Super Duper

This is a super week. The Super Bowl was on Sunday, then we got a day off, and now it's Super Tuesday.

Those two things have more in common than you might think. Both are very big TV shows, with sponsors and their own theme music.

It's also Mardi Gras.

It's also the day when they (the stock market people) realized we're going to get a Supersized(TM) recession. The Institute for Supply Management's service sector report came out, and it looks very bleak. The Super Recession of 2008 is also a TV show, but unlike the other two supes is a great deal more besides. It has the distressing characteristic of being real.

This particular ISM survey is a time-honored, respected, and reliable economic indicator.

"But how bad is it?" asks the New York Times's Paul Krugman. "The latest report has an employment diffusion index of 43.9 (50 means no change, anything less than 50 means job contraction)." He also supplies the historial graph, and it's not a pretty picture.

This is going to be very rough. There will be a lot of people out of work, and trying to squeeze by on little or no money. For how long? Nobody knows.

This is the last of the bouquet of poisoned blossoms the Neocon movement, beginning with Ronald Reagan, has cultivated for us over nearly 30 years in the toxic soil of its noxious garden.

Goodbye Britney

The right time for Britney Spears jokes, if there ever was such, is gone now, with the announcement that she'll be in the hospital another two weeks. Doctors and a person the AP describes as a "medical officer" decided she's not ready to leave.

We may never see her again. A Los Angeles judge has put the 26-year-old under the care of her father, naming him Britney's conservator. Both the judge and hospital personnel have drawn the justifiable conclusion that Britney Spears needs somebody to take care of her. Not long ago she was seen sitting alone on a sidewalk in Los Angeles, holding her miniature dog and crying.

This is no joke. There is a lot in this story that's the kind of stuff Greek Tragedy is made of -- the Olympian myth of a demi-goddess, like Icarus who flew too close to the sun, or King Midas who became the prisoner of his own good fortune.

An extraordinarily steep ascent to dangerous heights of fame and fortune at a tender age has worked its mischief. And a wise man once said, "At first a fool's mischief tastes sweet -- sweet as honey. But in time it turns bitter, and how bitterly he suffers."

Wedgie Season

John McCain looks like and has the personality of Captain Underpants. That's just one of his problems.

Keep a keen eye out for wedgies. PDF wedgies are the worst.

Cat Boxing

This morning I had forwarded to me an email message from Nancy Keenan, President of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL).

She reminds people that John McCain has voted to limit or rescind abortion rights 125 out of 130 times while in the Senate, that Mitt Romney once vetoed Massachusetts legislation making provisions for emergency contraception (his veto was overridden), and that Mike Huckabee has said he believes Roe v. Wade should be overturned.

On the other hand, Keenan advises us that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are pro choice, or not to put too fine a point on it, will work to protect abortion rights.

For those reasons, I plan to vote for the Democratic candidate this fall, no matter who it is.

I realize that nobody has spent more time on this site bad-mouthing the Democrats than I have. I still think we need a better Democratic Party, and that not just the Democrats, but the entire political system, has failed us miserably because it has failed to articulate a foreign policy that acknowledges reality (I.e., that acknowledges that the U.S. does NOT own the world and everything in it), or an economic policy that makes sense.

However, in consideration of the difference between the parties regarding certain domestic issues such as abortion rights, I will never vote Republican and will always vote Democratic.

I still reserve the right to be a pain in the ass among Democrats.

Quit Iraq Now.

Respectfully,

Merlestones

Visiting internet discussion groups is worthwhile if for no other reason than you can sometimes learn things you would not have otherwise heard about. For instance, on a visit to my regular political discussion board this morning I found out that the great country-western singer Merle Haggard has forsaken his fightin'-side-of-me persona and, late in life, taken to penning and singing antiwar messages. In 2006, Haggard wrote and recorded:

"Freedom is stuck in reverse
Let’s get out of Iraq and get back on track
And let’s rebuild America first"

You can get all the details of this remarkable transformation here.

I always knew Merle's heart was basically in the right place. Anybody who can move from note to note as smoothly and effortlessly as he does has to have a soul.

He and I both used to live in Bakersfield. I don't know why he moved away, but I suspect for the same reason I did -- the air quality, or lack of it. Like him, I've acquired this little habit called breathing.

And I'll bet he gave up whiskey. Nothing like giving up whiskey to turn a person into a full-fledged mensch.

So there's your sermon for today, boys and girls. Stay away from whiskey and cigarettes, and you too can transform yourself from a belligerent and obnoxious cheerleader for international aggression into a gentle, peace-loving writer of antiwar songs.

And while you're at it, stay away from Bakersfield.

Go Spy on Yourself

The Democratic Congress has refused to give Bush the surveillance bill he's been demanding.

The telecom companies who illegally spied on Americans are not off the hook. There's a very real possibility they'll eventually have to answer to us for what they did.

I'll consider this the REAL Democratic response to Bush's State of the Union speech.

We've been waiting for 13 months for the Democrats to do something right. I'm relieved that they finally showed they've got it in them.

Les Tendances Dangereuses

Mitt Romney and John McCain are accusing each other of harboring liberal tendencies.

Men from Uranus

In another solar system of the internet, a certain correspondent, a Democrat, expressed the notion that if we had to live with a Republican in the White House after Dubya vacates it, he'd prefer that Republican to be John McCain.

I guess hard times make people really desperate.

McCain isn't a whole hell of a lot different from Dubya. He speaks better. That's about it.

He's just as divorced from reality.

This is a guy who sings "Bomb Iran" (to the tune of "Barbara Ann") when asked what we should do about Iran and Ahmedinejad. He's now saying that "It's a tough war we're in. It's not going to be over right away. There's going to be other wars." See yesterday's article at HuffPo.

He's obviously insane. I don't mean that as a figure of speech or hyperbole. I'm deadly serious.

He's running strong in straw polls against Hillary right now, but that will change when people realize that he's a bullet-headed little fascist who's never seen a foreign intervention he doesn't like. The only reason they don't realize it now is because they're so distracted by the t.v. show called "Horse Race for the Presidency."

This country is yearning for peace, and our financial situation demands it, and this "straight talk" lunatic promises more war. I hope he keeps doing so.

I don't know what it would take for the poltical process in this country to come to terms with the real world. Both parties keep coming up with fantasy solutions like insuring prosperity through supply side economics, or neutralizing terror by establishing democracy in the Middle East, or maintaining our present way of life with alternative energy sources, and reality keeps blind siding us with unpleasant consequences for pursuing such follies.

Maybe a partial solution would be for all the delegates and VIP's at the Republican National Convention this summer to abstain from recreational drinking for relaxation, and take large doses of LSD or psilocybin mushrooms or ecstasy instead.

Democrats are from Mars; Republicans are from Uranus. With a little chemical tweaking of their psyches, they just might relocate to a planet a little closer in.

Tragic Frivolity

My friend Eadler says, "There is no sign that any major candidate is willing to discuss this topic (decline of American hegemony). Ron Paul and Kucinich, who have little credibility with the public at large, are the only ones who approach discussing this topic, but in my opinion, they do not have the pragmatic approach required to fix our problems. They are far too ideological in their approach."

To which I reply: That's the biggest tragedy of all. If any of these products of the corporate-bankrolled, lobbyist-directed political system, from Huckabee on the right to Edwards on the left, has considered these kinds of problems, they've shown no indication of it.

