I've been listening to stories of desperate wingnuts, working for insurance lobbyists, disrupting town halls held by our representatives who are returning home to speak with their constituents...One story reports attacks so aggressive that a certain senator had to be escorted out of the meeting in his own state! My God, when will the American people tell these corporations that they have no audience? When will we just say no? Can we not even have our own local meeting without outside interests importing people to disrupt our communication with our representatives?
Keith Olbermann is back. Its unclear how long he is actually back for or if MSNBC would be crazy enough to get rid of him, but he named O'Reilly the second worst woman in the world for a bald faced lie that he caught him in on tape, and then proceeded to pass on this very real information. There is an election next year, and if its preferable for you to have Corporate America in your business and controlling your life, then just keep electing these people. If you've had enough, start taking names and planning on who should go; that's a bipartisan suggestion.
Remember, those of you who are bristling against a government being too involved in your life, the insurance companies have all of your information and they are selling it to their closest partners if you don't read the tiny print and fill out a form and get it back to them! Any claim that sounds insane, such as that under the government plan, which is merely a choice, we have to decide how we want to die and when we have to die, is not true....if it sounds crazy, its likely not true. Read the bill people...its important enough to take the time and at least skip around in it...read it here. The let your representatives know what you want, and let them know that the lobbyists that are giving them huge donations must stop with their guerrilla tactics! It has to stop NOW!
I have doubts about America moving forward without investigating what happened during the past 8 years and addressing it strongly through the laws of the land. I've long thought Bush and Cheney should have been impeached; pretty much from the start, and at least by now that some special prosecutor should be looking at what happened. The toothlessness of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the rest of them, was and is maddening with that old line about moving forward and not dwelling in the past; we wouldn't want to appear like we're dwelling on...er...laws, the constitution, or anything like that....it seems like they all swing between feeling some helplessness about being able to actually get the support they need to investigate fully, and the old forget-the-past-and-move-on line. I guess that with the media the way it is, we always stand the chance of being looked at as dwelling on something that's over and done with; now what are we gonna do?
Well, get with the program or get outta the way; these days I'm all about the blame, the ounce of flesh and rehashing the past, who pays and who slips past, who ends up in jail, at the Hague, or crudely hung while dirty Americans in bars pump their fists in the air. This is about creating a record so that future generations, hell the generation growing up now, see that no one is above the law and that America doesn't operate this way. Blindly moving forward just to create space between us and the crimes serves no one in the long run. It does maintain the status quo, which is more comfortable for alot of people, but isn't that what got us into this in the first place? The questions once asked in high school and college level civics and government classes have all fallen by the wayside in an educational system that is barely able to teach the 3 R's, and without the knowledge of how things are supposed to work, people expect less from their elected officials. Punishing those who break the law is less about a pound of flesh and more about preventing a repeat by looking hard at who we've become and who we want to be; how far have we strayed from the founder's ideals of who we might become. You don't get to erase the past 8 years....ignoring the past is guaranteeing that we will repeat it.
The news of interrogation tapes from Guantanamo being destroyed during the Bush years is no real surprise to me, but news of existing evidence being destroyed by the last vestiges of the CIA is troubling, to say the least. More scary are the newly released Bush memos detailing that what was supposedly the insane ramblings of conspiracy theorists were not so far from the truth. If Bush and Co. had their way, America could easily have been turned into a police state in which the president could order a lockdown of all citizens at any time, and a suspension of our rights. This is dangerous stuff, and if they ever were trying to deny that innocent people were seized and renditioned to other countries, held and tortured, well, these memos are the groundwork by which all Americans could lose any semblance of due process or privacy. The government would only have to decide that the country was in some sort of danger. It could happen in committees where top officials hold up vials of white powders and show tubes and maps...oh, wait a minute, that already happened.
This material is a smoking gun, and its not like its the only smoking gun out there...the Bush administration boldly went about their business above the law because they really believed that they were above the law. The question is, can a country of laws continue on any reasonable path towards healing if we skip over these criminals and the evidence right in front of us? Shouldn't we at least be afforded a special prosecutor to just go over things a little? The shredders are whirring somewhere in the bowels of the gulags where shit went down....what are we going to do about it? Why hasn't Obama put this all in a state of investigation, frozen so that no more evidence could be destroyed? Where are the special prosecutors?
I'm waiting to see what the Obama line on this is gonna be, and I'm not all so positive about it. And so far he seems to be distancing himself from what the law folks are doing, which is neither here nor there. He did make the memos public without much fanfare, and it seems like any real lawbreaking will be responded to with an actual investigation rather than a pardon, but, I'm not sold. As much as I like his populist way of coming to the American people and laying it out on the table that we have a choice of who we want to be. This is a choice that we have to make and stand behind before our doors are kicked in and our treaties are canceled at our leader's discretion.
I love to see Obama speak, and its refreshing not to have to spit at the TV or run to turn down the sound of the voice of that sneering madman, but I can already feel the malaise of the thousands of people out of work or working 3 jobs and barely making it, just coalescing. It seems like we're in good hands and we're all so busy, so why not just let them try to handle it as best they can?
Regardless of how selfish we want to be in keeping more money in our own accounts, it must be clear that what the Bushies had in the works was the actual dismantling of our system in the guise of a tax break or a stim check. I've lost all faith in any politician actually standing by an idea as big as prosecuting an ex-President and an ex-Vice-President, but in my hopes and dreams I envision a world where a leader is bold enough to just say fuck it and throw politics to the winds to do whats right. Those sorts of leaders usually go down in history, but they don't necessarily have long lived careers (or lives for that matter.) There is a tremendous fear in the government that if we start prosecuting wrong doers, we may be knocking on alot of doors; but isn't it time?
