When brain chemicals strike

There seems to be something so typical, almost trite, about the e-mails that have been released from Mark Sanford to his lover:

Isn't this the way it always is? "You are my soulmate." "You are my one true love." "How has this miracle of love fell upon us?" "We are powerless to control this wild, wild thing." "We were just very special friends and then we realized just how we were fated to be together." And on and on ad nauseum. What's hilarious is that every time we hear of one of these high-profile affairs, each of these "very special and unique loves" is exactly the same.

The truth is far more prosaic, as we know from science:

What we know about love is still largely out of our control. For instance, infatuation. This is supposedly the first stage of falling in love, an unbearable attraction towards someone. This attraction causes a virtual explosion of nuerochemicals very similar to adrenalin. Assisted by Phenylethylamine (that speeds up the flow of information between cells), dopamine (that makes us glow and feel good), and norepinephrine (that stimulates the production of adrenalin), make our world go round, our eyes sparkle and our heart beat faster. Our entire existence then depends on the sight of the person who triggered these reactions to begin with, and as the addiction to the chemical grows stronger, our attraction becomes greater. At this stage we commit foolish mistakes which are the stuff puppy love stories are made of. Actually it is these three chemicals that combine to give us what we call infatuation. We feel we are energized, often floating on air…and the reason why people who are just falling in love can talk for hours on end… (the same person becomes boring at a later stage).

We can blame our chemicals for everything. We had a list of attributes ready for matching, but we just end up falling in love with the person who possesses none of them…it is , as they say, chemistry. Social obligations, other relationships, sense and sensibility, all take a back seat; our mind soars with these natural drugs. No wonder, a lover and a madman are said to be alike. Scientists also opine that this `clicking’ would be with a person with whom we can identify a parent-child situation. A person who, in our subconscious, will give us back something we feel we lost during our growing up years. For some it is security, for some others, it is warmth, and then others, just a spirit of adventure. This could be the reason why demure, well brought up girls usually fall for wastrels. This subconscious selection of mate gets our phenylethylamines and other chemicals moving. This period when our brain is awash with the love hormones lasts for different durations in different people, between six months to three years. In most of us, it settles down after that. For mercurial people, this high is missed and that’s the reason why they need another temporary high….another relationship, another chemical fix. If these love junkies stay married, they will need new relationships to keep their dope, and sometimes, bigger highs. hence bigger risks.

As if these treacherous brain chemicals weren't responsible enough for people wrecking what without the phenylethylamines would be perfectly satisfying lives, the aggressively bad Harlequin-romance prose these chemicals cause people to write may be just as bad as the wreckage people who succumb to these chemicals leave in their wake.

If Sanford weren't such a sanctimonious hypocrite, looking to the law to keep him faithful where his own brain doesn't want to allow him to, one could feel sorry for him. Because his brain doesn't care about the ruination of his career. He now has a biochemical addiction, and it's going to be a very hard one for him to break.

Would that this helped him develop some empathy for drug abusers as well, except that I'm quite certain that he will regard HIS brain chemicals as being as special and unique as the immortal adoration he has for his Argentine paramour.

The symbol of American faux-macho is now Chinese

Remember after the 9/11 attacks, when the Hummer became the must-have vehicle, the tough guy symbol to end tough guy symbols? It was one thing to slap a photo of Osama Bin Laden in crosshairs and a bumper sticker reading "These colors don't run" on the back of your Ford Expedition. But to do that on a Hummer meant you were REALLY an American patriot. You were Protecting. Your. Family.™ Never mind that you lived in Nebraska and had about as much chance of being hit by terrorists as you had of stepping out of bed and falling into the ocean. After all, the Hummer was Ah-nuld's vehicle of choice. It was big, it was badass, and in a Hummer you owned the road, your dick became bigger, and you could bully all those pussy-asses in their Civics.

I wonder how all those super-patriot Hummer owners feel now that the brand of the vehicle they love has been sold to a Chinese company:

The buyer is the Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company, based in Chengdu, G.M. said Tuesday. The price was not disclosed, but industry analysts had estimated that the Hummer division would sell for less than $500 million.

The deal, expected to close in the third quarter, would make Tengzhong the first Chinese company to sell vehicles in North America, though Hummer’s operations would remain in the United States.

“The Hummer brand is synonymous with adventure, freedom and exhilaration, and we plan to continue that heritage by investing in the business, allowing Hummer to innovate and grow in exciting new ways under the leadership and continuity of its current management team,” Yang Yi, the chief executive of Tengzhong, said in a statement released by G.M. “We will be investing in the Hummer brand and its research and development capabilities, which will allow Hummer to better meet demand for new products such as more fuel-efficient vehicles in the U.S.”

