in the day? After the police had investigated? Piffle, she merely implies that it was still racially motivated, and that the police had bowed to political correctness, when in fact it was one police captain, who'd done a thorough investigation and found it to be a case of two bullies beating a kid up that they'd been threatening to beat up. Oh yeah, by the way, the other "cheering" students, can't be heard on the videotape.

. . . .Race is the 800-lb. gorilla in the room, and if idiots that are attempting to start a race war in America like Limbaugh, Drudge and Beck don't stop, there will be one, now wouldn't that be a legacy the party of Lincoln will just be damn proud of.

. . . .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

Wednesday cont.

Wednesday September 16, 2009 cont.

. . . . .For all of my friends my age or older, who somehow see themselves as "different" or above it all, or unique. Lee Siegel in The Daily Beast today with a slightly different perspective:

In society, culture and now politics, what was once considered countercultural is today the establishment. And so it’s no surprise that what was once considered the establishment—the war cry of patriotism, religion, and morality—is the new counterculture.

The parallels between today’s right-wing radicals and radical tactics of the 1960s are striking. Sixties’ Dada theatrics—e.g. Allen Ginsberg leading people in an attempt to levitate the Pentagon (my favorite)—are echoed in the alarmist and conspiratorial theatrics of right-wing cable television. Then, too, just as the radical left was inspired by a few personalities—Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Mark Rudd et al.—today’s radical right is whipped up by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin et al.

And while the new counterculture’s racist images of Obama are sickening, they are similar in their emotional violence to the images of the old counterculture’s Representative Villain, Richard Nixon—caricatures which ran the gamut from violent to pornographic. Just as Nixon exemplified middle-class, middle-aged white, repressive stasis, so Obama exemplifies—for his haters—ceaseless, wearying, uprooting change.

Each man presented the perfect vexation to enraged opponents—Nixon a hurdle to change, Obama a wide-open door to an uncertain future.

But there are two important differences between the old and new countercultures. The old one grew in strength, after a long, tortuous time gathering into its antiwar fold decent people from all sectors of American society who were outraged by all the official mayhem at home and overseas. The new counterculture, for all its hollering, seems less numerous than loud, depending on liberal cable TV to eagerly pick up and opportunistically amplify conservative cable TV’s sensationalist assaults. Without the moral center of an unjust war—without any clear moral event, for that matter—the new counterculture will only become more hysterical as its numbers dwindle to a few talking heads and “maverick” politicians.

The other difference is violence. So far, no bombs have exploded, no conservative college students have been fired on by the National Guard, and no riots have engulfed the streets.

It could well be that comparing Obama to Hitler and Stalin, calling him an illegitimate occupant of the White House, and accusing him of virtually executing a coup d’etat is, as some people say, an incitement to violence. But the ancestors of the same people hurling these slurs once accused FDR of being a "Jew" agent of the Soviet Union and claimed that his wife had caught syphilis from her "Negro" lover.

In other words, everyone, calm down. What we are seeing is the good, old American Berserk in action. It’s just that, ever since the 1960s, we are not accustomed to seeing it come from the other side.

. . . .Back later on today

Wednesday Morning Early Edition

Wednesday Morning Early A.M. Edition

. . . .A couple of things bothered me this morning, couldn't sleep, so before the day and work really starts -

. . . . .I said last night that I firmly believed we would not be better off under McCain/Palin and Republican Christian Taliban rule, and that there were some very definitive reasons for that, and for continuing to support this President, despite my distrust, and the clear proof that we've become the United States of Goldman-Sachs. I hadn't finished that piece of it, but published on ahead anyhow. Lo and behold.

. . . .This morning, writing it far better than I ever could, from Crooks & Liars by Jon Perr, via Bob Cesca, says it far better than I ever could:

Back in April, the Daily Show's Jon Stewart offered some sound advice for frothing at the mouth Tea Baggers, "I think you might be confusing tyranny with losing." Now five months after their Tax Day outburst, thousands of vein-popping Obama opponents descended Saturday on Washington for Tea Party II. But while Glenn Beck's furious followers alternately slandered the President as a "fascist," a "communist" and worse, they remained unencumbered by either the thought process - or the truth.

Here, then, are 10 Lessons for Tea Baggers:

1. President Obama Cut Your Taxes
2. The Stimulus is Working
3. First Ronald Reagan Tripled the National Debt...
4. ...Then George W. Bush Doubled It Again
5. Republican States Have the Worst Health Care
6. Medicare is a Government Program
7. Barack Obama is Not a Muslim
8. Barack Obama was Born in the United States
9. 70,000 Does Not Equal 2,000,000
10. The Economy Almost Always Does Better Under Democrats

1. President Obama Cut Your Taxes

As in April, the Tea Baggers continued to display their fundamental misunderstanding of U.S. history and the American Revolution. Apparently, the right-wing zealots are outraged by no taxation with representation.

As promised, Barack Obama in the stimulus package delivered on his pledge of tax relief for 95% of American households. Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) didn't only jump start gross domestic product and refill empty state coffers in the second quarter of 2009. As Nate Silver thoroughly documented, "Obama has cut taxes for 98.6% of working households."

Nevertheless, raging Tea Baggers spouting Republican Tax Day lies took to the streets not to thank the President, but to blame him for the tax cuts they received.

2. The Stimulus is Working

A prime target of Bagger bashing, the $787 billion stimulus package passed over the near-total obstructionism of Congressional Republicans is already paying huge dividends for the economy.

To be sure, at 9.7% the unemployment rate remains dismal. But the impact of ARRA and other government actions extends well beyond the Obama administration's claim it has created or preserved one million jobs to date. As I documented in August:

After steep declines of 5.4% and 6.4% in the previous two quarters, gross domestic product fell only 1% in the last three months. And while the ARRA overall added "up to 3 full percentage points of annualized growth in the quarter," President Obama's stimulus helped precisely where it was needed most - rescuing devastated state budgets.

Earlier this month, the reliably Republican Wall Street Journal agreed the Obama administration has helped stem the bleeding from the Bush Recession:

Many forecasters say stimulus spending is adding two to three percentage points to economic growth in the second and third quarters, when measured at an annual rate. The impact in the second quarter, calculated by analyzing how the extra funds flowing into the economy boost consumption, investment and spending, helped slow the rate of decline and will lay the groundwork for positive growth in the third quarter -- something that seemed almost implausible just a few months ago. Some economists say the 1% contraction in the second quarter would have been far worse, possibly as much as 3.2%, if not for the stimulus.

For the third quarter, economists at Goldman Sachs & Co. predict the U.S. economy will grow by 3.3%. "Without that extra stimulus, we would be somewhere around zero," said Jan Hatzius, chief U.S. economist for Goldman.

3. First Reagan Tripled the National Debt...

For Tea Baggers supposedly concerned that "deficit spending is out of hand," history apparently began only on January 20, 2009. Because while President Obama rightly resorted to massive deficit spending to rescue the American economy from calamity, it was Ronald Reagan who ushered in the now-standard Republican practice of "spending our children's inheritance."

As Steve Benen rightly noted, it was not Reagan but President Obama whose stimulus plan delivered the largest two-year tax cut in history. And as it turns out, what Saint Ronnie giveth, he also taketh away.

As predicted, Reagan's massive $749 billion supply-side tax cuts in 1981 quickly produced even more massive annual budget deficits. Combined with his rapid increase in defense spending, Reagan delivered not the balanced budgets he promised, but record-settings deficits. Ultimately, Reagan was forced to raise taxes twice to avert financial catastrophe (a fact John McCain learned the hard way from Tom Brokaw last October). By the time he left office in 1989, Ronald Reagan nonetheless more than equaled the entire debt burden produced by the previous 200 years of American history.

4. ...Then Bush Doubled It Again

Following in Reagan's footsteps, George W. Bush buried the myth of Republican fiscal discipline.

Inheriting a federal budget in the black and CBO forecast for a $5.6 trillion surplus over 10 years, President George W. Bush quickly set about dismantling the progress made under Bill Clinton. Bush's $1.4 trillion tax cut in 2001, followed by a $550 billion second round in 2003, accounted for the bulk of the yawning budget deficits he produced.

Like Reagan and Stockman before him, Bush resorted to the rosy scenario to claim he would halve the budget deficit by 2009. Before the financial system meltdown last fall, Bush's deficit already reached $490 billion. (And even before the passage of the Wall Street bailout, Bush had presided over a $4 trillion increase in the national debt, a staggering 71% jump.) By this January, the mind-numbing deficit figure reached $1.2 trillion, forcing President Bush to raise the debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion.

Tea Baggers take note: the Bush tax cuts delivered a third of their total benefits to the wealthiest 1% of Americans. And the staggering $2 trillion price tag for Bush's giveaway to the richest needing it least dwarfs the estimated $900 billion cost over 10 years of President Obama's health care proposals.

