Fear and loathing in Zuccotti Park...

Ever since I read The Great Shark Hunt, Hunter S. Thompson’s anthology of various essays, articles and literary madness many years ago, I have looked at Pat Buchanan differently.  In the book, Thompson describes – several times – occasions where he and Buchanan got together for a few late night Bass ales and conversation and Thompson clearly had a sort of reluctant admiration for the pugnacious former Nixon speech writer, spear-carrier for the right, and bombastic publicity magnet.  I’ve always thought of listening to Pat as a good way to keep track of what the enemy is doing because, unlike many of his ideological brethren, he doesn’t cause me to retch and throw things.

That’s why his take on Occupy Wall Street caught my attention on The McLaughlin Group this weekend.  Pat said he thought that the protest – specifically in New York but one could project to other major cities as well – would probably end badly as the weather gets colder and everyone starts to lose their patience.  I think he’s right. 

The Occupy protests have made their point and from here on they are in danger of becoming a liability in terms or what the end game should be; getting previously uncommitted voters to lean to the left just enough to recognize that the republicans are a bunch of corporate whores who are only interested in getting people back to work if it is non-union, no benefits, slashed wages corporate servitude in keeping with the modern ruling class narrative of “global competitiveness”.   Essentially corporations have moved jobs overseas to low wage / no benefits countries and are tacitly telling us all that, if we want jobs back in America some sacrifices need to be made so they can maintain their profits.  And by the way, if we do that we want you pay more in taxes too, because some of you ner do well low life snivelers don’t even pay taxes now.

I am sensing a tremendous campaign afoot in the republican ranks to discredit the Occupy protests by linking them to Huey Newton and Jane Fonda and calling attention to the lack of demands, as if a list of demands might prompt corporate interests to reconsider their selfish and greedy policies for some rationally negotiated improvement.  Ha!!!  There is also a whiff of fear in the bug-eyed press appearances and statements being made by an increasingly shrill cadre of right wing foot soldiers – Bitch McConnell, Eric “the Fearful” Cantor, poster-boy and Hitler youth look-alike Paul Ryan and a covey of republican governors across the country trying mightily to disenfranchise the young and the old, the poor and unemployed middle class and people of color.  And the sense that the 1%ers are getting nervous is also reflected in the flurry of rhetoric coming from the dullards running for the republican nomination.  How else to explain retrograde and widely discredited economic policies like a flat tax suddenly being pushed as the idea of the month by chumps like Rick “Hell, I don’t know if it will really work” Perry and Herman “Goering” Cain.

Perry in particular is just a fountain of warmed over Reagan era ideas; ideas that history has longed judged to have been a series of fairy tales and hallucinations with no more chance of working than a handful of magic beans and Harry Potter’s wand.  Between his “sure fellas; come and get it” energy plan that’s nothing more than a 30 year old industry wish list, to his stale flat tax idea pushed with the accompanying sales pitch of promoting “fairness”, not only are corporate and ultra wealthy interests not caving in, they’re doubling down.   It’s like they’re saying, “Hey, you want to stir up shit and cause us trouble; we’ll take the food off your table and have you living in a box behind the bowling alley.” 

Cain's plan would raise taxes by about 58 percent for the bottom 20 percent of earners, double them for the middle class, and cut them by 249 percent for the top fifth of the income ladder, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.   Yet he continues to wander the country at random repeating the same tired lie over and over and over again, that it won’t do the very thing that everyone knows it will do.  His handlers are clearly counting on the ignorance of the low information voters, as Mike Lofgren referred to them, to carry the day simply based on blind acceptance of a ludicrous idea.  How is this possible? 

The so-called Super Committee tasked with coming up with some way to reduce the deficit, the reddest of red herrings in itself, is the perfect current example of the corporate class pushing this remorseless agenda of shoving the tax bill down on to the lowest quartile of Americans.  Intransigent republicans have absolutely no interest in even the most carefully considered proposals to raise revenue if it has any hint of a tax increase on the top 10% - the job creators, to use Bitch McConnell’s surrealistic description.  This phrase always begs the question, so where the fuck are the jobs?  But we know where they are – they’re in Asia for the most part.  They’re sure as hell not in Pennsylvania of Illinois or Michigan.  And Rick, a million unskilled minimum wage jobs doesn't mean they are in Texas either.

No, I think it’s time for the Occupy protestors to pack up their tents and head home for the winter.  Register to vote, go door to door, work for some worthy politician – assuming you can find one – write letters, talk to your friends and neighbors – just don’t let these sleazy bastards turn something good and real and noble into a shit-storm of tainted media, exaggerations and distortions.  You all did some good, now take Pat’s advice, leave the park and go home and get to work – running these creeps out of town on a rail.

Legalize it...!

I had intended to write today about the staggeringly schizophrenic spectacle of the Obama justice department in California flying reconnaissance missions over orange groves and almond orchards in concert with brown oxford-wearing rural sheriffs with crew cuts and aviator shades, spending millions of dollars feverishly looking for legal marijuana plantations hiding in plain sight.  Worse, when they find them,  they are now threatening to seize the land upon which this pungent and sticky green bounty is found, and take it from families who have been working the same land for generations and who have State of California issued permits to grow the stuff for legal and licensed medical marijuana dispensaries.   I hope the irony of this isn’t lost in the description.

The single most valuable cash crop you could possibly grow – more valuable than saffron or white truffles – is confiscated by law enforcement in operations costing millions, taken to the nearest incinerator and gleefully destroyed by these same self righteous but incredibly dull jar-heads while their spokesperson says things like: "The California marijuana industry is not about providing medicine to the sick," claimed Laura Duffy, the San Diego-based US Attorney at the October 8 Sacramento press conference. "It's a pervasive, for-profit industry that violates federal law."  Hmmmm…sounds a lot like Goldman Sachs to me.  

The thing is, this genie is way out of the bottle and – just like gay marriage and other social abominations – you’re not going to get it back in no matter how many puckered up soldiers you enlist to help.  Too many people are clear that – while not a particularly productive undertaking – ingesting pot shouldn’t be a crime.  Old Laura there probably goes back to the hotel room after a long day of railing against the evils of “for profit” but illegal agricultural industries, kicks off her stubby-heeled sensible justice department pumps and sucks down a couple of cocktails from the mini-bar.  I wonder if the irony of it all ever strikes her.

