Matt Taibbi's Last Appearance on Morning Joe...Also, Did Congress Sabotage Any Chance at a Public Option?
As reported by blogger D-Day, the fireworks were bright over in Starbucks-land this morning.
"Excuse me, but if America is so bad, why is it that if I got sick or one of my loved one's got sick, well America is the best....?" best, best, best? That was Maria Bartiromo on Morning Joe, arguing with Matt Tiabbi about the health insurance issue. What she didn't say is that she has great health insurance as an anchor at CNBC and so has everything that American medicine can offer available to her. And, its worth mentioning, as she spews out verbatim talking points, that she also is married to the very rich son of an investor, CEO of an investment services company, known as the "reinventor of the index fund," a company that specializes in exchange traded funds; (... supposedly a vehicle which holds certain stock and bonds, much like a bundled mass of crap, but what do I know? Supposedly these ETF's have the value of whats inside, but then so does everything have an underlying value and a possible value depending on the market...isnt it all gambling on what the value will or won't be?) which he designed himself, and Ms. maria never really has to worry or work a day in her life. Its easy to have total confidence in the American system when you are a have.
The fact that Bartiromo has such a glaring conflict in her financial reporting is something that I have never heard stated on NBC, and I'm an avid NBC viewer. Now that I've looked at the research, I have to say that I cant imagine why NBC would allow this to go on without constant disclosures, considering her stock holdings and lack of transparency while interviewing the titans of industry. She sure has a big opinion, even if it was written by the wingnuttia out there who float the talking points these days. When faced with actual figures she is comfortable stating that she just doesn't buy them because they include illegal aliens. Huh?...there are so many things I could say to that but maybe its best to just let it swelter, like a fine wine...
The great part always in all of this muck is that Taibbi has so many clear facts that he didn't need to pull the conflict of interest card, the talking points card, or the screeching over the other person card; he is unflappable, and just keeps coming with those facts. I think that's why the wingnuts are in such a ruffle over him and how he is merely a "hack." The truth, apparently, hurts.
Tweeted thusly by Morning Joe hisself:
Video: Taibbi: Health care 'can't be fixed': Aug. 20: Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi joins Morning Joe to discuss h.. http://bit.ly/3lJNUsabout 4 hours ago from twitterfeed"
Maria Bartiromo isn't a very smart person. She just tried to tell Matt Taibbi on Morning Joe that America has the best healthcare system in the world because people from other nations come here for procedures.
I feel like someone went to the mat for me and all I got was this lousy tweet! Hah!
Taibbi thinks a deal was cut from the beginning between the White House and the insurance and pharmaceutical industries and that they never intended to have a public option.
And without that the dems are not going to vote for it at all.
Taibbi breaks down the five steps Congress took to be sure no bill would pass — aiming low, gutting the public option, packing it with loopholes, providing no leadership and blowing the math — in his story, which is available on stands now. In a series of video interviews for RollingStone.com, Taibbi explores one of our system’s most severe flaws, explains how the government wedged itself into an awkwardly damning position, and looks at how the proposed bill would change the ordinary American’s life
Even a child could understand Taibbi, in these videos, explaining the situation and the obviously sensible solution. Unfortunately, the government here is run by the Insurance Industry, and the lobbyists have an army of armed, disgruntled, fringe whack-jobs out there to make sure that we don't even discuss our options. We seem to need total collapse of any particular system before we seriously look at any reality...and even then...the light of truth is just a little bright for most Americans, clutching their remote controls and chips.
Meanwhile, back here on the ground, Maria can get all the healthcare she wants or needs, so can Morning Joe and the CEO of Starbucks...but millions of Americans remain uninsured or underinsured, and its unclear what the answer will be for the rest of us in the free market; Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.... Just go here and watch the videos...and buy the new Rolling Stone! Its one of the few magazines worth having in your hands these days!
Speaking of The Crazy....Michelle Malkin Declares Backwards Day to Matt Lauer and he Takes it!
Speaking of the crazy; the bookers at NBC have decided that we haven't lived through enough outrage and crazy, so they decided to book Michelle Malkin with Matt Lauer today. Is it a slow news week or something? Did anything happen that made Malkin worthy of a national platform after the venom she has spewed over the past years. Lauer was clearly over his head on this, which is outrageous in itself. The man has years of experience as a reporter before he became a fluff morning host, so my only conclusion about his paralysis in the face of Malkin is that he is too wedded to the lifestyle that the paycheck brings to rock the boat much. They acted like he was gonna take her apart, but he hardly got a word in edgewise, and as she spewed lies and attacked President and Michelle Obama he didn't demand proof. So, once again NBC has given Malkin a platform to float lies into the American psyche basically unchallenged.
