US Army Uses Jedi Mind Tricks on Senators

From the AP:
The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan is ordering an investigation into charges that an army unit trained in psychological operations was improperly told to manipulate American senators to get more money and troops for the war...

The staff of Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, head of the effort to train Afghan security forces, ordered the information operations unit to compile profiles, voting records and other information on visiting lawmakers to leverage in a campaign to get more assistance, said a story Thursday on Rolling Stone's website. It says the campaign also improperly targeted the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, and others...

The military cell devoted to what is known as "information operations" believed their mission on arriving in Afghanistan in November 2009 was to assess the effects of U.S. propaganda on the Taliban and local Afghan population, Rolling Stone said, quoting Lt. Col. Michael Holmes, whom it identified as the leader of the five-man team.

Holmes said they resisted the order to compile information on congressional delegations that were visiting there and think of what information "to plant inside their heads." He said they were subjected to retaliation for resisting.

"My job in psy-ops is to play with people's heads, to get the enemy to behave the way we want them to behave," Holmes is quoted as saying. "When you ask me to try to use these skills on senators and congressman, you're crossing a line."

Those singled out in the campaign included Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., Jack Reed, D-R.I., Al Franken, D-Minn., and Carl Levin, D-Mich. Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., of the House Appropriations Committee; the Czech ambassador to Afghanistan; the German interior minister, and a host of influential think-tank analysts, the story said, without identifying the international figures by name...

General ordering probe into report of mind tricks
Pauline Jelinek And Lolita C. Baldo
Thu Feb 24, 2011
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110224/ap_on_re_us/us_pentagon_general_investigated

Obama's 2012 insurance policy?

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/09/30/obama_2012_republicans/index.html

Thursday, Sep 30, 2010
Obama's 2012 insurance policy?
It's remarkable how many of the Republicans in the '12 mix are spectacularly unelectable
Steve Kornacki

What may be most notable in the new Gallup poll on the 2012 Republican presidential race is the significant distance between Mitt Romney, who leads the crowded pack with 19 percent, and the next candidate without obvious and glaring general election liabilities. Just consider the results:

Romney 19%

Sarah Palin 16%

Mike Huckabee 12%

Newt Gingrich 9%

Ron Paul 7%

Tim Pawlenty 3%

With the disclaimer that anything is possible (and the obligatory acknowledgement that many Democrats didn't believe until the very end in 1980 that Ronald Reagan could ever actually win the Whitre House), it's hard to imagine Palin, Huckabee, Gingrich or Paul winning a general election in 2012, even if the economy hasn't improved significantly. They just carry too much baggage, and nominating one of them would likely produce something like what we're now seeing in Delaware, where a radioactive GOP nominee is about to cost the GOP a seat it would otherwise win.

I can't remember so many poiosnous general election prospects near the top of the GOP field at this stage in any recent contest. Last time around, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and (sort of) Romney were all near the top of the pack early. All of them passed the November electability test. (Sure, McCain fell flat against Barack Obama, but that was more a testament to the political climate; that same race in the climate of, say, 2004, could well have produced a different result.) Back in the 2000 cycle, the big GOP fish included George W. Bush, Elizabeth Dole and McCain. For 1996, we had Bob Dole and Jack Kemp, and in 1988, George H.W. Bush, Dole and Kemp. Sure, there were some toxic prospects in these cycles (Dan Quayle figured prominently in '96 talk and actually ran -- briefly -- in '00), but in each race had more than one general election heavyweight out front early. Not so for 2012.

Moreover, as NBC's First Read noted this morning, Romney's grip on the frontrunner's slot is unusually tenuous. The GOP's conservative base is markedly cooler to him than it was to McCain at this point in the '08 cycle and Dole at this point in the '96 cycle, even as that same base seems to be warming up even more to Palin, Gingrich and Huckabee. Factor in the most alarming GOP Senate primary results this year -- a Republican electorate in Delaware that willfully committed political suicide, for instance -- and it's fair to questions the assumption that the GOP primary electorate of 2012 will be as pragamtic as it's been in the past. Don't forget: the last time the Republican base was as angry at its own establishment as it is now was in the late '70s. Back then, the favorite of the restive right for the next GOP nomination also happened to be the next-in-line guy: Reagan. But Romney, to borrow a tired expression, is no Ronald Reagan. To the New Right of the late '70s, Reagan was practically a god. To the Tea Party, though, Romney is just a somewhat likable, extremely ambitious office-seeker.

This should provide at least a little comfort to Barack Obama. I've written before that his 2012 fate will rest on the economy. If it improves significantly between now and then, he'll win, no matter whom the GOP nominates. And if it doesn't, he'll be in serious trouble. But the evolution of the GOP in the Obama era suggests a third possibility: that the economy will be weak enough to give the GOP a winnable race in 2012 -- but that they'll nominate a candidate who's incapable of taking advantage of it.

Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki

Conservative Economist: 'Find the Unemployed and Hire Them'

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/08/conservative-economist-find-the-unemployed-and-hire-them/62100/

Derek Thompson is a blogger at TheAtlantic.com and staff editor for the Business Channel, where he writes about economic policy, technology, and the media industry. Derek graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University with a triple major in journalism, political science, and legal studies, but he doesn't plan on doing anything with that last bit. He has also written for Slate, BusinessWeek and The Daily Beast. He has appeared as a guest on radio and television networks, including CBS News Radio, the BBC, and CNBC.
Conservative Economist: 'Find the Unemployed and Hire Them'
Aug 26 2010

Let's put this gently: economist Kevin Hassett is no Keynesian.

Hassett, the director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an economic adviser to Sen. John McCain, recent attacked President Obama's economic plan as "voodoo economics," claiming "the biggest Keynesian stimulus in U.S. history was a bust."

But when I got him on the phone to talk about the unemployment crisis, he struck a different tone. His problem with the stimulus wasn't that government spending inherently fails to grow jobs and the economy. The problem, he said, was that Obama's stimulus was not direct enough.

With the Recovery Act, the White House eschewed direct hiring and aimed instead to raise overall economic output in the hope that more activity would lead to more demand, which would lead to more hires. "Look at the stimulus and the number of jobs we've actually created, and it comes out to a couple million bucks per job created," Hassett told me.

"My idea is simpler. Find the unemployed and hire them."

If the government had spent the stimulus hiring people directly, we could have supported 23 million jobs, Hassett claimed. Hiring millions of unemployed workers directly into government organizations that already exist -- such as the military and the Army Corps of Engineers -- would be a much more efficient use of government funds.

Hassett defended direct government hiring, which the federal government used en masse during the Great Depression, in a conversation about the nature of our unemployment crisis. There is an ongoing debate about whether 17 percent broad unemployment figure is the result of a "cyclical" challenge, due to temporarily weak demand, or a "structural" crisis, due to a fundamental mismatch of workers' skills and employers' needs.

Hassett said the answer was more nuanced than picking one adjective over another. Nearly 7 million Americans have been unemployed for more than six months. Long-term unemployment erodes skills and brands the jobless with a scarlet letter: A for Atrophy.

"Employers don't want to take a chance on some guy without a job for two years," he said. "The cycle is so long and deep that the cyclical becomes the structural." The easiest way for the government to end somebody's jobless spell is, very simply, to end it by straight-up hiring the worker.

"Since the economy has created this class of long-term jobless, the arguments for government hiring become stronger," he said. "If you give the person a job for a while, it helps them get a job later. You remove the stigma."

Fight the Derivatives Cancer

http://tarpley.net/2010/04/25/fight-the-derivatives-cancer-with-a-wall-street-sales-tax-plus-bans-on-hedge-funds-credit-default-swaps-and-synthetic-cdos/

Fight the Derivatives Cancer with a Wall Street Sales Tax, Plus Bans on Hedge Funds, Credit Default Swaps, and Synthetic CDOs
Webster G. Tarpley
April 24, 2010

The Obama administration has been posturing this week about the life and death issue of Wall Street reform. Obama’s predicament is that of a Wall Street puppet who has been put into the White House thanks among other things to almost $1 million of contributions from the infamous Goldman Sachs – but who now needs to make a show of fighting his own Wall Street patrons for political reasons. Of course, Obama’s health-care reform was largely a bailout of insurance companies, which are themselves a key part of Wall Street. But Obama is now pretending to quarrel with Wall Street to shore up his waning credibility, partly because many House Democrats are desperately seeking anti-banker, economic populist street creds in order to avoid defeat in November. So far, the results have been largely feckless and inadequate.

