I wanna grow up, to be a politician...

Have you ever heard the expression, “That’s just God’s way of”… blank?  This phrase is ubiquitous and can be used in multiple circumstances and, like much of organized religion, is sort of nebulous.   After all, if god wanted to tell us something, would he be so oblique as to send a hurricane up the east coast in a willy-nilly display of his righteous wrath, sending millions of people heading for cover from Georgia to Maine?  Why would he do that?  What if we didn’t have Glen Beck, Michele Bachman, Pat Robertson and various other people with direct access to him to explain to us that Hurricane Irene was actually a blessing and god’s way of telling us that Washington needs to change its ways and get more in line with republican orthodoxy which reflects, after all, his true wishes. 

Obviously we need to start jailing queers, executing more criminals as fast as possible so their shifty-ass lawyers can’t delay their inevitable and richly deserved deaths, burn down all of the Planned Parenthood offices and hope the devil worshiping abortionists are trapped inside along with the cheap hussies who “counsel” poor innocent young girls about how to hump like minks in the most sinful way using birth control, obviously against his wishes.  Oh,  and exploit the earth and poor working slobs in as meaningful and efficient way as possible.  Amen…

Wouldn’t it make more sense for him to just go on CNN?  Or better yet, Faux News – maybe on Sean Hannity’s show or one of those shows with the air head bimbo anchorpersons reading utterly National Enquirer-esque “news” stories like how Obama got pissed off at the bicycle rental place on Martha’s Vineyard, went home and guzzled a quart of Tanqueray.  Lots of people would see it and, as long as they didn’t mistake it for some random person auditioning on America’s Got Talent he would get his point across in a much more direct way.   He’s God; he would know this, right?  It’s a rhetorical question…

In a follow up to something discussed here last week, a new report says that the pentagon has wasted 30 billion dollars on projects doled out to private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last ten years and is in danger of having that number double if the Afghan and Iraqi governments choose not to continue projects already underway after we complete the pull out of American personnel.  This is disappointing and discouraging news but really, is anyone surprised by this?  Turning thousands of bureaucrats and Haliburton wanna-be’s loose in a largely 16^th century country with pallets of cash and telling them, “Here, fix this place.  Make sure there’s plenty of parking…” is an endeavor doomed to failure from the start.  The government is reported to have handed out 140 billion dollars in no-bid contracts in 2010 alone.  So a chaotic country at war with itself, whose main export is opium poppies, and which is run by smiling bands of criminals and thugs, is suddenly supposed to be able to operate a 300 million dollar power plant when they have trouble getting the goats to march single file into the pen at night – what incredible nincompoop thought that was a good idea?  Shit, if you could put a switch by the door that they could flip on the way out it might work but if it’s any more complicated than lighting the boiler in the basement, forget it.  You might want to build a school first.  And oh by the way; in a country run by a pack of thieves, who thought that the first thing they’d want us to build would be a 40 million dollar prison? 

Ironically, this report is coming to light just as Dick “The King’s Regent” Cheney has emerged blinking and muttering from under whatever safe and secure undisclosed rock he’s been under for the last couple of years with a garbled and self-serving memoir full of gaping narrative holes in the best tradition of political apology and blame casting and which mysteriously skips over his chicken hawk draft dodging, hapless assistance to G.H.W. Bush as defense secretary and graft and corruption infused tenure at the afore mentioned Haliburton and goes right to his heroic service and the rightness of his every thought.   OK, Dick, it’s safe to turn off the light now and go back to wherever your medicine is kept. 

And finally, a strategy memo sent to his loyal troops by official court jester Eric Cantor goes a long way towards a not-so-subtle explanation of the tenor of the political debate going forward into next year and it is a foul and swill besmirched document that reeks of the corporatocracy that is currently pulling the strings of the republican party.  While the bible toting wing of the party is doing parlor tricks to keep everyone’s eyes occupied, the corporate slime wing of the party is continuing it’s all out obsessive assault on the Obama administration.  

While Mitt “Am I president yet?” Romney slinks along trying to keep his head down, the nut cases in the republican field get all the headlines with wild-eyed rants about taking back the country and living a godly life and all manner of other distracting rhetoric, including the mantra of “No tax increase for job creators”.  Meanwhile the erstwhile job creators patiently sit on vaults full of cash, not creating jobs while sponsoring eager ring-wing youth like Cantor and Bachman to call for dismantling the “job-killing” EPA so that they are free to foul their own nest to their hearts content as long as it pays the shareholders what they need and they get to go to Paris for a month every spring.   Eric as much as said their goal as a party is to remove “regulatory impediments” to economic growth, a philosophy that sounds ominously like the type of decisions made just before the Deepwater Horizon exploded. 

“By pursuing a steady repeal of job-destroying regulations, we can help lift the cloud of uncertainty hanging over small and large employers alike, empowering them to hire more workers," Cantor said in his memo.

This is, of course, transparent bullshit meant to turn the desperate working class unemployed into foot soldiers to turn out Obama in a year and a half and return the rightful king to the throne.  But watch out, Mitt – as Shakespear said,  “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”  He might have added, it’s really tough on the hair…

How I spent my summer vacation...

I should have know that if I took a couple of days off to run up to Lake Tahoe and do a little paddling I would come back to a surging wave of laughable, ridiculous hyperbole and political doubletalk and, sure enough; I was right and then some.   It’s a little overwhelming to try to catch up to it all so I’m not going to do that.  After all, how surprising is it really that Michele Bachman wants to get rid of the EPA, Rick “Big Guns” Perry wants to get rid of social security and Ron Paul wants to get rid of FEMA?  Those are all prominent stories I heard today on the way back down to sea level and, as usual, Ron Paul is the only one to make any sense.   FEMA?  Katrina, and that's all there is to that.

I don’t have a working TV at the cabin – something has knocked the cable out - and ironically the single channel I did get was The Weather Channel.  So while it was mid-80’s beautiful where we were, I got to watch the multicolored swirls of hurricane Irene sweeping over the east coast over and over again, along with various weather guys inexplicably standing out in torrential rain telling us it was stormy and raining unusually hard.   This is a standard practice among weather people.  For some reason they feel that when they say it is raining really hard we are so stupid that they need to show us what that means.  Jill, the weather girl, standing outside with her hair blowing horizontally, struggling to tell Steve, the anchorman, that, boy it is really blowing out here.   Got it. 

When the first winter snow falls in the Sierras it is guaranteed that all of the local news truck will hightail it up to Blue Canyon, typically the first place you hit snow driving up from the Bay Area, so that they can set up their forest of antennae and all report back to us that, “We’re here in Blue Canyon where, as you can see, it is snowing like a son of a bitch, I am freezing my ass off and my hair gel is frozen.  Now back to you, Dick…”  Anyway, as interesting as the hurricane was, I think the coverage was just a little bit overhyped, being as it was hitting the New York – Boston – Philly triangle rather than Puerto Rico or Bangladesh. 

I also heard that Pat Robertson thinks that the earth quake back there that cracked the Washington Monument was god’s way of telling us he was on his way back soon, a portentous bit of news for gay couples, teachers of evolution, and devil worshiping secularists everywhere.

