'I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.' HST

It was hilarious yesterday to watch John Boner walking around capitol hill with his pink tie between his legs as he struggled to control the unruly tea party empowered portion of his caucus.  The fact is, he couldn’t control them, and was left to bang on the podium like Nakita Khrushchev, spittle flying, and looking like his head was going to explode.   Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.   And now the guys with the big shoes and squeaking noses have piled out of the little clown car and are running around raising hell in all three rings of the circus, all the while making about as much sense as Harpo Marx. 

I'm not sure why these donkeys voting against raising the debt ceiling fail to realize it is to make sure there is enough to pay back money that's ALREADY SPENT!!!  It's not adding any new spending.   So sure, tear the mutha down, throw orphans into the streets, make people pay for everything on their own – old, unemployed, sick – no matter.  Laissez faire capitalism in action; Ayn Rand would be proud.  But that’s really not what this is about.   It is the single most maddening thing about the whole farce.  The constitutional amendment to balance the budget really is not achievable – not any time soon…But the newbies elected on the tremendous rage and fear and uncertainty rampant in the country last year have truly made government the enemy.  They seem to be 6 degrees of separation from Timothy McVeigh in their contempt for the government of the last 60 years.   Throw in a healthy dose of racism to go with the fear and you’re left with capitol hill turning into an incredibly toxic waste dump.  As a matter of fact, I think I saw Michelle Bachman’s hair coming out in clumps.  Haven’t you ever noticed that Mitch McConnell’s face looks like it’s melting?

When you look at Boner and the “leaders” of the republican party over the last few days, you can definitely see the fear in their eyes as they come to grips with the fact that most of the clattering rabble are so far outside the political mainstream that they have become an enormous liability, long term, as well as an impediment to governing.  Even if you think that the status quo sucks and like the idea of farting during the sermon, nobody wants to end up with a government like Italy.  The tea party has, in fact, become a de facto third party within the confines of the republican camp.  When your party leader sets up an important bill for a vote and 10% of the ostensible party members vote against it to make a point, the thing is spinning out of control and what may be a perfectly sincere goal becomes lost in debilitating disfunction and chaos. 

I am pissed off that the single-minded badgering has apparently resulted in a deficit reduction plan that will continue the current tax structure – the Bush tax cuts that cost almost 2 trillion dollars and resulted in no job or income growth for the vast majority of Americans since they were enacted almost 10 years ago and are a huge reason why there is a budget deficit in the first place -this level of subtlety and historical perspective seems to have escaped the chanting horde.  But surely Harry Reid and Pelosi and the democrats remember all too well and they have pissed away a chance to set that up for debate again in the clear light of day and instead have surrendered faster than the French in 1940. 

Once again I am struck by the Joan of Arc parallel – the semi-delusional leader(s), obsessed by a single idea to the exclusion of all others and in the face of all evidence that's available to point out that speaking in tongues can be misconstrued and lead to a somewhat uncomfortable outcome.  In that sense what’s happening to Boner and the rest of the clowns who had their grand strategy blow up in their faces is fun to watch.  Polls continue to show that whatever the ultimate outcome of this particular pointless dust up, independent voters are watching carefully and are more interested in arriving at a compromise that accomplishes the goal of raising the debt ceiling, calming the financial markets and letting us get on with trying to support a half-crippled and staggering economy than in keeping score of who is accumulating the most political points.  Over two-thirds of those surveyed come down on the side of, “Hey, quit fucking around and get something done!”  A year from now all of the tea party sturm und drang may be best remembered mostly for boosting Obama to a second term.   Maybe that's what the crafty devil had that in mind all along when he threw up his hands the other day and said, "Whatever...you assholes figure it out." 

And speaking of 2012, Rick “Hey, I might run after all” Perry is in the news today for stating very clearly that - while he thinks those kooks and kikes in New York can let homos marry if they really want to - for now – he favors a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.  I thought I heard him say that he changed his mind after god came to him in a fever dream while he was jerking off to the fall fashion issue of GQ and told him that, unlike every other right that the republicans want to defer to the states, gay marriage – or polygamy for that matter – is just not OK and he should be agin it.  Plus his wife thinks it’s gross.  He is expected to announce his decision whether or not to run for president around labor day after consulting with some of his senior advisers, including the bible thumping creationist he recently appointed to head the Texas board of education, the guys that just abandoned Newt Gingrich and the ghost of Jimmy Swaggart. 

Stay tuned...

“When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." Jonathon Swift

Nobody is saying that Obama is a genius – smart guy, well spoken, reasonable, decent jump shot – but sure as hell the confederacy of dunces aligned against him would lead you to believe Swift’s prophesy was coming true before our eyes.   There is a tiny-brained republican cabal bent on creating chaos in the economy, thinking that will lead desperate democrats to capitulate and agree to the balanced budget amendment to the constitution that these poor deluded saps worship as the holy grail of 21^st century conservatism – the original intent of the founders played out on Twitter. 

Even John Boner has complained about these chuckleheads, whining to conservative head cheerleader witch Laura Ingram about members of his caucus holding the economy hostage.   And who are the putative leaders of this cult of tri-corner hat patriotism?  Why, none other than deep thinkers Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman, both of whom insist that raising the debt ceiling is unthinkable and a tax increase and license for the profligate spenders in congress to fund new abortion research centers where the conference rooms are used by death panels and the halls are filled with undercover muslim illegal immigrant terrorists plotting to take the guns from law abiding christian patriots.  Or something…it’s all pretty incoherent.

How did these assholes hijack a debate that – while ridiculous on its face, (Reagan raised the debt ceiling 18 times) – was proceeding towards a resolution that involved compromise by both sides?  Now the proposal reluctantly agreed to by John Boner - a proposal guaranteed to be defeated in the senate – includes a mandatory constitutional amendment to balance the budget and essentially make permanent a ridiculously unfair tax structure that continues to favor the richest of us at the expense of the poorest of us.  But it isn’t so much that a balanced budget amendment in and of itself is anathema to thinking citizens – it actually has much to recommend it, not least of which is that it provides political cover for elected officials who don’t have the balls to make a hard decision, perhaps allowing things to get done.  The problem is it takes ratification by ¾ of the state legislatures to pass a constitutional amendment and how long do you think that would take?  It is clearly not a real solution to the present problem of a budget deficit.   No, the reason this is the holy grail is that it is what the lucky million people who run the country really want - their tax advantages made permanent. 

Repealing the Bush tax cuts – in spite of squealing protestations to the contrary – is not a tax increase created out of whole cloth.  It is a return to the tax structure that was in place the last time that the country generated a surplus and had a robust economy.  Hello…!!!!   Tea baggers swathed in red, white and blue insist that doing so would kill jobs, (which are currently generated where exactly?), and “hurt the economy”.   However this is nonsense; propaganda meant to make people take their eye off the ball.   

It’s a legitimate debate to discuss revenue versus cuts; it’s hostage taking to insist that the “deal” has to be all cuts and no revenue.  If these brave souls seriously want to reduce the deficit – and that has ostensibly been a primary goal of the republicans for the last 10 years – they would – if only reluctantly – consider changes to the tax code to close some loop holes and provide for some additional revenue.  But that’s not really the end game here – that becomes more obvious with each passing day.   On a day when Chevron reported a 43% increase in quarterly profits to 7.7 billion dollars, wide eyed tea bag worshipping fanatics refuse to consider repealing the tax breaks that allow these profits to be virtually untaxed at all in favor of cutting social security and other services supporting middle class families – subsidized day and after school care, a competent school experience with enough pencils to go around and a clean park where a kid can go play and be a kid.  On a day when it was reported that the economy “grew” at a pathetically weak 1.3% during the first quarter due to a severe decrease in spending by both consumers and governments at all levels, they insist on a budget deal that will consist only of more cuts in spending, guaranteeing that the economy – for the bulk of Americans – will remain pathetically weak, feeding the fear and dealing a death blow to consumer confidence and, by extension, the economy.  

To Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi; I thought this country never negotiated with terrorists and hostage takers.  Unless you have some diabolical master plan to make this tedious spectacle the first step in clearing out these idiots, you should be ashamed of yourselves.  You folded on their bluff - wimps…

This is Major Tom to ground control...

As I write this tonight, John Boner is desperately trying to recapture the reins of a republican party caucus threatening to run off in every direction like cockroaches running from a suddenly switched on light at midnight.  He and the rest of the weasels trying to manage this jailbreak can’t seem to decide how to win gracefully in the face of increasingly panty-waisted democratic concessions.   The congressional democrats have taken the clear political advantage Obama had a week ago and surrendered to Boner en masse, handing him the keys so fast that they have apparently freaked him out and made him run back to the rest of the kids to see if they should take them or keep pushing their pointy little heads in the urinal and making them cry.

Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are the least inspiring lefties since Mickey Lolich.  I saw Harry meekly trying to get himself worked up on the floor of the senate today and I wanted to go and dust him off.   He looked like every bespectacled, rumpled, confused uncle trying to give a wedding toast when he can’t remember who the bride is.   And Pelosi – god bless her for being from San Francisco but the woman can alienate listeners like no one else in recent memory.  She almost single handedly fucked up Obama’s victory in the first 15 minutes of his term when she stepped up to the podium and started in on some hare brained quest – people started dropping over, eyes glazed and trembling like Japanese gamers having seizures from strobe lights and bad electronica.  It’s awful…it’s embarrassing.

The only thing more disappointing is that the regular, serious, professional, legitimate media – everyone but Faux News and the Wall Street Journal - keeps acting like it’s an even fight between two well meaning and equally compelling alternatives with two carefully considered and thoughtful policy platforms struggling for the hearts and minds of a riveted population steeped in the historical back-story and well grounded in the competing arguments…Yeah, right…The meek but well meaning democrats keep caving in and offering more stuff to the bully-boy republicans who have no agenda other than to hate their own government so much that they are willing to dismantle most of it in the interest of the 1,000,000 or so rich people who run things. 

At this point Obama is probably sitting in a dark room at the White House chain smoking and drinking the good scotch, wondering where in the hell he went wrong and why on earth reason doesn’t prevail.   Can it be possible that they offer to cut programs intended to make life better for the middle class, only to have Boner appearing ever 30 minutes in front of a live microphone claiming that the democrats are only interested in greasing the slippery slope that will end up with us living like fucking Cuba?  Can cutting programs for the poor and the weak and the old be – not only called not enough – but reflected back in a fun house mirror and made to look like they were the real problem in the country in the first place?   If only the richest of the rich could keep more of their money and not have to pay taxes at all, we would put this country on the right track?

There are serious Libertarian voices out there that really do make a lot of sense in trying to reduce the size of government through a thoughtful assessment of programs, abandoning sacred cows, thinking outside the box, changing the paradigm – nobody who’s 70 years old and living in Palm Springs on $200,000 a year should need social security or medicare.   The defense budget looks more and more like Jaba the Hut while we careen around the world chasing shadows that look like terrorists at the same time as – with no apparent irony – we build advanced strike fighters that cost over a billion dollars each to fly really fast, really high over the luxury compounds on the outskirts of Islamabad where the bad guys are smoking opium and playing cards with the bundles of $100 bills we’re shipping over there on 1,000 pound pallets.  Maybe we should think twice about that research grant to study how mold reacts to slides of the Kama Sutra.  OK, OK, we get it…

But do we really want to live this way, wallowing in cheap consumer goods, junk food, vodka and Marlboros, drugged by watching the extravagant slutiness of the Kardashians and thinking Lady Gaga really is talented?  To quote Dean Wormer, “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”  This spectacle was amusing for the first 6 weeks or so but it’s to the point where it really is making me sick and deeply, truly afraid for my country…if we are so stupid as to fall for this carnival sideshow magic act and freak show then we are in deep trouble.

A tribute to a brilliant writer who recently passed away. Read it, enjoy it, think hard about it, and pass it around.

AMERICA: Y UR PEEPS B SO DUM?

Ignorance and courage in the age of Lady Gaga
By Joe Bageant
Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico
If you hang out much with thinking people, conversation eventually turns to the serious political and cultural questions of our times. Such as: How can the Americans remain so consistently brain-fucked? Much of the world, including plenty of Americans, asks that question as they watch U.S. culture go down like a thrashing mastodon giving itself up to some Pleistocene tar pit.

One explanation might be the effect of 40 years of deep fried industrial chicken pulp, and 44 ounce Big Gulp soft drinks. Another might be pop culture, which is not culture at all of course, but marketing. Or we could blame it on digital autism: Ever watch commuter monkeys on the subway poking at digital devices, stroking the touch screen for hours on end? That wrinkled Neolithic brows above the squinting red eyes?

But a more reasonable explanation is that, (A) we don't even know we are doing it, and (B) we cling to institutions dedicated to making sure we never find out.

As William Edwards Deming famously demonstrated, no system can understand itself, and why it does what it does, including the American social system. Not knowing shit about why your society does what it makes for a pretty nasty case of existential unease. So we create institutions whose function is to pretend to know, which makes everyone feel better. Unfortunately, it also makes the savviest among us -- those elites who run the institutions -- very rich, or safe from the vicissitudes that buffet the rest of us.

Directly or indirectly, they understand that the real function of American social institutions is to justify, rationalize and hide the true purpose of cultural behavior from the lumpenproletariat, and to shape that behavior to the benefit of the institution's members. "Hey, they're a lump. Whaddya expect us to do?"
Doubting readers may consider America's health institutions, the insurance corporations, hospital chains, physicians' lobbies. Between them they have established a perfectly legal right to clip you and me for thousands of dollars at their own discretion. That we so rabidly defend their right to gouge us, given all the information available in the digital age, mystifies the world.

Two hundred years ago no one would have thought sheer volume of available facts in the digital information age would produce informed Americans. Founders of the republic, steeped in the Enlightenment as they were, and believers in an informed citizenry being vital to freedom and democracy, would be delirious with joy at the prospect. Imagine Jefferson and Franklin high on Google.

The fatal assumption was that Americans would choose to think and learn, instead of cherry picking the blogs and TV channels to reinforce their particular branded choice cultural ignorance, consumer, scientific or political, but especially political. Tom and Ben could never have guessed we would chase prepackaged spectacle, junk science, and titillating rumor such as death panels, Obama as a socialist Muslim and Biblical proof that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs around Eden. In a nation that equates democracy with everyman's right to an opinion, no matter how ridiculous, this was probably inevitable. After all, dumb people choose dumb stuff. That's why they are called dumb.

But throw in sixty years of television's mind puddling effects, and you end up with 24 million Americans watching Bristol Palin thrashing around on Dancing with the Stars, then watch her being interviewed with all seriousness on the networks as major news. The inescapable conclusion of half of heartland America is that her mama must certainly be presidential material, even if Bristol cannot dance. It ain't a pretty picture out there in Chattanooga and Keokuk.

The other half, the liberal half, concludes that Bristol's bad dancing is part of her spawn-of-the-Devil mama's plan to take over the country, and make millions in the process, not to mention make Tina Fey and Jon Stewart richer than they already are. That's a tall order for a squirrel brained woman who recently asked a black president to "refutiate" the NAACP (though I kinda like refutiate, myself). Cultural stupidity accounts for virtually every aspect of Sarah Palin, both as a person and a political icon. Which, come to think of it, may be a pretty good reason not to "misunderstimate" her. After all, we're still talking about her in both political camps. And the woman OWNS the Huffington Post, fer Christsake. Not to mention a franchise on cultural ignorance.

Cultural stupidity might not be so bad, were it not self-reproducing and viral, and prone to place stupid people in charge. All of us have, at some point, looked at a boss and asked ourselves how such a numb-nuts could end up in charge of the joint.

