Mission (Almost) Accomplished

And no, it's not about the endiing of George W. Bush's My Dick Is Bigger Than Daddy's war in Iraq.

It's about the deliberate and systematic demolition of the American middle class.

They aren't quite there yet, but there is definitely significant progress:

Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans — nearly 1 in 2 — have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income.

The latest census data depict a middle class that's shrinking as unemployment stays high and the government's safety net frays. The new numbers follow years of stagnating wages for the middle class that have hurt millions of workers and families.

"Safety net programs such as food stamps and tax credits kept poverty from rising even higher in 2010, but for many low-income families with work-related and medical expenses, they are considered too 'rich' to qualify," said Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty.

"The reality is that prospects for the poor and the near poor are dismal," he said. "If Congress and the states make further cuts, we can expect the number of poor and low-income families to rise for the next several years."

But don't worry. I'm sure a Kardashian is up to something, and there's a woman in a hijab at the Publix to worry about, and gee that Newt Gingrich sounds like a smart fella and he's from the south so I know we can trust him. And after all, the Rapture is coming and we good God-fearin' folk won't have to worry about poverty anyway, so let's just keep on keepin' on. And oh yeah, those dirty hippies protesting should just STFU.

Because poverty can't happen to those who love Jesus, right?

Did anyone actually think this would turn out any differently?

I don't know why anyone thought that locking six Republicans in a room with ANYONE who doesn't march in lockstep with them would result in anything other than Nothing Accomplished (NYT link). This is a party that has now definitively identified itself as the Party Of I Got Mine So Fuck Off And Die, so what gave anyone the idea that these people would ever emerge with a plan for the top 1% to kick in even one tiny copper penny more?

I often wonder exactly what Grover Norquist has on these guys, that their oath of fealty to him supersedes any sense of responsibility they might have to their oath of office. And why does it bother no one that this country is run by Grover Norquist, with House and Senate Republicans (and the clown car that is the 2012 GOP field) as his public face?

The Republicans on the committee are claiming Democratic intransigence, but just who's refusing to compromise here?



Republicans have forgotten that they and their wealthy buddies were paying the pre-Bush tax cut rates all through the 1990s, and the economy was humming along just fine. Tax rates seem to have little effect on economic activity, which has many influences. But Republicans live in a world in which only their interests count -- and the interests of those who have made them quite wealthy themselves as they sit in Congress receiving a government check and paid health insurance without contributing even as much to this country as my local DPW guys do -- and God knows the DPW in my town leaves a lot to be desired. Because of their obeisance to Grover Norquist, Republicans would rather see my COPD-afflicted mother suffocate to death rather than have the nebulizer that helps her breathe, and my chemotherapy-undergoing father fade away rather than have treatment that has an 85% effectiveness rate. They'd rather see low birth weight babies among the poor and deaths in childbirth rather than have Medicaid. They'd rather see the disabled dying of exposure on the streets than have such a thing as Supplemental Security Income. Got two kids and your husband dies? Too bad, lady -- get a job, because there are no more Social Security survivors' benefits. That Paul Ryan benefitted from that program is immaterial -- he got his so fuck off and die.

The Republicans have always been like this, but at least they used to be honest about it. Now they dress up in populist clothing and benefit from corporate-funded groups with names like Americans for Prosperity to dupe the uninformed into thinking that no sacrifice is too great for the poor and the middle class to make in the service of allowing the plutocrats to amass more and more and more and more of this country's wealth just so that they can have a vain hope of maybe landing a job someday.

Not one day goes by that I don't have George Carlin's voice in my head reminding me, "It's a big club -- and you ain't in it." Because he knew in 2005 what too many people still refuse to believe in 2011.

And so the so-called supercommittee, which everyone knew was just a ruse to kick the can down the road a little further, has failed. This is a microcosm of the failure of our entire system of government. So perhaps it's time to give up this bullshit about American exceptionalism and admit that we are just another failing empire, just another plutocracy. It's time to stop deluding ourselves and just try to get through as best we can.

I'm starting to think we may have to eat the shit sandwich again after all

In case you thought that we might be able to survive four years of Mitt Romney:

Speaking at the Americans for Prosperity Foundation’s annual meeting, Mr. Romney said his plan would cap spending at 20 percent of gross domestic product by 2016, and would require $500 billion a year in spending cuts. To accomplish this, Mr. Romney explained, he would eliminate all nonessential government programs, including Amtrak, return federal programs like Medicaid entirely to the states and improve the productivity and efficiency of the federal government. He would also immediately cut all nonsecurity discretionary spending by 5 percent across the board.

Mr. Romney’s proposal for Medicare is similar to the hotly debated plan that Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, introduced in April. Mr. Ryan’s plan would replace Medicare and offer payments to older Americans to buy coverage from the private market.

Mr. Romney’s proposal would give beneficiaries the option of enrolling in private health care plans, using what he, like Mr. Ryan, called a “premium support system.” But unlike the Ryan plan, Mr. Romney’s would allow older people to keep traditional Medicare as an option. However, if the existing government program proved more expensive and charged higher premiums, the participants would be responsible for paying the difference.

He presented his plan as offering more choice — though younger Americans would need to be prepared to possibly pay more, for instance, depending on which plan they selected.

“Younger Americans today, when they turn 65, should have a choice between traditional Medicare and other private health care plans that provide at least the same level of benefits,” he said. “Competition will lower costs and increase the quality of health care.”

He concluded, “The future of Medicare should be marked by competition, by choice, and by innovation, rather than by bureaucracy, stagnation and bankruptcy.”

Yes, because health insurance companies are stumbling all over themselves to get your business, each one offering a better plan than the one before. And they're so innovative -- like the way they fight every claim just to see how long it'll take to wear you down before you stop fighting.

I've had a pretty decent health plan for Mr. Brilliant and I the last few years. We get it through my employer, so we're "only" paying about $3600 of the annual premium. It's got a $20 co-pay for preventive care, a $250 per person deductible, and covers 90% of "usual and customary" after that. Now "usual and customary" seems to be based on medical fees back in the days when Don Draper was taking little Sally to the pediatrician, but this plan has worked out OK for us.

So of course 2012 is the last year we'll have it.

After 2012, we'll be offered two plans -- an 80% plan with a low deductible, 80% coverage in-network and only 60% outside; or an high-deductible plan with an HSA. The difference in employee premiums is about $2000, so perhaps if I put that $2000 into the HSA along with the $500 the company will kick in, it'll offset most of the $2700 deductible for two people...assuming of course that we could pay for all $225 of your standard office visit out of the HSA, rather than the sixty bucks that in Insurance Delusionland is "usual and customary."

This is the world into which Mitt Romney wants to spill all the elderly. Oh he's making noise now about how there'll be a choice, but what senior citizen in his right mind would choose to try to buy an individual insurance policy instead of Medicare?

Keep in mind that Mitt Romney is worth a quarter of a BILLION dollars, and a health insurance premium is like lunch money to him.

And yet he and his buddies just can't kick even one more nickel apiece. Good heavens, no. After all, Mitt Romney worked so hard to get his money -- working hard to buy up companies, dismantle them, and throw their employees in the trash can. And the Koch brothers certainly shouldn't be asked to kick in anything else. After all, they're billionaires, which means they worked harder than we do, right? And the fact that they inherited their business from their father means nothing, right? How about the Walton children? They have $87 billion. And they made it by starting out as greeters, right? Hardly -- they inherited it from old Sam Walton. But they can't kick any more, can they? Not without extreme hardship.

After all, America has to be kept safe for the Walton children, and Prescott Bush's children, and George Romney's son, and Fred Trump's son, and so on.

And if that means that the poor and the sick and the elderly have to lay down and die, so be it.

So where does that leave us? Do we hold our noses and vote again for a President who's already shown that his futile, quixotic quest to be liked by a bunch of greedy, racist bigots is more important than anything to him? Do we stick with a bunch of corporatist Democrats who give lip service to the middle and working class but behind the scenes know full well that it's all over, and they're going to get their piece of the pie before it all goes to shit and the rest of us start killing each other for cans of baked beans?

In the past we could rely on Democrats to at least be the guardians of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, even if they sold us out on everything else. But thanks to the so-called "supercommittee", and Obama's willingness to let mandatory cuts kick in if this small group of intransigent Republians and sellout Democrats can't come up with a compromise (as if that were even possible), and this tendency they have to learn all the wrong lessons when they get clobbered and move even further to the right, it's hard to have any faith in them either.

So we're left with a choice -- we either let it all go to shit now, or have a few more tolerable years before it's all Mad Max.

Hardly what we had in mind in 2008, is it?

Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere: State-Sanctioned Murder and Other Reasons to Despair edition

What does one even say about a country that seems perfectly OK with actively ending the life of an in-all-likelihood innocent man; one that professes to be pro-life but will not listen to anything that might change its already-made-up mind?

Oh. Right. The Tea Party drives the agenda these days, I almost forgot.

