America Waking Up?

Albeit a good four or five months too late. But though I can't really believe my eyes, the confluence of his Social Security nonsense and the Terry Schiavo idiocy seems to be taking its toll. The lowest rating of his presidency, what more does a person need to say? Only this, that the most interesting thing about these poll results is that the very people who the Terry Schiavo move was supposed to appeal to - i.e. the Christian base - were exactly the people whose support dropped out the hardest. It's reassuring to know that even they have a breaking point for acceptable levels of political pandering...

p.s. Call me nuts, but I have a crazy feeling that there's a terrorist alert of some sort coming on....

Finally, Backlash in the GOP

This op-ed essay by John Danforth in the New York Times today is a perfect statement of what is now, after the Terry Schiavo debacle, going to become a far more pronounced source of division in the Republican party. Unfortunately, I've been saying the same to my parents for years, that this brand of "Conservativism" has nothing to do with the small government principles of a true Republican, but since my parents ARE the Christian Right, well this direction of the Grand Ol' Party is just fine with them.... Fortunately, the remaining sane and rational and truly conservative (as opposed to theocratic)Republicans are finally getting sick and tired of their enslavement to a group that has nothing to do with their core political beliefs.

Speaking of Republicans and Terry Schiavo, my parents and I did well during their visit last week. Terry Schiavo only came up once, while mom was (I think pointedly) reading about it on the (of course) Fox News website. That's when I started hearing for the first time all about these accusations that her husband had tried to kill her (this accusation from a former caregiver of Terry Schiavo's that even her parents wouldn't allow to testify in court), among other Fox-induced extravagances. Can someone please tell me when people finally lost their minds and decided that The Star and The National Enquirer set the watermark for journalistic excellence in this country? Because it's frightening contemplating the hallucinatory haze enveloping all of the Fox News watchers in this country (a rapidly growing number I'm afraid). And now CNN and the rest of the gang are clearly beginning to decide that one has no choice in this fucked up day and age but to stoop to conquer...

Without Delay

Maybe the writing really is on the wall. Tom DeLay is sounding more and more desperate these days, which makes this speech he gave to the Family Research Council, in which he compares his own embattled condition to that of "lucid" Terry Schiavo (both according to poor Tom are being "killed" by some kind of liberal gestapo in this country), sound not just loathsome but kind of confused and pathetic.

In any case, you too can become a part of that liberal gestapo. Go and sign up here to go help pull the Hammer down.

What politics is really about

This depressing little piece by David Broder in the Washington Post says oh so much about the state of politics in Washington, concerning policies which will start to more and more effect all of us, most notably those of us on the lesser end of the American financial spectrum. The cynical of course will say, "It was ever thus." But if you start to look at how the income gap between rich and poor has been growing over the past twenty years - google around, you can find these stats - it becomes clear that, no, in fact we seem to be entering a new age of oligarchical feudalism. And it will all happen (is happening) before anyone will ever begin to really be aware that it's taken place. By all indicators, it feels as though we're just at the beginning of this wave. Anyone who has serious misgivings about a lot of things taking place in our society right now are probably tapping into this... Just call me Cassandra...

Okay I'm Posting Already

In order to quiet the masses screaming for fresh entries (ha!) I'm linking to Kevin Drum on this extremely enlightening bit of new tax legislation in Texas. You can use it to silence your Republican friends who would like to pretend that the Republican party is about ANYTHING besides making the wealthy wealthier at the expense of the lesser fortunate... And the Republican author of the bill, apparently emboldened by what he considers Republican hegemony in Texas, doesn't even choose to lie about this, or even spin it in any way whatsoever! Hey, at least he's honest!

In fact that's all I'm going to do now is tell people on this blog to go read Kevin Drum, daily. Too busy to do any original thinking lately at least politically.... If I do blog it's just going to be regurgitated from some other blog I've been checking out. Hey at least I'm honest!