5. Republican States Have the Worst Health Care

George W. Bush didn't merely spend the health care money on a windfall for America's rich and famous. He helped ensure red states continued to provide the worst health care in the nation.

Call it the Iron Law of Birtherism: the movement which denies President Obama's Hawaiian birth is strongest precisely in those states where Republicans poll best and health care is worst.

A 2007 Commonwealth Fund report, "Aiming Higher: Results from a State Scorecard on Health System Performance," examined states' performance across 32 indicators of health care access, quality, outcomes and hospital use. Topping the list were Hawaii, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine. Bringing up the rear were the Bush bastions of Kentucky, Louisiana, Nevada, Arkansas, Texas, with Mississippi and Oklahoma. The 10 worst performing states were all solidly Republican in 2004. (8 voted for McCain in 2008.)

The extremes in health care performance are startling. For example, 30% of adults and 20% of children in Texas lacked health insurance, compared to 11% in Minnesota and 5% in Vermont, respectively. Premature death rates from preventable conditions were almost double (141.7 per 100,000 people) in Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi compared to the top performing states (74.1 per 100,000). Adults over 50 receiving preventative care topped 50% in Minnesota compared to only 33% in Idaho. Childhood immunizations reached 94% in Massachusetts, compared to just 75% in the bottom five states. As the report details, federal and state policies, such as insurance requirements and Medicaid incentives, clearly impact health care outcomes.

(In May, the Washington Post rightly noted it would be blue state residents funding health care reform for their red state brethren in an article titled, "A Red State Booster Shot." The grandstanding of Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal et al notwithstanding, the same one-way flow of taxpayer dollars from Washington to red states, of course, is a permanent feature of federal spending in general. And yet a 2008 survey predictably showed 68% of Republicans believe the U.S. has the best health system in the world, compared to only three in 10 Democrats.)

6. Medicare is a Government Program

Among the greatest ironies of the health care debate is the specter of Republicans feigning concern over Medicare. The same party that opposed Medicare in the 1960's and tried to slash its budget in the 1990's now scares the bejesus out of 46 million American elderly recipients by warning of bogus death panels and Democrats "sticking it to seniors with cuts to Medicare."

Even more ironic is that a majority of the GP faithful do not seem to know that Medicare is a government-run program. As I noted previously:

In July, Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC) described an angry constituent who confronted him at a South Carolina town hall meeting, "keep your government hands off my Medicare." Despite his best efforts to explain that Medicare is a government program, the voter, Inglis lamented, "wasn't having any of it."

But as recent data from Public Policy Polling revealed, that same cognitive failure is now far more widespread than swine flu. While 39% of all Americans responded that the government should "stay out of Medicare," 59% of self-identified conservatives and 62% of McCain voters hold that oxymoronic view.

7. Barack Obama is Not a Muslim

An April survey by the Pew Research Center showed that 11% of Americans believe Barack Obama is a Muslim, a figure largely unchanged since its polling started in March 2008. Yet 17% of Republicans and 19% of white evangelicals (74% of whom voted for John McCain) insist the President is an adherent of Islam, despite his repeated pronouncements and decades of church attendance to the contrary.

Judging from their signs, a much larger percentage of Tea Baggers maintain this error.

8. Barack Obama was Born in the United States

As it turns out, the Tea Bagging faithful are even worse at basic geography than comparative religion. The Birther contagion is running rampant among the ranks of Republicans. And even with repeated treatments of birth certificates and Hawaiian newspaper announcements from 1961, there is apparently no cure.

A DailyKos/Research 2000 poll found that a stunning 58% of Republicans did not believe (28%) or were unsure (30%) that President Barack Obama was in fact born in the United States. To be sure, this is a Southern pathology, a region home to 69% of all birthers and the only part of the country to increase its Republican presidential vote in 2008. The PPP survey only confirmed the chronic birtherism plaguing the Republican Party:

Only 62% of respondents reported believing that Obama was born in the United States. 10% thought he was born in Indonesia, 7% thought he was born in Kenya, 1% thought he was born in the Philippines, and 20% weren't sure. Among Republicans 44% think he was not born here while just 36% believe that he was.

(In a promising development, only 10% of respondents weren't sure if Hawaii is part of the United States. On this score, conservatives were only slightly more confused than liberals and moderates.)

9. 70,000 Does Not Equal 2,000,000

Math, too, provides another stumbling block for the masterminds and acolytes of Tea Party movement.

After FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe wrongly inflated the estimates of the 9/12 crowd in Washington DC at 2,000,000, ABC and others corrected the fraud. But that didn't stop the conservative blogosphere from parroting the charade debunked by both DC police - and simple comparative photography.

As Nat Silver concluded, "Size Matters; So Do Lies."

The way this false estimate came into being is relatively simple: Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, lied, claiming that ABC News had reported numbers of between 1.0 and 1.5 million when they never did anything of the sort. A few tweets later, the numbers had been exaggerated still further to 2 million. Kibbe wasn't "in error", as Malkin gently puts it. He lied. He did the equivalent of telling people that his penis is 53 inches long.

10. The Economy Almost Always Does Better Under Democrats

If the extended Pinocchio nose and a similarly over-inflated phallus are the apt symbols of the Tea Party movement, the Tea Baggers are in for one final, rude awakening. For all of their histrionics about "socialism" and "communism", the historical record clearly shows the economy overall and the stock market in particular almost always do better under Democratic presidents.

Just days after the Washington Post documented that George W. Bush presided over the worst eight-year economic performance in the modern American presidency, the New York Times in January featured an analysis comparing presidential performance going back to Eisenhower. As the Times showed, George W. Bush, the first MBA president, was a historic failure when it came to expanding GDP, producing jobs and fueling stock market growth. And across almost every indicator (article here, charts here), Democrats outperformed their Republican counterparts.

The superior performance of Democratic presidents covers virtually the entire spectrum of economic indicators. As Elliott Parker of the University of Nevada, Reno detailed in a 2006 paper, since 1949 Democratic administrations have done better than Republican ones when it comes to unemployment (5.2% to 6.0%), job creation (-.0.4% decrease in unemployment, compared to 0.3% increase), GDP growth rate (4.2% to 2.9%), and even corporate profits as a share of GDP. And to be sure, he found the Dow benefits from Democrats in the White House.

There's no shortage of studies to show that stock market returns are higher under Democratic leadership. (As it turns out, Wall Street's performance is also better when Democrats control Congress.) In 2000, Pedro Santa-Clara and Rossen Valkanov of UCLA's Anderson School of Business concluded that "that the average excess return in the stock market is higher under Democratic than Republican presidents - a difference of 9 percent per year for the value-weighted portfolio and 16 percent for the equal-weighted portfolio." As the New York Times noted of UCLA study in 2003:

"It's not even close. The stock market does far better under Democrats...

As the spent Tea Baggers wipe the spittle from their lips at they trudge home from Washington, they would do well to remember one final truth. The words of Harry Truman, the man Sarah Palin cited as her model, are as true today as when he uttered them generations ago:

"If you want to live like a Republican, vote Democratic."

. . . . . .As for Sarah herself, and why I didn't want her anywhere near the White House, the Presidency or the launch controls, no less a Republican/conservative authority figure than George W. Bush himself:

some excerpts from a new "inside the Bush White House" book coming out shortly, and what we find is Dubya was not much of a fan of Sarah Palin.

Bush also is quoted as saying Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was "being put into a position she is not even remotely prepared for" after McCain announced her as his vice presidential running mate.

“I’m trying to remember if I’ve met her before. I’m sure I must have.” His eyes twinkled, then he asked, “What is she, the governor of Guam?”

Everyone in the room seemed to look at him in horror, their mouths agape. When Ed told him that conservatives were greeting the choice enthusiastically, he replied, “Look, I’m a team player, I’m on board.” He thought about it for a minute. “She’s interesting,” he said again. “You know, just wait a few days until the bloom is off the rose.” Then he made a very smart assessment.

“This woman is being put into a position she is not even remotely prepared for,” he said. “She hasn’t spent one day on the national level. Neither has her family. Let’s wait and see how she looks five days out.” It was a rare dose of reality in a White House that liked to believe every decision was great, every Republican was a genius, and McCain was the hope of the world because, well, because he chose to be a member of our party.

When he says he's a team player all that meant was he didn't want to offend the wingnut base and their love affair with an unqualified VP choice. It's no surprise that he bangs McCain, but what will his loyal followers say after they read him attacking the teabagger Queen?

. . . .And vindication at least, as the Max Baucus and the horrendous health care reform bill that he and his "Gang of 6" put together came crashing, smoking and lurching through the doors of the Capitol Building this morning:

Many of the details in the Baucus' bill were already known. Unlike more liberal versions passed by three committees in the House and by the Senate's Health Committee, it shunned liberals' call for the government to sell insurance and relied instead on co-ops to offer coverage in competition with private industry.