Tom B at They Gave Us a Republic asks, "How did we beget a generation of people who war for money, cheer at the number of people Rick Perry has condemned to death, shout out that people without insurance should simply be allowed to die, spew racial and religious hatred as if it were mainstream thought, put likely innocent (black) people to death while letting likely guilty (white) people go free or... who would deny their neighbors basic help in times of catastrophe and the myriad other examples of hatefulness, selfishness and greed we see on open display today unless there's something in it for them?"

Driftglass revisits Billy Budd.

Driscoll at Addicting Info on The Party of Death.

While we're being death-centered, how about a look at William Saletan's article about how Rick Perry's End-times "support" for Israel is a big gift wrapped package handed with a smile over to Islamic extremists.

Jess has had it with America.

A-1, first-class We Are Screwed rantin' from DCap.

I dare you to read this and not start weeping.

Nicholas Kristof (NYT link):

Then when she was 8 years old, her church began raising money to build wells in Africa through an organization called charity:water. Rachel was aghast when she learned that other children had no clean water, so she asked to skip having a ninth birthday party. In lieu of presents, she asked her friends to donate $9 each to charity:water for water projects in Africa.



Rachel’s ninth birthday was on June 12, and she had set up a birthday page on the charity:water Web site with a target of $300. Alas, Rachel was able to raise only $220 — which had left her just a bit disappointed.



Then, on July 20, as Rachel was riding with her family on the highway, two trucks collided and created a 13-car pileup. Rachel’s car was hit by one of the trucks, and although the rest of her family was unhurt, Rachel was left critically injured.



Church members and friends, seeking some way of showing support, began donating on Rachel’s birthday page — charitywater.org/Rachel — and donations surged past her $300 goal, and kept mounting. As family and friends gathered around Rachel’s bedside, they were able to tell her — even not knowing whether she couldn’t hear them — that she had exceeded the $47,544 that the singer Justin Bieber had raised for charity:water on his 17th birthday.



“I think she secretly had a crush on him, but she would never admit it,” her mom said. “I think she would have been ecstatic.”

When it was clear that Rachel would never regain consciousness, the family decided to remove life support. Her parents donated her hair a final time to Locks of Love, and her organs to other children. Word spread about Rachel’s last fund-raiser.



Contributions poured in, often in $9 increments, although one 5-year-old girl sent in the savings in her piggy bank of $2.27. The total donations soon topped $100,000, then $300,000. Like others, I was moved and donated. As I write this, more than $850,000 has been raised from all over the world, including donations from Africans awed by a little American girl who cared about their continent.

“What has been so inspiring about Rachel is that she has taught the adults,” said Scott Harrison, the founder of charity:water. “Adults are humbled by the unselfishness of this little girl.”



Yet this is a story not just of one girl, but of a generation of young people working creatively to make this a better world. Mr. Harrison is emblematic of these young people. Now 35, he established charity:water when he was 30, and it has taken off partly because of his mastery at social media. (He’s not as experienced in well-drilling, so the wells are actually dug by expert groups like International Rescue Committee.)

Youth activism has a long history, but this ethos of public service is on the ascendant today — and today’s kids don’t just protest against injustices, as my contemporaries did, but many are also remarkable problem-solvers.



As for Ms. Paul, she’s planning a trip on the anniversary of her daughter’s death next year to see some of the wells being drilled in Africa in her daughter’s name. “It’ll be overwhelming to see Rachel’s wells,” she said, “to see what my 9-year-old daughter has done for people all over the world, to meet the people she has touched.&

A child should not have to die for people to recognize that the value of the lives and health of those less fortunate is no less than those who already have more money than they and their heirs could spend in dozens of lifetimes. If we lived in a sane world, the froth-mouthed hatemongers who at the behest of greedy bastards like the Koch brothers want to see children go without food, and the elderly, poor, and sick go without a roof over their heads and life-saving medicines and nourishment would be touched by this.



But they won't be.

How did it come to this? A Rant.

Despite what the generations that follow the post-World War II baby boom think, most boomers in my circle have always had the fatalistic notion that Social Security would not be there for us. I've posted before about a Tom Toles cartoon from the 1980's called "The Reading of the Will" which is rife with boomer resentment at our parents' generation because of their defined benefit pensions and guaranteed Social Security payments and leisurely retirements. Somehow we always knew. Even when, in the 1980's, what is now called the "Social Security Trust Fund" was set up specifically for the purpose of beefing up the system for baby boomer retirement, we knew. We knew that whatever stores were built up were replaced with IOUs that we knew the government had no intention of paying.

Those of us who did not want children and have been lucky enough to have not been completely jettisoned from the job market are better off than many. We've been taking advantage of 401(k) match and putting away as much as we can afford. Whether we'll be OK remains to be seen, once Medicare is gutted (and it WILL happen, whether Barack Obama is re-elected next year or not, since he's shown himself to be at best a rubber stamp for Republican policies. But friends of mine who are trying to put kids through college and seeing them into adulthood are scared to death -- not just of their own futures, because who can put away money for retirement when a low-end college is $25,000 a year, but of that of their children, many of whom are unable to get a toehold in the job market. What good does it to do graduate with a degree in marketing when the only job you're going to be able to get is to be re-hired as a cart boy at the Stop & Shop?

Work longer, they tell us. People are healthier longer, so it doesn't make sense to retire at 65 the way it once did. That's all well and good, but is it healthy for a society that is hemorrhaging jobs for older people to clog up the workforce? And there's no sign that the job market is ever going to get any better. Anything done on a PC can be done more cheaply overseas. Anything requiring special skills can be done by hiring immigrants on work visas. I have a friend who's a production editor at a publishing company. She's fifty, she has two kids to put through college and who's going to be the one to tell her that her job may very well not even exist in five years?

I've spent all of my adult years in the Age of Corporatism. I graduated high school into the first Arab oil embargo and graduated college with a degree in sociology into the second one. I started out in a retail management training program that was the catch-all for liberal arts majors at the time. But at least I was graduating into a society that hadn't yet been completely taken over by greed. That happened later, after Ronald Reagan took office, and while I myself have done well, our society hasn't. Oh sure, we have gewgaws and toys and electronics and two flat-screen TVs and 200 channels of nothing you'd want to watch on TV. People have pulled their kids out of school for Caribbean vacations paid for on home equity loans and people in Section 8 housing have smart phones. All of this is cited as examples by Republicans of how well off we are. But are we? And what about tomorrow?

I work in an industry that is rapidly consolidating, with tens of thousands having been laid off in just the last two years. The web development I used to do is dead too, replaced by templates and do-it-yourselfers. When I was in high school and college there was always a "hot industry" that was hiring. If engineers weren't in demand, then marketers were. If there was a glut of marketers, the accounting field was begging for people. Now there is no "hot industry". There is no path to upward mobility for the poor, there is no path towards staying in the middle class for those who were born into it. Only those with inherited money are able to prosper.

Social Security was implemented in the depths of the Depression, and Republicans have been trying to get rid of it ever since. Whatever faults the Democrats may have had, what with Ted Kennedy's scandals and Tip O'Neil's tippling and Hubert Humphrey's often preposterous optimism, they could always be relied on to be the protectors of the middle class and the poor. Whether it was Social Security, Medicare, Pell grants, nutrition programs, or education, the Democrats were the party of the little guy.

Something happened along the way. I suppose you could say it started with Jimmy Carter, who was the first conservative Democrat to hold the White House. Carter, a Southern Baptist, paved the way for the relentless Christianism that has pervaded our political discourse in the years since then. Ronald Reagan started his presidency by busting the air traffic controllers' union and accelerated the path towards elimination of the middle class. Reagan recognized the religious fervor in the southern states and the midwest, and he recognized the residual racism in the south, and used it to pit the middle class against the poor while screwing over both. The patrician George H.W. Bush similar knew nothing about the struggles of middle class people as he marveled over a supermarket scanner. Bill Clinton used his charm to win over crowds of middle class and minority voters while implementing NAFTA and eliminating Glass-Steagall and insisting that he was one of them. The advent of the internet led to $100,000 programming jobs and new media and lots of opportunities for the middle class to start to afford the trappings of the wealthy, and Americans embraced them. They leased BMWs for the kind of payments you used to have to buy a Chevrolet. They took adjustable-rate mortgages that allowed them to make lower payments on bigger houses. They bought houses for 3% down. They took equity loans for akylit soaring-ceilinged great rooms and dream kitchens and summer-long cruises with their kids.

Then George W. Bush came along, and the first thing he did was look at the surplus that Bill Clinton and the internet boom had left him and said, "Let's cut taxes." But to paraphrase the man himself, the have-mores were his base, so they got most of the spoils. Then he ignored a Presidential Daily Briefing on August 6, 2001, and a month later almost 3000 people died in a terrorist attack that should have been thwarted had he been doing his job. And what did he tell people? Go shopping. He put us into two wars, one of them completely unnecessary, kept the tax cuts in place, and anyone who dared question him was called un-American and traitorous. A right-wing echo chamber that had been developed during the Clinton years to obsess over his sex life was now firmly in place, and Judith Miller canoodled with Scooter Libby, and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq became conventional wisdom, and if you questioned it, you could very well find your house firebombed by an increasingly frightened and angry population.

