Congratulations to Barak Obama on his South Carolina Win...Still waiting to see who comes in second. I don't know when or if American voters might choke at uncertainty mixed with racism, but if they're gonna start to have second thoughts, I hope that its before the general election.
I guess that Bill Clinton didn't win much of anything until later in the primary season, so its impossible to guess what will happen as this thing goes on. As far as I'm concerned, with Edwards, its all about the message, and hopefully he will have a good long time to talk about these very important issues. Its early to pick a winner in this, but as much as I hear that people hate Hillary, I'm also hearing some trepidation that Obama might not have the experience that is is necessary for this time of war. If we get any kind of terra surprise, we might see a result that we didn't bargain for. I hope to god that any of our candidates who moves towards the front of the pack is ready to react and act like they know what they're doing and they're gonna kick some terra-ist ass !

c/p RIPCoco

Labels: John Edwards, Obama, primaries

Being a John Edwards supporter is starting to feel an awful lot like being a Mets fan. Other polls are less encouraging, but the latest Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll shows Edwards gaining four percentage points since Wednesday to a level of 19% -- five points behind Hillary Clinton and within the poll's margin of error. Fortunately, this is a primary and not a caucus, so we won't be hearing about Clinton caucusers closing the doors at 11:30 for a noon caucus.

No one's expecting Edwards to win in South Carolina today, but a second place finish, or even a very close third would be enough to keep him very much in this thing, if not as the nominee than as potential kingmaker. Of course as Keith Olbermann pointed out last night, the so-called "superdelegates" (or as I call them, party hacks) could make the entire primary race moot if they decide to fall in line behind Hillary Clinton at the convention. But Edwards' role in this primary race is important, and it transcends his own potential for nomination. His role is about holding the feet of two centrist candidates to the progressive fire. We have one candidate who's a complete and unabashed corporatist, and another one whose inclination is to avoid fighting Republicans wherever possible in the name of "bipartisanship."

We're seeing this in the refusal of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to stand up for the U.S. Constitution by going back to Washington and standing with Chris Dodd (who deserves our thanks for his courage) in refusing to grant immunity to telecommunications companies who have been conducting mass surveillance of American citizens for the past seven years -- even before the 9/11 attacks. Oh, they've given lip service to opposing immunity, but they are sitting Senators, their votes are needed, but they're weaseling out of taking a stand. Yesterday John Edwards issued a plea to his opponents to do the right thing:

When it comes to protecting the rule of law, words are not enough. We need action.

It's wrong for your government to spy on you. That's why I'm asking you to join me today in calling on Senate Democrats to filibuster revisions to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that would give "retroactive immunity" to the giant telecom companies for their role in aiding George W. Bush's illegal eavesdropping on American citizens.

The Senate is debating this issue right now -- which is why we must act right now. You can find your Senators' phone numbers here or call the Senate Switchboard at 1-(202)-224-3121.

Granting retroactive immunity is wrong. It will let corporate law-breakers off the hook. It will hamstring efforts to learn the truth about Bush's illegal spying program. And it will flip on its head a core principle that has guided our nation since our founding: the belief that no one, no matter how well connected or what office they hold, is above the law.

But in Washington today, the telecom lobbyists have launched a full-court press for retroactive immunity. George Bush and Dick Cheney are doing everything in their power to ensure it passes. And too many Senate Democrats are ready to give the lobbyists and the Bush administration exactly what they want.

Please join me in calling on every Senate Democrat to do everything in their power -- including joining Senator Dodd's efforts to filibuster this legislation -- to stop retroactive immunity and stand up for the rule of law. The Constitution should not be for sale at any price.

Thank you for taking action.

John Edwards
January 24, 2008

(For the record, both of my Senators, Lautenberg and Menendez, are opposed to immunity.)

This is no time to "go all wobbly", as Margaret Thatcher might say, on the Constitution. Edwards isn't a current Senator, but as I mentioned above, his role is to get his opponents to do the right thing when it would (and apparently will) be far easier for them not to.

Meanwhile, in the Batshit Crazy Stakes, what should be the final nail in Rudy Giuliani's campaign coffin appears in today's New York Times: the revelation that the New York Police Department issued an analysis in 1998 opposing in no uncertain terms Rudy Giuliani's plans to locate the city's command center in the World Trade Center:

“Seven World Trade Center is a poor choice for the site of a crucial command center for the top leadership of the City of New York,” a panel of police experts, which was aided by the Secret Service, concluded in a confidential Police Department memorandum.

The memorandum, which has not been previously disclosed, cited a number of “significant points of vulnerability.” Those included: the building’s public access, the center’s location on the 23rd floor, a 1,200-gallon diesel fuel supply for its generator, a large garage and delivery bays, the building’s history as a terrorist target, and its placement above and adjacent to a Consolidated Edison substation that provided much of the power for Lower Manhattan.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, the mayor then, has acknowledged some police skepticism about the site, but he has described it as resulting from a jurisdictional dispute between police officials and his emergency management director, who had played a role in selecting the site.

[snip]

“This group’s finding is that the security of the proposed O.E.M. Command Center cannot be reasonably guaranteed,” the commander of the intelligence division, Daniel J. Oates, wrote in the July 15, 1998, memo to the police commissioner.

The memo said the conclusions were based on analysis by police officials with expertise in infrastructure, building security, explosives, traffic and ventilation systems, who also consulted the Secret Service, including the agency’s New York special agent in charge, Chip Smith.

“Mr. Smith agrees with this assessment,” the memo says in its concluding paragraph, “even though his own office is in Seven World Trade Center. He acknowledges that the security of his office is a continuing concern because of the public nature of the building and the other reasons specified in this report.”

The memorandum was provided to The New York Times by a law enforcement official not affiliated with a rival political campaign.

Mr. Giuliani received a briefing on the Police Department’s recommendations, but it is unclear whether he received a copy of the memorandum.

Mr. Giuliani has said in the past that one of the reasons for choosing the location was that several federal agencies with which city officials needed to be in contact during emergencies, including the Secret Service, had their offices there. Other federal agencies in the building included the Defense Department and the C.I.A.

But the Police Department took the opposite position in the memo, saying the presence of those agencies made the building a more likely target.

The mythology that Rudy Giuliani was able to build up around his role as "terrorism expert" and "tough leader" grows simply out of two facts: 1) that the President of the United States was crapping his pants with fear on 9/11 as he jetted around the country after sitting in a third grade classroom for seven minutes using schoolchildren as human shields and Giuliani was the public face of so-called "leadership" that day; and 2) that he was able to do so because since his own command center had been destroyed, he had no place else to go but photo-ops on the streets of New York. As the news comes out of his ineptitude in getting radios that worked to the firemen of New York and his refusal to listen to just plain common sense about where the city's command center should be located, his claims of being the only candidate who can keep America safe ring ever more hollow. With current polls in Florida showing him in Huckabee territory at around 15%, Tuesday should deflate Giuliani's biggest dickus balloon once and for all.

Labels: 2008 election

A bad reason, but a reason. Poor Thomas Warziniack was guilty only of the crime of Being a Drug User And Probably Mentally Ill While Having A Funny Name -- but it was enough to get him detained in a deportation facility for weeks:

Thomas Warziniack was born in Minnesota and grew up in Georgia, but immigration authorities pronounced him an illegal immigrant from Russia.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has held Warziniack for weeks in an Arizona detention facility with the aim of deporting him to a country he's never seen. His jailers shrugged off Warziniack's claims that he was an American citizen, even though they could have retrieved his Minnesota birth certificate in minutes and even though a Colorado court had concluded that he was a U.S. citizen a year before it shipped him to Arizona.

On Thursday, Warziniack was told he would be released. Immigration authorities were finally able to verify his citizenship.

"The immigration agents told me they never make mistakes," Warziniack said in a phone interview from jail. "All I know is that somebody dropped the ball."

The story of how immigration officials decided that a small-town drifter with a Southern accent was an illegal Russian immigrant illustrates how the federal government mistakenly detains and sometimes deports American citizens.