Baucus' approach includes a requirement for individuals to buy insurance, with financial penalties for those who don't. Rather than a mandate for larger businesses to provide coverage for employees, they would be required to defray the cost of any government subsidies for which their employees would qualify.

The bill is expected to cost about $880 billion over 10 years, and it tracks closely with the goals Obama laid out in his speech to Congress last week.

Even as he's failed to win over Republicans, Baucus also faces opposition from liberals on his committee. Some of them want a public plan in place of co-ops, and several have also expressed concerns about whether Baucus, in his effort to keep his bill's price tag down, has done enough to make health coverage affordable for working-class and low-income Americans.

"The way it is now there is no way I can vote for the package," Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Tuesday on a conference call with reporters, becoming the first Finance Committee Democrat to voice outright opposition.

Release of Baucus' bill sets the stage for what could be a lengthy and contentious drafting and voting session to begin next week, with numerous amendments expected both from the right and from the left. Following that, Democratic leaders in the House and the Senate are aiming for floor action in the fall.

. . . .As I said yesterday, Baucus has managed to craft a bill that only a health insurance company CEO could love.

. . . .Outta here, later.

Tuesday - Turning Point

Tuesday September 15, 2009

. . . . . .I know patriotism exists, and I know it has done much in the present contest, but a great and lasting war can never be supported on this principle alone. It must be aided by a prospect of interest, or some reward. . . . . .George Washington Commander in Chief of the Colonial Armies and First President of the United States.

. . . .R.I.P. Patrick Swayze. On top of being one romantic dude, and making for more than one enjoyable evening with a loved one with a movie like Ghost, you turned in a couple of hellish performances in Roadhouse and Black Dog. His last TV effort, The Beast on A & E was excellent, and he could still be killer when he had to. (I mean, come on, Roadhouse, one of the Top 10 guilty pleasure movies ever! Sam Elliot as an intinerant biker bar bouncer? How cool was that!)

. . . .Today marks a turning point for me, the current Administration has lost me, and is going to have to work, and work hard, to regain my trust. I cannot support it's current path

. . . .No, it has nothing to do with health care reform; nor "fascism", "socialism", "communism" or any of the other "ism's" being bandied about by fair-weather "patriots" and their tea-bagging-in-one-another's-faces ilk, nothing to do with the tinfoil-hat wearing crowd of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh's Christian Taliban or Alex Jones's sweaty, basement-dwelling, droolers listening on their shortwaves for the apocalypse.

. . . .No, I do not believe we would be better off if John McCain and Sarah Palin were in power, conversely, as a matter of fact, I believe we'd be much, much worse off with them there, given the current paradigm and parameters.

. . . .'S matter of fact, I'll take all of them on a little later in here too.

. . . .I know that most of you think that somehow I'm a supporter of Democrats, or this particular President because he's a Democrat. I'm not. I've been sharply critical of every Administration since Reagan (for a particular reason). From the day I started this column, it didn't matter who was in the White House, nor who was in the Capitol Building, none of them have served the American people, all have betrayed us. The only person that I ever support, out of necessity, is the President of the United States. I am an American, a believer in the Constitution of the United States, and the person who is elected via the process laid out in the Constitution is the sitting President via Constitutional process, and if I love my country and it's spirit, then I am obligated, as an American citizen, to support and respect the office and its Commander in Chief. Period. There's no gray, and it's very clear cut.

. . . . .Regular readers here will not be surprised by the next item, as they well know of my disdain and contempt for Goldman-Sachs and their ownership of the United States Government, and consequently, their ownership of the Fed, the Treasury, and our currency.

. . . . . . .Fortune magazine Managing Editor Andrew Serwer was on Morning Joe on MSNBC this morning with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, what he had to say was jaw-dropping:

Asked about Goldman Sachs and their post-TARP fortunes, Serwer used a pretty telling metaphor:

SERWER: I mean, it's amazing to me that as we recover, you know, come out of this financial crisis, you know, you'd expect a company like Goldman Sachs maybe things are improving, make a little money. But they have a record quarter. In other words, they made more money in this three month period than they ever had in any other--

SCARBOROUGH: [archly] But they just made some good guesses, right?

SERWER: Well, I don't know if it's okay or not, but I think what happened is that the government has telegraphed to Wall Street, not only Goldman Sachs but the other firms what it was doing, what was going on, what the program was, and so, essentially, it's like telling a Goldman Sachs, "Hey, put your money on 32 Black" at the casino, at the roulette wheel. And the thing spins and lo and behold, where does it end up, Joe?

SCARBOROUGH: 32 Black?

SERWER: 32 Black.

That's a pretty significant statement from the Managing Editor of a magazine that's going to have Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein present the "Goldman Sachs & Fortune Global Women Leaders Award" at this very Summit. And it's hard to ignore the fact what Serwer describes is a risk-free system of wealth accumulation that bears no real working resemblance to the thing we know as "capitalism."

Remember back to the 2008 campaign, when so many people worried about "wealth redistribution?" Turns out the worry was very real, but the worriers themselves are all making out pretty well!

. . . ..Now, if the Wall Street Journal is the Old Testament of Capitalism, Forbes is the New Testament. For this to come out of the mouth of their managing editor speaks volumes to two things (1) The incredible influence that Goldman-Sachs must have in Washington and (2) The growing contempt that they're held in, and given the fact that Serwer would be interacting with their CFO later on in the day, and how "teflon" they are, and impervious anymore to anything.
. . . .Remember that it was Goldman who held AIG's default credit swaps, so they made out twice on the collapse. Remember that Goldman is the only investment house that also has the same privileges as a Federal Reserve bank and access to that credit window.
. . . Remember Matt Taibbi's brilliant, savage piece of investigative journalism earlier this year in Rolling Stone.
. . . .I referred earlier to the Wall Street Journal, that other, older bastion of capitalism, they've had enough as well, as indicated by this MarketWatch article by Paul B. Farrell:

You better read "The Usual Suspects," Matthew Malone's brilliant article in Portfolio magazine: He "exposed" the "Goldman Sachs 'conspiracy' to take over the U.S. financial system." Read it in this context: America's financial sector has exploded from 19% of corporate profits in 1986 to 41% today, becoming a magnet for every wannabe billionaire. They know why Wall Street must control Washington.

Malone focuses on the incestuous "conspiracy" of Goldman alumni in Treasury, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, AIG, Citigroup, Washington lobbyists and politicians.

And just in case you think any emphasis on The Hammer's (Hank Paulson) conflict of interest was invented purely to increase drama, please remember that he worked at Goldman for three decades after serving under Nixon. He got $38 million his last year as CEO in 2006 before becoming Treasury Secretary.

Then during the market meltdown six months ago the $700 million personal fortune he built at Goldman was threatened by Goldman's huge $20 billion derivatives exposure at AIG: Suddenly his responsibilities at Treasury merged with a strong self-interest in protecting his personal fortune. AIG was "saved."

There's another equally disturbing expose in "The Quiet Coup," Simon Johnson's great article in Atlantic magazine. A former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, Johnson also warns that America's "financial industry has effectively captured our government" and is "blocking essential reform."

Worse, he says that unless we break Wall Street's stranglehold (unlikely in the new Washington) we will be unable "to prevent a true depression," warning that "we're running out of time," echoing many of our predictions of the "Great Depression II" coming soon. See previous Paul B. Farrell.

Matt Taibbi, author of "The Great Derangement," captured this drama in a Rolling Stone piece, "The Big Takeover, how Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution." A must-read: "As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating a crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. ... in the age of CDS and CBO, most of us are financial illiterates."

Wall Street "used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system -- transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below."

Seriously, here's how bad Taibbi sees it: "Paulson and his cronies turned the federal government into one gigantic half-opaque holding company, one whose balance sheet includes the world's most appallingly large and risky hedge fund, a controlling interest in a dying insurance giant, huge investments in a group of teetering megabanks, and shares here and there in various auto-finance companies, student loans, and other failing business."

And let's include $5.5 trillion in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Wall Street's greed and stupidity resembles the self-destructive reigns of banana republic dictators.

Here's how it worked: The Hammer conned a clueless Congress, then shelled out $350 billion of our taxpayer money (Helicopter Ben Bernanke helped by upping the ante with a couple trillion side-bet), buying toxic debt to save his ol' Wall Street buddies. They stopped lending and used the dough to doctor their balance sheets.

So no surprise that Goldman, Wells Fargo and J.P. Morgan Chase are now reporting "blockbuster" first-quarter earnings, says the New York Times, while just months ago "many of the nation's biggest banks were on life support."

Get it? They screwed taxpayers and borrowers so they can repay TARP with (you guessed it) our recycled TARP money. Now it's back to business-as-usual, with no restrictions on CEO pay and bonuses ... no thank-yous ... no admissions of guilt ... while some even arrogantly deny that they ever needed TARP money.