In any case, this ludicrous and brain-dead government use of our tax dollars had me ready to call out Obama, a former pot smoker and current user of the far more insidious and deadly – but legal – substance, tobacco, until I read a story today in which it was reported that these guys don’t even talk to Eric Holder when they decide to burn down the cornfield – they decided to do that all on their own.  Well butter my butt and call me a biscuit…I guess the sight of large groups of well behaved if somewhat addled cancer patients with orange Cheeto mustaches just gave them the willies so bad that they decided to do something about it on their own.  God knows we can’t take a chance that dangerous class 1 drugs are being used recreationally.  That would be…I don’t know; sinful…? 

It’s a funny situation when you think about it.  If you don’t think Phillip Morris already has research green houses somewhere growing the most kick-ass ganja imaginable, you’re naïve.  But for some reason the corporate royalty is hesitant to fully endorse the a move toward legalization so it has become a very grass (ar, ar) roots thing – the growing and distribution is a people’s industry, if you will, promulgated right under the flared nostrils of “the man” and it appears to me that someone somewhere is getting pissed off about it.  I can see fat guys in conference rooms practically bursting their suspenders, sputtering, “Well..well…we just can’t HAVE this, god damn it!” 

Every time I see a news story on TV about one of these pharmacies I marvel at the neat display cabinets holding all manner of varieties and permutations, like a counter-culture Baskin Robbins for stoners, a crazy impossible dream when I was in my 20’s, something you could speculate about and then laugh at the absurdity of it all, with Commander Cody in the back ground.

So Barack – brother man – put on the Super Fly soundtrack, call Eric Holder and tell him to chill, dude.  California pot growing is here to stay, like it or not.  Why don’t you have him hunt down some real criminals? 

"What chance does a returnin' deceased war veteran have of finding a job...?"

The recent announcement that all US troops would be out of Iraq by January 2012 was greeted with a collective yawn by both the national media and an American public typically too pre-occupied with the question of whether or not Mormons came from outer space and who got kicked off Dancing With The Stars to care much about the war in Eye-rack anymore.   So in the interest of seizing upon and fully understanding and appreciating this historic moment, I think it’s necessary to re-visit Dubbya’s Folly, just to make sure we assign it its proper place in early 21^st century history.

Not since the heroic invasion of Panama by Bush the Elder to make sure his junior grade bag-man, Manuel Noriega kept quiet about being a laundromat for Contra drug money has there been a more obscenely stupid and wasteful exercise undertaken to prove the size of one’s dick.   Now after years of chaos and bloodletting in the name of hubris and ignorance – and despite desperate and intense lobbying by the pentagon – all but a small force retained for protection of the embassy will be removed. 

Oddly, this move has not precipitated any outcry or even any comment from the chicken hawk wing of the republican party nor from any of their tribe of candidates.   After the fuss they have made over Obama’s foreign policy in general and his handling of the dynamic and volatile situation in the Middle East in particular, this silence is puzzling.  Can it be there is so little to which one could point and triumphantly say, “There…see what we accomplished!” that they want no association with an episode which history will undoubtedly deem ill advised at best and perhaps tragically criminal at worst?   

Or maybe it is that they sense that the public is anesthetized to all things Iraqi; the waste and corruption and grim death that we have observed taking place in the background while most of us go on with our business.  We’ve lived through – we hope - the one great financial crisis of our lives – most of us – we have lost our homes and jobs and fortunes and are so preoccupied with getting from today to tomorrow that we hardly notice.  It seems pretty clear that there isn’t going to be much traction in barking about Obama’s Iraq policy; particularly in contrast to his handling of the economy.  So a day that may have seemed like a dream out of reach to many young Americans who served there doing their best in a preposterously shitty situation has been announced and most everyone is busy doing other things.  

From The Nation Magazine – “Withdrawing the 48,000 remaining US troops will save approximately $50 billion annually. The direct cost of the Iraq War over the past decade has been $800 billion, with indirect expenditures like veterans’ care pushing the long-term cost into the range of $6 trillion, in the estimate of scholars Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz. More than 4,500 Americans have lost their lives in the conflict, while more than 30,000 were wounded. Iraq itself remains one of the poorest countries in the world, with millions of dead, wounded and displaced people."

Mission accomplished, eh, George?  Whatever the justification of the month has been since the 2003 capture of Saddam, the will of the majority of Iraqis has finally become important enough to carry the day and beat back the sense of ownership and entitlement of the Pentagon warriors who today, behind closed doors, may be ruefully and wistfully smoking cigars and channeling the ghost of Patton, saying, “God forgive me but I do love it so.”  Well don’t go all nostalgic fellas; last I looked we are still sending drones to blast scampering Taliban bad guys in Afghanistan and Pakistan so you’ll still have jobs.

But in the face of continued republican attacks on government spending, is it inevitable that our post-war amnesia leads the pitifully underfunded VA to offer even fewer programs and benefits to returning veterans?  Obama’s announcement yesterday of a government / industry partnership to offer 25,000 jobs to returning veterans and their spouses is encouraging but with the actual war in the rear view mirror would a President Romney...(ack...gag, coff, coff...), continue to devote the resources necessary to do the right thing for the military personnel  republicans always seem so anxious to deploy in the name of “preserving our freedoms and way of life”?  I’m not so sure.  But it would be nice if they at least acknowledge them...

Herman said he's ridin' on the one after 9-9-9...

In the latest example of one of the candidates getting it absolutely wrong on multiple levels, Herman Cain exacerbated his blundering comments blaming the unemployed victims of Wall Street’s drunken gambling spree for being unemployed by saying, to loud cheers from the audience, "I still stand by my statement,".   Herman has become a stand out amongst the largely bland or, in Rick Perry’s case, stupid, pack of would- be presidents and it may be that he has had a little too much of his own kool-aid, because he then decided to elaborate...uh oh...

"They might be frustrated with Wall Street and the bankers, but they're directing their anger at the wrong place," he added. "Wall Street didn't put in failed economic policies. Wall Street didn't spend a trillion dollars that didn't do any good. Wall Street isn't going around the country trying to sell another $450 billion. They ought to be over in front of the White House taking out their frustration."