In my own field, the book biz, the top hucksters in sales and marketing, car salesman with degrees, are put in charge of publishing the national literature. Similarly, ex-Pentagon generals segue from killing brown babies in Iraq into university presidents and CEOs. Conversely, business leaders such as Donald Rumsfeld who fancy themselves as battlefield commanders and imagine their employees as troops to be "deployed," find themselves happily farting behind Pentagon desks. On the strength of having mistaken Sun Tzu's The Art of War as a business text, they get selected by equally delusional national leaders to make actual war on behalf of the rest of us.

But the most widespread damage is done at more mundane operational levels of the American empire, by clones of the over promoted asshole in the corner office where you work. At least one study demonstrated that random selection for corporate promotions offset the effect significantly. Research again confirms what is common knowledge around every workplace water cooler in the country.

Save my spot in the gulag, I'm off to Wal-Mart
Cultural ignorance of one sort or another is sustained and nurtured in all societies to some degree, because the majority gains material benefit from maintaining it. Americans, for example, reap huge on-the-ground benefits from cultural ignorance -- especially the middle class Babbitry -- from cultural ignorance generated by American hyper-capitalism in the form of junk affluence.

Purposeful ignorance allows us to enjoy cheaper commodities produced through slave labor, both foreign, and increasingly, domestic, and yet "thank god for his bounty" in the nation's churches without a trace of guilt or irony. It allows strong arm theft of weaker nations' resources and goods, to say nothing of the destructiveness of late stage capitalism -- using up exhausting every planetary resource that sustains human life.

The American defense, on those rare occasions when one is offered, runs roughly, "Well you commie bastard, I ain't ever seen a sweatshop and I got no Asian kids chained in the basement. So I've got what the guvment calls plausible deniability. Go fuck yerself!"

Uh, don't look now, but the banksters own your ass, your country has become a work gulag/police state and the most of the world hates you.

Such a thriving American intellectual climate enables capitalist elites to withhold and ration vital resources like health care simply by auctioning it off to the richest. Americans fail to grasp this because the most important fact (that a helluva lot of folks can't afford to bid, and therefore get to die early) never gets equal play with capitalist political propaganda, to wit, that if we give free medical attention to low income cleft palate babies, a wave of Leninism will seize the nation. That is cultural ignorance. We breathe the stuff every day of our lives.

But when Americans too poor to buy health care nevertheless vote to retain the corporate auction process, that is cultural stupidity.

(Let us now pause to clutch our hair in our fists and scream AAAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!)
Like the old song says, "Them that don't know don't know they don't know." I venture to say that even if they did, they would not know why. Primary truths elude us because of the junk affluence and propaganda. We get buried under a deluge of commodities that suggest we are all rich, or at least richer than most of the world. A mountain range of cheap shoes, cars, iPods, ridiculous amounts of available foodstuffs, and the entire spectacle of engorgement defines, and is enforced as, "quality of life" under materialistic commodities capitalism. The goods we have in our clutches trump the philosophical, or even the most practical
considerations. "I may die early eating unidentified beef byproducts soaked in waste chemicals, but I'll die owning a 65-inch HDTV and a new five speed automatic Dodge Durango with a 5.7 L Hemi V8 under the hood!"

Even the threat of toasting planetary life is not enough to shake Americans loose from this disconnect. As Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Guy R. McPherson points out, "79.6% of respondents to a Scientific American poll are unwilling to forgo even a single penny to forestall the risk of catastrophic climate change. Scientific American readers undoubtedly are better informed than the general populace. And yet they won't pay a thing to avoid extinction of our species. Kinda makes you warm and fuzzy all over, doesn't it?"  Let us pray the next generation is a tad sharper.

Taser the tots
The "American Lifestyle," increasingly suspect as it is these days, is heavily soldiered and policed in the name of keeping we self-defined lotus eaters safe and secure from a jealous outside world. Which according to cultural consensus is a world that is at this very moment is stuffing its under drawers with explosives and buying plane tickets to Moline. Cultural ignorance dictates that the best way to stop foreign terrorists flying into the country is by humiliating American citizens flying out of the country. Go ahead, grope me, X-ray my dick and for god sake don't let anyone bring a large bottle of shampoo on board. In an obedient, authority worshipping police state, physical insult and surveillance are proof of safety.

It's profitable too, and not just for scanner manufacturers. The brouhaha over body scanners and crotch groping provide media with titillating fuel for ratings, thereby driving up TV advertising rates, which is passed on in the price of products we buy. So we pay to be insulted, have the hell scared out of us, and to unknowingly have our behavior shaped. Under American style capitalism, this mobius strip of cultural ignorance is called a win-win situation for everybody.

This also conveniently distracts us from the everyday human insult we practice on one another, as a result of state manufactured cultural misinformation -- fear. Ten years of orange alerts and post 9/11 fear mongering have led us to draw some paradoxical cultural conclusions.

Let us briefly careen off into one of these paradoxes. For instance, that we can taser our way to domestic security and tranquility. Yes, it's ugly business, but tasing the citizenry must be done. And besides, in these days of high unemployment, it's a paycheck for somebody -- usually, the guy who sat behind us in grade school happily eating chalk.

With taser packing police officers in thousands of schools, even grade schools (a weird enough cultural statement to begin with -- needless to say, the resulting deaths and injuries of school kids have personal injury lawyers shouting eureka and contemplating new recreational sail craft moored at Martha's Vineyard. Such are the rewards of righteous works through cult-ig.

In any case, the chance at a juicy lawsuit is accepted as a satisfactory offset to any screaming and writing in our school hallways. What are 50,000 volts and a little nerve damage, compared to a shot at paying off the credit cards, upgrading the family ride, and maybe remodeling the kitchen too?

But we gotta stick to the subject of cultural ignorance here, mainly because I wrote the title first and am determined to maintain some illusion of a theme here, or at least bullshit the reader into thinking that I have.
Soooo . . .

It can be safely said that cultural ignorance consists of the rational, sensible questions that never get asked. But it also includes the weird ones that are. For instance, one of the questions asked regarding tasering school kids is: What is the allowable weight range of a child to be tased? (Taser manufacturers say 60 pounds.) Somehow, by this geezer's prehistoric reasoning, that sounds like the wrong question, not to mention one that by its nature leads us away from the cultural truth.

The truth is that we live in a society which sanctions semi-electrocution of its own children on the grounds that it is not fatal, and therefore not true electrocution. It springs from the same streak of cultural cruelty that deems semi-drowning by water boarding not to be torture because it is seldom fatal.

This is not to be uncharitable to American communities willing to pony up tax money for school tasers. They've amply demonstrated their affectionate commitment to their children by bringing creationism and pizza-for-breakfast into the schools. But there remains the question, "What kind of community comes up with the idea of tasering its own children?"

The information racketeers
It is the job of our combined institutions to manage cultural information so as to deny the harmful aspects of the rackets they protect through legislation and promote through institutional research. That's why research shows that cell phone microwaves cause long term memory loss in rats, but do not harm people. Evidently, we are of different, more bullet proof mammalian material.

Our hyper capitalist system, through command of our research, media and political institutions, expands upon and disseminates only that information which generates money and transactions. It avoids, neglects or spins the hell out of information that does not. And if none of those work, the info is exiled to some corner of cyberspace such as Daily Kos, where it cannot change the status quo, yet can be ballyhooed as proof of our national freedom of expression. Here come the rotten eggs from the Internet liberals.

Cyberspace by nature feels very big from the inside, and its affinity groups, seeing themselves in aggregate and in mutual self reference, imagine their role bigger and more effective than it is. From within the highly directed, technologically administrated, marketed-to and propagandized rat cage called America, this is all but impossible to comprehend. Especially when corporate owned media tells us it is.