Racial Opportunist, my foot!! Look in the mirror Michelle! Who wrote a book about the internment camps being a GOOD thing? Who had the book challenged by "The Historians' Committee for Fairness," who said that it had not been peer reviewed, and that it's central thesis was ...er...false? On and on....a quick look at Wikipedia would have given them all of the information they needed!
Maybe she has a book out but I'm sure that many KKK members have "books" out as well. Just because she wrote a book, it doesn't mean that what is in it is true. And for some reason, the research department didn't prepare Matt to even question the claims that Malkin made. Just the cover alone is a tip off that its a backwards day book. She takes everything that the Bush administration was accused of, with evidence, and restated it without evidence....hmmmm...and Matt had little to say about this; NBC seems to think this is a ratings getter. I say no, its not! Stop booking crap or I'm going to boycott your sponsors. I already am boycotting Starbucks for giving Morning Joe 10 mil as a representative of what Starbucks stands for? huh? In that case I will avoid Starbucks totally and encourage my friends to do so (more on Joe at a later date.) I love Maddow and Olbermann on MSNBC, but this void in the morning between the fluff and the Joe is really difficult to parse. Keep the fluff fluffy if you must! keep the idiot Joe in a janitor closet and give Larry O'donnell his spor, or better, Sam Seder and Marc Maron! If you cant even properly research and interview the crazies, don't have them on in the morning...or invite Rachel to do the interview!!...now, that would be news and ratings! Even just someone who knows something would be preferable to this.
I, for one, am going to let republican Today Producer Steve Capus as well as the Head of NBC News, Jim Bell, know that I don't want this type of fringe character on the morning show, or any of the shows that I watch on their network.Her booking is nothing more than a silly stab at ratings, because men seem to like her looks, and they are hoping for some sparks to fly with Matt . It didn't happen and I wonder why he isn't tired of this. It was pathetic, and the fringe Malkin crowd feel like she "owned" him because he didn't challenge her insane claims. Oh well.....
Joe Lieberman; Liar for the Ages, Speaks on Single Payer Health Care....
Why oh why did I let myself start this? It was only a matter of time, if I sat here long enough that something about Joementum Lieberman was gonna come flying at me in such an infuriating manner as to shut down all other activity and force me to...rant! Here ya go: I was innocently on Talking Points Memo lifting the picture in the post below, of Al Franken's senate plaque, (which will become, I'm sure, a tourist attraction immediately, Just like the Ethics Office plaque!) when I saw this little bit of film from my Jr senator, Joe:
Isn't he brave to stand against the public option, alone in the wind? Isn't he a real mensch? Well, considering that old Joe is only in office due to a platform of lies and a twisting of the ticket, which should be made illegal if it isn't already (they were working on it last I heard,) CT was the capital of insurance in the country, and it used to be that you couldn't spit an miss an insurance agent willing to sell you some great low cost health insurance.
Then somehow, a couple of huge corporations began gobbling up the small private insurance agencies, and then suddenly they all decided in lockstep, not to write any policies at all for individuals. The next step was to create the Husky program for children in the state; a program that Joe and his buddy in war, Chris Shays, took great pride in...except that...oohh...there are very, very few providers in the southern half of the state. Reimbursement is so low, and oversight and paperwork are so overbearing, that there are very few providers for children here. Of course, the hospitals have deals with Husky and they also have the infrastructure to handle the billing, so, many low income people were forced into emergency rooms and clinics.
At a certain point, recently, actually, a company named Charter Oak came into the picture as an entity created by the state to oversee providers of a Husky like program for adults who are also unable to get health insurance. The problem there is that not only has Charter Oak taken over Husky, (it was previously outsourced, of course, with many problems,) There are no providers who will take this insurance; even the hospitals are wary.
There is a law on the books that doesn't allow any insurance company to deny private insurance to any individual due to preexisting conditions, and I realized that at a point that private insurance had crept back into Connecticut, so maybe I should check it out. But, here's the rub, they can legally deny you insurance if there is a state run plan available to you, regardless of if the plan has any doctors that take it. So the creation of the Charter Oak entity ensured that none of us could actually get insurance written for us by an agency that has providers!