The urgent problem raised by all this is the $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble. The financial crisis which struck the United States and the world in September and October 2008 was in fact a world derivatives panic. This panic marked the first phase of a world economic depression caused by derivatives speculation. The second phase of this depression, which is now beginning, can also be attributed in large part to derivatives, since derivatives are the main tool being used in the speculative attacks on Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, and other nations, building up towards a chaotic collapse of the euro.

Derivatives are the Cause of the World Depression of Our Time

Far from being some arcane or marginal activity, financial derivatives have come to represent the principal business of the financier oligarchy in Wall Street, the City of London, Frankfurt, and other money centers. A concerted effort has been made by politicians and the news media to hide and camouflage the central role played by derivative speculation in the economic disasters of recent years. Journalists and public relations types have done everything possible to avoid even mentioning derivatives, coining phrases like “toxic assets,” “exotic instruments,” and – most notably – “troubled assets,” as in Troubled Assets Relief Program or TARP, aka the monstrous $800 billion bailout of Wall Street speculators which was enacted in October 2008 with the support of Bush, Henry Paulson, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Obama Democrats.

Asset-Backed Securities

Derivatives can be defined as any financial paper which is based on other financial paper. In other words, they are financial instruments whose value depends upon or is derived from the value of other financial instruments. Any kind of securitization results in the creation of derivatives. If individual mortgages are wrapped up and packaged together as a mortgage-backed security (MBS), that is a derivative. Any asset-backed security (ABS), be it based on car loans, credit card debt, or anything else, also qualifies as a derivative.

Beyond this, there are generally speaking two kinds of derivatives. The first type includes the derivatives which are traded more or less openly on exchanges like the Chicago Board Options Exchange, etc. These include options, futures, and indices, plus all the combinations of these. These are what expire in each quadruple witching hour in the markets. This type of derivative has generally amounted to about $600 trillion of speculation in recent years.

OTC Derivatives

Then there are the so-called over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives, otherwise known as structured notes, counterparty derivatives, or designer derivatives. These often take the form of contracts which are kept secret by the counterparties, and which are often not included on the balance sheets of banks and other institutions which enter into these contracts. This type of derivative is currently not reportable to any regulatory agency. This secrecy is a result of the successful effort by Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Alan Greenspan to block the modest proposal of Brooksley Born of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to bring the OTC derivatives into the sunlight during the second Clinton administration. Since these derivatives are not reportable at the present time, we must guess at their amount, and the best guess is that OTC derivatives make up almost $1 quadrillion of ultra-toxic speculation.

CDOs, CDS, and SIVs

OTC derivatives include collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which often represent the packaging together of large numbers of mortgage backed securities, along with other debt instruments. A CDO can also be concocted out of other CDOs, in which case it qualifies as a synthetic CDO or CDO squared (CDO²). Notice that a synthetic CDO is not really an investment, but rather a form of gambling, in which a speculator in effect places a bet on the performance of some other financial instruments. This fact exposes the big lie inherent in the widespread reactionary myth that the current depression was caused by poor people taking out subprime mortgages on slum properties and then defaulting on these loans, thus bringing down the US and British banking systems. This fantastic story ignores the fact that derivatives were only a wager placed by speculative bettors from afar on mortgage backed securities which included some subprime notes.

Credit default swaps represent bets on whether a given asset or company will go bankrupt or not. As such, they can be used as insurance against such an eventuality, or else they can be used to make money on the insolvency. CDS are therefore a form of insurance, but they are issued by counterparties who have not registered as insurance companies and who have not met the legal and capital requirements which are necessary to function as an insurance company. It ought therefore to be clear that CDS have been totally illegal all along, and have flourished only because of an outrageous failure by state insurance regulators to enforce applicable laws against the privileged class of financiers.

Structured investment vehicles (SIVs) are another type of derivative, commonly used to wrap up masses of CDOs and synthetic CDOs and then to park them off-balance sheet, where they can be hidden from regulatory and public scrutiny.

All Derivatives Illegal under the New Deal, 1936-1982

All kinds of derivatives, be they exchange traded or over-the-counter, were strictly banned and outlawed in the United States between 1936 and 1982 thanks to a wise measure enacted under the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the wake of several attempts by predatory and sociopathic speculators to manipulate the prices of wheat and corn during the First Great Depression, the Commodities Exchange Act of 1936 outlawed the selling of options on agricultural products. This law had the effect of blocking most derivative speculation, until the counterattack of free-market fanatics gathered steam under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, an ideological zealot of the Austrian and Chicago schools. The very existence of derivatives today and their resulting ability to bring on a new world depression are thus directly attributable to the reckless and irresponsible dismantling of the New Deal regulatory regime. It should be added that derivatives were also banned in many states as a result of laws prohibiting gambling or forbidding bucket shops, which were betting parlors in which side bets could be placed on stock market fluctuations.

If Obama wants to pretend to have something in common with Franklin D. Roosevelt, he ought to be proposing measures to ban at least the most poisonous types of derivatives, and to discourage the others. Notice that he does nothing of the kind. Obama’s Cooper Union speech of April 22, 2010 approvingly cites Warren Buffett’s remark that derivatives represent financial weapons of mass destruction. But Obama then says that derivatives nevertheless have an important and legitimate role to play. So which is it? Some years back, French President Jacques Chirac rightly referred to derivatives as “financial AIDS.” What useful purpose can these toxic instruments possibly serve?

Again: in his 1936 re-election speech in Madison Square Garden in New York City, Franklin D. Roosevelt famously noted that the forces of organized money hated him, and that he welcomed their hatred. Obama, in sharp contrast, called on the Wall Street predators to join him in his efforts, compounding this with the monstrous thesis that Wall Street and Main Street are in the same boat. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The recent Goldman Sachs scandal has underlined once again that the Wall Street investment houses serve no useful social purpose whatsoever. They exist solely for the purpose of pursuing speculative profits through a process of looting and pillaging the rest of the economy. The Wall Street zombie banks are monopolizing US credit, while Main Street goes broke.

Thanks no doubt to the efforts of certain House Democrats, the reform bill is likely to contain two points which can qualify as positive half measures.

Force Derivatives Out in the Open

The first is the effort to end the secrecy of OTC derivatives by forcing these instruments to be traded on public exchanges or through clearing houses. This is a step in the right direction. But this provision needs to be strengthened by making all derivatives of any type whatsoever reportable to a central regulatory authority. This would include, for example, the derivatives held by hedge funds. In 1998, the Connecticut-based hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management went bankrupt with more than $1 trillion worth of derivatives, blowing a huge hole in the international banking system, and causing Greenspan to rush in with a crony bailout. Nobody has any idea of the amount of derivatives held by hedge funds today. Highly leveraged hedge funds are perfectly capable of causing a worldwide systemic crisis with derivatives, so they must emphatically be made to report their holdings.

This reporting requirement should also include the derivatives held by non-financial corporations, whose shareholders deserve to know if and when management is dabbling in these toxic instruments. Some years back, the Gibson Greeting Card Company took a huge loss on derivatives, so this is no theoretical danger.

In addition, all derivatives must henceforth be clearly listed ON the balance sheets of banks and all other financial institutions. The intolerable practice of hiding derivatives off-balance-sheet must be immediately brought to an end.

The other positive half measure which might survive Obama’s usual quest for a “bipartisan” sellout is the so-called Volcker Rule, which specifies that commercial banks with insured deposits are not allowed to engage in proprietary speculation with their own money. Depending on how this is worded, this may include a long overdue ban on derivatives speculation by commercial banks. Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, the chair of the Senate Agriculture committee—who is fighting for her political life against a primary challenge this spring—has been backing a provision that would explicitly prohibit commercial banks from engaging in derivatives speculation. These ideas go in the right direction. But we need to do much more. We need to go back to the full New Deal regulations embodied in the Glass-Steagall Act. This law stated that a financial institution could be either or a commercial bank, or an investment house, or an insurance company, but never more than one of these. In other words, the suicidal folly of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which repealed Glass-Steagall, must be rolled back.