[snip]

Tengzhong is a privately owned company, but Tuesday’s deal required preliminary vetting by Beijing officials, who retain the right to veto any effort at an overseas acquisition by a Chinese company and who give special attention to deals of more than $100 million.

Tengzhong is known in China for making a wide range of road equipment, from bridge piers to highway construction and maintenance machinery. But even before the Hummer deal, the company had been moving more into heavy-duty trucks, including tow trucks and oil tankers.

“Over all, we’re pretty pleased,” said a Hummer spokesman, Nick Richards. “If you think about the qualities we’d want in a new owner for the brand, this buyer really met all the criteria. They’ve got a proven track record in international business, and they’ve got a long-term vision for the brand. They’ve got the capital to invest in more efficient vehicles, which is what’s necessary to grow the brand.”

If the deal is completed, it would be the first acquisition of a well-known American auto brand by a Chinese company, after many months of speculation about such a deal. Chinese automakers have already purchased the MG and Rover brands, two of the most famous names in British automotive history.

As a Chinese company, Tengzhong could face a challenge in presenting the deal to American Hummer owners. The brand has long sought to emphasize patriotism, stressing that the Hummer H1 was essentially the same vehicle built in the same factory as the Humvee that carries American soldiers into battle in Iraq and elsewhere.

It should be noted that the Hummer that we see on American streets is no longer the one that was made for the U.S. military, so there's no need for wingnuts to have the vapors about the capacity for manufacture of American military vehicles being sold to the Chinese. But the symbolism of the vehicle that more than any other embodied the faux masculinity and toughness of the Bush years is now just so much detritus to be sold off to China for a relative pittance.

It's not the sex, it's the lobbying

Jesus H. Christ. It's getting so you can't even leave the house anymore, you might miss something.

Olbermann is covering this little goodie from the "Holy Shit!" file, that was posted at the New York Times web site less than an hour ago:

Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, in his offices and aboard a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s clients, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.

Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity.

Now, I don't give a shit who John McCain may be fucking (though the fact that this may force the image of John McCain fucking has a decided "Ewwwww!" factor). I'm a lot more concerned that he may have elevated cozying up to telecommunications lobbyists to a new level.

So the question is, what are we to make of this? We already know that sex scandals, whether true or not, are the mother's milk of the corporate media. We've been down this road with John Edwards earlier in a story that had no there there and went nowhere. Alas, so did his candidacy. Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest has a list of Obama smears already coming from the right. But it's kind of interesting that the day after McCain pretty much cements his nomination, suddenly an eight-year-old sex and lobbying scandal shows up. Gee, someone doesn't want John McCain to get this nomination, and I don't think it's the Clintons; after all, they have their own problems to deal with right now. So given how adamant activist Republicans have been that McCain is not the nominee they want, I don't think you have to be a genius to do the math on this one. The direction is clear, the only question is the source.

So let's perform some speculatio on this story, shall we? Who's behind it? Does it fatally wound McCain's candidacy? And if so, who becomes the Republican nominee? Does God really want Huckabee after all? And what about Mitt Romney, who didn't withdraw, but only "suspended" his campaign? And....how do I make my voice do this?

Have at it.

Don't let the door hit you on the way out, Rudy

Well, it looks like Judi Nathan's dreams of being America's Queen have been dashed on the shoals of Dade County. No longer will we have her zombie, plasticene, Botoxed-to-within-an-inch-of-her-life rictus of an adoring smile to make shivers of revulsion run down our collective spine. "Little Louis", her affectionate name for her Louis Vuitton handbag, won't be residing in the White House after all. (/meow)

And Rudy Giuliani's dreams of huge armies goosestepping through the streets at his command as they head off to endless, expansive war in the Middle East, of long prison sentences for potsmokers and jaywalkers and murderers alike, similarly must be put away, perhaps to be resurrected later, but for now -- simply a dream deferred.

And the rest of us can heave a deep sigh of relief.

For now.

Because the Republican nominee who will treat us to either an entire summer and fall of strolling down Whitewater Vince Foster Rose Law Firm Monice Lewinsky Lane, or a summer of turning Barack Obama into either a cousin of Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden's mole here in the U.S. will be either the craven Bush whore John McCain or the even more craven panderer Willard Mitt Romney.

And one of them could still pick Rudy as a running mate.

So what went wrong? Is the age of fearmongering past? Was it his personal life? Last night on MSNBC, the horror that is Pat Buchanan was offset by the treat of a rare appearance by Bob Herbert and of course the insights of Rachel Maddow. Herbert is dead-on here, that Giuliani is at heart a cop -- and it actually says something redeeming about Republican voters that this ultimate punitive daddy figure was so soundly repudiated:

However, the redemption stops there. For as noted at ThinkProgress (with more video), John McCain's vision for America is "less jobs and more wars."