Take the world recent shaking WikiLeak's "revelations" of Washington's petty misery and drivel, which are scarcely revelations, just more extensive details about what we all already knew. Come on now, is it a revelation that Karzai and his entire government is a nest of fraudulent double-crossing thieves? Or that the US is duplicitous? Or that Angela Merkel is dull? The main revelation in the WikiLeaks affair was the U.S. government's response -- which was to bring US freedom of speech policy firmly in line with China's. Millions of us in cyber ghettoes saw it coming, but our alarm warnings were shouted inside a cyberspace vacuum bell jar.

Bear in mind that I am writing this from outside the US borders and media environment, where people watch the WikiLeaks story unfold more in amusement than anything else.

The WikiLeaks affair is surely seismic to those whose asses ride on the elite diplomatic intrigues. But in the big picture it will not change the way the top lizards in global politics, money and war have done business since the feudal age -- which is to say with arrogant disregard for the rest of us. Theirs is an ancient system of human dominance that only shifts names and methodologies over the centuries. Two years from now, little will have changed in the old, old story of the powerful few over the powerless many. In this overarching drama, Obama, Hillary and Julian Assange are passing players. Watching the sweaty, fetid machinations of our overlords with such passionate involvement only keeps us from seeing the big picture -- that they are the players and we are the pawns.

Still, I for one am in favor of giving Assange the Médaille militaire, the Noble Prize, 15 virgins in paradise and a billion in cash as a reward for his courage in doing damned well the only significant thing that can be done at this time -- momentarily fucking up government control of information. But "potentially stimulating a new age of U.S. government transparency," (BBC) it ain't."

Which brings us to back to the question of cultural ignorance. For ten points, why was Julian Assange forced to do what the world press was supposed to be doing in the first place?

Bulletin: PayPal has caved to government pressure to pull WikiLeak's PayPal account for contributions. However, the feds generously let PayPal keep its porn and prostitution clients.

The transparency scam
It is a form of cultural ignorance to believe that at some point or other, we were more in charge and that our government was somehow more transparent in the past. Societies declining into obsolescence understandably resist looking forward, and hang onto their past mythologies. Consequently, both liberals and conservatives in America feed on myths of political action which died in Vietnam. The results are ludicrous. Tea Partiers attempt to emulate the 1960s protest gatherings by staging rallies sponsored by the richest beneficiaries of the status quo. For the average TP participant, the goal, near as I can tell, is to "start a new American Revolution," by wearing foodstuffs, screaming, threatening, and voting for nitwits. Media pundits proclaim the Tea Party "a historic populist movement."

Neither populist, nor authentic movement, the Tea Party may yet prove historic, however, by seriously fucking things up more than they already are. Spun entirely from manufactured spectacle (and thus void of cohesive political philosophy or internal logic), the Tea Party lurches across the political landscape bellowing at the cameras and collecting the victims of cultural ignorance in sort of a medieval idiots crusade. But to the American public, seeing the Tea Party on television is proof enough of relevancy and significance. After all, stuff doesn't get on TV unless it's important.

Progressives also fancy a revolution, one in which they participate through the Internet petitions, and media events such as the risk free Jon Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity, where no one risked even missing an episode of Tremaine. Seeing people like themselves on television was proof fighting the good fight. The Stewart rally was nonetheless culturally historic; we will never see a larger public display of post modern irony congratulating itself.

In the historical view, cultural ignorance is more than the absence of knowledge. It is also the result of long term cultural and political struggle. Since the industrial revolution, the struggle has been between capital and workers. Capital won in America and spread its successful tactics worldwide. Now we watch global capitalism wreck the world and attempt to stay ahead of that wreckage clutching its profits. A subservient world kneels before it, praying that planet destroying jobs will fall their way. Will unrestrained global capitalism, with all the power and momentum on its side and motivated purely by machinelike harvesting of profits, reduce the faceless masses in its path to slavery? Does a duck shit in a pond?

Meanwhile, here we are, American riders on the short bus, barreling into the Grand Canyon. With typical American gunpoint optimism, we've convinced ourselves we're in an airplane. A few smarter kids in the back whisper about hijacking and turning the bus around. But the security cop riding shotgun just strokes his taser and smiles. Not that yours truly has the ass to take on the security surveillance state. Hell no. I jumped out the window when the bus shot past Mexico.

What America needs is some balls
GOP honcho Mitch O'Connell says what America needs is for Republicans to finish beating the snot out of Obama, and strengthen the already rich by eliminating taxes for them and shifting the burden onto us. Obama says America needs to find bipartisan cooperation with the party of ruthlessness. Elton John says that America needs more compassion (Thanks, we never noticed).

What America really needs is a wall-to-wall people's insurrection, preferably based on force and fear of force, the only thing oligarchs understand. And even then the odds are not good. The oligarchs have all the legal power, police, jails and prisons, surveillance and firepower. Not to mention a docile populace.
Shy of open insurrection, a nationwide refusal to pay income taxes would certainly shake things up. But broader America is happy in the sense they know happiness as an undisturbed regimen of toil, stress and commodity consumption. Despite the way it looks in the news, most Americans remain untouched by foreclosure, bankruptcy and unemployment. So risking loss of their work-buy-sleep cycle in an insurrection looks to be sheer lunacy to them. Like cows, they are kept comfortable in the pure animal sense to be milked for profit. Animal comfort kills all thoughts of revolution. Hell, half of mankind would be thrilled with the average American's present material situation.

And besides, revolutionary history does not exist for Americans. The 20th Century's successful revolutions in Russia, Germany, Mexico, China, and Cuba are wired into our minds as history's evil failures, because all but one were Marxist. (The only successful non-Marxist revolution of the 20th Century was Fidel Castro's Cuban Revolution).

So if we are talking change through revolt, we're necessarily talking about deconditioning because the thing we fear already has a life deep in our own consciousness. Deconditioning from cultural ignorance is at the heart of any insurrectionary politics.

Deconditioning also involves risk and suffering. But it is transformative, freeing the self from helplessness and fear. It unleashes the fifth freedom, the right to an autonomous consciousness. That makes deconditioning about as individual and personal act as is possible. Maybe the only genuine individual act.

Once unencumbered by self-induced and manufactured cultural ignorance, it becomes clear that politics worldwide is entirely about money, power and national mythology, with or without some degree of human rights. America still has all of the above to one degree or another. Yet for all practical purposes, such as advancing the freedom and the well being of its own people, the American republic has collapsed.
Of course, there is still money to be made by the already rich. So the million or so people who own the country and the government use their control to convince us that there is no collapse, just economic and political problems that need to be solved. Naturally, they are willing to do that for us. Consequently, the economy is discussed in political terms, because the government is the only body with the power to legislate, and therefore render the will of the owning class into law.

But politics and money are never going to fill what is essentially a public vacuum that is moral, philosophical and spiritual. (The latter was instantly recognized by fundamentalist Christians, disfigured by cultural ignorance, as they may be.) Not many ordinary Americans talk about this vacuum. The required spiritual and philosophical language has been successfully purged by newspeak, popular culture, a human regimentation process masquerading as a national educational system, and the ruthlessness of everyday competition, which leaves no time to contemplate anything.

Still, the void, the meaninglessness of ordinary work and the emptiness of daily life scares thinking citizens shitless, with its many unspeakables, spy cams, security state pronouncements, citizens being economically disappeared, and general back-of-the-mind unease. Capitalism's faceless machinery has colonized our very souls. If the political was not personal to begin with, it's personal now.

Some Americans believe we can collectively triumph over the monolith we presently fear and worship. Others believe the best we can do is to find the personal strength to endure and go forward on lonely inner plains of the self.

Doing either will take inner moral, spiritual and intellectual liberation. It all depends on where you choose to fight your battle. Or if you even choose to fight it. But one thing is certain. The only way out is in.

Have you seen the little piggies, in their starched white shirts...?