Outlaw Credit Default Swaps

Beyond this, we must urgently address the catastrophic effects and obvious illegality of credit default swaps. More than a year ago, Senator Warner of Virginia asked Fed boss Bernanke about the advisability of creating a “bright line prohibition” against these CDS. Remember that CDS are already illegal, because they always involve an investor masquerading as an insurance company without having fulfilled the legal and capital requirements that would be demanded from a real insurance company. Credit default swaps have cost the US taxpayer almost $200 billion in the case of AIG alone, because of the bankruptcy of the AIG London-based hedge fund which had issued more than $3 trillion of derivatives – a total greater than the gross domestic product of France.

Credit default swaps are also a clear and present danger today, since they are the principal tool being used by wolf packs of banks and hedge funds against Greece and other nations, accelerating the arrival of the dreaded second wave of the world economic depression. Unless credit default swaps are banned now, they will be increasingly used for speculative attacks against the bonded debt of American states like California, New York, Illinois, and all the others. Before long, credit default swaps will be used by international speculators to attack the value and integrity of United States Treasury securities, threatening our country with the calamity of national bankruptcy. If the United States fails to shut down credit default swaps with timely legislation now, credit default swaps will be used to help destroy the United States and human civilization in general.

Ban Synthetic CDOs

The synthetic CDO or CDO² must also be outlawed. These are the toxic instruments which brought down Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers in the great derivatives panic of 2008. What are we waiting for to ban this kind of highly destructive derivative? Such a ban is easy to formulate: “Any collateralized debt obligation which contains other collateralized debt obligations is hereby prohibited.” End of story. This language recalls the approach of the very successful Public Utility Holding Company Act of the New Deal. One layer of CDO is more than enough risk, and it must not be further compounded.

Another ban which is long overdue and which should be included in the current legislation is the outlawing of the Adjustable Rate Mortgage (ARM). The ARM is another catastrophic innovation of recent decades which inherently carries with it an intolerable risk for any homeowner. No American family should be deprived of a roof over their heads because of the unpredictable and volatile fluctuations of interest rates over the life of a mortgage. These ARMs shift an unacceptable risk to the mortgage buyer. Fixed-rate mortgages should be the only legal kind, and any reset or change in interest rates on a residential mortgage should be strictly outlawed. While we are at it, we also need to outlaw the high-interest payday loan, a type of devastating usury to which the poorest and most defenseless parts of our population are now exposed. The outlawing of payday loans should take the form of a de facto federal usury law establishing an upper limit of no more than 10% on any promissory note or credit card. This was the limit traditionally set by state usury laws before the coming of the Volcker 22% prime rate three decades ago, and it should be restored. This simple prohibition of adjustable rate mortgages and payday loans will be far more effective than the proposed creation of an inefficient and unwieldy consumer protection bureaucracy, especially one that is located inside the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve has repeatedly struck out when it comes to recognizing systemic risk, when it comes to preventing financial bubbles, and when it comes to protecting ordinary Americans. The Federal Reserve failed in the run-up to the crash of 1929, in the run-up to the banking crisis of 1933, in the run-up to the stock market crash of 1987, in preventing the dot com bubble of 1999-2000, and in regard to the financial derivatives which caused the banking panic of 2008. Locating any consumer protection bureaucracy inside the privately owned Federal Reserve is simply to guarantee that such a bureaucracy will be subject to regulatory capture by Wall Street at the earliest possible moment.

Wall Street Sales Tax of 1% on All Financial Transactions

Derivatives which escape prohibition under these blanket bans on credit default swaps and synthetic CDOs must then be subjected to their fair share of the tax burden. In a time when haircuts, bowling alleys, and restaurants are threatened with new taxation, it is simply inconceivable that the financial turnover of US financial markets should remain immune to all taxation, rather like the French aristocrats of the pre-1789 old regime. Rather than crush the US economy under an ill-advised and oppressive Value Added Tax (VAT) or national sales tax, we must institute a Wall Street sales tax of 1% on all financial transactions and turnover, including derivatives. This is the levy known as the Tobin tax, the Wall Street sales tax, the financial transactions tax, the trading tax, the securities transfer tax, or the Robin Hood tax. A low-ball conservative estimate of US financial turnover (including derivatives) in any given year might be about one quadrillion dollars. In that case, a 1% Wall Street sales tax would yield $10 trillion, $5 trillion of which could be used to confront the federal budget deficit, the costs of entitlements, and the various unfunded liabilities of the federal government. The other $5 trillion would be available for revenue sharing with the states, who could use these funds to deal with their own budget crises, which currently threaten police, firemen, health services, and other indispensable parts of the fabric of civilization itself. One of the main causes for budget deficits of all levels of government in the United States is the glaringly obvious exemption of financial turnover from all taxation, while financial speculators use various tricks to escape paying the corporate income tax. The proceeds from such a Wall Street sales tax would almost certainly decline as speculation became less attractive, but in the meantime they would provide much-needed relief for the public treasury. Needless to say, any idea of paying the proceeds of such a tax to the International Monetary Fund is out of the question. Many other countries are in the process of instituting a Tobin tax on financial turnover, so the inevitable objection that a Wall Street sales tax would represent a crippling competitive disadvantage for US financial markets is increasingly untenable.

Additional Safeguards: Bankruptcy Triage, Reserve Requirement, Hedge Fund Ban

Further safeguards against the derivatives plague are also in order. Current bankruptcy law gives special privileged treatment to derivatives. These poisonous instruments continue to exact their claims even when protection against other creditors has been provided by the federal courts. This abusive and unwarranted favoring of derivatives must be reversed. Derivatives must be made to wait their turn in bankruptcy court, and sent to the end of the line after all other creditors and claims have been satisfied. If bankruptcy triage becomes necessary, it should be at the expense of derivatives.

Another needed measure is the establishment of a reserve requirement for anyone issuing derivatives. We have seen how Goldman Sachs is accused of designing their notorious ABACUS 2007-AC1 CDO, colluding with hedge fund speculator John Paulson to load this CDO with all kinds of super-toxic paper with the intent of designing an instrument which would have the best possible chances of going bankrupt in the short run. A reserve requirement for those issuing derivatives would mean that they would have to buy and hold on their own books for the life of the investment at least 20% of any derivatives they issued. This would represent an additional deterrent against the deliberate concocting of toxic derivatives with the intention of then allowing a speculator to short them with the help of credit default swaps.

A final necessary change involves the grave risk inherent in the existence of hedge funds. Despite their name, the main business of hedge funds is pure predatory speculation. Hedge funds are currently allowed to fly below the radar of the Securities and Exchange Commission, escaping regulation because they have only a limited number of super-rich investors. It is high time that this loophole came to an end. Once a hedge fund is regulated, it is no longer a hedge fund, so the call to regulate hedge funds is for all practical purposes a call for their abolition. Hedge funds should have been subject to regulation no later than the immediate aftermath of the Long-Term Capital Management debacle of 1998. The hedge fund loophole in the SEC rules must be closed now.

Seize and Liquidate the Zombie Banks

Obama’s $50 billion resolution fund for bankrupt banks is unnecessary. What we need most of all is to have the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Comptroller of the Currency, and other regulators enforce the applicable laws. Every Friday, Sheila Bair of the FDIC shuts down a number of small town banks because of insolvency. In her interview yesterday on CNBC, Ms. Bair blatantly admitted that she has no intention of enforcing these same public laws against the large Wall Street and other money center banks. She covers this malfeasance and nonfeasance with her opinion that bankruptcy does not work for the big banks. But there is little doubt that, if their massive derivatives holdings were priced according to mark to market rules, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citibank, and Bank of America would all be thoroughly insolvent candidates for Chapter 7 liquidation. Unless and until this is done, these zombie banks will continue to block any real economic recovery in the United States. Ms. Bair’s policies showed the destructive folly of the current administration’s illegal policies, which are all based in the final analysis on the discredited doctrine of Too Big to Fail.