The Governor has taken some flak for this, of course, and its a work in progress. If they just took the Medicare reimbursement model, but made different levels of payment depending on your income, it could be a viable option. But they won't do that it because they want to make deals with large insurance companies and drug companies themselves! When Joe Lieberman opens his mouth to say anything about insurance, he is likely to start patting his own back for being the first state to offer health insurance to all of its children.
The truth of that is pretty disgusting; a middle class income means that each child's insurance costs $195 per month. There are two huge practices with long waits and waiting rooms full of children of color, that accept the Husky program. Husky A is for the very poor, and Husky B is for the middle class and up. The closest heart specialist who takes Husky is 2+ hours away by car (if you have a car and money for gas.) A surgery on my son's legs took 1.5 years to have approved, and then was canceled on the evening before surgery when they realized that only the surgeon was approved but not the operating room!
My family pays cash for 90% of our health care, and around here if you don't have someone helping you out, or unlimited funds in the face of medical problems, you can just kiss your health or the rest of what you've built all these years, goodbye. If we were to get someone like our long term child psychologist involved, he would have to accept payment of $15 per session. He has been down that path and would prefer to see a few patients pro bono than to deal with this bureaucracy!
A pediatrician gets $19 per visit and for they they are accountable for every drug, and liable if anything goes wrong. And on top of that they are overseen by boards of nurses and "experts." The insurance companies, like Blue Cross and Blue Shield, create arms specifically for this program, so we had Blue Care Family Plan, which was Blue Cross and Blue Shield of CT, but with no providers and totally different standards for us as opposed to their corporate clients. This is how bad it's gotten: Blue Care Family Plan jumped ship because Charter Oak took over and they felt like the oversight of Charter Oak would limit them in some way. There is a profit to turn here, because Atena just created an arm for this program and signed on.
But that's not even what sprung to mind when Joementum, all wind-blown and handsome, jumped off the screen at me with his wisdom! No, its his wife, Hadassah, who is a well known big pharma lobbyist, and more recently was a consultant to Hill and Knowlton , PR firm to the unlovable and questionable, with clients such as the big tobacco firms , among others, who hired H&K to counteract the fact that smoking is hazardous to your health! These are bad people, and as much as Joe has been slaving away for the big payoff job that he should be getting from friends of Bush when he is voted out, (and he will go bye-bye, considering that he hardly has a supporter left in this state after what he did,) Hadassah has been slaving harder. Lets just say that I wouldn't worry about their retirement nest egg.
Can you say conflict of interest? Joe Lieberman should recuse himself from any talk of health care or drug coverage, and yet, he jumps right in the middle of it. And why does Joe do anything? Well, because HE knows whats best for the people of CT, and the people of America, experts and consultants be damned...he knows. Who does that sound like to you? Oh yes, George Bush, our previous president and idiot in chief!
So, If Joe Lieberman is talking about Medicare part D being a great blueprint for anything besides toilet paper, ask your local pharmacist how old or lower income people with catastrophic illness pay for their drugs when they hit the donut hole suddenly? Why is it that the most needy people in this country, with catastrophic illness requiring sometimes thousands of dollars of medications per month, are the ones suddenly hit with a bill for the pills that could mean the difference for them between life and death? Ask the pharmacist what happens, especially now that the credit card companies have turned on the people, and cut down everyone's credit limits and raised their minimum payments and interest rates?
He is worried that we are not going to have fair competition between insurance companies? That's what hes worried about? There is no competition at all. Not only can the government no negotiate with big pharma on the large amounts of drugs that they are buying but the general reimbursement prices are fixed anyway, and the insurance companies are paying their CEO's record bonuses, as they rake in dollars earned by scrambling their own drug lists and insisting that patients take older drugs that are...oh, let me see...recently I heard a referral to something that was actually speed. Its cheap and it kills!...but just so long as the CEO gets his payout!
That's what Joe is about when he speaks out as Representative of the minority of Americans who don't want a single payer health plan. He is for corporations that have more money than they know what to do with; He is for the big consulting fees that his wife gets from those very companies (and strangely, its hard to figure out where shes working these days,) and he is really about who owes him what, and when the payoff comes; because heaven knows, Joe has been bought and sold so many times, they cant even scrape the price tags off his back! Remember, this was one of the only few guys next to Bush himself and Barney the dog who thought that Iraq was going great and that we had to stay there till victory or bust!