Fear was a potent weapon during the Bush years, with color-coded terror warnings and a convenient tape by Osama Bin Laden issued every time Bush's approval ratings dropped. People in flyover states sat up nights worrying about Scary Swarthy Men doing things to the local Wal-Mart, and all the while, while Bush's Washington was warning of terrorist plots and Americans were hiding under the bed clutching a roll of plastic sheeting in one hand and one of duct tape in the other, the guys at the top were rifling through the dresser drawers where Americans kept their spending cash and filled their pockets, then crept off and joined the Be Afraid Chorus.

This is really the point at which the Democratic Party became completely undone. Faced with a McCarthyite White House, and saddled with the baggage of Vietnam amti-war protests, Democrats fell silent as they gave George W. Bush blank check after blank check after blank check to cut taxes for his friends and to feed more and more American kids into a Middle East meatgrinder. This is where it became obvious that this was a party completely unable to frame an argument. A half-million ordinary citizens marched in New York City in early 2003 because we knew that the Iraq claims were bullshit, but the Democratic Party could not even be bothered to study the readily-available evidence out there. It was easier to just listen to the Washington pundits and go along.

Then in mid-2002, a virtually unknown governor from Vermont appeared on Meet the Press and miracle of miracles, was showing that he HAD read the evidence, and he KNEW what was going on. Here was a guy I could vote for.

Howard Dean became so much of a threat to the Washington narrative that not only did Democratic presidential rivals pool resources to tag-team him in Iowa, where it was starting to look like he just might be able to take his campaign of truth to the nomination, but the media got in on the pile-on, deliberately turning down the crowd noise at a rally for campaign workers following his defeat in Iowa so that his exhortations to the disappointed crowd sounded like the ravings of a madman. Later on, after Howard Dean was safely out of the way, ABC, the network that perpetrated this journalistic crime, admitted that they had turned down the crowd noise. Horse, barn door, etc.

So John Kerry, the party's anointed one, the guy who couldn't possibly be attacked because he was a war hero, became the nominee....and was promptly attacked as a war traitor. John Kerry made two fatal mistakes. The first was believing that the American people are too smart to believe demonstrable untruths, and the second was believing that he was working with good-faith operators. Yet despite the willingness of the public to believe the claims of the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (a group financed by a Bush and Tom DeLay campaign contributor), Kerry still came within Ohio's electoral votes of defeating George W. Bush in 2004. Kerry, displaying now-typical Democratic gutlessness, didn't even wait till all the Ohio votes were counted before taking his $14 million in campaign cash and going home, but it has since been well-demonstrated that Republican-initiated electronic voting shenanigans really DID tilt the scales for Bush.

So fast-forward to 2008. George W. Bush is acknowledged by all but about 20% of the population to be the miserable failure that those of us with gray matter in our crania knew all along. The financial crisis of 2008 has, depending on what you believe, put us within a hair's breadth of global economic collapse. The Democrats' presumed front-runner, Hillary Clinton, who in a room full of netroots activists at Yearly Kos 2007 said that "Lobbyists are Americans too", lost the nomination in the face of the charisma of Barack Obama, his transformative potential, and a desperate hunger in the population for someone as different from George W. Bush as possible.

I had supported John Edwards in the primaries. Of course we had no idea then what was going on in his private life, and we knew that people in his home state regarded him as somewhat of a phony, but at least he was SAYING the right things about how Americans were already suffering in a diminishing job market and a contracting economy. Edwards turned out to be as bad a messenger for "The Two Americas" as Ralph Nader is for "There Is No Difference", but at least on the stump he was the only guy paying any mind to what was happening. I took no end of shit from Obama supporters in those early days of the 2008 Democratic nominating process because I did not believe that he was the progressive dreamboat they did. I remember paraphrasing Walter Mondale's 1984 convention speech to a gay friend who was offended by John Edwards' "struggle" with accepting gay marriage. "You make John Edwards feel icky and you make Barack Obama feel icky. Obama won't tell you. Edwards just did."

And I was right.

But still -- what was an American in search of a president with a brain in his head, vote for a once-proud American Senator whose stock had fallen so far that he had to choose a bubble-headed beauty queen for his running mate, or a guy who could string together coherent sentences and show that he recognized we live in a complex world? McCain was so inept on the campaign trail that Obama hardly had to break a sweat. McCain seemed old, out-of-touch, and cantankerous. And even the priapic sexual fantasies of the pundit corps at the mere mention of Sarah Palin didn't change the fact that this dimwitted, theorcratic End Of Days-er was potentially one cancer survivor away from the nuclear football.

Even if you didn't support Obama all that much, there was a palpable aura of change in the air on January 20, 2009. It was an aura that diminshed quickly, as Obama filled his Cabinet with hacks, Clinton retreads, and corporatists. And now, thirty years after the I Got Mine And Fuck You doctrine took over the Republican Party, and one summer after the shrill ravings of barely 19% of the American people were treated as a massive new movement, here we are, with a Democratic Party capitulating to a gutting of the American social contract, and not even a request to ask billionaires to throw even one more nickel...one penny...into the pot.

I ask you: Who do these people, these Democrats represent? It isn't these people:




So who is it? And just whom do they think is going to keep them in office? Obama's political people think that "They Have No Place Else To Go" will keep the Democratic base in the fold. They think they're appealing to "a wide swath of voters":

Mr. Obama, seeking to appeal to the broad swath of independent voters, has adopted the Republicans’ language and in some cases their policies, while signaling a willingness to break with liberals on some issues.

That has some progressive members of Congress and liberal groups arguing that by not fighting for more stimulus spending, Mr. Obama could be left with an economy still producing so few jobs by Election Day that his re-election could be threatened. Besides turning off independents, Mr. Obama risks alienating Democratic voters already disappointed by his escalation of the war in Afghanistan and his failure to close the Guantánamo Bay prison, end the Bush-era tax cuts and enact a government-run health insurance system.

“The activist liberal base will support Obama because they’re terrified of the right wing,” said Robert L. Borosage, co-director of the liberal group Campaign for America’s Future.

But he said, “I believe that the voting base of the Democratic Party — young people, single women, African-Americans, Latinos — are going to be so discouraged by this economy and so dismayed unless the president starts to champion a jobs program and take on the Republican Congress that the ability of labor to turn out its vote, the ability of activists to mobilize that vote, is going to be dramatically reduced.”

Borosage is dead wrong. Maybe the dead-enders at Daily Kos, and the commenter here who insists that if you don't cheerlead for Obama it means you really want Mitt Romney to be president, will show up no matter what. But this particular voter is being tired of being told by a bunch of at best inept, lazy, spineless Democrats that no matter how many times they capitulate to the most insane Republicans we've ever seen, we have to vote for them because we have no place else to go. This particular voter is tired of being shown pictures of Michele Bachmann and being told, "ooh, SCARY!"

I am 56 years old. I can't say I want to be subject to torture because I'm not a Christian. I can't say I want to see a hastening of global thermonuclear war because some lunatic that a bunch of inbred ignorant hicks decided was a good person thinks it's his or her calling by God to accelerate the End of Days. I can't say I want a world in which my friends' kids are pushed down into poverty because the oligarchs find any semblance of the middle class frightening. I'd like to believe that I have 20 or 30 or, given the longevity of my family, even more good years ahead of me. I'd like to believe that I'll have time to do something other than just work, eat, and sleep before I die. But I'll tell you this much: If the rest of the middle class in country doesn't care that its government -- both parties -- hates them and is out to eliminate them at the beck and call of their oligarchic masters, then what the hell is the point? Let Michele Bachmann become president. Let's have a Supreme Court that always sides with corporations. Let's have creationism be taught in every school in the country. Let's head down this road towards a new dark ages. If Americans don't care enough to do something to stop this relentless decline into ignorance and hate and fear and loathing, why the hell should I, with my best years already behind me, bust my ass?

The New Deal: Sacrificed on the altar of Barack Obama's childhood emotional baggage -- or for his greed?

I don't know.

Maybe Barack Obama really in his heart still believes, despite being depicted as a monkey, the target of an e-mail depicting his parents as chimpanzees, called a liar in the middle of the State of the Union message, described with lynching metaphors by a leading presidential candidate, and a nonstop barrage of obstructionism by Congressional Republicans during the last two-and-a-half years, that he still can negotiate with Republicans; that he's so special that he can part the waters. Maybe he has some deep-seated self-loathing that's so pervasive that he gets some kind of perverse gratification out of being abused by Republicans.