Any Wall Street reform bill should also deal with the public scandal of the ratings agencies – Standard & Poor’s, Fitch, and Moody’s. These agencies enjoy a quasi-governmental status when it comes to certifying the quality of certain investments. But the failure of these agencies to provide timely warnings during the onset of the derivatives panic was nothing short of spectacular. During that crisis, the ratings agencies were certifying investments as AAA investment-grade until mere hours before they collapsed. Senator Carl Levin’s investigation of the ratings agencies has now unearthed horror stories of corruption and incompetence. The ratings agencies need to be stripped of any special role in relation to the United States government. Senator Levin’s findings merit criminal referrals to the Justice Department for prosecution of these agencies and their executives. In short, the United States government should take this opportunity to shut down these rating agencies, before these corrupt entities join in the looming speculative assault on the US Treasury, which is being prepared by George Soros and the other hedge funds.

Wall Street speculators will certainly howl that the measures outlined here represent a vindictive policy of discrimination against derivatives, which they will attempt to portray as a beneficial innovation serving the public interest. But no serious analysis of the banking panic of 2008 can ignore the obvious role of financial derivatives as one of the principal causes of this disaster. As for the charge of discrimination, it should be clear that the proposals made here generally represent nothing more than ending the privileged special treatment which has been granted to derivatives so far. Derivatives have been exempted from the gambling laws. Derivatives have been given special status in bankruptcy proceedings. Derivatives have been made non-reportable, and carrying them off balance sheet has been allowed. Derivatives have been exempted from the usual laws governing the operations of insurance companies. Hedge funds have been exempted from the scrutiny of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Wall Street derivatives banks have been exempted from the usual bankruptcy laws and probably from the antitrust laws as well. Finally, derivatives, like all financial instruments, have been exempted from state sales taxes. This distorted treatment amounts to a systematic pattern of facilitating and fostering derivatives speculation under US laws and regulations. This pattern might be defensible if derivatives represented a public good. But all experience shows that derivatives are just the opposite – they are a public menace which now threatens to destroy our civilization and way of life.

No One is Illegal: Boycott the Arizona Diamondbacks

Dave Zirin

Gonna find a way
Make the state pay
Lookin’ for the day
Hard as it seems
This ain’t no damn dream
Gotta know what I mean
It’s team against team
— Public Enemy, By the Time I Get to Arizona

This will be the last column I write about the Arizona Diamondbacks in the foreseeable future. For me, they do not exist. They will continue to not exist in my mind as long as the horribly named “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” remains law in Arizona. It's a law that has brought echoes of apartheid to the state.

One Democratic lawmaker has said that it has made Arizona a “laughingstock” but it’s difficult to find an ounce of humor in this kind of venal legislation. The law makes it a crime to walk the streets without clutching your passport, green card, visa, or state I.D. It not only empowers but absolutely requires cops to demand paperwork if they so much as suspect a person of being undocumented. A citizen can, in fact, sue any police officer they see not harassing suspected immigrants. The bill would also make it a class one misdemeanor for anyone to “pick up passengers for work” if their vehicle blocks traffic. And it makes a second violation of any aspect of the law a felony.

In response, Representative Raul Grijalva, who’s from Arizona itself, has called for a national boycott against the state, saying, “Do not vacation and or retire there.” He got so many hateful threats this week that he had to close his Arizona offices at noon on Friday.

Many of us aren’t in either the imminent vacation or retirement mode. We do, however, live in baseball cities where the Arizona Diamondbacks comes to play.

When they arrive in my hometown in D.C., my back will be turned, and my television will be off. This is not merely because they happen to be the team from Arizona. The D-backs organization is a primary funder of the state Republican Party, which has been driving the measure through the legislature.

As the official Arizona Diamondbacks boycott call states, “In 2010, the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s third highest Contributor was the [executives of the] Arizona Diamondbacks, who gave $121,600; furthermore, they also contributed $129,500, which ranked as the eighteenth highest contribution to the Republican Party Committee.” The team’s big boss, Ken Kendrick, and his family members, E. G. Kendrick Sr. and Randy Kendrick, made contributions to the Republicans totaling a staggering $1,023,527. The Kendricks follow in the footsteps of team founder and former owner Jerry Colangelo. Colangelo, along with other baseball executives and ex-players, launched a group called Battin’ 1000: a national campaign that uses baseball memorabilia to raise funds for a Campus for Life, the largest anti-choice student network in the country. Colangelo was also deputy chair of Bush/Cheney 2004 in Arizona, and his deep pockets created what was called the Presidential Prayer Team—a private evangelical group that claims to have signed up more than 1 million people to drop to their knees and pray daily for Bush.

Under Colangelo, John McCain also owned a piece of the team. The former maverick said before the bill’s passage that he “understood” why it was being passed because “the drivers of cars with illegals in it [that] are intentionally causing accidents on the freeway.”

This is who the Arizona Diamondback executives are. This is the tradition they stand in.

The Diamondbacks’ owners have every right to their politics, and if we policed the political proclivities of every owner’s box there might not be anyone left to root for (except for the Green Bay Packers, who don’t have an owner’s box). But this is different. The law is an open invitation to racial profiling and harassment. The boycott call is coming from inside the state.

If the owners of the Diamondbacks want to underwrite an ugly edge of bigotry, we should raise our collective sporting fists against them. A boycott is also an expression of solidarity with Diamondback players such as Juan Guitterez, Gerardo Parra, and Rodrigo Lopez. They shouldn’t be put in a position where they’re cheered on the playing field and then asked for their papers when the uniform comes off.

Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming “Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love” (Scribner) Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.

The warped platitude of DC "centrism"

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/03/13/centrism/index.html
Saturday, Mar 13, 2010
The warped platitude of DC "centrism"
Glenn Greenwald

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank dresses up in idiotic costumes, and the overriding attribute of his commentary is adolescent, above-it-all snideness, and he's thus deemed a wild, unpredictable, creative "contrarian" in Beltway media circles. In reality, he's one of the most cliché-ridden purveyors of conventional Washington widsom one can find, as he demonstrates yet again in his column today, where he venerates Lindsey Graham and his quest to statutorily implement a system of military commissions and indefinite detention:

But Graham's latest offer should still be taken seriously by Obama's White House, which needs a way to recover from its self-inflicted wounds over Gitmo. Obama goofed twice, missing his deadline for closing the prison and then making the ruinous choice to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a criminal trial in New York.

This took an eight-year-old dispute to a new level of rage. On one side, there's now Liz Cheney's absurd accusation that Justice Department lawyers are al-Qaeda sympathizers. On the other side is the ACLU, which, in demanding civilian trials for 9/11 conspirators, ran an ad morphing Obama's face into George W. Bush's. . . . [T]the ideological purists on both sides need to compromise.


Liz Cheney advocates torture and indefinite detention with no charges, and just launched a repulsive McCarthyite smear campaign equating all detainee lawyers with Al Qaeda. The ACLU has steadfastly opposed Bush's torture policies as early as anyone, advocates due process for all, and ran a newspaper advertisement pointing out the indisputable fact that military commissions and indefinite detention were the crux of the Bush/Cheney Terrorism template and urging Obama not to embrace it. But they're on opposite sides of these issues and thus are equivalent: they're the extremists and purists who need to be rejected by those in the Glorious Middle (embodied by Lindsey Graham). As long both of them are against what you're doing, it means you're right. Could a false equivalency be any more trite or vapid than that?

Far worse is the specific, Graham-endorsed policy which Milbank endorses -- not by making any substantive arguments in its favor, but simply by declaring it to be in between Liz Cheney and the ACLU, at the center of the two "purist" extremes (which, in Washington, means, by definition, that it's superior regardless of content):

Graham has provided Obama a way out of this standoff: Send KSM to a military tribunal in exchange for Congress abandoning legislation that would deny funding to close Gitmo. Next, the administration would work with Congress to create a "national security court," which would govern how other current and future terrorism suspects can be held in preventive detention.