One thing I'd really wanted to link to was a Paul Krugman article from a couple of weeks ago that was all about how we must always keep in mind that when the Bush White House is making a big circus out of something like Social Security, half of what they're doing is creating a smoke screen for a thousand other things that they are doing below the radar.

Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana put it slightly differently last week when he was non-plussed by Bush's attempt to sell Social Security privatization at a meeting of the US Governors in the White House:

But Schweitzer compared Bush's promotion of Social Security changes to a magician with a hat in his right hand that he is waving around with "wide gestures" to distract his audience.

"Today we're talking about Social Security, something that might happen 20, 30, 40 years from now," Schweitzer said. "But guess what's really happening, over in the left hand? We're cutting Medicaid. We're cutting programs in the heartland."

Everything I read about Governor Schweitzer makes me think (as I can tell someone somewhere wants me to think) that this man is the man to watch for a Presdential bid sooner rather than later. Could he be the next Clinton?

Catch-22, W Style Part II

The New York Times has a fantastic(ally damning) editorial about Bush Administration budget math gymnastics, that as involved and absurd as it might be, doesn't really begin to capture fully the nightmare of deception that is the current White House Budget (for a more thorough thrashing I would recommend this bit from Salon's War Room).

Catch-22, W-Style

Okay, this little quote from our illustrious Harvard MBA “CEO” President attempting to describe the whys and wherefores of Social Security “reform” is by now infamous and blogged to death:

THE PRESIDENT: Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to what has been promised.
Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate -- the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.

Okay, better? I'll keep working on it.

At the moment, I happen to be reading Catch-22, and the following passage struck me as strangely appropriate. I’ve edited it somewhat to clarify its relevance to our current “dialogue”:

Yossarian was still puzzled, for it was a business matter, and there was much about business matters that always puzzled him.

“Let me try to explain it to you again,” (Bush) offered with growing weariness and exasperation, jerking his thumb toward the (red-stater) with the sweet tooth, still grinning beside him. “I knew he wanted the (guaranteed benefits) more than the (Social Security privatization). Since he doesn’t understand a word of English, I made it a point to conduct the whole transaction in English.”

“Why didn’t you just hit him over the head and take the (guaranteed benefits) away from him?” Yosarrian asked.

Pressing his lips together with dignity, Milo shook his head. “That would have been most unjust,” he scolded firmly. “Force is wrong, and two wrongs never make a right. It was much better my way. When I held the (Social Security privatization) out to him and reached for the (guaranteed benefits), he probably thought I was offering to trade.”

“What were you doing?”

“Actually, I was offering to trade, but since he doesn’t understand English I can always deny it.”

“Suppose he gets angry and wants the (guaranteed benefits)?”

“Why, we’ll just hit him over the head and take them away from him,” (Bush) answered without hesitation. He looked from Yosarrian to McWatt and back again. “I really can’t see what everyone is complaining about. We’re all much better off than before. Everybody is happy but this (red-stater), and there’s no sense worrying about him, since he doesn’t even speak our language and deserves whatever he gets. Don’t you understand?”

But Yosarrian still didn’t understand either how (Bush) could buy eggs in Malta for seven cents apiece and sell them at a profit in Pianosa for five cents…

Some black & white about Social Security privatization

It's great to see the kind of person conservatives will listen to (i.e. a successful businessman and investment guru) cutting through the crap about Bush's planned Social Security "reform" and pointing out where the real problem lies - with the budget deficit - a real problem that Bush pays lip service to each year during his State of the Union addresss and then promptly drops like a hot potato.

May there be much more of the same commentary coming from the same quarters...

Remember when Kenny Boy was Junior's Bestest Friend?

Remember when Enron was the biggest contributor to the Bush campaign, and Ken Lay was giving Bush a plane to fly around the country and campaign? Remember when Schwarzenegger, among other Republicans, was meeting in secretive sessions with Ken Lay? Remember when former members of, or consultants for, or those otherwise financially indebted to Enron populated the Bush administration? (One of them has just now been voted our Attorney General.) One of the many many things that make the Bush Corporation so happy that America has the collective attention span and memory of an ant.
Anyway, here are tapes from Enron, and this time there's no dancing around the fact that they were intentionally rigging power outages in California. That sentence actually deserves multiple exclamation points, but I resisted... Welcome to the state of our country today. Long live Freedom!