This is disgusting, and all i can say as a resident of this state is that I wish Joe would shut the fuck up until we can vote him out!
Goldman Sachs Best Quarter Ever Means its now time for The Biggest Bonuses Ever!!
For those of you that were losing sleep worrying about the top earners at Goldman Sachs, you can relax your little minds. According to the Guardian, Goldman will be handing out record bonuses; the largest bonuses in its 140 year history! And you know why?
Well apparently Goldman has done really, really well in it's first half, and that's due to...are you ready?..."lack of competition!" Oh, there is a surge of trading foreign bonds, and whatever else they've decided to package and trade back and forth to each other in a continuation of the most deceptive ponzi scheme ever. And then, of course, the bonus structure was changed at the end of last year which made it look like they saved money; but, what they really did was to stop allowing their "talent" to take the money and run at bonus time. In other words, the stock and cash bonuses that used to be liquidly available at bonus time, now take time to ...er..."vest." So, if I'm reading http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&refer=home&sid=ao5_D4S6Zgdw correctly, the 2008 awards don't really become fully available until the end of 2009, thus creating a bullshit scenario where everything is rosy, and so we can do it again, but this time bigger!! You get that? This is when you need Taibbi to 'splain things ( especially because I haven't mentioned his fantabulous Rolling Stone article that barely scratches the surface of this mess, in a long time. And you know what? It holds up well to a couple of months of more ponzi, if you want a window into the foundational non-rules of this game.)
When last we saw Goldman Sachs and their Chiefs, it was Christmas time 2008, and they were giving up their bonuses as some attempt to distinguish themselves from their brethren (what I envision as tentacles,) in just about every area of the financial world. The big question back then was would the rest of the big financial firms follow suit, and also could top "talent" be retained without huge bonuses?
The Wall Street Journal explained it thusly:
The decision at Goldman doesn't mean everyone at the firm will go home empty-handed. The firm still has to reward its roughly 30,000 employees. Distinctions are being made between the highest-ranking executives and lower-level traders and investment bankers, according to people familiar with the matter. Many of these employees performed well in 2008 despite the market turmoil, these people say, but could get plucked away by rival firms if compensation practices are significantly altered.
and
The move on the part of Goldman's top executives is expected to set the tone for the rest of Wall Street, where bonuses are typically many times bigger than base salaries. At many financial firms, about half of all revenue is allocated to compensation, and multimillion-dollar bonuses are routinely paid out to ensure the best talent stays put. Top traders and bankers on Wall Street typically make a base salary of about $250,000, with the rest coming as a bonus. Employees tend to get their bonus numbers in the first two weeks of December -- with the cash coming early in the New Year.
And isn't it a kick that the huge fight over the roll back in Bush's tax cuts for this top tier of earners was about what turns out to be just their base salaries?! I don't know why that strikes me as disgusting, but back then, those who earned over a quarter mil were willing to go to the mat to save a few thousand dollars of that at the expense of their fellow Americans whose houses were/are being foreclosed upon, and people who's lives were basically in the toilet, largely because of the ponzi schemes that these very characters cooked up! And, yes, the salaries that these folks make are contracted with the bonuses in mind, so I suppose you cant just tear away a percentage of what they expected to earn. Its just that all of this talk of contracts and retention of employees makes me think of the fact that every time any American puts a deposit into their 401.k or even their bank account, (remember the super money market with the .02% interest,) they have a contract with those "talents" who move this paper around the globe with the promise of a tiny percentage getting shaken down to the savers. Isn't the deal that they get to use our money, even overnight, to make a huge profit putting it somewhere, and so we get a penny in our own tin cup, or cat-food can, as the case may be?
So, while Goldman is patting itself on the back for this rock and roll first half, and making sure that no real laws were broken and that everyone gets their cut of the profits, I wonder if someone might look at the contract that the entire industry might have had with us. That really should go even beyond the little loans that we floated to keep these fuckers alive. Maybe somebody could look at how it's possible for the top chiefs and the "retained talents" to walk away with the biggest fucking bonuses in 140 years while everyone I know has lost their retirement savings! Oh, its because that other guy did it, right? Like AIG? Was it bad old AIG? How come they passed most of their bailout money directly to Goldman? How did that work?
