Waiting for Nov. 4th by Larry David

I can't take much more of this. Two weeks to go, and I'm at the end of my rope. I can't work. I can eat, but mostly standing up. I'm anxious all the time and taking it out on my ex-wife, which, ironically, I'm finding enjoyable. This is like waiting for the results of a biopsy. Actually, it's worse. Biopsies only take a few days, maybe a week at the most, and if the biopsy comes back positive, there's still a potential cure. With this, there's no cure. The result is final. Like death.

Five times a day I'll still say to someone, "I don't know what I'm going to do if McCain wins." Of course, the reality is I'm probably not going to do anything. What can I do? I'm not going to kill myself. If I didn't kill myself when I became impotent for two months in 1979, I'm certainly not going to do it if McCain and Palin are elected, even if it's by nefarious means. If Obama loses, it would be easier to live with it if it's due to racism rather than if it's stolen. If it's racism, I can say, "Okay, we lost, but at least it's a democracy. Sure, it's a democracy inhabited by a majority of disgusting, reprehensible turds, but at least it's a democracy." If he loses because it's stolen, that will be much worse. Call me crazy, but I'd rather live in a democratic racist country than a non-democratic non-racist one. (It's not exactly a Hobson's choice, but it's close, and I think Hobson would compliment me on how close I've actually come to giving him no choice. He'd love that!)

The one concession I've made to maintain some form of sanity is that I've taken to censoring my news, just like the old Soviet Union. The citizenry (me) only gets to read and listen to what I deem appropriate for its health and well-being. Sure, there are times when the system breaks down. Michele Bachmann got through my radar this week, right before bedtime. That's not supposed to happen. That was a lapse in security, and I've had to make some adjustments. The debates were particularly challenging for me to monitor. First I tried running in and out of the room so I would only hear my guy. This worked until I knocked over a tray of hors d'oeuvres. "Sit down or get out!" my host demanded. "Okay," I said, and took a seat, but I was more fidgety than a ten-year-old at temple. I just couldn't watch without saying anything, and my running commentary, which mostly consisted of "Shut up, you prick!" or "You're a fucking liar!!!" or "Go to hell, you cocksucker!" was way too distracting for the attendees, and finally I was asked to leave.

Assuming November 4th ever comes, my big decision won't be where I'll be watching the returns, but if I'll be watching. I believe I have big jinx potential and may have actually cost the Dems the last two elections. I know I've jinxed sporting events. When my teams are losing and I want them to make a comeback, all I have to do is leave the room. Works every time. So if I do watch, I'll do it alone. I can't subject other people to me in my current condition. I just don't like what I've turned into -- and frankly I wasn't that crazy about me even before the turn. This election is having the same effect on me as marijuana. All of my worst qualities have been exacerbated. I'm paranoid, obsessive, nervous, and totally mental. It's one long, intense, bad trip. I need to come down. Soon.

Couldn't have said it better myself....

RNC drops whopping $150K on Palin wardrobe?

by Pam Spaulding
Man, keeping costs down in the Bush economy is only for the little Joe Six Packs out there. Bible Spice doesn't have to open her wallet to get a spiffy, pricey wardrobe and makeover courtesy of the RNC.

According to financial disclosure records, the accessorizing began in early September and included bills from Saks Fifth Avenue in St. Louis and New York for a combined $49,425.74.

The records also document a couple of big-time shopping trips to Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis, including one $75,062.63 spree in early September.

The campaign has declined to comment on the expenditures. And they expect us to believe they know how to manage our economy and our tax dollars? It's also noted that there were no expenses of this magnitude prior to Palin's surprise veep pick. Oh, and Bible Spice wasn't the only one with new duds...

Macy's in Minneapolis, another store fortunate enough to be situated in the Twin Cities that hosted last summer's Republican National Convention, received three separate payments totaling $9,447.71.

The entries also show a few purchases at Pacifier, a top notch baby store, and Steiniauf & Stroller Inc., suggesting $295 was spent to accommodate the littlest Palin to join the campaign trail.

BTW, "elitist" Michelle Obama buys off-the-rack (e.g., the dress that she wore on The View was $148), and looks damn good in it without costing the campaign a fortune. You'll recall that Cindy McCain's ensemble at the Republican National Convention cost a mind-boggling $300K.

The Elephant in the Room by David Michael Green

excerpt... The second most astonishing thing about American politics is that John McCain and Sarah Palin have a respectable chance of winning the White House in 2008. (Or, for that matter, that any Republican could have a shot at any office for which the Democratic candidate hasn’t suddenly died on the stump.)

Yeah, yeah, I know. Barack Obama has a funny name. He’s relatively young and inexperienced. Oh, and – have you heard? – he’s also black. But, just the same, I mean, c’mon. A Republican could win the presidency in 2008? You gotta be kidding, right?

All of this is deeply related, in multiple ways, to what is without a doubt absolutely the first most astonishing fact of American politics. And that is that conservatism (I prefer to call them ‘regressives’) isn’t the most repudiated ideology this side of cannibalism. And that regressive practitioners of this hateful disease masquerading as a political philosophy haven’t been tarred-and-feathered, hung, drawn and quartered, then run out of town on an electrified rail. And that any red-blooded American wouldn’t infinitely prefer in this day and age to be called a pedophile, a terrorist or a European – heck, or all of the above combined – rather than a conservative.

I mean, seriously, people. Now that Wall Street has imploded, potentially taking down with it the entire global economy in a fun reprise of the 1930s, what more could possibly be necessary to repudiate a set of ideas for which a good day is when thousands of people don’t die (again) as a result of anyone, let alone the world’s sole superpower, subscribing to something so astonishingly stupid? Really, is there anything that the regressive agenda has touched so far that hasn’t completely turned into a pillar of salt? Not only do these nice pious Christians show every evidence of actually being the antichrist, they’ve also managed to be the anti-Midas as well.

The scope of the destruction is breathtaking to gaze upon. The rapidity with which American affluence and power and respect and responsibility were converted into their opposite numbers is mind-boggling. But the most astonishing thing of all is the absence of repudiation. Not from subscribers, of course. That army of clones was so existentially terrorized in their impressionable years by some toxic stew of religion, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-communism and/or some other forms of anti-otherism – along with a sinking economic status – that their cold, stiff fingers will never be pried from the politics of guns, gays and god. Especially now, when they can also add to their fears the blame for being so spectacularly wrong about everything imaginable these last decades. Who would want to own that?...

But here’s the part that they won’t admit to, despite the fact that it is inescapably true. Indeed, precisely because it is true, and because of where it leads. And that’s this: This is an ideology that has been tested. Nobody can say that George W. Bush, or his cronies in Congress or his enablers on the Supreme Court have pulled any punches these last eight miserable years. But the truth is, it runs a lot deeper than even that. With the exception of Bill Clinton’s moderately and sporadically progressive social policies, it’s actually been a solid thirty years of conservative politics in America, including Clinton’s economic policies, which were indistinguishable from anything you’d get out of Wall Street or off the GOP convention platform of any given year. Ever since Reagan, and in some ways even back to Carter, Washington has been all about implementing a conservative agenda of tax cuts, deregulation and privatization, unraveling feminism, gay rights, civil rights and the Constitution, along with interventions abroad and mass incarcerations at home. In short, it would take an obscene distortion of truth – of which regressives have so often shown themselves singularly capable – to argue other than that we’ve had a very thorough and robust test of the ideology these last decades, and especially under George W. Bush.

So the real question is, how come ‘conservative’ isn’t a dirty word today, a label that any politician outside of Mississippi would run from as if it were the Ebola virus?

What’s happened is that the regressive right has been wildly successful at one of the only two things they’re good at (the other being theft), which is marketing lies. The Atwater/Rove/Schmidt machine is fairly brilliant at using fear, smear and queer to turn night into day, black into white, Palin into Truman. Nowhere does this show up so clearly as in the contrast between policy preferences and the ideological self-definition of voters. On issue after issue – yes, even including guns, gays and taxes – Americans definitively line up in favor of liberal positions, often by huge gaps. They want national healthcare, they want regulation of guns, they support equality for women and gays, they oppose ‘free trade’, they favor government steps to ameliorate the polarization of wealth in America, they want to protect the environment, they approve ‘big government’ providing more services, they want the minimum wage raised, they support stem-cell research and massively oppose Terri Schiavo-type government interventions into personal morality, they strongly support abortion rights and oppose repealing Roe by a two-to-one ratio. Nowadays, they’re even giving up on the death penalty.

But then these same people have, over the last thirty years or so, self-identified as conservatives to the tune of about 30 percent of the population, versus liberal on the order of about 20 percent. And while there are decent arguments to be made that the public doesn’t understand ideological labels as well as they might, or that the other 25 percent or so calling themselves moderates are really liberals, the more important point has to do with marketing success. Who in America wants to be labeled a ‘liberal’ today? It’s still a dirty word, even though all its policy prescriptions are widely held, and even though conservatism has been monstrously and emphatically disastrous. This is the product of a marketing coup of first proportions, a stunning Madison Avenue success at, well, putting lipstick on a pig. You could see it, most recently, at the Republican Convention last month, where neither George Bush nor Dick Cheney nor even the word Republican were anywhere to be found, and yet people bought into loads of the claptrap about Sarah Palin. Democrats would have been hopeless and morose with a hand like the one Republicans have dealt themselves in 2008. The GOP, on the other hand – them boys know how to peddle soap, man.

Read the (excellent!) whole article here.

We Had Alternatives

The following statement was presented on the floor of The House of Representatives after Congressman Kucinich voted against the Wall Street bail out plan, H.R. 1424, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008:

The public is being led to believe that Congress has reconsidered its position because we have before us a better bill than we had a few days ago. It is the same bill plus hundreds of new pages for hundreds of millions of tax breaks. What does this have to do with the troubles of Wall Street?

Driven by fear we are moving quickly to pass a bill, which may produce a temporary uptick for the market, but nothing for millions of homeowners whose misfortunes are at the center of our economic woes. People do not have money to pay their mortgages. After this passes, they will still not have money to pay their mortgages. People will still lose their homes while Wall Street is bailed out.

The central flaw of this bill is that there are NO stronger protections for homeowners and NO changes in the language to ensure that the secretary has the authority to compel mortgage servicers to modify the terms of mortgages. And there are NO stronger regulatory changes to fix the circumstances that allowed this to happen.

We should have created a mechanism for our government to take a controlling interest in mortgage-backed securities and use our power to work out a new deal for the homeowners. We could have done this. We should have done this. But we didn't.

Now millions of Americans will face the threat of foreclosure without any help. And the numbers will soon rise for a number of reasons. Not only because of the Alt-A, jumbo mortgages which will soon be reset at higher interest rates, but because the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) is pushing up rates on adjustable mortgages and more than half of the US adjustable mortgage rates are tied to LIBOR. Homeowner defaults will grow in significant numbers. Let's see if Congress will be as quick to help homeowners on Main Street as they were to help speculators on Wall Street.

Now the government will have to borrow $700 billion from banks, with interest, to give banks a $700 billion bailout, and in return the taxpayers get $700 billion in toxic debt. The Senate "improved" the bailout by giving tax breaks to people in foreclosure. People in foreclosure need help paying their mortgage, they do not seek tax breaks.

Across our Nation, foreclosures continue to devastate our communities, people are losing their jobs, and the prices of necessities are skyrocketing. This legislation, just like the one we defeated last week, will do nothing to solve the problems plaguing American families or help them to get out from underneath the oppressive debt they have been forced to take on.

Unfortunately, there has been no discussion of the underlying debt-based economy and the role of our monetary system in facilitating the redistribution of wealth upwards.

It is not as though we had no choice but to pass the bill before us. We could have done this differently. We could have demanded language in the legislation that would have empowered the Treasury to compel mortgage servicers to rework the terms of mortgage loans so homeowners could avoid foreclosure. We could have put regulatory structures in place to protect investors. We could have stopped the speculators.

This bill represents an utter failure of the Democratic process. It represents the triumph of special interest over the triumph of the public interest. It represents the inability of government to defend the public interest in the face of great pressure from financial interests. We could have recognized the power of government to prime the pump of the economy to get money flowing through out society by creating jobs, health care, and major investments in green energy. What a lost opportunity! What a moment of transition away from democracy and towards domination of America by global economic interests.

Years ago, in a Cleveland neighborhood, I saw a hand-scrawled sign above a cash register in a delicatessen. The sign said: "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash." The sign above the Speaker's rostrum reads "In God We Trust," but we are paying the cash to Wall Street.

It is not as if we had no other choice but to pass this bill.

How Racism Works

What if John McCain were a former president of the Harvard Law Review?

What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?

What if McCain were still married to the first woman he said 'I do' to?

What if Obama were the candidate who left his first wife after she no longer measured up to his standards?

What if Michelle Obama were a wife who not only became addicted to pain killers, but acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?

What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?

What if Obama were a member of the 'Keating 5'?

What if McCain were a charismatic, eloquent speaker?

If these questions reflected reality, do you really believe the election numbers would be as close as they are?

This is what racism does. It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities in another when there is a color difference.

(Wish I had written this... just passing it on.)