But the funniest tidbit I heard today was about the chorus of analysts and political talking heads taking pot shots at Obama for his choice of summer reading while he was hanging out on Martha’s Vineyard.  It’s unimaginable to me that supposedly serious media types would spend more than 5 minutes thinking about this, as if by him choosing to read Cutting for Stone he might as well be reading Archie comics and is therefore unworthy of the long tradition of presidents with giant intellects and a sign that he isn't up to the job.  What made me laugh out loud, though, was when they compared it to George Bush’s vacation reading list from 2006: biographies of Chairman Mao, Robert J. Oppenheimer, Lincoln, Tsar Alexander II and Babe Ruth, not to mention Camus’ The Stranger, a history of polio and – wait for it – MacBeth.   This is so completely hilarious; first, that his PR people would seriously propose that as his summer reading list while he’s on the ranch in Crawford for a couple of weeks.   I mean, come on; George Bush reading Camus and MacBeth?  Seriously…?  This is a man who struggled to get through My Pet Goat.  If that book hadn't had pictures he’d still be trying to read it.  And second, picturing him sitting around the ranch in the evening…

Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be

What thou art promised. Yet do I fear thy nature;

It is too full o' the milk of human kindness

To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;

Art not without ambition; but without

The illness should attend it.

“Laura, what the fuck is he trying to say?  Is this English?”  

Funnier still is that Michele Bachman, who is a malapropism waiting to happen, says that her beach reading “is Van Mises” a19^th century economist and social commentator famous for his disdain for socialism.  Sure, Michele, I can picture you on the beach reading this: “Therefore, socialist waste of capital goods is as chronic as the incentives for production and retention of capital are low, while capital goods are coercively monopolised by a dysfunctional State operating with only the data pertaining to interpersonal comparisons of utility, as per democratic production” Yeah, and, "Marcus, could you put some more lotion on my back; I’m just getting to the good part.”   

I say if Obama wants to forget the hellish and unforgiving 4 years he’s going through right now, give it to him.  As it stands right now he will be remembered as a good man trying to do the right thing and failing or as a socialist negro fuck-up, also failing depending on your point of view.  Maybe it’s time to do like JFK and bust out the Ian Fleming.

You gotta fight...for your right...to (a third) paaaaarrrrrrty...

Ever since the debt ceiling “debate” ended in a sickening thud, with Obama negotiating his way to full blown surrender, and the republican campaign had its semi-official kick-off in the corn maze of the Iowa straw poll, the idea of a third party candidate has been rattling around in my head and recent events seem to point to that as a real possibility.  As numerous third party candidates have shown over the years, it’s a nearly impossible road to the White House.  But it looks tantalizingly favorable as we wind into the 4^th quarter of what has been an unmitigated disaster of a year for democrats and a year that the republican party, for all its heavy handed obstructionism and mad-hatter tea party distractions, has been unable to produce a single candidate who looks electable.

Flavor of the month, Rick ”I jog with a 6-shooter” Perry, given an opening you could invade Mexico through, has energized the biblical and socially retarded wing of the party but the old testament morality that is superficially underpinning his campaign could well be his undoing, especially when it is compared to the double dealing cronyism and borderline fraud being exposed on a daily basis as the source of his success in Texas.  I’m thinking that voters – even those completely blinded by the light of their own spiritual incoherence – can smell a rat when the same guy who is praying through crocodile tears in the national limelight one day is stacking bags of cash in the basement like a lone star Mohamar Khadafi  and selling out to the highest bidder like a Dallas call girl. 

Michele Bachman – the Red Queen to Rick’s Mad Hatter – appeals to the tea party rabble and almost no one else, making her about as electable as Newt Gingrich.  All you have to do is picture her as the first woman in American history to be elected president and the dizziness sets in immediately.   Running neck & neck with Perry, Mitt “Doesn’t my hair look good from this angle” Romney has a chance but he has to win the nomination first, a conundrum in that, to win the nomination he has to act crazy enough to draw some support from the Joshua, Judges, Ruth voters but not so crazy as the three piece suits on Wall Street get nervous and start looking around for someone else to carry their water.  It’s tricky business and after hearing Mitt practically swallow his tongue trying to think fast enough to counter a heckler, ( "Yeah, well...well...corporations are people too you know, buddy..."), I’m not sure he’s up to it. 

That assessment leads to the source of my suspicions, Jon Huntsman.  Huntsman has seemed to have consciously decided that he was standing a little too close to the hell fire and brimstone and couldn’t keep a straight face when Perry started babbling about how he has doubts about the theory of evolution and giving extraordinary credence to that one scientist who can’t find his way out of his basement lab but nonetheless has plenty of evidence that there is no such thing as climate change.  Huntsman has taken the sensible yet dangerous position that those shibboleths of party orthodoxy might be suspect and sounding altogether too rational and sensible to really factor in to the actual republican primaries.  But positioned between a severely wounded Obama who’s getting some of the all time worst advice from somebody over there and a nut-case hollow candidate on the right like Perry, he’s starting to look like a reasonable, adult choice to many frustrated democrats, traditional republicans and – most importantly – the majority of voters who call themselves independent.

This is where the current political structure of the country – one that has been badly in need of an overhaul for 30 years – gets in the way.  There is no one party currently whose tent is the right configuration to house a Huntsman candidacy.  He’s not Libertarian enough nor Green enough nor Peace & Freedom enough to sit well in the existing structure of any of the usual third party suspects.   And the way the electoral college is set up, it’s almost impossible for a third party candidate to do anything other act as a spoiler, a la Ross Perot or Ralph Nader.  A spoiler third party candidate could tip the election either way, depending on whether or not he could actually win any states and hence garner any electoral votes or just draw popular votes away from one or the other candidate.  This is what Perot did in 1992, likely leading to Bill Clinton being elected over the incumbent, G.H.W. Bush, don of the infamous Bush Family criminal cabal, and erstwhile preppy bad ass.

But all that aside, I think I would like to see someone run and run well, because I think it’s high time both parties get a swift kick in the ass from voters who are sick of all the blather and bullshit and a level of political discourse more in keeping with a kindergarten lunch room than a mature nation and ostensible leader of the free world.   Let’s call it a profound and timely paradigm shift  - Jon, are you up to it?

A Momentary Lapse of Reason...

Today at the back fence we’re taking a break from our usual focus on the misadventures of Satan’s Legion, otherwise known as the radical American right wing, for a feature I’m going to call, “Stories I Don’t Care About – or the confusion of the mainstream media”.   As you might guess, I do a lot of reading and listening to various news outlets and commentary on a daily basis.  From time to time there is a day when I garner absolutely nothing of interest from this practice and am left wondering in the end why the feature stories of the day became so prominent.  Yesterday was one such day.  So in descending order of irrelevance…remember if you dare that the UN estimates that 12 million people are in danger of starvation in the Horn of Africa...12 million...

