the defeatists!

Why I haven't said a lot...

I've relatively quiet about the election, the post-election, the pre-Inauguration and expect to say relatively little about the Inauguration. At the moment, my favorite Obamas are the kids who while as bright as the previous Democratic kids of my lifetime seem to have the ability to cut to the quick. "First African-American president...speech better be short." "It better be good.."

Well, there's no doubt that Batboy will deliver an eloquent speech. The problem is the reality that underlies the speech. Things suck, and will continue to suck for a long time and the American people -- hell, the people of the world -- have short attention spans. We'll waive flags, talk about how great everything is going to be and then like Cthulhu, return to our slumbers. (AXE just compared the American people to Dark Gods, the old ones? Yeah, make something of it...) And things will continue to suck.

Now, I hope I'm wrong. I suspect not, but I hope I am. In general, the level of hysteria is absurd. This isn't going to be like the revitalization of the countryside in one of those Stalinist films where all the happy peasants go out and build fucking canals. It's going to take time. And for many, time is not what we have a lot of...we have several wars going on (Drugs, Terrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan); a tanked economy; a tanked world economy. In the past, the military has done well on recruiting and retention when the economy has sucked. Well, duh, of course it has. But, enlistments are up and retention is way up in the middle of two wars and whatever we want to think of Drugs and Terrorism as...)

So, it's looking grim. And, at about 1215  tomorrow, reality should be setting in.

Well, the problem with history is that it is what makes today...

About a year ago, I was spending lots of time in a room with a bunch of my closest friends, the negotiating team from Ginormous Defense and our counterparts across the room, the Teamsters local, who in some cases are people I regard as friends. Anyway, the union honcho and I were talking about politics, and he said something acidic about Twitsheet de la Dweeb and his cohorts. I didn't disagree; however, I said that I blamed Jimmy Hoffa I for the mess we've got. He stared at me -- he's at a level in the union where they probably have arcane initiation requirements involving tatoos of Hoffa in sensitive places, secret oaths, and something like the Skull and Bones initiation sequence from The Good Shepard. He asked me what I was talking about and I said, the Construction Workers were probably as much to blame. Now he was definitely curious, and asked for clarification. I smiled at him and said, "Who'd the Teamsters and the Union Movement REALLY support in 1968? 1972? 1980? By stiffing Humphrey over cultural conservatism as opposed to supporting the most vocal champion of labor in the history of the Senate, the whole thing started to come down..." He looked at me, shook his head and nodded.

If you live long enough, and 40 years isn't all that long, you can see the cows, ducks, horses, chickens and wolves return.Krugman has a great column this morning on this aspect of the Republicans and their southern strategy, pointing out that the government by the parochially loyal but incompetent was inevitable. However, I differ from Paul on one point -- Bush is EVERYBODY"S fault. EVERYBODY with a vote, a buck or two, a degree of awareness and perhaps some values, beliefs and attitudes that reach beyond the reptillian part of the brain that reacts and is driven primarily by fear of "the other" to cite my French Existentialist subconscious.

The "other" is a mass of things -- in 1972, it was people with long hair, girls without bras and "niggers riding in cadillacs..." It's new -- and old --ideas like the Constitution of the United States, economic justice, free love, drugs and open sexuality. Now, from that partial list, some ideas are good ideas, some are bad ideas and some are kind of neutral. But, fearing ideas is bloody stupid. Being afraid of the other just because they are others is equally absurd. If Bush actually read The Stranger, he would have encounted exactly what put him in power and the inevitable, albeit often long delayed result. Let's have some Dylan --Roxy Music Style.

Bastards...or Banker's Dream

Well, money talks and bullshit walks... all over the people of the Isle of Sark... Tell me this isn't the dream of every Steve Forbes, Bill O'Reilly, lunatic right, Richard Shelby-esque asshole. Yup, jingo Joe the plumber and the Barclay Brothers are flipsides... Since the Barclay boys own a lot of tourist stuff, I'd say a boycott -- a fine Irish tradition -- might be in order, particularly of the stuff in England, the Ritz in London and Telegraph.

 
 

John McCain made Joe the Plumber feel dirty...