A scholar like Parag Khanna, writing on this topic today in the New York Times magazine, can analyze America's position in the world and the pressures exerted on us by significant others and then make suggestions for action based on the analysis, but are any of the candidates capable of acting rationally and proportional to the changes of the last seven years? Are any of them even capable of understanding these things?

Sometimes it appears that our political candidates actually take the t.v. show they're starring in seriously. But unfortunately, there is absolutely nothing so momentous or profound that network executives can't trivialize it, turn it into a sitcom, and then use it as a platform for advertising.

If there was a nuclear exchange somewhere, it would immediately become a made-for-t.v. miniseries, with its own theme music and its own sponsor, on CNN. "'The End of the World,' brought to you by Depends Undergarments."

America's diminished postion in the world is not a t.v. show. It can't be trivialized or reduced to a sound byte. And how our political establishment deals with new realities, and even whether they are first of all willing to accept reality, will largely determine our future position in the world.

Assessing the quality of the candidates for leader of our country, Parag Khanna comments: Turn on the TV today, and you could be forgiven for thinking it’s 1999. Democrats and Republicans are bickering about where and how to intervene, whether to do it alone or with allies and what kind of world America should lead. Democrats believe they can hit a reset button, and Republicans believe muscular moralism is the way to go. It’s as if the first decade of the 21st century didn’t happen — and almost as if history itself doesn’t happen.

Wising Up

I got my latest issue of the New Yorker (Jan 28) in the mail yesterday and turned immediately to the elections article. The author, George Packer, seems to assume that, as with some NFL playoff seasons, the winner in the "Democrat Division" will be the Superbowl winner, and that we've already reached the division finals. Or in other words, the race for the White House is now between Clinton and Obama.

I soon found myself reading a personality piece, which turned out mostly to be about Clinton. Packer says that the "most important" difference between Hillary and Obama, "whose policy views...are almost indistinguishable," is their "rival conceptions of the Presidency."

You know, their policy views may be "almost undistinguishable," but I don't really have any reliable idea what they are. To find out specifically what either of them plans to do about the war in Iraq or the foreclosure landslide or anything else you have to go to obscure places on their websites. What little both candidates have said about these issues, especially Iraq and the Middle East, is often vague, sketchy, and contradictory.

Maybe personality really IS important and I'm missing something. Maybe considering the facts that Obama sees himself as a "catalyst" while Hillary sees politics as "the art of the possible" is critical to deciding which one will make a better president. Who am I to say that such nebulous distinctions are somewhere between unimportant and meaningless, and insult both the intelligence and the distress of voters?

Why is this election about personalities and insults and vague philosophical outlooks? Why can't these people get down to brass tacks? Is it because they're all show and no substance?

The country is in a very sour mood right now, and we don't need to be patronized by a bunch of phonies. An article in the politics section of the New York Times yesterday laid it out deadpan, and catalogued the reasons for the "darkening of the country's mood," and a "fraying of America's very sense of itself." This article identifies Americans' "powerlessness" over any of the crises afflicting this country -- the war, the economy and our ability to determine our own financial futures, our safety and, especially, our health, the environment, or immigration -- as the root of the malaise.

My question is, how will a personality and beauty contest instead of a serious presidential race help to address this feeling that we're powerlessness? And are we?

Do you seriously feel like you're living in a democracy?

Crashing the Gate

Slowly but surely, the corporate news media are beginning to back off some of their most reactionary and outrageous habits. They're having to clean up their act because of the pressure blogs are exerting on them, and because of the growing influence of the internet generally. Network pundits now know that when they say something stupid, they're going to get publicly called to account.

An example of what I'm talking about is provided by an incident involving MSNBC resident loudmouth Chris "Tweety" Matthews. On the January 17th edition of "Hardball," Matthews went on one of his trademarked MCP tirades against Hillary Clinton, saying "the reason she's a U.S. senator, the reason she's a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around. That's how she got to be senator from New York. We keep forgetting it. She didn't win there on her merit."

This was nothing new for Matthews. Jamison Foser of the blog Media Matters notes that Matthews has referred to Clinton as "She devil." He has repeatedly likened Clinton to "Nurse Ratched," referring to the scheming, manipulative character in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest who "asserts arbitrary control simply because she can." He has called her "Madame Defarge." And he has described male politicians who have endorsed Clinton as "castratos in the eunuch chorus."

Left-leaning and Democratic blogs responded immediately to this gross personal attack dressed up as political criticism. Their outraged howls were loud enough to get picked up by newspapers and other news broadcasts. The upshot of this "blogswarm" was Matthews's on-air apology. There's a full account of the fallout from this incident at Media Matters.

Matthews being called to account and forced to apologize could never have happened even just a few years ago. It was due to the growing power of the internet, documented here in an excellent analysis by the Pew Research Center. The number of people who get significant portions of their news and information from the net has nearly tripled in the last severn years, and whether they're accessing mainly right-leaning or left-leaning sites, they're gaining access to viable alternatives to what until recently was a corporate media monopoly on information. Hundreds of thousands of people are blogging now, and hundreds of thousands more than just a few short months ago are visiting the most popular blogs daily. The internet now parallels the corporate media, which as a result is slowly being forced to curb its most pernicious excesses.

The Seattle blog Orcinus has an intelligent and insightful article on the positive changes the internet is exerting on the corporate media, at [url][/url]. I'd recommend it highly, if for no other reason than to learn why it's now possible to call Pat Buchanan a white supremacist to his face and get away with it.

Sooner or later, the truth will out. And it's about time.

Crash

Stock indexes all over the world are falling precipitously as insecurity and fears of shrinking economic activity due to the U.S. recession spread. The first sign of it I saw came late last night when I read the stock market reports from Tokyo. It was Monday, not Sunday in Japan yesterday.

"Investors," the AP coverage says, "...were skeptical that an economic stimulus plan President Bush announced Friday would shore up the economy, which has been battered by housing and credit problems. The plan, which requires approval by Congress, calls for about $145 billion worth of tax relief to encourage consumer spending."

OK, I've been called Chicken Little and "Mr. Gloom and Doom" on this board and in other net places many times. It never bothered me, but I'm here now to tell you that gloom and doom is right as rain, and that this is going to be worse than you think. It's probably going to be worse than I think.

"Went to bed last night and I was feeling fine,"
Woke up and it was 1929."

Hear the words of our contemporary Jeremiah who calls the current crisis "Godzilla with Herbert Hoover's face," and says "the damage could be so colossal globally that Stephen Hawking might have to be brought in to run the Federal Reserve.

"This is going to be a rough week. Fastening your seat belts may not be enough for this ride. Better superglue yourselves to the floorboards and pray for God's mercy."

Romney the Socialist?

Writing at the Atlantic Magazine's site, Ross Douthat points out that Romney won in Michigan at least in part by foregoing the platitudes and generalities that have been the candidates' bread and butter this season, and addressing the state's industrial problems in very specific terms.

"If I’m president of this country, I will roll up my sleeves in the first 100 days I’m in office, and I will personally bring together industry, labor, Congressional and state leaders and together we will develop a plan to rebuild America’s automotive leadership,” Romney said.

Douthat comments, "This is what people like to call 'industrial policy,' and what Jonah Goldberg likes to call liberal fascism - big business and big government working hand-in-glove for the purposes of economic nationalism."

It's also why the Europeans are kicking our asses, economically speaking.