Libyan rebels move on Tripoli and storm Khadafy’s compound.   The story of the uprising in Libya, while an important part of the larger story of the Arab Spring, has always been far more important to Europe than it has to America, simply because, for all of his bombast and mad-sheik bluster, Khadafy has been small potatoes for years, ever since he pulled the covers over his head after the bombing of the Pan-Am flight over Scotland.  Not to minimize the tragedy of that event, but afterwards he seemed to realize had gone too far and was going to get his ass kicked from one corner of the Med to the other so he decided to make nice and retreat to his luxury tent for some dates and seven-veil dancing.   Now as the Libyan people take the opportunity presented by the uprisings across North Africa to oust this clown once and for all – a foregone conclusion once NATO started bombing his tanks, by the way – the international press has reported breathlessly every day on rebel advances and retreats, progress and defeat while, again, not to devalue human suffering, but the American public has had to stifle a collective yawn.  And while our non-intervention intervention and the beltway clamor about it had a brief moment of prominence on the nightly news, for the most part we don’t care.

Now that happy, albeit, slightly crazed Libyans have set fire to his house, are drinking his 20 year old scotch and madly firing AK-47’s in the air in celebration, the news was dominated yesterday by various international pundits opining on what happens now and the big question; where is the rat bastard.  I say if he has any brains at all he’s in Buenos Aires appearing as Bette Midler in a drag queen review, never to be seen on the African continent again and all the better for it.  Meanwhile the nervous Europeans – especially the French and Italians – are sitting around chain smoking Gauloises and trying to figure out how they’re to deal with a woebegone country of multiple hostile tribes with no tradition of democratic institutions or history of unity aside from snatching the chance to chase Colonel K the hell out.  Good luck with that…The only interesting part of the story was watching the Fox News Fascists stumbling over themselves trying to either blame Obama or down play the fact that his mini-intervention worked out as planned and one of their favorite villains had been kicked to the curb on his watch.

The second story that I really don’t care about is the Rupert Murdoch phone hacking scandal that seems likely to implicate most of British law enforcement and the entire political establishment for either ignoring or being stupid about the slimy tentacles of The News of the World slipping under every door at 10 Downing St.   There is nothing new in the idea that Murdoch is capable of assuming that anyone can be bought and proceeding to prove it over and over again.  Nor is it really shocking that he’s enough of a cold, heartless bastard to hack the voice mail of families of soldiers killed in the war in Iraq or victims of domestic tragedy.   He’s proven to be a craven slut to a dollar over and over again as well, and almost nothing disreputable or callous or illegal or unethical should surprise anyone paying attention.   So the story has itself become a sort of super-tabloid extravaganza – the tabloid story of a tabloid paper doing unthinkably egregious things in the interest of making money, multiplied by the royal family and raised to the nth degree by virtue of the entire bunch of powdered wig-wearing government types clearing their throats and desperately trying to think of excuses for why their number is turning up in Rupert's phone book.  Once again, I think the media is a lot more interested in this than the American public, whose interest in Murdoch begins and ends with replaying the youTube video of him barely dodging the shaving cream pie in the court room because his trophy wife just about ripped the arm off the guy trying to splooge him.  Now that’s entertainment, Rupert old shoe…

Finally, another tawdry drama played out in Southern California, where slut princess and professional celebrity Kim Kardashian married a professional basketball player and a seriously delusional young man with way too much money before 400 or 500 friends and the cameras of E! TV, who subsidized this ridiculous farce to the tune of 2.5 million dollars for exclusive rights to the pictures that a breathless nation demanded.  Kris Humphries – the empty headed tall guy who somehow thinks he has found the woman of his dreams and spent 2 million bucks on a rock for her precious finger – stood nervously in front of the minister, shifting from foot to foot trying to remember his lines and praying for a short reception so he could climb back in the saddle and practice his...uh, footwork.  The strangely macabre Bruce Jenner stood proudly with Kim’s mom by his side trying to remember where his eyebrows were while paparazzi helicopters roared overhead, Kourtney and Khloe, the booty sisters, scanned the crowd for their own tall guys and attendees placed bets on the marriage duration over/under.   The whole scene reeked of a 21^st century American sub- culture run amok and televised to keep the semi-sedated masses amused until the new American Idol starts up.  It was a ripping fine show and as we ponder with anticipation images of the honeymoon – soon to be televised as a follow up series – we can only hope that the morbidly obese cast of The Biggest Loser lives up to standard they’ve set.   The bar is pretty high…

Beating a dead horse...because it will feel so good when I stop.

I hate to keep picking at Rick Perry, especially when the republican field is such a target rich environment, but the guy is in full campaign mode and every time he opens his mouth he reminds me of when that naughty boy turns into a braying jackass in Pinocchio.  He is a fountain of stupid and I am starting to believe that, in the midst of the chance of a lifetime to run for president as a republican hero, he is going to end up so godsmacked, beleaguered and delirious that he ends up going home, pissing in his sock drawer and passing out. 

Not only did Jon Huntsman – in a strangely courageous move – call him out for his idiotic sounding climate change denial, (“Well there’s some folks got questions about that”), and half-hearted endorsement of teaching creationism over evolution, (“Well, there’s some folks say there’s some holes in that theory”), he is clearly flummoxed by having to try to explain that his Texas job-producing miracle is built on the backs of unskilled workers with no benefits and consists of the highest number of minimum wage jobs in the country.  He opposes the Obama health care laws while fully 26% of Texans have no health insurance, the highest percentage in the country.  Why?  Because employers there don’t provide it.   He was quoted today explaining his agenda for producing more jobs if he is elected by saying he’d “cut regulations and cut taxes to get people working again”, a weirdly  familiar and simpleminded  prescription that proved to be such a disaster during George II’s ignominious reign.

George’s unnecessary tax cut greatly amplified the deficit issues and combined with his dick-measuring war in Iraq is the reason that the Clinton surplus disappeared faster that a drunkard’s lottery winnings.  His laissez-faire “oversight” and lax regulation of everything from financial institutions to his pals in the oil patch ended with the country in a never ending nightmare of unemployment, fear, greed and general despair, the Gulf of Mexico permanently stained with a zillion gallons of crude, dead miners in West Virginia and people on the rooftops with rifles in New Orleans, just to mention the highlights of republican de-regulation. 

Now after the prolonged pissing contest that was the fight over raising the debt ceiling and all manner of clamorous hyperbole from republicans about any proposed tax increase being the black death for the economy, this donkey still insists on proposing corporate welfare tax cuts as the handful of magic beans we simply must have while the leaders of his party in congress are already spewing propaganda against Obama’s very modest proposal to extend the payroll tax cuts for the rest of this year and possibly next.  Why does a party that is so staunchly against any tax increase on the wealthy and closing loopholes for corporations oppose a tax cut that benefits moderate and low income people?  Not to encourage class warfare because truth be told, I’d very much like to be rich myself, but this is a scorched earth campaign to oppose Obama at every turn for no other reason than the ruling class doesn’t like him and wants him gone, period.