This past weekend I turned on Sunday's This Week with George Snuffleupagus, and saw that no less than Karl Rove was on the panel. There he was sitting at the round table, spouting his beliefs and ideas, as if hes not a criminal and as if George and every other idiot there hasn't been masquerading as a news person at one time or another, or at least as a public servant. How does it work that this guy gets his great American second act before he even responds to the subpoena? How can news people sit on a round table with him as if nothing is wrong? Who are they inviting next, Bernie Madoff?
Even Arianna could not believe her eyes, and thank god in a way, for the netroots and all of my politically astute friends out there, because when this whole thing began, back in the dark days of Bush's first term, I felt so crazy and lost and alone. But with the gelling of the force there, I knew that as much as I was shaking my head and saying no-no, so were thousands across the country opening their laptops to begin the day..."today I saw a living nightmare commenting on my president's bailout package, as if he has anything to say to us ever again!" As Arianna said, this is no way to keep your viewers at a time when TV is on the way o-u-t.
Just because Rove has a certain amount of expertise in advertising and the old bait and switch, does not mean that he should be given a platform. He sat at the right hand of someone who may be one of the worst criminals in history. Why is he being elevated like this? I guess that its because the punditocracy seems to want to normalize him and therefore lessen their own guilt, as well as keep their bridges to the bad guys because it's likely they will be in power again at some point...I don't know anymore; none of it makes any sense.
So, he gets to sit there all nice and social and give commentary on Obama's strategies? There is something wrong with that picture and I'd prefer to not have him on the screen when I turn on the TV on a bleary Sunday morning. They've had their say and they actually lost big time on the merits of whats happened. So its safe to say that the old Rovian terrorizing of the masses, until they cant think straight or look at evidence, is over. I have no interest in his ideas...not at all.
Time Magazine isn't my favorite read. I tend to shy away from those weekly rags that encapsulate what they think you need to know of the news. They do, however, have something interesting online from time to time, and I caught something this week that I found so interesting that I had to...um...borrow a copy from the gym so I could read it in hard copy. Its the Faith Healing issue, and it has, by the way, a great little piece on how boomers are taking over FaceBook...kick ass!! (And if I hadn't un-friended my niece I would send that link to her, because she seems to think that the thing belongs to the college aged kids with no spending power....as if anyone has any anymore.) But, the piece that got me was about The 25 People to Blame for the Economic Mess We're In., and its lineup of the expected suspects, most of whom I won't go into here because you can follow the link over there if you're really interested in what Time thinks, (and I'm ultimately not).... its the attitude that gets me.
At Time they see fit to barely scratch the surface of the problem, and present it as a faux lineup, with heads crudely pasted on fake bodies or some such silly photoshop. There is Bush and a whole mess of movers and shakers that we may or may not know. And smack dab in the middle is YOU, the American Consumer; come on now, take your medicine! You got yourself into this and now that you cant get yourself out of it you're gonna complain and ask to be bailed out? Wait a minute!
I'm going to try to explain what I've had circling for days only to gel today in light of old Karl sitting there, and I'm gonna do it without slanting things towards my own socialist tendencies and without letting the American consumer off the hook:
Americans are bombarded with advertisements that imply that the American Dream is just a credit card away. We are offered cards upon checkout at every store from Target to Tiffany's, and promised 15% off our purchase that day if we sign up. Most of us have many of these cards, not realizing that they are mostly owned by a few big banks (aka Chase usually...Chase owns just about everything these days.) We've been fed a line and promised certain things that are explained in small print, too small to read, and we've signed up gladly because next week's paycheck will surely come and we'll surely pay that off. Of course the interest rate is 21% or more, and if we don't get the entire balance paid that month, or within the designated period, the 15% we saved is only an offset of that for the first month. Everything is like that these days; nothing is simple as things were even 20 years ago when I was putting things on layaway and not picking up the merchandise until I had paid it off!
The get-it-now, need-it-now culture has sprouted out of nowhere, but it couldn't have happened if the banking industry hadn't become more and more reliant on the consumer credit part of their business. It used to be hard to get a credit card, and then suddenly every kid was getting offers and you didn't have to have an income or a credit record. You can shake your finger at the people who signed up for mortgages they couldn't afford and didn't understand, and people who lost track of the money needed to support those plastic cards, but not without noting that deregulation has allowed for the biggest advertising schemes in history to dupe us all into believing that we could have it all! And more, that ALL was not good enough. If you had the house you needed the bigger house....if you had the bigger house you needed to win the lottery. The American Dream has become more, more, more; and I'm sorry, but that little secure job and comfy life on the cul-du-sac just wont cut it. That's because we are AMERICA! Look comrade, at a point, you gotta decide whats the norm, and if what you aspire to, like the rest of us, is winning the lottery, well, chances are stronger that you'll get hit by lightening. So maybe its time to set out some basic norms, so that we aren't struggling to achieve what has been presented to us and what is unachievable.
All of American life has become predatory...how many of us can really make it on just our incomes without relying on credit from time to time, or all the time? Its not just that credit is an integral part of the capitalistic landscape, its that our culture has turned on itself and somehow we find ourselves in a situation where it matters little if the purchaser/borrower loses everything, so long as the predatory bank is bailed out.
Now, that predatory bank that I owe a certain amount to on a card has been sending out fliers. I often find some blowing down the street and they sit unread in garbage cans. Those fliers, it turns out, say that the cycle is being made smaller and the minimum payment is being raised. At that point, if like me, you have automatic payments set up from the bank and you're not checking all the time, you're screwed! The deal is this, you get called on the day you're late, and as you're saying that your payment isn't due till next week and rifling through the stack of bills, they offer you a deal to pay on the phone for a small fee of $14.95....then, since you're late, they charge $39 as a late fee. Oh, and that thing they used to do when you went over your limit where your card was denied? Most of 'em don't do that anymore; instead they allow you to go over your limit and then they charge you an overlimit fee!...oh, and by the way, in the other little flier with tiny letters that you may or may not have gotten in your junk mail there was mention of how they were lowering your limit....so chances are you don't know that a card that had $1000 on it actually now has half that! And one more thing, your card holder bank has just bought all the little banks and they now own all your store cards...and they've reported you to the credit bureau and in response to all of this your limits are raised, your minimum payment is raised, your credit is lowered and you cant get a consolidating loan to try to make sense of this because your score was lowered for any one of 3 or 4 reasons which range from just silly to insane! Welcome to my world!