Last night we were once again treated to clashing lightning bolts of cognitive dissonance in the form of back to back speeches by Obama and John Boner and the contrast was striking.  Obama once again – in spirit if not tone – laid out a generous compromise and a willingness to give up some of his party’s hard fought ground in the interest of getting this non-issue resolved so we can move on to deal with the many pressing issues facing the country.  Boner, on the other hand, hewed tightly to the party line; taxes, taxes, taxes, spending, spending, out-of-control spending, taxes, taxes, taxes…”  As much as Obama made sense, Boner kept shoveling from the same pile of bullshit, trying his best to stoke the flames of irrational anger, resentment, ignorance and crippling fear currently running amuck across the country.  

I know it’s normal for politicians to bend the truth to whatever shape best suits them – if we’re honest, both of these guys are masters of the prestidigitation of obfuscation and partisan hypnosis.   But really, Boner, to continue to lay the current deficit and budget situation at the feet of Obama is akin to hinting to your kids that there really might be monsters under the bed – it’s a twisted fairy tale; one of the great lies of our time, perpetrated by you, Cantor, McConnell and the incoherent chorus of pinheads at Faux News in your desperate attempt to win in 2012, no matter the consequences to the rest of us.   “Well, we had to destroy the village in order to save it…”

 Let’s pull the curtain to one side here for a minute and lash together a few raw facts.   Yesterday the New York Times – using data from the congressional budget office – published an analysis of the contributions to the deficit by both Obama in his first two years and that semi-retired buckaroo who used to inhabit the White House, George Dubbya Bush during his painful reign over the previous eight years.   It calculates that Obama – by cutting some defense spending – has achieved a saving of 126 billion dollars and Bush saved nothing.   

On the other hand, Bush increased defense spending - by virtue of one somewhat defensible intervention and one done to defend his Daddy’s honor – by nearly 1.5 trillion dollars.  That’s not too surprising - terrrorists and all.   So let’s move on to tax cuts as a contributor to the deficit.  (And let’s try to clear the air of any misbegotten notion that these tax cuts “stimulated” the economy.  Obviously they didn’t, begging the whole question before us today.)  The Bush tax cuts totaled 1.8 trillion dollars.  And again, as we noted, their efficacy as stimulus is deeply questionable.  Obama also cut taxes – something rarely, if ever, spoken of – a total of 425 billion dollars.

Well, you might ask, how about all the other stuff – you know – the wasteful spending so often mentioned by government critics - discretionary spending?  Well policies supported by George II spent 600 billion and Obama about 300 billion.  But now we get to the fun stuff – the stuff that the angry mobs are always worked up about -the stimulus / bail-out / TARP money.   Most of the time the republicans and Boner pin the TARP money decision on Obama – not surprising since the program mostly took place after he was elected and it’s in the republican’s best interest to blame him.  But what our short attention span voters have forgotten is that the whole TARP program was created and set in motion during the Bush administration.   That’s another 225 billion attributable to him. 

OK, how about that damned health care law that the borderline communist Nancy Pelosi and her thieving horde pushed through in 2009?  Huh?  How about that?  Oh shoot – you got me – that was 152 billion that Obama has to take the blame for.   Of course, Bush’s gift to the pharmaceutical industry – the prescription drug benefit changes to medi-care – cost 180 billion so I’m saying that’s a toss -up.   

Lastly, there is the stimulus itself, begun by Bush and continued under Obama: that's another push – more or less 700 billion each.  The grand totals?  Bush – 5 trillion, Obama - 1.5 trillion.  Game over...

I know, I know, John – we can’t be confusing the simple folk with all kinda random and confusing facts like this.  Their heads will explode if they’re exposed to anything more complicated than The Bachelorette.   But I gotta say, you and your ridiculous selection of ties and your “I’ve just been to the Bahamas”  tan, standing up in front of cameras as you did last night and spewing out this outrageous vomit of outright lies and abracadabra makes me sick.  Your touching tale of being a small business owner in Ohio, as if you are capable of having any empathy for the people who you are knee-capping by your “let them eat cake” policy stand is transparently phony.   To say that Obama has offered nothing when the deal was 3 dollars of cuts for every dollar of revenue is blatantly disingenuous and an insult to the intelligence of every America capable of adding 2+2. 

If the democrats cave to this crap it will be a generation before they sit in the White House again.  And that’s exactly what they’ll deserve.    

Sad news, sad news, come to where I sleep...

The ongoing spat in DC about the debt ceiling seems to be staggering to a close like some cheesy 10 round county fair boxing match between two fat guys so I thought I’d browse through the Sunday papers to see what else was going on.   Unfortunately it’s as if today was “depressing news only day” because after a couple of passes through the local rags I wanted to eat about 100 pancakes and just go lay down.   Random death, insanity, perversion and Amy Winehouse, someone who sadly personified all of them at once, comprised the news of the day, making the noxious stew of political snake oil and bile seem palatable by comparison.  Everywhere you turn people are killing each other, deliberately or accidentally. 

A gunman opens fire at a roller rink, killing 5 people before killing himself.  Yeah, that’ll show ‘em.  It was probably the disco music.   I have never understood the pissed off guy – almost always a guy – who runs amuck and then kills himself.  If you’re that unhappy just jump right to that last part and get it over with.  I always wonder if the mentality is some kind of analogue of the Muslim suicide bomber – they do something incredibly horrible and senseless thinking that they get the girl in the end – or girls in their case.   There’s a special corner of hell where all these guys are sitting around going, “Wait…they said there’d be chicks…and falafels”

An eleven year old girl sitting on her cousin’s bed in San Francisco was shot while waiting for a snack of carrots and peanut butter at 11:30 at night, too excited to go to sleep after watching Iron Man with her little brother.  Dirt bag gang bangers, probably pissed off at each other because one of them looked at the other one wrong, decided to shoot it out in the park across the street and – because they are such stupid idiots – they didn’t hit each other but managed to pump a few rounds through the wall of her uncle’s house and hit her in the chest.   She’s alive but they shouldn’t be.

Then there was the shoot out at the low rider corral in Washington state, another case of somebody getting “disrespected” or some shit and whipping out the nine-mils at a car show.  Ten people ended up shot and taken to the hospital.  With any luck, it was the dumb asses with the big guns and tiny dicks and not some innocent kids thinking they were just checking out some cool rides.

Of course, not all the idiots are gang bangers; some of them are just drunks in boats.  In Wisconsin a pontoon boat loaded with liquored up knuckleheads celebrating an upcoming wedding wandered blindly into the path of a speedboat, killing two people and leaving two more missing and presumed dead – a typical bit of summer madness at the intersection of alcohol and machinery. 

Locally the news is still full of the aftermath of the three hikers who – against every single sensible impulse – climbed a guardrail, ignored multiple signs and wandered into the river above Vernal Falls in Yosemite, where almost inevitably they slipped and went over in a nightmarish and tragic daisy chain in front of nearly 200 horrified fellow hikers.  Their bodies have not turned up yet after falling over 300 feet.  

And of course there is the almost indescribable horror in Norway, a country where violence of this magnitude has been absent since WW II.  An Aryan-looking Timothy McVeigh wanna be decides that – in the interest of some hare-brained manifesto on European independence – he simply had no choice but to ruthlessly kill everyone he encountered at an island summer camp until the police showed up, whereupon he laid down his gun and surrendered.  This miserable lunatic didn’t even have the decency to kill himself in the end.  And in Norway he will probably get some kind of prison sentence and not the hypodermic in the neck that he deserves.  

After riding this relentless battering ram of bad news and sordid testament to the worst in human behavior I turned the final page and there was a picture of John Boner and Harry Reid, heads together obviously discussing matters of grave concern to the republic.  Somehow it seemed fitting…

No taxes, got it? Nothing that smells like a tax increase, looks like one, hints at one, or even contains the words, OK?