But I got a little off track there – we were talking about Rick ”I got big ideas” Perry, who looks like nothing so much as a man intent on emptying his trusty six-shooter into his foot even if he has to reload.   The frightening part of watching him blunder towards self destruction is that a certain percentage of the population is so scared and so uninformed that they are susceptible to a high bullshit-content Reaganesque narrative like this because it gives them hope when they don’t have any and makes them feel like maybe they can come out from under the bed and out into the light of a new day and make the car payments again.  Maybe that factory job that went away never to return will be replaced by something better, or least something good.  Maybe their kids can go to college and the rest of their life isn’t going to be a monotonous slog through hell after all. 

That this hypocritical pinhead fixer can have that effect on the very people that he and his clown posse have hurt the most is what makes me sick.  Ron Paul has some good ideas; Huntsman has some good ideas, and neither of them can win; at least that’s the conventional wisdom.   But  I am going to hang onto the notion that even if neither of them can win they are islands of sanity in the vast republican ocean of biblical delusions, proudly anti-science crusaders, thieves and gun nuts and that gives me hope.

There's something happening here...

I was reading Matt Taibi’s excellent article in the new Rolling Stone about how the SEC has been engaged in series of ménage a trois arrangements with the same greed-bag Wall Street firms and slimy criminals they are supposed to be policing and it brought to mind a disturbing thought.   I’m generally not a conspiracy kind of guy, although I do firmly believe that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.  But there are some long term situations that are going essentially unreported in a mainstream media still following Sarah Palin around in salivating packs and that should - at the very least - give one pause to think that perhaps there is grand right wing conspiracy, to paraphrase Hillary Clinton.

The first of these is the aforementioned relationship between an SEC enforcement division turned into a eunuch because of what seem to be standing offers of bags of cash from the dirty dealing firms they’re charged with overseeing.  Every time someone at the SEC follows a trail of bread crumbs leading to a financial crime, some big-daddy power suit guy takes them to lunch and they suddenly lose interest, can’t find the file, deem the charges unsubstantiated by the evidence or just flat out shred the paper trail in madcap all nighters in the basement of the building, fueled by bottles of Cristal and handfuls of amphetamines.  It’s a well known and much remarked on fact that none of the treacherous bastards responsible for the giant sucking wound of the economic debacle have gotten so much as a weekend in the county jail for bringing the world economy to its knees and, in fact, they’re still playing three card monte with other people’s money right under the SEC’s nose.   How these buttoned down assholes were able to avoid all culpability and basically skate away from the train wreck they perpetrated is one of the great mysteries and disappointments of the Obama administration and a sharp needle in the eye of the American public too busy praying for god’s help with their 401k account to give a shit.

In another completely under-reported story, a couple of weeks ago there was a report issued, called Limited Interagency Coordination and Insufficient Controls Over US Funds in Afghanistan Hamper US Efforts to Develop the Afghan Financial Sector and Safeguard US Cash, a sublimely clear and straightforward title to a report that begs to get more attention and which is almost guaranteed to piss you off if you read it.  It essentially says that we have a “process” set up in Afghanistan that has been relentlessly funneling cash to an utterly broken and corrupt Afghan government for 10 years and 70 billion dollars worth and now suddenly some genius in Washington decided they probably should try to do an audit and accounting of where this has been going, just for the record.  And their findings can be summed up with just a couple of sentences from the report:

“However we found that agencies have not instituted sufficient controls over US funds, limiting their oversight over these funds and potentially the ability of the ATFC, (Afghan Threat Finance Cell)to insure that these funds are not diverted to insurgents.  As a result, the US risks inadvertently funding activities that directly oppose its reconstruction goals for Afghanistan.”  

I’d say that’s pretty unambiguous.   The US taxpayer, at a time of profound financial crisis, has been throwing money down a rat hole in Afghanistan and very likely financing flat screen TV’s in insurgent caves all over the god damn country, not to mention paying for RPG’s and all manner of mischief making supplies and equipment our happy Afghan peasants are buying from Iran.  The report goes into some detail about the fact that the various US agencies charged with overseeing the theoretical reconstruction projects in the country don’t communicate with each other, let the Afghan banks run wild and have no systematic accounting of the pallets of $100 bills that have been delivered there for years.   

Either the government hires the most incompetent accountants they can find across the enterprise or they’ve been bought off by a cabal of criminals who don’t have our best interests at heart. 

The Obama administration has had its hands full for the better part of three years but there comes a time when they have to be held accountable for this chaos and the thieves that are running amok in seemingly every building in DC. 

Meanwhile the lunatic republican presidential wannabes wander around spouting extravagant nonsense denying global climate change, challenging the theory of evolution and advocating prayer as the answer to our economic problems, masking the very real culpability of the Wall Street money changers and a defense establishment that stands to profit immeasurably from the endless “war on terror” at the expense of normal, average people who want to have the good life of the American dream and are witnessing it being stolen from under their noses without being able to recognize who the fixers and thieves really are.   Now today it is being reported that house republicans are marshaling their forces to oppose Obama’s extension of the payroll tax cut, a tax cut that actually benefits these average American dreamers, all while continuing to say over and over that they’ll fight to the death against any proposed tax increase on the wealthiest 2% of us because it is a “job killer”, a hilarious example of bald faced hypocrisy that really only a republican could try to get by with a straight face.

I’m not lining my windows with aluminum foil yet, but there’s a foul stench in the air and it’s starting to smell like conspiracy…

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.” Abraham Lincoln

This quote ran through my mind today as I read story after story of how Rick “Talkin’ bout the Benjamins” Perry ran a combination corporate welfare agency and whore house out of the Texas state capitol.  After being elected by reportedly wandering the state speaking in tongues and flaunting a deeply cynical and hypocritical religiosity, he immediately set to work selling influence and access to whoever brought the biggest bag of cash in a flurry of abject corruption that would make Spiro Agnew and Ed Meese proud. Oil and gas leases  and the anti-environmental policies that enable them, the cockamamie Trans Texas Corridor toll road construction bids, phony “development” slush funds – they all received governmental hand outs and returned the favor with contributions in the millions of dollars – over 100 million dollars since the 2000 election.

How does a “wipe-snot-on-your-sleeve” good old boy Texas republican get away with that kind of cheesy and transparent patronage and still get elected?  Well from here it looks like he does it by wearing old testament street cred on that same sleeve; jabbering on about abortion and gay marriage and overseeing the execution of death row inmates at four times the pace of any other state in the union.  

He recently went on record giving total support for Israel, probably because the damn Ayrabs look a lot like Mexicans, and because of his wrath-of-god inclination towards biblical apocalypse – something which current Israeli policy seems destined to produce.  His modern take on the wild west notion of manifest destiny and “kill all the Indians” leads to a perversion of American exceptionalism – a road we recently traveled with his dumb ass predecessor as governor, and which he seems to want to revisit by getting his foreign policy updates from Donald “It will only take a week” Rumsfeld and a group of his minions, one of whom is Doug Feith.  This is a man once described as “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth” by Gen. Tommy Frank, for getting completely sucked in by Ahmed Chalabi and his relentless and incomprehensible advocacy for the invasion of Iraq. 

I would have thought that the most prominent example of a modern theocracy – our friendly mullahs in Iran – would put people off the whole idea of a half mad religious sect reading 2,000 year old books and deciding how we all should live.  Memo to Rick, Sarah, Michele, and the rest of you – conquering Arab lands and building a 40,000 seat combination church and Wal-Mart in East Jerusalem is not god’s plan.  An endless war against the Muslim world is also not god’s plan and America is probably not going to re-conquer Europe either. 