Of course, the whole thing is stupid and we shoulda known, but how many of us are able to read the fine print legalese and fight the brainwashing....the brainwashing...yes, I said it! Besides that and more important is that many of us have been putting groceries and medical bills on these cards...forget about if there is an emergency and a huge hospital bill. So, I take responsibility for my own credit, and Ive never paid late until they started to change the date regularly, but obviously Ive only paid a day or few late and I always paid much more than the minimum! Who stops them from from doing whatever they want? You know, you can refuse these changes but then they are gonna shut down all of your cards and call in the loans...and remember, they own all the little cards too! This is all AFTER we, the tax payers, bailed them out!...now they want more! You know what? why not let them fail to hell and see what happens? Credit may be the cornerstone of business from the newspaper stand on the corner to the biggest banks, but there is no reason not to bail out the businesses that have a need to be guaranteed to their vendors or whatever. It sure would be cheaper, wouldn't it?
Meanwhile, back to my Sunday morning hate fest, and seething by now, Ive got to ask: Who is the king of brainwashing and deregulation? Karl Rove! The same Karl Rove who now gets to sit on a panel on Sunday morning and discuss Obama's bail-out stimulus plan! The same lying cheating neocon who so firmly believes in that odd somehow bigger "less government," privatization, and deregulation of everything, until the financial dealings of this country are more like the wild west than a civilized society. That's the same Rove who masterminded the terra threat and the go shopping to support your country lines. There has not been a time when Rove wasn't sitting at the right hand of the president, and therefore he doesn't deserve a place on the roundtable until hes cleared, even if its a kangaroo court set up just to smooth the transition. He has refused to answer a subpoena on many occasions, and now hes saying he will but there are always rules and things that cant be asked in the interest of national security. Well, I'm not feeling very secure, are you?
I'm also not so happy to note that he does not appear in Time's lineup of who to blame....how about looking at him as being criminally culpable in the government's disinformation campaign, causing the disassembly of how we had previously handled money in this country? Is it legal to lie and propagandize until there is little left of this house of cards? And is this someone who should be advising us on the quick progress of Obama, who is at least doing something; something that Rove didn't suggest that his buddies in the oval office do in the last few years.
This whole thing and who is to blame is really not so hard to figure out; just follow the money, pundit chairs and book deals. If the game was to loot the country and then hand the war and ruined economy over the the democrats, and then float that its Obama's problem and try to even tie it to Clinton, as if Bush had nothing to do with any of this, well then Rove is a fucking genius! The catch is that 80% of Americans believe that Obama inherited these problems from Bush, so its apparently gonna take a little more than what Rove has been trying to dish in the talking points, along with disgusting flunky "party leader" Limbaugh. So, maybe Americans are wising up and maybe, just maybe, we're sick to death of being lied to.
So, who is to blame? it seems to me that every damned bit of this economic crisis can be traced back to that day that Reagan was standing at a podium saying that large corporations don't need the government to police them! They don't need regulation; they can regulate themselves, by god!!I remember staring in disbelief at the man basically carrying out what had been planned for a long time, and what was the beginning of the end of the American Dream.
Government involvement or disinvolvement in how money has been handled in this country brings me to a very interesting piece on 60 Minutes last Sunday night. It seems that one Harry Markopolos figured out that Bernie Madoff was a fraud and he told the SEC quite a few times over many years, and they didn't investigate properly. It was quite straight forward actually, and the hedge funds in Greenwich that were making money hand over fist by putting client's money into Madoff's fund, should have realized something was amiss. Its impossible for a fund to not ebb and flow with the market, and its impossible that no one noticed that something was wrong. What seems clear is that those who were able to pull a profit from Madoff, kept raking it in in an impossible scenario that was as intoxicating as it was a ticking time bomb. Any money person could see the few things that Markopolos found, and the SEC should have looked. Madoff's neice had married an ex SEC man, and he was heard to say that he had ties with the officials. There are huge conflicts of interest in every area of this, and beyond that Madoff is such a sociopath that he is unable to even feel the pain of the not so rich people who thought they were secure only to end up having to go and work menial jobs to live day to day, its clear that lax enforcement puts a big piece of the blame on the government that we fund to police these things. New York Magazine has a great article on Madoff as The Monster Mensch, which is telling in its dissection of the making of someone so removed from what he has become, and one who clearly is a sociopath. But what interested me was the depiction of Madoff as an climber, an outsider, who upon achieving the dream and being in a position to hold court with some of the most influential people in the world of finance, still was the scrappy boy from the streets. He retained a sort of anger at the people for whom he had made fortunes, and felt "ennobled" that he had worked his way up and enabled these people to have such fine lives. Maybe the resentment was a necessary first step in the break from ethical reality, in that things would go south or had already gone south, and so a bit of anger and resentment made it all the easier to fabricate his detailed statements and lie so convincingly, while acting like he cared for his clients and employees so much. As an outsider, he created an exclusive club that people were so happy to be in that they didnt question. It reminds me of Stevie Rubell standing at the velvet ropes of Studio 54, a little balding guy who never really fit in, controlling who would get in and who wouldnt; always there was that underbelly of resentment for people not of whatever the code was for that night....the shoes wrong, the chains wrong, the party mix wrong....and regardless of the law breaking that went on inside, once you were in, you werent gonna rock the boat.