For those of you confronted by rabidly preening conservatives, post-Iraqi election

Perhaps this article by Arianna Huffington might help somewhat. Whatever you might think about Arianna personally (if you think anything at all whatsoever about Arianna personally) this is a particularly concise and clear-eyed summary of everything the Bush administration hopes the Iraqi election will make everyone forget...

Train Wrecks Past and Train Wrecks to Be

This essay by James Carroll in The Boston Globe strikes me as scarily dead-on, especially his predictions for how the Iraq debacle will play out in the long term.

And of course, the elections are perfectly timed to lead in to Herr President Bush's hour long commercial for Wall Street that will be this State of the Union address. The logic of course is that, well sure the reason we actually went to Iraq didn't exist at all, but now look at the happy results. So, sure, Americans really aren't buying wholeheartedly that there actually is a Social Security crisis, but privatization will work out just like Iraq see? At least the RNC is hoping this is how it will play out... At this point however, since Harry Reid has declared that there will be absolutely no Senate Democratic support for the President's plan for privatization (or personalization or warmfuzzyation or cuddlyteddybearation or whatever the RNC has decided to call it) of Social Security, it would appear to be dead in the water in any case. And some members of congress, such as Gene Taylor from Mississippi, are producing wonderfully lucid justifications for their opposition. One can only hope and pray that Dems follow his lead en masse and take this as an opportunity to parade the domestic debacle of fiscal policy that Bush has gotten away with now for four years. Apropos of this, this report by the GAO, entitled The Long Term Fiscal Challenge, one hopes would be a wake up call of some sort for someone in power in Washington, not to mention the rest of the country.

Is this idea, that someone in this country will start to wake up to the fact that the "crisis" right now is not Social Security but is in fact Bush's fiscal policy, simply laughable on its face? Some of the survey results in the report would seem to indicate that Americans are catching on to the idea that the current DC spending spree is not such a hot idea. Even if Rick Santorum has decided to describe the $1 to $2 trillion needed to fund Social Security applepiezation as "prepayment" instead of "deficit spending". The next time you use your credit card remember - you're not going into debt. Uh-uh, you're PRE-PAYING! Sweet!

Rock the Inaugural

If Bush's Speech Had Rocked as Hard as His Inauguration.

If the inaugural speech is going to be meaningless and absurd and have everyone including the President's own father telling us he didn't actually mean anything by it, well, then, it might as well be entertaining...

Short but sweet - Bull Moose on the President's inaugural

I forget to read Bull Moose aka Marshall Wittman as much as I should. A Teddy Roosevelt Republican as blunt and to the point as his hero and assumed namesake.

Heck, even Peggy Noonan didn't like the speech...

The Unfeeling President

I know I've linked to this essay by E. L. Doctorow before, but it seems particularly appropriate today. With all of the analysis spent on Bush, doesn't it just as often come down to the fact that when you look at the man, when you watch him give a speech or interact with others, this sensation of dullness, of emptiness, of absolute disconnect from the gravity of his office, and of a lack of simple basic human empathy, emanates from him in depressing waves. Paul O’Neill in his comments about working with Bush seemed to confirm this from close-up. The truth of course is that a person and their motives are ultimately unknowable - we can only intuit what is going on inside from what we see on the outside - but this essay seems to hit very accurately on the palpable lack of genuine human warmth and empathy that follows this President like a stench. And Doctorow’s castigation of the President’s talent for mouthing empty platitudes in speeches with a sincerity casually donned for the occasion is a perfect skewering of exactly the kind of speech that Bush delivered today: a predictable gruel of a speech filled to the teeth with a constant stream of exactly the kind of rhetoric that, while on the surface expressing sentiments that every American should be proud to support, has instead, through endless Pavlovian repetition and through the shadowy, misleading, sometimes straightforwardly dishonest acts of his own administration over the past four years, been rendered entirely devoid of actual meaning and moral force.