Even 55% of republicans now agree that a budget agreement should include a mix of spending cuts and revenue increases.  Yet so many of these freshmen Tea partiers have signed the goof-ball Grover Norquist no taxes / no way pledge that they now find themselves with quite a dilemma; they can’t do the right thing, even if they want to.  Pretty sweet, I think.   Brain dead hard line single issue politicians should stay home and run for the local community college board where the collateral damage from their stupidity can be limited. 

But it looks to me as if Obama has these chumps right where he wants them.   He has shown a willingness to compromise and the republicans have not, proving again that they are less concerned about actually getting anything done than about undermining Obama and continuing the rhetorical nonsense about how closing corporate tax loopholes will kill jobs, even as those corporations aren’t creating jobs and are just sitting in front of a vault full of cash.  68% of voters registered as independent favor a mix of cuts and revenue.   In general over 60% of the public supports this position.  But Boner walked away from talks for the third time, muttering darkly about Hobson ’s choice and November, 2012. 

Two things appear to be in play here; first, Boner is not in control of his own party in the House and so he cannot trust that a deal made with Obama wouldn’t blow up in his face when presented to the screaming rabble with the torches.  And second, if he compromises on the revenue piece – an otherwise entirely sensible thing to do – it looks, on some level, like Obama “won”.   Even as Obama is getting hammered by the left for his willingness to compromise, he still wins because the left isn’t going to vote for any of the current crop of republican candidates nor, for that matter, any potential republican candidate lurking in the weeds, (Sarah, this includes you…).  

This explains why they are peeing –their- pants scared of him.   But even republicans have to be scratching their heads over why this circus is still in town.  Obama offers a 3-1 ratio of cuts to revenue and it still isn’t good enough?  If they’re serious about long term deficit reduction, how can they turn that down?  The fact is, they aren’t as interested in the deficit as they’d like everyone to believe – not if it means the hedge fund manager on his 50-footer in Newport has to worry about paying more in taxes so that average people have enough money to buy the goods sold by the companies in the very fund he manages.  And no, that doesn't make sense.

Obama’s best move now is to lay that all out and tell them to pound sand and not bother him until they decide they’re serious.  The longer this goes on and the more damage is done, the more the republicans look like petulant, spoiled children who don’t really want a deal if it is in any way good for Obama.  They only want a deal that hurts him politically and furthers their real ambition – to destroy him and simultaneously take back the senate so a newly elected republican king can reign o’er the land.  (Shudder…)

The thing that bothers me and makes me uneasy about the whole nasty, silly drama is that Obama doesn’t seem inclined to put the hammer down on these clowns.  It’s as if he can’t believe what’s happening; he keeps expecting someone to man up, act like an adult, deal with the situation, and every time he thinks he has a deal, Boner shrivels up to the size of a raspberry and slinks off claiming with great, puffed up indignity that Obama has stabbed him in the back.  That this hilarious spectacle continues through another weekend, with the economy teetering again on the brink and desperate for political leadership, holds up a shiny fun-house mirror to the patriotic protestations of the tea-intoxicated bumblers trying to lead the loyal opposition.   Of course they don’t give a shit about the debt ceiling really; of course they will work something out so we don’t default; of course they hope to inflict as much damage as possible before doing so.   It’s up to Obama to make them pay for it - or I will be really disappointed. 

What the world, needs now, is knives, sharp knives...

I was driving home tonight, kind of zoning out, when I drove past the pale blue bunker that is the local tittie bar and noticed their sign out front; it said, “Watch the game with us.”  Now I was left wondering, what kind of guy goes to a tittie bar to plop down $6.50 for a beer to watch a baseball game on a big old flat screen instead of going in to see…well, titties?  It had to be that the owners are getting desperate to attract customers and thought that baseball would draw guys in to drink over priced beer when bare breasts would not.   This is puzzling to me and I take it to be a metaphor for the sorry state of the economy in general. 

In order for our economy to thrive, we all have to spend money – buy stuff.   If the owners of a tittie bar have to resort to offering big screen broadcasts of Giants games, it seems a clear indication to me that our ability – or willingness – to spend money and buy stuff has hit a serious snag.  Which calls into question the whole damn idea of a consumer based economy in the first place.  When you stop and think about it, is it realistic that we all are just going to go on buying stuff endlessly?  Won’t we all end up with a house full of extra stuff?  How many flat screens can you really support with quality viewing?  Is having one in each bathroom what’s required to pull us out of the slump? 

Personally I’m not a shopper – I am more of a buyer.  If I need something I’ll go get it.  I’m not interested in driving around “shopping” for the best price – I am far more interested in actually acquiring whatever it is I need and taking it home and using it.  And while I’m at it, I’ll try to buy a pretty good one so it will last a long time and I won’t need to buy another one.  But now I realize this goes against everything that this great country stands for.   If I get, say, a new couch, I can’t see going and getting another one - unless of course I get another house.   But if 2/3 of the economy depends on us constantly buying stuff, there has to be more and more stuff to buy - it is almost my duty to go and buy another couch.  This explains a couple of mysteries of modern America.

The first one is the size of the average American house.  Depending on who you ask, the average American house is somewhere around 2,500 square feet, almost double the average size in 1970.   And given the number of those 1970 houses still around, that means that when these guys build a new house these days, it is giant sized.   Seriously; unless you’re going to have an upstairs and downstairs maid, what on earth do you want with a house that big?  At the same time as mini-mansions became all the rage, the average American household has shrunk in size to a robust total of 2.7 people per house.   What does this mean?  It means you have to have a lot of stuff that you probably don’t really need to fill the damned things up.  And with the average working American’s wage being basically flat for the better part of 20 years, it also means that this stuff is cheaper and mostly sold at Wal-Mart.   And made in China…

This phenomenon also helps explain the mind numbing variety of crap that’s available to buy and nowhere more extravagantly and enthusiastically glorified than on late night TV, and especially on cable.   There are more hucksters on late night cable TV than at every carnival midway that’s ever existed anywhere.   My personal favorite is The Knife Show, where these two goofball guys sell 20, 30, even 50 knives at a time.   I’m not talking about silverware – these are everything from little folding knives to Bowie knives that Sarah Pain might use to skin griz up on the tundra.  It goes without saying that people buy them, probably to put in one of those big-ass new houses they bought.  They better damn well not leave that one kid home alone by himself – they’ll probably find him playing mumbly-peg on their Brazilian rosewood floor.  

It isn’t enough to have some cookware to make dinner; you need dedicated special pans to facilitate making meat loaf.   We have stores specializing in freaking candles.  Stores are overflowing with cheap clothes, sheets and towels, toys, electronic gadgets that all the nerdy analysts say make us more productive but at what?  Updating your Facebook page?  Is it really a boon to modern life to be able to tell your TV what channel you want to watch?  Do I need a granite countertop that’s $100 a square foot?  A six slice toaster that also make julienne fries?  A food processor and a blender and a juicer and a Mix Master and a double oven?  How many turkeys are you going to cook at Thanksgiving?  What the hell are we really thankful for?  A clap-on bedside lamp?  Forty pairs of underware?  Designer cat food?  Scented toilet paper in packages of 20? $8.00 lattes? 

I fear that we’ve come to the intractable edge of an economic cliff, where we need to continue to spend money that we don’t have for stuff we don’t need – or even want, in some cases - or we're all going down.   The credit cards are all maxed out, our jobs suck, we’re all surrounded by idiots and we have an enormous house we don’t need and can’t pay for to boot.  Christ…I’m going to the tittie bar to watch the game…

"Well, in history today, Patty..."