U.S. citizens who are mistakenly jailed by immigration authorities can get caught up in a nightmarish bureaucratic tangle in which they're simply not believed.

[snip]

Officials with ICE, the federal agency that oversees deportations, maintain that such cases are isolated because agents are required to obtain sufficient evidence that someone is an illegal immigrant before making an arrest. However, they don't track the number of U.S. citizens who are detained or deported.

"We don't want to detain or deport U.S. citizens," said Ernestine Fobbs, an ICE spokeswoman. "It's just not something we do."

While immigration advocates agree that the agents generally release detainees before deportation in clear-cut cases, they said that ICE sometimes ignores valid assertions of citizenship in the rush to ship out more illegal immigrants.

Proving citizenship is especially difficult for the poor, mentally ill, disabled or anyone who has trouble getting a copy of his or her birth certificate while behind bars.

Pedro Guzman, a mentally disabled U.S. citizen who was born in Los Angeles, was serving a 120-day sentence for trespassing last year when he was shipped off to Mexico. Guzman was found three months later trying to return home. Although federal government attorneys have acknowledged that Guzman was a citizen, ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice said Thursday that her agency still questions the validity of his birth certificate.

Last March, ICE agents in San Francisco detained Kebin Reyes, a 6-year-old boy who was born in the U.S., for 10 hours after his father was picked up in a sweep. His father says he wasn't permitted to call relatives who could care for his son, although ICE denies turning down the request.

The number of U.S. citizens who are swept up in the immigration system is a small fraction of the number of illegal immigrants who are deported, but in the last several years immigration lawyers report seeing more detainees who turn out to be U.S. citizens.

(h/t: He Who Must Not Be Named)

Labels: fascism, police state

Imagine what might have been, were it not for a bunch of paid Congressional thugs and a partisan Supreme Court:



(Now just sit back and wait for Barry to show up with one of his highly incisive zingers about Al Gore's weight. You know it's coming...)

Labels: Al Gore

If I didn't want to stick an icepick in my forehead after a week of Battlin' Barack and Hellion Hillary in their steel cage match, this bunch of lunatics would:



Note how Ron Paul is the only one who got any kind of positive response from even this crowd. It's no wonder that so many people are willing to overlook his white supremacist associations because of his stand on the war. And you have to love the Huckster's remarks about "the potential for weapons of mass destruction." I have in the house one of those long lighters used to light the grill during the summer. Does that mean I too have "the potential for weapons of mass destruction"?

Labels: batshit crazies, icepick meet forehead, Republican Presidential Debates

Why am I not surprised that the Bush Administration's IRS isn't going to be able to process these much-vaunted "stimulus"* checks in time to make a difference?

The checks will be in the mail — eventually.

But President Bush’s plan to send payments to 117 million households to stimulate the economy would impose major strains on the Internal Revenue Service, delays in answering calls to the agency and require a host of technical rules to determine who ultimately collects the benefits, officials said Thursday.

The deal between the administration and House leaders calls for checks to be issued 60 days after the president signs a law authorizing the one-time payments. That may be in as few as four or five weeks if the full House and the Senate come to terms on the details quickly.

In theory, the first checks may arrive in early May, if nothing goes wrong.

Even as the negotiators crunched the numbers, the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation warned that the tax-filing season could be disrupted and hinted that it might be June before checks were issued.

I.R.S. computer and other systems “are today fully engaged in processing 2007 tax returns,” the committee said Monday in a report. “As a result, it is not practical to contemplate distributing cash rebates until the peak filing season is completed, which in past years has been the very end of May.”

At the very least, the agency needs to have in hand the annual returns for last year to know who is married and who has dependent children, information that often changes.

The size of the checks will also depend on incomes and other factors. For example, individuals would not qualify for the $300 payments if they earned less than $3,000, unless they paid taxes on unearned income like pensions and interest.

Although many people who owe no income tax will receive checks, none will be sent to people who pay their taxes through withholding but do not file returns, said Anthony DeSouza, a spokesman for the Treasury Department. Because the withholding tables typically collect slightly more tax than is owed, those nonfilers are seldom pursued.

The prospect of collecting the stimulus payments may spur some of those taxpayers to file returns, after all, adding to the logistical strain and increasing the drain on the Treasury, which would have otherwise kept their money.

Determining who is eligible and for how much money will require major reprogramming of an outdated computer system that relies on technology long since abandoned by business. The software changes will have to be made as an estimated 135 million individual income tax returns arrive between now and April 15.

The Democratic candidates for the presidency ought to be all over this, not because of the delay in getting these ridiculous vote-bribes out to the public, but because it's yet another symptom of what happens when Republicans decide to reduce government so much that you can "drown it in a bathtub." For twenty-eight years, Democrats have allowed Republicans to brand them as "the party of tax and spend", when they should have been fighting back against the party of "borrow and shovel the borrowed cash into the pockets of our friends." Because the borrowed money sure as hell isn't going to fund government agencies. In fact, even though the IRS was deemed to be underfunded earlier in 2007, the House cut funding even further in December:

The omnibus appropriations bill passed by the House last night contains 3,500 pages and over $516 billion in spending. Yet with all that space (and money), Congress could not find enough room for even their own priorities from earlier this year for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Specifics of the IRS's funding take from the omnibus show the House has included $2.15 billion for taxpayer services, down slightly from the $2.155 proposed earlier this year, $4.78 billion for enforcement (down from $4.93 billion) and $3.68 billion for operations (down from $3.77 billion). What's more, the House has backed away from a requirement for the IRS to develop a strategic plan to address the tax gap. The total IRS budget request ($10.89 billion) is $203 million below even President Bush's request!. What is going on here?

So, just to review, despite a year in which congressional hearings revealed that the IRS is underfunded, runs a dangerous and wasteful privatization program, and has no strategic plan for addressing the tax gap, Congress decided to give it less money, allow the privatization program to continue, and let the IRS off the hook for developing a strategic plan.

I guess they had forgotten about this when they decided to toss a few coins at the peasants.

Labels: Bush Administration, incompetence, IRS, taxes

The Bush Administration will face no impeachment hearings for lying us into a war without reason, for spying on American citizens without cause, for outing an undercover CIA agent working on nuclear nonproliferation, and for firing U.S. attorneys who refused to trump up "voter fraud" charges where there were none.

Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers will face no contempt charges for refusing to answer Congressional subpoenas.

The telecommunications companies will face no charges for illegally recording all of our phone calls for the last seven years, even before 9/11.

So why should Osama Bin Laden be any different? He IS a good friend of the Bush family, right? So he gets off the hook too:

Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes appeared on Fox this morning to discuss his recent meeting with President Bush in the Oval Office. The key takeaway for Barnes was that “bin Laden doesn’t fit with the administration’s strategy for combating terrorism.” Barnes said that Bush told him capturing bin Laden is “not a top priority use of American resources.” Watch it.

Bush’s priorities have always been skewed. Just months after declaring he wanted bin Laden “dead or alive,” Bush said, “I truly am not that concerned about him.” Turning his attention away from bin Laden, Bush trained his focus on Iraq — a country he now admits had “nothing” to do with 9/11.

[snip]
Full transcript:

HOST: Alright Fred, you and a few other journalists were in the Oval Office with the President, right? And he says catching Osama bin Laden is not job number one?

BARNES: Well, he said, look, you can send 100,000 special forces, that’s the figure he used, to the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan and hunt him down, but he just said that’s not a top priority use of American resources. His vision of a war on terror is one that involves intelligence to find out from people, to get tips, to follow them up and break up plots to kill Americans before they occur. That’s what happened recently in that case of the planes that were to be blown up by terrorists, we think coming from England, and that’s the top priority. He says, you know, getting Osama bin Laden is a low priority compared to that.

Because when you're associated with the Bush Administration, all crimes may be forgiven -- even the murder of almost 3000 people. Trials by jury, conviction, and incarceration are for the little people.