Madoff is in the lineup of Time's 25 people to blame for the financial crisis, you see, along with Chris Cox, who was the Chief of the SEC, and who didn't investigate the allegations of wrongdoing in the Madoff case. Even as Cox claims to have lacked the authority to do much, as if his hands were tied by deregulation, he still didn't stand up and blow the whistle....There were reports of wrongdoing all over the place, not just in Madoff's case, but the SEC lacked authority to investigate? It seems to me that a few people were blowing whistles and the masters of the universe who were running these supposed "regulatory" agencies lacked the balls rather than the authority. It seems that the concern over and over these days is in one's own career and future rather than ethics and logical decision making.
The money in many of these cases has disappeared, but yesterday the paper noted that Switzerland holds some 147,000 American accounts where money has been stashed tax free. Of those they will only divulge a few in current hearings amongst a particular 52,000. How can that be ethical? You know what? UBS is one of the biggest businesses in my town, having gotten huge tax breaks to build its headquarters here, and I dont see why they should be given such a huge footprint in the US if they are harboring the money of tax cheats and criminals. It has to do with Swiss law not allowing Swiss employees of the banks to implicate themselves in crimes, but shouldnt foreign companies operating in the US have to follow our laws and not be screwing us over offshore? I say shut them out of America until they pony up the names of all of the cheats. I think we might see many familiar names on those accounts, and we might recover some of the missing Madoff money as well. Oh, and those big financial operations that make Stamford the second largest trading floor in the country; operating on tax breaks meant to bring jobs to the area. Those operations are laying off thousands of people in little bursts. So, what are we getting and who is protecting our citizens?
This country is rife with really sick people. It seems that no sooner have the laws been softened than the movers and shakers begin some descent into a convenient madness that is really just a form of what happens when the Freudian id loses its social restraints. I have long marveled at the human brain's ability to twist situations to a point where it makes perfect sense to resent and blame the victim as you steal them blind. The unfettered id is not a good thing, but it is a pretty transparent thing, just like the accounts that cant possibly make the return they are making. It is the thing that we, as human animals, have been working against, towards a more ordered and kinder society. It is the animal urge to fight for resources as if they were limited in this forum where the people in question have more than any group could ever need. Either we just admit that we migrate and kill each other for resources, or we try to keep up this facade of the good churchgoing populace...the seedy underside is always there no matter what part of history you look at. The common thread is always that we strive to be better and to end violence and unfair tactics that leave part of the population out in the cold in a way that is well removed from the Darwinism of yesterday, before the decks were stacked against certain groups from the getgo.
And who are the leaders in the unfettered department; the inability to understand your effect on others, and to see how big of a footprint you have, or the air that you suck out of a room? The most ill of them all? Rush Limbaugh is claiming that prize proudly as he opens another button on his shirt because its s-e-x-y! In the following clip Janeane Garafalo and Keith Olbermann discuss the incredible pathos there, and what is great is that its just so clear that Limbaugh is a lonely, ugly, guy who is out of the loop, abhorrent, self loathing, and so even in the middle of adoring fans, he finds a way to hate, and a way to soak up the bucks; while also furthering the cause that allows him to profit off of the misfortune of our country. Rush just serves as an example of the the other half that I have struggled to understand for so many years. Its the Rovian hook and lie, the hate in their eyes that gives permission to all of the writhing ids, barely held in check out there, to go for it. Its a devilish wink and nod that lets the underbelly of our society know that its OK to take what your instinct tells you are resources, and not to feel much empathy for anyone. The fascinating thing is that with these Bush neocons, the KKK hood is off. They boldly display themsleves so that their employers will know where to send the checks. hate sells in this culture...and maybe it would be about time to ask ourselves why? Let them throw back the freedom of speech argument at us all they want. At some point we have to stop trying to be so politically correct and call a spade a spade.
Christian religions are based on the all-men-are-born-bad model, which seems to allow for alot of straying and repenting, with forgiveness by the ultimate authority a given bonus, even for the worst crimes. Darwinists see the prehensile tail and layers of pre-reptilian brain telling the human man to survive and to excel, and whats so wrong with that? Its understandable and it allows for a certain acceptance of the crimes committed in the service of resources and land. Its a hard cruel world out there in the animal kingdom, and as much as you can dress up a chimp or the human race for that matter, eventually their instincts take over. Its very hard to tell a billionaire that he has enough money, because its not about money anymore; its about pounding your chest and peeing on the edges of your territory.
Fundamentalist religion seems to be about one angle or another that allows a group to be exclusive of those who might otherwise be welcomed as a brother; meantime denying the survival of the fittest and espousing the survival of the one that follows the convenient word....and of course if you stray there is the forgiveness as well....but the whole thing seems to end in a fiery pit anyway, with a heaven goal, so all bets are off. Strange that so many of the other 50% have embraced the fringe of the fundamentalist creed.
The deregulated government and waning culture seems to ultimately free the barely contained id usually contained by the weak vessels of theory proven wrong, to wreak havoc on those who might trust in the logical and empathetic order of things. You would thinkthat in absence of some superego, a social structure might come forward to keep this all in line so that no one gets hurt. Where is the superego or even a little regulation? When did it become OK and even just part of business to state that you screwed people over but it was lawful? If the conflict of interest is between the patient in the hospital and the shareholders....when does it stop? when you've denied care because your first responsibility is to the business dealings of the shareholders? The answer is that it doesn't stop, and it may signal the end of the cycle of pure unfettered capitalism...which might mean a sharp turn back with a new administration or possibly that a tipping point has been reached and the whole thing is gonna come crashing down.