Hey Herm...just a reality check for you; blaming the rape victim for wearing too short a skirt is a really, really bad idea.  And blaming the one guy who has actually put forward some tangible attempts to fix the unprecedented and deeply fucked up mess made by profit-crazed geniuses in tassel loafers just makes you look like an tool.  Try to remember that the nasty lingering infection plaguing the economy had a long gestation in 30 years of almost unbroken republican dominance of the prevailing national discourse on economic theory, coupled with gratuitous and slavish devotion and service to corporate interests, all in the name of trickle down or Bush-a-nomics or Greenspanian gibberish that can be passed off as the one path to the American dream for struggling middle class joes scared shitless of being laid off or down-sized right out onto the street.

Of course, this fairy-tale nonsense is just another chapter in Herm’s simple minded 9-9-9 plan, one which he bravely but almost unintelligibly hollers about at every debate now, made bold by being underestimated and his rivals’ utter lack of a cogent plan of their own.  He is well schooled in the theory, made into standard republican doctrine over time, that loud and repeated lies will often be assimilated by simple-minded voters eager to hear someone say something positive about the future, even if it as unlikely as an episode of The Jetsons.  So he keeps claiming that his plan will level the playing field, enhance fairness overall and “not raise taxes on those least able to pay”, a completely indefensible position repudiated by economist after economist but clung to feverishly by Herm who doesn’t appear to have many other ideas aside from building some big-ass electrified Berlin Wall along the southern border to keep the brown hordes away.

Last night, as a matter of fact, every member of the clown posse tried to impress the audience with the ferociousness of their policy towards illegal immigrants; this is an easy sell to the hate-filled assholes who seem to gravitate to these things.  The problem is, though it may have slipped past them unnoticed, that there are a hell of a lot of Hispanics in the US – getting close to 20% of the population – and they’re not all pushing Mitt Romney’s lawn mower or washing dishes in Texas BBQ joints.  Alienating them with tough talk designed to get the base all riled up so you can win the early primaries may just make shooting yourself in the foot seem like elective surgery. 

But I am getting off the subject at hand; the pile of outrageous lies and misinformation evident every time these simpletons wonder off into the morass of theoretical economics.  It’s bad enough that all of them – with the possible exception of Ron Paul – in one way or another supported the TARP program as it was unveiled by Bush the Dullard at the dawn of the financial crisis.  Perry clearly supported it, much as he wants to pretend he’s some bad-ass anti-government gunslinger, and knows damn well that, even if it didn’t turn out exactly as planned, it was necessary for the government – not private industry muscled up with tax cuts – to do something.  Bachman had her hand out, Romney was all for it as long as his drinking buddies from the Hamptons told him to be – even Newt Gingrich, blowhard know-it-all professor emeritus specializing in how to squander an overwhelming political advantage, reluctantly admits that he would have supported it had he had a vote in the matter. 

Now, of course, all of these Nobel prize winners play I-told-ya-so and try to be the one who hates the bailout – and, by extension, Obama – the most, once again in a desperate attempt to move the anti-government nincompoops who constitute the torch carrying mob of republican primary voters to support them.  If they can’t; if they don’t drag in enough money over the next month, they will be sitting glumly around the Thanksgiving table, washing down dried out turkey and nasty oyster stuffing with tumblers of good whiskey and bending everyone’s ear with half drunken and bitter tales of why they couldn’t win the Illinois straw poll. 

It was comical and a tiny bit sad to watch Michele Bachman shrilly try to get a word in edge ways and when she finally did, propose to just shit-can the whole US tax system and replace it with a flat tax so – in her garbled explanation – even poor people can pay income tax at the same rate as millionaires, a tricky position to defend when pissed off cops and laid off sheet metal workers are camping out in the town square, murmuring angrily about the filthy swine who ruined their lives.  Clearly none of these knuckleheads has a clue really about how to fix things any time soon.  But one of them has to win and I predict the field will be significantly smaller by the time I choke down the last of the pumpkin pie and slump dazed and confused in front of the fireplace on Thanksgiving night.

How to Succeed in Fund Raising without Really Knowing How to Do Anything...

While anyone who has had to get a building permit to move their kitchen sink can empathize with those who say that pointy-headed bureaucrats wield too much influence on day-to-day life for our economy – or anything else, for that matter – to run smoothly, the constant barrage of republican campaign rhetoric for a reduction in “onerous regulation” as a means to economic nirvana flies in the face of the various catastrophic disasters we’ve seen over the last year caused by industry run amock after giving hand jobs and doughnuts to erstwhile government regulators for years.  The nexus of profit, corruption and incompetence too often leads to the mine collapsing or the drilling rig exploding or a generation of cows with two udders yielding milk that glows in the dark. 

But the republican corporate foot-soldiers like Eric Cantor and nominee-in-waiting, Mitt Romney still insist on treating “over-regulation” as the monster under the bed in describing what we should fear most as the economy stumbles inexorably along in a middling “still breathing” status.  Oh, and in case anyone forgot, taxes are too high on the “job creators”, (the single most dubious republican talking point since Nixon bragged about Peace with Honor).

Cantor must never watch recordings of himself because if he did his pathetic bleating on the Sunday talk shows about the democrats being spawns of Satan for supporting the crowds of unwashed poor people currently occupying every major city in America should be enough to embarrass him mute.  His bumbling attempt to respond when Chris Wallace – of all people – called him out, asking where the republican jobs plan has been incubating was in itself enough to drive a more conscious person into retrospection and thoughtful reconsideration of one’s position on the major issue of the day. 

Kudos to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida for saying out loud what has become increasingly clear to anyone paying attention; the republicans don’t have a coherent jobs plan, nor do they give a shit about one.  Their primary goal in 2012 is to make sure Obama isn’t re-elected.  If a few million Americans have to suffer for a couple of years to get that accomplished, well that just adds a bit of dramatic emphasis to their central argument – that Obama is a socialist negro Robin Hood and if they have to burn Sherwood Forest to the fucking ground, he’s going down.  Having a jobs plan would mean that the corporate sponsors of the party would have to reduce profits and repatriate jobs here by investing some of the bags of cash they have heretofore been saving for that little place in the Hamptons. 

Dovetailing ironically with this most recent blast of ill-considered vitriol towards the unemployed and angry demonstrators was the report detailing the fundraising efforts of the various candidates and Obama – subtitled, “How to Rake Jack”.  Obama the Evil has somehow managed to convince enough contributors to haul in about 45 million – the source of which is a worthwhile topic for another day – and has another 25 million from the democratic party so he’s sitting pretty.  What was interesting was the tally of the 10 Little Indians running against him, particularly the front runners.