If this doesn't run counter to the unimpeded free-markets principle I don't know what would. And it appealed to Michigan voters precisely because it's to the left of what Huckabee and McCain were saying. McCain, in particular, was going around saying Michiganers can't expect the Feds to bail them out and return Detroit and Flint to what they once were.

Good old Karl (Marx, not Rove), he just refuses to die. But I never expected to see his shadow falling on the likes of the Mittster. It's funny, the way economic necessity savages people's most sacred ideologies.

Spencer Ackerman, as usual, has the best comment of all: "This makes National Review, which endorsed Romney, objectively pro-liberal fascism. The horror! Clearly, when liberal fascism comes to America, it will come wearing a bow tie and freighted with repressed homosexuality."

Phred Phalls Phlat

Thers at Firedoglake has an amusing take on the too-slowly-dying Thompson campaign, "Enjoy the SchadenFred."

The Thompson campaign has been fascinating to watch, as would be any desperate attempt to slap a saddle on Grandpa. Fascinating, but disturbing, like one of those sadistic Japanese game shows. The constant equestrian metaphors alone were enough to make the sane queasy, and they still haven't stopped with them.

Duncan Hunter is officially out of the race as well, so for comic relief I guess there's nobody left but Huckabee.

Enjoy the rest of the game. It'll be over on February 6, and we can resume what passes for normal behavior for a couple months.

Long Shadows

Is that the question? Who is recession? You is, for starters. And me am.

Actually, this is a hell of a lot more than just a recession. This is the sound of the other shoe dropping. The first shoe was called "communism" and that one dropped in the late 80's -- early 90's. And we congratulated ourselves then, because we thought we were the winners. Ha ha. Funny how things turn out. Now it's our turn.

Some winners we turned out to be! Look! There's Konstantin, waving good-bye to us. Now it's our turn to wave good-bye to him. Bye, Konnie.

I don't know if you saw them, but Bernanke and some other high priest of the Finance Sector were on MSNBC or one of those vesches this morning, and I didn't listen to what they were saying, but I noticed they were shaking like a couple of dogs shitting peach pits.

So later on I read that what he was saying was that he expects "slower growth in 2008, but no recession." Uh-huh. That Ben is such a kidder. [url][/url] Meanwhile, as he's saying this cal, the Dow drops another 300. Oy!

Here's the thing about it boys and girls, brothers and sisters; this isn't just the end of the most recent "boom," this is the end of the line. The pattern of housing that's developed since the end of WWII, heavily dependent on the growth of new suburbs and strip malls and highways, that's all over. See the Jeremiah who's been right for years (but few have listened to him) who predicted this very collapse I don't know how many years ago.

And as Kunstler is at pains to point out, it's not just the pattern of housing that's in ruins, but the lynchpin of economic development and growth that's gone as well.

Unregulated free-enterprise, long touted-by Republicans, economistitos, and other challenged types as the answer to all life's problems has now produced nothing but the biggest stinky corpse since the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics expired. And this one's even bigger than that one was.

The thing is, you know the pooch is screwed when you can't insure yourself against disaster, because the money is just not there to cover that magnitude of disaster. Atrios points out in a couple of posts today that the major bond insurers may be out of business.

Atrios pulls an item from Bloomberg News Service: Jan. 17 (Bloomberg) -- The risk that bond insurers including MBIA Inc. and Ambac Financial Group Inc. will default rose to a record after ratings firms increased their scrutiny of the companies as the value of mortgage-linked securities they guarantee plunge.

(snip)

Ambac may lose its AAA credit rating after reporting larger losses than the company previously indicated, Moody's said in a statement yesterday. S&P is examining all bond insurers after increasing its predictions for losses on subprime mortgages.


Then he comments: Ambac and MBIA are the two Jenga pieces which will pull the whole shitpile down. They insure all of the shitpile, allowing everyone to pretend that all of the risky stuff they own isn't risky at all. But that insurance is most likely a complete fantasy as it seems Ambac and MBIA don't have the cash to pay out claims. I should've gotten into the bond insurance business. Lower their ratings, you destroy their businesses. More than that, you wipe out the insurance fantasy, forcing everyone who insured with them to admit they have all this risky stuff on the books. Recognizing, of course, that in this context "risky" is just a euphemism for "shitty."

Ambac is currently down 64%. MBIA is down 26%.

Looks like the way we've been living our lives the past 62 years is coming to a screeching halt. But don't worry, all you hard-core Republicans and free-enterprisers out there. This isn't the end of the world, just the end of a bad business. There is a future, and some parts of the world are already in it. If you want to see what the future looks like, take a European vacation.

Diss Approval

Bush's approval rating has hit a new low in the most recent polls. The disapproval/approval split is now 66/32.

I'm sure I don't have to remind anybody that we're entering the last year of this administration. Bush now stands before us entirely stripped of the cowboy-"regular guy" mystique that clung to him when he first took office. Our diminished power and reputation and his own inarticulation have left him mercilessly exposed as a remarkably unintelligent and insignificant person.

This chapter in our history stands as an indictment of the American electorate and political system, and I've seen nothing in the new political cycle that gives any hope for improvement.

We've Only Just Begun

One of the casualities of the revolution which at this very moment has already begun (they're calling it a "recession," but it's going to be a lot more profound than an economic ripple) is our assumption that the U.S. owns the world, and that all those A-rabs and Persians (for those who know the difference) are sitting on top of OUR oil. The fact is we simply can't afford the military adventurism of the last 40 years any longer. We don't have the money, and we've reached the limit of what the Chinese and the "good" Arabs are willing to give us.

The future is like this: we will not attack Iran, and we will end our occupation of Iraq. We will build no new suburbs or highways or strip malls. We will no longer drive too many miles in inefficient, wasteful vehicles so we can go further into debt buying junk we don't need and shitty food which is killing us. We are now faced with changing the fundamental way we live, and the revolution will affect every aspect and detail of our lives.

It's happening now, and it's happening because we have no choice. And it's a good thing, although it will be quite painful for all of us. I'd suggest you start getting ready and planning your responses to changed conditions.

All this talk of attacking Iran "before it's too late" is the raving of an imbecile who's unable to comprehend what's happened to the world he's living in. For him it's already "too late." Three years from now, his abandoned dinosaur of an embassy in Baghdad will stand as an appropriately-sized monument to the colossal stupidity and cognitive dissonance of the people who have been running this country, this economy, this war machine, for the past 40 years, and especially for the last seven.

And I know I'm repeating myself, but we're going to start doing the right things now, not out of choice, but because we have no choice. People are like that. I'd still be smoking cigarettes if I was physically able to do so.

I guess I'll vote in the California primary today, but it's not really all that important, because as far as I can tell, none of these clowns of the political circus seems to have a clue about what's going on at this very moment, and even if they did, there's not much any of them can do to alter the momentum of the changes already under way.

The revolution is not primarily political. It mainly will consist of changes in the way we live, and political change will follow structural change, the way a wagon follows the horse that pulls it.

Dick Cheney once said "The American way of life is non-negotiable." He was right. See Kunstler this week.

Easy Al

The Wall Street bank Citigroup is desperately looking for about eight to ten billion in foreign investment to try to stay afloat. News today is one of the people they're looking to is Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who's talking in the neighborhood of two billion, although the deal is reportedly far from done. The prince already owns four percent of Citi, and this is the same bank that got 7.5 billion late last year from investors in Abu Dhabi, who now own 4.9 percent of the bank.

Citi is also seeking a cash infusion from Chinese government sources.