This is the so-called "centrist compromise" -- the one Graham (along with the Brookings Institution) is pushing, Milbank is endorsing, and the administration may be heading towards adopting. But just think about what it actually is. According to its advocates, there is and will continue to be a group of people whom we deem Too Dangerous to allow to be free, yet who have committed no crime and/or against whom there is no evidence of actual wrongdoing. Therefore, we want to imprison them even though we can't prove they did anything wrong. Thus, we're going to create new, special courts -- and christen them with the Orwellian title "National Security Courts" -- and empower them to approve the President's decision to imprison human beings in cages even though they've committed no crime (not even the extremely broad criminal offense of "providing material support to Terrorist organizations," of which anyone who even gets near an actual Terrorist group is easily convicted).

This new judicial system will be devoted to imprisoning people "preventively" -- for being Dangerous. In other words, we're dispensing with the idea that the Government can only imprison those who we can prove have committed crimes, and are instead creating by statute a new category of human beings -- people who have committed no crimes but belong in prison anyway -- along with courts to keep them imprisoned (this idea was unveiled in Barack Obama's "civil liberties" speech last May when he described the so-called "fifth category" of people, and I wrote about everything wrong with that proposal here). But why stop with accused Terrorists? Why not dispense with this "due process" annoyance entirely, and imprison all people who we know deep down are guilty of something really bad, or at least will be in the future -- such as those we know murdered someone or raped children but can't find the evidence to prove it (or those we believe likely will in the future)? What decent person would possibly allow such monsters to go free just because we can't convict them in court?

That's the "centrist compromise" which Graham and Milbank advocate, and which the ACLU -- by virtue of its opposition -- is deemed by Milbank guilty of being the "purist" equivalent of Liz Cheney. Aside from how radical such a proposal is on its face, it's actually a more extreme version of what George Bush and Dick Cheney did. As a result of the Supreme Court's Boumediene ruling, detainees imprisoned by Bush/Cheney with no charges are now are entitled to habeas review by federal courts, and the vast majority have won their cases and been ordered released on the ground of insufficient evidence. Notably, it was the "centrist" Graham, to his eternal disgrace, who led the way in trying to deny those innocent detainees the right of habeas review -- and thus tried to keep innocent people imprisoned indefinitely with no judicial review -- by sponsoring the habeas-denying section of the Military Commissions Act which the Boumediene Court invalidated as unconstitutional.

Now, Graham (echoing Obama's May speech) wants to statutorily institutionalize this power of indefinite detention -- making it a permanent fixture of our political system and solidifying it as the bipartisan policy of all three branches. As demonstrated by the truly dangerous, extremist bill just introduced by John McCain and Joe Lieberman (the "Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010") -- which, among other atrocities, would allow the President to indefinitely imprison even American citizens arrested on U.S. soil -- it's almost certain that having this fear-mongering Congress write an indefinite detention bill would result in a much broader and farther-reaching detention scheme than even what we've had under Bush/Cheney and now Obama. But hey: Liz Cheney and the ACLU (with whom I consult) are both against it (Cheney's opposition is due only to the fact that the "compromise" would lead to the re-location of Guantanamo to Illinois) -- and one can find some Democrats and some Republicans who favor it -- and, therefore, it is, by definition, the sensible "centrist" solution which all non-purist-extremists favor. That's the warped, childish, substance-free definition of "centrism" which Washington media drones like Dana Milbank constantly embrace, and nothing has led to more damaging policies than that.
* * * * *
The Washington Post Op-Ed page deserves some credit for publishing this excellent Op-Ed yesterday by Georgetown Professor Gary Solis, who points out that, under international law, CIA agents who operate lethal drone attacks are every bit as much "unlawful combatants" as the Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters we have imprisoned, rendered, tortured and killed, because "they are fighters without uniforms or insignia, directly participating in hostilities, employing armed force contrary to the laws and customs of war." He also points out that CIA officials involved in such activities are legitimate military targets of the enemy. The same is true, of course, for the vast number of private mercenaries the U.S. uses to engage in war-fighting and related activities. By the warped reasoning that has prevailed in our country, it would be perfectly legal and proper for these unlawful American combatants to be imprisoned indefinitely with no charges and even tortured. If you advocate and practice lawlessness, it's only a matter of time before you're subjected to your own deranged standards.

Why a GOP Ad Man Dreams of Electric Sheep

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1960405,00.html

Why a GOP Ad Man Dreams of Electric Sheep
By Michael Scherer/Washington
Friday, Feb. 05, 2010

Republican media consultant Fred Davis III has a vision for the future of American politics, one in which building-sized rats roam the landscape, babies in strollers wear enormous brown toupees, and demon sheep feed on rolling green hills with red robot eyes. He envisions a democratic process driven by viral oddities and visual tricks, campaign ads so weird that no one can look away.

What's more, for Davis and the candidates who employ him, that future is already here. "My whole deal in life is if nobody sees it and nobody talks about it, you have wasted your money," says Davis, who is best known for creating the famous Barack Obama "Celebrity" ad as a media consultant to presidential candidate John McCain.

On Wednesday, the Hollywood-based political auteur released his latest creation, a three-minute YouTube spot attacking Republican Senate candidate Thomas Campbell on behalf of his client, Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett Packard CEO now running in the GOP senate primary. The ad was so weird — employing montages of pigs and sheep, a robotic wolf man dressed in wool, and graphic illustration from the era of Monty Python — that it spread online like swine flu on a pig farm.

"Carly Fiorina Is An Internet Genius," declared New York magazine. "The Most Bizarre Ad In Recent Memory," blared the Huffington Post. "Demon Sheep Goes Viral," announced the Washington Post, in a front-page web headline. The tag #demonsheep quickly spiked near the top of Twitter's trending topics, and Rachel Maddow played spot on her MSNBC show, calling is "so bad no one wanted to believe it was real." Not wanting to be left out of the controversy, the third Republican candidate in the race to unseat Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, Chuck DeVore responded by launching a webpage — Demonsheep.org — which asked people to "pledge your efforts to stop these Jawa-like, Terminator-esque Demon Sheep from taking over California."

Davis, meanwhile, watched the explosion with a sort of mischievous delight. "In California, it costs almost $5 million to fund one 30-second TV spot statewide," he explained in an interview on Thursday. "We have to go out of the way to get attention. I would say we probably got more attention on this little sheep film that they would get for $10 million of advertising."

And the object of all of that attention was Fiorina's fiercely negative message: Campbell, frontrunner in the polls for the GOP nomination, was not a true fiscal conservative. Rather, he was a wolf in sheep's clothing, a "fiscal conservative in name only." The Campbell campaign responded by deploying its new-media consultant, Mindy Finn, on Twitter to try and direct the viral buzz. "If the GOP has any hope of taking back the senate it won't be by accusing each other of being #demonsheep," she wrote in one post, having already rated the spot a "marketing fail."

"People have been mocking the campaign for releasing this type of ad," said James Fisfis, a Campbell spokesman, noting the criticism that has spread on blogs. "We sent it out to our supporters to raise money on it." The fundraising email claimed that "Carly's campaign is hitting the panic button."

Davis, a rare blow-dried Republican in liberal Los Angeles, has played this card before. He first made his mark on the national scene by producing a ten-minute movie for 2002 Georgia gubernatorial candidate Sonny Purdue, that depicted the sitting Gov. Roy Barnes as "King Roy," a giant rat with a gold crown stomping like Godzilla through Atlanta. That was before the advent of Youtube and viral video, so he screened the film for journalists at a movie theater, and the next day the Atlanta Journal Constitution ran an image from the spot on its front page. Purdue went on to win the office.

In Illinois, last year, Davis produced a six-minute video for Republican senate candidate Andy McKenna that put Governor Rod Blagojevich's hair on the state capital and most of its inhabitants, making it a symbol of corruption in the state. The ad was called "Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow," and though it generated significant media coverage, the McKenna campaign eventually pulled it from circulation. "While the ad was running we gained countless points in the poll," he said. "But they got cold feet on the hair."