{ Neither of the top fundraisers in the Republican primary have a broad base of support from small donors. Romney raised $1.9 million from donors giving less than $200, 13 percent of his total. Perry raised only $698,820 from small donors, which was 6 percent of his total, the lowest percentage of all the Republican candidates. } (Huffington Post)  In other words, they are corporate water boys to the core, representing the interests of the few at the expense of the many - same as it ever was.

In another unintentional bit of comedic irony, Rick “Shut up, Anita” Perry also revealed his own jobs plan, modeled on his successful formula in Texas.  Unfortunately he had to revise the first draft after his advisers informed him there weren’t enough gardening and dishwashing jobs to employ all 14 million people currently unemployed.  So he fell back on what little he knows best – servicing the energy industry.  His plan calls for drilling in Alaska and off our coasts and punching holes in every back yard across the country looking for buried pirate treasure...er, natural gas, a virtual Christmas list for the corporate bosses that keep him in good scotch and a list to make McCain and Palin light up with pride.  Shill baby, shill...

The fact is that every republican economic policy shibboleth of the last decade – from trickle down to tax cuts to deregulation of the financial industry - has, not only not worked, it has been a complete disaster.  And somehow the only thing they can think of to propose is more of the same only say it louder and blame the black guy.  Oh, and in the case of Bachman and Perry and some of the other deeply disturbed purveyors of old testament political ideology, pray.  Good luck with that...

Thoughts on the Knuckleheads of the Round Table...

Anita Perry, wife of Rick “What the hell happened?” Perry, has been campaigning in South Carolina and she gave a speech today right out of a fever dream in which she said the following: 

She compared her husband's decision to run to seeing a "burning bush," referencing the Old Testament story of Moses seeing a sign from God. "He felt like he needed to see the burning bush," she said. "I said, good, let me tell you something: 'You may not be seeing that burning bush but there are people seeing that burning bush for you.'" 

This incomprehensible attempt at something deep and metaphorical was, astonishingly, met with knowing nods and murmurs of agreement from the confused southern Baptist audience, who quickly swept her away to the church basement for some cookies and bourbon, and stands as a successful day on the campaign trail for Rick lately. Today – after cheaply flaunting their christianity in a craven attempt to attract even the most delusional evangelical fringe – they are suddenly whining about being victimized and attacked because of their faith -in fact, another naked grab for the sympathy vote and a clear sign of how desperate they are. 

 During the debate at Dartmouth the other night, where the candidates sat around a circular table and shared their meager knowledge of economics, Rick looked like a freshman at his first pledge dance, a semi-panicked smile on his face as he sat quietly and tried his best to figure out what the others were talking about.  As Newt Gingrich sent out one blustery blast of overheated rhetoric after another, Rick could be seen contemplating Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan and counting on his fingers. 

After witnessing this mind-bending coffee klatch, it is no wonder that most republicans are still trying – unsuccessfully – to pull the “none-of-the-above” lever and get somebody else to run.  It’s like bad cable TV, when the programs on channel after channel are ridiculous or pointless or both and you find yourself feverishly flipping through all 500 in the vain hope that you’ll finally find something worth watching. 

While this absurd spectacle is going on there continue to be very important developments happening as the republican congressional leadership stealthily and relentlessly works to undermine 30 years of progress in everything from women’s rights to environmental protection - working to restrict the ability to vote and to roll back the rights of labor unions, all with the unwitting assistance of many in the national media who can’t seem to sort out the good guys from the bad guys.  The amount of breathless commentary and theatrical outrage over the Wall Street protests is a shameful indicator of the complicity of media and political types who should know better.  It is essentially making the victims of the wholesale greed-a-thon that landed the country in such a profound mess into the enemy somehow, and causing us to take our eye off the ball as John Boner and his band of thieves work tirelessly to advance the cause of the very greed-heads who tossed gasoline on the fire that was the housing bubble. 

If the people who are supposed to cover the financial markets in the press had done their jobs instead of genuflecting every time they went down on the trading floor there might not need to be Occupy Wall Street protests – bottom line.  Beady eyed speed freaks like Jim Cramer spent 10 years screaming “Buy, Buy, Buy” at the top of their lungs and never bothered to pull the curtain back and potentially spoil the gangbang going on in the back room.

There are moments of comedy, however, everyday if you just let yourself see them.  Gingrich’s bugged eyed rant about the filthy unwashed Occupy Wall Street masses who don’t care enough about anything to pick up their Slurpy cups was a good example.  Rush Blowhard lashed out with a sputtering diatribe yesterday also that was over the top, even for him, characterizing the protestors as un-American liberal tools of organized labor and pot smoking shiftless class warriors who want to kill the unborn…or some similarly noxious bilge. The guy is funny; he really is.  The problem is that tea party knuckle draggers take him seriously and there are obviously plenty of those around. 

And of course, in keeping with the opening theme of this post, Rick Perry’s garbled attempt to explain his emphatic non-repudiation of Robert “Hey, Mormons might be from outer space” Jefferrs is worth repeated viewings, if only as a way to symbolically wave good bye to one of the previously appointed “savior of the week” nominees and remind ourselves that the height of idiocy is not limited to marching through downtown Detroit in a Shriner’s parade playing Zip-a-dee-doo-dah on a kazoo…

Hell yes, it's class warfare...get used to it...

A report released this week showed that the average American’s income has declined 6.7% since 2009.  That’s the fundamental backdrop of the Occupy Wall Street protests that are scaring the shit out of the right wing and their corporate masters, and the reason the leaders of the republican party are soiling themselves attempting to broad-brush the protestors as nihilistic hippy anarchists and serial litterers.   Me thinks they protest too much, though, because they are being ridiculed and repudiated by everyone from Jon Stewart to Paul Krugman.   The more the Mitch McConnells and Eric Cantors stand and – with a straight face – try to play the class warfare card, the more they call attention to the salient facts in the debate and sound like a spoiled Thurston Howell the 3^rd wet nursed by Eva Peron.  And the facts have been laid out quite clearly:

·         The top 1% of income earners own 40% of the wealth of the country. 

·         The top 1% takes home 24% of the nation’s income.

·         The top 1% own fully 50% of all stocks, bonds and mutual funds.