See the AP's recap of the Wall Street Journal story.

Naturally the prospect of Saudi Arabian interests and other Persian Gulf states acquiring huge portions of American financial institutions raises a lot of very interesting questions about our Middle East policy and the Global War on Terror and 9/11 and so forth, but let's not go there for the moment.

It takes a genius with a comprehensive memory like the blogger Atrios to tie that story to this one: flashback to October 12, 2001.

Mayor Rudy Giuliani said Thursday the city would not accept a $10 million donation for disaster relief from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal after the prince suggested U.S. policies in the Middle East contributed to the September 11 attacks.

"I entirely reject that statement," Giuliani said. "There is no moral equivalent for this [terrorist] act. There is no justification for it. The people who did it lost any right to ask for justification for it when they slaughtered 4,000 or 5,000 innocent people."

Prince Alwaleed gave the mayor a check after a Thursday morning memorial service at Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center towers destroyed in the attacks.

The prince offered his condolences to the people of New York, but after the ceremony he released a statement suggesting the United States "must address some of the issues that led to such a criminal attack."

See also Eschaton.

It's not terrorist bombs and Islamofascism we need to fear, it seems to me, but our own ineptitude and inability to face facts.

Once the Arabs and the Chinese own all our banks, what do you think they'll do with 'em?

Sidetracked

The good old U.S. of A. had a pretty wild and crazy ride last week. Oil hit a hundred bucks, unemployment hit five percent, and the stock market had its worst three-day start to a new year evah, or at least since 1930. And that combination of ugly events caused the ugy word "recession" to crop up in the mouths of several ugly experts.

So when moderator Charlie Gibson, the famous ABC news anchor gets the Democratic candidates together for a debate, what does he say is the most serious threat facing the country? A nuclear attack against an American city by al-Qaida, of course! So that's what he asked the candidates to respond to.

Instead of debating responses to the combination of disasters already raining down on us, the Democrats were forced to discuss a hypothetical event that hasn't happened and may never happen.

Our first response is to wonder whether they send network anchorpeople to a special school to teach them how to be as stupid as Gibson was that night. But the people who run the corporate media are not stupid, they're devious. They don't want the candidates or the voters discussing real issues. That might empower us.

They assume we're idiots, and they work hard at keeping us that way. For more detail on this story see Tom Engelhardt's Tomdispatch.com

In a related item, Hillary Clinton today proposed a 70-billion dollar emergency spending plan to deal with foreclosure and unemployment, and I could see the shadow of Smart Bill working with his smart wife. Bill was always instinctively healthy enough to take the initiative, and Hillary knows the smart moves too. So they definitely got the jump on whatever Republicans are left in this thing, who no doubt stood around with their mouths open watching the Clintons take charge of the situation.

To the best of my knowledge, Hillary did NOT come up with a plan for heading off or otherwise dealing with a nuclear attack on an American city by al-Qaida.

Supply-Side Economics

"This is the end -- this is the end, my friend," sang old Jim Morrison of the Doors, and a great economist he was too.

Today the stock market looked like a crackhead on opium. Check it out.

It's been looking that way for a while. Every day there's a different reason. Today it's "worries about Countrywide, AT&T." Yeah, lots of people are losing their jobs, like my ex-wife lost hers with an insurance agency, and lots of the accounts they were insuring were these local construction oufits, and, well...you know the rest. And it's that way at a lot of insurance agencies that used to insure these house builders and to lots of furniture stores that used to sell stuff to house buyers and lots of furniture makers, and on and on.

It's because making houses and strip malls is about the only industry that's grown in the last 30 years. The rest have gone overseas through outsourcing or shut down or got put out of business by foreign competition. Now that building houses and strip malls has gone under, what is there to keep the ship afloat?

While the stock market and the dollar are going down, unemployment and the price of gas are going up, and the price of gas going up means [i]all[/i] prices will be going up. We're catching it from both directions. Plus credit is drying up. There's very little money out there.

It's pretty scary. You know, there were some of us who have been telling the "experts" for years that this was going to happen, because the housing mania, along with dangerous innovations in the totally unregulated mortgage-lending sector of the "financial industry," was an obviously dangerous bubble for years, and because oil production is now past peak and prices will inevitably rise. You don't have to be Einstein or anything to figure it out.

Stay Home

Diego knew Monday morning was coming, and he dreaded it. He'd had so much fun at home during the holidays that he hated the thought of going back to school. His mind kept running through lists of things he might do to avoid having to go.

He finally decided to glue himself to his bed.

"I remembered my mom had bought a very strong glue," the ten-year-old Monterrey, Mexico schoolboy told reporters, after paramedics and police had spent two hours ungluing his hand from his bed's metal headboard.

"I don't understand why this happened," Diego's mother Sandra commented, as if his decision to apply industrial-strength shoe glue to his problems was a natural occurrence, like a rain shower. "He's a very good boy," she added, then sent him on his way to school.

He was a few hours late.

Portents and Omens

Do you believe in omens? Do you consult astrologers, card readers, or tea leaves?

From DailyKos: "The Ohio National Guard received it's marching orders from the US Military and will be sending 1,600 troops to Kuwait, then onto Iraq. It is the biggest Ohio National Guard call-up since WWII."

And here I thought the soige was over. Or is it? Are we drawing down or ramping up? Did we win or lose? Somebody call Bill Kristol and Matt Drudge; we need clarification here.

What it looks like to me is no change -- status quo ante.

Page toooooooo: Last month Led Zeppelin played its first full live set since 1980 at the O2 Arena in Lundinium. It was Robert Plante, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham's son Jason playing what Plante hoped would be "one last, great show."

See the New Yorker this week.

I know this was happening overseas and all that, but it's significant to me because I remember Led Zep first appearing on the scene in 1969 was the same time the U.S. antiwar movement really kicked into overdrive and started giving the villagers inside the D.C. beltway nightmares much worse than the ones they were already having. It was crunch time, and as a result Nixon started pulling out troops.

It's probably too late for similar things to happen in connection with this war. We'd be better off just electing John Edwards.

By the way, for what it's worth, which is probably nothing, the DailyKos readers' poll shows Edwards winning with 48 percent and Obama second with 27 percent. Others polling above one percent were: Clinton, 7; Dodd, 4; Kucinich, 2; and no effing clue, 2.

Author!! Author!!

How many of us have ever been sure that somewhere in the depths of our suffering souls, there was a book just waiting to get out, a story the world would be eager to devour, and a point of view that judicious and discriminating readers everywhere would find, new, innovative, and refreshing?

Well, the time is at hand, would-be authors (me included), and there are no more excuses. We can no longer say, "I'd probably never find a publisher," or "It would cost too much to have it printed myself." Becuase, the up-to-date fact is, if you can write that book, you can easily publish it at no expense. After that, all that's left is the hard part -- promoting and selling it, or, not to put too fine a point on harsh reality, finding people willing to pay to read what you wrote.

The on-demand publisher Lulu.com, according to an Associated Press story running on Yahoo today, "has churned out 236,000 paperbacks since it opened in 2002, and its volume of new paperbacks has risen each month this year, hitting 14,745 in November."

The A.P.'s Candice Choi goes on to explain what makes cost-free publishing possible: "Publishers produce books only after they're ordered and paid for, which eliminates overruns and the need for warehousing. They charge for printing, or take a cut of sales, and they set up payment systems, online bookstores and Web marketing tools."