Labels: George W. Bush, icepick meet forehead, Osama bin Laden, utter horseshit

The media may be trying to turn competition for the gold at the U.S. Men's event at this week's U.S. figure skating championships between the excellent but dull Evan Lysacek and the flamboyantly pansexual Johnny Weir as the Second Coming of the Battle of the Brians, but I say they don't make skaters like Kurt Browning anymore. Granted, these are post-eligible exhibition performances, but it sure does make one wonder what would have been had the early 1990's Bowman/Browning rivalry gotten the same hype as the Two Brians did a few years earlier:



And if you want to see something impressive, here's the same performance eleven years later (yes, that is still Kurt Browning, not Scott Hamilton):



I can't do that. Can you?

Labels: figure skating, mus

In today's society of blindingly blue-white teeth and tummy tucks and Botox, qualifications for a job may no longer matter. It's all about how well you disguise the fact that you're getting older. And inevitably, another entry in the multimillion dollar industry of so-called self-help books plays on yet another insecurity that Americans, particularly American women, have to face every day:

IN a new self-help book called “How Not to Look Old,” chapter headings in screaming capital letters warn readers of the dreaded signs of aging that are to be avoided at all costs.

“NOTHING AGES YOU LIKE ... FOREHEAD LINES” admonishes one chapter introduction. Another chapter cautions: “NOTHING AGES YOU LIKE ... YELLOW TEETH.”

Nothing, apparently, also carbon-dates you like GRAY BROW HAIRS or SAGGING SKIN or RECEDING GUMS, according to the book written by Charla Krupp, a former beauty director at Glamour who writes a column for More, a magazine for women over 40.

The book is the latest makeover title to treat the aging of one’s exterior as a disease whose symptoms are to be fought to the death or, at least, mightily camouflaged. But the book offers a serious rationale for such vigilant attempts at age control, arguing that trying to pass for younger is not so much a matter of sexual allure as of job security.

“Looking hip is not just about vanity anymore, it’s critical to every woman’s personal and financial survival,” according to the book jacket.

Promoted recently on Oprah Winfrey’s show and “Today,” the book clearly speaks to the fears of professional obsolescence and economic vulnerability among women over 40, at whom it is aimed. “How Not to Look Old” made its debut on the New York Times best-seller list last week at No. 8 in the advice and how-to category.

“Whether we want to admit it or not, in male corporate America we would rather have a cute, sexy 30-year-old working for us than a 50-year-old with gray hair who has let herself go and looks out of it, not in the swing of it, like a nun,” said Ms. Krupp, a blonde who blurs her age by personifying her advice about donning highlights, bangs, heels and sheer lip gloss. After all, nothing ages you like dark lipstick.

“My book is hitting a nerve because I am giving not looking old a spin as if your life depended on it,” Ms. Krupp said in an interview last week.

Many people would shun a book if it were titled “How Not to Look Jewish” or “How Not to Look Gay” because to cater to discrimination is to capitulate to it. But the success of “How Not to Look Old” indicates that popular culture is willing to buy into ageism as an acceptable form of prejudice, even against oneself.

[snip]

In one study on hiring practices, for example, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology applied to entry-level jobs in Boston and St. Petersburg, Fla., by sending out 4,000 résumés as a female job applicant; the résumés varied the year of high school graduation, which dated the job seeker as being from 35 to 62.

The study, published in 2005 by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, found that younger women were 40 percent more likely to receive an offer of a job interview than women over 50; a woman over 50 in Boston would have to send in 27 résumés just to get one job interview, where a younger woman would have to send in only 19, the study said.

I hate to burst the balloon of this fantasy that enough products and money spent on cosmetic procedures and time at the gym is going to somehow magically make employers think you're younger than you are, but has Charla Krupp ever heard of background checks?

In companies that don't care about a person's age, as long as that person looks youthful, spending tens of thousands of dollars on plastic surgery and less-invasive cosmetic procedures may work. But when it's all about the age itself (as it was during an interview I once had at a television network when I was 45, and the human resources recruiter I spoke with asked me a number of questions containing cultural references that were clearly designed to make me indirectly reveal my approximate age), there isn't a cosmetic procedure in the world that's going to disguise the fact that you graduated college in 1977.

It's no secret that I'm not thin. I was thin for about five minutes in 1983 when I was on Cambridge Diet, consuming 300 calories a day and crying all the time, eventually going from a size 12 to a size 6, which lasted, as I said, for about five minutes. I have undereye circles. I always have, even when I was a child. My teeth are in good shape, but I can't use whiteners because my molars are all crowned to match the rest of my teeth. And as for plastic surgery and Botox, well, I remember when botulism was something to avoid, and frankly, there are other things I'd rather spend thousands of dollars on than trying to fight a battle against time that we all ultimately lose.

Oh, sure, I do that thing in front of the mirror where you pull back your cheeks and say, "Gee, if I just had this pulled back just a TEENSY bit..." Then I think about how freaked out I was about the sedation involved in a colonoscopy and say to myself, "And you're going to let them put you under so they can cut up your FACE??"

There's a point that starts around 45 where there aspects to the face that looks back at you in the mirror in the morning that can be terrifying -- those little jowly things that start to appear that you never thought would appear on you, because YOU were never going to grow old. And sometimes you look in the mirror and think it's a stranger looking back at you. But then after a minute you recognize your own face, and there's a comforting aspect to that. I can't imagine what it must be like to be Greta Van Susteren and to have spent years looking in the mirror at the face on the left below and then one day seeing the one on the right:






I understand that in her line of work, a youthful appearance is mandatory (though Lisa Myers and Candy Crowley show that not EVERYONE has to look like a Fox News-bot). But for the rest of us, what difference does it make? Why should the illusion of one's "fuckability" even come into play in the workplace? Are you there to do a job, or to feed the fantasies of male employers?

I've been in my current job for seven years, and hope to stay there for fourteen more. I've taken a total of seven sick days during that time -- that's one sick day a year, on average. I've worked weekends and evenings when there was a crunch project and I stay late if I'm in the middle of something. If the users of a project I'm working on want additional features, I try to provide them. I try to keep up with changing technologies as much as someone with limited time can do. I get along with everyone in my department. People in other departments with whom I work say I'm great to work with. I'll stack up my work ethic and energy level against just about anyone. But books like this, and osme workplaces, would say none of that matters, because I'm short and overweight and my teeth aren't blue-white and I have circles under my eyes no matter how much sleep I get and I have lines around my mouth.

What kind of fucked-up value system is this?

I'm not saying that you shouldn't try to look attractive. I wear makeup and get my hair professionally colored. That's my concession to the quest for youth. But where is it written that attractiveness has to be about trying to look twenty-five forever? And why not just try to look good, no matter how "old" you look? Now if you WANT to have these procedures, and you have the money to do it, more power to you. Be my guest. But it shouldn't be mandatory -- and that brings up another, more insidious aspect to this quest for eternal youth, and that is that it's the exclusive province of the affluent. In a country with a diminishing job base, are we going to make employment accessible only to those with the financial resources to spend thousands of dollars to retain a youthful appearance?

Labels: ageism, rant

Kudos to Keith Olbermann, who seems to be the last journalist in America to remember that there are still three candidates in the Democratic presidential race, instead of just making sure that everyone is so disgusted with the Clinton/Obama nastiness that they just stay home on February 5th.

Meanwhile, back at the hackocracy in Washington, Harry Reid, who's supposed to be the Senate Majority Leader, said majority being Democrats, is once again being the Republicans' bitch. As Glenn Greenwald notes, Reid, who has never once forced a filibuster from the Republicans, is about to force one from Chris Dodd, should he dare to thwart the drive to give the telecommunications companies retroactive immunity from prosecution for its massive, warrantless, and yes, illegal, surveillance program:

Harry Reid -- who has (a) done more than any other individual to ensure that Bush's demands for telecom immunity and warrantless eavesdropping powers will be met in full and (b) allowed the Republicans all year to block virtually every bill without having to bother to actually filibuster -- went to the Senate floor yesterday and, with the scripted assistance of Mitch McConnell and Pat Leahy, warned Chris Dodd, Russ Feingold and others that they would be selfishly wreaking havoc on the schedules of their fellow Senators (making them work over the weekend, ruining their planned "retreat," and even preventing them from going to Davos!) if they bothered everyone with their annoying, pointless little filibuster.