·         The top 1% have only 5% of the nation’s debt

·         The top 1% take home a higher percentage of the nation’s income than at any time since the 1920’s

Now we have these same ruling class warriors whining about the Dodd Frank financial reform act, an emasculated shadow of what it should be but which contains a major reform provision – called the Volcker Rule – that is set to roll out in the 4^th quarter and which is putting the fear of the proletariat into the masters of the universe, specifically our favorite criminals, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, whose half-mad spree of ultra speculative investments was facilitated by their ability to play with the house money and who now are being forced to moderate their heretofore risky investment strategies in favor of protecting depositors from massive losses.   Gee, how unfair is that?  

Why would the government restrict the trading abilities of these geniuses?  Here’s is an explanation from an article in Fortune Magazine; it states that the Volcker Rule “would also bar them from engaging in trading schemes that would be considered to be a “material conflict of interest” between the bank and its customers”.  In other words, no more advising customers to do one thing and then investing their own money in a bet against them.   Sound familiar?  Like maybe the sub-prime mortgage market derivatives these evil carnival barkers were selling to every greed crazed speed freak investor from Iceland to LA. 

What pisses people off about these guys is that in 2008 they decided to become bank holding companies so they could have access to the government bailout programs and now they are bank rolling the republican clown posse that has been railing against the whole idea of bailouts and whose most enthusiastic backers are the intellectually incoherent tea party.  They somehow are against government bailouts of the most powerful forces behind the candidates they now support and who have them intoxicated and confused with rants about gay marriage and military service, questions of who is the most sincerely and authentically Christian and which is more of a job killer: the EPA or the Department of Education. 

At the Dartmouth debate tonight, Newt Gingrich, in a blast of righteous reverse class warfare, suggested throwing Barney Frank and Chris Dodd in jail and firing Ben Bernanke, apparently not understanding that the Fed chairman serves as set term and can’t be fired.  I think poor Newt is in the throes of a last wrenching grasp at staying alive in the race and, like a number of the others who are ostensibly still running, he has to make a splash in the next few of the seemingly endless succession of debates.   His wide-eyed, slightly off kilter rants sure don’t give him any presidential cred to me but maybe the book’s not selling and he needs whatever works to keep the benjamins coming in so his wife doesn’t bail on him.

Regardless of these exercises in jabbering non sequiturs, the fix is in; now that Christie has endorsed Romney this thing is just going to play out over the next couple of months as an amusing sideshow.  For better or worse, the big money in the republican party has settled on Mitt as the one guy – 25% favorable rating or not – who they want to carry their firewood to the village square for the Obama roast and if he can’t manage it, well fuck it; there’s always 2016 and by then the damned terrible negro will probably have things so screwed up they could run Bachman and Palin on the same ticket and win.   Romney flips positions like an insomniac but as feverishly as the desperate others try, they can’t make anything stick.  He was pro-choice and then pro-life.  He wanted to privatize social security and now ridicules Perry for calling it a ponzi scheme.   Romney has no real positions; has no zealously defended ground staked out except laissez faire capitalism.  He’s an empty suit who doesn’t make a fool of himself very often and can be counted on to press the agenda of lower taxes and party hats for the 1% and that’s why he’s going to be the nominee.  He’s not who they wanted; he’s not great, but he’ll have to do.

Do you take me for a fool; do you think that I can't see...

For the last couple of days I have been thinking about a couple of things that are prominent in the media and closely related; the Occupy Wall Street protests and, more specifically, the reaction to them, and the republican presidential candidates’ descent into madness. 

The politburo that is Faux News has spent the  last two weeks, first down playing it, then ridiculing it and now as it is seemingly gaining some traction, criticizing and demonizing it.  This is encouraging.   The other day Eric Cantor gave us a sputtering blast of hyperbole, saying he was fearful of the “growing mobs” in various cities across the country, channeling the ghosts of John Mitchell and Spiro Agnew.  And Herman Cain, former pizza magnate and CEO, showed his deep empathy with working stiffs everywhere by saying, “Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich.  Blame yourself.”  Brilliant.  Given that the tea party rabble was initially motivated by Washington’s bailout of Wall Street and the “big banks”, I wonder how that will play with them; assuming they’re paying attention.

Several prominent tea party-backed members of congress scoffed at the notion that the Wall Street protests and protesters have anything in common with their own movement, saying essentially that, well, the difference is, they’re wrong and we are right.  They completely miss the fact that the protests have basically grown organically and, while the major unions are sympathetic, they didn't start the protests; the protests were started and are being sustained by average people who are finally pissed enough to get out in the streets and make a point about who the bad guys are in the continuing financial debacle and, just as important, their complicity in it not getting better.   The initial tea party protests were about government run amock and the bailout of Goldman Sachs and Bank of Americas but I guess they were angriest that the government did the bail out; Occupy Wall Street is angry that, now that they have been bailed out, the evil bastards have turned on us all like a rabies-infected wolf nursed back to health – an 21^st century take on biting the hand that feeds you, except they've gotten away with it. 

Aside from the normal “talking heads” blather and semantic masturbation, there are more reports every day about how difficult retirement will be for millions of us, now that our pensions are being stolen away in the name of good governance, our 401k’s have had to be spent to pay upside down mortgages and our jobs have been ruthlessly shipped overseas where starving people with no indoor plumbing eagerly line up to be exploited.    It seems people who never dreamed of having to get in the streets with a sign are beginning to realize that their lives have been blown up and the guys with the detonators are upstairs in the corner office playing hide the salami with their secretaries and plotting new ways to steal the village chickens. 

And the obvious cluelessness of those called upon to comment is hilarious and unsettling at the same time.  On Faux News there was a comment that these protests will continue “until the deficit is reduced” a hilariously wrong -headed interpretation and more evidence that these clowns are just a bunch of shills for the targets of the protest and the republican party that continues to empower them.   Jason Linkins, in his Huffington Post blog says it perfectly; “but it's a result of Obama being on the wrong side of that war, (class warfare) -- under the Obama administration, corporate profits have been jaw-dropping. Occupy Wall Street isn't an army ready to fight a new class war, it's an encampment of refugees from the losing side of the last one."

On the campaign trail, there is starting to be whiff of fatigue and “who gives a shit” as the 8 or 10 or 25 remaining republican candidates try desperately to hold on long enough to raise some more money to get to the next town to try desperately to raise some money, to…well, you get the idea.  Aside from Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich, both of whom seem to be less interested in being elected president than they are in selling books and commemorative coffee mugs, there continues to be a mad scramble for money or headlines or both by the confused and awkward prom dates the right is left with now that, one after another, those deemed more attractive and electable have decided they would rather stay home and wash their hair than bother trying for the White House at this point in history.    