I'd encourage all unpublished authors to read the whole thing, then reach deep into that bureau drawer, under the tee shirts, and pull out that yellowing manuscript, and blow the dust off. It's time to go to Lulu.com or Amazon and start working.

I'll be right there with you, since I already have my topic. It's going to be a biography, but I won't say of whom.

New Year

I'll be moving into my new home in a couple weeks, and spent a significant part of the day going through piles of old magazines and papers, some recent and some which I've been saving for years. One pile got thrown away, i.e. recycled; the rest were finally subjected to a sort of semi-organized preliminary regime of ranks and files.

When I get into the new house, I want to be really totally organized for the first time in my life, sort of like my mom is, or like Ron, or like Dian. Yup. Those are definitely the people I'll emulate when it comes to filing, labeling, and instant, unhesitating retrieval.

A lot of my stuff will be organized by virtue of not being put away, and I'll have enough room that many of my few possessions, like two sets of drums and a couple guitars, will just remain out in the open.

That'll be new, as is getting used to living alone, and even liking it sometimes. Being alone was definitely the hardest part of getting divorced for the first six or seven months. So 2008 will be unique in that respect.

I've been finding out that air is sweet, and that breathing is one of life's great pleasures. Not being able to breathe properly for the last 25 or 30 years was something I just gradually got used to, and I didn't think much about it until chronic bronchitis became painfully severe, 24/7. So my New Year's resolution is to smoke no cigarettes, and I have an 83-day head start.

Will the world fall apart this year? It might. See Jim Kunstler's Predictions for 2008.

Christmas Present

I parked in the public lot behind Palm Canyon and walked out past Ruby's to the main drag. It was relatively cold (around 50 degrees) for a sunshiny morning in the desert, as it often is the week before Christmas. A few feet from the statue of Palm Springs's most beloved departed patriarch, St. Sonny Bono, an old guy in a wheelchair sat in the sun.

"Morning," he says to me. "Merry Christmas."

I stopped and waited for the "Can you help a guy out," but it never came.

Curious, I walked over closer to him. "How are you this morning," I asked.

"I'm doin' good," he says. And still, he didn't ask for anything. Although probably younger than me, he appeared old -- no teeth, and little hair. He had one wooden leg and one stump.

"Do you need anything?" If he wasn't going to panhandle, it was on me.

"Ya know, I could use a pretzel from Jamba Juice, so I can feed my birds," he says. "Let me give you some money for it."

"No," says I, "I got it."

Returning with the pretzel, I sat for a few minutes and listened to his story. Disabled and legless after being struck from behind by a drunk driver 23 years ago, he'd been living on the street ever since.

"Welfare doesn't want to pay enough for me to get an apartment," he said without a trace of self pity. He's independent, sober, self-respecting.

I went to get coffee and a scone at Starbucks. When I walked past him to return to the car a few minutes later he was inundated by pigeons flocking to feast on pretzel crumbs. No passers-by had any objections to him feeding those dirty birds.

Benazir

By: Bernard Chazelle

Benazir Bhutto's assassination is a tragedy for her relatives and those of the 20 others who died in the attack. It is a sad day for her supporters.

Ms Bhutto was courageous to the point of recklessness. Her father was both Pakistan's great hope and bitter disappointment. But she lacked his considerable political skills. Upon her return to Pakistan at Bush's behest, Musharraf made mincemeat of her. It is doubtful he had anything to do with her death: in fact, his political future is now in jeopardy. If anyone besides her killers has blood on their hands, it is Bush, who sent her to her death in a harebrained scheme.

Bhutto's two stints as Prime Minister were marked by massive corruption and gross incompetence. But she agreed to do America's bidding and so she was merely, in the words of the New York Times, "imperfect."

In the corridors of power in Islamabad, few will mourn her passing. In fact, Agatha Christie could have written the script: the victim is dead and all the usual suspects have reason to celebrate. The military hated her; the master triangulator Musharraf couldn't stand the thought of the power-sharing agreement the US was trying to shove down his throat. Her nemesis and chief rival, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, had been mentored by Zia-ul-Haq, the man who killed her dad. The Inter-Services Intelligence (the infamous ISI) wished her dead. So did the Islamists and tribal leaders.

Pakistani politics is not for the faint of heart. One can imagine Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, muttering to himself: "And they think we are the crazy Muslim country!"

One man wasn't too thrilled by yesterday's events: Bush. His entire Pakistan policy is in tatters. For this he can also thank torture-loving John "Musharraf is our indispensable ally" Negroponte. The US gave Musharraf $11 billion in 6 years and the good general used that money to rid Pakistan of the last vestiges of American influence. He may well meet Benazir's fate one day or be ousted by his former protege and replacement as Army Chief, Ashfaq Kiyani, but don't discount his extraordinary survival skills. In particular, for years now Musharraf has been running circles around American policymakers; or, for that matter, the imperial satraps manning the fort at the New York Times.

Washington must now call for new rules

Washington must also demand

[Washington] must insist that

Washington will need to send the same message

How about "Washington must learn to mind its own business"?
Now, on to the nut graf.

American policy must now be directed at building a strong democracy in Pakistan that has the respect and the support of its own citizens and the will and the means to fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
This is a statement of breathtaking ignorance. A strong democracy in Pakistan that had the respect and the support of its own citizens would have neither the will nor the means to fight the Taliban, an organization that Pakistan helped create in the 90s to pacify its Tribal Areas and maintain its influence in Afghanistan. The US is losing the war in Afghanistan and is pressuring Pakistan to fight the good fight for us. Trouble is, Islamabad has long nurtured a careful relationship with the tribal belt and has no desire to start a full-fledged civil war within its borders. The low-level skirmishes that the Pakistani army wages (and usually loses) in Balochistan and the North-Western regions are more than it can handle.

Bush got mad at Musharraf for negotiating with the Taliban. Never mind that
Britain and the US are currently in negotiation with the Taliban in Afghanistan. (Has the NYT noticed that European diplomats were expelled from Afghanistan last week?) The hypocrisy is staggering.

Speaking of which, President Bush said this today:

The United States strongly condemns this cowardly act by murderous extremists who are trying to undermine Pakistan's democracy
Forget about the use of words: the "cowardice" of suicide bombers; the murderous extremists (not to be confused with the murderous moderates). How can Bush speak of those "trying to undermine Pakistan's democracy"? What democracy? The US has been propping up a dictator to the tune of $11 billion for 6 years, and The Decider goes after the Underminers of Pakistan's democracy...

Why must Orwell always have the last word?

Huckleberry

Huckleberry is campaigning in Iowa and getting rave reviews. By way of Atrios, I found this little nugget from the NY Times coverage of this triumphant campaign.

“Who is your favorite author?” Aleya Deatsch, 7, of West Des Moines asked Mr. Huckabee in one of those posing-like-a-shopping-mall-Santa moments.

Mr. Huckabee paused, then said his favorite author was Dr. Seuss.

In an interview afterward with the news media, Aleya said she was somewhat surprised. She thought the candidate would be reading at a higher level.

“My favorite author is C. S. Lewis,” she said.

They tell us to make lemonade when life gives us lemons, but what are we supposed to make when the polticial system gives us morons?

“What’s wrong with our country, what is wrong with our culture, is that you can’t say the name Jesus Christ without people going completely berserk,” Mr. Huckabee told a crowd in Dike, a tiny farm town about 80 miles northeast of Des Moines, where people also stood to applaud.

God, what a complete and utter dildo this guy is.