Big news today - Michele Bachman has leaped into second place in a poll of likely republican voters, trailing only nominee- in- waiting, Mitt Romney in the field of 10 little Indians or 7 dwarfs or whatever it is called this week.   The two of them polled 46% of the votes, with the other 54% scattered among the other announced candidates, plus Texas evangelist, governor, and erstwhile candidate-to-be, Rick Perry.  In a poll of Tea Party-aligned voters, Romney’s lead is much narrower – 24% to 20% - and among voters who identify themselves as “very conservative”, she actually leads 24% to 22%.   What does this reveal about the republican electorate?   Well, they’re either sedated, crazy as loons, dumb as a box of rocks, or some twisted combination of all of them.  Or they’re self-serving, rich people who hate all taxes and big government unless it benefits them…yeah, I think that covers all the possibilities.

In the ultimate irony, Jon Huntsman, the most normal, sensible, non-psychotic one of the bunch is trailing the field – dead last.  It’s probably a function of him just entering the race and being from Utah but Bachman hasn’t been in the race all that much longer so it’s not just that.  The guy has a pretty spiffy resume for an elephant – work for both republican and democratic presidents, multiple ambassadorships, a degree in international politics, two-term governor of Utah, re-elected with 78% of the vote, 6 honorary doctorates, and founder of the Pacific Council on International Policy.  I have to say, I am impressed.  He would make a very worthy and tough opponent for Obama in 2012…among people with the capacity for rational thought, that is.   Luckily for Obama, that apparently doesn’t describe the majority of republican voters, who seem to have mistaken Bachman, a woman with her hair on fire, for Lady Liberty holding up the torch.

In contrast to Huntsman’s impressive resume, Bachman’s accomplishments consist of sponsoring 38 bills since 2007, none of which even made it out of committee, let alone became law.  She and her husband run a some kind of Christian counseling service, where they apply half-baked psychological theories to try to un-homosexualize homosexuals and perform other feats of evangelical Christian witchcraft.  That’s pretty much it.  Oh, and she got pregnant and had 5 kids of her own and cared for a number of foster kids – all teenage girls, many with eating disorders.  Evidently, while republicans seem to have some weird aversion to sex, they procreate like rabbits – Huntsman has a handful of kids too. 

With the rest of the republican field becoming irrelevant faster than J-Lo, those seem to be the primary – so to speak – actors in the neat little drama unfolding over the next year or so.  Newt can’t figure out why he’s running, Herman Cain is a half-baked pizza baron with a little too much pepperoni, Ron Paul makes too much sense, Pawlenty has a search party looking for his charisma and Sarah Palin – lurking in the weeds and basking in the glow of her docu-comedy film debut, The Undefeated – can’t make up her mind whether she wants to be Eva Peron or Jennifer Aniston.   So that leaves Bachman and Romney, along with Perry when he finally throws his Stetson in the ring for real and – I hope, for the sake of the country – Huntsman.   Barack, if you just don’t drive the bus off a cliff, you should be OK.

Meanwhile frustrated republican members of the house have pushed through a bill that would freeze the national budget and require a constitutional amendment to change it, a radical, unwieldy and largely symbolic exercise, in exchange for voting to allow an increase in the debt ceiling.  You have to admire the focus of the mostly freshmen house members – they keep saying they were elected to reduce the size of government and that the one thing they intend to do.  Of course, idiot savants are focused too.  These folks don’t seem to realize their constituents have the attention span of 4 year-olds and have already moved on to caring more about the finals on So You Think You Can Dance than something as esoteric as the size of government.  And the first time the unemployment check bounces they’ll have something else to be pissed off about in any case. 

John Boner gave the obligatory verbal thumbs-up to this nonsense, all the while continuing to cut a deal behind the scenes and scheming with his senate pals to come up with something to save face after Obama essentially called their belligerent bluff about shutting down the country for its own good if they didn’t get their way.  It was always clear that that wouldn’t happen, despite dire warnings and the most elaborate political theater since Ninja Newt went a few rounds with Clinton in 1995 and lost his ass in the process.   Thirteen years after leaving the political arena, he’s still looking for it and McConnell and Boner and Cantor don’t want to end up in the same leaky lifeboat so they are finally taking off the Kabuki make up and cutting a deal.  Honestly – there is nothing more boring than a political slap fight where both sides are trying to make sure their hair doesn’t get mussed up.   Let’s get back to something serious like getting the troops out of woe-be-gone Afghanistan – that would be accomplishing something important.

Hey everybody...want another credit card...?

Not going home for the traditional 4^th of July recess seems to have exacerbated a certain group of senators’ predilection to put partisanship before anything else – DC is a pretty insular place.  Well, anything except their sycophantic quivering at the loins of their Wall Street bosses, as their continued intransigence over raising the debt ceiling – and their ridiculous semantic gymnastics in justifying their position – illustrates.  Today, however, brings news of a fresh bitch slap to the face of every consumer in the country, as all 44 republican senators have vowed to block the appointment of ANYONE to head the newly created Consumer Finance Protection Bureau -  Machiavelli, Grover Cleveland, J. Edgar Hoover, Mickey Mantle, Elvis…anyone.

No, they are still pissed off that they couldn’t block creation of the agency last year when it was created so now they will just symbolically take their ball and go home, once again doing the bidding of their corporate overlords, who look at any kind of regulation of the high stakes poker they play with other peoples’ money like you or I look forward to a colonoscopy from a jittery, doped-up internist with a grudge.  And they are so sure that the public is going to get sucked into their “If Obama’s for it, we’re against it” tiny-brain nonsense that they just come right out and admit it.

They propose that, instead of a single person running the agency, a 5 person board be appointed, that it is subject to the always-political plate of spaghetti that is the appropriations process  and that bank regulators have greater oversight – essentially insuring it will never accomplish anything and turning it into a gelding.  Having an agency run by committee with greatly reduced power to get anything done is now the in-your-face strategy republicans are employing as a fall-back position to try to protect the ability of the big money boys to run amuck. 

This kind of partisan gamesmanship may play well with the Tea party knuckle draggers and Wall Street lobbyists but to most of the rest of the country, it looks more like a bunch of pimps and double-dealers more interested in one upping Obama and taking care of the fat cats who write the checks.   Again…

I was very happy to see Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley call these disingenuous pricks out in no uncertain terms, saying what has been obvious since Obama was elected – the primary goal of the republican party ever since has not been fixing the economy, crafting intelligent foreign policy, punishing the criminals who brought the house down in the first place or providing a loyal opposition – it has been to make sure Obama loses in 2012, period.  And you gotta love it when another politician just comes right out and calls a spade a spade: "They know that their formulations, their policies of less revenues and less regulation badly failed our country and plunged us into this recession. So their only way of evening the playing field is to keep the president from being successful in the jobs recovery.”  He went on to say that, "through their intransigence, they have cleverly set up a situation for America's economy to fail, either by needlessly driving us to default, or needlessly driving us into massive public sector layoffs."

You could barely hear yourself think for the resulting, outraged harrumphing spewing out of republican headquarters like some bilious fart straight from between Michael Steele’s butt cheeks.  He called it an “unhinged partisan rant”, a nice turn of phrase but a laughable example of pot kettle black, coming from the spokesman for John Boner.  The republicans as born-again deficit hawks remind of when I was eligible for the draft during the Vietnam War in the early 70’s and the guys who were always first in line for the fraternity house gang bangs suddenly found Jesus and became conscientious objectors. 

The same snarling anti-deficit attack dogs today were puppies rolled over on their backs hoping for a belly rub when Bush was racking up deficits and spending the surplus accumulated during Clinton’s two terms.  Now they want to write republican – Wall Street – economic priorities into the constitution in exchange for agreeing to raise the debt ceiling, something they are bound by their oaths of office to do anyway.  No way, fellas – that kind of cynical, transparently self-serving bullshit is so noxious that even with the full support of Faux News the public will see through it in the end.  My advice to you guys would be, make a deal.

"This just in...Generalisimo Francisco Franco is still dead..."