Michele Bachman this week made a grim campaign appearance in Iowa in front of a dwindling number of her fans and admirers, exhorting them not to settle in choosing a candidate but to choose someone who is “pro-life, pro-god and pro-marriage”.   Her faltering campaign is sinking fast; meanwhile she says she would reinstate Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell, because the military is no place for sex.   She has introduced a bill, universally ridiculed, that would require a woman choosing to get an abortion to have an ultra sound anyway, complete with audible heartbeat, a procedure with no medical benefit whatsoever and the epitome of government intrusion into our private relationship with both our physician and our god.  It’s nice to know that by Thanksgiving she’ll be back in Minneapolis using her time more sensibly, trying to turn gay men back into straight men and giving Marcus backrubs and helping him sort out his feelings.

Newt, meanwhile, appeared on Faux News and laid out a clear but, sadly, Gestapo-like plan to drag any judges who make a ruling he doesn't like in front of a congressional committee / interrogation chamber, a spectacularly inappropriate flaunting of the constitution from someone who purports to be a member of academia; seems more like the actions of the consummate snake-oil sales man.  This sort of extra-constitutional manipulation seems to be the flavor of the month with the republicans these day, as Batman & Robin…uh, I mean John Boner and Eric “I’m scared shitless of the nasty protesters” Cantor demonstrate daily, with the able assistance of McConnell and Paul “No, really; it will work” Ryan. 

At the Family Values Hate-fest, Rick “I don’t even know this guy” Perry was introduced by Robert Jeffress, who called Mormonism a cult, just to get things started off on an unambiguous note.   Rick has been busy trying to figure out how to reconcile his vision of government with the rampant pay-to-play gig he had going on in Texas, and the continuing revelations that even Michele Bachman is talking about.  And of course his inept attempts to get both feet in his mouth almost every time he speaks publicly complicate this task enormously.

Huntsman, in the straw poll associated with this exercise in pandering, got exactly 0% of the vote, demonstrating both his limited appeal to republican primary voters and the characteristic that makes him the least noxious of the whole crew. 

Santorum gets my vote as the guy I least want anywhere near the big board in the room with the red phone and the button.  The guy is nuts.

It seems to me more and more likely that there is something fishy going on in terms of the choice of candidates available.   Obama couldn't be more vulnerable and with good reason.  He got dealt a shitty hand initially and then folded about 20 consecutive times before he finally has decided that maybe he should stop negotiating with these clowns who keep killing the hostages every time he pays the ransom.   But that’s not nearly enough; not yet.  You would think that the best and brightest on the right would be clamoring for a chance to win the big prize but instead we get this bewildered flock that keeps wandering around the country in a roving dunce contest.  It doesn't add up and I can’t help thinking that there is more going on here than meets the eye. 

"Christ you know it ain't easy...you know how hard it can be...the way things are goin'..."

Charlie Rose recently interviewed Jeffrey Sachs, author of the book, The Price of Civilization, in which he posits that, for the last 30 years or so our over-heated consumer culture combined with the rise of globalization and its concomitant loss of jobs long held by uneducated but hard working men and women, has caused us to come apart at the seams and abandon the whole notion of one nation under god, that requires us to all pitch in and share the burdens of growing our economy and seeing to our mutual prosperity.   Our political parties are unwilling to ask us to face the truth and furthermore, in the case of the republicans, are actively engaged in maintaining the continuing the fictional narrative that has the America we knew and loved ruined by waves of non-white immigrants, wasteful and underhanded politicians, excessive taxation and a “wimpification” of our culture, personified by gay marriage, nanny state welfare, and tree hugging with our pants down.  

Our biggest failure – and one that the neither party is willing confront – is not adapting to the new global economic reality.  Things have changed in a deep and profound way and yet the Obama and the democrats just keep changing the band aid and the republicans’ answer is to lower taxes on the wealthy.   Nobody has the balls to come out and say that many of the lost jobs will never come back, that it might take 5 to 10 years to turn things around and we need to have higher taxes – yes, I said higher taxes – if we are going to pay for all the things that we value as a nation. 

Republicans – and the tea party rabble in particular – propose that the only thing government should pay for is a defense establishment, (and maybe hookers and vodka), and the democrats are too drunk on campaign contributions to cobble together a big picture narrative to oppose that view.  If we continue down this path we are in for a brutal decade.

Mitch McConnell gave a speech today on the senate floor, once again dissembling like a madman, lying and distorting and misrepresenting everything in his hyper-partisan path.   This guy is so slimy you should throw salt on him to make him go away.   He accused Obama of seeking “partisan tax hikes fourteen months before an election”, the poor innocent waif, and said those tax hikes “won’t create one single job”.  Funny, but he and John Boner and the rest of the republican intelligencia seem to think that the tax cuts they want, 14 months before an election, will create lots and lots of jobs.  Either that or they don’t give a shit about jobs, since their corporate masters have been shipping jobs overseas for the last ten years in the name of globalization.  

They talk about globalization as if corporations are so altruistic and open minded and willing to embrace their fellow man, when in reality if they weren’t raking in money from moving operations off shore they would be rinsing and spitting after even saying the word, overseas.  But since the piles of cash they are sitting on comes in large part from operations and customers overseas, they aren’t particularly concerned about doing anything or sacrificing anything to create jobs here.  Why should they bother?  There is a crisis in our culture, in which an overstimulated and consumption-driven populace, in a ferocious quest for wealth, now suffers shortfalls of social trust, honesty, and compassion.  The quest for wealth has turned us against each other and allowed the republican party that is in bed with the wealthiest among us to seem as if they are trying to help the striving citizens achieve their dream.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Rupert Murdoch was also interviewed recently and among the usual self serving gibberish he spewed, he admitted that the only reason he hired Sarah Palin was that “she was hot and got ratings”.  In other words, he couldn’t care less about what she said – she never speaks in complete sentences or has any idea what she’s talking about anyway.   He only wanted her in his stable of idiots because it would make him money, the same reason he has Bill “Pinhead” O’Reilly and Sean “Obama is from Mars” Hannity.  This flies in the face of the opinion of tea party kingmaker and grand high exalted pooh bah Jim DeMint, who has decided, after having a few glasses of absinth, that Palin is as important a figure in modern American politics as Ronald Reagan.  Now we can argue about that point – to me Reagan has always been that amiable dunce described by Clark Clifford - but there is no denying his impact on the American political landscape.  It’s like he was an asteroid sucked out of its orbit that landed in the heartland and the crater is still smoldering.  Palin, on the other hand, hit the scene like some two-drink minimum pole dancer who was plucked from obscurity to run for Hockey Queen.  