Maybe he's even just doing what he's wanted to do all along -- set himself up for a nice cushy eight-figure job with an investment bank after he leaves office and join the ranks of the very people we elected him to keep under some kind of control.

Whatever it is, it's pretty clear that the poor and the elderly in this country are going to be sacrificed, not by some right-wing Republican greedmeister, but by a Democrat that those very poor and elderly elected:

President Obama is pressing congressional leaders to consider a far-reaching debt-reduction plan that would force Democrats to accept major changes to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for Republican support for fresh tax revenue.

At a meeting with top House and Senate leaders set for Thursday morning, Obama plans to argue that a rare consensus has emerged about the size and scope of the nation’s budget problems and that policymakers should seize the moment to take dramatic action.

As part of his pitch, Obama is proposing significant reductions in Medicare spending and for the first time is offering to tackle the rising cost of Social Security, according to people in both parties with knowledge of the proposal. The move marks a major shift for the White House and could present a direct challenge to Democratic lawmakers who have vowed to protect health and retirement benefits from the assault on government spending.

“Obviously, there will be some Democrats who don’t believe we need to do entitlement reform. But there seems to be some hunger to do something of some significance,” said a Democratic official familiar with the administration’s thinking. “These moments come along at most once a decade. And it would be a real mistake if we let it pass us by.”

Rather than roughly $2 trillion in savings, the White House is now seeking a plan that would slash more than $4 trillion from annual budget deficits over the next decade, stabilize borrowing, and defuse the biggest budgetary time bombs that are set to explode as the cost of health care rises and the nation’s population ages.

That would represent a major legislative achievement, but it would also put Obama and GOP leaders at odds with major factions of their own parties. While Democrats would be asked to cut social-safety-net programs, Republicans would be asked to raise taxes, perhaps by letting tax breaks for the nation’s wealthiest households expire on schedule at the end of next year.

The administration argues that lawmakers would also get an important victory to sell to voters in 2012. “The fiscal good has to outweigh the pain,” said a Democratic official familiar with the discussions.

Yup. Cuts to the social safety net that have been in place for decades and that keep the elderly from living out on the street are going to really be a big seller in 2012, especially in states like, oh, say, Florida, and North Carolina, where there are both a lot of retirees AND a lot of poor people. That's gonna go over BIG.

Americans have drunk the deficit kool-aid, but they don't really understand what the kind of BIG CUTS NOW they seem to be asking for are going to mean. A poll in March of this year showed that while 80% of Americans are concerned about the deficit, they oppose cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and K-12 education. Believe me, when Grandma has to move into a house where Dad has been out of work for two years and the family income is a third of what it was; where the son has been out of college for a year and is still working at the Piggly-Wiggly for $7.25 an hour because he can't find a programming job; where the daughter who's an A student is living at home and going to community college because the money that Dad and Mom had put away from her college lost 40% of its value during the 2008 financial crisis and still hasn't recovered -- because Grandma can no longer afford her apartment and food after her Social Security checks have been cut, families like that are going to find their concern with the deficit disappearing mighty quick.

Americans don't favor cuts to these programs, but they DO, contrary to the relentless drumbeats of Republicans, favor increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans, especially when the questions are framed as a choice between just cuts, just tax hikes, or a combination of both:

Several polls ask people if taxes should be increased on people who make more than $250,000. Polls show substantial majorities support the idea. We found majorities of 72 percent, 64 percent, and 59 percent. (Those are from April polls by ABC News/Washington Post, McClatchy-Marist, and USA Today/Gallup, respectively.)

On whether corporations pay enough in taxes, Gallup found that 67 percent said they pay too little.

Finally, we should note one area where we found contradictions on tax increases --in polls that ask people if they favor spending cuts, tax increases, or some combination thereof.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted at the beginning of May found that most people, 52 percent, favored a combination of cuts and tax increases. The NBC/Washington Post poll from April found that number was even higher, at 59 percent.

On the other hand, when you don't give people the option of both, they favor spending cuts over tax increases by significant margins. We found a Reuters/Ipsos poll from March that found people favored spending cuts over tax increase by 56 percent to 30, and a CBS News/New York Times poll from January that put it at 62 to 29.

But then we found polls that asked participants if they preferred cuts to benefits such as Social Security and Medicare over tax increases. In those cases, the results favored tax increases. The CBS News/New York Times poll found that 62 percent favored increasing taxes before Medicare benefits are cut.

The tax cuts that were instituted by George W. Bush in conjunction with his spending spree on two futile have been in place for a decade -- and there are still no jobs. But that isn't stopping Republicans from continuing the trickle-down meme that when the rich have stuffed all the cash into their pockets that will fit, they will start just tossing it on the floor in the form of jobs and let us pick up the scraps. The reality that we're seeing is that when their pockets are full, they just start stuffing cash into the pockets of another jacket.

And yet there is our President -- the one we elected in 2008, along with a Democratic Congress, to protect Social Security and Medicare, to protect public education, and to protect a woman's sovereignty over his own body -- selling us out on EVERYTHING.

Wo which is it? Are we once again dealing with a president who's willing to sacrifice a nation to his primal childhood wounds, or just another greedy asshole who rode a Trojan Horse into the White House?

Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere: Because I Just Can't edition

Because I got up at 4:30 AM this morning, I'm tired, and my customary prowl around the Intartoobz this morning has me so pissed off already I just can't even speak.

Let's start with Amanda today, as the Republicans start to show their true colors about abortion: that they believe women are just a bunch of dirty sluts.

Driftglass takes on David "No End of Life Care for Geezers" Brooks (who doesn't seem to realize that he is one).

If you haven't checked out Keith Olbermann's new blog, FOK News Channel, you should do it now, and bookmark it. Sure, he's a Big Name and linking to him isn't exactly in the spirit of Blogroll Amnesty Day (or in the case of this blog and many others, Blogroll Amnesty LIFE), but he's a damn good blogger. Start here.

Mike Stark calls Rush Limbaugh again.

As Republicans start feeling safe saying that all women who have sex are whores, and all public school teachers (most of whom are still women) are lazy bitches who shouldn't get paid; as the Republican jihad against women really kicks into gear, Shelby Knox kicks off Women's History Month.

Speaking about Republican jihads against everyone who isn't one of them, here's Digby on Haley Barbour and the resurrection of Ronald Reagan's welfare queen meme.

Ted Frier on the hostile corporate takeover of Wisconsin -- and elsewhere.

And in closing: This segment from The Last Word made me wonder if I'd entered a time warp and gone back in time to 1968, since we once again have Republicans talking about unwashed smelly hippies:

Have as non-shitty a day as you can.

It isn't even surprising anymore

Come on, admit it. The fact that Senate Democrats are caving to Republican demands that the top 1% keep their tax cuts doesn't even make you shriek with frustration anymore. I don't know about you, but I shrugged my shoulders when I read this:

White House officials and Congressional Republicans said Sunday they were closing in on a deal to temporarily continue the Bush-era tax cuts at all income levels, while bitterly frustrated Democratic Congressional leaders began exploring whether they would have the votes for such a package.

[snip]

Senior Democrats on Sunday said that they were resigned to defeat in the highly charged tax debate, and they voiced dismay.

“We’re moving in that direction,” Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat said dejectedly when Bob Schieffer, host of “Face the Nation” on CBS, asked him if the 2001 and 2003 tax rates would be extended even for the wealthy. “And we’re only moving there against my judgment,” Mr. Durbin added.

In meetings with administration officials after the Senate votes, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and many other House and Senate Democrats voiced deep unhappiness at the prospect of extending all the tax cuts and also expressed their belief that the White House did not appear to be getting enough for such a big concession, officials said.

What makes Nancy Pelosi think that this president even WANTS anything else? At this point, it's pretty clear that lip service to working Americans is all this guy does, while he amasses chits with Wall Street to be cashed in for a fat Wall Street paycheck when he leaves office. What's hilarious is that in return for a seven-figure windfall for Rush Limbaugh, Republicans "probably" would vote to extend unemployment benefits.

No guarantees.

Does anyone actually believe that an extension of unemployment benefits will be part of the final package?

Meanwhile, Wall Street multimillionaires are so concerned that they might have to buy one less Maserati that they're planning to move bonuses into 2010:

Worried that lawmakers will allow taxes to rise for the wealthiest Americans beginning next year, financial firms are discussing whether to move up their bonus payouts from next year to this month.

At stake is a portion of the hefty annual payouts that are a familiar part of the compensation culture on Wall Street, as well as a juicy target of popular anger. If Congress does not extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the highest income levels, a typical worker who earns a $1 million bonus would pay $40,000 to $50,000 more in taxes next year than this year, depending on base salary.

Goldman Sachs is one of the companies discussing how to time bonus season, according to three people who have been briefed on the discussions. Pay consultants who work with major Wall Street companies say that just about every other large bank has also considered such a move in recent weeks.