Right after the election in November, at the peak of the banking crisis, when Hank, Goldman and the Wall Street mercenary armies were divvying up the $350 billion TARP money, we detailed 30 reasons for the "Great Depression II" likely coming around 2011. We quoted John Whitehead, former Goldman Sachs chairman, former chairman of the New York Fed, former Reagan deputy secretary of state. He warned America's problems will take years, burn trillions, result in massive deficits:

"This is a road to disaster," he said. "I've always been a positive person and optimistic, but I don't see a solution here." He did see a depression at the end of that road, one you can call the "Great Depression II."

But in real life, Hank, Goldman and Wall Street's mercenaries are winning the war. Read and weep Portfolio's chilling finale: "Obama's victory and Geithner's appointment are the completion of Goldman's meticulously crafted plan to become a superpower. The firm now has the clout to impose its will on the financial markets, and the world."

GOP or Dems? Conservatives or liberals? It doesn't matter. We'll all controlled by "The Conspiracy." So why not surrender, let them have the power? The truth is, through their lobbyists and surrogates in Washington, they already rule America. Surrender is a mere formality.

. . . .Bear in mind that Goldman-Sachs was the sole, single largest campaign contributor to Barack Obama's Presidential campaign. We are truly the The United States of Goldman-Sachs. The Trilateral Commission and JP Morgan Chase won.

. . . .Obama has done us no favors at all on the financial front, and appears to be exactly the puppet that Goldman-Sachs and JP Morgan Chase needed in the White House. From Nomi Prins column over at The Daily Beast:

Where he missed the mark, though, was the target he went after, in terms of making sure we don’t fall back toward those dark days. Obama talked about “some in the financial industry” falling back into old, risky habits, when calling for a series of wide-ranging, but incremental reforms. First, he should have said “all.” And second, the problem right now isn’t just on Wall Street, but also in Washington, which now essentially owns our banking system, with all its misplaced risk—the exact same system that gave us the meltdown we’re currently enjoying.
Specifically, the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have dumped $19.3 trillion into the banking system—$17.5 trillion of which went to financial institutions in the form of capital injections (like an adrenaline shot to the heart of a bank overdosing on its own risk), general market backing, federal guarantees, and cheap loans from eight major new Fed facilities in return for quasi-toxic collateral. That makes last year’s $700 billion in TARP money a mere 4 percent of the full subsidization of Big Finance and the havoc it wreaked on the rest of the economy.

And that means the next financial bubble to burst will be the federal bailout itself.

All these subsidies were supposed to prop up the biggest financial firms in order to keep them from unleashing further devastation on the general economy during last fall’s crisis period. We were told this would stabilize the banks and loosen credit for small businesses and individuals.

The exact opposite happened. Banks continued to go belly up and credit became tighter, “systemically important” banks were consolidated courtesy of the Fed and Treasury Department, and bank fees increased. And the financial goliaths that inhaled our money got their soaring stock prices, profits, and bonuses. But that part is an illusion. Even the profits themselves, announced in July, aren’t what they seem. They came from using federal capital to take more risk.

So the profits reaped by the big banks aren’t likely to be passed on to consumers in any meaningful way any time soon. But the larger problem is, what happens when banks have to pay back the government subsidies beyond TARP? We might discover that there’s even less to these firms than they would have us believe, and find ourselves in the middle of another financial collapse. That bubble burst will be even more chaotic than the current one. Why? Because next time, it won’t just be the capital they raised in the markets on the table—it will be all that federal money they got as well.

And what if the banks don’t pay back their loans any time soon? Stronger banks will chug along while the FDIC keeps shutting down struggling banks, raising debt and trading big on the back of federal capital. Until one of those scenarios plays out, the problems that spurred the crisis—the loan and credit defaults, foreclosures, job losses, and general disparities in incomes—continue to hammer the average American.

But ideas like shuffling some regulatory-agency decks in Washington, when regulators, most notably the Fed, failed to do their job to begin with—isn’t change. And pumping trillions of dollars into the financial sector does not address the banking system’s most fundamental and obvious flaw: Banks are too big and their functions too convoluted and dangerous. When the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 was repealed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, commercial banks were again allowed to take speculative risks with consumer deposits, merge with investment banks and insurance companies, and load up debt based on weak assets. All those pools of money were allowed to mix and the financial system devolved to the freewheeling mentality that existed pre-Great Depression. That’s when the current economic crisis really began.

Which brings us back to the beginning. Churning federal capital, big trading risks, and less competition created the illusion of improved bank profits following a horrendous 2008. At least before the meltdown banks were ostensibly creating their own capital, borrowing from each other or their investors. Now they’re playing with the taxpayers’ stash. We don’t have to look into the future to find the next bubble—we just have to take a look around now. The brewing bubble comes courtesy of this federal bailout. So will the next burst.

. . . . The American people, the citizens of the Republic, have been had, just as they were during both Bush administrations, the Clinton administration and Reagan's.

. . . .How's this for being had folks? I know many of you pinned your hopes on the House of Representatives bill, America's Health Care Choices Act of 2009, but you were being jobbed. It was a head fake, a feint and designed only to get you looking the other way while Max Baucus, the Democratic puppet of the health insurance companies got his "Gang of 6" working on the bipartisan bill, sure to benefit only health insurance companies, and big greedy Senators like Max, Enzi and Olympia Snow. Baucus claims that his bill will be ready by Wednesday morning. Got news, it's gonna suck and in the end, it will not have a public option and it will include mandatory coverage for everyone, with subsidies for those who can't afford it, in other words, a health care insurance companies dream bill. Just who's going to pay for those subsidies?

. . . . .So, anyhow, don't get all worked up on me. And don't go congratulating me on joining any Tea Party, Birther or Turfer ranks. Personally, I have no use for you as a political animal if you count yourself among those.
- If you weren't out protesting and having Tea Parties as George W. Bush expanded the Federal Government beyond anything in history
- If you weren't out protesting as he turned the largest budget surplus in history into the largest deficit in history, and left the sorry damn financial mess that Medicare Part D is, the true "straw that broke the camel's back" behind health care reform.
- If you weren't out holding up posters comparing him to Hitler, and calling him a fascist and a communist for suspending the Bill of Rights, for invading a sovereign country under false pretenses, for abandoning the hunt for bin Laden to do Cheney's bidding so he and Aramco could get their hands on the trans-Iraqi pipeline
- If you weren't out calling George Herbert Walker Bush a socialist for crafting and signing NAFTA and using the phrase "New World Economic Order"
- If you weren't doing any of that, and thought all that was just nifty and OK, then keep on moving and don't even stop to pass the time of day, I don't have the time, and in my mind, you're nothing but a poser, a dilletante, a hypocrite and pretty damn ignorant and late to the whole "I'm a patriot" party.

. . . .From Rod Dreher, via Andrew Sullivan, over at The Daily Dish:

Despite what Sam Tanenhaus says, conservatism is not dead. Rather, it's undead. The conservative movement is herking and jerking like a zombie, dedicated to little more than frenetic gestures execrating Obama, and to regaining power. To what end? Given that they're birthing a conservative party whose instincts are dictated by loudmouths, reactionaries and crackpots, and overseen by cynics, it's dispiriting to contemplate.

Where can those who wish to think and debate clearly about a serious politics of the right go? The degenerate form of populism now dominant on the right loves to praise "freedom" - but it has no use for freedom of thought, or thinking much at all. In turn, increasing numbers of thoughtful conservatives have no use for it.

. . . .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

Monday - Perfect Storm

Monday September 14, 2009

. . . . ."It is a time when one's spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why, when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death." Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)


. . . .There is something about Sunday evenings, something about them, especially the gray ones, when you're traveling alone, that are so lonely and empty. Sunday evenings should be spent with your people, being in the warmth of close relationships and bonds, eating a bowl of soup.

. . . .Well, it's time to jump into things big, I do talk, quite a bit, about nexus points, about those points in time when everything changes, on an otherwise mundane day, just a typical day in the calendar or of the week, but somehow, looking back, you can see them as points where everything changed. If you're in tune enough, you can feel them if they're happening around you.

. . . .And on a more pedestrian note, being a football fanatic, yes, Saturday's University of Michigan game made me smile, things are getting back to normal in Ann Arbor. Being a U of M fan, it was even more delicious to see Michigan State return to it's normal ways as well, finding a way to self-destruct and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Hey State fans, want to make snide remarks about Appalachian State anymore? Go Chips!!

. . . .Sunday was even better. Despite a new coach and a new quarterback, the Lions once again succeeded in making their opponent, this time the New Orleans Saints, look like an absolute Super Bowl lock. I give the Lions all due praise for their consistency. There are many teams in the NFL that unfairly tease their fans from time to time with glimmers of actually getting up to ordinary, or up to being able to win from time to time. Not the Lions. . . . .with them, you can count on them to be miserable. . . .What are the Harrah's sports book odds on them going 0-for-the-season this year as well? Anybody check?