And yes, the wild nut rat was right. Fascism has arrived, wrapped in the flag ad carrying the cross, and it's going to get worse. It's going to get stupider.

Mohammed the Unitarian

Edward Gibbon's description of Mohammed's God says, "The prophet of Mecca rejected the worship of idols and men, of stars and planets, on the rational principle that whatever rises must set, that whatever is born must die, that whatever is corruptible must decay and perish. In the author of the universe, his rational enthusiasm confessed and adored an infinite and eternal being without form or place, without issue or similitude, present to our most secret thoughts, existing by the necessity of his own nature, and deriving from himself all moral and intellectual perfection. These sublime truths, thus announced in the language of the prophet, are firmly held by his disciples, and defined with metaphysical precision by the interpreters of the Koran. A philosophic theist might subscribe the creed of the Mohammedans; a creed too sublime, perhaps, for our present faculties. What object remains for the fancy, or even the understanding, when we have abstracted from the unknown substance all ideas of time and space, of motion and matter, of sensation and reflection? The first principle of reason and revolution was confirmed by the voice of Mohammed: his proselytes, from India to Morocco, are distinguished by the name of Unitarians; and the danger of idolatry has been prevented by the interdiction of images.

Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter L, "Description of Arabia and Its Inhabitants,"

Santa Claus Sexually Assaulted

The war on Christmas by Islamofascist terrorists and alien foreign immigrants from other lands continues. These are people who want to destroy our way of life, our religious observances, and our busy retail outlets.

The latest blow in this cultural war was struck in Danbury, Connecticut this past weekend when a crazed female woman whose national origin is not known at this time, but who has way too many vowels in her names, sexually assaulted Santa Claus.

Santa Claus says that a woman who sat on his lap was naughty, not nice. A Santa at the Danbury Fair mall said the woman groped him. "The security officer at the mall said Santa Claus has been sexually assaulted," police Detective Lt. Thomas Michael said of the weekend complaint.

This latest incident, along with the usual annual spate of nativity scene vandalisms and chain stores whose flyers include phrases like, "Nothing says Happy Holidays like Free Shipping!!" are potent evidence showing that the war on our sacred traditions, our family gatherings, and our precious bodily fluids continues.

Halcyon Days

I had occasion earlier today to write something about the first band I was in, the V.I.P.'s, in Marin County in 1963 and '64, when I was 19 and 20. We played around town for a little money now and then: Stones and Beatles covers, along with the Kinks, Van Morrison's first group, "Them," and work by a local group, the Beau Brummels. They were quite good.

We were a good band. We played cleanly, and with vigor. We were young and hot and out to get laid, and I can assure you we did. We were just boys, really.

Those were magic days, and we had only a vague notion of how specially lit up they were. I look at the very young Stones and wonder if they knew how good some of that stuff was they were doing. They must have felt it, yes?

That was when I learned to get drunk, stoned, etc., with band members Shari Pandit and Joe Mulder. When we listened to new music, it was like a flight into the unknown. I won't forget the struck-by-lightning feeling of hearing the Stones' "The Last Time" for the first time. That would have been, I think, late '64.

We didn't last long, us V.I.P.'s, and I being the oldest and only one in college. Moved on first. But we were together just long enough.

Capitalism and War

We've entered a serious economic downturn, maybe the worst one since 1930--1940. We'll get through it the way we got through the last one, by eating lots of rice and potatoes and throwing potlucks for entertainment.

The more interesting question is what we're going to do to recover from it. Historically, big capital recovers from its periodic collapses by having wars. It's been that way since modern times began. When the economy is in the bucket, building a war machine, then using it, is always a road to recovery.

European societies recovered from the economic downturns of the 1870's by unleashing an orgy of colonialism on the parts of the world that weren't already under their control, and toward the end of the century carved up Africa like a turkey. Many short but quite violent and destructive wars accompanied the end of the age of imperialism -- the Sikh War in Punjab, The Boer War, and the Russo-Japanese nightmare.

The U.S., done with conquering North America, got ino that race partly to recover from the stagnant economy and very tight money supply of the '90's. Teddy Roosevelt built us a modern navy of steel ships fitted with guns that could shoot exploding artillery shells, and we jumped into a very cool little war to pick up territory and prime the economic pump.

Hitler understood almost instinctively that the quickest way for Germany to recover from the hyperinflation and economic collapse of the Weimar years was through massive defecit spending for military purposes, which suited his intentions anyway. Defecit spending doesn't matter, because if you've got a big enough, technologically intimidating army, you can always get that money back.

The New Deal notwithstanding, we didn't begin recovering from the depression of the 30's until after the buildup for WWII began, first with lend-lease and then to produce the hardware for our participation. But the U.S.'s main role among our allies was as "the arsenal of democracy," or in other words, the main supplier of materiel for the allied war effort. The money that was made by manufacturers in Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh during those hectic days when they made the tanks, planes, bullets, and bombs was the embryo of our present-day war machine.

Capitalism's business cycle hasn't changed since the beginnings of modern times. it always follows the same familiar pattern of growth and exuberance, followed by boom and mania, followed by hysteria and panic, followed by collapse and depression, followed by slow recovery. And in modern times, recovery means preparation for war, then war.

Now is the time for us to start preparing for the future. We actually do have choices, and this endless cycle of boom, bust, and war does not have to continue. We can actually have a different kind of world, but we have to be able to envision it first.

Stagflation Nation

Back in the seventies we had "stagflation," a new economic term coined at the time to describe something that had never happened before. It was right after President Drahcir Noxin was chased from office and Gerry Ford had stumbled into the presidency and there was an oil embargo. Stagflation is what happens when there are rapidly rising prices (the "flation") at the same time as the economy slows down and wages and new jobs dry up (the "stag").

Then Jimmy Carter got elected and he had no more idea what to do about stagflation than Ford did. It was the old bipartisan shoulder shrug.

Today we found out that inflation jumped up more in November than at any time in two years. The AP article on this new round of inflation reports that "In a troubling juxtaposition, the rise in inflation is coming at a time when economic growth is slowing sharply under the weight of a steep slump in housing and a severe credit crunch."

Long story short -- prices are going up real fast at a time when there's very little money out there. Very little money and just a lot of bad paper left over from the last gold rush.

"We are in store for a period of very weak if not recessionary growth and uncomfortably high inflation," says the chief economist at Moody's. "People are going to get hit with both a weaker job market and having to pay more to fill their gas tanks and buy groceries."

It's a pretty alarming article, ostensibly about the stock market drop today, but really covering the whole spectrum of disturbing economic changes occurring right now.

Inflation is one of the most socially destabilizing economic phenomena. I once had a history teacher who said the only thing more destabilizing than inflation is food shortages. Nowadays I would think gas shortages are right up there in the same league as food shortages.

Inflation is especially bad when there's little money because credit has dried up. Most people can still buy food and a little gas, but we're not going to be able to move those microwave ovens, or be able to move those color t.v.'s (apologies to Dire Straits). And that means more layoffs, more foreclosures, more people sitting at home wringing their hands and crying all day long wondering how they're going to pay the heating bill.

Merry Christmas to you, too, Mr. Greenspan.

Hysteria and Hardassedness

Now that Huckabee's under the microscope, because it looks like he's going to be the one, since he's more or less acceptable to all Republicans, his position on immigration had to be checked for RPC (Republican Political Correctness). It was duly checked and found to be ok. He's for sealing the border and patrolling it with pit bulls.