Why is it that the politicians most likely to kill something given half a chance are so hung up on the old testament?  It’s like they never read past Leviticus to the part where they talk about loving one another – it’s all a pillar of salt and an eye for an eye.  Oh, and they all do seem unnaturally hung up on the men not laying down together part too.  How can Perry cavort with Cadillac evangelists, neo-nazi preachers and all manner of fringe fanatics and freaks and be taken seriously?  It’s because it’s all an act designed to keep that part about meeting with corporate bag men and cutting deals with dedicated anti-environmental interests on the down low, camouflaged by this aura of righteous, patriotic, pseudo-Reagan, “morning-in-America” bullshit, all the while he’s giving a sleeve job to anyone with enough cash to keep him in ostrich-skin boots, gold nugget cuff links and a colt revolver. 

Now this clown – who insists he’s running because his wife told him it was his god given duty to save his country from that terrible negro, Obama – works a room shaking hands, quoting scripture and trying to sound like he knows what continent Afghanistan is part of, hoping that nobody jerks back the curtain far enough for the public to catch him sitting on the lap of the big money republican elite that got spoiled running the country for eight years and has been pissed off since 2008. I like to think he’s going to wet himself sitting there and they’re going to send him away with his pants around his ankles muttering the 23^rd psalm.

A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall...

The inexplicable march of the Texas blowhards continues in earnest now that Rick “Stop printing the damn money” Perry is hitting his stride after a week of campaigning, and the unsettling comparisons to George Bush are becoming hard to avoid.  Like Bush, Rick has fallen ass-backwards into a successful Texas economy built on abundant oil and gas resources at a time the price of oil has gone from 20 bucks a barrell to well over a hundred, combined with the highest percentage of minimum wage workers in the nation – wait; that's not true - they’re tied for last, with Mississippi. 

 Like George, he has remained blissfully free of the ravages of the road kill housing market due to Texas having the most stringent consumer protection laws in the country related to housing.   This, for anyone who isn’t paying attention, is the government intervening successfully in the market place, an idea that would make most card carrying right wing ideologues retch.  Unlike George, however, he has the anti-immigrant racists of the tea party fueling his rise to national notoriety and thus will have some ‘splainin’ to do about the part played by Mexican manufacturing plants, workers and imported parts in the ongoing Texas employment miracle.  

That will put him at odds with his most fervent supporters on several fronts, and put questions about his ideological purity front and center at the very time that Michele Bachman is working her mystical wide-eyed voodoo on salivating ministers from one corner of South Carolina to the other.   Combine that with the very prominent role of the stimulus funds in amping up job growth in education, health care and government and the tea party pin up boy starts to look more and more like he’s all hat and no cattle.   

Rick may also find himself having to explain his ties - though lobbyists his administration hired – to current federal prison hors d’oeuvre Tom Delay and one time republican big shot, Jack Abramhof; professional partisan money grabbers and bag men who made a career out of bringing home the bacon and spreading the lard on Texas toast, setting the stage for Rick’s self-described economic wizardry.

These problems aside, Rick and Stepford simpleton Bachman may have a larger and more fundamental problem in trying to drag all of the tea party baggage along with them on the campaign trail.  There’s no truth to the rumor that Bachman has hired Imelda Marcos’ former cabana boy to travel on the “Which Way’s Heaven?” campaign bus to manage her share and Perry was overheard telling his campaign aides to see if they could go down to the local Home Depot and pick up some Mexicans to sit in the back and be available to help him drag his around.   They may want to re-think this in light of the NY Times poll done recently that suggests that the tea party – for all of its success in creating a clattering rabble and scaring the shit out of the other candidates – is deeply out of favor with most Americans and ranks right down alongside fundamentalist Christians in a ranking of who should be influencing policy and choosing the political and economic direction of the country.  In fact, most Americans would rather have Howie Mandel and Carrot Top running things than anyone so closely identified with the tea party.

As their 15 minutes ticks closer and closer to the end leaders of the tea party movement are having their protective layers of “government out of our lives” and “get rid of all the bums” rhetoric peeled away and what’s revealed is a vile and hateful core smoldering with the toxic fumes of racism and old testament philosophy – having less to do with shrinking government and cutting spending than it does with outlawing abortion and driving imaginary waves of half-crazed and savage immigrants into the sea.   The few tea party inspired republicans that make any sense are almost lost in the incendiary and incoherent mob-mentality and cowed by the fact that any whiff of compromise has become a capitulation and renders them dangerous turncoats and subject to stoning or burning at the political stake.  Or, like Tim Pawlenty, utterly frustrated irrelevance.   Like King Kong escaped from his captors, it is running amok and sensible people across the country are running away screaming in every direction.  Now tea party heroines like Michele “Tip of the Spear” Bachman will end up with her head on a pike carried through the town square if she waivers from genuflecting to the new and poorly conceived orthodoxy that turns the simplest political decision into a knife fight. 

So Bachman and Perry can continue to flaunt their prayerfulness and undeserved state of grace for the halfwits who come out to their combination stump speech/ prayer rally/BBQ's and the cameras and blathering pundits will surely follow them and breathlessly report every word.   Somewhere Mitt “Corporations are people too” Romney is practicing not responding to hecklers by saying something stupid while knocking back a stiff bloody mary and saying his own prayer of thanks that these two morons have the spotlights directed on them.  He couldn’t have planned it any better…

Random thoughts on the Obama bus tour through the corn...

Unless something really weird happens, Perry is going to win the nomination, despite the hours of tedious jabber to which we're doomed between now and then by the professional pundit class.  I really think the end-of-days zealotry will be his undoing though.  It isn't going to get him much of the democratic vote and he is going to turn off independents with it as well.  All Obama needs is just a little bit more of a "fuck you idiots" attitude to prove he's nobody's whipping boy and unemployment at about 7.5% and he's in.  He has to do something to get people back to work so they have money to spend on that robot toaster / GPS unit.  The Chinese are flooding the country with cheap consumer goods so all he has to do is put some money in people's pocket to buy them so they have that warm consumer glow and all the nazi talk about the deficit will be so much background noise.  I'd lay it right out; are you more worried about leaving a debt to your great grandchildren or being able to feed your current children?  Pretty simple really - he needs to take the debt away as an issue.  First he needs to fire the dumb asses who've been advising him and get some fire breathers - he has to get that this isn't a negotiation, since the other side has no interest in negotiating.  Fuck that...and if he proposes solutions that get people employed and increase the debt because the republicans won't tax their hedge fund manager, put that on them and see who the public sides with.  The only way to mess this up is to be a pussy about it - forget about getting re-elected and just tell the truth. 