Hey, that's capitalism and the free market for ya! I may not know much about the ins and outs of this shit, but I know when I've been railroaded. These top financial institutions took our trust and in a global way raped the system. They threw back some crumbs last Christmas to try to look all sorry like, and now they are back at it.
If these firms are all in bed with each other and banks are insurance co's are brokerages, then no one should be paying huge bonuses until the entire thing is regulated fairly. President Obama just can't make new laws that fast, and the quarter mil club has too strong a lobby...and, honestly, I don't know if Obama really wants to completely overhaul this anyway, because that would amount to the S-word....and we all know that if we go down that path we may end up with single payer health care and the whole package! What would that be like?
So, all you independent and free Americans out there, be happy that the government isn't allowed to put its hand in your pocket and its rules in your bedrooms, (some of the time,) its cameras on your street corners and its taps on your phone lines, (some of the time,) because these guys removed your pocket stitching while you were busy being all free out there on the range with Bush, and the money already poured out the other end.
Elliot Spitzer is back and hes talking. The thought of this, no doubt, brings a small shiver to the boardrooms of some of the perps walking around trying to figure out how to hide the money this week. Today Edward Liddy testified that there have been death threats made to or about executives who received bonuses, so no names will be put on the record, but these anonymous players must know that the jig is up in the land of easy-money. Isn't what to do a no-brainer for these great Americans?
Spitzer may be as "disgraced" as any anonymous sex loving Republican loser, but America is known for its great second acts, and we may be witnessing the curtain rising on Spitzer's. Today in Slate Elliot Spitzer has a short op-ed that speaks volumes about what is going on, and indirectly, if you follow the money, what happened to him. Plainly stated, Spitzer brings the AIG Ponzi Scheme one step closer to the revered establishment when he explains how the bailout money was funneled straight into the top players, with Goldman Sachs being the name that comes up again and again. These top players already got bailout money, and Goldman is looking at zero losses at this point, while regular Americans are being asked to make concessions or just plain losing everything. here are the biggest financial entities in the world, making billions on what appears to have been nothing but air traded back and forth, and having gutted the American people they are walking away with 100% return to their stockholders. In return AIG seems to think that its appropriate to pay themselves bonuses with the leftover funds. This leaves AIG still a wobbly shell with no plan of how to go forward, and the threat of the collapse of all of the world's financial markets still up in the air. So, what was all that bailout money for? Apparently to make sure that no one at Goldman or the other few top firms in the hand-out-line lost anything!
The relationship between AIG and Goldman goes back long enough that one would think that Goldman would know, having bought so much of this "insurance" or whatever it was, whether the "products" were ...er...real or feasible at all. Indeed, Goldman and AIG almost merged a few years ago, but Spitzer notes that the unknown black hole of AIG's business practices were probably what prevented it. Still, that didn't stop the incestuous dealings; it almost makes one think that this whole thing was a setup.
This is country that Spitzer is familiar with; he has been a terrible liability to entities that, under the Bush administration, were allowed to literally gut the country and its citizens. All of this seems to have been part of the Bush Administration's own Ponzi Scheme, which figured that the illusion of an ownership society, terrified of the "terraism" and steeped in the me, me, me, culture would look the other way while they finished clearing out the vault. Beyond that, it's clear that the media hyped housing bubble encouraged the house flip mentality and the idea that anyone could be rich. The idea of the lottery dropping on our own heads made us more protective of the rich, because we might one day be one....or look, we could be one with no money down, if we could just balance that on this, and flip that house!!
Every week came a new offer from our bank or credit card to just put the enclosed check into the bank for a $50,000 loan, unsecured and with a low APR!! Who would know that those same banks would go out of their way to cause a day or week default by changing the cycle or stopping refusing cards that went over-limit, in order to charge fees and raise the rates. Who could know that the fine print on all those little fliers talking about privacy rights and how they are selling all of our information, also said that by-the-way the interest rate is now 25% and the minimum payment has tripled! Default on that and likely AIG has sold insurance to your lending institution that should repay them for making the bad loan in the first place....no money down mortgages? No problem....its the same story. This is the ownership society and we all need to own alot of stuff. It is... what did he say?...uniquely American!