What is striking about the jockeying for position going on by the republican candidates is this; we now have no Palin and no Chris Christie.  We have Ron Paul continuing to be marginalized, (that’s crazy Ron…wink, wink), a fistful of also-rans in Santorum, Gingrich, Cain and Bachman, and what seem to the chosen ones – Romney and Perry.  Does any right thinking republican strategist think they have a winner in that group?   It certainly appears that Romney has the best chance and also appears that Perry is being abandoned – when Faux News starts dissing you and Michele Bachman feels free to start speaking in tongues about your well known cronyism in Texas, you have a problem.  So what is the end game?  Are these guys the best they can do?  Or is it that the country is so fucked up that no sober republican wants to be put in charge? 

Thomas Friedman recently was quoted talking about the time being right for a third party candidate and I am feeling like that might be the best way out.  I put an Obama bumper sticker on my car the other day and was flipped off three times within 2 hours, an admittedly unscientific way to assess his chances but it made me deeply uneasy.  I think he is a good man – certainly much better than the rag-tag clown posse opposing him – but he is getting bad advice from all sides and may not have the vision necessary to run this country right now as it lurches around dangerously like a rhino that just woke up after an all-night bender at the water hole, (goddamn gazelles are crazy, man...).  In the last couple of weeks it seems that maybe somebody close to him got his ear and said, Hey Barack; the ship is going down.  It time to stop bailing and get the hell off and move the flag somewhere else to fight another day.   I think he wants to do the right thing but at this point, the right thing is going to be really hard to do.  Maybe if Bachman and Perry pray for him…

It alright John, I'm only dancing...

John Boner has decided that it is appropriate for the American tax payer to pay a private law firm 1.5 million dollars to defend the Defense of Marriage Act since Attorney General Eric Holder – and many other individuals and jurisdictions across the country – have decided it is fundamentally unconstitutional and therefore not worthy of defending.   

Unfortunately Nancy Pelosi and some of her democratic colleagues missed the point entirely, railing about the cost which, in the big picture, is a rounding error.  Nancy – try to stay off the prescription drugs for a few days and stop making a fool of yourself and your party.  Get a clue… The point isn’t that Boner and his clown posse are spending a million and a half hiring Washington hired guns who may or may not be worth it.  No, the problem is that the republican party, a party rife with perverts, closet queens and serial adulterers like Newt Gingrich, gets itself into a biblically inspired lather over gay citizens getting married.  As cultural warriors learned in California, this is really a non-starter, since the basic presumption of the DOMA is that gay marriage harms someone and, hard as they try, harried Christian soldiers can’t prove anything like that. 

But since the obstructionist republican congress has seen fit to leave an unprecedented number of judicial vacancies empty, who knows how this may end up being litigated.  We could have some conservative judge hearing arguments wearing nothing but a thong under his robe while muttering old testament verses and doodling penises on his desk blotter.   But we can’t worry about that now.  If it ever gets to the supreme court and is argued logically and covered fairly by the press, it will be very interesting indeed to see if The Nine can resist their activist conservative inclinations and send this ridiculous sideshow out of town once and for all. 

But that doesn’t mean Boner is any less ridiculous for obsessing over something like gay marriage at a time when we have far more serious issues to deal with and therein lies the problem in our little biosphere of a capital; Boner and his troops have been in election mode for at least six months now, with the election only just now a year away.  They are pissing away an opportunity – created by the appointment and task of the “super congress” – to work on real solutions to real problems for a majority of people in the country and instead chose to spend time, energy and - sure - money on something that frankly most of the country is over.  Gays are mainstream and their being allowed to marry – for better or worse – is inevitable.  But since it is a divisive social issue sure to rile up the super-partisan knuckle-draggers who form the republican base, lets worry it like a dog, (a Labrador?), with a chew toy so maybe no one will notice us changing the voting laws in 20 or 30 states to systematically disenfranchise voters who smell like democrats. 

This under the covers move by former Faux News blowhard and quasi-Hitler Youth John Kasich and anti-middle class autocrat and union busting Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker stood to be the stealthiest anti-democratic move in years until it started getting media coverage and now Obama’s keystone cops justice department is investigating, which should at least give the bastards pause.  Walker is a Reagan disciple and another true believer who is also anti-choice, against giving prisoners time off their sentences for good behavior and in favor of teaching abstinence as the favored birth control method  - oh, and cutting government spending.   These two and a number of other newly minted tea party heroes have systematically moved to change voting laws and procedures to make it more difficult for students and other non-republican white bread patriots to vote next year in a blatant attempt at denying the vote to political enemies – you know; sorta like Idi Amin or Stalin...or even George Wallace before he went and got himself shot and turned into some kind of weird folk hero.   Let’s hope dragging the weasels into the light of day and maybe into court will stop them before they steal the vote.

Dick, Dick, Dick...I don't even know you anymore...

Semi-lucid war criminal Dick Cheney, while expressing solidarity with Obama after the drone strike that killed US citizen Anwar al Awlaki in Yemen, also insisted that Obama apologize for his speech in 2009 characterizing the Bush administration as a bunch of torturers, (I’m paraphrasing), claiming that the administration never tortured anyone and hadn’t flushed our traditional values down into a rancid cesspool with extraordinary rendition, water boarding and all of the other nefarious practices now seen by most clear thinking people as an overreach at best and disgusting and counterproductive foolishness at worst.   Right, Dick.  And Vlad the Impaler was just a misunderstood guy with anger management issues.  Why anyone pays any attention to this ridiculous gasbag other than to prosecute him is a mystery to me, just as it is a mystery why someone like Chris Christie would want the garbled endorsement of Teutonic prince regent and notorious law-breaker Henry Kissinger, a man who to this day is deathly afraid to show his face anywhere in Asia for fear of being “Pinochet-ed” into a dank and stinking jail cell somewhere, never to be seen again.

Cheney’s flailing attempts to justify what are now widely held to have been illegal and unconstitutional actions emanating largely from his office are pathetic.  When a “put up your dukes” warrior like John McCain calls you out and says flat out that it was torture you probably should just shred your passport, shut up and hope nobody comes knocking on your door with a warrant. 