We live in whats left of the shell of a country looking over the fallout of the last 8 years, while those who are not served whatsoever by espousing the neocon ideas of yesterday, continue on in what is the cognitive dissonance of the conscious colliding with whats gone on, or just plain old-fashioned denial. Its sick and it appears sick, even to regular old conservatives looking at what has become of their party. I dont want to play games anymore; I'm tired. There is no status quo in this ever changing landscape of the spotty history of our country. There is only us deciding who we want to be and shutting down the bad influences out there. Bad begets bad, and anger begets hate and blame.... Short of using our laws, damn the torpedos, we return to the gutter that we barely have emerged from.
Get Out and Vote! Odds and Ends from a Long Campaign...
Yeah, Ive been disgusted by the self important youngsters questioning Obama's experience, or the rich folks and their tax cut concerns....like, not that they need 'em, but they just sorta like 'em! Vote, and not just for the free coffee at Starbucks...I wonder if you have to show them your purple thumb to get that coffee...and heaven knows that some of you will no doubt have to stand in line for a long time so may need the coffee. My thoughts are with those voters who will wait on lines, including my Mom (though she has that uncanny ability to get up really early ad be there before the line forms!) My thoughts are also with voters who will be blindsided by questions that are misleading at best (that was, vote NO to question one in CT!!) Bring your camera/phone/camcorder....
For your party, Bill Maher has kindly provided a party pack including a coloring map to follow along with the ice rink at Rockefeller Center, and special libation recipes to grease the wheels. Check the printout buttons and name tags...This pack is a must for every election party.
...and remember, Maron v Seder will be broadcasting live at around 9PM here. They're also on, you know, weekdays at 3PM, so tomorrow is a double!
The Seditionist blog will have a chat, which I may or may not drop in on depending on what time I get home. The link will be posted here and there.
At this point, it looks good, but I'm not counting my...well, you know...
Ben Afflek did a really funny Keith Olbermann on Saturday Night Live this past weekend...its long but pretty damned funny...if you catch nothing else, check out the special comment towards the end:
For your nervous snacking pleasure, I think its OK to finally eat those Obama heads that you've been saving in the fridge
A dutch company came up with these, and because of overwhelming interest produced the head in white as well as dark chocolate. The McCain head only came in white chocolate...and for the life of me I cant find the link to the place that was selling them; they're obsolete anyway after tomorrow....Ill keep looking for it.
What am I gonna do with this? I guess she goes down to the shelf in the basement with the Spice Girl dolls,
and Cher...We call it "mom's collection" but I wonder if I'm ever really gonna get around to that eBay listing thing I've been planning for so many months now.
I'd like to send a big shout out to the Freeway Blogger who has managed to take blogging to the next level during this nightmare and reach more people than we could imagine. I hope that he continues his work and that his followers keep on going too...I'm seeing a bit of it around here even, so...its working as a great way to get the word out. Is it possible that we may be looking at the end of our long national nightmare...? Good luck to us all...At some point some little bit of insight and logic has to dawn around the edges of things...right?
Great thanks to Colbert and Stewart for their part in opening some eyes out there! And as always, Olbermann himself....
Quick Hits and Countdown to Election Wierdness...Marc Maron at Comix in NYC...
If American life lacks the punch of a reality show to the point that we demand larger than life puppets as candidates for our highest office these days; if Jerry Springer-esque family drama played out in oil wrestling is the thing we need to fill our check-out-line reading needs; maybe we shouldn't be so fucking surprised that we pay to fully costume the actresses and actors and that the production companies...er...campaigns stand on the sidelines with the storyboard and airbrush machine at the ready. No such luck for the McCain campaign which history may look at as really a night course in performance art 101 taught by some agitprop group found in Washington Square Park. It seems impossible that any professional politicos could have run thigns exactly this badly without it being part of some sorta joke. But then, the delusional current administration did at some point drink their own koolaid and after all that inmates/asylum stuff blows over, it will be anyone's guess if we can ever untangle what part of the nightmare thats gonna lave quite a hangover in this country for a long time to come. Whats left to hope for? Well, I hope that my son might be captured by Obama's hope thing in the way that I was captured by Jimmy Carter and before that the Kennedys, when I was a kid. Maybe he can feel some feeling of being able to shape the destiny of his world before the reality comes crashing in.
Sarah Palin may well be looking towards 2012, and for the appetites of the wingnut fringe, the ongoing Palin saga should be a great diversion while Obama races to deconstruct all that the Bushies have put in place. This, my friends, is not a joke. It would behoove us to keep the lunatic fringe that Palin will lead back underground with her in mind because if we don't there wont be any excuse. I tell myself that its gonna be a good time for me to pull back from politics and to try to work with birds and just be happy...but really, its probably not going ot be possible in the long run. I can always hope though, cant I?
With an unbelievable eleven days to go, Rachel Maddow is taking over the TV-box cable ratings game with her MSNBC show, proving that even a network run my the M$M has to listen when ratings talk. The American people surely have made it clear that they want liberal voices out there, and Rachel has risen to the top on sheer intelligence and star power. Its been fantastic to watch her rise. Tonight Keith Olbermann had Sam Seder on to punditize about snarky republicans spinning Obama's break to see his grandma into some sort of air mile thievery. Sammy immediately turned that silliness into how sick McInsane is in his cold assessment of "the life of the mother" being important in the abortion issue, spotlighting how fucking cold the radical right can be when dealing with real people as opposed to test tubes of cells....and how cold McCain is in general as he would say anything to get a few more votes. This delighted me because no one is better than Sam at pointing out wingnuttia in terms that draw us all together, along with Obama, shaking our heads in disbelief at the silliness of the children in their pretend world.