With tax politics in Washington unpredictable, bank executives have spent months sketching out several options for their bonus plans, including the possibility of an earlier payout. Lawmakers have been trading accusations across a partisan divide, but after this weekend, it appears likely that a compromise will extend the tax cuts for all income levels.

Even so, the banks’ discussions about bonus timing underscore how focused the industry is on protecting every dollar of pay.

Isn't is nice that Goldman Sachs and other banks are so concerned with protecting every single little dollar of their employees' pay, while other industries are still hemorrhaging jobs? Doesn't it make you feel all warm and fuzzy that the people who got us into this economic mess, the people WE THE TAXPAYER bailed out are going to have their bonuses protected come hell or high water while the rest of us are going to work every day wondering if today is the day we're going to get called in to find out we don't have a job anymore?

The fix was in from the beginning under the previous president, as Krugman notes today. Bush was an instant-gratification kind of guy who has always been able to evade any kind of responsibility:

Back in 2001, former President George W. Bush pulled a fast one. He wanted to enact an irresponsible tax cut, largely for the benefit of the wealthiest Americans. But there were Senate rules in place designed to prevent that kind of irresponsibility. So Mr. Bush evaded the rules by making the tax cut temporary, with the whole thing scheduled to expire on the last day of 2010.

The plan, of course, was to come back later and make the thing permanent, never mind the impact on the deficit. But that never happened. And so here we are, with 2010 almost over and nothing resolved.

[snip]

Bear in mind that Republicans want to make those tax cuts permanent. They might agree to a two- or three-year extension — but only because they believe that this would set up the conditions for a permanent extension later. And they may well be right: if tax-cut blackmail works now, why shouldn’t it work again later?

America, however, cannot afford to make those cuts permanent. We’re talking about almost $4 trillion in lost revenue just over the next decade; over the next 75 years, the revenue loss would be more than three times the entire projected Social Security shortfall. So giving in to Republican demands would mean risking a major fiscal crisis — a crisis that could be resolved only by making savage cuts in federal spending.

And we’re not talking about government programs nobody cares about: the only way to cut spending enough to pay for the Bush tax cuts in the long run would be to dismantle large parts of Social Security and Medicare.

Yes, but this is what Americans WANT, isn't it? They really truly care about deficits to the exclusion of all else, right? They WANT the wealthiest one percent to have big tax cuts continued because Rich People Create Jobs™, right?

Wrong:

According to a new CBS News poll, however, Boehner is off-base in his claim that Americans "want us to stop all the looming tax hikes."

The poll finds that 53 percent of Americans want the Bush-era tax cuts extended only for households earning less than $250,000 per year. That roughly matches the proposal put forth by the White House, which wants to extend the cuts only for incomes less than $250,000 for families and $200,000 for individuals.

Just 26 percent of Americans say they support extending the cuts for all Americans, even those earning above the $250,000 level, which is the GOP proposal.

Doesn't that make you feel great about America? And doesn't that just INSPIRE you to continue to elect the kind of people who allow this to happen?

Krugman throws in the towel on Barack Obama

I'd pretty much thrown in the towel after health care "reform". I've realized for a long time that what we have in the White House is yet another guy replaying his childhood tape loops on a national stage. George W. Bush spent eight years and the nation's economy and reputation trying to simultaneously prove that his dick was bigger than his father's, and simultaneously gain that father's approval. Barack Obama seems bound and determined to spend four years (because it's impossible to believe that having completely alienated his base AND independence, he'll get eight) trying to prove to an intransigent Republican Party that would hang him by a rope from a tree if it thought it could get away with it that he's not one of those THREATENING, MEAN black men. No, indeedy, he's a NICE black man, one who won't knife them in a dark alley. And he seems bound and determined to spend four years and what's left of the nation's economy and reputation trying to prove that.

And that's the CHARITABLE interpretation.

One of the less charitable ones is that 56% of American voters were hoodwinked by a guy who's more like the Republicans than anyone even now wants to believe; a guy who BELIEVES in torture and assassination; a guy who BELIEVES in tax cuts for the wealthy and screw everyone else; a guy who WANTS endless war; a guy who is all about doing the bidding of corporations BECAUSE HE WANTS TO; a guy who feels every bit as "icky" about Teh Gays as John Edwards did, only who lacks even the courage that a weasel like John Edwards had to admit it; a guy who WANTS to gut Social Security and Medicare; a guy who decided to become president as a kind of ruling class internship; in which he spends four years doing Wall Street's bidding in exchange for a nice eight-figure gig upon leaving office.

The even less charitable, tinfoiley-scarey one is that American Presidents have absolutely zero power; that there are shadowy figures who really run things who sit every new president down and lay down the law. And that if he (or she) wants his/her children to survive to adulthood and not be gunned down on live television to be replayed over and over again on 24-hour cable news, the line is to be toed and their bidding is to be done without question. And that bidding is to wreck the middle class, push everyone who doesn't sit at their table into grinding poverty, and expand military adventures without end to feed the defense contracting beast. On the right they would call these shadowy figures "George Soros". There's FAR more evidence of this from right-wing corporate circles, what with the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch. But if such a shadow government exists, it's not run by anyone that we have ever heard of. It wouldn't be shadowy in that case.

But whatever the deal is with Barack Obama, there's no denying now that there is no game of 11-dimensional chess going on, -- that he really does know what he's doing and we should just trust him. No, it's clear that what we have to look forward to is two more years of utter sellouts to a lunatic right-wing House of Representatives and corporate interests, followed by an election in which a despairing public forgets what a grifter the Wackjob from Wasilla is and puts her in the White House.

If Obama has lost Krugman, he's lost America:

After the Democratic “shellacking” in the midterm elections, everyone wondered how President Obama would respond. Would he show what he was made of? Would he stand firm for the values he believes in, even in the face of political adversity?

On Monday, we got the answer: he announced a pay freeze for federal workers. This was an announcement that had it all. It was transparently cynical; it was trivial in scale, but misguided in direction; and by making the announcement, Mr. Obama effectively conceded the policy argument to the very people who are seeking — successfully, it seems — to destroy him.

So I guess we are, in fact, seeing what Mr. Obama is made of.

About that pay freeze: the president likes to talk about “teachable moments.” Well, in this case he seems eager to teach Americans something false.

The truth is that America’s long-run deficit problem has nothing at all to do with overpaid federal workers. For one thing, those workers aren’t overpaid. Federal salaries are, on average, somewhat less than those of private-sector workers with equivalent qualifications. And, anyway, employee pay is only a small fraction of federal expenses; even cutting the payroll in half would reduce total spending less than 3 percent.

So freezing federal pay is cynical deficit-reduction theater. It’s a (literally) cheap trick that only sounds impressive to people who don’t know anything about budget realities. The actual savings, about $5 billion over two years, are chump change given the scale of the deficit.

[snip]

Mr. Obama’s pay ploy might, just might, have been justified if he had used the announcement of a freeze as an occasion to take a strong stand against Republican demands — to declare that at a time when deficits are an important issue, tax breaks for the wealthiest aren’t acceptable.

But he didn’t. Instead, he apparently intended the pay freeze announcement as a peace gesture to Republicans the day before a bipartisan summit. At that meeting, Mr. Obama, who has faced two years of complete scorched-earth opposition, declared that he had failed to reach out sufficiently to his implacable enemies. He did not, as far as anyone knows, wear a sign on his back saying “Kick me,” although he might as well have.

[snip]

The real question is what Mr. Obama and his inner circle are thinking. Do they really believe, after all this time, that gestures of appeasement to the G.O.P. will elicit a good-faith response?

What’s even more puzzling is the apparent indifference of the Obama team to the effect of such gestures on their supporters. One would have expected a candidate who rode the enthusiasm of activists to an upset victory in the Democratic primary to realize that this enthusiasm was an important asset. Instead, however, Mr. Obama almost seems as if he’s trying, systematically, to disappoint his once-fervent supporters, to convince the people who put him where he is that they made an embarrassing mistake.

Whatever is going on inside the White House, from the outside it looks like moral collapse — a complete failure of purpose and loss of direction.

Krugman is more charitable than I am. He implies that there ever was a purpose other than what we're seeing.

(Obama has lost the Kossacks, too. And yeah, what Yellow Dog said.)

And the swell of the drumbeats continues

Ah, how they miss the codpiece, the broken sentences, the blotched complexion of the drunk off the wagon, the penis-size anxiety of the bantam-rooster swagger, the bluster into wars based on complete lies, the utter certainty that driving the country off a cliff was the right thing to do.

First it was Chris Matthews broaching the subject of "Bush nostalgia":

Now it's Stanley Fish in that Public Enemy #1 of teabaggers everywhere, the New York Times:

Analyses of how this has happened are plentiful and varied, but most agree that it had something to do with the summer of 2009, when the town meetings that seemed a good, nicely democratic idea in the spring turned into a recruiting device for the angry crowds that would become the Tea Party.