Not all of Davis' clients — a roster that includes Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley and Tim James who is running for Governor in Alabama — request the viral boost he offers. But Davis said that Fiorina's background in marketing from the corporate world made her predisposed to this kind of risk taking. "She loved it," he said of Fiorina's reaction when he screened the demon sheep spot. "Do you go into it knowing it is going to get negative blowback? Absolutely, you do. But at the end of the day my only goal, and the campaign's only goal, is to get people to wake up to the fact that Tom Campbell's telling you may not be the real Tom Campbell."

A day after posting the sheep spot, YouTube recorded more than 120,000 views of the spot. By contrast, Davis pointed out, the campaign had released a straight 2-minute bio video about Fiorina on Feb. 1. Three days later, it had garnered 611 views on YouTube. "What would the normal chattering class say you should do? Run a serious ad," Davis continues. "No you don't. Nobody is interested in that."

This is Davis' campaign mantra for a new era of political communication, one in which free viral attention is just as valuable as costly television time: "I just say there are two choices," Davis says of his advice to his clients. "You can pay a whole lot of money to get your message in front of eyeballs, or you can go out on a limb a little bit." For Davis, that's a no-brainer.

McCain's wife, daughter back gay marriage

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/20/AR2010012004764.html

McCain's wife, daughter back gay marriage movement
By JOAN LOWY
The Associated Press
Wednesday, January 20, 2010

WASHINGTON -- Cindy McCain, the wife of 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain, and their daughter Meghan have posed for photos endorsing pro-gay marriage forces in California.

Mrs. McCain appears with silver duct tape across her mouth and "NOH8" written on one cheek in a photo posted Wednesday to the Web site of NOH8, a gay rights group opposed to Proposition 8. The ballot measure passed by California voters in 2008 bans same-sex marriage.

The McCains' daughter Meghan, who has been outspoken in her support for gay rights, has also endorsed NOH8. She appears with silver duct tape across her mouth and "NOH8" on a cheek in a photo on her Twitter site.

Cindy McCain contacted NOH8 and offered to pose for the photo endorsement, the Web site said.

John McCain's office said in a statement that the Arizona senator respects the views of members of his family but remains opposed to gay marriage.

"Sen. McCain believes the sanctity of marriage is only defined as between one man and one woman," the statement said.

John McCain backed an Arizona ballot measure passed by voters in 2008 that defined marriage as between one man and one woman.

The NOH8 Web site praised Cindy McCain's willingness to publicly endorse a cause that is unpopular within the Republican Party.

"The McCains are one of the most well-known Republican families in recent history, and for Mrs. McCain to have reached out to us to offer her support truly means a lot," the site says.

"Although we had worked with Meghan McCain before and were aware of her own position, we'd never really thought the cause might be something her mother would get behind. We have a huge amount of respect for both of these women for being brave enough to make it known they support equal marriage rights for all Americans."

Meghan McCain said Wednesday in a Twitter message linked to her blog: "I couldn't be more proud of my mother for posing for the NOH8 campaign. I think more Republicans need to start taking a stand for equality."

Meghan McCain was asked to be the keynote speaker at next month's National Equality Week at George Washington University in Washington for her advocacy, but her appearance has drawn criticism from Republicans on campus, the NOH8 site said.

McCain's Senate re-election campaign said Wednesday that his presidential running mate, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, will come to Arizona to campaign for him in March. Palin has been a vocal opponent of gay marriage.
---
On the Net:

http://www.noh8campaign.com/

http://twitter.com/mccainblogette/

‘We’ll have a dictatorship soon in the US’

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article6854221.ece

September 30, 2009
Gore Vidal: ‘We’ll have a dictatorship soon in the US’
The grand old man of letters Gore Vidal claims America is ‘rotting away’ — and don’t expect Barack Obama to save it
Tim Teeman

A conversation with Gore Vidal unfolds at his pace. He answers questions imperiously, occasionally playfully, with a piercing, lethal dryness. He is 83 and in a wheelchair (a result of hypothermia suffered in the war, his left knee is made of titanium). But he can walk (“Of course I can”) and after a recent performance of Mother Courage at London’s National Theatre he stood to deliver an anti-war speech to the audience.

How was his friend Fiona Shaw in the title role? “Very good.” Where did they meet? Silence. The US? “Well, it wasn’t Russia.” What’s he writing at the moment? “It’s a little boring to talk about. Most writers seem to do little else but talk about themselves and their work, in majestic terms.” He means self-glorifying? “You’ve stumbled on the phrase,” he says, regally enough. “Continue to use it.”

Vidal is sitting in the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair, where he has been coming to stay for 60 years. He is wearing a brown suit jacket, brown jumper, tracksuit bottoms; his white hair twirled into a Tintin-esque quiff and with his hooded eyes, delicate yet craggy features and arch expression, he looks like Quentin Crisp, but accessorised with a low, lugubrious growl rather than camp lisp.

He points to an apartment opposite the hotel where Churchill stayed during the Second World War, as Downing Street was “getting hammered by the Nazis. The crowds would cheer him from the street, he knew great PR.”

In a flash, this memory reminds you of the swathe of history Vidal has experienced with great intimacy: he was friends with JFK, fought in the war, his father Gene, an Olympic decathlete and aeronautics teacher, founded TWA among other airlines and had a relationship with Amelia Earhart. (Vidal first flew and landed a plane when he was 10.) He was a screenwriter for MGM in the dying days of the studio system, toyed with being a politician, he has written 24 novels and is hailed as one of the world’s greatest essayists.

He has crossed every boundary, I say. “Crashed many barriers,” he corrects me.

Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.”

America should leave Afghanistan, he says. “We’ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it.” The “War on Terror” was “made up”, Vidal says. “The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction’. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He’d be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you’re both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination.”

His voice strengthens. “One thing I have hated all my life are LIARS [he says that with bristling anger] and I live in a nation of them. It was not always the case. I don’t demand honour, that can be lies too. I don’t say there was a golden age, but there was an age of general intelligence. We had a watchdog, the media.” The media is too supine? “Would that it was. They’re busy preparing us for an Iranian war.” He retains some optimism about Obama “because he doesn’t lie. We know the fool from Arizona [as he calls John McCain] is a liar. We never got the real story of how McCain crashed his plane [in 1967 near Hanoi, North Vietnam] and was held captive.”

Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in “a black city” (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama’s intelligence. “But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”

Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. “He f***ed it up. I don’t know how because the country wanted it. We’ll never see it happen.” As for his wider vision: “Maybe he doesn’t have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there’s a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ‘I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it’. That’s what Obama needs — a bit of Lincoln’s chill.” Has he met Obama? “No,” he says quietly, “I’ve had my time with presidents.” Vidal raises his fingers to signify a gun and mutters: “Bang bang.” He is referring to the possibility of Obama being assassinated. “Just a mysterious lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital,” he says in a wry, dreamy way.

Vidal now believes, as he did originally, Clinton would be the better president. “Hillary knows more about the world and what to do with the generals. History has proven when the girls get involved, they’re good at it. Elizabeth I knew Raleigh would be a good man to give a ship to.”The Republicans will win the next election, Vidal believes; though for him there is little difference between the parties. “Remember the coup d’etat of 2000 when the Supreme Court fixed the selection, not election, of the stupidest man in the country, Mr Bush.”

Vidal says forcefully that he wished he’d never moved back to the US to live in Hollywood, from his clifftop home in Ravello, Italy, in 2000. His partner of 53 years, Howard Austen, who died in 2003, collated a lifetime’s-span of pictures of Vidal, for a new book out this autumn, Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History’s Glare (an oddly clunky title). The cover shows what a beautiful young man Vidal was, although his stare is as hawkish as it is today.

He observes presidential office-holders balefully. “The only one I knew well was Kennedy, but he didn’t impress me as a good president. It’s like asking, ‘What do I think of my brother?’ It’s complicated. I’d known him all my life and I liked him to the end, but he wrecked his chances with the Bay of Pigs and Suez crises, and because everyone was so keen to elect Bobby once Jack had gone, lies started to be told about him — that he was the greatest and the King of Camelot.”

Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. “Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they’d say ‘They live well but they’re all alcoholics’. In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over.” Instead, America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”

Vidal adds menacingly: “Don’t ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren’t any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I’m never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.”