. . . .The Americana Music Conference is this week in Nashville, TN. Some of my favorite artists; Cross Canadian Ragweed, Reckless Kelly, The Drive-By Truckers, Wilco et al will be there. It should be a very, very good time.

. . . .And even for the usually off the wall, anything goes MTV VMA's; Kanye was waaayyy off base last night, and way out of bounds with what he did to Taylor Swift. This wasn't a PSA about Katrina and George Bush, this was merely an artist who'd been voted an award. However, in that community, I've got a feeling the Dre and Snoop will take care of things their own way, and let Mr. West know how out of bounds he was.

. . . .Lest all rappers get a bad name from that, I'd like to mention that Jay-Z came out over the weekend with his benefit concert in New York for the families of victims of 9/11, and as usual it was well received.

. . . As well, U2 opened the North American leg of it's world tour in Chicago at Soldier Field over the weekend, the stage as promised, is an engineering marvel, but it's kind of impossible for even an engineering marvel to upstage the 4 working class lads from North Dublin.

. . . .The playlist, if I get around to it tonight, should have some new, brand-brand new stuff in it, things I think you'll enjoy.

. . . .I talked up above about it being the confluence of a perfect storm. It is, if you're paying attention. It's all coming together in a way that just is not good, and the best part of it is, we're the ones at fault, not anyone else.

. . . .Bear with it today, read all the way through it. I reiterated on Saturday my anger over the build-up to 9/11 and the over 20 warnings that 2 administrations received; my anger over Bush and Cheney almost immediately abandoning the hunt for bin Laden in Afghanistan to invade Iraq on false pretenses and sacrificing so many good young people on a fool's errand; my doubts about Afghanistan now. I've spent the last month writing about how fractured this country is becoming, and how separated it is, about how the gulf is widening; about how frustrated people are with the finances of this country and their own finances, and about how dangerous it is for China to hold most of our debt; about how we're not paying attention to the basics in our own biosphere like dirt and water. About the fact that neither party; Republican or Democrat has anyone's interests at heart, least of all their voters, but instead work only for their lobbyists and campaign donors, in this case, notably recently, the health insurance lobby; about how the CFR and Trilaterals, by owning Goldman-Sachs; JP Morgan Chase, the Treasury and the Fed, are ultimately shaping the world though the most effective means possible, money, to their own vision, laid out very publicly by George Herbert Walker Bush 30 some odd years ago.

. . . .Like any human body, when stress finally overwhelms the system and sickness sets in good and hard and takes us down; we are a body politic; a Republic and the stresses, the fractures, are setting in hard, all coming together at once, and we are ripe to be taken down, stricken down like any other organic system. This all goes so far beyond Republican and Democrat; liberal vs. conservative; progressive vs. populist that the scope of it is beyond comprehension.

. . . .First up; today marks another anniversary. This time, the President spoke from Wall Street, on the anniversary of the financial crisis that fairly well cemented the election for him. Regular readers probably know of my complete disdain for the phantom "recovery" we're supposedly in, and the contempt within which I hold Summers, Geithner, Bernanke, Paulson. Men from two administrations who have done nothing but make Goldman-Sachs and JP Morgan Chase richer through all of this. Men who have helped make the institutions that were "too big to fail" far bigger than they were a year ago, and even more prone to take down the U.S. economy and world economy even further than it already is. It's Day 365, and your wallet, and our country's economy is still being held hostage by the Fed, the Treasury, AIG, Goldman-Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and China. Please take the time to read some of the excerpts below, without a solid banking and credit system, everything else is nothing more than an ephemeral wisp of unpaid for, unfunded smoke.

. . . .All from television this morning:
- Elizabeth Warren, the TARP watchdog (who has been harshly critical of how the TARP funds are being handled) on Dylan Ratigan's Morning Meeting on MSNBC this morning:
"Until we have a credible liquidation threat, we don't have capitalism in America."
- Dylan Ratigan himself, on NBC's The Today Show:
"We are falsely perpetuating failed businesses like Citigroup and AIG."
- Robert Reich and Pat Buchanan, two complete political polar opposites on Morning Joe on MSNBC found themselves, surprisingly, in complete agreement:

Professor Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary in the Clinton administration, and Pat Buchanan had a rare moment of agreement this morning when they were discussing the one-year anniversary of the beginning of the financial crisis.

Reich lamented that the banks seemed to have learned nothing from the crisis as they have returned to the business practices that got them in trouble in the first place. Buchanan agreed, saying the banks are still "carrying these subprime mortgages in their colon. It's like a tumor."

Buchanan then asked Reich if he believed the government should have allowed a couple of the massive banks to fail like Lehman Brothers to teach them them the lesson that the government won't always consider them too big to fail. Reich found himself unexpectedly agreeing once more:

You know it's interesting Pat Buchanan, I start worrying about my own convictions when I hear you repeating back to me exactly what I believe. We ought to have either had kind of a restructuring of all of these big banks based upon something like Chapter 11, or we should have had a kind of temporary receivership, but we have the worst of both worlds. Taxpayers bailed them out so right now they know they were going to get a bailout next time. Before they didn't even know they were going to get a bailout, now they're making these wild trades they're doing the same risky stuff they were doing before, and now they know that if they get in trouble the government is going to bail them out because they are, quote, "too big to fail." Nothing in capitalism, no entity should be too big to fail.

. . . .Elliot Spitzer, on CBS's Early Show:
"We are not doing well in reforming the financial system".

. . .Robert Reich, from his blog today:

Let's be clear: The Street today is up to the same tricks it was playing before its near-death experience. Derivatives, derivatives of derivatives, fancy-dance trading schemes, high-risk bets. “Our model really never changed, we’ve said very consistently that our business model remained the same,” says Goldman Sach's chief financial officer.

The only difference now is that the Street's biggest banks know for sure they'll be bailed out by the federal government if their bets turn sour -- which means even bigger bets and bigger bucks.

Meanwhile, the banks' gigantic pile of non-performing loans is also growing bigger, as more and more jobless Americans can't pay their mortgages, credit card bills, and car loans. So forget any new lending to Main Street. Small businesses still can't get loans. Even credit-worthy borrowers are having a hard time getting new mortgages.

The mega-bailout of Wall Street accomplished little. The only big winners have been top bank executives and traders, whose pay packages are once again in the stratosphere. Banks have been so eager to lure and keep top deal makers and traders they've even revived the practice of offering ironclad, multimillion-dollar payments – guaranteed no matter how the employee performs. Goldman Sachs is on course to hand out bonuses that could rival its record pre-meltdown paydays. In the second quarter this year it posted its fattest quarterly profit in its 140-year history, and earmarked $11.4 billion to compensate its happy campers. Which translates into about $770,000 per Goldman employee on average, just about what they earned at height of boom. Of course, top executives and traders will pocket much more.

Every other big bank feels it has to match Goldman's pay packages if it wants to hold on to its "talent." Citigroup, still on life-support courtesy of $45 billion from American taxpayers, has told the White House it needs to pay its twenty-five top executives an average of $10 million each this year, and award its best trader $100 million.

A few banks like Goldman have officially repaid their TARP money but look more closely and you'll find that every one of them is still on the public dole. Goldman won't repay taxpayers the $13 billion it never would have collected from AIG had we not kept AIG alive. (In one of the most blatant conflicts of interest in all of American history, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein attended the closed-door meeting last fall where then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who was formerly Goldman's CEO, and Tim Geithner, then at the New York Fed, made the decision to bail out AIG.) Meanwhile, Goldman is still depending on $28 billion in outstanding debt issued cheaply with the backing of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Which means you and I are still indirectly funding Goldman's high-risk operations.

. . . .Dylan Ratigan, mentioned above, the host of Morning Meeting:

The American people have been taken hostage to a broken system.

It is a system that remains in place to this day.

A system where bank lobbyists have been spending in record numbers to make sure it stays that way.

A system that corrupts the most basic principles of competition and fair play, principles upon which this country was built.

It is a system that so far has forced the taxpayer to provide the banks with the use of $14 trillion from the Federal Reserve, much of the $7 trillion outstanding at the US Treasury and $2.3 trillion at the FDIC.

A system partially built by the very people who currently advise our President, run our Treasury Department and are charged with its reform.

And most stunningly -- it is a system that no one in our government has yet made any effort to fundamentally change.

Like health care, this is a referendum on our government's ability to function on behalf of the American people. Ask yourself how long you are willing to be held hostage? How long will you let our elected officials be the agents of those whose business it is to exploit our government and the American people at any cost?

As hostages -- was there any sum of money we wouldn't have given AIG?

Why did we pay Goldman Sachs and all the other banks 100 cents on the dollar for their contracts with AIG, using taxpayer money, while we forced GM and others to take massive payment cuts?

Why hasn't any of the bonus money paid to the CEOs that built this financial nuclear bomb been clawed back?

And more than anything else -- why does the US Congress refuse to outlaw the most anti-competitive structure known to our economy, one summed up as TOO BIG TOO FAIL?

It has become startlingly clear that we as a country, and I as a journalist, had made a grave error in affording those who built and ran those banks and insurance companies the honorable treatment of being called capitalists. When in fact the exact opposite was true, these people were more like vampires using the threat of Too Big Too Fail to hold us hostage and collect ongoing ransom from the US Government and the American taxpayer.

This was no unlucky accident. The massive spike in unemployment, the utter destruction of retirement wealth, the collapse in the value of our homes, the worst recession since the Great Depression all resulted directly from these actions.

Even with all that -- the only changes that have been made, have been made to prop up and hide the massive flaws on behalf of those who perpetuated them. Still utterly nothing has been done to disclose the flaws in this system, improve it or rebuild it.

Last fall was an awakening for me, as it was for many in our country.

And yet, our Congress has yet to open its eyes, much less do anything about it. In fact conditions have never been better for the banks or worse for the rest of us.

Why is this? Who does our Government work for? How much longer will we as Americans tolerate it? And what, if anything, can we do about it?

As we approach the anniversary of the bailouts for our banks and insurers -- and watch the multi-trillion taxpayer-funded programs at the Federal Reserve continue to support banks and subsidize their multibillion bonus pools, we must ask if our politicians represent the interests of America? Or those who would rob America of its money and its future?

As a country, we must demand that our politicians stop serving those whose business models are based on systemic theft and start serving those who seek to create value for others -- the workers, innovators and investors who have made this country great.

. . . .From Alan Colmes' blog:

Oliver Willis links to the Vanity Fair piece by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele that instructs who the teabaggers should really be protesting against.

As the Bush administration waned, the Treasury shoveled more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in tarp funds into the financial system—without restrictions, accountability, or even common sense. The authors reveal how much of it ended up in the wrong hands, doing the opposite of what was needed.

It boggles the mind that money was quickly doled out with no accountability. It was given to institutions whether they wanted it or not. Some of hem were troubled; others were troubling.

…once the money left the building, the government lost all track of it. The Treasury Department knew where it had sent the money, but nothing about what was done with it. Did the money aid the recovery? Was it spent for the purposes Congress intended? Did it save banks from collapse? Paulson’s Treasury Department had no idea, and didn’t seem to care. It never required the banks to explain what they did with this unprecedented infusion of capital.

Monies went to more than just big-name institutions.

The excesses weren’t confined to big-city banks. A subsidiary of North Carolina–based B.B.&T., after accepting $3.1 billion in tarp money, sent dozens of employees to a training session at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Sarasota, Florida. TCF Financial Corp., based in Wayzata, Minnesota, sent 40 “high-performing” managers, lenders, and other employees on a junket in February to Cancún, soon after receiving more than $360 million in tarp funds.

But let’s face it: episodes like these, infuriating as they may be, aren’t the real issue. The real issue is tarp itself, one of the most questionable ventures the U.S. government has ever pursued. Adopted as a plan to buy up toxic assets—one that was quickly deemed impractical even by those who first proposed it—it evolved into something more closely resembling an all-purpose slush fund flowing out to hundreds of institutions with their own interests and goals, and no incentive to deploy the money toward any clearly defined public purpose.

. . . .Les Leopold:

Maybe the most sophisticated economic models all point upward, but our sense of history should be flashing warning lights. There are a few enduring lessons we can't avoid: any nation that fails to find enough work for its people, and that doesn't rein it its obscene distribution of income, is courting catastrophe. Consider these problem areas:

1. As Larry Summers recently said, unemployment will remain, "unacceptably high." Truer words were never spoken. He's telling us that the recovery will be so anemic that current massive job shortfall is likely to continue for years. According to the most recent government numbers, there are about 29 million Americans out of work or forced into part-time work. If that continues, as Summers predicts, consumer demand will be low and misery for millions will be high. That's bad economics.

2. We have done almost nothing about financial institutions that are too big to fail. Supposedly we're supervising them more carefully. But all the evidence suggest that they are off and running into a new round of fantasy finance. Goldman Sachs already is selling repackaged synthetic securities, precisely the kind that crashed the system last time around, (and Moody's again is rating them AAA.) Large banks are making a move into "Death Bonds," finding new ways to skim profits by buying up and securitizing life insurance policies of the elderly and ill. We could stop this madness either by nationalizing the largest institutions entirely, or breaking them down so that they truly were small enough to fail. Trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt would have understood what to do. But in today's Washington such a discussion is off limits.

3. There still are no controls on the specialty derivatives that caused the last crash and likely to contribute to the next one. In fact, I've been told by reliable sources that derivative traders are pooling a bit of their upcoming bonus money to fund a billion dollar lobbying effort to make sure no serious reforms take place.

4. Despite President Obama's insightful words last May, nothing has been done to shrink Wall Street's size, let alone its political power. The Pay Czar was supposed to crack the whip on outrageous compensation packages. Instead, Mr. Czar immediately said that it's okay for Andrew J. Hall, an oil speculator, to receive $100 million in trading fees from CitiGroup, a bank which we basically own. What a Wall Street recruiting poster for new math whizzes!

5. Most importantly, we've failed to address the major cause of the entire mess: the underlying distribution of income and wealth. The fantasy finance casino and its bubbles grew from the fact that the super-rich accumulated too much capital after years and years of tax "reforms" that gushed money to the top. When they ran out of real world investments, their capital rushed to Wall Street's speculative securities. And they are doing it again. You can't limit catastrophic speculation without returning excess capital to society. And there is plenty of excess: The latest tax data shows we have the worst income distribution since 1929. Not only are we failing to learn from history, we are begging to repeat it.

The failure of Washington to clamp down on Wall Street is also creating a very negative political feedback loop between government and the public. Most Americans are furious about Wall Street's outsized pay and profits. They are also furious about the inability of the administration and Congress to act. There's a growing sense that the rich and powerful are in control of financial policy and of the political process. This fuels anti-government anger which undermines the things we need government to do: raise taxes on the super-rich; put in place a windfall profits taxes on Wall Street; cap outrageous financial compensation packages; and enact public programs and national industrial policies that create real jobs for the unemployed.

Given the failure to enact serious reforms, it wouldn't take much to push the economy off the cliff again: a severe pandemic flu, a terrorist attack, a major weather event or an unexpected failure of a company that is too big too fail could set off a major economic relapse.

. . . .Stiglitz, from Bloomberg today, one of the most prescient economists around:

Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize- winning economist, said the U.S. has failed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system after the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

“In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”

Stiglitz’s views echo those of former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who has advised President Barack Obama’s administration to curtail the size of banks, and Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer, who suggested last month that governments may want to discourage financial institutions from growing “excessively.”

A year after the demise of Lehman forced the Treasury Department to spend billions to shore up the financial system, Bank of America Corp.’s assets have grown and Citigroup Inc. remains intact. In the U.K., Lloyds Banking Group Plc, 43 percent owned by the government, has taken over the activities of HBOS Plc, and in France BNP Paribas SA now owns the Belgian and Luxembourg banking assets of insurer Fortis.

While Obama wants to name some banks as “systemically important” and subject them to stricter oversight, his plan wouldn’t force them to shrink or simplify their structure.

Stiglitz said the U.S. government is wary of challenging the financial industry because it is politically difficult, and that he hopes the Group of 20 leaders will cajole the U.S. into tougher action.

. . . .Krugman, from his New York Times magazine piece, on the roots of the crisis, and why we're doomed to repeat it:

Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field’s problems. More important was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy. During the golden years, financial economists came to believe that markets were inherently stable — indeed, that stocks and other assets were always priced just right. There was nothing in the prevailing models suggesting the possibility of the kind of collapse that happened last year. Meanwhile, macroeconomists were divided in their views. But the main division was between those who insisted that free-market economies never go astray and those who believed that economies may stray now and then but that any major deviations from the path of prosperity could and would be corrected by the all-powerful Fed. Neither side was prepared to cope with an economy that went off the rails despite the Fed’s best efforts.

And in the wake of the crisis, the fault lines in the economics profession have yawned wider than ever. Lucas says the Obama administration’s stimulus plans are “schlock economics,” and his Chicago colleague John Cochrane says they’re based on discredited “fairy tales.” In response, Brad DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley, writes of the “intellectual collapse” of the Chicago School, and I myself have written that comments from Chicago economists are the product of a Dark Age of macroeconomics in which hard-won knowledge has been forgotten.

What happened to the economics profession? And where does it go from here?

As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a response to shifting political winds, partly a response to financial incentives. But while sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution and job opportunities on Wall Street are nothing to sneeze at, the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.

Unfortunately, this romanticized and sanitized vision of the economy led most economists to ignore all the things that can go wrong. They turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality that often lead to bubbles and busts; to the problems of institutions that run amok; to the imperfections of markets — especially financial markets — that can cause the economy’s operating system to undergo sudden, unpredictable crashes; and to the dangers created when regulators don’t believe in regulation.