Spitzer was questioning this back in February 2008 when he wrote his Valentine to predatory lenders in the Washington Post. He detailed that Attorneys General across the country had entered into litigation in an attempt to protect the people of their states from predatory lending. The response from the federal government was astounding!
What did the Bush administration do in response? Did it reverse course and decide to take action to halt this burgeoning scourge? As Americans are now painfully aware, with hundreds of thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure and our markets reeling, the answer is a resounding no.
Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.
snip
In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules.
But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks. In fact, when my office opened an investigation of possible discrimination in mortgage lending by a number of banks, the OCC filed a federal lawsuit to stop the investigation.
Now, they will say that they fought the consumer protection laws to actually protect the consumers and assure that they could get credit in the future. But actually, Americans could get credit; just credit that they were able to handle and could, by reasonable standards, pay back. This was just more of the same in hindsight. Looking back that all that the Bush administration has done, the beginnings of this disaster looks almost quaint, and not like an institutionalized foray into the dirty underside of criminal activity. There were quotas passed by the government as to who got the loans and the focus was on certain populations who would be helped into homeownership even if they couldn't maintain the credit. It was treated as some sort of fulfillment of the American Dream for people to own something, but really had more to do with the insurance on the loans than the people involved. The American dream is dead, as we well know, but what it was, way back then, was that people could afford to own a house and put their kids in college!
AIG sold insurance to the biggest entities in the financial world to cover the proliferation of bad loans. This insurance became so common that it was impossible that the lions of finance didn't somehow have an inkling that something was wrong. Didn't Goldman and the rest of these huge firms know something about the stability of an impossible business plan? Hadn't Goldman gone over everything in their bid to merge? And what of the government and their mandating of certain loans that were bound to go bad. There were people involved in these things, and its not like regular people understand the ins and outs of the financial industry. They rely on brokers to explain it to them. But these brokers were being forced to see a certain product to an unqualified population. How could they? Why would they? Those are questions for another time.
Spitzer has been fighting these guys and asking questions all along. Coincidentally, right after the WSJ editorial appeared on Valentine's Day 2008, Spitzer was caught up in what was an extremely unusual sting. So unusual is an investigation like this that it seems almost like it was a set-up; and considering where it all came from and how it all came down, it might well have been.
It seems that Spitzer's bank was investigating expenses under the auspices of the newer Homeland Security laws of the Bush administration. Greg Palast wrote about this compellingly, and in light of how the whole thing is shaking out now, and what Spitzer said back then about this financial mess and what he tried to DO about it, Palast had a pretty good early grasp on what had gone down. So now, with Spitzer poking his head up from the underground of "healing his family," at this most compelling of moments, its probably worthwhile for Americans to screw their heads on straight and forget the details of the hooker, and look at what Spitzer was working on when he was taken down. We might all find ourselves wanting to thank the egotistical crime fighter who cant keep it in his pants.
I am no apologist for breaking the law, and usually its the highest and mightiest that fall the hardest. But when the mainstream is showing us the shiny object, we must resist the temptation to succumb to our base natures and try to see the bigger picture. There was never a real case against Elliot Spitzer, and no charges were filed. The release of embarrassing personal information was at the discretion of the Bush Administration's Justice Department.
Why was this information released? It wasn't that he was a crusader against such crimes, because many who have been caught were exactly the same and their information has been kept quiet. It wasn't that the press is all so great in their investigative journalism, either...because we know they're loathe to get off their asses if they can just read a talking point; as is evidenced by the reportage on this case.
Not all crimes lead to federal bust or even public exposure. It’s up to something called “prosecutorial discretion.”
Funny thing, this ‘discretion.’ For example, Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, paid Washington DC prostitutes to put him in diapers (ewww!), yet the Senator was not exposed by the US prosecutors busting the pimp-ring that pampered him. Naming and shaming and ruining Spitzer – rarely done in these cases - was made at the ‘discretion’ of Bush’s Justice Department.
Or maybe we should say, 'indiscretion.'
Bush's Justice Department. Its clear to me that all things being equal, this was at the very least, not a transsexual streetwalker a la Hugh Grant, and it was all very ho-hum and quiet. So, whatever the problem that leads to this sort of behavior, I don't want to know about it...its personal, so just walk on by...nothing to see here.