At the same time, Bush profited from the fact that he kept a low profile and didn’t snipe at his successor, a task left to his vice president, who therefore took upon himself the enmity and scorn previously directed at his former boss. Dick Cheney was, in effect, a lightning rod, and he was joined in that function by Sarah Palin, who slid neatly into the slot Bush had occupied in the mind of all good liberals for eight long years. Hatred and contempt of Palin is now the favorite pastime of those who have abandoned the cowboy from Texas and transferred their obsessive animus to the belle of Alaska (who, I say again, is more formidable than many in both parties believe.)

Meanwhile, Bush’s policies came to seem less obviously reprehensible as the Obama administration drifted into embracing watered-down versions of many of them. Guantanamo hasn’t been closed. No Child Left Behind is being revised and perhaps improved, but not repealed. The banks are still engaging in their bad practices. Partisanship is worse than ever. Obama seems about to back away from the decision to try 9/11 defendants in civilian courts, a prospect that led the ACLU to run an ad in Sunday’s Times with the subheading “Change or more of the same?” Above that question is a series of photographs that shows Obama morphing into guess who — yes, that’s right, George W. Bush.

And now, right on schedule, Bush has resurfaced (just as I imagined him doing a year ago last September ) to join Bill Clinton in a humanitarian relief effort. He is officially a member in good standing of the ex-presidents club, and the longer he lives the more his reputation will be burnished. To be sure, his post-presidency resume is still thin, but we can expect it to be beefed up by good deeds, ceremonial appearances and the activities that will surround the building and opening of his library at Southern Methodist University. We’ll see Bush the tour guide and Bush the patron of historical scholarship and, perhaps, even Bush the seminar leader.

And the judgment of history? Well, I’m not that foolish, but I will venture to say that it will be more nuanced than anything the professional Bush-haters — indistinguishable in temperament from the professional Obama-haters — are now able to imagine. He will not go to the top of the list, but neither will he be the figure of fun and derision he seemed destined to be only a year ago. You heard it here.

Yes. George W. Bush's reputation will be burnished, because Americans have notoriously short memories and they care more about who's going to win American Idol than they do about how their country has been turned into an oligarchy in which they don't stand a chance.

George W. Bush drove the entire country off a cliff, and Barack Obama was allowed to become President because the oligarchs knew that there was nothing he or anyone could do to fix it. And things are going to be so bad in the future that Americans will long for the days when a POS Cape Cod was a half-million dollars because the banks were built on nothing. That three thousand Americans died because George W. Bush was asleep at the switch will be long forgotten in favor of the guy with the bullhorn at Ground Zero. In fact, they'll think 9/11 happened on Obama's watch, because of people like Dana Perino and Rudy Giuliani and Mary Matalin insisting unchallenged that there were no terrorist attacks on Bush's watch. They'll forget about the lies, the surveillance, the remarks about being a dictator. They'll forget about the appalling boorishness he showed overseas, and how he turned this nation into a laughing stock -- a giant bully to be alternately feared for being batshit crazy and loathed for being stupid. They'll forget because things are going to be so bad in the future as a direct result of what George W. Bush and Dick Cheney set in motion, that the years from 2001-2008 will be regarded as the good old days.

Why it's so hard to blog these days

Sometimes I wish I'd made a conscious choice to blog about being middle-aged in America, or about cooking, or about cats, or something else pop-cultural and relatively insignificant in the larger sphere of things. Perhaps I'd feel somewhat less like I'm carrying a boulder on my back all the time. But doing this seems like a chore most of the time of late -- a chore and an exercise in futility. It's not that much different from when I managed to bang out a review of Unleashed in 2005 and realized "This just isn't fun anymore."

Part of it is that instead of being able to get my necessary 7-1/2 hours of sleep every night I'm up at 5 AM in order to leave the house by 7:15 for the Job That Ate My Life. It isn't that I don't LIKE said job; and I'm damn lucky to have it. It's challenging, it pays decently, and I work with great people. But when the reality is that you are out of the house from 7:15 (6:15 some mornings) and most nights don't get home till 6:30 PM (or later if you manage to squeeze in a half-hour at the gym), and then have more work to do in the evening, you end up with a house that you'd be ashamed to have anyone enter, and a spouse whose patience with the fact that all you do is work makes him damn close to a saint and who deserves more of your attention than he gets, how do you even breathe, let alone do insightful articles about the Important Issues of the Day?

This is why you've seen little here from me lately but in-depth articles about Olympic figure skating and funny videos. Because when I sit down at 5 AM, and start looking at various news sites and other blogs, I'm so horrified by what I see that I go into a kind of paralysis. I'm not the only one getting to this point. Our good friend DCap, one of the best bloggers down here among the rabble (as opposed to the Big Boys and Girls, for whom this is What They Do instead of something they do in stolen moments), threw in the towel at the beginning of February. Richard Blair gave up at the beginning of the year. Carrie of Carrie's Nation, who used to contribute here, just up and disappeared one day, going so far as to delete her blog.

I'm not about to go that route, even if only because I have no idea what I'd do with myself without it. Going into my home office after pouring a cup of coffee, turning on the monitor, and starting to read is something I do on autopilot at this point. On the other hand, it would probably take the rest of my expected life to just clean up this house. (And no, don't tell me to hire someone, because this house has to be purged of effluvia before anyone can effectively clean it, and after last week's snowpocalypse, all of my shrubbery is pretty much destroyed, which is going to require huge expenditures of cash to have it all dug up and replaced in the spring.) But when I read stuff like this, and this, and Cookie Jill's Sunday environmental news, and when Driftglass has to hold a fundraiser in order to continue, well, you know things are at a sorry pass indeed.

It was one thing when we had an inept boob as President, a soulless ghoul as Vice President, combined with ruthless bought-and-paid-for Republicans in Congress for whom ideology trumps EVERYTHING, including the good of the country and feckless Democrats, bought for usually less money, who are scared of their own shadows. But now we have the same Congressional Republicans and Democrats, combined with yet another President playing out his childhood baggage on a national stage, one who's smart enough to know better, but just as inept, and a Vice President who ought to be better able to help him navigate the morass known as Capitol Hill. And what do we have? Continued war, continued mass surveillance of Americans, continued worship of Wall Street to the exclusion of everyone else, and an impending huge transfer of workers' wages to insurance company executives. So what's the difference? Democrats aren't trying to create an evangelical Christian theocracy designed to bring about the Rapture and they aren't trying to jail women for having miscarriages? Because Jesus and female sexuality are about the only playing fields on which there's any difference anymore.

So if you don't see daily posts from me for a while, don't fret. I'm just trying to regain some equilibrium here.

UPDATE: DCap is dipping his toes in the water again. But for the most part, the only ones of us who aren't just plain exhausted are guys like Bustednuckles, who in a parallel reality, are the Tea Party -- only with rage pointed in the right places and minus the stoopid.

Welcome to the Corporate States of America

It shouldn't surprise us, really. The only thing that the Roberts Court's decision today that a giant multinational corporation is EXACTLY THE SAME as a guy who gets up in the morning, drives to a job, pays a mortgage, and coaches youth soccer does is codify into law what I've known for quite some time: that our government is entirely bought and paid for by corporations.

The Democrats used to keep it hidden by their rhetoric about being for working people. They'd talk a good game, but when push came to shove, they'd be under the table like a mangy dog settling for the scraps left over after the Republicans finished gorging themselves. But I think we've seen now in the Harry Reid Senate that the Democrats are just as bought and paid for as the Republicans. The only difference is that they finally raised their price. Now they want the same huge wads of cash as the Republicans get.

And this year another 45,000 people will die because they do not have access to health care. Hundreds of thousands will lose their homes. Children will have respiratory problems from factories belching out the products of coal combustion. They will die from E Coli infections from their hamburgers and tainted baby formula and glass shards in the bologna. Wars will be sold during commercial breaks on American Idol, presented as if they were video games. And any of the 100 Senators and 435 Representatives, and the President and Vice-President, who dares defy the will of the corporations who now own our country, will be run out of office. Because the frazzled moms and dads packing the kids' lunch while watching the Today show won't hear about the mine sludge that's contaminating their kids' playground. All they'll hear about is how Congressman so-and-so wants to eliminate jobs in their community -- in ads paid for by the very mining company that's poisoning them.

We got stuck with George W. Bush in 2000. It was important in 2004 to replace him for just this reason -- and we didn't.

For a few moments in January 2009, we were able to fool ourselves that the Republic had somehow weathered the storm. Today, with feckless Democrats led by President Hope and Change scrambling away from their signature issue as fast as their little cockroach legs can carry them, now that an obscure state Senator whom I've seen more of because of a 20-year-old magazine spread than I ever want to see, gets them off the hook from having to actually do anything.

I don't even need to go into the Republicans. I have over 7000 posts in this blog documenting their folly.