Yesterday he was able to mix it up with one of the leading tea party clowns in Iowa when the guy jumped up at a small town-hall meeting and sniveled that Joe Biden called him a terrorist and that wasn’t nice.  What a load of crap that is.  Biden only said what many people were thinking; that the tea party was holding the country hostage over the fake issue of raising the debt ceiling and, in their zeal were only too happy to sacrifice innocents in order to get what they want.  Kinda like a terrorist. Obama acknowledged that the name calling and fiery rhetoric was over the top and counterproductive and then, ironically, this goof goes to the media afterwards and insists Obama’s a socialist.  If he’s the founder of the tea party wing in Iowa that comment goes a long way to define who these people are and what they’re about.

Obama also has to stop saying “balanced approach” – he sounds like a weeny.  When all eight of the candidates on stage in Iowa raised their hands saying they would never accept a deficit deal that had ten dollars of cuts for every dollar of revenue, it became clear that trying to make sense of this in any logical way was a waste of time. Polls continue to show that, even if those eight drones think that way, a majority of the country, including republicans, feel differently.  Make them do the math – in order to cut to the extent they are proposing with no increase in revenue what would the federal budget look like?  How many schools would close?  How many people would die from preventable illness or hunger? The republicans were all aghast about the fairy tale “death panels” but their policies would make those seniors not being killed off in the doctors’ offices slowly starve to death in their own homes.  Nice choice…

The constant harrange against Obama and clear intent and hope for him to fail is as close to treason as is possible without actually calling for a coup.  The contest to see who can say the most outrageous and provocative things about him and the government in general while claiming to be inspired by the bible accelerated today, with Rick “dang, this is fun” Perry firing away about Fed Chairman Bernanke committing treason by using monetary policy to goose the economy, never mind that he was appointed by Bush – that’s an Obama conspiracy too.  Meanwhile Ron Paul was spewing some incoherent gibberish about the IRS using armed force to take money from normal god-fearing folks to pay for liberals’ abortions and Bachman was happily courting the lunatic fringe gun nuts like Larry Pratt, president of Gun Owners of America, who seriously thinks that Obama’s health care program will lead to compilation of data bases that will later be used to confiscate guns.  I know – it sounds made up.  WTF doesn’t begin to cover it. 

On a completely unrelated topic; today, in a preposterous and telling lawsuit filing that is a clear indictment of both the ruling class and their lawyers, investors who lost their money in Bernie Madoff’s greed lubricated ponzi extravaganza insisted that they should not only be able to recover the money they invested, but also the fake profits from the fake hedge funds made up of fake companies that Bernie invented.  As evidence of their being deserving of this level of court ordered largess, they offered up the fake statements from the fake accounts showing the incredible 300% fake profits that they now feel is due to them.  The judge in the case reportedly responded by saying, “What the fuck?!?!?” and dismissing the case.  The investors promise to appeal.

The Triumph of the Iowans...or how I spent my Saturday at the fair...

17,000 people with nothing better to do turned out on a warm humid summer day yesterday to vote for their favorite republican candidate for president and 4,800 of them picked Michele Bachman, an Iowa native who has spent months spreading a rich layer of manure and giving sleeve jobs to fellow evangelicals from one corner of this heartland state to another.   With her heady mixture of salt of the earth prairie roots, biblical hallucinations and a crusader’s divine hubris, her drive to rid Washington DC of the heretics who currently occupy it obviously resonated with the state fair folks straight out of American Gothic.    Given the effort she expended it’s no surprise that she finished first, a couple of hundred votes ahead of Ron Paul, a man with an impressive organization and a diligent and focused group of supporters.   Unfortunately for both of them, they can’t win. 

As was the case in 2007, when Mike Huck-a-ster won, the Iowa straw poll is meaningless for all practical purposes and much more apt to start to clear the field of pretenders than pick a winner.  But to hear Bachman leading her mini cheering section after the results were announced you’d think she and her husband, Marcus “no, I’m not gay” Bachman were picking out the White House curtains.  Hey, Norma Desmond; you’re nuts and the 30% of the country that will vote for you are nuts too.  They’re bitter, ignorant, misguided haters sitting around drinking cheap whiskey waiting for Jesus to come back and you and Rick “god finally told me to” Perry can fight over them all the way to the convention. 

In case you missed it, Rick announced he was running, surprising only Sarah Palin, who was quoted as saying something like, “I was surprised because a while ago he said he wasn’t going to run.”  Yeah, the flip-flopper; how dare he change his mind and screw up your cockamamie bus tour.  You ought to know this better than anyone; when god decides to pick you as a candidate, you damn well better hop to and get yer spurs on because he’s not fooling around.  Unfortunately for Palin, her low-rent fifteen minutes of fame are winding down.  This isn’t high school; playing hard to get doesn’t just get you a reputation as a cock tease, it ends up with you standing by your locker while the new girls get all the attention.  The short attention span American voting public – at least the ones who populate republican caucuses and straw polls – is smitten with the new girls.  And since you seem to want attention more than actual elected office, you’re going to end up forgotten and utterly irrelevant by Thanksgiving. 

 Speaking of the new kid in town, Rick got kind of wound up during his speech announcing that he was joining the current field of eight munchkins; he blamed Obama for pretty much everything but the Asian sex slave trade, trans-fat, and spandex bicycle pants on the middle aged.  He might as well have screeched, “Off with his head!!!!!!”  I would love to have one of the half-wit drones “moderating” one of the debates to ask them this simple question: “If you had been elected president in 2008, with the conditions exactly the same as Obama found them, what would you have done?  Would you have continued the TARP program begun under Bush?  Would you have bailed out the auto industry?  Would you have done the stimulus differently?  Not at all?  Explain it to us without resorting to saying, ‘Well I would have cut taxes’”

But Rick standing on the stage with Bachman should make the next debate interesting.  I’m only half kidding when I say it wouldn’t surprise me if someone starting speaking in tongues.

As for Obama, I read today that he and his aides are “considering whether the White House should adopt a more combative stance”  Jesus, Barack; you think?  You’ve got the big stick and all you’ve done for two and a half years is roll over and hope someone rubs your belly.  Of course you need to be more combative!  What the hell have you been thinking ?  This isn’t Chicago’s ninth ward and you’re not trying to work with slum lords or set up a farmers’ market.  You need to get out and get on the stump and tell the god damn truth; set a tone, take control of the debate.  You’ve let these assholes convince the country that reducing the deficit is the answer to all of their problems when it is the last thing anyone should be worried about.   And not only have they hijacked the conversation, you let them do it by advocating cutting, cutting, only cutting.  Playing along with this ridiculous fairy story while 10% of the country can't find a job is the most sackless thing you and your minions could have done.  Until the average Joe realizes that these treacherous fuckers are the ones stealing him blind, he’s going to continue to blame you.   

And you might point out to everyone that Rick Perry’s snake- handling hokum of a “Day of Prayer” is not only a pointless waste of time and a publicity stunt on a grand scale, it is the transparent act of a hypocrite and carnival barker in snakeskin boots.  The last thing this country needs is another empty headed bumpkin trying to prove how big his dick is with a bible in one hand and six-shooter in the other.  Man up, Mr. President…

Now in the center ring, for your amusement, eight performing elephants...