It was good to see Rupert Murdoch publically flogging himself yesterday for the phone hacking scandal that is currently blowing up into armageddon for him and his blow-hard media empire.  Frankly, other than NPR, it would be good to watch any of the current owners of a media empire get a public spanking, so culpable are they for the sorry state of “news” – at least in this country.   But to have the leading light of the relentlessly anti-government yet shamelessly pseudo-patriotic republican cheerleaders at Faux News getting what for every time he steps out into the public eye does my heart good.   I haven’t kept up on how his brain-dead band of “personalities” and “commentators” is reporting this dust up but it must be pretty funny.  I would watch in the name of research but my gag reflex just won’t relax enough when I see those garish sets and smiling Obama-haters so I am not sure I can do it.    But word has it that they have managed to basically ignore it, giving lie to the notion that they are even a rumor of a legitimate news organization – more like the republican politburo.

Speaking of my gag reflex, there was an entirely predictable response from the republican poo-bahs after Obama once again explained his position on the debt ceiling debate/ pissing match/slap fight earlier yesterday.   John Boner actually had the gall to say – and I am paraphrasing – “we are not going to sit back and let the president increase taxes on job creators.”   Ha!  Good one, John – job creators; I get it.   But that always begs the question; if they haven’t had their tax increased yet – or anytime recently, really – where are the jobs?   They’ve had these tax breaks for years and jobs are disappearing and nowhere on the horizon.  If we cut three trillion in spending, and ask for 1 trillion in increased revenue, that’s not enough for you guys?   Why don’t you come right out and say that you don’t give a shit about the poor and the weak and the doomed middle class? 

For its part, the majority of the national media – obsessed with ratings and not really given to exploring much of anything in depth – doesn’t seem to remember that one time Tea party pin up Paul Ryan’s budget also would require an increase in the debt ceiling.  Michelle Bachman – when confronted with the seeming disconnect between supporting a plan that increases the deficit while demonizing any attempt to raise the debt ceiling – momentarily had an epiphany and was reported to reply, “Christ, I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about most of the time – why should this be any different?”   Instead the new clones breathlessly report – every god damned day – that “there was no progress on the negotiations to raise the debt ceiling and prevent a government default”.   Hey fellas – how about delving into why there was no progress?   Instead their reporting is about as useful as the insights gleaned from one of those gortex-wearing bimbos who stick their microphones into a football coach’s face as he’s leaving the field at halftime and ask, “What do you think happened there in that first half, coach?”   It always amazes me that the guy who’s losing doesn’t go completely over the edge and suggest some anatomically difficult gymnastic moves to these twits.

Finally, I would be remiss not to mention the nationwide opening of the Sarah Palin docu-comedy, The Undefeated, not to be confused with the 1969 film about post civil war cavalry man and notorious Hollywood party boy, Rock Hudson, a guy ill-suited to play the role of a heroic man on a horse.  But I digress.  Sarah’s relentless publicity machine enthusiastically spread the word about the film through the ubiquitous “social media” and its opening night crowds of listless teen aged girls thinking it was a new Justin Bieber music video and horny republican guys wearing their dress- camo suits were sure to raise the specter of the moosey Palin entering the republican race and injecting it with her own brand of inspired lunacy, non-sequitar-laced campaign rhetoric and historical nonsense.   And it would make the next debate actually must-see TV.   Keep your fingers crossed…

"This must be heaven, man...!" Wavy Gravy

I never have watched the TLC channel program, Sister Wives, about the Brown family of Utah – Kody Brown, his four wives and their sixteen children.   I stopped watching TLC when it went from being a relatively sane if boring educational channel to a channel with programs like “I’m a Big Fat Pus Bag” or “My Mom Sold me to Dwarves”.  But apparently this show was a pretty popular and not completely absurd showcase of the polygamist life style – one that seems incredibly taxing for the man and sort of unsatisfying for the women but a choice with a long, if outlaw tradition in the West.  It is not true, however, that it was sponsored by Cialis and had a commercial showing the guy and his wives in a daisy chain of hand holding in five claw-foot bath tubs staring at the snowy Wasatch Range.  That was just a rumor.

As polygamy is against the law in Utah, it turns out that the Browns intended that the show would result in prosecution or an investigation by Utah authorities and give them an opportunity to challenge the Utah law in court on the basis that prosecution of polygamists is an unconstitutional breach of their right to privacy – a test case.   Personally I think this is a great idea – there is far too much biblical moralizing and brain-dead religiosity in this country and high time to confront it head on.  That’s all well and good.  Have at it.

What interested me, however, was the supreme court case upon which they were preparing to base their suit – Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark supreme court decision from 2003 overturning Texas’ anti-sodomy law.   Sodomy laws, and indeed, all of the various laws prohibiting sexual conduct between consenting adults are unsupportable on their face – Alabama’s law against sex toys, Milner v. Apfel, a law which stated that legislatures are “permitted to legislate with regard to morality”, and a Maryland law that actually holds, “a person has no constitutional right to engage in sexual intercourse, at least outside of marriage”, a ridiculously blatant spit in the eye of the separation between church and state.  And that’s the real point – there is no place for high-minded, if well intentioned, moralistic notions based on the Christian bible to instruct the laws of this country. 

The court sided in favor of the accused in Lawrence v. Texas by a margin of 6-3.  The dissent was largely authored by Antonin “Don’t touch my butt” Scalia, who thunders on and on like Abraham come down from the mountain with the divine word of god in hand to smite the damned fornicators with a righteous wrath.  He goes on for a very long time with, “the court, blah, blah, blah, sodomy, blah,blah,blah blah, homosexuals, blah, blah, sodomy, blah, blah, sodomy, blah blah, blah.”  Early in the dissent he throws in this sentence which nicely summarizes the problem; “State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers' validation of laws based on moral choices.”  LAWS BASED ON MORAL CHOICES!  Maybe they shouldn't be sustainable.  Bowers was a case that was also thrown out by the majority, thereby rendering it ineffective in bolstering the case against the Texas gay couple in Lawrence.

Throughout his dissent, Scalia refers to a long tradition of society disapproving of various sexual acts and practices as an entirely reasonable basis upon which to continue to arrest and criminalize citizens who engage in them.  I don’t know about Antonin himself but if we can all get arrested for jerking off they better start building more jails this morning. 

Recently Michael Krazny, host of Forum on KQED public radio in San Francisco, wrote a column in the San Francisco Chronicle, opining that the use of religion as a political bludgeon was declining in the country, and pointed to the growing acceptance of gay marriage as his principle evidence but when 1^st century biblical morays are fundamental to the entire legal structure of the country, I am not so sure.  There are still countless examples of politicians wielding their own old testament ideas of morality and holding them out as a call to arms for fellow believers to take back the country from the sinners and…well, liberals, who have co-opted it and stolen their children’s birthright.   Never mind that they often end up with their pants around their ankles in some seedy motel or that some of those very children are likely gay themselves.  It almost always pays to flaunt religiosity in public life and the culture renders suspect anyone who doesn’t.

The sputtering fury evident beneath the surface of Scalia’s dissent – and he does insert the Seinfeldian phrase, “I have nothing against homosexuals myself” – begs the question; do we really want someone on the court who bases their decisions, not on common sense or societal evolution over 200 + years, but on the old testament?  I don't.   Is this what the right rfers to as a "strict constructionist"?  

In a rare break with their standard hand-holding, Scalia and his half-wit sidekick Clarence “Crickets” Thomas did not dissent together, although Thomas did dissent.  He apparently couldn’t get himself worked up into the same froth as Tony – his randy, inappropriate, women-harassing past may have prevented him from doing so.  He satisfied himself by saying that he thought the Texas law against sodomy was “silly” but he defended the state’s right to put it on the books regardless, a simpleminded opinion that begs discussion another time.

So I am hoping that the Brown Family – all 21 of them – march into court together and make a compelling and cogent argument that a guy having four wives is no biggie.  After all, plenty of guys have had four wives – hell, Sinatra had four.  It just usually isn’t all at once.  But hey, it’s a lifestyle.