Quittin' While the Quittin' Is Good

Sarah Palin quit her Alaska governor's job today. Apparently, half of the country still loves her for her inabilities, flightiness, cowardice, ignorance, and general incompetence. You have to wonder about a country that idolizes someone who has failed every step of the way through her life, but that's the same country that elected "W" who had a similar life record.

The AP report on today's resignation included the information that Palin was leaving under the cloud of "ethics probes, mounting legal bills and dwindling popularity." However, that writer reminded us that "Palin may host a radio or TV show, or launch a lucrative speaking career." Yeah, that's what we need in the midst of a depression; another simple-minded, superstitious, wingnut "author" and talking head.

In quitting 17 months before the end of her first term, Palin finished off most her Alaska support (although there are still 40 percent of that goofy crowd who still "approve" of her performance). It's always worth remembering that Americans are the most short-term memory population in human history and Palin could yet return to her past summer's 60% favorable rating.

One of the idol-worshiping Alaska crowd, Wilson Villanueva, was quoted as having said, "She's not a quitter; she's a fighter. She wants to fight for the Alaskan people and for the greater good nationally."

Hilarious.

Palin burned up her parents' and taxpayers' money taking six years and five colleges to earn a BA in Communications, a degree slightly more demanding than Phys Ed. She didn't like journalism, barely able to cope with the low-level sports crap she wrote about, so she turned herself into a "hockey mom."

She didn't care much for the full-time mom thing, so while cranking out five brats, she ran for the highly demanding job of city council member and, later, Mayor of Wasilla, AK. She ended both jobs prematurely, quitting as it were. Wasilla has a population of 9,000 people and puts so little faith in the job of mayor that the town has a city manager to handle all of the actual tasks of running the city. The mayor has the following job description:

1. Preside at council meetings. The mayor may take part in the discussion of matters before the council, but may not vote, except that the mayor may vote in the case of a tie;
2. Act as ceremonial head of the city;

That's it. All those claims of management experience were about self-management, since the mayor of Wasilla has no authority, no practical function, and nobody wanted a particular mayor, Palin, to have the keys to her own office. I'd say "community organizers" all over the nation have more practical experience than Wasilla's mayor. She couldn't manager to keep her fingers out of the cash drawer in that job, either. She quit that job after unsuccessfully campaigning Lt. Governor from the Mayor's Office and getting caught using city funds for her state campaign. During her VP campaign, she was asked if she had done the same thing that she'd accused Randy Ruedrich of having done. She said, "Yeah, what I did was wrong.'"

From there, Palin moved on to the Alaska governor's office. 18 months from the end of her first term, she quits because, in her own words, because she is "doing what’s best for Alaska." Her biggest whine was that the Alaskan people questioned her ethics, decisions, and sources of income. While she once campaigned telling the people of Alaska to "hold me accountable," when they did that she stonewalled investigations (When she was the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission Chairwoman, she quit because, "I'm forced to withhold information from Alaskans, and that goes against what I believe in as a public servant."), whined often and publicly that she was being picked on (after accusing Hillary Clinton of "whining" about her press coverage.), and now she's running away. Running a state overfloowing with cash from its natural resources and managing a population a fraction of the size of a decent Midwestern city proved too much for Sarah's talents. The poor babe couldn't keep her hands out of the state's till and her cronism got the best of a state known for legendary cronism. Wow, that's sad even by the low standards of Republican candidates!

As one conservative squawking head put it, "Sarah Palin is no quitter. That's why she's quitting."

Advertising age has speculated on her future exit from the media in this article: Inside the Collapse. I vote with them. No matter what Palin does, she'll screw it up, cover herself in "family values," and run away dragging the approval of the low brow wingnuts with her. Everything you need to know about Sarah Palin's fans is properly described in the movie, Stupidity.

Flying Lame

Up to 2002, I spent a lot of my life in commercial airlines, flying for business and, rarely, flying for pleasure. Over the last 40 years, I've watched air travel evolve from a somewhat inconvenient experience into what is now a downright miserable exercise in customer-hostile service. I admit that I have flown business class or first class fewer than a dozen times out of the hundreds of flights I've suffered. It's possible that the folks who cough up $1,000 to fly from Minneapolis to Chicago are treated better than the rest of us. It's even likely. It's also possible that the reason coach-class travelers are treated like passengers in steerage on the Titanic is because the airlines don't make any money from us and would just as soon we didn't fly at all. If that is the case, I should be making them happy. I'd much rather drive 2,000 miles round-trip, take the train or even the bus, than put up with the vagaries of air travel and the discomfort of airports. Hell, I'd rather pay a taxi driver to pick up friends and relatives at the airport than go myself. Airports are so badly designed, overpriced, and security is so erratic and hostile that walking into a dark alley with a pocket full of cash feels safer than the airport experience.

The demise of the passenger train system in the US and the decay of airlines is returning the country to a time when moving away from home meant never seeing your home and family again. When a family member moves outside of practical driving distance, many families lose physical contact and resort to the age-old written communication tactic; although that is now instant via email, Twitter, and cell phone texting. Of course, cross-country telephone communication has been with us since the turn of the last century. Nothing beats eye-to-eye, though and that is something that the death of air travel will cost all of us.

In a recent airport experience, I was amazed at how incompetently airlines are handling the downturn in their business. American Airlines, for example, has lost the ability to accurately predict when a plane might land at a given airport. In the case of the flight I was trying to track, their telephone system decided to skip the Minneapolis/St. Paul portion of a flight and jump directly to predicting when that plane might land in Ontario, Canada. The flight had been moved from a 10:45AM Sunday arrival to an eventual 1:45AM Monday landing over more than a dozen steps and an equal number of plane transfers, so it's sort of understandable that the airline might lose track of what plane is going where. It might be understandable, but the passenger we picked up had suffered 16 hours of airport misery and had walked a considerable percentage of the total travel distance running from plane-to-plane without ever leaving the Dallas airport. Not once had an American Airlines employee offered sympathy, useful guidance, or tried to assist this 88-year-old traveler. In fact, without the generous aid of two fellow travelers, he might not have made the trip at all. The airline's employees were as useless as a Republican Peace Corps volunteer.

While we waited to learn where and when we should meet our traveler-in-misery, I watched a dozen passengers stacked up at the misnamed "help desk" baggage claim. I watched them for an hour and a half. The line didn't move. No one received any sort of assistance. The two giggling AA uniformed women behind the counter appeared to be engaged in conversation and were actively ignoring the customers in line. One-by-one, the passengers simply gave up and wandered off without their luggage.

In the meantime, the airline's computer system jumped from predicting (incorrectly) the arrival time of the remaining evening's flights to the mid-morning flights, leaving us to wonder if our flight would be arriving at all. That's when a call to the American Airline's computer system informed me that our anticipated flight would be arriving in Ontario in three hours.

I've been to our airport about a half-dozen times this year. The place is a ghost town. Two years ago, there were still a substantial number of pleasure travelers flying out of Minneapolis. Eight years ago, the place was booming. The differences are purely numeric and economic, though. Good times or bad, the airlines optimize the misery of their customers. You'd think when passengers are squeezing their dollars for maximum benefit, a luxury like air travel would try to provide added value, better service, and actively court customers. Airlines don't bother worrying about the middleman. Their existence relies on corporate welfare federal dollars. When the economy tanks, people stop flying, and executive bonuses are in jeopardy, the airlines go crying to Washington, begging for welfare and management assistance. Like finance and the military-industrial complex, airlines can't exist without taxpayer aid. Their management systems are incompetent. Their business model is non-functional. Their product may be obsolete.

Exceptions, like Southwest, seem to do well regardless of economic conditions and some of us limit the places we travel to the places those companies service. Obviously, the country needs to let the incompetent companies fail, including the manufacturers of the airplanes and the rest of the support industry for this out-of-date transportation system. It is impossible to justify the massive energy waste air travel represents and, clearly, airlines can not support themselves with the product they sell. Flight was an interesting engineering challenge and a lot has been learned from the experiment, but when commercial airlines become a luxury that only the rich can afford and they can only afford it with assistance from every other taxpayer, it's time to give it up. If the competently managed companies, like Southwest, can find a niche that doesn't require regular injections of corporate welfare, that would be wonderful. The overwhelming majority of airline management couldn't turn a profit under any conditions. They should be allowed to fail--and their management should exit without publicly financed golden parachutes--and the country needs to move on to transportation systems that work under 21st Century energy constraints.

Circular Logic

The crazy right wingnuts (Yes, I am comfortable with the redundancy of that phrase.) are trying to pull off a logical fallacy on par with the argument that caused God to vanish in Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy.

"Now it is such a bizarrely impossible coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful [as the Bable fish] could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God. The argument goes something like this:
"'I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'
"'But,' said Man, 'the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'
"'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't though of that' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."

The equally loony wingnut argument begins with the idea that the far right and the far left are so corrupt, despotic, and anti-democratic that they are the same; an arc that meets in the end and, therefore, is a circle without ends. Since the circle is continuous, there is no need for both the right and the left to be involved and, hence, all corrupt, despotic, and anti-democratic regimes are of the same ilk. If they are the same, they might as well all be called "socialist" or "far left," leaving the far right innocent of ever engaging in such immoral acts.

Part of the "logic" involved in this manipulation abuses the fact that the official name of the German Nazi Party was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (abbreviated NSDAP), before that the Workers' Party, and is commonly known in English as the Nazi Party. While the Nazi's were fond of gibbering about the failures of capitalism, they were allied with all of the elements of Germany's far right; including most of the nation's religions institutions. Much of the socialist reputation of the Nazi's came from their penchant for confiscating substantial property from wealthy Jewish business men and transferring it to their own followers. The Nazi's did, however, have a strong "small business" following among Germans.

This is a short distance from the equally crazy religious fanatics' claim that the worst human rights' abuses in human history are connected to atheist regimes; Stalin, Mao, and Hitler. The first two are most likely accurate, but Hitler was far from atheist and much of his staff and most of Germany were religious, superstitious, and appeared to believe the most dangerous of human fallacies; that the gods were on their side.

In 1998, Jesse Ventura launched the American Reform Party into national prominence as a candidate for Minnesota's Govenor. It took exactly one election cycle, 2 years, before the religious right took over the party and crazy Texan Ross Perot jealously took back the reins of the party for his own purposes. Their Party chairman, Russell Verney, demanded (as Perot's spokesman) that Ventura resign from the party. Two years after that, one of the nuttiest wingnuts ever, Pat Buchanan, and his collection of religious whackos took over the party and Ventura left. Now, based on the party name and Ventura's candidacy, it would be possible to imply that Buchanan's wingnuts represented the original ideals of the American Reform Party, but that would require disrespect for and ignorance of reality.

Likewise, pretending that Hitler and his henchmen could even spell "Karl Marx," let alone imagining that they made an attempt to act as communists or socialists or human beings is an act of self-delusion. One of the greatest skills of the right wing is their ability to sell bags of crap to folks suffering from overflowing toilets. Call it "spin," "propaganda," "marketing," or "advertising," but whatever you call it you'll need to have a limited knowledge of history, an easily distorted grasp of reality, and some sort of vested interest in the underlying purpose of their story to be taken in this easily. The big pitches of the last 30 years has been family values, abortion, and a completely dishonest faith in capitalism. Characters who have the most to gain from exactly the thing they claim to dislike the most, creeping socialism, pretend to be advocates for "the free market": the military-industrial complex, the energy industry, finance, and medicine, just to name a few dependent-on-government-handouts usual suspects.

The right's claim to a chunk of taxpayer income is always based on public ignorance, fear-mongering, and corporate conspiracy (the activity that antitrust legislation once attempted to regulate). The right's claim to be the protectors of capitalism is as believable as Dick Cheney's patriotism.

Picking the Good Guys

I'm spending part of my summer reading a collection of history books that I've put off due to their size and time commitment. It's almost impossible to find a decent book about any complex period in history that weighs in at less than 750 pages. For me, that means at least two almost complete days spend reading. The older I get, the more work reading becomes as my eyes are slowly turning into semi-functional organs. I suspect that one reason people become more conservative as they age is they are less able to comfortably take in information the only way humans produce complex stories and data, the written word. Once you shift your input source from books to the Internet or, much worse, television, you are reduced to baby-talk and executive summaries of complex issues that can not be summarized.

The more American history I read, the more confused I get. We Americans have an almost infallible ability to pick the losing side in practically any international situation. In every instance, we arm our choice with overwhelming strength and watch them fritter their advantage away in corruption and cowardice. From Teddy Roosevelt to G.W. Bush, our Presidents have consistently picked the losing side. How is that possible?

At first, I suspected that it was poor military advice and our usual pitiful language skills that drove us to the weakest link. But the more I read about our history in places like the Philippines, China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, the more I am convinced that is not the problem. At some point before each conflict, we've supplied both sides of every one of those places with American military and economic advisers who provided insightful, intelligent, and predictive advice that could have saved the nation decades of trouble, trillions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of American lives. Every time, that advice was either ignored or suppressed. Why?

After wrapping up my third such book this week, I asked this question to my wife, "Why are we so attracted to the losing side?" Her answers were almost identical to what I'd considered over most of my life: our leaders are corrupt, special interests are in charge of our foreign policy, our military is incompetent, and the usual suspects that always appear at the beginning, middle, and end of every one of our foreign adventures. It's probably true that every one of those factors are involved in our national inability to pick a winning side, but in reading these history journals I don't see any of them as a unifying cause. For a country that firmly believes, and has for at least 150 years, that gods are on our side we seem to be on the bad side of whatever gods are in charge.

And that, I believe, is the problem. No, I don't think the gods are lined up against us. Yes, I do think that gods are at the root of our national loser complex. Going back over the history I've just read, it's obvious that we are picking the side that most accepts Christianity over its own traditional religion. If we can't find a serious leader who will adopt our national superstition, we'll pick someone at random, prop them up in power, and pretend that we're defending a Christian nation.

Holy crap! [And I mean that literally.] We're risking the lives of our children and our national security over superstition; disregarding common sense, solid information, history, and sound military advice. Often, as best typified by MacArthur (Korea) and Rumsfeld (Iraq), we've put complete nutjobs in charge because rational men would not make the "right" decision based on those religious goals. Every time you look into the domestic argument, especially the congressional argument, over any of these conflicts you find yourself surrounded by religious justifications for the craziest decisions. Roosevelt's "white man's burden" to Bush's "crusade," one after another, these pitifully bad decisions were done under the cloud of religious justification.

While I still believe that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," I suspect a similar relationship exists between politics and religion. Any time, anyone tries to justify anything based on any religious "principle," we should all assume that person is trying to drive the national family vehicle over a cliff. Superstition and politics, clearly, do not mix well.

Defining Treason

Back in the late 40's well into the late 50's, a collection of characters mostly from the Republican Party decided to define "treason" in their own terms. Many of these good ole' boys were often characterized as "the senators from Taiwan" or by some equally obvious terms that defined their true sponsors. Some congressmen like Joe McCarthy from Wisconsin, Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, Missouri's James Kem, and Nebraska's Kenneth Wherry barely seemed to realize that they had been elected by US citizens and were not personal representatives and lobbyists of Chiang Kai-shek and his band of corrupt gold diggers. The similarity between the China Lobby of the 1940's and 50's and today's Israel Lobby is beyond striking.

The Chinese Nationalists were particularly effective at handing out favors, money (syphoned from US taxpayer funds sent to prop up that pitiful "resistance"), and all sorts of under-the-table benefits to those who would chant their party line in Washington. The rightwing press (the overwhelming majority of the press) was equally over-the-wall about Chinese affairs. Publishers like Henry Luce of Time were children of that period's evangelism and believed that their lives would have been in vain if China were allowed to fall to communism. On one hand, Nationalist China was being represented by our own corrupt, bought-and-paid-for elected officials and on the other China's propaganda was marketed by the major newspapers and magazines. That, however, was never considered "treason."

Every on-site military advisor in China knew that Chiang (the "generalissimo") was incompetent, cowardly, and corrupt. One US general after another was sent to China to prop up Chang's conscripted and kidnapped military and found it to be so useless that the effort was a career killer, even for the best and most competent of our military leadership. Part of the reason that MacArthur managed to stay on top of the military dogpile in the Far East was that he was the most remote of leaders, hiding out in Japan and only sticking his toe into China and Korea for photo-ops. He managed to mismanage every step of China and Korea while shifting the blame for his failures to subordinates, mostly, through his political links to the Republican China delegation. To Republicans, that wasn't even considered incompetence, let alone treason.

There is a question whether "history repeats itself" or "history precedes itself." Humans make the same mistakes so often, misjudge current events so predictably, and follow the wrong leaders so consistently that it almost makes one fatalistic. The marching morons line up so quickly behind "conservative" goofballs that you'd have to suspect there is a human herding instinct that resembles a similar characteristic of lemmings.

Reading the history of our involvement in the Philippines at the turn of the last century, China in the 1920's, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq is almost boring in its repetition. First, there is a business interest to protect, often not even a US business interest, followed by war drum beaters from the so-called "conservative" crowd. Often reluctantly, the military is drawn into what is typically a civil war and our side is picked by whatever special interest has the ear and its hand in the pocketbook of, usually, the Republican Party. Often "our side" was either our opponent or a non-involved party in whatever major issue began the civil war. Once we're tangled in the invasion, the "conservatives" fake positive reports of how well our "allies" are doing. The allies, of course, are packing their pockets with US funding instead of spending it on the actual war. Every major reporting agency is in the pocket of the powers that be because that is the easiest, most profitable position. Eventually, the other side begins to completely overwhelm our "good guys" and occasional reports of corruption, incompetence, and cowardice begins to filter into the media reports. Those reporters are always criticised as "traitors" and accused of "aiding the enemy" by the representatives of foreign governments in Washington. Finally, the house of cards falls, we're routed from the battlefield, the folks in power come up with some fake settlement that allows them to save face, and everyone who was right at the beginning of the catastrophe is banished from public view, labelled "traitor," and the people who were most wrong are promoted to the next level of incompetence.

The occasional rare story that doesn't resemble this sequence of events, like the UN action in Bosnia, is often heavily discredited because there wasn't enough corruption and profit-taking from the event. You'd think that would raise some sort of red flag in the public consciousness, but the real lesson to take from that is that "public consciousness" is an oxymoron. The one thing that we appear to learn from history is how to make money from repeating it.

Who Wants A Canadian Healthcare System?

On a motorcycle mail list, no less, a rider commented on the free Canadian medical care he got for his non-injuries in Saskatchewan with the following score card:

1. Emergency Room visits: one (Regional Health Centre in Yorkton, SK)
2. Elapsed time from arrival at hospital to first being seen by physician: 93 minutes
3. Number of words in physician's first sentence directed at me: one (whereisyoupain?)
4. X-Rays received: 3
5. Broken bones found in X-Rays: zero
6. CT Scans received: two
7. Damaged organs found in CT scans : zero
8. Number of times I subsequently wished the US had a "single payer" healthcare system "just like Canada": zero

So, I asked what experience he'd had in US emergency clinics and what it cost to have all that care for what a guy with two testicles would have just shaken off and ridden away from. ("Just curious, what was your out-of-pocket cost for Canada's medical care? Sounds like they went out of their way for what was probably obviously a non-emergency injury. ")

Instead of an answer, I got the following response:

"I've looked through my constitution and no where do I see that this country is obligated to give me free medical care."

and

"Sounds like you should move to Canada!I don't know one Canadian friend who likes their system better than ours....they pay far more in taxes (at least so far) than we do and their care is not as good.But before you get rid of our system please go live under the system you think you like better.....see how it works for you.....and then if you like it....just stay there ;)I have insurance and you don't....no reason for me to also have to start paying for you to have insurance...to solve the problem you need to find a way to get insurance..your problem, not mine....so you solve it and don't toss it onto my shoulders....I am far too busy working to pay for schools and illegetimate kids and kids with worthless parents and a bunch of other societal ills that really should not be my problem either.....so I don't need your problems added to that....just fix it for yourself and leave me (and the rest of us) out of your troubles." [his punctuation, spelling, and syntax]

This reminds me of my brief experience with Libertarians in the late 1970's. I went to a party meeting with a friend who had been invited by another friend. The first thing I noticed was that about half of the Libertarians were still wearing their USPS uniforms. The more I listened to them talk, the more obvious it was that a majority of Libertarians at that meeting were public employees of some sort. It resembled a "think green" protest where every participant drove himself to the event in a Hummer.

In my experience, an overwhelming number of people who say "I see no reason for me to also have to start paying for you to have insurance" [lots of words for a tiny statement] are folks whose insurance I've been paying for most of my 50 years in the work force: retired and current military; local, state, and federal politicians and bureaucrats; corporate welfare receipents (medical industry, military-industrial industry, oil and highway construction corporations, and the cast of deadbeats who lobby government); the finance industry; practically every business that imports or exports products and jobs) and most of academia from K-12 through Harvard.

It would be interesting to live in a country where none of us had to pay for anything we disagreed with. For example, I'd like to keep my money as far from anything military as possible. Those douchebags couldn't protect the country from a pack of boys with box knives or a truck load of fertilizer. I'm tired of paying to protect Little Dick Cheney's oil investments. I don't need pavement for any vehicle I care about, so I don't want my money wasted on highways or city streets. Dirt was good enough for the first 50,000 years of human civilization. It's good enough today, especially since I like dirt bikes. I absolutely don't want my money handed over to banks, GM, or people who don't pay their morgages. The War on Drugs (and all other victimless crimes) is a waste of my money and I'd like to see police forces cut back to 1960-levels. Don't waste any of my money on cops who spend their days eating donuts and worrying about kids smoking joints.

I could go on.

On top of all that, there are a ton of things government isn't doing that I'd like to pay to have them do. Top of the list is corporate monitoring and white collar crime. All that money that's being dumped into diddly crap police and federal regulators pretending to be doing ought to be poured into clamping down on corporate polluters, stock manipulators, employee abuse, and executive scams. Hell, I'd trade the entire military for a functioning national white collar police force.

For the record, every Canadian I know and have talked to is proud of their medical care system. Obviously, like every human endevour, it's a ways from perfect, but people get care when they need it. Any rational system will prioritize medical care and that's a huge fear in the US. Currently, if you have the money you can blow it all on hopeless procedures that contribute nothing to extending or improving your life. Tax money should not be wasted that way.

Here is a terrific article (Travel By Car: Minnesota's Big Public Subsidy) that describes one of the many places where we are all asked to pay for the convenience, luxury, and profit of a significant minority. The gas tax doesn't even come close to paying for the cost of highways.

Literacy in the AP and Minnesota's Senators

This just in from the AP:

"Democrat Al Franken is due in Washington this week to be sworn in on Tuesday. The seat he'll fill has been vacant for six months while Franken and Republican Norm Coleman dueled over a close November election.

"Franken joins Democrat Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota's Senate delegation. His win puts Minnesota in a unique category. The state now has more former living senators than any other."

I would think that older states would have more "former living senators" than a relatively young state like Minnesota. "Former living" does mean dead, doesn't it?

Most likely, the geniuses at AP meant "living former senators" and that group is pretty representative of the erratic nature of the Midwest's politics:

Anderson, Wendell R. (D-MN)
Dayton, Mark (D-MN)
Mondale, Walter (D-MN)
Boschwitz, Rudy (R-MN)
Durenberger, Dave (R-MN)
Grams, Rod (R-MN)
Barkley, Dean (I-MN)
Coleman, Norm (R-MN)

That list swings from radical, religious right-wingnut talkshow babblers, Rod Grams, to the posterboy for "liberal" by today's goofy standards, Walter Mondale. There are some middle-grounders in that list, but they are old school politicians with the traditional Minnesota long lifespan. Boschwitz is 79, Durenberger is 75, and Mondale is 81. Rod Grams is 61 going on 200. Grams is still pissed off about the American Revolution and thinks the king deserved more respect.

Of course, many lists don't include Dean Barkley, since he served a two-month appointment by Jesse Ventura after the death of Paul Wellstone (2002-2003) and barely warmed his office chair before being replaced by one-term Republican Norm Coleman.

Coleman now has the distinction of having been beaten in major state elections by a professional wrestler with one-term small town mayor experience and a professional comedian with no political experience. It appears that almost anyone running against Coleman has a pretty good chance of winning, as long as that opponent isn't a professional politician and the election isn't rigged. Coleman's two political "wins" came against established Democratic opponents, although his 2002 win (by 61,000 votes out of 2 million) was during the period when US elections were symbolic and democracy was put on hold while Bush, Cheney, and Rove packed their pockets with taxpayer money and threw out the Constitution in favor of the corporatocracy. Coleman "beat" Walter Mondale after the state's favorite candidate, Paul Wellstone, died in an airplane crash in northern Minnesota. More than a few Minnesotans suspect that Coleman, Rove, and Bush had some hand in Wellstone's death.

Before the Senate election, Coleman had come in third behind Jesse Ventura and Democrat Skip Humphrey. In normal times, that would be enough to finish a politician's career, but with the help of the RNC, Karl Rove, and the nationwide election fraud of the first decade in this century, Coleman made a "comeback." The price for his resurrection was Coleman's slavish obedience to the Rove and Bush agenda. Franken played against that record as a big part of his campaign advertising.

In Minnesota, like most states, Republicans are reeling from their hard-earned reputations for general purpose incompetnence and wide-ranging corruption and non-existent moral values. The current govenor, Pawlenty, has decided not to run for re-election, since he would probably be beaten by a stand-up comedian or a pro football player or a tasefully dressed transvestite if one chose to run. Pawlenty has so linked himself to Rove's "no new taxes on the rich" principles that practically everyone who can manage basic mathematics wants to see the bastard tossed to the wolves. So, he's campaigning nationally in the hopes that Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold, in the great tradition of corrupt corporations changing their names to protect the guilty) will return American elections to the low standards of 2000 and 2004. At worst, Pawlenty will run for President. Next worst, he'll be a Republican candidate for Senate.

The Greatest Generation

My parent's generation is being called "The Greatest Generation (TGG)," also known as the G.I. Generation. To be honest, most of the honors being bestowed on that generation comes from themselves. A MSM hack, Tom Brokow, is printing money catering to the egos and self-delusions of the generation born around 1910-30. His credibility is, at best, suspect. Brokow, having been born in 1940, is probably jealous because he's a member of the in-between generation -- the coolest of which were Beatniks and dullest and more numerous became IBM executives and MSM talking heads-- that is neither Boomer or TGG.

Members of the TGG would include famous characters like Joe McCarthy, John Wayne, Truman Capote, Allen Ginsberg, Billy Graham, Walter Cronkite, Howard Zinn, and Johnny Carson. TGG World Leaders would be from the terms of US Presidents Ike Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronny Reagan, and George Bush I.

Having offered a respectable portion of the best and most courageous of their generation to fight on all sides of WWiI, TGG made some awful sacrifices. The US members of TGG take a lot of credit for having been on "the right side" of a "good war." If being on the right side makes for greatness, their German and Japanese peers must be "the worst generation." Using that weird criteria for greatness, the Boomer Generation and the X-Gen'ers rank pretty low, having failed miserably at their "bad wars." It should be noted that all of those "bad wars" were initiated by TGG members, except for the most recent Iraq screw up which was handed down to a loser Boomer by his TGG father and a bunch of Nixon political failures.

To their credit, it would be worth noting that 1960's Boomers stopped an illegal, immoral war begun by TGG'ers. TGG voted to continue fighting in Vietnam, long after the terrible cost to both the US reputation and economy and the incredible Vietnamese cost were obvious to their children. The social, economic, and personal cost of opposing that TGG war has never been considered by the MSM hacks (particularly, that suck-up Brokow) and I don't believe Vietnam or Joe McCarthy appears to be costing the TGG'ers much credibility. The proud direct descendants of TGG among my own and my children's generations are characters like Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Dick Cheney, and the Republican working class and the cast and crowd of conservative spokespersons. If those folks impress you, I can understand why you would call the G.I. Generation "TGG." You are clearly often asking yourself, "What would TGG do?" And answering that question with their usual behavior.

On a recent trip to North Dakota's historic monuments and museums, I came upon a diary of a young U.S. Army calvary private and, later, I found myself among the gravestones of boys who had died "in the service of their country" in that lonely, disconnected place. There were more than 200 graves in that yard, many marked with fake headboards that were inscribed with the entry made in the fort's log that recorded the fatality number, victim's name, office, date of death, and cause of death. The real headstones were small rocks with a number carved into the face. Almost 100 years ago, the "important" bodies were moved to a military graveyard when the fort was decommissioned. Everyone else stayed comfortable in their eternity on that North Dakota hillside. Obviously, most of the causes of death are no different in Iraq today than they were in North Dakota 120 years ago. The causes of the causes aren't much different, either.

In 1870, a collection of ruling class assholes wanted to have the taxpayer pay for a corporately-owned railroad that ran coast-to-coast. First, the people who lived in the way of that railroad had to be disposed of, so young men were recruited to "serve their country" in outposts like Fort Ransom, Fort Lewis and Clark, and others all over the west. It was an overwhelming invading force and the locals (Native Americans) were forced into living lives underground as "terrorists" opposing the invaders with their primitive tactics and ineffective weapons for decades. The "good guys" won, because history tells us the good guys always win, having absolute control of the recording of history. The bad guys vanished into reservations, the nation's manufacturing and construction work force, and to inner cities.

Outside of the odd designation of the "good war," the overwhelming numbers of generations in US history have been bad generations involved in bad wars. Almost without skip, each generation creates a greed-inspired war for which young men and innocents will fight and die. The size and the good or badness of the war seems to me to be insignificant. It appears to me that to be among the class of generations that can be called "great," a generation either has to have skipped the cycle of sending children to war altogether or to have gone to war and done everything possible to keep the next generation from dying the same pointless way.

Brokow's TGG doesn't fill that bill at all, having fought a war and having sent its children to several even dumber wars. There are certainly many truly great people in TGG: men who wouldn't fight and went to jail for their beliefs; parents who fought against having their children sent off to wars; men who once fought and later refused to believe politicians and profiteers who argued that wars are "easy." These great people spoke the truth regardless of how unpopular it was at the time. Every generation has members of that caliber. The real mark of a generation, though, is how its majority acts and speaks.

Nixon's "Silent Majority" was composed of TGG. TGG spawned and empowered Joe McCarthy and Nixon and Ronny Reagan. TGG spent more of its life in power in fear, rather than acting from courage. Sure, they'd suffered the most recent depression and one of the world's most vicious wars, but many of TGG were so timid that they consistently gravitated to conservative, dangerous white men. I fail to see the greatness in that attitude.

All of the poor qualities endemic to Boomers were first seen in TGG. TGG was the first US generation to be overwhelming unconcerned that their children would live less safe, less healthy, and less secure lives than previous generations. TGG burned up resources as if tomorrow was unlikely. TGG went through the world's supply of everything from good farming land to oil with abandon and disregard. They passed that attribute on to their offspring who most admire that careless past (see Dick Cheney and others above). TGG shipped jobs and industries overseas so that they wouldn't have to bother learning difficult concepts such as leadership and creativity. TGG tossed off every useful activity the government and academia could be involved in to create the largest, most expensive, most dangerous military and military-industrial complex in the history of the world. They vote regularly and they voted conservatively.

If the G.I. Generation is great by any standard, they are great spenders of wealth and resources. A man who makes his living selling toothpaste and snake oil may see that as greatness, but I am less convinced. I don't think much of Tom Brokow and I'm disappointed in The Greatest Generation. They haven't left us much to work with and they have left a horde of messes for future generations to clean up.

Why is national health insurance so complicated?

If we are lucky, some half-baked, marginally noticable "national healthcare plan" will be in place at the end of this summer. Obama is clear that this won't be anything useful or make a slight dent on the fact that most US citizens are not covered for any major medical costs; "we may need a system that's not so disruptive that people feel like suddenly what they've known for most of their lives is thrown by the wayside." The last thing we need is a system that actually covers medical expenses after all these years of being refused by insurance companies for all of the medical expenses we pay medical insurance to cover.

Here's the real reason we won't be seeing meaningful national healthcare reform:

2008 Compensation Packages
Ron Williams - Aetna: $24,300,112 (down from a high of $124.8 million in 2005, poor Ronny)
H. Edward Hanway - CIGNA: $12,236,740
Angela Braly - WellPoint: $9,844,212
Dale Wolf - Coventry Health Care: $9,047,469
Michael Neidorff - Centene: $8,774,483
James Carlson - AMERIGROUP: $5,292,546
Michael McCallister - Humana: $4,764,309
Jay Gellert - Health Net: $4,425,355
Richard Barasch - Universal American: $3,503,702
Stephen Hemsley - UnitedHealth Group: $3,241,042

Add to this the personal use of a corporate aircraft and vehicle, as well as financial planning and 401(k) company matches and undetermined and undisclosed and often illegal benefits and bonuses ( stock-option back dating, continued benefits after retirement, ).

I've never heard of some of these companies and I'm sure their underserved customers wish they were in the same boat, but the CEOs of the most customer-hostile industry in the world are paid as if they actually contribute something useful to the company's bottom line. They don't. For example, the year Aetna flushed $124.8 mil down William's toilet, they paid a stock dividend of $0.03. So much for corporations working for the benefit of stockholders. Aetna would have been a half-decent investment that year if so much of the company's profits hadn't been wasted on useless executives.

Regardless, with that kind of spare change floating around Washington, we are not going to get any meaningful reform on healthcare. Honestly, I'd say that most Americans might as well admit we're living in a 3rd world country and plan on dying alone, broke, and without even medical marijuana to dull the pain. Unless you are rich, a US Senator or Representative, a government worker, or in prison you have no chance of receiving decent medical care without giving up your family's future and shipping yourself to debtor's prison. If you are in one of the protected groups, you are cared for by the finest socialized medical system in the world and the rest of us envy you.

My father-in-law once joked that if his military pension and medical coverage vanished, he'd just pick a politican to shoot and look forward to decent medical care in prison. Seems like there are more productive targets available, doesn't it? If, for example, Aetna didn't have to waste $24 to $125 mil on Williams--who is undoubtedly as useless as tits on a doorknob--the company could provide top-quality health insurance for about 2,500 to 14,000 families at a $750/month premium. Obviously, if the premium didn't have to support the equally useless and overpriced management boobs in the corner offices in Williams' building, even more people could have medical care.

The advantage to human beings having medical coverage vs. evil aliens receiving ridiculous salaries (which they no doubt send back to their home planets adding no value to the Earth economy) is obvious. Human beings do work, providing services and products for other human beings. CEO/COO/CIO/CTO/CMO/CFO/CEE and other C-labelled aliens waste resources depriving humans of food, shelter, and the necessities of life (such as medical care). If we could find a way to purge the planet of C-label executives, we might discover that there is more than enough money avaiable to solve all sorts of problems. Clearly the question is, "Where is Theodore John Kaczynski when we really need him?"

If President Obama is really unable to imagine a way to get around the defective healthcare insurance system we're currently suffering, he's not as bright as his fans claim. This is a simple issue: let the medical insurance companies find some other group of suckers to victimize and let's get on with resolving the biggest problem the nation faces. If Congress and the Senate feel this is too complicated for their simple minds to grasp, we should remind them that if they are so underemployed that they have time to worry about gun possession in national parks they have plenty of time to work on things that actually matter.

Why Do We Do This?

Back in the 60's, when I was draft age, the country's ruling elite picked an unnecessary fight with a small, primative country that couldn't have presented a threat to the United States if aliens had chopped Vietnam from the planet and thrown it at us from space. That "war" was simply an opportunity for the corrupt characters in the military-industrial complex to milk the nation's wealth for their own benifit. There was no more reason for the Vietnam War than that simple, evil, corrupt, selfish motivation. It was a perfect example of what happens to a nation when the worst people on earth are given the power to control the nation's actions.

Because humans are their own best evidence that there is no basis for imagining an "intelligent designer," we make this sort of moronic mistake in electing and following "leaders" over and over again. In fact, it has happened so many times, in so many places, for so long that it would take an army of historians to roughly document the number of times it has happened in the last century. Almost universally, it would be best for every person in every country to assume that when someone rises upon his hind legs waving a flag or a weapon shouting, "Follow me!" that everyone else turns and runs the opposite direction. If we can manage that, maybe grabbing our own weapons and shooting that character is the best we can do. Especially when it comes to war, the people who most want to lead are exactly the people who shouldn't be allowed near leadership.

For some reason, this past couple of weeks I've been close to a bit of the end results of our latest charge into wartime stupidity: the kids who return home from this exercise in evil. I am ashamed for my country, myself, and the rest of you. What we have done to these kids is unforgivable. What we will do to them is worse.

I wasn't aware enough to understand what I was seeing back in 1966, but I know I see today. When a nation sends its children off to kill or be killed, both those who die and those who come back are damaged, permanently. When a nation desperately wants to pretend that there is something patriotic about killing random "insurgents" (a word the British once applied to American revolutionaries) we are pissing on reality and hoping our children won't smell the results. Old people have deadened senses and can often ignore all sorts of foul odors and ugly sights, but kids see and smell and identify those things with clarity. The way to create mindless, soulless adults is to tell kids that a pile of crap is really a bouquet of roses often enough that they can't tell one from the other.

These poor kids coming back from the hell we’ve created in Iraq and Afghanistan are, at the least, wounded and, at the most, ruined. You can see it in their eyes and hear it in their voices. The things they have seen and done would turn cowards like Bush and Cheney into quivering catatonic balls of jelly. But people like Bush and Little Dick never have to suffer the consequences of their own greed and incompetence. The advantage of being an elite is that someone else always pays the tab. Foolish George has expected the rest of us to solve his problems for his entire life and Little Dick would chew the meat off of his own children’s bones if he felt a pang of hunger.

I once wrote that I believe voting twice for Bush and Cheney was evidence that a voter is too stupid to be allowed to vote again. I have to modify that. Honestly, I believe that having voted to any Republican in the last 25 years, and about 75% of the Democrats running for office in the last 10 years, is evidence that a voter is too stupid to be a citizen in a democracy. Too many of the people who run for office in this mess we’ve allowed our country to become are unfit for leadership at any level.

Conservatives, especially conservatives advocating war, have been wrong about practically every important issue in every decade since the founding of this country and, I would imagine, every issue in the history of organized society. It seems obvious that one should, at least, be wary of the opinions of those who represent the status quo. Personally, I assume that claiming to be “conservative” is a statement of near-perfect stupidity and I do my best to avoid stupid people.

What's Still the Matter with Kansas?

Today, Dr. George Tiller, one of the nation's (and that hatefilled state's) few providers of abortions was murdered at his church while serving as an usher. Dr. Tiller's clinic, Tiller's Women's Health Care Services, was one of the few such facilities left in that fundamentalist theocratic state. It had been targeted several times by "pro-life" terrorists since opening in 1973.

As Thomas Frank noted in his book about the mental flaws of the Midwest, What's the Matter with Kansas?, the right has managed to create a cause with abortion that they will never have the courage to be honest about. The cowardice behind going after doctors and nurses rather than attacking the women who hire those medical professionals is as dishonest as it is evil. If the self-proclaimed pro-lifers actually aimed their evil at the women who ask for these services, they would be castrated and shipped out of the country on a rial in minutes. Since they are devoid of morals, courage, or honest beliefs, they are left with pretending to belive that the messenger is the message author. If they were to declare war on the women of this country, as their Muslim heroes have done, they'd be gone in moments. They don't have half the courage of their in-word-only convictions, so they pick easy targets and go after women's rights through a sniper's sights.

The federal government should apply the kind of force against these terrorists that was once aimed at the KKK and the American Nazi Party. They are the same kind of people and deserve exactly the same fate, or worse.

Being A Republican: the Coolest Things

While I watched the "proceedings" surrounding the approval of Obama's cabinet, I reminisced about the good old days of Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II (with a little flicker of memories of Nixon and Ford). When a Democrat is in office, Republicans attempt to demonstrate that they still remember what it was like to be a human being. They put fancy suits over their lizard skins and jabber about "moral authority," "family values," and other topics of which they are totally unfamiliar and could care less about when there is booty to be taken.


While they pretend to give a damn that some minor Democratic nominee didn't pay Unemployment or Workmans' Comp on an illegal alien nanny, they didn't bat an eye when they voted to approve Condolezza Rice to Bush II's cabinet. Rice had a Chevron oil tanker named after her, for Christ's sake! Do you have any idea how low you have to kneel down to get an oil tanker named after you? Me either, but I bet you'd put a lot more wear and tear on your knees than if you were just giving Clinton head in the Oval office.


These are the same characters who nominated Cheney for Vice President after the skulduggery he'd managed as Haliburton's CEO during the Clinton years and his Nixonian criminal past. When Cheney got caught selling nuclear reactor parts to Iran, violating the National Security ban on such sales in 1998, Cheney said, "I think we'd be better off if we…backed off those sanctions didn't try to impose secondary boycotts on companies...trying to do business over there." Yep, Little Dick was pissed off that Clinton and the Pentagon wouldn't let him help Iran develop nuclear technologies and actively campaigned to be allowed to do so. Hell, Haliburton had an office in Tehran during the time when that was a violation of U.S. sanctions.


Obviously, the coolest thing about being a Republican is that there are absolutely no limits on the evil one can do, After a lifetime of stomping on US law, you can still end up on the public payroll. Come-on Democrats, you have to admit you're more than a little jealous. In the 1960s and 70s, southern Democrats were so jealous of the double standard that they switched parties in droves, dragging along the dumbass crackers who were more interested in blaming minorities for their pitiful economic and social status than in looking into a mirror and seeing the results of decades of incest. There is nothing better than screwing the public and pretending to be on some sort of moral crusade at the same time. That's what being a Republican is all about.


And you wonder why all I can do is laugh when I see or hear any Republican make any claim to morality? You're lucky I don't spit in your face, which sometimes happens as an unintentional by-product of laughing uncontrollably. Being a Republican means "never having to say your sorry" for pocketing the public trust, destroying the economy, murdering millions, and being wrong at every turn in the road. Anyone would be jealous of that record.

Geese and Immigrants

The connection between Canada Goose and immigration probably isn’t obvious. Stick with me for a few paragraphs and I’ll try to draw lines between my dots.

Canada Geese are pretty amazing birds. They are physically large with a 50-88 inch wingspan, weighing 7-24 pounds. They live 10 to 24 years. They create large families and mate, sometimes, for life. They aren’t found in every area of the country. When you see them in their natural habitat, it is hard not to admire them for both their beauty and their resilience. By the 1950s, they were driven to near extinction by the combination of over-hunting, chemical poisoning (DDT and other pesticides and industrial farming chemicals), and loss of habitat. The received a little federal protection about the time there were fewer than 50 birds left in the world. And they have bounced back. They, unlike many migrating birds, have adapted their migration to the eastern United States and as far as Siberia, eastern China, and Japan. If you can’t admire that kind of toughness, you probably hate everything and everybody.

If you live on the edges of their flight path, you may be among those of us who think a Canada Goose sighting was a rare and special thing. I nearly bought a house in eastern Colorado, almost exclusively because there was a small pond behind the house where Canada Geese nested during the summer. Moving from southern California to a place where wildlife co-existed with human population was such a shock that I was overwhelmed by the opportunity and put my money down to take advantage of the prospect. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on the state of the Colorado economy of the moment, the seller turned down my offer in hope of finding a more motivated buyer. I still remember the backyard of that house and seeing a “v” of geese fly over and land a few yards away.

Today, I live in Minnesota and have a larger pond in my backyard that is usually populated with a dozen geese and a family or two every spring. In Minnesota, Canada Geese are not particularly appreciated. My wife and I love them and every year we look forward to their arrival in the spring and their families in the early summer. Many of our neighbors hate the droppings and the noise and actually fear being “wing-whipped” or "pecked" by the dreaded geese. To be honest, I am incapable of respecting anyone who is afraid of a bird. Chubby little city-boy Alfred Hitchcock references included, death by birds is not something a human should consider likely or particularly scary. But I’ve witnessed a few of our neighbors petitioning our city council to “protect” the neighborhood from the terror of Canada Geese and the city complies by hiring a local college professor and his gang of “naturalist” students to round up the geese, kill them or sell them to game “farms,” and, thereby, save the neighborhood from the goose threat.

Fear is a strange emotion. People will say any damn thing when they are afraid. Personally, I’d rather be wing-whipped to death by a million sparrows than to admit publicly that I’m afraid of a bird. But that’s just me. Likewise, I’d rather live under a bridge and eat grocery store castoffs than to admit that I can’t compete with third world immigrants for a job. When you give in to that kind of irrational fear, you are setting yourself up to be taken advantage by all sorts of con artists, fanatics, extremists, and every other Rush Limbaugh-type. You have to learn to control your panic if you want to live in civilized society.

On my way to work last week, I was heading west on I694 just past the new rats’ nest of freeway convolution when I passed a group of Canada Geese gathered on the edge of the freeway. The new freeway design has incorporated a collection of drainage ponds that attract waterfowl to the hazardous environment of a poorly designed fast moving freeway and we’re going to see a lot more of this sort of road kill as this design matures. The geese, one adult and several goslings, were all looking at the mangled body of an adult goose that had been recently hit as the geese crossed the freeway. They looked and acted exactly like a family of humans would look and act if they witnessed a parent being killed; they were shocked and stunned and appeared almost ready to go back into the traffic to assist the slaughtered parent.

One of the evolutionary tricks nature played on geese is that after eggs are laid, both parents loose their ability to fly for almost 30 days. This forces the parents to travel at the pace of their offspring until the goslings attach themselves to the parents and parental affection forces the parents to stick with their children until they are ready to care for themselves.


Nature has one sick sense of humor. Geese are not well-designed for walking, but walk they must until they can fly again. So, while we humans think the geese are just jamming up traffic out of stupidity, it’s really something more complicated.

Twelve hours later, I returned from work on the same path. The body in the road was much more mangled than it had been when I first saw it. There were feathers floating in the air almost like large flakes of snow. The whole family was still stuck on the edge of the freeway, all looking at that unrecognizable gory shape, all unable to believe life was over for that parent and the rest of the family would have to figure out how to get along without the dead parent.

This connection between geese and humans struck me particularly hard that evening. It was too easy to see myself in the surviving family. Usually, it’s easy to imagine geese, raccoons, bears, lions and tigers, and people who don’t speak the same language as being something lesser than ourselves. “Them and us” is a convenient perspective when we feel our resources are being taken by someone or something that we can simply run over with our cars, our police, our military, or our majority vote. The truth is that many of the animals on earth love their families. Nature designed us to care for our offspring, our mates, and to protect them with our lives. The connection between geese and humans is painfully close and, sometimes, unavoidably obvious.

I Love You, Man

Admit it, it's hard not to love Little Dick Cheney. The man is a font of weird-dom in a world of decreasingly rational behavior. This week, for example, Little Dick's hero, Rush Limbaugh said "Colin Powell is just another liberal. What Colin Powell needs to do is close the loop and become a Democrat." Limbaugh claimed that Powell is "just mad at me because I'm the one person in the country that had the guts to explain his endorsement of Obama. It was purely and solely based on race." And Little Dick followed that brilliant analysis (with special emphasis on the "anal" aspect of the word) by saying that he'd rather follow Rush than Colin Powell into battle for the soulless heart of Republicanism. Dick was practically reverential about his admiration for the crazy rightwing talk show fratboy.

Pretty funny; one super-cowardly draft dodger claiming that he would rather follow another maniacally timid draft dodger into battle than be led by someone who grew a pair during adolescence and has actually been in a battle more physical than a collection of corporate backshooters whining about desert.

It’s a spectacular image. Little Dick, with his shotgun in hand, being chauffeured in a Hummer crawling along behind Rush, who would be waddling along the side of an isolated dirt road looking for hillbillies to convert or shoot, or both. Ah, the exhilaration of a Republican battle! The most corrupt, elite, and cowardly people on the planet convincing the children of the working class to kill themselves for the fame and fortune of the idle rich. That is the stuff that conservative legends are made from.

In one of his finer sit-down comedic appearances, Little Dick told one hilarious story after another as a CBS interviewer/straight-man gawked in amazement and complicity. My favorite one-liner, which Little Dick never tires of telling, is the one about how his secret torture memos describe "attack planning that was under way and how it was stopped." Even the CIA clowns who reveled in the glory days of amoral behavior under Little Dick don’t have the gall to claim that they uncovered anything beyond a few torture victims’ private parts. The FBI agents who actually obtained the information from traditional interrogation techniques are less enthusiastic about Little Dick's fables.

But Dick, having secure faith in the gullibility of the Republican minions, can say anything with a straight face. If you can’t love an absolute lack of moral values or any connection to reality, what can you love?

Here is a small sampling of my favorite Little Dick Cheney routines:

• The hilarious story of how he created enemies from friends and mindlessly distributed weapons across the face of the Mideast to make the US safer from terrorists who, otherwise, would be armed with sand and rocks.
• The amazing talke of how he turned our boarders into freeways jammed with an uninterrupted flow of illegal immigrants (cheap labor for the ruling class) and how that was a great triumph of national defense.
• Everybody loves hearing about his gutting of the volunteer military in favor of corrupt, incompetent, and overpriced private contractors who couldn’t protect a platoon of Marines from a dozen rampaging retired nuns.
• And we all laugh our guts out as he tells about disassembling the core of the federal government and replacing it with K-Street fruitcakes who, outside of packing their pockets with federal welfare, have no useful skills or human value. A side effect of eliminating all necessary regulation of everything from banking and finance to government oversight of federal expenditure is that corruption ran so rampant during the Cheney-Bush years that we almost forgot that government doesn't have to be a criminal enterprise. Damn,. that's good comedy.
• His gutbusting description of overseeing of dozens of the best examples of mismanagement in the history of the nation (you pick, there are so many possibilities from 9/11 to the Second Great Depression).
• My favorite: how Little Dick and Brainless George turned a booming economy and a rapidly approaching balanced budget into a catestrophic economic depression with as little hope for a return to a functioning economy as has existed since 1929 (the last time Republican criminals completely took over the government).

With an absolutely straight face, Little Dick ends his routine with his explanation of why he’s still doing sit-down comedy after so many years of service to humor: if Little Dick wasn’t out there telling his stories, "then the critics have free run, and there isn't anybody there on the other side to tell the truth." One thing is for certain, where ever there is truth, justice, and the American way, Little Dick Cheney will be on the other side telling his stories.

The Mess We're In

In 1980, Ronald Reagan ran a campaign based on repeating "there you go again" whenever Jimmy Carter brought up the spectre of reality vs. Ronny's "magic of the market" mantra. Reagan won and Americans headed down the path of consistently choosing fantasy over reality any time the option was presented. A nation of ostriches with our feathered necks stuffing our heads into the sand on practically every vital issue that presented itself for the next 28 years. I hate to consider the possibility that my country may be mostly populated by cowards and fools, but 8 years of Reagan and 12 years of Bushes presents a lot of evidence. Maybe "mentally lazy" would be a more generous label, but generous or not we probably don't want to spend a lot of time looking into the mirror. Our outsized porportion of supertitious types is a sad indicator, too. The things we, as a culture, believe in are indications of our deterioration.

Belief in or a desire for magic, for example, is always a bad sign.

A lot has been made of the dying of the "traditional media." It appears that newspapers and even the major networks have lost their means of support; advertising and readership. We are told that this is a disaster for our democracy. The real disaster occurred about 28 years ago, when Reagan and his FCC Commissioner, Mark Fowler, set out to deregulate the communications media under orders from the robber barons who wanted to consolodate the national media into the hands of a few huge corporations. They got what they wanted, every one of those characters walked away with wealth and power beyond belief, and the country got an advertising-based, public service and investigative journalism-free, media that lost its value to the democracy and trivialized itself into Faux News values.

I think it is safe to say that any business that forgets its core purpose is doomed, eventually, to history. The reason the media exists is to provide vital information about important issues to the society. When media becomes simply entertainment, it also becomes disposable.

GM, GE, and a host of once-great American manufacturing companies fell to the same short-term thinking. They saw easy money in finance, especially unregulated finance, and tossed off their core business in exchange for a fast buck. Since minimal skill was required for the fast buck, their expertise withered to accounting and legal functions, leaving them to blow in the winds of luck and ignorance. Luck always runs out and ignorance is a poor defence. Characters like Jack Welch ran their companies into the ground, stripping off functional portions of the business to prop up the phony finance business, until the company was down to its birthday suit and it was impossible to hide the invisible quality of the king's new suit.

Why are today's businesses and business "leaders" so much less prepared for reality than the very same companies of a few decades back? Competition, mostly. Once, our lazy, incompetent corporate management class could exist because nobody did that job better. In the 1970's, Japan showed up with hard-working, quality-driven, technically competent, humane management and we thought the world was ending. One world was; the American manufacturing world. Kicking Europe's ass was easy, because as bad as our management class had become Europe's was even worse. After the Japanese invasion into the world of manufacturing, the clock was ticking on the demise of American leadership in the practical world of building products.

The only manufacturing areas where American companies could still compete were socialized; munitions and medicine. Without the assistance of the taxpayer, American manufacturing had to be shipped off-shore to compensate for over-priced, untalented American corporate management.

The solution was magic; magical finance and magical marketing.

As usual, this was a short-term solution. For magical finance to work, the financial system had to be "deregulated" (the politispeak word used for "let the buyer beware"). Rules that had kept the banking mobsters in check since their last swarm of corruption in the 1920's had to be quietly eliminated. The regulators who kept a thumb on the games finance swindlers love to play had to be intimidated into retiring or silence. Entire departments, especially in the SEC, were downsized until they were impotent. Twenty years later, we see the result but we don't see that the people who created this system were rewarded and are perfectly happy with the system they have created and the culture they may have destroyed.

As for marketing, the first thing out the window when times get tough is unproductive marketing activities. No other department in a business has less connection to profitability or a closer connection to waste. After 40 years in business, I'm still waiting to see my first bit of confirmation that any activity by a marketing department justifies the expense of that department. After 20 years of shifting the purpose of television news services and newspapers to the sole function of marketing products, those industries are discovering that pointless fluff is an unnecessary luxury. In hard times, luxury doesn't even get a seat on the bus.

Franken vs Coleman

Hopefully, Minnesota will soon have a 2nd US Senator. According to a 3-judge panel, it will be Al Franken. Early in the election, I had a dog in this race. I was, initially, a strong Al Franken supporter, including standing and voting for him in the Minnesota Democratic Caucus. The closer Al came to being a "real Democrat," the further I fell from his list of supporters. On election day, I canvased two precincts attempting to get out the vote for Obama and the other Democratic candidates, but I'm not really a Democrat. I vote for any candidate (Independent, Libertarian, Green, or Democrat or anyone else) who appeals to me, as long as they are not Republican. I try not to piss in my drinking water.

Franken was, initially, the Democratic unfavorite. Our local US representative, Betty McCollum, was a very vocal supporter of Franken's opponents. Anyone she is happy with, I'm against (unless they are Republican). McCollum is the prototypical Pelosi-Democrat and they are as worthless and gutless as Republicans. Our lone senator, Klobuchar, did her best to stay out of the campaign, in case some actual position was expressed, requiring her to have an opinion on any given issue. Again, a Pelosi-Democrat and a waste of valuable air. I liked Franken a lot better before he became politically acceptable. Once Clinton came to town to campaign for Franken, I lost a lot of respect for him. After I briefly met him at the caucus, I lost a little more interest.

The fact is, anyone who will associate with the kind of subhuman who populates our political system is probably not someone you'd want mowing your grass unsupervised.

However, in the end it was a no-brainer decision; anyone with half-a-chance to move Normal Coleman's creepy, leering mug out of government was worth a shot. Nobody was more of a slave to Cheney/Bush than Coleman. Not even the slavering loons from the deep south walked the party line as tightly as did Normal.

By election day, the Independent Party candidate managed to become a neuter, so the only contender was Franken. On election night, with a tiny majority proclaimed by anti-law Republicans, Coleman proclaimed himself the winner (regardless of Minnesota's law requiring a recount even with a far greater margin of "victory" than Coleman retained) and asked Franken to conceed "for the good of the state and the nation." After the legally-required recount resulted in Coleman losing his tiny edge, Coleman forgot about "the state and the nation" and began to worry about his own self-interests. Norm has some election finance problems and other money issues. Not being a US Senator could result in a lot more problems for the corrupt little transplant from Boston. He might go straight from Washington to jail, which is totally appropriate. We should have such luck with the majority of Republicans.

In the end, it should be remembered that Norm Coleman lost elections to a retired professional wrestler, was nearly beaten by a dead man (Wellstone), and has now been whipped by a semi-retired Saturday Night Live comedian. That is a political record that even your typical Republican ought to be nervous about saying outloud. We know, though, that being a Republican means never having to say, "I'm ashamed of myself."

Image Improvement

A collection of robber barons and blackmailers met with President Obama this week. Obama was attempting to bring some restraint into an industry that is jammed full with mobsters who are disconnected from reality, "Show some restraint. Show that you get that this is a crisis and everybody has to make sacrifices."

In the case of banks and large corporations, that "somebody" is, as usual, middle class taxpayers. The executives will still take home their overstuffed pay envelopes. Most of them will keep flying corporate jets to exotic business parties all over the world. When they completely trash their businesses, get caught stealing from customers, and are faced with jail time, they run to Canada where they get hired by Canadian brokerages to do it all again. The rest of us will be left to clean up their mistakes and outright theft.

The bankers hoped that standing next to Obama would "clean up" their images. In a world where image is reality, I supposed that is possible.

Disgusting, isn't it? If human intelligence were a reality, Obama would be afraid to stand near these wolves out of fear for his image. Nothing could clean up the reputations of the corporate crooks, in that ideal world. We're not in that world, though. Humans, who pride themselves as "the thinking animal," have the long term memory of ants. Twenty minutes after cursing the names of bankers and the financial sector, many Americans began railing about "socialism" and the "restriction of fundamental rights" when Obama's regulators began to investigate bankers and brokers. All it took was a little proding by Rush and O'Reilly and half of the country went ballastic over the idea that the federal government might be doing its job.

Obama said, "It's very difficult for me as president to call on the American people to make sacrifices to help shore up the financial system if there's no sense of mutual obligation . . . and mutual help . . . There's no separation between Main Street and Wall Street. We're all in this together."

No, we're not. The bankers and CEOs are in it for themselves. The rest of us are in it because we have no choice. Wall Street is on one side of the battlefield and we are on the other. If they win, we lose. If they survive, we'll die. We don't need them. They do need us. This is, face it, a class war and has been since the founding of the nation in 1776. Working Americans, however, quit the fight in 1814. The ruling class have been at war, without pause, for hundreds of years. If we don't fight back, we deserve the government, economy, and country we get.

#195 Analyzing the Right

An amazing thing has happened. Ding,dong the nut is gone. Bush and Cheney have left the room, returned to the opulence from whence they came. The rest of the crazy crowd who polluted the Washington atmosphere for eight miserable years have gone back to their cushy corporate jobs and have returned to their real work, making money.

Unfortunately, that doesn't mean we are rid of them. They'll be back. Like cockroaches, they are terrified of the light, but the lights don't stay on forever. We are a short-sighted, short memory country and they will return to do what they always do again.

I've been reviewing the last quarter-century while watching Obama's first days. The things he is trying to change are exactly what the Reaganites and Bushies spent so much time building; fear, secrecy, corruption, and disinformation. I'm sure that many Americans have no idea why Obama is spending so much effort trying to reconstruct government "transparency." Bush and, especially, Cheney operated so much of government behind layers of closed doors that the US federal government had more in common with the old Soviet Russia than any Constitutional relationship. Obama wants to close the connection between Washington employment, especially at the civil and military higher levels, and lobbying double-dipping. Republican politicos wouldn't consider "public service" if it didn't directly lead to gigantic paychecks before, during, and afterwards. The right wing idea of service always involves someone else bending over.

One of the mental traits I've observed in all right-wingers is a disconnect between myth (even self-invented myth) and reality. It's a useful quality when you are trying to sell craziness, however, when taken to extremes it can be simpleminded madness. Most salespeople believe, at least a little, in the crap they spew, but really crazy salespeople believe their own lines completely. Characters like Jack Abramoff, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Dick Cheney, and Adolf Hitler drink their own Koolaid and serve themselves seconds. It makes planning an escape particularly difficult. It's one thing to lie and invent realities on the fly, it's another to plan to fly that magic carpet off of a cliff.

I have a typical piece of crazy right-winger drivel on my desk, it came from the "Republican Party of Minnesota" and it's a pitch for money. My favorite bit read (the punctuation, capitalization, and bold print is all Republican):

". . . But here's what we DO know: Our friend, Norm Coieman, won a razor-thin victory on Election Day. Liberal Democrat Al Franken has resorted to taking extraordinary measures to overturn Norm's victory."

By Minnesota law, nobody won the Minnesota US Senate seat on "Election Day." State law requires a recount when election results are far more unclear than the 2008 Minnesota US Senate election. Those "extraordinary measures" involved actually counting Minnesotans' votes. Damn, those liberals. Not only do they want to have democratic elections, they want to count the damn votes.

Later, this crazy rant went on to claim, "Govenor [sic] Tim Pawlenty will be in their crosshairs, and we can't rest on our laurels for even a minute."

There are Republican "laurels?" For what? Decimating the economy, wiping out the middle class, involving the military in two criminal and wasteful wars while pouring a nation's fortune down the drain of mercenary international corporations, incapacitating the federal and state governments with incompetence and corruption? Man, with laurels like that, you'd think resting would be the last thing Republicans would do. I'd think either skipping the country to avoid prison and tar and feathers would be pretty high on the list.

Games Wall Street Plays

My favorite quotes of the month are all about how "the best and the brightest" are being put upon by terrible ideas like limits on CEO salary and talk about cranking up the upper bracket income tax rate.

The best and the brightest? Maybe, it's sad to say.

It's actually possible that this country has directed its best and brightest into do-nothing mobster occupations like tax accounting, finance, MBA-style management, marketing, law, and similar unproductive manipulative skills. Many so-called "top schools" have refocused their output into accounting, law, and MBA programs, moving out of the much more capital intensive science and engineering disciplines. Americans are rarely found in the engineering and science departments of our own universities. The money is found elsewhere and that's where the hot students have gone.

The money is the only motivation for the legal crowd. Where the money isn't is in government service. Under a constant barrage of Republican and faux-Republican (Clinton's "Eisenhower Republican" administration) executive branch bureaucrats for nearly 30 years, the federal government's talent level has fallen to 1929 levels. Reagan and the Bushies stuffed the legal system with hundreds, if not thousands, of untalented neocon fruitcakes and it will take decades, if we cared to do the work, to purge that collection of morons from the judicial system. Cinton packed the regulatory agencies with pro-corporate yes-men. Dedicated talent fled civil service after Reagan made it clear that talent was the last thing he wanted in government. For the last 8 years, Bush actually actively chased down talented civil servants and tossed them out.
If the United States wants to make a comeback, we are going to have to reverse all of this foolishness. The federal government is, once again, going to have to find a way to staff itself with scientific, industrial, economic, diplomatic, legislative, and white collar criminal investigative talent. Our universities and K-12 education system is going to have to relearn how to educated itself, then its students, in disciplines that are based in science and technology, not tax-evading money laundering games. We have to figure out how to, once again, attract the best and the brightest to government service.

Wall Street is the last place we want to waste that kind of talent. As anyone who follows history knows, Reagan's "miracle of the markets" is based on the squalor of criminal behavior. Markets, when allowed to run wild, are nothing more than a collection of gangsters in suits wallowing in greed, corruption, and collusion. Mathematic's game theory has long proven that the basic capitalist theory was a misreading of human nature. Libertarian theory is so far from reality that it appears to be as reality-based as Creationism. Humans are both greedy and lazy. The greediest and laziest are often best suited to take advantage of a system that is not based on laws that regulate those tendencies. Executives are not the cream of any crop and haven't been since the first generation of any industry. Once the founders are gone, the politicians move in and sharks begin to feed on the business culture, turning it from productive to vicious. Keeping the best and brightest from finding homes on Wall Street should be a prime directive of the education system, the legal system, and the rest of us.

For now, we are stuck with a generation or two of our best and brightest who are unsuited for any productive work. The American X, Y, and Z Generations have rarely been engineers, scientists, doctors, technicians, or even schooled in any reality-based discipline. Our society and our education system has wasted 20 years of bright young talent and there will be a terrible cost to the world because of that misuse.

A solid description of the flaw in our economic and education system is presented in "The Ascent of Money," a British documentary about how money has been disconnected from reality. The introduction to this documentary demonstrates the scale at which money has outstripped reality. The fact that derivitives have valued themselves more than 10x the total assets of the world is mind-boggling. Bankers have actually invented an alternative universe of money that argues against the existence of the real world. This is not only insane, but it is an example of how poorly our education system has prepared the average person to govern himself.

Obviously, the cure is in our tax system. It should be clear that a tax system is designed to encourage or discourage activity. We tax the stuff we don't want to happen and we don't tax the stuff we want to encourage. Currently, our tax system is designed by exactly the people our culture ought to be discouraging.

There is no upside to fantastic inherited wealth, which is the reason for inheritance taxes. G.W. Bush is the posterboy for why wealth and power should not be inherited. The people who campaign actively against "the death tax" are exactly the people who benifit from the lack of a rational tax system, which would actively prevent those people from inheriting the power to launch a meaningful campaign for anything.

There is no advantage provided to businesses or the culture for excessive executive salaries; it's not like these morons could go somewhere else and make money. We should stop providing corporate tax breaks for executive income expenses.

We need alternative energy research and development. We need a working education system. We need manufacturing, infrastructure, and technology. We don't need more lawyers, tax accountants, or MBAs. The fix is to tax to death the things we don't want and to reward the activities we desperately need.

Above all, the nation needs to develop and encourage leaders. However, leadership is top-down. When the top of our corporate structure is incompetent, uneducated, and corrupt, you can expect the economic levels below them to follow. For the last 30 years, from the President to CEOs, our "leadership" has been drawn from the worst of the worst. We have to fix that. We need to find a way to discourage our best and brightest from wasting their abilities on Wall Street.