. . . .Pay attention to much of what is mentioned above, particularly how fragile everything still is, and how little it would take to topple it all again. I say that as a lead-in to this Reuters article that is the one thing that no one wants to talk about, that of China calling in the debt that they hold, as truly, they really are the only things propping our economy up:

A report that Chinese state-owned companies will be allowed to walk away from loss-making commodity derivative trades provoked anger and dismay among investment bankers on Monday as they feared it may set a damaging precedent.

. . . .How and why are the financial institutions still being allowed to take even bigger risks than they were taking a year ago, this time with yours and my money? It's simple, and two-fold. First and foremost is the lobbying money that gets thrown at legislators everyday. The health-care industry, which has dumped over $1.6 billion in lobbying money and campaign contributions this year alone, isn't the only high flyer in Washington. The financial services and investment bank lobbying firms are in that stratosphere too. I want to thank reader Kay for sending along this link to the Lobbying Disclosure Act Database, where Senators and Representatives are required to file quarterly disclosures.

. . . .I agree with Otis Gibbs, a great musician, whose Facebook posting today read:

"Otis Gibbs wants to force all elected officials to wear NASCAR type uniforms with the logos of their campaign donors plastered all over, so that we can plainly see who they are really representing."

. . . .Now, I've rattled on in this forum enough about my sincere hatred for the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission, David Rockefeller's babies (JP Morgan Chase). I'd like to thank my friend Matthew, over in Peoria, for the link to this one. Ron Paul, whom I often disagree with, but agree with just as much (it's about a 50/50 thing) has just as big a beef with the Fed as many people, and it's getting the CFR jumpy, from the New American website:

Near the start of this year Ron Paul (R-Texas) introduced H.R. 1207, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009. The bill was referred to the House Committee on Financial Services. As of this writing, H.R. 1207 has 282 cosponsors.

A Senate equivalent, S.604, the Federal Reserve Sunshine Act of 2009, has been introduced by Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). It has 23 cosponsors. Both bills have received a tremendous groundswell of grass-roots support. Much of the support is coming from ordinary people who have become aware of the fact that the Federal Reserve has created trillions of dollars literally out of nothing during the past calendar year in its effort to micromanage its way out of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

If such a measure were passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law by President Obama, the resulting bill would allow the Government Accounting Office to conduct audits of Federal Reserve System monetary policy. The bill proposes to scrutinize the Fed’s dealings not just on domestic monetary policy but on dealings with foreign central banks and foreign governments.

The power elite is worried. Evidence for this can be found in a short article "The Fed's Political Problem" appearing on the website of Foreign Affairs, flagship journal for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The article's author, Alan S. Blinder, is a senior-level economics professor at Princeton University who also directs Princeton’s Center for Economic Policy Studies. From 1994 to 1996 he served as vice chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

Blinder first argues a thesis he proposed back in 1997, that some areas of government are properly political and others are properly technocratic. He places monetary policy in the latter, where it can operate independently of political oversight. The drawback of Ron Paul’s bill is that it would transfer Fed oversight to the political realm and end its independence.. . . . . . .

. . . . . .The dollar’s value will drop considerably more should it lose its status as the world’s reserve currency. The Chinese are getting very nervous about the money-creation spigot in Washington, D.C. Perhaps these are the kinds of developments that elites such as Blinder don’t want the public to know about. Clearly the elites are uncomfortable with the amount of attention the Fed has received — the public being aware of the trillions having been created literally out of thin air during the past year. “What will this do to the long-term purchasing power of my money?” is a perfectly valid question many ordinary Americans are asking.

. . . . .Which of course, does tie in with Health Care Reform, for there remains one fundamental question, how does it get paid for? Now, that is a rhetorical question. I've spent the better part of a month trying to examine it from several points of view. There are plans out there that are basically revenue neutral, and involve restructuring administratively, eliminating unnecessary testing and redundancy, putting the caps back in place that existed pre-Reagan on health insurance companies, and tort reform. However, not much of that is on the table at all. There is one other fundamental problem that I have with all of it. "Health Care Reform" is really a misnomer, as the primary focus has been, and remain on, health care insurance companies. Now, as a utilitarian, I truly have absolutely no use for, nor can I see any reason for health care insurance companies very existence! They do not manufacture a product, nor provide a true product. They do not provide a service, it's actually the health care provider that supplies the service. The health insurance companies entire existence, their only reason to exist is to broker risk and act as middlemen, skimming an inordinately large amount of profit from the transaction. The entire system could be reformed by going back to a simple Keynesian economic equation, that of doctors and hospitals providing the medical care at a negotiated price with the patient. This would be far too simple, and far too economical, and put too much logic in the equation between doctor and patient.

. . . .Now, the issue of Joe Wilson will not go away. For some, Joe Wilson has rapidly become a folk hero. To me, he's a piece of pond scum, a bastard child of Strom Thurmond, and one item in particular about him makes me want to spit in his face, his treatment of veterans:
- Jon Soltz, the founder of VoteVets.org, who served as a Captain in Operation Iraqi Freedom, at VetVoice.com:

The only thing more "out there" than Joe Wilson's disrespectful display during the president's speech to Congress on health care is Representative Wilson's all over the place take on two of the largest government-run health systems there are -- the ones that benefit our troops and veterans.

Wilson has railed against health care reform, warning that offering more choice to people amounts to a government takeover of health insurance. To him, it's an evil that has to be defeated.

Yet, at the same time, Wilson hasn't said whether he's opted into TRICARE for Life. The completely government-run health insurance system for certain military retirees is available to Wilson, as he's a 31-year Guard and Reserve veteran (though he joined after getting out of Vietnam). If he's not, of course, then he's taking insurance from the government-run pool offered to Congressmen. Then, there's all of our active duty service members who are on TRICARE -- stuck in an evil government system that must have turned them into Communists by now.

Wilson has saved them and gotten them out of TRICARE, right?

Right?

"TRICARE provides world class health care," said Wilson in a press release. "I believe TRICARE is one part of our health care system that's working."

What?! Joe Wilson is all for this horrible fascist system of government care?

Well, maybe not. Despite being against government health care, and then paying lip service about the awesomeness of government-run TRICARE, Wilson's voted to underfund it.

In 2007, Wilson was against $1.9 billion for military medical care (including funds for Walter Reed) and in 2005 voted against expanding TRICARE eligibility for our Guard and Reserve components, despite the fact that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has them fighting alongside the active component more than ever before.

OK, so Wilson suffers from split personality disorder when it comes to government health care for troops. But, he must be against the Department of Veterans Affairs, another bastion of Marxist thought, turning generations of American veterans into pinkos.

"With a growing number of servicemembers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, we must go to great measures to ensure our veterans receive the best care possible. That means greater oversight of the facilities, hospitals, and clinics that care for our veterans. They deserve access to the highest quality medical technology and a health care system that is responsive to their immediate and long-term needs. Their sacrifice and commitment to this nation deserves nothing less," said Wilson on his campaign site.

Gosh, that sounds just like Hitler, doesn't it?

Oh, but thank heaven, Joe Wilson voted repeatedly to cut veterans care, and save us from modern day Leninism. He voted for a $14 million cut in 2003, against $1.6 billion for the agency in 2005, $2.9 billion again in 2005, for a $13.5 billion cut in 2005, against $1.8 billion in 2003, and millions and millions more.

Maybe it's asking too much for me to ask that Joe Wilson think like a rational human being, but I'll ask anyway. He needs to decide whether offering citizens the option of getting the same kind of coverage we in the military get is evil or not evil.

If it's not -- if military and veterans government-run insurance and care is not malevolent -- then he needs to stop his shouting and properly fund TRICARE and the VA, and let everyone have the option of getting a public insurance plan.

But, if government-run care and insurance really is wicked, then he needs to stop lying about how he feels about TRICARE and Veterans Care. He should tell the truth about why he voted against funding for those programs -- because he thinks troops and veterans should be left out in the cold and turned away in return for their service.

Until he's honest about his position on Veterans Care, Military Care, and the Public Option, I can only say this: Representative Wilson, YOU LIE.

. . . . .Joe Wilson, you are a shameful, lying piece of dog crap.

. . . .From one of my favorite websites, Open Congress, again more proof of Joe Wilson's hypocrisy and lying:

However, in 2003, Wilson voted to provide federal funds for illegal immigrants’ healthcare. The vote came on the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003, which contained Sec. 1011 authorizing $250,000 annually between 2003 and 2008 for government reimbursements to hospitals who provide treatment for uninsured illegal immigrants. The program has been extended through 2009 and there is currently a bipartisan bill in Congress to make it permanent.

Hospitals have a legal obligation to treat everyone who comes in seeking care, regardless of citizenship status, insurance or other characteristics. This means that hospitals treat millions of people every year who don’t have the means to pay. Obviously, this drives up the nation’s healthcare costs overall. Section 1011 helps cushion the costs for hospitals, but it’s not nearly enough to cover the actual costs in most areas.