While materially comfortable, Vidal’s was not a happy childhood. Of his actress and socialite mother Nina, he says: “Give her a glass of vodka and she was as tame as could be. Growing up is going to be difficult if the one person you hate is your mother. I felt trapped. I was close to my grandparents and my father was a saint.” His parents’ many remarriages means that even today he hasn’t met all his step-siblings.

He wrote his first novel, Williwaw, at 19. In 1948, he was blacklisted by the media after writing The City and the Pillar, one of the earliest novels to deal graphically with homosexual desire. “You’ll be amazed to know it is still going strong,” he says. The “JT” it is dedicated to is James “Jimmy” Trimble, Vidal’s first love and, he once said, the love of his life. “That was a slight exaggeration. I said it because there wasn’t any other. In the new book there are wonderful pictures of him from our schooldays. He was a great athlete.” Here his voice softens, and he looks emotional, briefly. “We were both abandoned in our dormitory at St Alban’s [boarding school]. He was killed at the Battle of Iwo Jima [in 1945] because of bad G2 [intelligence].”

Vidal says Trimble’s death didn’t affect him. “No, I was in danger of dying too. A dead man can’t grieve a dead man.” Has love been important to him? “Don’t make the error that schoolteacher idiots make by thinking that gay men’s relationships are like heterosexual ones. They’re not.” He “wouldn’t begin to comment” on how they are different.

In 1956 he was hired by MGM, collaborated on the screenplay for Ben Hur and continued to write novels, most notoriously Myra Breckenridge about a transsexual. It is his satires, essays and memoirs — Live From Golgotha, Palimpsest and most recently, Point to Point Navigation — which have fully rounded our vision of this thorny contrarian, whose originality springs simply, and naturally, from having deliberately unfixed allegiances and an enduring belief in an American republic and railing sadness at how that ideal has been corrupted.

Vidal became a supportive correspondent of Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killing 168 people. The huge loss of life, indeed McVeigh’s act of mass murder, goes unmentioned by Vidal. “He was a true patriot, a Constitution man,” Vidal claims. “And I was torn, my grandfather [the Democrat Senator Thomas Gore] had bought Oklahoma into the Union.” McVeigh claimed he had done it as a protest against tyrannical government. The writer Edmund White took the correspondence as the basis for a play, Terre Haute (the jail McVeigh was incarcerated in before he was executed in 2001), imagining an encounter between the bomber and Vidal charged with desire.

“He’s a filthy, low writer,” Vidal says of White. “He likes to attack his betters, which means he has a big field to go after.” Had he wanted to meet McVeigh? “I am not in the business of meeting people,” Vidal says. “That play implies I am madly in love with McVeigh. I looked at his [White’s] writing and all he writes about is being a fag and how it’s the greatest thing on Earth. He thinks I’m another queen and I’m not. I’m more interested in the Constitution and McVeigh than the loving tryst he saw. It was vulgar fag-ism.”

Vidal says that he hates labels and has said he believes in homosexual acts rather than homosexual people. He claims his relationship with Austen was platonic (though they reputedly met at a legendary New York bath-house). He was once quoted as saying that he’d had sex with a 1,000 men by the time he was 25. It must have been a little strange for Austen, Vidal’s life companion, to source those pictures of Trimble, his first, perhaps only, love.

Vidal puts on a scornful, campy voice. “People ask [of he and Austen], ‘How did you live together so long?’ The only rule was no sex. They can’t believe that. That was when I realised I was dealing with a public too stupid by half. They can’t tell the difference between ‘The Sun rose in the East’ and ‘The Sun is made of yeast’.” Was sex important to Vidal? “It must have been yes.”

He is single now. “I’m not into partnerships,” he says dismissively. I don’t even know what it means.” He “couldn’t care less” about gay marriage. “Does anyone care what Americans think? They’re the worst-educated people in the First World. They don’t have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke.” You could have been the first gay president, I say. “No, I would have married and had nine children,” he replies quickly and seriously. “I don’t believe in these exclusive terms.”

Impaired mobility doesn’t bother him — he “rose like a miracle” on stage at the National — and he doesn’t dwell on mortality either. “Either you accept there is such a thing or you’re so dumb that you can’t grasp it.” Is he in good health? “No, of course not. I’m diabetic. It’s odd, I’ve never been fat and I don’t like candy, which most Americans are hooked on.”

There is a trace of thwarted ambition about him. “I would have liked to have been president, but I never had the money. I was a friend of the throne. The only time I envied Jack was when Joe [Kennedy, JFK’s father] was buying him his Senate seat, then the presidency. He didn’t know how lucky he was. Here’s a story I’ve never told. In 1960, after he had spent so much on the presidential campaign, Joe took all nine children to Palm Beach to lecture them. He was really angry. He said, ‘All you read about the Kennedy fortune is untrue. It’s non-existent. We’ve spent so much getting Jack elected and not one of you is living within your income’. They all sat there, shame-faced. Jack was whistling. He used to tap his teeth: they were big teeth, like a xylophone. Joe turned to Jack and he says, ‘Mr President, what’s the solution?’ Jack said, ‘The solution is simple. You all gotta work harder’.” Vidal guffaws heartily.

Hollywood living proved less fun. “If there was a social whirl, you can be sure I would not be part of it.” He does a fabulous impression of Katharine Hepburn complaining about playing the matriarch in Suddenly Last Summer, which he wrote. “I hate this script,” he recalls Hepburn saying . “I’m far too healthy a person to know people like this.” Vidal snorts. “She had Parkinson’s. She shook like a leper in the wind.”

I ask what he wants to do next. “My usual answer to ‘What am I proudest of?’ is my novels, but really I am most proud that, despite enormous temptation, I have never killed anybody and you don’t know how tempted I have been.”

That wasn’t my question, I say. “Well, given that I’m proudest that I haven’t killed anybody, I might be saving something up for someone.” A perfect line: we both laugh.

Is he happy? “What a question,” he sighs and then smiles mischievously. “I’ll respond with a quote from Aeschylus: ‘Call no man happy till he is dead’.”

Union plumbers heckle and jeer 'Joe the Plumber'

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Union_plumbers_heckle_Joe_Plumber_at_0331.html

Union plumbers heckle and jeer 'Joe the Plumber' at rally
Rachel Oswald
Tuesday March 31, 2009

Despite the praise heaped on Joe Wurzelbacher, aka "Joe the Plumber," by conservatives as an exemplary blue-collar working man, many in the plumbing industry are none too pleased -- and they're letting it be known.

Wurzelbacher, a Toledo man first made famous by Sen. John McCain during the final presidential debate in 2008, appeared in Pittsburgh Monday night to rally opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act. The act is ardently opposed by the business lobby because it would make it easier for workers to unionize.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's James O'Toole on Monday covered a preemptive rebuttal to Wurzelbacher's remarks by union officials at the headquarters of Pittsburgh Plumbers Local 27.

"It's definitely a slap in the face to every real plumber out there," said Thomas Bigley, the business manager of the Pittsburgh Plumbers, of Wurzelbacher, adding that he should be called "Joe the impostor," as he is not a licensed plumber.

Wurzelbacher's actual appearance at a hotel rally Monday night was met by a mixture of cheers from fellow conservatives and boos from union members who managed to infiltrate the anti-EFCA rally.

As O'Toole reported on Tuesday, the crowd of approximately 100 attendees was divided between conservative supporters and those there to jeer Wurzelbacher with catcalls of "liar" and "pay your taxes," as well as a few more choice words.

"Mr. Wurzelbacher appeared unperturbed by the catcalls as the impromptu debates within the audience grew heated, though never violent, under the gaze of several Green Tree police officers," wrote O'Toole.

Wurzelbacher admitted that he is not a state-certified plumber in Ohio but asserted that he is in fact a working plumber with many years on the job.

"The mainstream media is powerful. They'll destroy you if they can. ... I'm a plumber, brother," he said. "A lot of people seem to respond to what I have to say. And what I'm saying is very simple, I'm just regurgitating what my mother and father taught me."

Wurzelbacher did receive an appearance fee from the anti-labor group, Americans for Prosperity, for his remarks at the Pittsburgh rally and will receive fees as well for anti-EFCA appearances on Tuesday in Harrisburg and Philadelphia. He declined to divulge the amount of the fee, saying, it was "nobody's business."