WELL, SHEEEEITTTTT. And, "Sarah Palin is the real deal..." Ok, so we have a tax dodging, lying, code violating asshole who finds Palin a comer in the Republican party. The reason that he stayed on the bus, as it were. Must have been blowjobs in the bathroom or something. 

While I really got fed up with Batshit McCrazy's schtick, I gotta say that for this nobody to have any credibility is as absurd as hiring Larry the Cable Guy to do heart surgery.  At least Palin has the grace to say nothing bad about the guy who made her a household word. Joe the Plumber is pure dipshit.

God in his wisdom gave us Richard Nixon to lead us into the ...future?

Crusader AXE is unhappy with Sirius/XM. When I want to listen to Alt Country music, I don't want to listen to Mojo Nixon or Johnny Knoxville droning on and on about the size of Porter Waggoner's member.  Hank Williams Jr is not an outlaw. He's a drunk. And on and on...XM used to have some exceptional programming that was accessible --Wednesday was all day Bobby Dylan and Thursday was all day Tom Petty. Now, who knows when they are on.

Anyway, of Dylan's theme a while back was Presidents. He had some "song poems" about Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon. Song poems are what happens when you have a frustrated wannabe writer and an add for "setting your words to music." Probably going to go the way of the great speckled bird given our current technology, but a group of studio musicians would put down a groove and sing the thing.  They work is pretty cynical; think vanity press sort of cynicism. The one about Nixon began with the title of this piece.

While I think it's pretty obvious that among the areas in which Twitshit de la Dweeb has been a disaster includes science, obviously other people have different ideas. Bush's thinking is more "magical" than scientific. Hell, this administration has surpassed the "trees cause pollution/ketchup is a vegtable" nonsense of the Reagan years. But, in much the same way as the author of the God gave us Nixon song, Bush's science adviser published something with a different take in Physics World

    "Today, the scientific enterprise in the US is strong, highly productive and significantly greater than it was eight years ago. Contrary to popular mythology, President Bush has devoted more attention to science and technology in his official actions than most of his predecessors. Strains and imbalances exist among the various research fields, but the Bush administration has initiated programmes to address many of these on a prioritized basis. However, despite the magnitude of competing national needs and fiscal constraints affecting all domestic federal programmes, science in the US has moved forward substantially during the Bush years. "

While the commentators at Physics World  aren't quite as feisty as those at less "Physics-y" sites, the link to Discover is interesting.  

So, are these morons delusional or do they really believe that we're stupid? The Fox Commentator who suggested that Obama take rhetoric lessons from Twitshit was probably sincere. But, come on, gang. The best thing you can say about Bush and science is that he hasn't burned any witches. Is this just some very broad satire , as Improbable Research suggests?  Probably not; on the other hand, the guy has a Stanford PhD in Physics and was President of SUNY-Stoney Brook which is probably the best school in the New York state system, especially in sciences. So, I'm wondering. He's about ten years older than I am-- perhaps the Bush administration reached out and found academics with early onset Alzheimer's to fill these roles?

Speaking of Improbable Research, it's a non-guilty pleasure. One of the AXE's profs at the Catholic West Point said that an educated individual should be able to read The Scientific American and understand it. Well, I struggle with it, but I think Dr. Wilson was absolutely correct. For your viewing pleasure...

Only way to say goodbye, to Sarah...

First the dark haired girl on the way to boystown, than things aren't so wonderful...Don't you love it when infatuation meets light of day?Love the McCain-Palin stuff. Marvelous speech by Batshit McCrazy, by the way; the old Greek thing about the gods destroying those they love through madness and pride showed through. He showed the class that a lot of us expected for the last six months. But, I air kiss executrix's I despise with more fondness than he showed Palin. So, to show how things can go south when you should have stayed north, and a cautionary tale north of the border but south of the 49th state, here's Walter Trout and the Free Radicals discussing what needs to happen with all that crap from Nieman Marcus...

Trivial pursuit of the prize...or nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of hanging

Paul Krugman's column this morning is right on target with where a lot of Americans are feeling and thinking today. This actually might be a bad thing for the blogosphere -- but a good thing for the country and maybe the world. Probably not, because of the AXE oft-complained view of the attention span of the American people. But, maybe not.