Now the corporations run everything, and there isn't any way to delude ourselves anymore. And if you think there's any hope at all for living in the free nation you thought you did instead of a corporatocracy, Keith Olbermann's special comment tonight will straighten you out quickly:

A side note: Tonight as I was driving home from work, I was listening to that paid-for whore Mara Liasson talking on WNYC (that's NPR, yes, supposedly "liberal" NPR, that is also bought and paid for by corporations) about how this decision "evens the playing field for Republicans" -- as if the airwaves weren't already full of Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck and Laura Ingraham and the Fox Morning Idiots and Monica Crowley and Neal Boortz and Michael Medved and Mark Levin and Michael the Savage Weiner and on and on and on; choosing instead to imagine a world in which two hours of Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, and Randi Rhodes broadcasting on maybe five low-power stations in the entire country somehow dominate public discourse. I hit buttons on the radio, getting a traffic report here, an observance about the Jets' chances this weekend by Mike Francesa there, and for some strange reason, a rerun of Ron Reagan's show that seemed to be from last Friday. It seemed odd to me, and when I got home I found out why this was:

It is with the greatest regret, on behalf of our Board, that we must announce that Air America Media is ceasing its live programming operations as of this afternoon, and that the Company will file soon under Chapter 7 of the Bankruptcy Code to carry out an orderly winding-down of the business.

The very difficult economic environment has had a significant impact on Air America's business. This past year has seen a "perfect storm" in the media industry generally. National and local advertising revenues have fallen drastically, causing many media companies nationwide to fold or seek bankruptcy protection. From large to small, recent bankruptcies like Citadel Broadcasting and closures like that of the industry's long-time trade publication Radio and Records have signaled that these are very difficult and rapidly changing times.

Those companies that remain are facing audience fragmentation as a result of new media technologies, are often saddled with crushing debt, and have generally found it difficult to obtain operating or investment capital from traditional sources of funding. In this climate, our painstaking search for new investors has come close several times right up into this week, but ultimately fell short of success.

With radio industry ad revenues down for 10 consecutive quarters, and reportedly off 21% in 2009, signs of improvement have consisted of hoping things will be less bad. And though Internet/new media revenues are projected to grow, our expanding online efforts face the same monetization and profitability challenges in the short term confronting the Web operations of most media companies

When Air America Radio launched in April, 2004 with already-known personalities like Al Franken and then-unknown future stars like Rachel Maddow, it was the only full-time progressive voice in the mainstream broadcast media world. At a critical time in our nation's history — when dissent on issues such as the Iraq war were often denounced as "un-American" — Air America and its talented team helped millions of Americans remember the importance of compelling discussion about the most pivotal events and decisions of our generation.

Through some 100 radio outlets nationwide, Air America helped build a new sense of purpose and determination among American progressives. With this revival, the progressive movement made major gains in the 2006 mid-term elections and, more recently, in the election of President Barack Obama and a strongly Democratic Congress.

Laws have changed for the better thanks to this revival.....but all the same our company cannot escape the laws of economics. So we intend a rapid, orderly closure over the next few days. All current employees will be paid through today, January 21. A severance package will be offered tomorrow to full-time current employees with more than six months of tenure.

We will strive to assist affiliates and partners in achieving a smooth transition. Starting at 6 pm EST today, we will provide our affiliates, listeners and users a selection of encore programming until 9 pm EST on Monday, January 25, at which time Air America programming will end.

It isn't as if watching the dusty bones of what used to be something fresh and interesting and loaded with potential blow away in a cold winter wind is such a huge loss, not after the way a series of management teams, each one worse than the one before, treated their on-air talent -- people like Sam Seder and Marc Maron, who sweated bullets for that organization and were tossed aside like candy wrappers. But coming the same day as the Supreme Court of the United States handed the country over to Archer-Daniels-Midland and Capital One and News Corp. and McDonald's and Xe and Halliburton and Raytheon and Wellpoint; and the same day as Nancy Pelosi essentially threw in the towel on health care reform because Harry Reid is terrified to let the Republicans filibuster, it just feels like the final nail in the coffin of what once was America.

Right now I find myself wondering what to do about this blog. I've been at this for over five-and-a-half years. We're within spitting distance of a million page views over that time. Because of this blog, and other online writing ventures I've had, I've been fortunate to meet some of the most amazing friends I've ever had in my life. For a long time I had a job where I really wasn't all that busy. I could leave the house at quarter to nine and I was always home by six, after an easy 20-minute ride on scenic back roads. Now I have a job where I'm out of the house sometimes as early as 6 AM, and most nights I'm not home till 6:30. I have a tremendous workload, and spend most of my evenings and often a good part of my weekends doing work for this job. I like the job. My boss is great, I have wonderful co-workers, and the work itself is interesting. But what little life I have is largely spent on this blog. In short, I'm really, really tired.

I started this blog in July 2004 because if I didn't talk about what had me outraged all the time I would go insane. I also started it so that people in my family would know what was going on in the world that wasn't being reported in the mainstream media. And maybe I need to keep it going just for that. But there's a part of me that looks at my messy, cluttered house and thinks, maybe I need to change my priorities, even if only for a little while. When I used to write movie reviews, i dreamt of a day when someone might pay me to do it; a day when being a film critic was my job. When I started this blog, I thought perhaps my ultimate future would be writing for pay. I came sort of close to it after I was laid off in 2008, when I interviewed for an editor/contributor job for a progressive online magazine. Nothing was going on with that for a while, and I got the offer for my current job, and the rest is history.

I think we all would like to believe that we're making a difference. But after five and a half years of writing, not one of my nonpolitical friends is paying one iota more attention than they did before, and they're all just as susceptible to a media that regards Sarah Palin as a serious presidential candidate and that gives birthers equal time with sane people as they ever were.

I just feel that it's over, and there's no point putting any energy into trying to change things anymore.

Maybe I'll feel different in the morning.

It's astounding how after a decade, Democrats still don't know what they're dealing with

If it weren't for the fact that the viciousness of today's Republican Party is so dangerous to us as a nation, I'd almost say that the Democratic Party deserves to go away, because a party this inept has no business running a nation.

The tinfoil hat side of me says that Barack Obama was allowed to win because the Republicans wanted a Democrat, particularly a weak one, to be running the show when the ecnomy they created went entirely to shit. But if I discount that, all I'm left with is being appalled at the sheer, utter cluelessness of whomever is making the political decisions at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

I'm going to dump the Massachusetts debacle about half in the lap of Martha Coakley, who made the John McCain mistake of believing in her "entitlement" to Ted Kennedy's seat. Just as John McCain felt his POW experience entitled him to the presidency he so dearly longed for, Coakley felt her status as a Democrat entitled her to Ted Kennedy's seat. Both of them were hopelessly out of touch with the mood of the people, and both of them lost.

A quarter of the fault falls in the lap of Senate Democrats, led by Harry Reid and Max Baucus. For these are the people who took an 80% of the population longing for real health care reform -- even the possibility of single payer -- and turned it into a giant blowjob for the insurance industry, losing most of the support along the way.

And a quarter of the fault lies at the White House. I don't know if Barack Obama is a George W. Bush-style figurehead with Rahm Emanuel as the Karl Rove pulling the strings, or if his habit (or deep psychological need) to have everyone like him has made him temperamentally unable to lead when the opposition is a party for whom compromise is Do It Our Way Or No Deal. Long after it was clear that the Republicans' goal was not just to be the loyal opposition, but to pound him into the ground and then spit on the pieces, he was still seeking "bipartisanship". The result was a summer spent aloof from his own signature issue, while Harry Reid wasted months on Olympia Snowe, as if the American people were supposed to believe that this ridiculous wooing of ONE Republican senator somehow constituted "bipartisanship" when the rest of the Senate Republicans were baying like wolves.

Rahm Emanuel has never once been right about anything at all. So the day that he was selected as Chief of Staff, I knew the fix was in. I know that Emanuel seems to think that throwing EVERYONE you can rely on to vote for you under the bus while chasing people who dance at any new shiny object held in front of them is the way to win elections, rather than providing Americans with an alternative to a Republican agenda that is going to make life for more and more Americans nasty, brutish, and short.

There may very well have been no choice but to continue the Bush bank rescue plan and throw more money at the banks. But to sit quietly by while the banks tell the very people who loaned them money to go fuck themselves, we're going to shovel record amounts of cash into our executives' pockets; to not recognize that this was not going to sit well, demonstrates an ineptitude of the highest order.

You can blame the media if you want, though the media hadn't yet fallen in love with Scott Brown the way they did with Sarah Palin, so they're off the hook on that front. (I expect that to change now, especially for Chris Matthews.) But at this late date, knowing what we know about Republicans and how they operate, there's no one to blame here but the Democratic Party.

Greg Sargent lays the Giant Turd o'Blame in their laps at well:

The predicament her loss has created for Dems is yet another reminder of the folly of the Dem decision to delay reform last summer in hopes of winning over a few GOPers — and, by extension, of the folly of their broader, ongoing quest for empty “bipartisan” support for the health care plan.