The variety of voices criticizing the Obama administration’s reliance on drones to play kill Waldo with the al Qaeda leadership should give him pause.  It appears to be a low risk way to discourage them and the Taliban from getting together for fund raising car washes and bake sales but it is not ultimately making us safer and if the Pakistani security apparatus gets fed up enough with us pissing on their shoes to cook up another coup and install a more radical government we’d have more to worry about than who's living in what cave.  The single scariest foreign policy issue today is the nukes in the basement of the Islamabad post office.

Ron Paul’s overall political platform may be a little suspect and he is way too Libertarian to win the republican nomination but his foreign policy is admirable and he’s right about this.  Obama went too far in trying to increase his tough guy cred and defang the traditional republican aphorism that the democrats are soft on national security matters.  It’s bad enough that the state can kill citizens it deems to have committed a capital crime; Rick “Let me pull the switch” Perry and his well oiled Texas execution machine being the most efficient, unflinching and unapologetic example.  But deciding that a citizen living abroad – even one spewing the kind of toxic and hate-filled rhetoric as al Awlaki – is a worthy target for assassination, we are treading on a very slippery slope once trod mostly by the KGB.   

Apparently some genius inside the Justice Department wrote a John Yoo-inspired memo that purports to provide a legal justification for the assassination of US citizens abroad for saying the wrong things, without proof that they’ve done anything.   This follows in the twisted tradition established by Cheney and his half-mad cabal of closeted Brown Shirts serving the clown prince, Bush the Younger.   So Obama thinks he has license to go to any length necessary to take the fight to al Qaeda and the Taliban bastards who won’t stand still long enough so he can throw a straight right hand.   We’ll chase the tattered rabble right into the town square of some godforsaken stucco compound and use a Predator drone to blow it all up if it means we can take out some ersatz Tokyo Rose in a dish-dash.

After the candidate Obama used the perfidy and avarice of the whole Bush criminal enterprise to get elected, he decides that using a gun in a knife fight is a pretty good idea, if for no other reason than the entire ridiculous Afghan adventure has no foreseeable end game and therefore he has no reasonable option other than to say screw it, just take some people out and hope for the best.    Unfortunately this lends credence to the past high crimes and misdemeanors of Cheney and his half-baked band of reactionaries and makes Obama and this administration no better, a truly tragic outcome and maybe the perfect metaphor for the whole stupid adventure of the last ten years. 

Another week, another blast of indecision...

How did the responsibility and blame for the economic crisis – the mortgage mess and all of the accompanying shady dealing, unemployment, fear and loathing - shift from the geniuses on Wall Street and their political accomplices to Obama?  This is the really impressive sleight of hand performed by Faux News and the republican party.  Now there are ten candidates, all trying hard to pin all of the country’s problems on one guy; the guy who was elected to try to fix them and who has been obstructed at every turn and every step of the way by congressional leaders who are determined to see him fail.  How is that OK? 

This week once again provided evidence that there is some secret test the republican presidential candidates have to take to verify they possess the necessary level of idiocy before being allowed to run.  It is no wonder that republican audiences, such as the one assembled at the Reagan Library for some sort of celebration recently, are clamoring for Chris Christie – or anyone, frankly – to get in the race, because the woeful field so far seems to guarantee Obama a second term and to the rabidly anti-Obama true believers, that’s their worst nightmare.

“On day one we will immediately begin to change government so it starts serving the will of the American people.”  This quote is from Newt Gingrich’s web site and begs the question; what is the will of the American people?  And more importantly, how in the world do you think you know what it is?  You’re cruising the Med with your trophy wife, (#3), and running up a six figure tab at Tiffany’s and you think you know what the American people want or need?   Hilarious…In a recent interview I saw he kept repeating that the reason he is going to win is that he’s the only candidate whose ideas are “big enough”, an inexplicable phrase but one he clearly thinks will resonate because he said it three times in a 5 minute interview.

He has laid out a ten point plan in a new “contract with America”, itself a tired “big” idea that he used to screw the GOP and lose control of the congress for 10 years when he was speaker of the house.    Among the ten, nine are variations on the corporate welfare that is at the heart of republican party theology, (increase domestic energy production, with “from oil and gas exploitation” left unsaid), with only a nod to “investing in brain science” to show his humanity while he goes door to door with the storm troopers taking back food stamps and poor folks’ satellite dishes. 

Meanwhile, Michele Bachman, in a flurry of forceful speeches that, unfortunately completely missed the point, tried her best to slam Obama by saying the Arab Spring uprising were his “fault” as if millions of people rising up against dictators and oligarchies and embracing democracy is somehow a bad thing, presumably because it somehow lets the infidels get closer to the temple and threatens Israel and, by extension, her Old Testament hallucinations.   That the republican party – and the entire foreign policy elite for the last 60 years – has made a policy of Nixonian repolitik and coddled cardboard cutouts of leaders as long as they played ball with us is an ongoing embarrassment and the change in US policy  over the last three years maybe the one thing Obama has gotten right.  But the voices in Bachman’s head won’t let here accept the idea that just maybe the vast non-white majority in the Middle East may have a legitimate point of view. 

But, saving the best for last, there was Rick “Let me start over” Perry’s first major domestic policy speech,  in which he touted his record on taxes, health care, employment, and the environment while he has been governor of Texas for the last 10 years.    Let’s see…Texas is tied with Mississippi for last – or maybe it should be considered first – in the percentage of jobs that pay the minimum wage, or less.   Nearly 1.5 million Texans have dropped below the poverty line while he was busy creating his famous 1 million new jobs.  Texas also leads the nation in the number of its citizens that are uninsured and children that go to bed hungry, prison population and executions while also having the lowest high school graduation rate.  Wow, sounds like a god damn paradise to me. 

His wife reportedly defending him this week for his sputtering performance in the last debate, saying he never had a debate coach or a speaking coach, as if hiding his inconsistent policy positions and questionable record in Texas with a smoother delivery is the answer.   If he thinks offering up his Texas “miracle” is all he needs to clarify to win the hearts and minds of voters, he is dumber than he seems.  Or we are…

On a lighter note, an East Bay Velero gas station was robbed one recent morning at 3:30 AM by six people wearing Halloween costumes.  They took a fistful of cash from the till, a couple of six-packs of beer and twenty packages of condoms.   Must have been a really good, but really early, Halloween party.