To do so, Reid announced that, unlike for the multiple filibusters from Republican colleagues, he would actually force Dodd and company to engage in a real filibuster. This is what Reid said:

[I]f people think they are going to talk this to death, we are going to be in here all night. This is not something we are going to have a silent filibuster on. If someone wants to filibuster this bill, they are going to do it in the openness of the Senate.

That is what Democrats have been urging Reid to do to the filibustering Republicans all year -- in order to dramatize their obstructionism -- but he has refused to make them actually filibuster anything, generously agreeing instead that every bill requires 60 votes. Instead, he reserves such punishment only for the members of his own caucus trying to take a stand for the rule of law and the Constitution, those who are trying finally to bring some accountability to this administration.

That's right, folks -- Our Senate Majority Leader is in cahoots with Mitch McConnell to make sure that George W. Bush's evisceration of the Constitution is made legal and permanent, and that those who engaged in these activities before Harry Reid decided that whatever campaign cash is being funnelled into his pockets was more important than the Constitution, are never held accountable.

Greenwald cites this comment to show exactly what is going to become legal, thanks to Harry Reid...the leader of the so-called "opposition party".

The problem we have goes way beyond the fact that there is absolutely zero opposition to unfettered executive branch and corporate power in our government. The bigger problem is that Americans just plain don't care. Far too many have no idea what's in the Bill of Rights, and too many of those who do actually know what the Fourth Amendment says:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

...just don't care about it. "I have nothing to hide, and if that's what the government needs to keep us safe from terrorists, I'm all for it."

That's an actual quote from someone with whom I had a conversation recently. This person is a conservative Republican who is disgusted with George W. Bush and planning to vote for Barack Obama, but is still willing to cede his freedoms to an all-powerful executive branch in the name of "safety." That's "safety", not safety. It's a notion of safety instead of actual safety, and that's enough. When I asked this person why the ports are still unsecured, or why he's OK with having his phone calls to his mother recorded while nothing has been done to secure our ports and air security is a joke, he has no answer. Of course he has no answer -- because to open his eyes and look at how this Administration and this Congress, with the help of the very Democrats who are supposed to represent some kind of check on this madness, is to realize that We the People have allowed this to happen -- and now it's too late.

As for the two Democratic frontrunners and the ex-president who wants another crack at it, they're busy putting more energy into trying to mortally wound each other than either of them has ever put into trying to uphold the Constitution, hold George W. Bush accountable for the 935 lies about Iraq told by his Administration in the run-up to war, or any of the other tasks that a Senator from the opposition party ought to be doing in their legislative role of providing checks and balances to an Administration run amok. They're giving lip service to opposing immunity, but somehow I don't think this is going to translate to returning to Washington to help Chris Dodd (whose boots neither of them is fit to wipe) with the filibuster.

Both Clinton and Obama claim to be opposed to telecom immunity, but neither have committed to a filibuster. And don't hold your breath waiting for them to do so. They're too busy handing the November election to the Republicans.

Meanwhile, in other news of Democratic fecklessness, remember the subpoenas issued to White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers over their refusal to testify about the firing of the U.S. attorneys? Oh, well, the Democrats were just kidding about that, too. Rule of law? Oh, sorry, sir...madam. we forgot back in July that we're supposed to just kiss your asses. Well, we'll do something about that right now:

House Democrats will postpone votes on criminal contempt citations against White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers, while congressional leaders work with President Bush on a bipartisan stimulus package to fend off an economic downturn, according to party leaders and leadership aides.

Senior Democrats have decided that holding a controversial vote on the contempt citations, which have already been approved by the House Judiciary Committee as part of its investigation into the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, would “step on their message” of bipartisan unity in the midst of the stimulus package talks.

Bush, citing executive privilege, has refused to allow Bolten or Miers to testify before the House Judiciary panel about the prosecutor purge. And former deputy White House chief of staff Karl Rove was barred by the administration from appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the same issue.

“Right now, we’re focused on working in a bipartisan fashion on [the] stimulus,” said House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), indicating that the contempt vote is not expected for weeks, depending on how quickly the stimulus package moves.

Brendan Daly, a spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), said “no decision has been made” as to when a criminal contempt vote would be held by the House.

I've got my money on "the twelfth of never" on that one.

What a relief it must be to Nancy and Steny and Harry, that they don't have to deal with the unpleasantness of having to, oh, say, UPHOLD THE FUCKING LAW. Instead, they can work in perfect harmony with Congressional Republicans to print money backed by nothing and hand it out to American voters just in time for election day, hoping that a few hundred bucks will shut them up until after the election -- when by the time they do their 2008 taxes next year and realize that they now owe money because of the "rebate" they got this year, it'll be too late for them to do anything about it. And then it'll be another year till they have to run for re-election anyway.

All this as the one candidate who recognizes that the system is broken is further and further marginalized by the media -- and by Americans who are now too worried about their dwindling 401(k) savings and their plummeting home values and their tenuous job security to even pay attention.

(h/t: Digby and Dday)

Labels: Democrats, economic death watch, FISA, rant, spinelessness

Well, there are two reasons. One of them is that I just plain didn't think about it. Now you could ask why I didn't think about it, and I have to admit that since I no longer have to think about unwanted pregnancy, it isn't at the forefront of my mind.

But there's another reason, and that is that I'm tired. I'm really, really tired of this battle. I'm not saying that we have to capitulate, but I've been fighting this battle since the early 1970's, only to see many young women either dismiss early feminists as an anachronism, or shrug their shoulders and say, "Oh, they'd NEVER make abortion illegal again." Well, sue me for thinking sometime that if that's how they feel, why are we busting our asses to preserve this right that the women most affected take for granted?

I'm not talking about the progressive blogosphere, where the young activists congregate. God knows they do yeoman work trying to drive home the realities behind the "Save the BAYBEEZZZZZ!!" rhetoric. I am talking about the larger society, where every single election we have to fight this battle over and over again, with fewer people taking it seriously as a right we have to continue to fight to retain.

By ceding any portion of their right to bodily self-integrity, young women who are not on the front lines of this battle have enabled one of the crazier pieces of legislation to attempt to seize state control of women's uteri: an amendment to the state constitution in the state of Georgia that reclassifies most of the common methods of contraception (i.e. all nonbarrier methods) as abortion, while defining a fertilized egg as a human being.

I've railed for years about the prospect of government inspection of used tampons, investigation of every menstrual period and prosecution for miscarriages, as a way of dramatizing the logical outgrowth of such legislation, which pops up every now and then like the unwanted mice that somehow find a crack in the foundation you hadn't patched yet. And yet where is the demand for staunch pro-choice candidates? The Democrats are supposed to stand for women's equality, but every time Chuck Schumer chooses a candidate like Bob Casey, or Hillary Clinton looks for "common ground" with fetophile absolutists, our rights over our own bodies are increasingly endangered. I know a woman whom I will not identify here who has a horror story of her own about how her health has been endangered by doctors' determination to salvage her uterus at all costs. I hope she will decide to tell her story soon.

While young people are wishing that we baby boomers would just die the fuck off already so they could get the share they feel they're due of an ever-shrinking pie, we boomers have been out there trying to apply the brakes to an organized drive by religious fanatics to once again make women prisoners of our own biology. Perhaps many of us let our guard down and didn't kick up enough of a ruckus when groups like NARAL decided to do things like endorse Joe Lieberman, who had the gall to say that if a hospital refuses to prescribe emergency contraception out of "religious principles" (sic), well, that dirty slut who got herself raped can damn well just drive to another hospital. But you know what? We get tired. Tired of fighting the same Goddamn battle for thirty, forty years. We need help now. And we need it from those women who are going to be most affected by the Handmaid's Tale society the Christofascist Zombie Brigade has in store for them.

Labels: abortion, contraception, rant, reproductive rights

Mitt Romney -- The whitest man in America:

Labels: cluelessness, Mitt Romney

Remember the episode of Beavis and Butthead in which the two dimwits are working in a fast food restaurant? Beavis sticks his hand into the fryer, yells "Ow!" as he pulls it out -- and sticks it back in again?