Despite the feisty and spirited republican presidential candidate debate last night, most of the participants reminded me of non-swimmers trying desperately to reach a proffered life ring in deep water; lots of splashing and gasping for breath but very little moving towards survival.  So while the nations eyes are turned hopefully towards Iowa – and when has that phrase ever been uttered – waiting and watching as the stout citizens of Ames gather under garishly decorated tents, scarf free ice cream and – incredibly – decide which of the current field of candidates can proceed to the next step, let’s have a quick review for those of you who chose to watch the finals of “So You Think You Can Dance” rather than the trumped up spectacle of the Faux News arranged and orchestrated performance.

And that, by the way, was the first sign that this was not going to be a serious event.  Anytime the barkers and carnies of the Faux network are involved it immediately becomes deeply suspect.   Drunk on the success of American Idol and shows about the morbidly obese struggling to lose weight, the Faux News production of this “debate” was predictably garish, superficial and over the top, rife with stage-managed controversy propagated by blockheads, Chris Wallace and Brett Baier.  These guys were clearly more interested in generating some kind of buzz and “pull-your-pants-down” publicity than seriously exploring the nuanced positions of the candidates…wait, did I just say that?  I forgot for a moment that this was a republican debate – detailed and serious exploration of nuanced positions isn’t allowed.  If they were to do that, a crowd of tri-cornered hat-wearing ruffians would likely appear in front of their homes or offices shouting and making farting sounds.

So it boiled down to, 1.) Obama is a chump who is bent on destroying the American way of life, 2.) a series of less than fully articulated but nonetheless multipoint plans for fixing the economy, most of which involved “cutting taxes” and “reducing regulation” and which, like a handful of magic beans, promised to immediately produce wondrous results for us all.  Call me a cynic, but, well…let’s just say, I doubt it.  But content aside – and there wasn’t a hell of lot to begin with – let’s get down the inevitable media game of “Who won?” 

Herman Cain, never a serious candidate to begin with, is pretty much done and his continuing in the race is really a function of how much of his pizza money he wants to piss away to prove the point that it is legitimate for an African American to run as a republican, a quixotic quest to be sure, as the day the republican party embraces African Americans is looming somewhere off in the far distance, like landing a man on Mars.  Sorry Herman but I’m just keepin’ it real.   A sizable percentage of the opposition to Obama is because he’s African American and it wouldn’t matter if he came around personally handing out hundred dollar bills.

Rick Santorum kept raising his hand like the obnoxious smart kid in the back of the class room and his old colleague and fellow Faux News shill, Chris Wallace, kept ignoring him.  When he does get a chance his obsession with moral issues trumps anything sensible he has to say about anything else and makes him seem more like your pastor than your president.  He’s also done.  Memo to Rick – railing about gay marriage may seem like a good idea to your closeted handlers but really, that ship has sailed.  Nobody gives a shit, probably not even most people in Iowa. 

Jon Huntsman, a normal, successful, intelligent guy who is, sadly, kind of little and also kind of Mormon, seems to still be a bit uncomfortable with the X’s and O’s of this whole candidacy thing and seems to shrink on stage every time the lights are focused on him.  The guy is intellectually capable of governing but it’s not clear if he has the stomach for the hyper-schizoid scrutiny involved in modern national campaigning and by Halloween he will be back in Utah on his dirt bike with Black Sabbath cranked to 11 on his iPod wondering why he thought this was a good idea.

Ron Paul is, in some ways, my favorite in his libertarian leanings. He also makes a lot of sense in his advocacy of reeling in our perceived foreign policy interests and obligations in favor of taking care of our own citizens before trying to teach goat-herding villagers in Afghanistan how to double down on a pair of sixes or order cheap jewelry from late-night cable TV.  Unfortunately for Paul, he is saddled with a prevailing media burden that he is some kind of semi-disturbed quack, so far outside the realistic boundaries of orthodoxy that no one takes him seriously.  Thus, he can’t win even though he has a cult following and a very intense constituency.  He will stick it out and should continue to try to get the field grounded in something substantial but he will fail in the end.  Maybe Rand can prevail at some point.

Newt Gingrich continues to give off a vibe of someone who really isn’t very interested and he probably isn’t.  He is loaded, has a trophy wife and probably prefers sailing the Med with a good, dry Bombay Sapphire martini and a handful of cialis.  He’ll hang in a while, gathering enough material for another book, and then surface somewhere as an “expert commentator” or elder statesman, making provocative and delirious statements and throwing his opinion around like it’s god’s own truth and end up on a game show or something. 

Pawlenty seems like a decent guy, although a little too prone to go wherever the wind blows, but he can’t seem to get over the fact that the Red Queen is also running and it just seems to piss him off.  He is obsessed with trying to prove what a nut-cup she is, as if anyone who cares doesn’t already know that.   But other than that he seems like an empty suit.  Most of the time when he’s speaking I get the impression that his audience hears him like Charlie Brown’s teacher and is just waiting for him to finish so they can get to someone interesting.   If he can ever forget about Lady Macbeth and get some traction he has a puncher’s chance but if the money dries up he’s out by Labor Day.

This leaves the aforementioned Red Queen and Mitt “don’t I remind you of Reagan?” Romney.  I'm not sure what else I can say about Bachman - she is an attractive, dangerous, bible obsessed serial liar, deeply immersed in an almost psychedelic delusion with a frightening prescription for what she thinks this country is and what it should be.  She is a know-nothing with strong beliefs and as such continues a long line of prominent republicans, with a gestation in the reign of Ronald Reagan, that somehow still bedevils the cultural and political landscape of this country.  She is inexplicable.  She also can't win - she can be a very disturbing pain in the ass, but she can't win.

Romney himself was doing the rope-a-dope last night as he has been for months, a questionable strategy long term and one which reveals that he and his people either underestimate the opposition or are a bit too comfortable with his lead in the polls.  On the other hand, given the gravitas of the group running against him, playing prevent defense has its merits.  Until Perry announces he can hope that either the others fade away or Bachman’s head explodes or both and really nobody laid a glove on him last night so why should he get his hair mussed up if he doesn’t have to.   It will be interesting when Perry does announce to get them both on the same stage so we can judge who has the best hair.   Until then I am left with the existential question; Barack, how in the hell are you losing to these guys?

Devil with the blue dress, blue dress, blue dress...

In the most recent sign of the apocalypse, Larry Flint has offered big bucks to Casey Anthony to pose nude in Hustler Magazine, and I don’t think you’ll find a better snapshot of 21^st century America than that – a semi-attractive white trash accused baby killer as masturbatory fantasy.   All you’d need to do would be to put her in swastika panties and the deranged image would be complete.

Speaking of which, Ann Coulter, bitch-queen republican icon and pin-up girl for hunting lodges and militia headquarters across America, has accepted a seat on the board of GOProud, a gay republican organization, in a somewhat disorienting development that can only be explained by her overall fashion sense and fabulous pumps.  (That doesn't explain the inclusion on the same board of anti-tax crusader and tea party hero, Grover Norquist - as far as we know, that remains a mystery.)   Ann was last seen whining about how liberals were, not only godless communist terrorist appeasers, but mean and disrespectful as well, a perfect example of the standard republican strategy of lying, dissembling and twisting the truth shamelessly and brazenly in an attempt to get the media to report it, whereby for a significant portion of the population it turns into the truth.   What’s really kind of satisfying is her sniveling that Karl Rove can’t go out in public without people shouting nasty things at him, an entirely suitable fate for our favorite turd blossom and what he should take to be an ominous preview of his doomed afterlife.