. . . .And on the other issue, that of what he did. Joe Wilson has every right to say it, (though the evidence above clearly points out that he's just another lying POS politician who is riding the current Right Wing resentment-of-a-black-leader tsunami), the forum he said it in and when he said it was all wrong. It is not a First Amendment rights issue, it is not a Freedom of Speech issue. When you are elected as a United States Representative, you also take on the the responsibility and accountability of living by the Rules of Decorum while sitting in and serving in that seat in a formal setting, some of the Rules of Decorum, directly from the House of Representatives website:

• Avoid personality

• Address remarks to the chair

• Refer to other members only in the third person

• Refrain from discussing the president's character

. . . .For a full PDF copy of the Rules of Decorum, from the House website, click here.

. . . .For those for whom Joe Wilson has become a cause celebre, and a folk hero, just more proof that the Republic is becoming unhinged and fractured beyond health, help and healing. The Right wing, the neoconservative movement has become a movement far beyond John McCain or Orrin Hatch, true Republicans, and is now a party and a movement that counts Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh as their spokesmen; Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and yes, Joe Wilson as their leaders, and Fox News as their House Organ.

. . . .First up, yesterday's 9/12 protest in Washington was far more lightly attended than being reported, and the movement is resorting to sending around a Photoshopped picture as it's "proof". For one, I don't understand Beck's 9/12 movement. If the stated intention is to rally the country to the state it was in on the day after 9/11, it seems that he's doing absolutely the opposite, and splitting the country in two. As I recall, the country rallied around an extremely unpopular President and followed him, and supported one another, despite political differences. That is not the purpose behind Beck's 9/12 project at all. I fear that once again, as with the Religious Right, the Republican party, the party of oppotunists is riding that wave. The Democratic part, the party of spineless pussies, is doing their best to do nothing, and assume that the Republicans are right.
. . . .John Avlon, in The Daily Beast today:

The weirdness of the Wingnut summer isn’t over. The anger has metastasized into the body politic, and it’s going to get a lot uglier from here.

Obama Derangement Syndrome is establishing itself as a potent political force, able to rally tens of thousands of citizens to the Washington Mall after Glenn Beck’s call. Joe Wilson’s outburst isn’t an embarrassment of incivility to these folks; it is a rallying cry for an army of useful idiots. But Republicans will soon find that they cannot contain or moderate this strain—while Democrats won’t understand what hit them.

The wave of white people that descended on Washington, D.C., this Saturday wasn’t motivated by simple racism, as some liberals might wish—at least that’s what the lady waving the Confederate flag told me. No, this was something else: a pent-up frustration at unprecedented Washington overspending and an individualistic resentment of the welfare state, all mixed with a dose of self-referential patriotism and a spicy dash of paranoia.. . . . .

. . . . . .

But back to the woman with the Confederate flag. She gave her name as Becky. I asked her why she was carrying the Stars and Bars to the rally. “Because I’m from the South…It has nothing to do with slavery. People think it means slavery. That’s not what it stood for. It stood for the Union.”

Somewhere, Lincoln just threw up. A guy named Norm decided to step in and help her out: “I don’t think it’s so much that anybody would advocate any secession-like movement, or that anybody wants to remove a star from the flag. I think if anything, the Confederate flag serves to remind me of where we’ve been and where we would not like to go again.”

There is a “don’t make me shoot this dog” aspect to this logic: an angry, divisive protest designed to stop the divisions they see erupting from Washington’s policies. The date of the protest provides the ultimate irony—it was pitched by Glenn Beck as a day to reflect the national unity and patriotism that was evident on 9/12/01, the day after the terrorist attacks. And yet this protest celebrated the deepest domestic political divisions we’ve seen since, with unhinged accusations of traitors and despots in the White House and talk of resistance and revolution.

Liberals who want to ignore the populist anger do so at their political peril—the frustration at Washington overspending is real, a reflection of bailout backlash. People are frustrated because they are expected to pay their bills and balance their budgets, but both big business and big government seem arrogantly exempt.

But Republicans are playing a dangerous game. They are benefitting from all this anger in the short term, but they have tapped into something deep and ugly that they can’t control. Calling the president a communist or even Hitler is something far beyond simple incivility or street theater—it is an accusation that intentionally stirs the crazy pot. It is ultimately an incitement to violence.

. . . .Hendrik Hertzberg, in The New Yorker today:

Perhaps it was naïve, and obviously it was optimistic, to hope that once Obama—having been elected by a large and undisputed majority, unlike his two predecessors—took office the nastiness of the assault against him would subside. And so it did, briefly. But as the reality sank in that this temperamentally conservative President intends to make good on his substantively progressive promises, the fury returned, uglier than before and no longer subject to the minimal restraints inherent in a national electoral campaign aimed at persuading a plurality of voters. Lies and fantasies about health-care reform swirled together with lies and fantasies about the chief executive himself. Obama is plotting to set up “death panels,” government tribunals authorized to euthanize the old and sick. Obama was born in Kenya and therefore his very Presidency is unconstitutional. Obama will cut Medicare benefits to provide coverage to illegal aliens. Obama seeks to indoctrinate children in Marxist ideology and put teenagers in “reëducation camps.” Obama is a Communist. Obama is a Fascist.

This sort of lunatic paranoia—touched with populism, nativism, racism, and anti-intellectualism—has long been a feature of the fringe, especially during times of economic bewilderment. What is different now is the evolution of a new political organism, with paranoia as its animating principle. The town-meeting shouters may be the organism’s hands and feet, but its heart—also, Heaven help us, its brain—is a “conservative” media alliance built around talk radio and cable television, especially Fox News. The protesters do not look to politicians for leadership. They look to niche media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and their scores of clones behind local and national microphones. Because these figures have no responsibilities, they cannot disappoint. Their sneers may be false and hateful—they all routinely liken the President and the “Democrat Party” to murderous totalitarians—but they are employed by large, nominally respectable corporations and supported by national advertisers, lending them a considerable measure of institutional prestige. The dominant wing of the Republican Party is increasingly an appendage of the organism—the tail, you might say, though it seems to wag more often from fear than from happiness. Many Republican officeholders, even some reputed moderates like Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, have obediently echoed the foul nonsense.

. . . .Why is all this so important? Guess who's back? The same guy who planned and executed the murder of 3,000 people, and prospered so well when Bush and Cheney abandoned the hunt for him. Osama bin Laden released an audiotape today:

But the core of bin Laden’s message is a warning to Americans to take note, not of an impending attack by some outside force, but of what bin Laden seems to suggest is a grave threat posed by an “enemy within”: the pro-Israel lobby in Washington.

“The White House is occupied by pressure groups,” bin Laden says. “The time has come for you to liberate yourselves from fear and the ideological terrorism of neo-conservatives and the Israeli lobby.”

. . . .The man is very much alive, and very much paying attention to the current political scene in Washington.
. . . .We have met the enemy, and he is us, looking straight back at us in the mirror.

. . . .And one more, on that front. One of the scariest things I've heard of yet, in the biosphere we all live in. From the L.A. Times:

Staphylococcus aureus is a common bug that can cause serious infections. An antibiotic-resistant strain, called MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), has increased dramatically in recent years. It typically spreads in hospitals. But it's also found in healthy people in the community. It spreads from skin-to-skin contact with someone who is infected, or by touching surfaces contaminated with the germ.

Little is known about places in the environment where MRSA can hide. A study presented today, however, is the first to show that public beaches may be reservoirs for the bug. Staph was isolated in marine water and in intertidal beach sand in nine of 10 public beaches in Washington state, and half of the strains were MRSA, according to the study from researchers at the University of Washington. When examined, those strains appeared to be the type that spreads in hospitals rather than community-acquired MRSA.

How beaches are becoming contaminated with hospital-acquired MRSA is unknown, said the lead author of the study, Dr. Marilyn C. Roberts. The study was presented this morning at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy in San Francisco.

"Where all these organisms are coming from and how they are getting seeded, we don't know," Roberts said. The samples were "grab-and-go" samples, meaning that researchers didn't spend a lot of time thinking about where to collect the samples. And, Roberts said, "the fact that we found these organisms suggests [beach contamination] is much higher than we normally thought."

Another study on beach sand, published in June in the Journal of Epidemiology, found that people who dug in the sand or covered themselves with sand were more likely to have diarrheal illnesses in the following week or two compared with beachgoers who just walked on the beach or lay on the sand. The most likely scenario for MRSA infection, Roberts said, is getting sand in a cut or abrasion. But the risk of getting MRSA at the beach cannot be estimated at this time.

. . . .We created MRSA. It evolved in response to our overuse of antibiotics, which came out of our fear of something "scary", so we used a curative, a preventive, to keep an "infection" from getting into our system. Think about everything else that I wrote about above, and draw the metaphor for yourself.

. . . .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 bein