In a way, you can’t blame Mr. McCain for campaigning on trivia — after all, it’s worked in the past. Most notably, President Bush got within hanging-chads-and-butterfly-ballot range of the White House only because much of the news media, rather than focusing on the candidates’ policy proposals, focused on their personas: Mr. Bush was an amiable guy you’d like to have a beer with, Al Gore was a stiff know-it-all, and never mind all that hard stuff about taxes and Social Security. And let’s face it: six weeks ago Mr. McCain’s focus on trivia seemed to be paying off handsomely.

But that was before the prospect of a second Great Depression concentrated the public’s mind.

I was talking to my sister in Michigan yesterday. Blue collar, hard-working family hanging on by their finger-tips. She said something that amazed me -- " Bobby and I have always voted Republcian. We're ashamed..." She said that her sister-in-law isn't talking to her husband, because when she asked what Bob thought about Sarah Palin, he said "She's a Bimbo. McCain's a moron..." Peg's a working mom, through kids through college and getting up at 4AM to go work in a donut shop in southeastern Michigan while Bob is an autoworker, who gets up at 3:30 to leave by 4AM to be in Romulus for the start of the only remaining shift at the factory.  They're the epitome of Reagan Democrats...and, they've had it.  She said something interesting, and telling -- "We don't mind paying taxes for things we believe in -- but, Iraq?"

While we all should have diminished expectations going forward for a while, I find this optimistic. That's about as mainstream American as it gets. When I told her the tale of Joe the Plumber not being licensed and not being able to think about any business making $250K on his income, she just laughed, and to channel Bugs and put words in Peg's mouth, "What a maroon!" Common sense may actually triumph over conventional wisdom. I'm not taking bets, of course, but sheesh, that would be nice. To give Krugman the last word:

Will the nation’s new demand for seriousness last? Maybe not — remember how 9/11 was supposed to end the focus on trivialities? For now, however, voters seem to be focused on real issues. And that’s bad for Mr. McCain and conservatives in general: right now, to paraphrase Rob Corddry, reality has a clear liberal bias.

So, we'll see.

Flow on, Flow on, River of Shit...

Bob Herbert's columns trouble me. And, they trouble me for a good reason -- they remind me of how in so many ways we are not the City on the Hill so much as the slums and warrens and hovels at the bottom. But of the many sayings of Joshua ben Joseph, the one that he often makes me think of is "Whatever you do for the least of these my brothers, you do it to me." So, when Herbert reminds us not of the perils of the middle class but what's happening at the bottom -- the poor, the dispossessed -- we need to frankly listen and pay attention. We can shake it off and say "It's their fault that they are poor, hungry, unemployed, unemployable, disease-ridden, homeless, bankrupt..." but as the poet-twit put it 40 years ago, "Instant Karma is going to get you..."

I've been twisting this problem in my head for a while -- the collapse of the ownership society -- and I frankly had been as guilty as John McCain in not thinking lately or enough about the fate of those who would like to be able to aspire to the middle class, but can't get there from where they are. It's just another part of the whole, and in the United States, since the depression, the poor have been The Other America. However, shit does roll down hill...and you're safe, higher up on the hill, unless you slide down.

Few Americans have noticed, but a tremendous number of hospitals, from Boston to Los Angeles, are in serious, even dire, financial trouble. A survey of 4,500 hospitals by the New York consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal found that more than half were technically insolvent or at risk of insolvency. The current economic downturn, combined with an anticipated surge in patients without health insurance, will only worsen what is already a crisis.

The nation’s financial system was all-but-overwhelmed by the mortgage crisis because none of the nation’s leaders paid serious enough attention to the widespread symptoms of what turned out to be a metastasizing disease. A similar situation exists on a number of important fronts right now: the deteriorating national infrastructure, the woefully inadequate public school system, our self-defeating energy policies, health care. Symptoms of serious trouble are staring us in the face, but no one is mounting an adequate response.