So what went wrong for Rudy? Why is it that his attempts to reframe himself as a conservative were such a spectacular failure whereas Mitt Romney's same game has him still in the race? Is it simply a matter of Romney being better-looking? Was it the Vanity Fair article about his sleazy business dealings that include representing Middle Eastern dictatorships that have harbored the very terrorists he decried at every turn? Or the article in the New York Times revealing the police memo that unequivocally urged the then-mayor to NOT locate his command center in the World Trade Center? Did the revelation of his use of city vehicles to chauffeur his then-goumah around turn off socially conservative voters, and was the "Eww!" factor triggered by Judi's gushing about her hot, manly husband a symptom of just too much information? Did Joe Biden distill that nagging something that people didn't like about Rudy but couldn't put their finger on when he famously and accurately said in a debate that every sentence out of his mouth is a noun, a verb, and 9/11? Or is it just that he's an openly authoritarian prick, and Republicans prefer their authoritarian pricks to have a stupid grin and a towel-snapping frat boy demeanor?

If there were no other reasons to wish Steve Gilliard was still here, the spectacular fall of Rudy Giuliani would be enough reason all by itself. But since he's not, let's let one of his torch-carriers, the great Lower Manhattanite, answer the question:

Take the worst elements of Captain Queeg, Nellie Oleson, Stinky from Abbott & Costello, and an STD'd scorpion, bundle it into a man and put said man in charge of a complex, challenging city and you'll get what Rudy Giuliani was really all about. Tourists and outsiders didn't get him. They didn't have to live with him. They got the cathode-ray Bing Crosby of the pipe, red alpaca sweater and the Christmas specials. We lived with the drunken Bing swinging the extension cord and windmilling signet-ringed fists as he prowled the house looking for someone to fuck up.

Time won out, though, and it managed to utterly expose him. Quite honestly, Rudy was nearly as lazy and disinterested a candidate as Fred Thompson was—both of them lazy honoraria-grabbers swearing somebody owed 'em something because they thought they were somebody . And in the end, they can now go meet at Tree's Loser Lounge and swap notes on star-fucking and prosecutorial malfeasance.

Me? I'm gonna sit here with the icy blonde tonight, and get around town a bit later in the week. I'm sure I'll see a bunch of her doppelgangers out and about with my fellow revelers in town. But for now, the mind wanders.

What's Ol' Judith gonna do now? Cialis and dough is fine, but mama wanted more. Access to power was the drug. What new doll will she start crawling after in the “Valley of Delusions”?

The Aqua Velva's gone—along with the leathery, old-man skin. And now, so too is the “tough cop”—his precious Sipowicz. It's down to McCain for Tweety to toss the lettuce, tomatoes and ranch dressing for. Ick. I just threw up in my mouth. Not a little. A lot.

And the irony isn't lost on me that Rudy's final come-down is tomorrow in California—of all places, Simi Valley. Home of the Reagan Library, and home of the springboard for the police-brutality-fueled L.A. riots. Rudy should be right at fucking home.

Full circle. Bullshit's end. And please let the door hitcha' on the way out—and may there be a patch of ice right in front of the Goddamned door.

(And while you're at it, don't miss installment one of his series The NY/DC Power Play on the Giuliani/Kerik/Judith Regan Axis of Evil.)

Whatever the reason, today we can all breathe a deep sigh of relief that Republican voters in Florida -- especially the transplanted snowbirds -- saw how cynical the relentless repetition of 9/11 was, and how terrifying the Foreign Policy of Norman Podhoretz was and said "No!". We can be thankful that Jewish voters in Florida are not the blind, crazy Zionists that Rudy thought they were and didn't think turning the entire Middle East into a sheet of glass was a swell idea. Today we owe a debt of gratitiude to the state of Florida.

But don't get too cocky, there, guys. Don't forget, your state is still, and forever will be, the scene of the original crime of November 2000.

Gee, ya think?

This is about as close an admission as we're going to get that the so-called "strong economy" of the Bush years despite anemic at best job growth and stagnant wages was a function of homeowners using their bubble-inflated homes as a piggybank:

“Everybody was basically using their house as an A.T.M. machine,” said Dave Simonsen, a senior vice president for NAI Alliance, an industrial real estate firm in Reno. “Now they are upside down on their house without that piggy bank to go back to.”

From 2004 through 2006, Americans pulled about $840 billion a year out of residential real estate, via sales, home equity lines of credit and refinanced mortgages, according to data presented in an updated working paper by James Kennedy, an economist, and Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman. These so-called home equity withdrawals financed as much as $310 billion a year in personal consumption from 2004 to 2006, according to the data.