Republican Political Correctness consists of alternating enraged yells of "Get those bastards!" with tearful, solemn recitations of "God Bless the USA." It's an emotional ritual.

In the New Yorker profile on him, Huckabee sounded real reasonable on the immigration issue. He even said he understood why a family man with kids to feed might feel like he's being forced to come here illegally (rather than wait seven years to have it done legally, while his family starves). But when push comes to shove, he comes down for the most hardass possible position. That's the Republican way, and it's half of the two-part ritual.

It's like a church service with them. The fear and rage are so predominant in the Republican mentality that they are projected onto anyone perceived as a threat, even a trivial one. Thus immigration needs to be shut down, we need to "double Guantanamo" as Romney or Giuliani or one of those pinheads said (I forget which one), and we need to bomb a couple more countries where the scary brown people live.

What we got going on in this country and under the Empire of the Pentagon right now is a kind of half-assed debate in which one side is trying to discuss the issues in a factual sort of way, using statistics and citing historical facts, and the other side is going "Shoot 'em! Hit 'em harder! Punish 'em! Get those bastards!" alternating with "We're so lucky to live in this the most wonderful country on earth, blessed by God and filled with our spotless virtue."

It's starting to seem really silly, besides being pointless.

Satan's Face

I'm proud to say I never served in the U.S. armed forces. My splendid opportunity to do so came during the Empire of the Pentagon's murderous and totally pointless season of carnage in Vietnam, a 14-year-long conflict that ended in the Empire's utter defeat, and judging from the recent barrage of lies directed against Senator Kerry, is still going on in some deluded heads.

Well, bring it on, assholes.

I chose not to participate in this crime called Vietnam, but was reminded of it this past week when I re-read some of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece "The Gulag Archipelago," a passionate factual account of what happened in the Siberian death camps of the U.S.S.R., where somewhere between ten million and 100 million innocent victims froze and starved to death between 1930 and 1980. Neither the actual numbers, nor even an accurate estimate will ever be known.

Reading Solzhenitsyn is like looking in Satan's face, because in those pages the reader encounters the indifference at best, and raw sadism at worst, of the bureaucrats, stool pigeons, and torture masters who made up the lists of people to be rounded up in Russia on any given night during the years of the Stalinist terror. I get much the same feeling when I look into the faces of the Empire of the Pentagon's Masters of War during the Vietnam era, under Lyndon Johnson: Rusk, Laird, McNamara.

Not satisfied with killing a million Vietnamese in its war against a country which had done absolutely nothing to us, the fear, rage and bloodlust of the Pentagon was only satisfied when the Masters of War employed their violence against the very soil of Vietnam itself, dumping thousands of tons of a deadly herbicide -- Agent Orange -- on the croplands and waterways of that unfortunate country. The long-term effects of this deadly poison included loss of health and longevity for thousands of American servicemen, and are still playing out in the form of birth defects among the affected portions of the Vietnamese population today.

In addition, the Dow Chemical Corporation made millions from selling their product Napalm, an incendiary jellied gasoline, to the Masters of War, which they proceded to drop on any Vietnamese who resisted us as well as any Vietnamese the Masters suspected might possess the capacity to resist. This led me to the conclusion at a young age that the chief difference between Lyndon Johnson and Adolf Hitler was that Hitler had loaded his victims on trains and took them to where the gas was, while Johnson loaded the gas on planes and took it to where the people were.

But I didn't learn to hate the Empire, at least not enough. After 1975, for the next 30 years, I assumed the Vietnam war was an aberration. It took Bush, Cheney, and the Neocon clique surrounding them to teach me the whole truth -- that war is the normal and natural state of the Empire of the Pentagon.

After causing nearly a million civilian deaths in Iraq and presiding over the demolition of that country's infrastructure, the Empire of the Pentagon can proudly take its place among the rogues' gallery of murder empires of the 20th and 21st centuries, along with Hitler's Reich and Stalin's Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and its insatiable thirst for blood puts the blood sacrifice cults of the Ancient Aztecs in the shade.

I need to point out, however, that the Empire of the Pentagon is an entirely different entity from the United States of America, a large geographical area whose inhabitants are mostly overweight and increasingly impoverished "consumers," living for the most part in a state of debt peonage and rising illiteracy, and hypnotized by disinformation fed them 24/7 by the corporate media. They're also basically kind and good-hearted, and increasingly politically disconnected. Interacting with people over the past few days, the two things I've noticed about most of them is their political naivete and disconnectedness and the unaccountable kindness of strangers.

Democrats

I keep wondering when large numbers of American voters are going to completely, once and for all, reject the political establishment, Republicans and Democrats alike, and move on. We've been given more than sufficient reasons to do so.

I think the only thing preventing it is lack of imagination. "Move on to what?" people ask. To whatever happens next, is what I answer.

A story in the Washington Post this morning provides further proof of the Democrats' complicity in the crimes of the last seven years. Its lede paragraph:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Now we now why impeachment was "off the table," eh? The court where you can haul in defendants and accuse them of crimes in which you yourself participated hasn't been born yet. The Post story goes on to say:

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

Too many people who regularly participate in this forum are distracted and hypnotized by the Republican vs. Democrat diversion, and bogged down in pointless ideological tennis games on threads like the ones started by our own version of Sideshow Bob. I've pointed out before that if the Republicans were the main perpetrators of the crimes of the last seven years, the Democrats were their main accomplices, and today's Post story proves it.

With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).

I don't know who the "one exception" was, but I do know I'll not spend any more time in criticism of Republicans, or patiently explaining to a pair of earplugs why it's certain that Bush is a liar. From now on the brunt of my anger and political efforts will be directed against the Democrats, with a few, nonestablishment exceptions.

The Democrats are traitors and Pharisees. They're hypocrites who pretend to be on our side and then stab us in the back at the first opportunity. And they've done us again, in the matters of first the Iraq War, then torture, and now Social Security (a work in progress). Like the Republicans, they are the enemy, and they will be destroyed.

To hell with these people.

We don't need an election in this country, we need a revolution. And I ask you, what good is an election if it doesn't give us an opportunity to overthrow the government?

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The popular website Beliefnet, was recently purchased by Fox Entertainment. Liberal posters at the the Beliefnet political forums, upset and imagining that Fox might impose some sort of censorship on the discussions there, stirred up a bit of a mini-tsunami on several threads and in innumerable internal e-mails. So of course, I posted my own take on the situation.

The one change I would hope for under the new owners is that they finally obtain enough bandwidth to run this sucker, so it doesn't take two or three minutes (on dial-up) to go from one page to another. I assume Fox is a little more flush than the old owner, which was AOL if I'm not mistaken, and that they've got enough money and interest in seeing this place thrive to make the necessary upgrades.

The purpose of BNet, when you boil it down, is no different than television. It's a platform for advertising, and all those fancy ads that have cute little gizmos that pop up and flash and make noises when you drag the mouse over them require mucho bandwidth to run efficiently.

As with television (thank god for remotes with "mute" buttons) the stupid ads can be and will be ignored by most of us. But don't lose sight of the fact that those ads are what this place is all about.

As for Fox subjecting the content here to some test of ideological purity as some have suggested and others apparently advocate, I think you're suffering from delusions of grandeur. Nobody really cares what you or I think about things, or what our political opinions are, and as long as liberals have money to spend there'll be niche markets for the kind of stuff they like -- hiking shoes, organic blueberries, hybrid cars to make them feel less guilty, and places like this where they can go and vent about George W. Bush and the evils of our heartless, soulless capitalist society.