Welcome back Elliot Spitzer. I hope we hear more from you very soon...your voice is needed in this matter.
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.
For Chist's Sake, Who Cares? John Edwards in the Age of Holier-than-thou Morality
Tonight on Hardball, David Schuster, went on about how John Edwards' titillating 2006 affair has damaged his message on poverty so severely that...well, he has lost his message. So powerful is the media's feeling about this moral lapse that it surpasses everything else in his career, and all other news on this Friday dump-day.
The National Enquirer, after months of trying, for no real reason, to uncover this thing, as if no one else in politics ever has cheated, as if it means anything in the face of what his work and message has been....or even in the face of the news of the week or the fact that we are at war and planning another, has finally satisfied a hungry supermarket checkout line, dragging our culture further into the gutter.
Lies? You wanna talk lies? How about the lies that the democratic leadership don't want to waste time bringing to light? How about the sick, the old, the suffering that are hungry tonight because of the lies of the government and the insurance industry? What about those old republican ultra-conservatives who would force patriotic Americans to deny their right to the pursuit of happiness honestly, forcing don't-ask-don't-tell, while they have sordid bathroom sex with strangers, even sneaking them into the White House press briefings?
Yeah, HuffPo's Edward's Big News Page will fill you in on the immorality of that night way back 2006, and its even being suggested that then the family went forth, stoically, with this lie under their belts. But who is to say what happened, how they felt, and if they even knew? Maybe it was his own personal secret...Why do we care?
You know what? As heartbroken as I am, because this may answer the question of why he dropped out when and how he did, and as much as I hate liars, I've got to say that I don't think that it changes what his message has been in this race or how he would be as a President or a Vice President, Attorney General, or diplomat. To deny his influence on the messages of the primary candidates, of all of them, is to deny the effective parts of Bill Clinton's Presidency, the social and political impact of RFK and JFK, and if you want to go there, evidence suggests that even Martin Luther King Jr strayed.
Anyone who has been on the road in any intense job capacity understands what happens sometimes in those intense hours and days and weeks. Not that it's OK; not that anyone would condone it. But can't we just understand that whatever it was back then, in 2006, they obviously worked it out and decided to go forward as the happy family that they appear to be. Can't we allow ourselves to learn from Edward's message about the Two America's and apply that to what needs to be done? Why does the message have to be tarnished by a slip that is as common as divorce is in this country? All of Europe laughs at us, the ugly Americans who waste so much time on issues of morality while we slaughter innocents for oil and allow our own weakest citizens to go hungry and without proper care.
I don't like it, and I'm really, really disappointed, but humans are fallible and its not for us to question what happens in someone's personal life unless it is against the law or hurts others in some way that effects society as a whole.
Why are men like this? We are animals and the urge for sex with many different people is deep in the coil. That doesn't mean that we dont have the ability to reason and that we shouldn't strive to overcome those urges, especially when there are children and the construct of the family unit involved.
I cant say that I believe in marriage in general, as a 100% forever thing. I don't understand the mentality of lying to oneself that any particular marriage is the one that will weather years and trials. Rather, if I were to find someone who I felt compelled to marry, I would have to say, realistically, that its a craps shoot and that all we can hope for is to make it to old age together in one piece; that we would promise to try to understand the fallibility of humanity and to not be cruel to each other. Its not OK to make a promise and to be untrue, but its unrealistic to think that its possible for 100% of the people, especially in positions of power that require huge egos, to be perfect 100% of the time.
Why should this make a difference in what he did professionally? I guess he should have told the truth up front... I guess they all should have. I suppose that if we took the same amount of time to hold up the truths of the Clinton's, the McCain's, the Bush's, the Cheney's...I wonder which would be more destructive to society as a whole.
As usual Americans will follow the bouncing ball, the shiny-shiny, and let the rest be buried. Its the soap opera effect...but this is not a story on TV, these are people who have some very real ideas that just could improve our lot as a country and the world as a whole. So, lets no get carried away with this crap. Move along, theres nothing to see here...except some ideals that were meant to bring us closer to what America was founded for.
And so it goes. lets stop the presses and do a special on the life of....hey, lets do a couple or three... nothings going on anyway, and its been so long since Timmy... And what a great guy he was as well... The reporters ARE the news
Tony Snow: deliverer of lies, fudger of truths, all around mensch. But....where does his responsibility begin for this?:
