Jews to Bring Economy Down? The bailout/rescue plan for the financial system failed in the House today, and House leaders won't even work on amendments to present to Congress tomorrow because Congress is planning to take off Rosh Hashanah, a Jewish holiday observed by at most 2% of the people of this country. For the sake of observing that absolutely unimportant, inconsequential holiday in a CHRISTIAN country in which there are more Moslems now than Jews, Congress is perfectly willing to let the economy collapse into a new Great Depression! — rather than go back to work tomorrow, as they would if they had any regard for the Nation or the world. But Jews are the be-all and end-all of the United States Congress nowadays, and if the whole planet has to plummet into Depression in order for Congress to honor the Jews, that is a small enuf price to pay. So, apparently, think the Jews, and their slaves in Congress.
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Congress simply cannot take off two f*kin' days to accommodate the Jews. That's insane. The national economy is in meltdown. Congress has no right to take off two days at a time of extreme crisis for a Jewish holiday. If the U.S. economy crashes into a Great Depression, and Europe, Japan, even China and India fall into grave, long-term economic distress because of the Jews, how much support can Jews expect for Israel? You let us go down the tubes? We'll let Israel go down the tubes.
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Economic Dogma More Important than People. The refusal of Republicans to sign on to the rescue plan caused the stock market to drop by more than 777 points, a cost, if that loss stands, of $1.1 TRILLION, more than half again as much as the rescue plan was pegged at — in one day. Brilliant. My own retirement account, which I need to draw upon now and then, because I am now retired, is down by at least 7 percent from last week. Thank you so much, Congress! And Democrats share the blame, because only 60% of Dems voted for it. Yes, 68% of Republicans voted against it. But if 100% of Democrats had voted for it, along with the 32% of Republicans who did, it would have passed.
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Nancy Pelosi, who is a TERRIBLE Speaker of the House, was blamed by some irresponsible Republicans, because she needlessly, and STUPIDLY, attacked the 'Bush economic policies' in a speech that alienated some Republicans. The reality, however, is that those Republicans abandoned their own President, that same "Bush" the attack upon whose policies supposedly infuriated those Republicans. They defied their own President, Vice President, and the President's Chief of Staff. They ignored their own Presidential candidate. All of the aforementioned Republican "leaders" urged them to vote FOR the bill. John McCain supposedly regarded a rescue plan as so important that he 'suspended his campaign' for a couple of days and declared for all to hear that he would not resume his campaign until a plan had been implemented. He urged his fellow Republicans to vote for the bill the House voted down today. So what are we to say about the leadership abilities of the Republican who would be the next President? John McCain says he will reach across the aisle to achieve bipartisanship, but he can't even rally his own side of the aisle! Oh, and in case you hadn't noticed, he resumed his campaign without rescue legislation having been passed. So he has broken his word and rendered his theatrics into nothing more than nonsensical grandstanding.
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The No-Talk Express. Lost in the whirlwind of news coverage of House madness is the huge story that the Palin state administration in Alaska is refusing to heed subpoenas to testify at an official inquiry into Troopergate. They don't want to talk, so just won't show up. How very interesting. Republicans don't think subpoenas apply to them. They are above the law. Reminds me of Leona Helmsley's remark, "Only the little people pay taxes." Today's Republican version is "Only the little people pay attention to subpoenas."
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This bunch of lawless Alaska officials is the administration that Sarah Palin heads. Plainly she is behind this. Plainly she intends to be similarly arrogant in Federal office if she is elected Vice President. And we will have an even more imperial Presidency, and even more secretive White House that refuses to answer to anyone, going far beyond any reasonable interpretation of "executive privilege". I happen to believe that the President, and thus his inner circle, cannot be subpoenaed by Congress, because Congress is not superior to the President. But that is the Federal Constitution. States' laws do not have the majesty of the Federal Constitution, and the news stories I have seen do not say that the people refusing to testify have invoked "executive privilege" at the state level but simply asserted that the subpoenas are not valid.
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Admission of Guilt. Even absent a subpoena, if the people in the Palin administration were interested in letting the public hear the truth, they would nonetheless voluntarily appear before that legislative committee. They won't. The conclusion is inescapable that Palin is guilty as charged, and everyone who refuses to testify is in cahoots with her in her criminal activity. That constitutes an astonishing conspiracy in a government that, far from having been cleaned up by imitation-squeaky-clean Little Miss Moose Guts, is filthy with scandal from the top down. Why have the Democrats not landed on this like a ton of bricks?
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Not only does Palin not talk to the media, but she has also plainly instructed people in her administration not to talk to their own state legislature! If Palin wanted the truth to come out, she would publicly urge and officially instruct all members of her administration to give testimony before the Troopergate committee. She has the authority to do that. She may not have the legal authority to compel her own husband, who also refused a subpoena, to go before the committee anyway. But isn't the executive authority of any government supposed to enforce subpoenas? On anyone? If you, I, or any ordinary citizen is served a subpoena by our state legislature, we have to go, or we risk being arrested and sent to JAIL. Why should it be any different for Todd Palin, members of his wife's administration, and even that bitch herself? Serve her with a subpoena, and if she refuses to appear, throw her skinny butt in jail.
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Again, the Democrats show themselves to be only an imitation opposition party. They do not really contest the power of the Republicans. When Bill Clinton was President, his behavior was almost indistinguishable from that of the Republicans in Congress. His claim was that he was "a different kind of Democrat", and he was: a Republican. The Democrats are now the Good Cop to the official-Republicans' Bad Cop in a con to make us think that we have a chance with one that we don't have with the other. In actuality, alas, we have very little chance of being treated right by either of the major parties. And the Democrats make sure they never get a veto-proof majority, so they can never be held to account for why they never pass the legislation we want.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website Antiwar.com is 4,175 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:06 PM

 
Goofy Smile. Thru almost the entire Presidential debate tonite, John McCain had a bizarre, goofy smile on his face while listening to Obama speak. Obama, by contrast, was serious, and his facial expressions were appropriate. McCain's were very inappropriate, so inappropriate, indeed, that you have to wonder what is going on inside his deranged mind.
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Obama is a pussyboy, and you have to wonder how ardently he will fite for us when he won't fite for himself. Time and again, McCain insulted Obama, saying he "doesn't understand" this, that, and the other. Obama should have snapped back, after no later than the third time, "I understand perfectly well, and do not appreciate your attempt to make me out to be a moron."
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Nor did Obama follow up McCain's assertion that Georgia should be admitted to NATO, to ask, "So, if Georgia is admitted to NATO, and Russia invades again, will you insist that NATO mobilize to send troops to Georgia to fite Russia? If so, don't you have any concern that Russia could cut off oil supplies to Europe, for instance, in the middle of winter, and even launch attacks all along its European frontiers? Might that lead to World War III, over a tiny country thousands of miles from the United States — and right nextdoor to Russia — with which the United States has had NO connection at any time in our entire history?" But he didn't.
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When McCain talked about having been in this place or that place, and Obama not having been, Obama should have replied, "I haven't been to the Moon, but that doesn't mean I don't know about it. You don't have to travel to a place to understand it, and indeed if the particular places you see on a brief stop are not representative of the entirety, an in-person visit may actually mislead you. Especially is that the case if the local government stage-manages the visit and keeps you from talking to people, like dissidents, who have a different view from that which the government wants you to accept."
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But most importantly, McCain's demeanor, constantly smiling goofily when Obama spoke, was bizarre and should have been unsettling to the audience.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,173 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:20 PM

 
The Bait-and-Switch Behemoth Crisis. I feel there has been a lot of misrepresentation of what is really at issue in the present economic crisis. Reports are most unclear as to whether the bulk of the "bad" mortgages that catapulted us into crisis were bad from the outset or were initially good mortgages that the people indebted could afford to pay according to their original terms and interest rates, and went bad only because the rate of interest was changed. I suspect the overwhelming preponderance of the mortgages defaulted on were perfectly fine until lenders raised the rates. This is classic "bait-and-switch" behavior, which is ILLEGAL in most contexts: lure people into the 'store' with one advertised product and then substitute another, of higher cost. Now the financial system of the entire Western world, if not the entire developed portion of planet Earth, is at the edge of catastrophe because the laissez-faire monsters of the Radical Right of the United States made sure that no one "regulated" (a bad word in their parlance) financial activities as to prevent such a calamity. Then, when the rapacity of bankers produced millions of foreclosures, and there were no ready buyers for the abandoned properties and no money that could have empowered would-be buyers to step up, the thieves in the banking boardroom found their empire of deceit toppling. That was the first shoe.
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"Too Big to Fail". The second shoe was that, again, laissez-faire fools, who controlled U.S. financial institutions and the Federal Government, permitted banks and other corporations to become so immense and so tortuously intertwined that the failure of any of the biggest players would produce a domino effect of cascading failures that could take down the entire economy, because pretty much nobody can make the biggest purchases and pursue the biggest projects without borrowing money, from somebody. In a compartmentalized financial system, if credit were to become unavailable from one source, say, a given bank or even from banks as a type of institutional lender, there were other sources, such as an initial public offering of stock or the issuance of bonds. Now, however, all the banks, and stock markets, and bond markets are tied together, thanks to the practice of bundling bunches of mortgages together into packages treated as a commodity, those "mortgage-backed securities" that President Bush spoke of in his speech tonite. What financiers justified as "spreading the risk" ended up meaning "ensuring universal failure".
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In the Good Old Days, an individual bank, based in a single community or small geographic area, would lend money to an individual / couple so they could buy a house, and the house would be used as the collateral for that loan. If the borrower could not make payments, the bank would first try to work something out and only if the borrower simply could not continue to pay (for instance, for having lost a job or suffered an income-reducing injury), would the bank foreclose. The banker had to be concerned about the attitudes of depositors and potential borrowers, because they lived in the same town, and there were other banks competing for the public's business and, importantly, approval. We didn't like that system. That is, the powers that be in the banking industry didn't like that system.
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So they enlarged the bulk of banks beyond a single town, region, even state, and eventually even country. At the same time, other businesses were also being enlarged beyond all reason. Today, there are 54 individual corporations around the world with annual revenues larger than the U.S. Federal Government's entire budget in 1963 ($93 billion). That is, $93B in the dollars of the day. Today, 1963's $93 billion would equal $624 billion. Even so, the world's largest corporation, Wal-Mart Stores, has revenues equivalent to 61% of the entire Federal Government's budget in 1963 ($379 billion for Wal-Mart, $624 billion for JFK's budget in 2008 dollars). Think about that. John F. Kennedy was a Liberal, one of them durned "tax-and-spend Democrats", but his total Federal budget was only 1.65 times (little more than half again) as large as the revenues for one corporation. (He also had a budget SURPLUS.) Forget about foreign corporations for the moment (but not for good) and speak only of American corporations.
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Arnold Schwarzenegger today signed into law the budget for the largest state in the Union, California: a bit less than $104 billion. There are 14 individual corporations that have revenues larger than the California state budget. FOURTEEN. Five of them are financial companies (banking, insurance, etc.), including AIG, which is only the fifth largest of them.
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The failure of any one of those megacorporations would be bad enuf, but many of the giant financial corporations have tentacles that have insinuated themselves into all segments of the financial industry, in the United States and abroad. Were any one of them to fail, many others would be weakened. Some of those others would be so seriously weakened that, along with their own losses from bad judgment/rapacious behavior, they too would fail, further weakening some of the same companies weakened by the first failure and reaching companies that the first company was not entangled with. Some companies that were able to withstand the failure of one financial giant could not survive the loss of two, so would themselves also fail. And on and on, in a cascade of grief produced by greed.
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The temptation is to say, "Good. Serves them right." And it would, except that in liquidation, many loans they made would be called in (since some are "demand" loans, which the bank can demand payment for at any time), others have "acceleration clauses" that the bank can invoke to require early payment, etc. Many individuals and businesses would be required to make unexpected payments they could not afford, or forfeit their collateral. And even where the consequences to existing loanholders are not so dire, after the failure of so many lenders, there would be so few lenders left, with so little money to lend, on conditions so stringent as regards creditworthiness, that much of the economy would come grinding to a halt, throwing people out of work in huge numbers. That is why we can't simply stand aside and say "Serves them right." Because that would serve us wrong.
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Bailing Out the World. Foreign banks doing business in the United States demand to be included in any bailout! How dare they? No. You made stupid choices? That's your problem. If any government is to bail you out, let it be your own government, because that's where the bulk of your operations are, in your own country. It is not up to the American taxpayer to bail out the entire planet. If you must fold your U.S. operations, then sell your U.S. assets to American companies and return some of our economic sovereignty.
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There is in fact a serious question as to the 'nationality' of AIG — if any transnational corporation can be said to have a nationality at all — 80% of which the Federal Government just bought for $85 billion. A webpage on the New York Times website says:

Though its name is American [International Group], the company is rooted in Asia. According to company lore, its founder, Cornelius Vander Starr, a World War I veteran, traveled to Asia with only 300 Japanese yen (less than $3 by today’s exchange rates) in his pocket and started the firm in Shanghai in 1919.

With a partner, he sold marine and fire insurance and expanded rapidly throughout the Philippines, Indonesia and China by hiring locals as agents and managers, a business strategy A.I.G. uses today. Nearly half [sic] of A.I.G.’s 116,000 direct employees — about 62,000 people — are in Asia.

The company is headquartered in Downtown Manhattan, and now is American, because the Feds bought it. But those foreign banks that want guaranties on their bad investments are not headquartered in the United States and not owned by Americans, so there is no reason the U.S. taxpayer should save them from their own stupidity.
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Scaling Downward. The bigger-is-better crowd in the corporate boardroom wants us to believe that there is no alternative to ever bigger corporations with ever more power over governments and societies, that cannot be controlled but nonetheless have to be bailed out if their own stupidity and rapacity threaten to produce their collapse, because we have to compete in the world, and other countries are allowing their corporations to become immense. No, that's not true at all.
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The same 'people' use the same reasoning to argue that Americans (not, of course, including corporate executives) must accept that their wages must decline and their benefits vanish because in the age of "globalization" that's the only way "we" can compete with Third World hellholes: by making the U.S. into one of those hellholes. No.
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We have political sovereignty — for the moment — and can exert that sovereignty to put into antitrust laws, absolute size limits for corporations, and enforce those laws in ways that will affect the behavior of foreign governments as well. That is, if we decide that there should be no corporation larger than, say, $50 billion in annual revenues, or whatever standard we set, we can refuse permission to any corporation, anywhere on Earth, larger than that, to operate in the United States or even sell to the United States. If foreign corporations attempt to conceal their actual size to sidestep such restrictions, a provision could be written into U.S. law to assume that any secretive company (not just corporations, but also proprietorships, limited liability companies, partnerships — whatever) exceeds the permissible size, and bar them from doing business in or with the United States.
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In all likelihood, that would produce enactment of a series of similar laws around the planet. But at least we would free ourselves from what we might call the Tyranny of Size. That way, if one stupid executive or board of directors in one big corporation were to produce the destruction of that corporation, we could easily and without worry permit capitalism to make that "adjustment". Let it fail, because the ripples thru the remainder of the economy would be trivial.
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We often speak of a "level playing field", as tho that's something we want. In fact, however, there is no level economic playing field whatsoever. How many small businesses can really compete with transnational corporations? How many small businesses can get capital enuf to build a factory, or even refit an old factory, from a vanished industry?
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We see the Tyranny of Size in politics as well. There are hundreds of minor political organizations in the United States that have ideas of value (Wikipedia mentions 83 that have offered candidates for major national office), but they cannot compete in the "marketplace of ideas" because they cannot get display space on the store shelf. Just as major food and beverage corporations demand outsize presence on supermarket shelves, and even specific places within store layouts, as almost entirely precludes major supermarkets from offering goods produced by local small businesses, the major parties are jealous of their own share of (metaphorical) shelf space, and product placement vis-a-vis, for instance, the cash registers or certain types of compatible foods and beverages.
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They do not simply compete with their superior resources. You'd think that would give them enuf of an advantage. But no, they want to bar smaller parties from even getting on the ballot. They may argue that they don't want the ballot 'cluttered', lest their own candidates be hard to find. No, they are assured prime product placement at the top of the ballot, because ballots are typically arranged in order of the number of votes received by that party in the last election. No, the major parties just don't want minor parties to appear on the ballot at all, so do everything in their considerable power to make it impossible for minor parties to be seen, much less voted for. In New York State some decades ago, for instance, you couldn't just get x-number of signatures in the state overall but had as well to get at least y-number of signatures in each and every county of the state! That was clearly designed to keep a local or regional party from getting on a statewide ballot, because only major parties could get that wide a distribution of signatures. If the requirement was 50,000 signatures, and you could get that many in one of New York City's hugely populous counties, why should you have to collect signatures anywhere else? Because, you see, the actual purpose of petitions is to prevent minor parties from achieving "ballot access". With modern voting technology, we could have 200 candidates for each office, and be able to use "Search" to find the one you want, by name or party. But that will never happen if the major parties continue to control ballot access. Because even a dozen minor-party candidates in Congress is too many for the major parties to tolerate.
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The result is that minor parties, such as the one a friend and I, from different boros (counties) of New York City started in 1977, the Expansionist Party of the United States, are reduced to passively offering their ideas on a website, or via a blog, letters to the editor, and other means that can make only minimal impact.
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In any case, what hope is there for society, when things are going so very wrong, the major parties don't even offer answers until obvious problems that have been developing for decades without restraint suddenly produce, or threaten to produce, a calamity, and no one listens to those of us crying in the wilderness?
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We must find ways to destroy the Tyranny of Size, not only to reign in the present misdeeds of major corporations but to prevent future misdeeds, yet to be developed by the fevered, greedy imaginations of corporate insiders. Our political system is ossified. New ideas cannot reach the floor of Congress, much less the Oval Office. We must, in this time of reevaluating our economic institutions, reevaluate our political institutions as well.
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Hiding from Scrutiny. At the very time when we need to be thinking about the future, John McCain, running from comparison to Barack Obama, has announced his intention not to participate in Friday's debate at Ole Miss, on the pretense that the current economic crisis requires him (and, by implication, Senators Obama and Biden) to tend only to resolving the present crisis. He said he is 'suspending his campaign' until that crisis is resolved.
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David Letterman and Craig Ferguson both blasted the very concept of suspending the campaign. Ferguson was especially forthrite: "Democracy first!" Ferguson also blasted financial manipulators: "they don't make anything but money" — no product, no service, just money. Ferguson is a brilliant comic, but he has had two WONDERFUL political tours de force in the past couple of weeks. He's a new U.S. citizen (we saw his participation in a mass swearing-in ceremony in January, and know that he actually recited the words; how do we know all the others did?), and his passion for participatory American democracy comes thru, even tho his show is very, very heavy in foreign guests, especially from Commonwealth countries. I don't know if he asked for that or Worldwide Pants (Letterman's production company, which owns the show) saw him as the ideal host to talk knowledgeably with Brits, Aussies, and the like. I wish he would stop making drug "jokes", tho. I'd be in favor of flogging people who make drug "jokes" on TV. Maybe then people wouldn't regard drug use as trivial, and thousands of people in Colombia and Mexico wouldn't die in the drug wars, and tens of thousands of Americans wouldn't die from drugs and drug-related crime here.
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In any case, Ferguson made the same sarcastic point I wanted to make: why not just suspend the election? Lots of other people have done it, in many countries. Letterman was hot under the collar at McCain's lying to him, in saying that he couldn't appear, as scheduled, on Letterman's talk show today because he had to return to Washington urgently. But then he went onto CBS News for an interview with Katy Couric at exactly the same time as Letterman was taping his own show, with replacement guest MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann. Since Letterman is also on CBS, he was able to show the live feed of the Couric interview to prove McCain's perfidy.
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Never mind that we have little more than a month to make a decision we will have to live with for four years. Never mind that there is no agreement among Administration officials and the members of both houses of Congress, so there may not be a resolution for days, possibly even weeks! Never mind that a new ABC/Washington Post poll shows Obama 9 percentage points ahead of McCain, and voters showing much less confidence in McCain's ability to handle this economic crisis in particular and the economy beyond the crisis more generally.
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I have said that the real margin of error in this election, due to the "Bradley Effect", is about 12 percentage points, not the 3 claimed by pollsters. Obama's margin in the ABC/WashPost poll is 9%. We are getting to the point where an Obama win is almost believable. Almost.
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McCain got the message. He now wants to pose as supremely concerned about the economy, and ready to do what needs to be done to save us (from the laissez-faire economics he himself has championed for decades). He has gone so far as to say that all politics should stop until this crisis is surmounted. Oh? So we're not going to have an election November 4th?
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This is like Rudolph Giuliani's statement after 9/11 that the crisis was so great that we should suspend the normal rules so he could remain in office beyond his scheduled departure date! His successor, Michael Bloomberg, would have none of it, and insisted that Giuliani (a would-be dictator we were lucky enuf to stop this year) was not above the law and had to leave on schedule.
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In like fashion, we will in fact NOT put off the election to some later date. It IS going ahead on November 4th, just as planned. If John McCain wishes to withdraw his candidacy for President, he can certainly do that. What he cannot do, however, is tell the voters that Barack Obama is irresponsible in accepting that time waits for no man, our fixed-term system of government must be absolutely inviolable, the election must go forward on November 4th, and that election, which will saddle us with a President (and Vice President) for the next four years, is more important than any given crisis. Obama was right in saying, plainly, that a President must be able to do more than one thing at a time. Obama did not say, but I will, that if McCain cannot handle more than one thing at a time, then perhaps he should resign and let Sarah Palin take up the Republican banner alone. She'd love that. She has already plainly spoken of a Palin-McCain ticket! A Palin(-only) ticket would probably delite her. But would it delite the Nation?
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McCain has already hidden Palin away to keep the voters from scrutinizing her. And now he wants to sequester himself in the Senate and keep the voters from scrutinizing him! The tragedy is that this odious tactic might actually work, and we will have a new Administration that is even more secretive and more insulated from public scrutiny and control than the Bush Administration. That should worry everyone, even people who admire John McCain, because the person in charge might not be John McCain at all, but Sarah Palin. And that is truly scary, because she is strong-willed enuf to refuse to be anybody's puppet, and the Invisible Hand that pulls Dumbya's strings might find those strings cut out from under them by a headstrong female with absolutely no qualifications to run things herself.
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O No. Japan's new prime minister is Taro Aso. Aso. Funny.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,171 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Failing More Tests. Keith Olbermann asked Barack Obama flat-out if he thinks Sarah Palin is qualified to become President shortly after assuming office as Vice President, and Pussyboy didn't say, plainly, "Of course not." If he is that cowardly, that he won't say what he needs to say, his campaign is done for.

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin has been absent from Alaska for 10 days, and has thus not been fulfilling her duties as chief executive of Alaska. How indispensable, then, is she to the governance of a state? There's no Alaska communications center traveling with her, like the red phone and such that go wherever the President goes. She is just AWOL, and the Alaskan government is not in panicked turmoil.

As for the claim that she is "commander-in-chief of the Alaska National Guard", that is complete and total bullsh(asterisk). At least part of the Alaska National Guard is NOT IN ALASKA and NOT UNDER HER COMMAND. Where are they? Iraq. Who is their commander-in-chief? The President of the United States, not the Governor of Alaska. She is, in short, a baldfaced liar. She "commands" the Alaska National Guard — note the word "National", not "State" — only in certain very limited circumstances, as for instance to counter a natural or man-made disaster, such as a fire, earthquake, flood, or riot. Alaska doesn't have riots, and the Alaska National Guard is almost certainly deployed for local emergencies between rarely and never. If she were the actual commander-in-CHIEF of the A.N.G., she could REFUSE a request/order from the President to send the Guard to Iraq. In point of legal fact, she under no circumstances could do any such thing.

In 1990, the United States Supreme Court ruled in the case of Perpich v. Department of Defense that the Federal government has plenary power over the National Guard, and greatly reduced (to the point of nonexistence) the state government's ability to withhold consent to Federal deployments and training missions of the National Guard.

The National Guard is not a state militia but an element of the active reserves of the UNITED STATES military. So all this nonsense about her 'military experience' as "commander-in-chief" of the Alaska National Guard is outrageous, vile crap.
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Sarah Palin is the weak link in the McCain campaign, but the Democrats won't land on her like a ton of bricks and show her to be not just completely unqualified to be President but also a dangerous extremist who believes in The Rapture and might actually work to produce the End of the World in Armageddon.
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"There's a certain Teflon quality to this woman", said Ryan Lizza this evening on Hardball with Chris Mathews. Exactly, which shows perfectly, if any more proof were needed, that her choice was NOT McCain's doing, but that of the Invisible Hand, that cabal of faceless Republican geniuses who have given us one Teflon President after another.
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Meanwhile, McCain dares to continue to say that Obama doesn't have the experience to be President!
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If Not Issues, Then What? I said here September 2nd that this campaign is not about issues. The same day, and 220 miles away, a McCain heavyweight agreed, in part:

Rick Davis, campaign manager for John McCain's presidential bid, insisted that the presidential race will be decided more over personalities than issues during an interview with Post editors this morning.

"This election is not about issues," said Davis. "This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates."

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
No One Can "Have It All". A lot of nonsense is bandied about by feminists about a woman's right to "have it all" — career, love, motherhood — and not worry about shortchanging anyone or working herself into exhaustion, feeling there aren't enuf hours in the day or days in a life to do everything she "should" do. At a time when tens of millions of women who tried to "have it all" have accepted that it's just not possible, and made a choice, ordinarily for family over 'career', some stupid babe from Alaska has reignited the debate. But is it really taking the right form? Are enuf women who have accepted that it just is not possible to do right by everyone in trying to "have it all" willing to say,

I made my choice. I decided that my feminine side was far more me, than my 'masculine' side, and that I am happiest when I am with my family, taking care of them. I love my children, and my husband. I liked my job. It is insane to love a job, and emotionally impoverish yourself and the people you love in order to pursue a career that, at end, is meaningless. Many other people can fill any job in the economy. I am the only one who can fill my 'job' as wife and mother. I am not just the best-qualified person on the planet — no, in the universe — to do this job, but I am even the only one who can do it. And I wouldn't have it any other way. I agree with what Barbara Bush said at the Wellesley commencement exercises in 1990:

At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, winning one more verdict, or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a child, a friend, or a parent.

This is a common sentiment more customarily expressed as "On their deathbed, nobody says 'I wish I'd spent more time at the office'." Altho some feminists decry the sentiment, it remains essentially, and obviously, valid. And it's not just a female thing. The late singer-songwriter Harry Chapin is best known for his achingly wonderful song, "Cat's in the Cradle". (Wikipedia says that his wife, Sandy, actually wrote the words as a poem, and Harry merely added the music. But the sentiment is associated firmly with men in their relations with their kids.)
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Republican women in particular should be completely comfortable with saying such things aloud, especially as regards a woman who has a "special-needs" child, as has Sarah Palin. Normal kids have a hard enuf time adjusting to neglect. How is a Down's syndrome kid supposed to cope?
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Ms. Palin made a conscious choice to have a child she knew would have Down's syndrome and require more time and more attention than normal children. Now she is making an absolutely incompatible later decision to take on a job that will require her to neglect the responsibilities to that child that she knowingly, willingly accepted. She's slime.
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And what of her husband? Does he have a job in Alaska that he will have to leave? a career he will have to suspend because it's location-dependent? Or does he have to remain in Alaska in order to avoid losing his career to her temp job (4 years, 8 at most)? Is it really up to the man to give up his career, if he can't pursue it in a new location, and follow his wife? What kind of castrato would do that?
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There is a minor problem for the Republicans with regard to Todd Palin aside from this issue of where he is to live and what he is supposed to work at: he was a registered member of the Alaska Independence Party (AIP), many of whose members have advocated SECESSION from the United States. Tho a news report claims that secession is not a formal part of the party's (present) platform, the AIP's own website does in fact speak of wanting independence from the United States! Did the Republicans do ANY vetting of this Sarah Palin creature? Any at all??
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Consider this passage from the "Introduction" page on the AIP website:

The platform of the AIP is, as one would expect, centered on Alaskan issues. Although it is widely thought to be a secessionist movement, the Party makes great effort to emphasize that its primary goal is merely a vote on secession, something that Party advocates say Alaskans were denied during the founding of the state. A plebiscite was, in fact, held in Alaska at the state's inception in 1958, but AIP members argue that voting was corrupt and that residents were not given the proper choice between statehood, commonwealth status, or complete separation -- something they say has been granted to other U.S. territories such as Puerto Rico.

That page also includes this intriguing quote from the founder of the party:

"I'm an Alaskan, not an American. I've got no use for America or her damned institutions."

Michelle Obama was fiercely, rabidly attacked for a much more oblique comment, "for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country". Michelle Obama is not known ever to have said anything remotely like "I'm ... not an American. I've got no use for America or her damned institutions."
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Returning to Todd Palin, "the First Gentleman of Alaska", a National Governors Association website says:

Mr. Palin has worked for nearly 20 years as a production operator in the oil fields on Alaska’s North Slope, and he also is a lifelong commercial fisherman in Bristol Bay.

Mr. Palin was born in Dillingham, located in western Alaska, where he gained an appreciation for Alaska’s cultural heritage and traditions from his Yup'ik grandmother. These traditions and the state’s rugged outdoors have played an influential role in the life of the Palin family. Since 1993, the first gentleman has participated every year in the Iron Dog race—the world’s longest snowmachine race (spanning 2,000 miles, from Wasilla to Nome to Fairbanks). To date, he has won the championship four times. * * * In his free time, the first gentleman enjoys fishing, flying and spending time with his family.

Hm. There are no oilfields in the DC area. I suppose he could commute an hour or more each way to work in commercial fishing on Chesapeake Bay, if that fishery hasn't been destroyed. But apparently at least elements of the Chesapeake Bay fishery are in grave trouble.
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Well, he can indeed spend a lot more "time with his family", by staying home with the kids, "Mr. Mom" style. Yeah, that's Republican family values, alrite. Men as stay-at-home 'moms'.
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This reminds me of a comment by Chris Rock that 'you know the world is going crazy when the best golfer in the world is a black guy and the best rapper is a white guy.' (Tiger Woods, Eminem)
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Nite is day, up is down, black is white, male is female. Yes, everything is fine in this Republic, and Republicans are the guardians of traditional American values, to make sure everything stays fine.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,152 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Not Right vs. Left, but Them Against Us. I finally figured it out. So-called "conservatives" have rabidly rallied around John McCain's Radical Feminist choice for Vice President not because Radical Feminism is suddenly a conservative value but because She is One of Us, and We will circle the wagons to protect any of Us from Them.
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The Radical Rightwing, you see, is not about ideas at all but Tribe. Once a so-called "conservative" has established his or her bona fides, s/he is embraced by the Tribe, and the Tribe will fite to the death to defend them. It doesn't matter how far one strays from the supposed "principles" of the Tribe. You can teach Sunday school from Mao Zedong's Little Red Book, or hire a male prostitute and use meth with him. As long as you make the appropriate noises, carry a gun or at least become a "lifelong member of the NRA", you are in like Flynn, and nothing you can do will turn the Tribe against you, unless you forthritely and unrepentantly attack the Tribe. What matters is not what you DO, but what you SAY.
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Ronald Reagan, Heap Big Chief of Tribe, could say:

In this present crisis, Government is not the solution to our problem; Government is the problem.

But he could then increase the size of that very Government, and triple the national debt, and no one in the Tribe would call him on it. Because it's not Reagan who expanded the size and intrusiveness of Government, not Heap Big Chief! No, it was all Those outsiders forcing deficits upon him against his will by refusing to cut spending to stay within the limited means he tried to impose by cutting taxes! It's not that Reagan asked for all those expenditures and signed all those budgets. No, he was just powerless to stop a 'runaway Congress'. And he had to defeat Communism, didn't he? — the Red Tribe. Well, didn't he? So he had to engage in an arms race to subject the Red Tribe to stresses it couldn't sustain, so the Red Tribe would fall to pieces. And it worked, didn't it? The Red Tribe is gone, isn't it? Never mind the bigger branch of the Red Tribe that makes nice capitalist noises and is our trading partner, the very core of the world's biggest corporation, Wal-mart. They're not the Red Tribe anymore. They're Us now.
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So they can shoot demonstrators in Tibet and deport foreigners who were so rude as to demonstrate during the Olympics. The Olympics is Amurikan, goldurn it! How dare Them demonstrators embarrass our good buddies in Beijing?
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Any betrayal in deeds is ignored if the words are right ("Read my lips: no new taxes!"), and if a few symbolic actions jibe with the supposed raison d'etre — not that We would ever use a hifalutin French term like "raison d'etre"; no, We'll say "principles" — that We, and all decent people, live by.
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But those principles are lies, rationalizations for tribalism. When Hillary Clinton wore pantsuits and ran for commander-in-chief, she was a castrating bulldyke who wanted to dominate men. When Sarah Palin runs for next-in-line-to-become commander-in-chief, she's "my kind of woman"! She even sometimes wears a dress!
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We of the Liberal Left have it all wrong in assigning good-faith belief to the Right. They don't have any principles. They have only Tribe. Everything is Them Against Us. The Government wants to take Our money to help Them, and that's what makes Government bad. When Government takes Their money to help Us, that's fine. Thus there's no outcry against the massive transfer of wealth from Blue States to Red States.
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The Radical Right is 1/6th principle and 5/6ths tribalism. Any deviation from the very few principles that "conservatives" do sort-of believe in will be excused, even fiercely defended, if the deviant says s/he's a True Believer, no matter how things may appear, or begs forgiveness for temporarily straying from the path of righteousness.
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Such "conservatives" can become Radicals overnite, then defend their new Radicalism with calm certitude, as tho they always believed that. In the American Revolution, conservatives were Loyal to the King and to the Mother Country (note the kinship/tribal term). Within a few short years, however, the old Loyalists were out — literally: some 62,000 to 100,000 physically left the Thirteen States — and the new regime was in. In those confused times, some Loyalists continued to identify their Tribe as the British Empire, but for others, Tribal identity shifted to "American".
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There is a close connection between "conservatives" and a particular "way of life": that is, Tribal Rites. Be it NASCAR and country music, or attendance at Protestant churches and religious music, the Radical Right is a community of customs and actions rather than ideas. (The peculiar exception is neocon Jews who insinuate themselves into a community of which they are actually not remotely part, to promote their Zionist values by convincing feeble-minded Rightwingers that Christianity is actually Judaism because "Jesus was a Jew", which makes all Christians Jews, and thus, by extension, members of "God's Chosen People" (the ultimate tribe you'd want to belong to); "the Bible" includes the Old Testament, which are Jewish writings that Christians are obliged to believe, no matter how violently at variance they may be with Christianity; "Israelites", with whom Christians are to identify, equals "Israelis"; and the Christian Holy Land must be defended, even tho Christians don't hold it and aren't allowed to spread the "Good News of Our Lord, Jesus Christ" to the locals within it. And this new coziness with Jews, long a despised minority in the homeland of the Radical Right, is, we are to believe, thoroly natural. We were always pro-Jew!
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The innermost core of the "conservative" Tribe is, some observers have seen, an actual tribe: the Scotch-Irish. A colleague of mine in northern England has pointed out that many of the bellicose and tribalistic behaviors we see at work in the Radical Right of the United States originated in the aggressive Protestantism of Scots who moved first to Catholic Ireland as Protestant settlers/conquerors in the service of British imperialism, then on to the New World, again in service of British imperialism. They concentrated in parts of what is now the core homeland of the Radical Right, the South and especially Appalachia, where they became a major or even the dominant component of the population.
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Their behavior to this day has little to do with ideas, but only with Tribe. A book, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America by James H. Webb, discusses their influence. I haven't read it, but the premise seems largely credible. A review in Publisher's Weekly says:

Webb's thesis is that the Scots-Irish, with their rugged individualism, warrior culture built on extended familial groups (the "kind of people who would die in place rather than retreat") and an instinctive mistrust of authority, created an American culture that mirrors these traits.

His premise that rugged individualists of military bent first went with the flow of empire, then turned against the WASP ruling class, would explain the sudden switch from British to American allegiance — and then the equally abrupt switch from American to Confederate allegiance — and then the gradual switch to American jingoism. Consider the inherent contradiction between individualism and militarism. Armies aren't individualist. Each soldier doesn't make his own decisions, but takes orders from a commander. So what is this 'rugged individualism' nonsense? And now these 'rugged individualists' want to take orders from a female commander-in-chief??
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The culture that the Scotch-Irish gave rise to is not American culture at large. It is the Tribalist culture of the Radical Right, which now pretends to concern values and ideas, but is actually all about, and only about, Tribe.
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Now, we are to believe, Radical Feminism is a conservative value. It wasn't a couple of days ago, but it is now. Because the Heap Big Chiefs of the Tribe today embrace a female subchief, and all loyal members of the Tribe must consequently, and enthusiastically, embrace the idea that if the Big Chief should die, we must gladly accept a female Supreme Chief, a female commander-in-Chief, a female Chief-in-Chief. "Conservative principles", you see, are very flexible, and change every time the Heap Big Chiefs say they have changed. You can't have an 'army of the faithful' without commanders.
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So what are the core, unchangeable principles of the Radical Right today? Hard to say. The homeland of the Tribe, the Deep South, is presently under assault and threat by hurricanes. Not the wrath of God, of course, just a natural occurrence. It would be the wrath of God if a series of hurricanes struck the homeland of Them, the Liberal tribe, in, say, New York City or Los Angeles. (And don't forget that there was a prominent, reddish-brown tornado in Colorado the day the Democratic Convention opened!) But when it hits the Gulf Coast, it's just an unfortunate confluence of natural forces. It's sort-of alrite for Government to act to evacuate people at taxpayer expense, tho most people should evacuate themselves of course. And the Republican Party will encourage people to give assistance as a voluntary act, as long as it is clearly understood that they are under no legal nor moral compulsion to give up their money for others, but that whatever they give is an act of charity — to be understood as charity by both giver and taker — for which they will get credits in Heaven. It is worth remembering that the major Scottish religious affiliation is Presbyterianism, a fundamental belief of which is predestination: that before any person's birth, God chooses who is to go to Heaven and who to Hell, and the Elect evidence their selection by doing good deeds, such as giving to charity. Naturally, as far as the Radical Right is concerned, everyone in Our Tribe is among the Elect.
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Gun ownership, or defense of the Second-Amendment-right-to-bear-arms (to heck with the introductory language in the Second Amendment; it has absolutely nothing to do with anything and is just there to puff up the document), is one indispensable element of membership in the Radical Right Tribe. If you actually go out and kill animals with guns, so much the better. It doesn't matter if you need the meat or just enjoy the "sport" of watching animals die. Hunting is a core value — really? value? — of the Radical Right.
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A foreign extension of this right-to-bear-arms madness is militarism and militarist jingoism. The Radical Right wants us to be armed to the teeth and ready to "kick ass" whenever anyone attacks us, even rhetorically. Not over any principle, just to defend the Tribe. Militarily. The Radical Right will sit passively by, while millions of jobs are shipped overseas, then hundreds of billions of dollars follow, to buy the products made by the people who took those jobs, subverting the Nation's economy and fueling a military buildup by, for instance, Communist China, which is using our dollars to prepare for war against us. That's fine. No problem there. But we've got to have the best, most modern, most awesome technology of war, and we can then pretend that all is well with the world, no matter how far the dollar drops, no matter how many jobs we lose, no matter how many Americans can't find work. Because taking care of our own poor is not a value of the Radical Right Tribe — except, of course, when it comes time to vote on a foreign-aid bill. Then, all of a sudden, "Charity begins at home, you know!", and we shouldn't be sending money overseas until all Americans are taken care of. Once the foreign-aid bill is whittled down to nothing — except for Israel, of course — then the Radical Right goes back to not giving two shakes of a rat's ass about the poor — even tho their Tribe is poorer, on average, than other Americans.
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Until yesterday, one might think that sexual abstinence before and outside marriage is vital to the Radical Right. Only They are whores, who screw around without a care and give rise to babies without any concern. What about Sarah Palin's unmarried 17-year-old dauter, who is five months pregnant? Well, you see, We make mistakes. And it is part of our Faith to forgive. So Sarah Palin's dauter gets herself knocked up at 17 and all of a sudden it's okay to f(asterisk) around without marriage, even to get pregnant — as long as the girl and the (unintentional) father 'do the right thing' and get married. But those Liberals! Their screwing around outside marriage is evil.
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See the pattern? Identical behaviors produce opposite reactions. We are only human. They are evil.
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It's not about ideology. It's about Tribe. You might talk someone out of a mistaken idea. You won't talk them out of Tribalism. Once someone has invested himself in the Tribe, he will forgive any "failing" by any member of the Tribe, as long as s/he admits having "strayed" and makes appropriate noises proclaiming allegiance to the Tribe. And once the Tribe has accepted someone, s/he can stray wildly from the Tribe's supposed ideology and the Tribe will not only permit the deviation but might actually embrace the Radical departure from everything that went before as a "new direction" of "conservative" ideology. Not a betrayal; a natural development from prior principles. No, Sarah Palin is not a dyky, petty-vindictive bitch who victimized her former brother-in-law. She's a "strong woman", who "has more balls than most men". Our kind of conservative!
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The "conservatism" of the Radical Right is, in short, no such thing. Liberals have principles. "Conservatives" have only Tribe.
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P.S. A friend here in Newark mentioned to me in email what I have said here several times about embittered white people in or near cities ravaged by black violence and crime: "I would NEVER choose a black man to be commander-in-chief. I voted once for a black man — Ken Gibson [former Mayor of Newark, our local commander-in-chief] — and would NEVER do it again." Gibson (of whom Wikipedia says, "He was the first African American elected mayor of any major Northeastern U.S. city.") was accused but never convicted of corruption (tho he did plead guilty to tax fraud), and the city continued its downward spiral, despite his trying to work with business.

Gibson himself said, "Wherever American cities are going, Newark will get there first."

Newark has been to hell and back. But despite the return of reasonably good days, huge numbers of current and former white Newarkers will NEVER forgive "the blacks" for what they did to this fabulous city, and will NEVER vote black till the day they die. They are not alone. Myriad former Detroiters, Clevelanders, Philadelphians, etc., will also NEVER vote for a black President. In that many genuine conservatives will never vote for a woman President, or even a Vice President they think might ascend to the Presidency if an old man dies or becomes incapacitated, this may be a very interesting election. Alas, many people think, "No good can come of it."
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq is 4,151 — for Israel.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:43 PM