This is clearly true on two levels. In practical terms, if Dems hadn’t delayed reform this summer, they would very likely have passed a bill by now. As bad as the loss of the Kennedy seat is for Dems, it wouldn’t have been quite as bad if they already had health care reform under their belts. Now it’s in peril. If it does pass, the current situation all but ensures that the bill will be much weaker than it might have been.

More broadly, if we accept the interpretation that tonight’s results are a referendum on health care reform and Obama’s agenda, it becomes even clearer that with tonight’s loss, Dems reaped what they sowed. The GOP strategy — stated openly in multiple forums — was to delay reform as long as possible in the belief that the longer it took to become a reality, the more public sentiment would turn against it. As much as people like to argue that Massachusetts election wasn’t about health care, Brown stated clearly on the trail that he would be the 41st vote for a GOP filibuster.

Bottom line: The GOP has been very open about the fact that the longer the clock runs, the better it is for them. Dems, foolishly imagining that they needed to win over one or two Republicans to make David Broder happy, fell for it. The electorate grew more confused. And here are the results.

So you'd think that perhaps Barack Obama might have learned something from this. You'd think he might look back to what got him elected. But you'd be wrong. Because for the next three years, what we're going to have is a very, very weak Republican president.

Exhibit A:

Faced with growing alarm over the nation's soaring debt, the White House and congressional Democrats tentatively agreed Tuesday to create an independent budget commission and to put its recommendations for fiscal solvency to a vote in Congress by the end of this year.

Under the agreement, President Obama would issue an executive order to create an 18-member panel that would be granted broad authority to propose changes in the tax code and in the massive federal entitlement programs -- including Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security -- that threaten to drive the nation's debt to levels not seen since World War II.

So if you don't have health insurance, or if your premiums went up 25% this year, too bad. If you're a low-wage worker lucky enough to still have a job, and you don't have anything left after putting a roof over your head and food on the table to put money into an IRA, get ready to live on the street in your old age -- or kill yourself, because your Social Security is going to go away. You want to talk about pulling the plug on Grandma? There's more than one way to do it.

Exhibit B:

President Obama will address the House Republican Conference later this month during their retreat in Baltimore, being held Jan. 28th to 30th.

Obama was invited by the elected GOP Leadership to speak a few weeks ago and will take them up on their offer.

House GOP Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-IN) said the following about the upcoming meeting with the President:

"House Republicans are grateful that the President of the United States has accepted our invitation to meet with the Republican Conference later this month. House Republicans look forward to presenting the president with our proposals to protect our nation, create jobs, control federal spending, lower the cost of health care, achieve energy independence and strengthen families."

And Obama had better be ready to rubberstamp everything the Republicans want. I'm not worried about that at all. He's already demonstrated that he'll do anything...anything they want, as long as they just LIKE him.

Well, he'd better not expect the netroots to have his back anymore. Because we warned him: If you don't Dance with Them What Brung You, you're going to go home alone.

And 30,000 more soldiers and years more of this makes us safer -- how, exactly?

Raw Story:

Protesters took to the streets in Afghanistan on Wednesday, burning an effigy of the US president and shouting "death to Obama" to slam civilian deaths during Western military operations.

Hundreds of university students blocked main roads in Jalalabad, capital of eastern Nangahar province, to protest the alleged deaths of 10 civilians, mostly school children, in a Western military operation on Saturday.

"The government must prevent such unilateral operations otherwise we will take guns instead of pens and fight against them (foreign forces)," students from the University of Nangahar's education faculty said in a statement.

Marching through the main street of Jalalabad, the students chanted "death to Obama" and "death to foreign forces", witnesses said.

The protesters torched a US flag and an effigy of US President Barack Obama in a public square in central Jalalabad, before dispersing.

"Our demonstration is against those foreigners who have come to our country," Safiullah Aminzai, a student organiser, told AFP.

"They have not brought democracy to Afghanistan but they are killing our religious scholars and children," he added.

Civilian deaths in the eight-year war to eradicate a Taliban-led insurgency are a sensitive issue for the Afghan public, and fan tensions between President Hamid Karzai and the 113,000 foreign troops supporting his government.

A similar protest was planned in Kabul against the "killing of civilians, especially the recent killing of students in Kunar by foreign forces," said organisers from the youth wing of Jamiat Eslah, or the Afghan Society for Social Reform and Development.

"The demonstration is to show our hatred, anger and sorrow about the current situation," said Sayed Khalid Rashid.

"Our main request is that the American and NATO forces must leave the country and Afghan people must have political autonomy," he said, adding that he expected hundreds of people to turn out for the march through western Kabul.

2009 started with the promise of a different way forward and a return of America's prestige as a role model in the world. It ended with the President who embodied that promise being burned in effigy in the very place he plans to escalate an 8-year-old futile war.

And so it goes....

Perhaps this is why Barack Obama was allowed to win

The more we see of Barack Obama as president, the more we realize that he in no way represents change we can believe in. There is no chess game, there is no Special Barack Mojo that we just can't see yet. What there is, yet again, is a Washington outsider who doesn't understand how the game is played; who doesn't understand that Washington is run by Sally Quinn and Maureen Dowd and Little Luke Russert and Big David Gregory and Sweaty Chris Matthews -- and that even though they don't know jack shit, what they say and what they want happens. The Desiree Rogers fracas is Travel Office II: Electric Bugaloo. Gays in the military is, well, gays in the military. And health care is once again health care. If it feels to you like the Clinton era with all the media scandalmongering and none of the prosperity, you're not alone.

It's not all his fault. He came to office in a clusterfuck, and in a nation full of people whose most important issue is who is going to win American Idol, he wasn't going to have enough time to fix what ails this country. But the degree to which the WAshington Villagers want him to fail is truly spectacular. This morning I was watching The Chris Matthews Show for about five minutes and wanted to shoot myself in the face. "If he doesn't get health care, his presidency is ruined", opined one of the hackocracy on the panel. It's amazing just how much the Village wants Barack Obama to fail. It isn't just for Republicans anymore.

I'll tell you a secret. On September 12, 2001, I didn't want George W. Bush to fail. We were in a crisis, and I wanted a president who knew what the hell he was doing. We didn't have one, of course, and he didn't know what the hell he was doing, but not for one minute did I wish his failure. I don't wish Chris Christie's failure either, for all that I didn't vote for him for governor. If he can somehow manage to get New Jersey out of its fiscal mess that's all to the good.

But Barack Obama doesn't "belong", so he must be ruined. And therefore, the Washington social set has decided that if Barack Obama doesn't get health care "reform" passed, the rest of his presidency is just a waste of time.

I'm ready to say that if it DOES pass his presidency may very well be ruined.

Here's why:

The public option in the Senate bill, it should be emphasized, is a compromise of a compromise already. The first compromise was to have the public plan negotiate its rates directly with providers, rather than set them based on Medicare’s rates. This compromise meant that the Congressional Budget Office was unlikely to score the public plan as producing the huge savings that it projected for a plan that used Medicare-based rates. Whether CBO was right in discounting the negotiated-rate plan’s savings is another matter--as I have written on this site, it’s likely underestimating the cost-containment potential--but the CBO’s numbers rule on Capitol Hill.

The second compromise was to allow states that did not want to have the public plan operating within their borders to “opt out” with the passage of a state law. How many states will take advantage of this option is unclear, but it’s certain to reduce the impact of the public plan even further. Indeed, the CBO is now projecting—again, pessimistically in my view--that only a few million Americans will enroll in the public plan. Yet none of this has apparently appeased the handful of hold-outs. Emboldened by the White House’s lack of clarity and pressure on the issue, they are digging in their heels and spewing false claims about the public plan (for example, that it’s a budget buster when there are no special government subsidies for it and the CBO projects it will exert downward pressure on private premiums, thus lowering the price tag of reform). Hence the new push to find some kind of middle road.

The problem is that the “middle-ground” ideas that are currently flying around aren’t in the middle at all.

[snip]

In short, the new compromise proposals are anything but. They represent calls for advocates of the public plan to eat their crumbs and be happy. But a majority of Senators support the public plan. At least two--Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont and Senator Burris of Illinois--have said having a real public plan in the legislation is a precondition for their support. Those who believe in the public plan—and, more important, who believe in the principle it embodies: that no American who lacks access to good insurance should be forced to buy coverage from the private plans that got us into our present mess--should stand firm in the face of these non-compromises.

This includes President Obama. He made the public plan part of his promise of change in 2008. Now he needs to put his weight and influence behind the public plan and its essential goals, rather than allow them to be gutted. This is in our nation’s interest. It is also in his and his party’s political interest. A bill that forces people to take private insurance but doesn’t create competition or a public benchmark is a prescription for unaffordable coverage, runaway costs, and political backlash. The “middle ground” is nowhere to stand if it’s going to crumble beneath you.

Amen to that.