It occurred to me tonight that with Rachel rising, Sam is going to be moving into the spotlight more and more. At the same time, Seder and Marc Maron are breaking ground with their web based daily live show, Maron v. Seder 3PM EST, M-F, here. Maron is currently traveling cross country with the UK Guardian and talking to a remarkable array of people from all walks of life showing us the front lines in America up close and personal. Of course, Marc also has his way of pulling even the most far-out survivalists close, and helping us to see their humanity if not really understand it. Looking at our ever morphing culture along with Marc makes it all a little more bearable...and seeing things like the plight of homeless veterans standing on line for services with our own eyes is jarring and sad. This is merely a small glimpse of what the future will be like as we pull out of Iraq and the Guardian and Air America are doign a great thing by showing us some unvarnised truths. Maron v. Seder should be on cable or even network TV...I think that they would have to tone it down for network, so it probably belongs on HBO, Showtime, or FX, daily. In any case, look for Maron to also start turning up on Olbermann etc, as he is a tremendously smart commentator with a gift for explaining issues from angles that touch on everyday people while not being so wonky as to over intellectualize them.
Lucky New Yorkers will have the opportunity to see Maron on Friday the 24th and Sat the 25th at Comix in NYC...I'll be there at some point, tho I'm not sure which show yet...I'm in transit again from CT to NYC, and everything is in flux, as usual. Come on down and see our traveling correspondent in his element...its always fun, and Comix is a nice place. Its gonna be a rainy Saturday in NYC, and you know, I love me some weather...
Love him or hate him, Michael Moore has been speaking out bravely against the total and complete insanity of the past 8 years from the get go. This morning I woke to a letter in my inbox from Mike to God, and...so clearly does it spell out whats happened to us all as Americans, who has hijacked our country, the undercurrent of ideals from nuts implying who and what we are, and how helpless we have been in the face of a construct of fear designed to immobilize us.
This insidious fear , constructed by the Rovian spin machine, has glued us to our couches and demanded that we sit on our hands while our fellow Americans and citizens of the world suffer; go shopping, is the message that we get from our leaders...don't question what is being done in our names because if we do, maybe we are less than patriotic. Even if he is over the top, Moore has bravely spoken out about the truth of this sad situation. He is also someone who immediately took action when Katrina hit, raising money, closing his office, and sending all of his resources there. That is what Americans do in the face of disaster. As the Bush administration is winding down their fiasco, maybe we can start to get back to ourselves. 8 years is a long, long time in the American short term memory, but maybe we need to start expecting a little more of ourselves and eachother.
As of yesterday New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin had ordered the evacuation of NOLA and hopefully that is moving along as well as can be expected. There is no wonderful and smooth way to get the old and infirm out of their homes and to ensure pets and property. There is no easy way to then return to destroyed homes and to try to rebuild again. Even with most of the people gone...even with a partially rebuilt infrastructure...there is no way to tell what is going to happen. The same news reports about Louisiana also apply to Florida, Texas and just anbout any Gulf region where this or the next storm could hit. From the AP:
So, direct from Mike's site, here is his letter from this morning...you can read it here or there...and be sure to look at the trailer to the new documentary Trouble the Waters which is playing in limited release right now and should be required viewing as we decide who is going to take over the mantle of Commander in Chief.
Sunday, August 31st, 2008 An Open Letter to God, from Michael Moore
Dear God,
The other night, the Rev. James Dobson's ministry asked all believers to pray for a storm on Thursday night so that the Obama acceptance speech outdoors in Denver would have to be canceled.
I see that You have answered Rev. Dobson's prayers -- except the storm You have sent to earth is not over Denver, but on its way to New Orleans! In fact, You have scheduled it to hit Louisiana at exactly the moment that George W. Bush is to deliver his speech at the Republican National Convention.
Now, heavenly Father, we all know You have a great sense of humor and impeccable timing. To send a hurricane on the third anniversary of the Katrina disaster AND right at the beginning of the Republican Convention was, at first blush, a stroke of divine irony. I don't blame You, I know You're angry that the Republicans tried to blame YOU for Katrina by calling it an "Act of God" -- when the truth was that the hurricane itself caused few casualties in New Orleans. Over a thousand people died because of the mistakes and neglect caused by humans, not You.
Some of us tried to help after Katrina hit, while Bush ate cake with McCain and twiddled his thumbs. I closed my office in New York and sent my entire staff down to New Orleans to help. I asked people on my website to contribute to the relief effort I organized -- and I ended up sending over two million dollars in donations, food, water, and supplies (collected from thousands of fans) to New Orleans while Bush's FEMA ice trucks were still driving around Maine three weeks later.
But this past Thursday night, the Washington Post reported that the Republicans had begun making plans to possibly postpone the convention. The AP had reported that there were no shelters set up in New Orleans for this storm, and that the levee repairs have not been adequate. In other words, as the great Ronald Reagan would say, "There you go again!"
So the last thing John McCain and the Republicans needed was to have a split-screen on TVs across America: one side with Bush and McCain partying in St. Paul, and on the other side of the screen, live footage of their Republican administration screwing up once again while New Orleans drowns.
So, yes, You have scared the Jesus, Mary and Joseph out of them, and more than a few million of your followers tip their hats to You.
But now it appears that You haven't been having just a little fun with Bush & Co. It appears that Hurricane Gustav is truly heading to New Orleans and the Gulf coast. We hear You, O Lord, loud and clear, just as we did when Rev. Falwell said You made 9/11 happen because of all those gays and abortions. We beseech You, O Merciful One, not to punish us again as Pat Robertson said You did by giving us Katrina because of America's "wholesale slaughter of unborn children." His sentiments were echoed by other Republicans in 2005.
So this is my plea to you: Don't do this to Louisiana again. The Republicans got your message. They are scrambling and doing the best they can to get planes, trains and buses to New Orleans so that everyone can get out. They haven't sent the entire Louisiana National Guard to Iraq this time -- they are already patrolling the city streets. And, in a nod to I don't know what, Bush's head of FEMA has named a man to help manage the federal government's response. His name is W. Michael Moore. I kid you not, heavenly Father. They have sent a man with both my name AND W's to help save the Gulf Coast.