We Americans are like Beavis, in that we have short memories. The American optimism is often born of nothing but, well, American optimism. And so, just a few years after the dot-com boom and crash, we started it all again, this time with residential real estate.

I've never understood how anyone could think it would go on forever. In 2005, I would look around my living room, with the ugly but amazingly still intact (it's wool) red carpet that the previous owners of the house decided was attractive, and I'd look at my kitchen, with its hideous yellow geometric vinyl floor, and my 1970's basement family room with the dark paneling and rust-color carpet, and think "Who the hell would pay $489,000 for this?" But in 2005, if we had wanted to sell, that's the price at which we would have been able to list. I'm sorry, but any rational mind would realize that nearly a half-million dollars for a "POS cape" in a not-top-tier town was just insane.

And yet the rational mind seemed all too often to just fly out the window, as people tapped home equity for expensive vacations and more SUVs than there were drivers in the house, and that's on top of the additional 2000 square foot add-a-levels and the gourmet kitchens with Aga cookers that no one ever used, except to dish out the greasy Chinese takeout from the strip mall.

And just like the 1920's, and the 1980's, and the late 1990's, no one ever thought it would end. But it has. Because we never learn:

The recent financial turmoil has many causes, but they are tied to a basic fear that some of the economic successes of the last generation may yet turn out to be a mirage. That helps explain why problems in the American subprime mortgage market could have spread so quickly through the world’s financial system. On Tuesday, Mr. Bernanke, who is now the Fed chairman, presided over the steepest one-day interest rate cut in the central bank’s history.

The great moderation now seems to have depended — in part — on a huge speculative bubble, first in stocks and then real estate, that hid the economy’s rough edges. Everyone from first-time home buyers to Wall Street chief executives made bets they did not fully understand, and then spent money as if those bets couldn’t go bad. For the past 16 years, American consumers have increased their overall spending every single quarter, which is almost twice as long as any previous streak.

Now, some worry, comes the payback. Martin Feldstein, the éminence grise of Republican economists, says he is concerned that the economy “could slip into a recession and that the recession could be a long, deep, severe one.” In Monday’s Democratic presidential debate, Barack Obama made the same argument: “We could be sliding into an extraordinary recession,” he said.

This time, the firms are facing real losses, which will almost certainly curtail lending, and economic growth, this year.

The second problem is that real estate and stocks remain fairly expensive. This shows just how big the bubbles were: despite the recent declines, stock prices and home values have still not returned to historical norms.

David Rosenberg, a Merrill Lynch economist, says that the stock market is overvalued by 10 percent relative to corporate earnings and interest rates. And remember that stocks usually fall more than they should during a bear market, much as they rise more than they should during a bull market.

The situation with house prices looks worse. Until 2000, the relationship between house prices and rents remained fairly steady. The same could be said about house prices relative to household incomes and mortgage rates. But the boom of the last decade changed this entirely.

For prices to return to the old norm, they would still need to fall 30 percent across much of Florida, California and the Southwest and about 20 percent in the Northeast. This could happen quickly, or prices could remain stagnant for years while incomes and rents caught up.

For those of us who didn't answer the siren song of home equity loans, we should be all right provided we can hang onto our jobs. But there are any number of people who are going to be foreclosed right out of those gourmet kitchens because their Wall Street jobs have been eliminated and they tapped so much equity that they now owe more than their homes are worth; and that's on top of those who would never have qualified for a mortgage under normal circumstances, but succumbed to sharp-talking lenders who convinced them they could have a piece of the action.

I remember in the 1980's, during the last real estate speculative bubble, when friends were all grabbing houses at inflated prices and telling me it was a great time to buy -- even though the money for a down payment wasn't there. I longed to have a house, but just couldn't afford it. And then I saw friends sell at a loss one step ahead of foreclosure. I'm in possession of one friend's grandmother's stemware, bought at their scrape-together-the-cash-for-the-closing garage sale after she sold at a loss, because I felt at least someone she knows should have it. So it's hard to feel a whole lot of schadenfreude for those who succumbed (extent to the extent that they look down on my ugly kitchen, of course). Because ultimately, those poor decisions are going to affect all of us. Because sometimes good old American optimism allows us to get things done or come together during a crisis. And sometimes American optimism is just delusion.

Labels: economic death watch, housing bubble

Twelve days ago I saw the news about Christopher Bowman's death on the news crawl on Morning Joe. Today I heard the news about the death of Heath Ledger on Newsradio 880, and my reaction was identical: "Oh, shit...."

One thing that happens when you get to be fifty is that you start recognizing the names of famous people who die, as the actors and celebrities you watched when you were a kid start to drop off one by one. Of course we had our share of young wasted lives too, during those few years when Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison all decided that twenty-seven years was long enough to hang around. But when you hit middle age, and your own time gets shorter, the news that someone young and attractive and talented is gone amidst speculation of whether the death is due to suicide (which seems at this moment to be probably not the case), an accidental overdose (possible) a continuing substance abuse problem, or due to a bout with pneumonia that apparently he'd been fighting (revealed by TMZ's Harvey Levin on Countdown this evening just makes you angry.

I'm not sure why these deaths affect us the way they do. Even now, two weeks after Bowman's death, most of the traffic coming here from Google is from searches for information on this male figure skater whose career ended fifteen years ago, and of whom you'd think most people had never heard. Perhaps it's because we think we know them because we see them on a screen; or perhaps it's that we think that they are somehow happier than we are because they live lives we can't even imagine -- and then it's a shock to find out that they have problems with depression and mental illness (Bowman was, it turns out, bipolar, which explains a great deal about his conduct during his skating career). Perhaps the deaths of people like Bowman and Heath Ledger and the similarly untimely death last week of the young and troubled actor Brad Renfro helps us to appreciate our own lives.

The Usual Suspects of tabloid media are going to be all over this story, with speculation. You know where to find them, so I'm not going to quote from or link to them here. I may have more to say on these as the toxicology reports come back and we know what the causes of death are. Until then, to speculate only causes more pain to the very real people in their lives.

Ledger was an actor the quality of whose work seemed to be a function of his director. For every Monster's Ball, there was A Knight's Tale. For every Brokeback Mountain:



...there was a Casanova. Ledger had always seemed to me to be a pretty but unimpressive actor until Brokeback -- with a deep voice that seemed incongrous with his Guess model features. I never could have imagined that this particular actor could have been the one to breathe life into the deeply closeted and tormented Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain, but his work in that film can still take your breath away. I defy anyone to watch this final scene without tearing up -- and the loss of someone so talented at such a young age just makes it worse.

Labels: movies

Congratulations to Kate Harding, who's featured in an article in the New York Times about the Fatosphere.

And here I thought I was hot shit for having a letter in the Magazine section.

Labels: bloggers, weight

Isn't it funny how none of the Republican candidates are talking any more about private Social Security accounts, or about investing part of Social Security funds in the stock market?

In case anyone thought that yesterday's bloodbath in the overseas market was just a one-day blip, guess again:

Asian stocks came under relentless selling pressure for the second straight session on Tuesday, a day after fears the U.S. economy could slip into a recession triggered a sell-off that spread to Europe and Latin America.
India's Sensitive Index was the most volatile in the region and suffered the steepest intraday losses for the second straight session. The index, which finished 7.4% lower in the previous session, was recently down 8.9% at 16,040.13. At that level, the index has already lost around 16% from Friday's close.
Things were equally downbeat elsewhere.

Japan's Nikkei Stock Average shed 5.7% to 12,573.05, while the broader Topix index skidded 5.7% to 1,219.95. Earlier in the day, the Nikkei dropped as low as 12,572.68 -- its lowest level since September 2005.
Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index slumped 8.7% to end at 21,757.63, as the sell-off deepened from the previous session, when it tumbled 5.5%. The Hang Seng China Enterprises Index plummeted even more, sinking 12% to 11,911.91. See related story.
Australia's S&P/ASX 200 extended its loss-making run into the 12th straight session, ending down 7.1% at 5,186.80 and setting a 52-week closing low, while New Zealand's NZX 50 index took its losses into the 14th session, dropping 1.1% at 3,607.13. South Korea's Kospi shed 4.4% at 1,609.02.
China's Shanghai Composite, which fell more than 5% in the previous session, sank 7.2% to 4,559.75, its lowest close since August, and Taiwan's Weighted index tumbled 6.5% to 7,581.96, a 10-month low. Emerging markets page
Singapore's Straits Times index, which lost 6% in the previous session, dropped 4.9% to 2,773.36 and Indonesia's JSX Composite tumbled 9.4% to 2,252.49 by late afternoon.