When a new president takes office in January, the temptation will be to delay bold action on these fronts until the overall economic situation improves. That is the kind of mistake (like ignoring the housing and credit bubbles until it was too late or refusing to heed the pre-Katrina warnings in New Orleans) that opens the door to additional crises.

Ultimately, comes the kleptocracy, and chaos. What Herbert points out today, focusing on the health care infrastructure, is that we have an underlying systems problem, not a crisis. The crisis exists because of short-sighted solutions, thirty years of greed, exploitation, and the return of the Robber Barons. He concludes by saying that at no time since World War II have we required a president who can lead on so many fronts.

Ultimately, Ronald Reagan sold snake oil, and George H.W.Bush was right in 1980. Ever since then, we have had a national addiction to...snake oil. Whomever leads going forward has to wean us off snake oil. Yeah, the marginal tax rate needs to go up, probably higher than 39% on income over $250K. Payroll taxes need to go up, in that they need to cover income earned up to $250K. We've been spending like drunken idiots and we need to pay down the debt while at the same time spending money where we need to spend it. Infrastructure, health care, education, basic research (Fruit Flies, I kid you not) and defense. I see a massive jobs program as one possibility.

But, it's easier to call the other guy a Muslim. Kerry's campaign, and Gore's to a similar extent, were about complex solutions to complex problems. "Nuance, and complexity -- fuck, no. We're 'Muricans. Got a problem cuttin' that diamond. Sheetfuck...just get me a bigger fuckin' hammer, Clem."

"Never thought about tomorrow..." We're lost, and I have no confidence that we can find ourselves again. In fact, I'm pretty sure we won't -- that's the reason I'm a defeatist. Jesus isn't the answer; Alan Greenday Greenspan has admitted he's clueless. Joe the Plumber is a fucking idiot. We got lost at some point, and we'll see about tomorrow...

Metaphysically, I expect we're going to end up like Peter Wolf, doing what looks like a wedding in a tent someplace Lost in America. But, Herbert indicates a different fate if we pay attention and take action. Me, I'm willing to give it a try, but I'm having problems seeing how this ultimately works.

I thought Richard Wolfe was incredibly restrained on Countdown...

Thanks to IOZ.
Why did Batshit McMadman choose Sarah Palin? ? Current right wing intelligentsia thought is sexually laden. She seduced McCain...damn you, Delilah! If it weren't for her, we could have Joementum really adding joy to the campaign!

Occam's razor certainly makes sense in this case -- the simplest explanation is usually the best, and most of us are damned confused coming up with a reasonable explanation for this choice. Sex is a good one...of course, I happen to think Cindy is more attractive, but I could escape from big John. Todd would run me down with a snowmobile...Still, given his habit of bouncing airplanes off various unyielding surfaces, McBatshit has a short attention span.

I thought Richard Wolfe was incredibly restrained about her comments on special needs kids. He refrained from sputtering, and avoided calling her an insensitive, ignorant cunt-demagogue bitch. He must be in league with Shakespeare's sistern...We're gonna help them, dagoneit, by letting the ignorant idiots that have their water break and then fly back to Alaska from fucking DFW to Juneau or Anchorage or some weasel infected place and have the kid -- we're going to let them decide what's best for their child. And, research -- why spend money on scientific research. Maybe if that preacher prayers over little T and casts out the witchcraft in his life, things will be better.

That ultimately is the Palin program. Import crazed loonie preachers from Kenya and have them cast out the demons. Picture that guy casting devils out of the ATM...

Let me venture an analogy from biology...

Let me venture an analogy from biology: A patient arrives at a hospital in serious condition. Now, it may be that the patient has simply fallen victim to one of those debilitating ailments that go around from time to time and can be cured by a massive dose of antibiotics. In this case we have a macro problem with a macro solution. But it could instead be that the patient is suffering from a decade of serious abuse—smoking, drinking, overeating, lack of exercise, a fondness for crystal meth—and that it has not only taken a catastrophic toll but also left him open to opportunistic infections of every kind. In other words, a buildup of micro problems has led to a macro problem, and no cure is possible without addressing the underlying issues...

Read it and weep, or learn. If you're due to retire in 40 years, pay attention. If you're due to retire in six months, don't. Continue to pay attention.