So please God, let the storm die out at sea. It's done enough damage already. If you do this one favor for me, I promise not to invoke your name again. I'll leave that to the followers of Rev. Dobson and to those gathering this week in St. Paul.
Your faithful servant and former seminarian,
Michael Moore MMFlint@aol.com MichaelMoore.com
P.S. To all of God's fellow children who are reading this, the city of New Orleans has not yet recovered from Katrina. Please click here for a list of things you can do to help our brothers and sisters on the Gulf Coast. And, if you do live along the Gulf Coast, please take all necessary safety precautions immediately
Who is More Over the Top? Keith Olbermann or Hillary Clinton herself?
It is the season of Over the Top, and from moment to moment the most adept speakers edge each other out in the ad lib and the prepared statements of the moment...With the off the cuff, exhausted remark being the most revealing, its clear who is planning what. Personally, I think the Over the Top Award goes hands down to Hillary. In a world where people openly talk about being afraid for Obama's health should he get the nomination, wouldn't it have been wiser for Hillary to apologize to both the Kennedy's and the Obama's and then say that in her exhaustion she merely mentioned something that comes up all the time. The American public would get it. Its not something to be spoken of by the inexplicably ongoing opposition within the party, who has taken to bending the truth and numbers, to the point that it seems like maybe she IS just waiting around for the slot to open because Obama will surely be vacating it one way or another... I dunno what to think about any of whats going on...it smacks of someone telling us that they know what is better for the American people than the American people themselves. Its the "look! Shiny, shiny!" of Joe Lieberman politics that changes only to get into office and then goes on about its business...I don't like it. Here, Keith Olbermann again, because YouTube seems to be pulling these videos as quickly as they can be put up. Within this clip is Hillary's clip and transcript.
I think that he is spot on...exasperated...and I agree with him completely. This is where Hillary supporters say, "Well, you have to forgive her because she is A) tired as hell, and B) wants whats best for the country and truly believes that she knows better than we do, and C) she probably DOES know something more than we do, being in such a powerful position and all....so it follows that D) she knows that Obama will be taken out because she is on some security committee, so we'd better hold onto the devil we have...she really cares about us and will be the Hillary that we know she is, under the tough-girl act, again once she is in office... and daddy wont hit me anymore because he says he's sorry....you know the drill. This is the definition of insanity!! Look for Hillary next to try to break all laws to make a Hillary for Hillary party and run independent...I'll bet she's looked into it!
What can you say about Keith Olbermann? He expresses our anger and outrage so fully, so completely, that you just want to shake his hand and say thank you. Tonight's comment covered Mukasey and waterboarding. Why we have to be discussing this is anyone's guess in this upside down administration. Its embarassing and horrifying that grown men claim to know nothing of this practice and yet continue to allow it to be practiced in our names. Thanks Keith...History is going to remember you as the mouthpiece of a generation and a warrior against injustice.
Following is the transcript. Video to follow as soon as it is available.
Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on the meaning of the story of former U.S. Acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin.
It is a fact startling in its cynical simplicity and it requires cynical and simple words to be properly expressed:
The Presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.
All the petulancy, all the childish threats, all the blank-stare stupidity;
All the invocations of World War Three, all the sophistic questions about which terrorist attacks we wanted him not to stop, all the phony secrets;
All the claims of executive privilege, all the stumbling tap-dancing of his nominees, all the verbal flatulence of his apologists...
All of it is now -- after one revelation last week -- transparently clear for what it is: the pathetic and desperate manipulation of the government, the re-focusing of our entire nation, towards keeping this mock president, and this unstable vice president, and this departed wildly self-over-rating Attorney General -- and the others -- from potential prosecution for having approved or ordered the illegal torture of prisoners being held in the name of this country.
"Waterboarding is torture," Daniel Levin was to write.
Daniel Levin was no theorist and no protestor.
He was no troublemaking politician.
He was no table-pounding commentator.
Daniel Levin was an astonishingly patriotic American, and a brave man.
Brave not just with words or with stances -- even in a dark time when that kind of bravery can usually be scared -- or bought -- off.
Charged -- as you heard in the story from ABC News last Friday -- with assessing the relative legality of the various nightmares in the Pandora's box that is the Orwell-worthy euphemism "Enhanced Interrogation," Mr. Levin decided that the simplest, and the most honest, way to evaluate them... was to have them enacted upon himself.
Daniel Levin took himself to a military base and let himself be water-boarded.
Mr. Bush -- ever done anything that personally courageous?
Perhaps when you've gone to Walter Reed and teared up over the maimed servicemen? And then gone back to the White House and determined that there would be more maimed servicemen?
Has it been that kind of personal courage, Mr. Bush, when you've spoken of American victims and the triumph of freedom and the sacrifice of your own popularity for the sake of our safety? And then permitted others to fire or discredit or destroy anybody who disagreed with you -- whether they were your own Generals, or... Max Cleeland, or... Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame… or Daniel Levin?
Daniel Levin should have a statue in his honor in Washington right now.
Instead, he was forced out as Acting Assistant Attorney General, nearly three years ago, because he had the guts to do what George Bush couldn't do in a million years: actually put himself at risk for the sake of his country, for the sake of what is right.
And they water-boarded him and he wrote that even though he knew those doing it meant him no harm, and he knew they would rescue him at the instant of the slightest distress, and he knew he would not die -- still, with all that reassurance, he could not stop the terror screaming from inside of him, could not quell the horror, could not convince that which is at the core of each of us -- the entity who exists behind all the embellishments we strap to ourselves, like purpose and name and family and love -- he could not convince his being… that he wasn't drowning.