I'm lucky enough to work in a place where my employer puts aside an amount equal to a percentage of my salary into my retirement account, and I'm putting a decent percentage of my income myself. Since the beginning of the year, every penny that has been put into my account has been lost, over and above about 2% of the account's value at the beginning of December. Right now, at age 52, I'm literally shoveling money into a black hole, where it's never to be seen again.

This is retirement savings? This is what's supposed to replace Social Security? This is what people are supposed to rely on?

Yesterday the U.S. markets were on a roll: they were closed. Today the bloodbath comes back home:

U.S. stocks may enter a bear market on Tuesday, with stock futures pointing to losses of roughly 4% after two days of huge selling in overseas markets on fears over a U.S. recession.
Though off session lows, futures were pointing to early pain: S&P 500 futures dropped 56.2 points to 1,269.10 and Nasdaq 100 futures dropped 70.5 points to 1,779.00. Futures on the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 478 points.

So fasten your seat belts and put your tray tables in the upright position. We're going to prepare the cabin for landing now, because we're anticipating a great deal of turbulence as we land.

In the swamp.

Labels: economic death watch

Mark yesterday on your calendars, folks, because on the observance of the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the first viable woman candidate and the first African-American candidate for the presidency handed the office to the Republicans....again.

Frankly, I'm sick of the pair of them already.

I want to lock them in a room where they can bicker to their heart's content and let us get on with nominating a candidate who isn't providing his/her same-party opponent with video material for attack ads; one who has shown he can fight back against attacks and who doesn't come across like a narcissist; who gives the impression that this election is about US, not himself or herself.

If this wasn't some nice red meat that the media can use to make the eventual nominee look as unappealing as possible, thus furthering their corporate owners' goal of perpetuating Republican power, it would represent a possible breakthrough opportunity for John Edwards. But of course that can't be allowed to happen. It can't happen because media ownership will never allow the talking heads that are beamed into our living rooms, the ones idiotically obsessing about the horse race instead of what each of these candidates would actually do, to permit John Edwards, who represents a threat to their power and access to the corridors of Washington, to gain any traction.

We seem to have forgotten as we sit and watch, appalled, while Hillary Clinton engages in her scorched-earth campaign, is that this is why the Clintons were successful against the worst Republican onslaught of mud and feces in our lifetime: They fight dirty. They know how to fight dirty, they have no qualms about fighting dirty, and they're going to fight dirty. We loved it when we liked them. Now, with the public face of Clinton politics being the less appealing Hillary instead of the charismatic Bill, and now that it's directed against a candidate who's more transformational than Hillary Clinton is, and now that it's taking the form of a powerful white couple directing it against a black guy who's on their own team, it doesn't seem as much of a strength.

But here's the problem revealed by last night's debate: Barack Obama repeats over and over again that Americans are tired of this kind of divisive politics. And I'm sure that in his ideal world (as in ours), campaigns would be fought on issues and on real, substantive differences. But if he's going to complain about the tone of the Clinton campaign, what on earth is he going to do when the Republicans get hold of him? Obama's desire to run a different kind of campaign is a laudable one. But in Hillary Clinton, he's running against a candidate who plays for keeps. And she's just the warm-up. If he thinks that Hillary Clinton is being unfair and misrepresenting him, he isn't going to know what hit him when the Republicans try to turn him into a al-Qaeda mole trying to infiltrate our government.

Does anyone honestly believe that this kind of bickering is what Democrats want to hear as they decide for whom they want to vote?



And why on earth is the third guy not being taken seriously as a candidate? He's attractive, he's funny, he's smart as a whip, he keeps the focus on the American people, not about himself. He lets what he says and what he wants to do speak for itself. And in this context, with the "top two" trying to destroy each other, he's like a cool drink of water on a hot day. The way this contest is going, there's only one way to get this campaign back on the issues, and that's to get out from under the identity politics of race and gender. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama seem able to do that. Whether it's Clinton or Obama or their supporters doing it is immaterial. There are more important things we have to worry about than which identity group is going to take the White House.

Americans want someone who's running for this office for THEM -- for Americans -- not for themselves. Last night both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama gave the distinct impression that it's all about THEM, not about US. I don't believe that Obama is the narcissist that Hillary Clinton is, but if he isn't, it's time for him to show us.

Haven't we had enough of narcissism in the White House? Can we please stop letting Chris Matthews and Wolf Blitzer and Joe Scarborough and Brian Williams and Tim Russert decide who should be the nominee, and actually listen to what these people are saying?

On Saturday, Martin Luther King III met with John Edwards at the King Center in Atlanta. On Sunday Edwards received this note:

…I appreciate that on the major issues of health care, the environment, and the economy, you have framed the issues for what they are - a struggle for justice. And, you have almost single-handedly made poverty an issue in this election.

You know as well as anyone that the 37 million people living in poverty have no voice in our system. They don’t have lobbyists in Washington and they don’t get to go to lunch with members of Congress. Speaking up for them is not politically convenient. But, it is the right thing to do.

I am disturbed by how little attention the topic of economic justice has received during this campaign. I want to challenge all candidates to follow your lead, and speak up loudly and forcefully on the issue of economic justice in America.[..]

I believe that now, more than ever, we need a leader who wakes up every morning with the knowledge of that injustice in the forefront of their minds, and who knows that when we commit ourselves to a cause as a nation, we can make major strides in our own lifetimes. My father was not driven by an illusory vision of a perfect society. He was driven by the certain knowledge that when people of good faith and strong principles commit to making things better, we can change hearts, we can change minds, and we can change lives.

So, I urge you: keep going. Ignore the pundits, who think this is a horserace, not a fight for justice. My dad was a fighter. As a friend and a believer in my father’s words that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, I say to you: keep going. Keep fighting. My father would be proud.

Consider this: While the "transformative" candidate was taking Hillary Clinton's bait, the son of the man we honored yesterday was telling the southern white guy to keep fighting.

Senator Obama, I'm looking for a backup candidate should John Edwards prove unable to counteract the deck that's so stacked against him. You're the logical choice. Please stop giving me reasons to decide to just stay home.

(In case you missed it, and watching train wrecks isn't your cup of tea, Jeff Fecke liveblogged it, for which he has earned our eternal thanks.)

(h/t)

Labels: 2008 election, Barack Obama, democratic debate, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards

Lower Manhattanite: Down That Dark Alleyway - Part One.

Labels: bloggers

Labels: John Edwards

Somehow I expect that if by some miracle we have a Democratic president who somehow manages to implement policies that start extricating us from the economic mess that the Bush Administration is leaving us, conservatives will say it's because of policies Ronald Reagan implemented. Because before George W. Bush was worshipped as a god by hard-core conservatives, it was Saint Ronnie. Republicans have been searching for their new Ronald Reagan ever since George Herbert Walker Bush proved a bit honking dud as a campaigner, expressing astonishment at a supermarket scanner and saying to middle class Americans about whom he really didn't give a damn except to the extent that they might keep him in power, "Message: I care."

To the extent that Ronald Reagan is to be admired, it's as a highly effective snake oil salesman, convincing middle class people that if you shovel enough cash into the pockets of the wealthy, the change that trickles out of their overflowing pockets will enrich the middle class as well. Reagan also fed into the deep-seated emotional need that conservatives have for a father figure, though in those waning days of the Cold War, nutually assured destruction seemed a remote prospect at most. Reagan was the affable daddy, the one who'd keep the bogeyman (welfare queens) away from you but still go out in the backyard and have a catch. In this year's Search for the New Reagan, the Republican candidates are running as the punitive, controlling daddy; as Robert DeNiro in This Boy's Life or Robert Duvall as The Great Santini.