Poor George Bush had to cancel an appearance in Europe because the population there hates the dim-witted bastard and promised to throw stones at him if he dared appear in public.  I’m sure this was a shock to George but I am also quite certain that he is surprised that his shoes are supposed to go on specific feet.   Ann, on the other hand is essentially a well spoken media whore who finds irresistible the opportunity to say something outrageous and hostile while crossing and uncrossing her legs, assuming with some accuracy that most simpletons interviewing her will be mesmerized and not really give a shit what kind of toxic, foul screed she is unleashing.  So many of her fellow republicans are sexually repressed closet queens, bed-wetters and prostitute chasers who try to spin being found in cheap motels by saying they were making sure that the rooms all had Gideon’s bibles, that flaunting her trailer park pheromones has made her filthy rich.  She somehow constitutes a sizable portion of the republican intelligencia, a situation as disconcerting as it is funny. 

Meanwhile in other news, temporary republican front runner, Mitt “I’m a regular guy” Romney, probably dealt his floundering campaign a death blow in Iowa when – clearly flummoxed – he attempted to disarm a heckler by stating forcefully that, “Hey, corporations are people too, you know…”, causing more of the stale air to squirt out of his presidential balloon and moving him ever more quickly towards irrelevancy.   Sadly for Mitt, lots of voters are likely to take his inadvertent advice- “If you don’t like my answers, vote for someone else.”  In spite of the staunch republican resistance to any attempt to get the ruling class to contribute more to the national well being – what Boner calls “the job creators” – I don’t think you’re going to get much traction with independent voters defending corporations.  Taxes might be a dirty word and using it to describe even the most carefully thought out and benign revenue increase has proven to be a winning strategy but even the dullest among us don’t have much sympathy for corporations as people. 

And if the democrats could somehow cut through the sludge and clamor of the cheerleaders on the right, they could make a case for increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans as part of a broad solution to whatever daunting problem the deficit presents.  Money Magazine published an article today pointing out that increasing taxes on individuals with adjusted gross incomes over $200,000 a year would affect 3% of Americans who earn 26% of total national income and would produce 750 billion dollars in extra revenue to throw at the deficit.   But this tiny minority has somehow convinced the average Joe that raising their taxes is an affront to him as an American and fighting against that is more in his best interest than trying to solve unemployment and shitty wages, unaffordable health care and education for his kids that’s obsessed with test scores rather than learning.  This borders on mystical sleight of hand.  It is easier to explain crop circles.  And even though polls show that well over 60% of voters surveyed hold the sensible view that there needs to be some additional revenue collected in order to solve the problem, the ruling class has kept the public debate on cutting “waste and fraud and inefficiency” and off the eminently reasonable compromise Obama proposed before getting shouted down by the rabble.   It is hard to understand; not as hard to understand as Ann Coulter as a gay icon, but close.

The chosen one cometh; or Rick" Hey, it was god's idea" Perry to declare for the presidency...

Now that he is feeling refreshed and revitalized from his weekend snake-handling dance with the devils of lunatic fringe religiosity, Rick Perry is set to announce he is entering the republican race for the presidency as an instant front runner along with Mitt “Wait, you said I was ahead” Romney and Michelle “I’m not crazy” Bachman; what I like to refer to as the “scares the shit out of me” trinity.  They all represent the anti-science, overtly conservative christian, anti-government, stealth-racist tea party wing of the new republican party, a wing grounded in a terrifying stew of biblical end-of-days fatalism and economic armageddon as a cure for what they perceive as the inordinate largess of semi-communist liberals in general and democrats in particular.

The tea party zeitgeist is fundamentally anti-government.  Not a mature two party system of compromise, congeniality, collaboration and common goals but a “tear this fucker down” contempt for the status quo that would make the Chicago Seven and the Weather Underground proud.  Their stated policy is to obstruct any such compromise and hold hostage any governmental initiative that ignores “what we were elected to do” – that is, reduce the size of government.  While this is clearly a position that rings true with the portion of the American electorate that feels disenfranchised by the mealy-mouthed political class of pseudo-elites wandering from J Street cocktail parties to No-Tell Motels, it doesn’t address the immediate issue of economic survival for the rest of us.  If you get trapped by a fallen boulder and your only choice is to saw off your arm with a nail file, you do what you have to do to survive.  You don’t make that your first reaction if you get your jacket caught in the car door.

But the tea party is obviously the flavor of the month among short attention span media types anxious to find any angle, even if it’s bent over at the waist.   So to the extent that they are given credit for the almost default and subsequent economic chaos, it feeds their hubris and gives them the feeling that hostage taking will always result in ransom being paid, something you should never do and something anyone who ever watched a cop show on TV would understand.   In this they are becoming dangerous to the very powerful interests who created them, as freakish monsters often do.  Wall Street wanted something around which to galvanize opposition to Obama, who they obviously consider persona non grata of the highest order, but in a new and satisfying example of “be careful what you wish for”, they have created a cult of economic doom to rival the delusional Heaven’s Gate cult tossing back Jello shots laced with rat poison while waiting for the flying saucers to land.  

It’s this kind of “Oh, fuck it” fatalism that makes their screeds more disturbing than a typical political rant.  Michele Bachman is alternately called “crazy” and “a real person”, a disturbing confluence of character traits that may go a long way towards explaining her popular appeal.   At some point the democrats may have to face the fact that much of the electorate is just as crazy as she is.  This doesn’t mean they have to get on board the space ship with them but it does call for an acknowledgement that cow-towing and pandering to these bastards just makes them more determined to burn down your house.  

But for now it might also be a good idea if they could uncouple the Book of Revelation from the Macro-economics text book and point out with some urgency that policies that result in 1,000 point drops in the stock market over two days are no more helpful to the economy than leaches are for treating a brain tumor.   Tea party republicans not only gleefully take credit for causing this disruption but promise to replicate it every time they have the chance, an ominous pledge that might make the smart guys at Goldman Sachs, who thought that turning loose a bunch of inexperienced one trick ponies in Washington was a good idea, spend some long nights in the conference room taking turns pointing fingers, spinning the chamber and deciding who takes the margin calls. 

Meanwhile, progressives are wringing their hands over soy lattes and gluten free scones trying to figure out a coherent argument to put forth in opposition to the blare of “the government sucks”  shouts they keep hearing in their nightmares, and can’t come up with anything remotely sexy enough to get the attention of a mob of voters who can taste blood and feel empowered by the sight of the mastodon of DC corruption staggering and about to fall.  The last thing they want to do is continue talking about shit like global warming, immigration reform, gay marriage and other traditional concerns of gentrified liberals – the mob doesn’t care, the media doesn’t care and continuing to try win the hearts and minds of a electoral majority this way is doomed to failure. 

Unless, of course, you find the idea of doom inspirational…