Water-boarding, he said, is torture.
Legally, it is torture!
Practically, it is torture!
Ethically, it is torture!
And he wrote it down.
Wrote it down somewhere, where it could be contrasted with the words of this country's 43rd President: "The United States of America... does not torture."
Made you into a liar, Mr. Bush.
Made you into, if anybody had the guts to pursue it, a criminal, Mr. Bush.
Water-boarding had already been used on Khalid Sheik Mohammed and a couple of other men none of us really care about -- except, Sir, for the one detail you'd forgotten -- that there are rules, and even if we just make up these rules, this country observes them anyway, because we're Americans, Sir, and we're better than that.
We're better than you.
And the man your Justice Department selected to decide whether or not water-boarding was torture, had decided, and not in some phony academic fashion, nor while wearing the Walter Mitty poseur attire of flight-suit and helmet.
He had put his money, Mr. Bush, where your mouth was.
So, your sleazy sycophantic henchman Mr. Gonzales had him append an asterisk suggesting his black-and-white answer wasn't black-and-white, that there might have been a quasi-legal way of torturing people, maybe with an absolute time limit and a physician entitled to stop it, maybe, if your administration had ever bothered to set any rules or any guidelines…
And then when your people realized that even that was too dangerous, Daniel Le Vin was branded "too independent" and "someone who could (not) be counted on."
In other words, Mr. Bush, somebody you couldn't count on to lie for you.
So, Levin was fired.
Because if it ever got out what he'd concluded, and the lengths to which he went, to validate that conclusion, anybody who had sanctioned water-boarding, and who-knows-what-else… anybody -- you yourself, Sir -- you would have been screwed.
And screwed you are.
It can't be coincidence that the story of Daniel Levin should emerge from the black hole of this secret society of a presidency just at the conclusion of the unhappy saga of the newest Attorney General Nominee.
Another patriot somewhere, listened as Judge Mukasey mumbled like he'd never heard of water-boarding, and refuse to answer in words… that which Daniel Levin answered on a water-board somewhere in Maryland or Virginia three years ago.
And this someone also heard George Bush say "The United States of America does not torture"... and realized either he was lying or this wasn't the United States of America any more, and either way, he needed to do something about it.
Not in the way Levin needed to do something about it, but in a brave way nonetheless.
We have United States Senators who need to do something about it, too.
Chairman Leahy of the Judiciary Committee has seen this for what it is and said "enough."
Senator Schumer has seen it, reportedly, as some kind of puzzle piece in the New York political patronage system and he has failed.
What Senator Feinstein has seen, to justify joining Schumer in rubber-stamping Mukasey, I cannot guess.
It is obvious that both those Senators should look to the meaning of the story of Daniel Levin and recant their support for Mukasey's confirmation.
And they should look into their own committee's history and recall that in 1973, their predecessors were able to wring even from Richard Nixon, a guarantee of a Special Prosecutor (ultimately a Special Prosecutor of Richard Nixon!), in exchange for their approval of his new Attorney General, Elliott Richardson.
If they could get that out of Nixon, you -- before you confirm the President's latest human echo tomorrow -- you better be able to get a "yes" or a "no"… out of Michael Mukasey.
Ideally you should lock this government down financially until a special prosecutor is appointed -- or fifty of them -- but I'm not holding my breath. The "yes" or the "no" on water-boarding will have to suffice.
Because, remember... if you can't get it, or you won't... with the time between tonight and the next presidential election likely to be the longest year of our lives, you are leaving this country, and all of us, to the water-boards -- symbolic and otherwise -- of George W. Bush.
Ultimately, Mr. Bush, the real question isn't... who approved the water-boarding of this fiend Khalid Sheik Mohammed and two others.
It is: why were they water-boarded?
Study after study for generation after generation, sir, has confirmed that torture gets people to talk, torture gets people to plead, torture gets people to break, but torture does not get them to tell the truth.
Of course, Mr. Bush, this isn't a problem, if you don't care if the terrorist plots they tell you about, are the truth... or just something to stop the tormentors from drowning them.
If, say, a President simply needed a constant supply of terrorist threats to keep a country scared…
If, say, he needed phony plots to play hero during, and to boast about interrupting, and to use to distract people from the threat he**didn't** interrupt…
If, say, he realized that even terrorized people still need good ghost stories before they will let a President pillage the Constitution…
Well, heck, Mr. Bush, who better to dream them up for you… than an actual terrorist?
He'll tell you every thing he ever fantasized doing, in his most horrific of daydreams -- his equivalent of the day you "flew" onto the deck of the Lincoln to explain you'd won in Iraq.
Now if that's what this is all about -- you tortured not because you're so stupid you think torture produces confession -- but you tortured because you're smart enough to know it produces really authentic-sounding fiction -- well, then… you're going to need all the lawyers you can find… because that crime wouldn't just mean impeachment, would it Sir?
That crime would mean George W. Bush is going to prison.
Thus the master tumblers turn, and the lock yields, and the hidden explanations can all be perceived, in their exact proportions, in their exact progressions.
Daniel Levin's eminently practical, eminently logical, eminently patriotic way of testing the legality of waterboarding… has to vanish -- and him, with it.
Thus Alberto Gonzales has to use that brain that sounds like an old car trying to start on a freezing morning, to undo eight centuries of the forward march of law and government.
Thus Dick Cheney, has to ridiculously assert that confirming we do or do not use any particular interrogation technique, would somehow help the terrorists.
Thus Michael Mukasey, on the eve of the vote that will make him the high priest of the law of this land, cannot and must not answer a question, nor even hint that he has thought about a question, which merely concerns the theoretical definition of water-boarding as torture.
Because, Mr. Bush, in the seven years of your nightmare presidency, this whole string of events has been transformed…