That Charlie Wilson's War turned out to be a dud at the box office is actually a positive sign that people outside those on the hard-core right with their daddy issues are re-evaluating the Reagan era. Whether it's that Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts are past their prime as box office draws, or if it's that people now understand that the events described in that particular story are what led to the creation of al-Qaeda remains to be seen. But it's clear now that the American role in putting the last nail in the Soviet expansionism coffin helped put us in the mess in which we find ourselves now.

It's in the area of economic policy where the current crop of Republicans persist in embracing the Reagan Doctrine, despite the fact that it was a Democratic president that had to clean up the mess that Reagan and Bush left in their "borrow and spend" policies. Today Paul Krugman sets the record straight on the Republicans' Reagan nostalgia in pointing out how there is absolutely no reason for any Democrat to invoke Ronald Reagan as an example for anything:

The Reagan economy was a one-hit wonder. Yes, there was a boom in the mid-1980s, as the economy recovered from a severe recession. But while the rich got much richer, there was little sustained economic improvement for most Americans. By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before — and the poverty rate had actually risen.

When the inevitable recession arrived, people felt betrayed — a sense of betrayal that Mr. Clinton was able to ride into the White House.

Given that reality, what was Mr. Obama talking about? Some good things did eventually happen to the U.S. economy — but not on Reagan’s watch.

For example, I’m not sure what “dynamism” means, but if it means productivity growth, there wasn’t any resurgence in the Reagan years. Eventually productivity did take off — but even the Bush administration’s own Council of Economic Advisers dates the beginning of that takeoff to 1995.

Similarly, if a sense of entrepreneurship means having confidence in the talents of American business leaders, that didn’t happen in the 1980s, when all the business books seemed to have samurai warriors on their covers. Like productivity, American business prestige didn’t stage a comeback until the mid-1990s, when the U.S. began to reassert its technological and economic leadership.

I understand why conservatives want to rewrite history and pretend that these good things happened while a Republican was in office — or claim, implausibly, that the 1981 Reagan tax cut somehow deserves credit for positive economic developments that didn’t happen until 14 or more years had passed. (Does Richard Nixon get credit for “Morning in America”?)

But why would a self-proclaimed progressive say anything that lends credibility to this rewriting of history — particularly right now, when Reaganomics has just failed all over again?

Like Ronald Reagan, President Bush began his term in office with big tax cuts for the rich and promises that the benefits would trickle down to the middle class. Like Reagan, he also began his term with an economic slump, then claimed that the recovery from that slump proved the success of his policies.

And like Reaganomics — but more quickly — Bushonomics has ended in grief. The public mood today is as grim as it was in 1992. Wages are lagging behind inflation. Employment growth in the Bush years has been pathetic compared with job creation in the Clinton era. Even if we don’t have a formal recession — and the odds now are that we will — the optimism of the 1990s has evaporated.

This is, in short, a time when progressives ought to be driving home the idea that the right’s ideas don’t work, and never have.

It’s not just a matter of what happens in the next election. Mr. Clinton won his elections, but — as Mr. Obama correctly pointed out — he didn’t change America’s trajectory the way Reagan did. Why?

Well, I’d say that the great failure of the Clinton administration — more important even than its failure to achieve health care reform, though the two failures were closely related — was the fact that it didn’t change the narrative, a fact demonstrated by the way Republicans are still claiming to be the next Ronald Reagan.

Now progressives have been granted a second chance to argue that Reaganism is fundamentally wrong: once again, the vast majority of Americans think that the country is on the wrong track. But they won’t be able to make that argument if their political leaders, whatever they meant to convey, seem to be saying that Reagan had it right.

I would say that the reason the Clinton Administration didn't change the narrative had nothing to do with policy, and everything to do with the Clintonistas' underestimation of whom they were dealing with on the other side of the aisle, and Bill Clinton's inability to exercise the extra caution in his personal life that was required when the vultures are constantly circling.

Ronald Reagan ought to be the third rail of Democratic politics in that anything that smacks of praise of the Republicans' most cherished icon is to be strictly avoided. I have to wonder how much of Barack Obama's disappointing performance in Nevada was a result of him touching that third rail. It may be that he was trying to win the endorsement of the Reno newspaer that was conducting the interview, but ultimately none of the newspaper endorsements in the world will compensate if you don't get the support from voters who never, ever, want anything that smacks of Ronald Reagan running the country ever again.

Labels: 2008 election, Paul Krugman, Ronald Reagan

We are the Deciders!
Today I posted some audio from Rachel Maddow's January 16th show, on my player over there. Rachel has spent the past week at MSNBC in the liberal's, gayz, and wimmin's only isolation booth, and during her moments on camera has been hammering her head against a wall of...I'm sorry, but the only way to describe it is stupidity... that prevails at that anchor table between Tweety and Pat and the other guyz, with Tweets scowling dramatically at Keith's every word. Yeah, Keith is the shining star over there, but he sure knows when and how to share the spotlight with really talented and smart people like Rachel. Hey, its not his fault if he makes all the rest of 'em look bad!

I understand that there is some deep need to get on with it, and that the job of the media has transformed from informing us into a service to expedite the wishes of the large corporations that have conglomerated any critical thought or problem solving skills that might be inherent in us, into an easy cartoon for the masses who are too lazy to think. But, before we sew this thing up, doesn't it make sense to, at least, know a few of the major differences between the 3 democratic frontrunner's? Isn't it worth a moment of thought in an election cycle that is drawing unprecedented crowds, and upsetting the control of powers that have put us in a box and decided for us for so long?

The reason that so many people vote against their own best interest is because they accept the fear and manipulation of the parties without doing even a little work to find out the basic stances of the candidates. We are somehow encouraged to trust our gut, and to go with the feelings that we personally have about a candidate, as if this is some sort of high school popularity contest.

Last week Sam Seder said something really helpful while on the air with a caller. He said that he doesn't believe that voting is about your own personal preference, as in which candidate that you personally like, is pretty, or whose views you like. Its about assessing all of the information that you have and voting on what works and is logical for the process and the country. This is absolutely true.
We live in a me, me, me society that encourages individuality and political correctness to an extreme that was probably unthinkable in the election cycles of the founders of this thing. In order to be a workable society, we have to consider what is best for the entire society...right?
This isn't just about what serves YOU personally, but what serves, not only the process, but the continuation of this imperfect union, and the society as a whole. If we consider that this country is only as strong as it's weakest citizen, and that we are supposed to be a country of immigrants, each giving a hand up to the one below, then a question arises about how this thing got twisted into a way for the rich to get richer and to hang onto their wealth while the poor, and increasingly the middle class, are getting the shaft. Capitalism cant possibly work over the long run unless the more fortunate and talented members of our society pay a scaled percentage of their earnings back in. If they use their position to hang onto an unfair share, (that's a relative unfair share...as in, not comparing it to the average middle class wage, but to what is above and beyond most of our wildest dreams, as in the percentage difference between the CEO and the lowest worker, and that sort of equation rule of thumb,) then they are pulling the foundation out from under the society that allowed them to build that wealth in the first place!

You may be able to build your McMansion on the hardship of others for a while, but this is really a house of cards, and one natural disaster or catastrophic illness could be a great leveler. So, unless you really have no feeling about who we are or what our aim is, or who your neighbor is and how the homeless man on the street could be your brother, you need to learn what is happening out there and have real reasons for why you're doing what you do...more specifically, why you are voting the way you vote.