Nobody

He lived in no place, which is exactly midway between here and there.

Believe me, I've been to San Francisco and Seattle and Frankfurt and Tokyo. Those are places. Omaha is no place.

Born in an unremarkable time, bearing no distinguishing characteristics, and having no attributes worth noting, he lived a short, bleak life among the televisions, public institutions, retail outlets and fast-food joints, and what pass for families in the place that is no place, in a time frozen at the precise wrong moment.

Weak-eyed, long-haired, with no particular academic inclinations and no identifiable ambitions or desires or passions, he became a high school dropout at 17.

Kicked out of the parental hut for his multiplicity of failures, then taken in by a sympathetic household, his life seemed a short while marginally tolerable, though it would never qualify as pleasant by any standard.

But then came the inevitable breakdowns -- loss of the job at McDonald's; the optional girlfriend bails out of this nowhere scene.

It's hard to imagine a life of such stark, brutal, and unremitting spiritual poverty. I'm surprised more such lives don't end in blood and mayhem, but mostly they don't. The majority of them, lives of "quiet desperation" (as Thoreau said) simply peter out the usual way.

This one, however, exploded under pressure. After leaving a note in his adoptive home explaining, "I'm a piece of shit and now I'm going to be famous," Robert Hawkins, 19, of Omaha, Nebraska, went to a local shopping mall where he shot and killed eight people he didn't know, then himself.

Years ago, during the sixties, I met a 15-year-old runaway girl who was beginning to get a handle on life after a rough transition brought on by her leaving home at 14. "Living this way," she said to me, "in this place, it's like somebody putting you on a piece of steel, then saying to you, 'OK, live.'"

Isn't it wonderful? We're living do-it-yourself lives in a do-it-yourself world.

Bye Bye

I saw bits and pieces of Bush's Tuesday presser on NBC News last night, and it looks to me like the Geo W Bush administration is over a little early. It's kind of hard to tell who's running things right now.

Bush gave that little speech yesterday that insulted the intelligence of anything marginally smarter than a brick, and now it's time for him to take the advice the King of Spain gave to Hugo Chavez. The timing of the release of this NIE, which effectively ends the Bush/Cheney years, is very odd.

The country's basic foreign policies haven't changed, and the incoming president 13-1/2 months from now, whether a Republican or a Democrat, will continue to try to implement them just as the neocons have done. These basic policies are:

1. The United States must control and run things in the Middle East (more specifically, the Persian Gulf).

2. The way to do this is to form close alliances with as many countries there as possible.

3. Those who hate us and refuse to cooperate with us have to be crushed.

Bush and Cheney won't get to bomb Iran like they wanted. But the policy requirement that Iran somehow be crushed hasn't changed and won't go away. How we're going to do it simply hasn't been decided yet. That'll be priority one for Hillary or Mitt or whomever.

The next president, again whether a Republican or a Democrat, is now also locked into an Iraq policy that has us there permanently, with four or five huge permanent bases requiring a permanent complement of 45--60,000 personnel. That's not going to change either.

The Bush presidency was a disaster, but many of the policies that began with him will now continue no matter which party is in power. The way to change in this country is no longer through elections, and any genuine and significant political change movement at this point can only come out of the grass roots.

I'm afraid there isn't all that much to celebrate in the end of the Bush/Cheney show. If anything, I'll miss the comic relief that Bush provided every time he flapped his slack jaws.

Suffering

All creatures suffer, as the Buddha taught. It's the one thing we have in common with each other, with weasels and wolves and wombats.

All creatures grow old, grow sick, and die as well, but we're the only ones that know in advance those things will happen. The weasels and wolves and wombats are off the hook of that sorrowful knowledge.

Some suffering is inevitable, but other kinds are optional. Smoking was always optional in the old days, and now my heroin is nicotine. It's like a demon that's determined not to let go, so the struggle and the suffering will go on, probably a year or more. All I can do is take each day as it comes, and take them all one at a time. After a year has gone by I'll re-assess my relationship with this dirty fighter, who makes me sick in other parts of my body besides brain and lungs, and will go to seemingly any lengths to avoid relinquishing control of me.

It was probably good, in that case, that I was called out this morning to make a 12-step call, and asked to intervene in the case of a young alcohol addict coming off a nine-day run on hard booze. He was a pitiful sight by the time I got to him -- red as a hunk of corned beef, shaking, and blind in one eye.

"I guess I didn't take my contacts out for a week," he said.

And he was grateful for the ride to rehab, where he'll spend the next three days or so detoxing. I've never done it, but I've heard it involves significant amounts of intense suffering. So it goes, as Vonnegut always said.


"For a while the fool's mischief
Tastes sweet, sweet as honey.
But in the end it turns bitter.
And how bitterly he suffers!"

After I grumbled, rolled out, got some hot water on my sore back, and generally scraped myself off getting ready for that 12-step call this morning, I ran into the old lady from up the street who takes care of cats when people are gone, and has an unknown number of her own. She asked about my twin tomcats, then said,

"That new little kitty that I got sure thinks I'm her mama."

And it hit me, as I said goodbye and turned away, how many people in the world are only looking for something warm-blooded that they can love, and that might even love them back. The incredible loneliness of the human soul hit me like a bullet as I walked away, and the tears stood in my eyes, and I wept bitterly to think of all this suffering.

Trailers

I'm beginning to wonder whether people are supposed to be living in these things. Since they're designed as temporary shelter, living in a trailer takes some doing, sort of like living in a tent. You've got to be kind of a permanent outdoors/maintenance person.

That's not as true of the double-wides, which are intended to be semi-permanent structures sitting on foundations, but even they feature the same mix of cheap materials and hurry-up workmanship as travel trailers. There are the ubiquitous fake-wood panelled interior walls -- really a type of cardboard, and the same tinny furnaces, substandard plumbing, and flimsy wiring in nearly all these things. Believe me; I've been inside a few, and seen the way they leak through the seams at the first hint of rain.

The newer ones are often built of vinyl, the new universal building material, and there are definitely third-world undertones to seeing Americans housed in vinyl or plastic huts. From what I've seen, those living in them are engaged in constant struggles keeping the plumbing functioning, the air conditioning from blowing out the breaker box, the seams caulked sufficiently to hold the water out, and so forth.

It's a part-time job and some people jump right into it. Living in a trailer is a challenge that requires a do-it-yourself self-reliant type of person, and a lot of these older guys in trailer parks really enjoy that kind of stuff. It helps them feel useful in retirement, and still good for something.

I had an electrical fire here a couple nights ago, during the great one-day deluge. I never thought twice about that electrical coupling lying on the ground in a layer of rotting vegetation, the one connecting the main cable from my box to the park's power source. But when that coupling got wet inside and burst into flames, I was fortunate not to have lost my hut or worse. It should have been off the ground, and minimally sheltered from the elements, but how am I to know such things?

I've never in my life done "stuff," and I didn't retire from my last job to become a maintenance man and gardener. I don't have the knowledge or inclination to do maintenance, and gardening hurts my back. I remember when I lived in apartments, if something went wrong I called the landlord to send someone to fix it, plus the guys with the truck came every week and did the yard.

Still, it's kind of nice living here in the tin shack, and I'm learning, slowly. I'm going to have to think about this some more. If the trailer doesn't kill me it might make me stronger.