But in the first half of this year, equity withdrawals were down 15 percent nationally compared with the average for the last three years, and consumption supported by such funds plunged nearly one-fourth, according to the Kennedy and Greenspan data.

This summer, the size of withdrawals fell even more sharply to about one-third below the level of late last year, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com.

“This slide in equity withdrawal is very recent,” Mr. Zandi said, “so you wouldn’t expect the drop in spending to occur until now, or Christmas.”

Only a year ago, money taken out of houses was still more than 9 percent of the nation’s disposable income, Mr. Zandi calculated, using a sampling of Equifax credit reports to supplement Fed data. By this fall, it had dropped to about 5 percent, a difference of about $350 billion a year.

Much of the attention in the recent collapse of the housing boom has focused on those in danger of losing their home or facing higher monthly payments in their adjustable mortgages. But the broader effect on the economy is likely to come from the much larger group of homeowners who can no longer count on rising home values to bolster their wealth.

You know what? I have no sympathy for people who find themselves tapped out because they decided to blow their home equity on home theatres and in-ground pools and Ford Excursions and vacations in Tahiti. You don't have to be a genius to know that tapping equity for ephemera is really goddamn stupid. It's one thing to take an equity loan to remodel the kitchen, though I would say that the way things look now, those who spent $70,000 to put a gourmet kitchen with custom cabinets, tumbled marble floors, commercial appliances, and quartz countertops in a 1950's cape cod aren't going to see a return on that investment. But at least that's putting the money back into the asset. Tapping home equity for things that wear out within a few years or are gone within a few weeks is just plain stupid.

But it's hard to believe that retailers are going to enjoy the kind of holiday seasons they've had in recent years.

Mr. Brilliant and I have no equity loans and no credit card debt. And when we go out to buy our HDTV this season, we'll probably get a really good price. And if we buy it on a "no interest for eighteen months" plan, we won't be paying interest either, because it'll be paid in less time than that.

Sometimes deferred gratification has its advantages.

As long as Maggie's obsession with the walls in the basement doesn't mean there's mice behind them. That would mean basement remodeling. And then I won't be able to be so damn smug.

Don't do the crime if you can't do the time

My better nature thinks it's bad form to be happy when someone sees no way out but suicide. But in this case, I'll make an exception:

A federal prosecutor who was arrested in an Internet sex sting after he allegedly traveled to Michigan from Florida to have sex with a 5-year-old girl hanged himself in a Michigan federal prison Friday morning, Detroit television station WDIV-TV reported.

John D.R. Atchison, 53, was put on suicide watch after he used a bed sheet in an attempted suicide in September.

Detroit police confirmed Atchison's suicide death at 10:14 a.m. Friday. They have not released any details.

Atchison was a married father of three and a respected figure who coached girls' softball and basketball in a park a few blocks from his home in a well-to-do Florida beach community.

Atchison had been communicating with an undercover sheriff's detective from Macomb County, Mich., who was posing online as the fictitious girl's mother and arranged for him to have sex with the child, police said.

He was arrested carrying presents for her, including a doll and earrings, and sexual materials, officials said.

"There were no red flags. He was normal. He went to work at the courthouse Monday through Friday. It's not like he carried dolls to the ballpark," said police Lt. Rick Hawthorne, who knew Atchison for more than 10 years.

I first wrote about this piece of human excrement here.

Good riddance, asshole.

Side note: I really wish that news coverage of cases like this didn't refer to "having sex" with the child. One does not "have sex" with children. It's called rape.

Somewhere in the Great Beyond, Steve Gilliard is laughing

(New York Daily News)

A good Christian boy like Andy Pettite must have thought it was one of the seven plagues of Revelation, as a swarm of gnats took over the infield out at Jacobs Field in Cleveland. It wasn't locusts, but it might as well have been, as the swarms tormented the Yankees' much-touted rookie reliever Joba Chamberlain. No matter how much I would love to see the Yankees get swept in four games, I had to feel badly for Chamberlin. My neck was itching just watching all those gnats alight on his neck. I just hope the fans don't give him too much shit in game 3 about looking more like Nuke Laloosh out there than the Heir Apparent to Mariano's Throne.

This was the wildest eighth and ninth innings I've ever seen not played by guys in blue-and-orange hats. And in the end, Luis Vizcaino gave up the winning run to Cleveland in the 11th.

Eff the effing Yankees.

Phillies and Yankers both come home down two games to none in their division series. Sweet. I'm rooting for a Rockies/Indians World Series, myself.