Conservatism is not a bad thing at all, and it actually is part of the delicate balance and the checks and balances of our government, but fer' Christ's sake, at least know why you are a conservative....and try not to have it always end up back at your disdain of taxes and how you deserve somehow to have more money in the bank as opposed to people who cant go to the doctor or afford their medicine.
I spend more time than I'd like talking to people about politics, because I am the political one...you know, the one who knows whats what, and so its easy to get a quick and easy fix on whats happening without having to sit through Tweety and...er...the national news, every night. And, I have to say that I'm hearing, more than I like and mainly from middle class people who are working so damned hard to just make ends meet, that they are sick and tired of these immigrants and poor folks with their hands outstretched. Give them health care for free? No way!! School for their kids? No way!!
But, the long view tells us that, on the ground its different. Should you spend some time at say, an inner city after school program, or a food pantry, you might see that neglecting a shot or a checkup can result in long term costs to society that are much more than it would cost just to make medical care available to all. I also have been very troubled by the ongoing impact of Clinton's Welfare reform package and the lack of programs for children who have no place to go in the afternoon. I see kids wandering around with little parental oversight, parents working way too hard to barely get by, and the very real possibility passes by me each day, that our society is saving money on social programs in favor of long term care for teen parents and their kids in the same cycle. Very young girls pushing baby carriages, and girls sneaking to see their boyfriends even as parents tell them not to...what can a parent do if they have to work so many hours and there are no programs for teens in this entire city? If we don't do something preventative now, we are throwing away our most valuable asset of educated future generations.
Knowing what your opinion is and why is of the utmost importance. For those who say that its just too depressing or that it infringes on their life to worry about such serious things, I say that if you find this hard, then just wait until we ignore this for a few more generations.
And we all have the responsibility for future generations. Its not like, if you don't have kids yourself you shouldn't have to pay for schools, because the schooling you're paying for is as easily your own, as it is for the people who will carry on for you, regardless of if they are your flesh and blood or not.

I also have to say that I don't know where the idea came from that Americans are somehow deserving of an easier ride in life than anyone else on this planet. We are lucky to have an abundant country and power in the world, but to assume that we deserve to never be touched by what happens in the rest of the world, or what the fallout is from our actions, and alto of what got us where we are in the world order, is a little shortsighted. If its about being safe and ensuring our continued luck of abundance, then the long view is necessary for all of our citizens. We also have to be aware of what we've done on the path to where we are. It was the disregard of history and scholarly advice that got us into this war, and that we will be paying for for generations to come. There is nothing more powerful that having good diplomatic standing and a reputation as a good guy. There is nothing worse than being hated by the entire world because we've fucked up a country and made the worldwide terrorism problem worse.



So, no matter what your persuasion is politically, or what candidate of either party sounds good to you, look into what their platforms are now, in this cycle, and look at what they are saying.
If you are a republican or even just like McCain or any other the other clowns in that freak show, you're on your own over here. There is a ton of information out there, and its up to you to figure out what the proposed policies are beyond your impressions of the candidates, (locally, here is some of it.) Good hair or having been in a prison camp does not make for a great president, or even a passing one. A general feeling of liking or disliking someone doesn't pass for knowing what they are going to do at this critical juncture. Keep in mind also that anyone who wants to be president at this particular juncture is either half crazy or some kind of true believer. It is up to us to know which and of what before we go in the voting booth, or the folding table that we get here in CT now.

Regarding the democratic front runners, Rachel Maddow does a great rundown in the audio on the RIPCoco player from 01-16-08; The Differences Between the 3 Dem Frontrunner's. This goes beyond the woman vs. race vs. white guy line that we keep getting. These candidates are very different in how they would govern, and anyone who doesn't know the differences between them needs to look into it. A synopsis of Rachel's explanation of it might go like this:

Hillary Clinton is the candidate of change from within. She thinks that it is enough to have a Democrat back in the White House. She wants to work with corporations and within the structure of the government, as it is now, to create some programs that address the problems of the country. She is a party player and believes that lobbyists and large corporations deserve to be heard on the same level as regular citizens.
On the war, she wants to get us out, but foresees being in militarily for a long time and having a presence there via our embassy. She seems to want to reserve judgment on what exactly will be done until she gets into office. Even as she says that she will end it, it seems like there are no hard numbers forthcoming, except for a plan to begin within 60 days of taking office. There is alot of talk about our strategic interests in the region and fighting terrorism, but it sounds alot like the Bush agenda. Like most of what I hear from her, this position isn't really stated clearly; like, she has a plan but its not fully formed yet.

John Edwards is the candidate of change by force and power. He wants to turn the system upside down and try to return it to a more equitable distribution ideal. He sees the system as being in such a state of disrepair that it really needs to be changed. Edwards entire career has become one of working for the middle and lower classes and trying to right the wrongs that come about when unregulated capitalism is allowed to go wild. Edwards wants to re regulate the deregulated big businesses, (and particularly the insurance industry,) that Reagan was so sure would regulate themselves if the government just backed off. Hows that working? Its not! And the result has brought out the basest of human frailties and cruelty that anyone could imagine.
Edwards On the war: He wants to start to withdraw troops and get us completely out of the country within 9 months. He would order an immediate drawdown of 40,000 to 50,000 troops, and continue until we are out for all intents and purposes, leaving 3,500 to 5,000 troops to guard the embassy and humanitarian workers. He wants to keep sending the vetoed supplemental funding bill , with the timetable for withdrawal, back so that Bush has to veto it over and over, (this is an idea I like, because maybe the American people will start to look at what exactly is going on, and maybe we can make a record of this so that future generations know that this was Bush's war and his prerogative to stay there this long.) He wants to engage in diplomatic talks with all the countries in the region and hold peace talks. He also wants to continue to help Iraq train its forces. This plan still has a ways to go, in my opinion, but it does have that concrete withdrawal which will bring things to a head pretty quickly and lets the country stand up and figure out its leadership one way or another. The likely chaos that will ensue is not worse than dragging this out and having a slightly lesser level of the same over more months...it has to be done one way or another because we are clearly making things worse by being there.

Barack Obama is the great communicator candidate. he believes that only through communication and unification will this partisan country resolve it's differences and get anything done. Beyond that its a little unclear as to what exactly he will be able to do that is all that much different than Edwards. One thing is for certain, he is new and inexperienced, and he is sliding towards the center as this thing goes on. I would like to see more concrete plans from him. Pretty words don't mean much anymore.
Obama on the war: he seems to have a 16 month plan that involves bringing home 1-2 brigades per month, and not leaving a permanent base...that is, unless Al Qaeda build a base there...then its all out the window. One interesting thing is that he feels like we never finished the war in Afghanistan; its unclear if he wants go back there and finish or just keep strategic outposts in order to strike Al Qaeda when necessary. My opinion is that he may find that drawing down so slowly is more dangerous to the troops left behind and draws out a situation that may need to become chaotic before it reaches its own level.
And firewater always seeks its own level.





Products of the week:

Rapturewear (What will YOU leave behind?) is a real company...so I'm not suggesting actually giving them money. But some of their products are just too good not to share. Behold a sampling of their T-shirts!:

c/p RIPCoco

Labels: 2008 election, Democrats, Rachel Maddow, Sam Seder

Today, as we savor the fact that one year from today, our long national nightmare of the Bush/Cheney regime will at last (we hope) be over, someone needs to give Nancy Pelosi a clue that impeachment is no longer about removal from office, it's about documenting for the sake of history (and to prevent forgetting the past):

U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she’s drawing heat from fellow Democratic lawmakers as well as people across the nation for refusing to move to impeach President George W. Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney.

“I go through airports, and people have buttons as if they knew I was coming,” Pelosi said with a smile, mimicking a protester pointing to an “Impeach” button on their chest.

But the California Democrat said she is sticking to her position that trying to remove Bush or Cheney would be divisive, and she added, most likely unsuccessful. If the House voted to impeach Bush and Cheney, a two-thirds vote would be needed in the closely divided Senate to oust them.

That's not the point, and she should realize that. As far as trying to remove BushCheney being divisive, that's the biggest insult of all, and it goes a long way to explain why she has caved to the Bush Administration in absolutely everything -- because she doesn't want to be "divisive." Well, divisiveness where today's Republican party consists of anything that varies one iota from marching in lockstep with the most insane elements of the party.

A two-party system is sometimes going to be divisive, especially where issues in which the parties are so far apart are concerned. If she's so afraid of divisiveness, then let her step aside for someone who has the guts to do the right thing for the country and the Constitution.

Barack Obama, take note.

Labels: impeachment, Nancy Pelosi, spinelessness