Happy Inauguration Day!

To help you celebrate, here are some fascinating facts and figures about today's Inaugural Celebration. What better celebration of the Bush Administration's misbegotten reinstatement than a bloated, excessive paean to the wealthy contributors that got him there in the first place? You can still take care of the needs of the disenfranchised and our under-equipped soldiers in your acceptance speech... much more important than such things as emergency relief or body armor.... ah yes, our faith-based President...

Speaking of which, his inaugural speech was certainly monumentally forgettable. Everyone I've talked to who listened to it or read the transcript is just kind of saying, "Huh, wha?" And apparently the fires on Social Security are cooling as not one word was spoken about it, as had been the reported plan. I guess when ranking members of your own party in Congress are saying that your plan is a "dead horse", it's time to let it die a quiet death...

Four More Years! As this NYTimes poll indicates, Bush is facing it with a populace clearly unconvinced of his ability to do anything very well at all... and we elected him because...?

Republican mutiny over Social Security?

It sounds like it might happen. I can only hope that W/Rove exacerbate this problem with their flim-flam about how all "serious-minded" individuals know that there is a dire crisis on hand... clearly a lot of Republicans would not agree.

National Security, always our President's top priority... mm hmm....

From Talking Points Memo via the Washington Post comes this little gem: our President, elected because he is somehow perceived as superior on security matters, or more to the point, who got elected because of obscenely cynical politicization of the worst tragedy in modern American history, is forcing Washington DC to divert millions from their homeland security efforts in order to help fund his massive inaugural (which has already been getting plenty of bad press for being so oversized when that money could easily be used elsewhere, for example, hmmm... Iraq? Thailand? Naaahhh...) The poetic awfulness of this President shaking down DC's security fund for his inaugural is just somehow perfect in its badness (like just about everything in his Bizarro world). I mean, Washington DC, they act like they have some reason to be a PRIME TARGET or something... Get a grip, you pussies, and fork up!

Britain's (Lack of) Success with Private Accounts

In the American Prospect, they examine Britain's experimentation with privatization that took place in the eighties. The conclusion: Britain really, really wishes they had our Social Security system, and are looking on it as "a model of reform". Talk about living in parallel universes.

Of course, actually examining the lack of success for social security privatization around the globe would smack of something like (gasp) the use of empirical evidence - the kind of thing those Godless liberals use... Lord knows we can't have that...

Social Security Insecurity

A seriously great and thorough editorial about the straw man issue that Bush is taking on with Social Security.

And another from Krugman.

The long and short of it is this: Wall Street and the already wealthy and invested are the only conceivable beneficiaries from this pointless change. With W at the helm, color me shocked...

Xmas in Greenville

Happy New Year! Virtually forgot about politics for two weeks while at the Republican in-laws. The only time it really came up was when my mother-in-law and I had a short, very brief tiff over Iraq, and then when Kelley and I were walking around her neighborhood in Greenville, NC and easily 19 out of 20 cars on the road in her hood was a frickin' SUV!!! !@#$@#$!@#$!!!! I was staggered to see that driveway after driveway was filled with three or four of them at a time! Granted, Kelley pointed out that this was because sons and daughters and other family members were home for the holidays, but okay this just means everyone in the family has a frickin' SUV that is normally stationed elsewhere! And generally speaking the more obscenely oversized the more prevalent these ungodly things were. As if it weren't bad enough being bombarded with the gas-guzzling monster trucks of the SUV Terrorist Support Fund network - a good half of which were (of course) sporting Bush Cheney '04 stickers, there was a UPS driver who kept tearing down these "quiet" residential roads at freeway speeds, apparently trying to make his time no matter what the cost. Needless to say, our attempt at a peaceful winter walk (there was an unusual snow in Greenville that even more unusually stayed on the ground for days) was a wash. Fortunately, this walk was the exception to an otherwise wonderful relaxing computer-free stay in Greenville.