"The public loves Joe the Plumber," said Americans for Prosperity spokesperson, Mary Ellen Burke, to The Plum Line's Greg Sargent. "They see him as a role model."

Writes Sargent, "Asked whether Joe the Plumber had any particular knowledge or expertise about EFCA that might explain the decision to enlist him, Burke said that he was being enlisted to provide a 'grassroots perspective' and 'the working perspective' on the measure. Pressed on whether Joe the Plumber has any particular claim to being a spokesperson on the issue, Burke replied that 'he represents the American worker.'"

According to O'Toole, Wurzelbacher dismissed speculation that he would respond to a draft movement for him to run for Congress next year.

The Employee Free Choice Act is unlikely to pass in the current Congress. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) recently switched his allegiance on the measure, saying he would vote with Republicans to filibuster it. Specter faces a tight primary race with a conservative challenger, and has been told by the national Republican fundraising apparatus that he must oppose the measure to receive national GOP aid.

Kucinich hits Iraq withdrawal

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Kucinich_hits_Iraq_withdrawal_You_cant_0227.html

Kucinich hits Iraq withdrawal: 'You can't be in and out'
Stephen C. Webster
Friday February 27, 2009

It wasn't even one year ago when Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and members of his political campaign said now-President Barack Obama "seems to think losing a war will help him win an election."

Which is what makes this week's announcement of -- and the fallout from -- President Obama's plan to withdrawal troops from Iraq so surprising. It isn't the opposition party Obama must now win over: It's his own political allies.

Sen. McCain and top Republican leaders actually support the Democratic administration's plan, while some top Democrats have openly criticized it. Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), himself a former presidential candidate, hit back Friday against a portion of Obama's plan which would leave 35-50,000 "observer" soldiers in the country.

"You can't be in and out at the same time," said Kucinich in a media advisory.

"America must determine at some point to end the occupation, close the bases and bring the troops home," he said. "We must bring a conclusion to this sorry chapter in American history where war was waged under false pretense against an innocent people. Taking troops out of Iraq should not mean more troops available for deployment in other operations.

"In February of 2007 I presented H.R. 1234, legislation that would end the war in Iraq, and the process I outlined is still necessary. We should immediately bring home American service members and contractors, convene a regional conference to prepare an international peace-keeping force and accelerate Iraq-driven reconstruction."

"As a candidate for President, I made clear my support for a timeline of 16 months to carry out this drawdown, while pledging to consult closely with our military commanders upon taking office to ensure that we preserve the gains we’ve made and protect our troops," Obama said on Friday. "Those consultations are now complete, and I have chosen a timeline that will remove our combat brigades over the next 18 months."

Obama added, "Let me say this as plainly as I can: by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end."

Congressman Kucinich has been a leading opponent of the Iraq war policy even well before many of his Democratic colleagues in the House of Representatives came to agree with his position.

Obama’s War Machine Needs $800 Billion

http://www.prisonplanet.com/obamas-war-machine-needs-800-billion-for-2009.html

Obama’s War Machine Needs $800 Billion For 2009
After Iraq “withdrawal,” tens of thousands of U.S. troops will remain
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, February 26, 2009

Barack Obama’s election promise to bring “change” to Washington and reverse the juggernaut of the Bush war machine has proven to be nothing more than a cruel hoax, emphasized by his recent actions on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq and his latest demand for a total of around $800 billion in war funds and subsidiary costs just to cover the rest of 2009.

“According to the US defense officials, Obama needs USD 75.5 billion for 2009 to cover the cost of the additional troops deployed in to Afghanistan this year and an another USD 130 billion for the rest of fiscal 2009,” reports Press TV.

An additional $534 billion is required for the Defense Department, added to another figure of $65.9 billion that has already been approved by Congress, bringing the total figure to over $805 billion dollars.

As Wikipedia states, “The military budget is that portion of the United States discretionary federal budget that is allocated to the Department of Defense. This military budget pays the salaries, training, and healthcare of uniformed and civilian personnel, maintains arms, equipment and facilities, funds operations, and develops and buys new equipment. The budget funds all branches of the U.S. military: Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard.”

We can be assured that the vast majority of the $805 billion is going into the war chest because seperate programs such as nuclear weapons research, maintenance and production are included in the Department of Energy budget. Every single component bar one of the DoD budget is up 5-10% compared to 2008, with the budget for “military construction” increasing by a whopping 19.1%.

The most expensive programs in the DoD budget are things like missile defense, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the F-22 Raptor, as well as the DDG 1000 Destroyer, the F/A-18E/F Hornet and the V-22 Osprey. These are all war-related programs, so mainstream media reports that a mere $200 billion war chest is being demanded do not include the cost of any of these programs which form part of the $500 billion-plus DoD budget.

The demand to refill the war coffers arrives in the same month as Obama’s announcement to send at least 17,000, and eventually perhaps as many as 30,000, extra troops to Afghanistan - over seven years after the U.S. invaded in 2001.

Obama has also recently beefed the U.S. military role in Pakistan beyond that pursued by the Bush administration and “expanded the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside Pakistan,” according to the New York TImes, with an increase in missile attacks by drone aircraft.

All this within just one month of Obama’s inauguration on the back of an election campaign won on the basis of changing the warmongering policies of the Bush administration!

Meanwhile, despite public pronouncements by Obama that a plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq is in progress, the details of the agreement actually establish a permanent presence of a sizable occupying force in perpetuity.

Despite his pre-election promises it’s interesting to note that the new WhiteHouse.gov website, in the “foreign policy” section, contains nothing whatsoever about Obama’s plans for Iraq. That’s probably because he will simply be following the exact same course undertaken by the Bush administration in publicly stating an intention for withdrawal while privately ensuring that tens of thousands of U.S. troops will remain in Iraq in perpetuity for the reason they were sent there in the first place - to safeguard a U.S. geopolitical foothold in the middle east and maintain control over whatever puppet government is installed.

As Chris Floyd points out in his article today, “The hypocrisy – the literally murderous hypocrisy – of claiming that this plan “leaves Iraq to its people and responsibly ends this war,” as Obama asserted in his State of the Union speech, is sickening. It does no such thing, and he knows it.”

In reality, after the “withdrawal” of U.S. troops in 19 months, “Mr. Obama plans to leave behind a “residual force” of tens of thousands of troops to continue training Iraqi security forces, hunt down foreign terrorist cells and guard American institutions,” reported the New York Times.

A senior military officer spelled it out more plainly to the Los Angeles Times, “‘When President Obama said we were going to get out within 16 months, some people heard, ‘get out,’ and everyone’s gone. But that is not going to happen,’ the officer said.”

“By implementing his war continuation plan, Obama will complete the work of Bush and his militarist clique,” writes Floyd, and in doing so send, “an apparently endless stream of American troops to die — and, in even greater numbers, to kill — in a criminal action that has helped bankrupt our own country while sending waves of violent instability and extremism around the world. It will further enfilth a cesspool of corruption and war profiteering that has already reached staggering, world-historical proportions.”

The ultimate course for Iraq is something closer to what Obama’s presidential rival John McCain conceded - that U.S. troops will remain in the country for 100 years and probably beyond, long after Barack Obama leaves the White House and long after his empty mantra of “change” washes away like a footprint in the sand.

Obama's Housing Bailout Comparisons to McCain's

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/first100days/2009/02/19/obamas-housing-bailout-draws-comparisons-mccains-plan/

Obama's Housing Bailout Draws Comparisons to McCain's Plan
President Obama's $275 billion housing bailout plan, aimed at halting mortgage foreclosures, is drawing comparisons to a proposal championed last year by John McCain.
FOXNews.com
Thursday, February 19, 2009

President Obama, in rejecting GOP alternatives to his massive economic stimulus plan, cited his electoral victory over John McCain in November as proof that Americans wanted change.

But Obama's $275 billion housing bailout plan, aimed at halting mortgage foreclosures, is drawing comparisons to a proposal championed last year by John McCain.

"I hope they took the best ideas wherever they found them. And, certainly, Senator McCain campaigned for a long time on this proposal," said Douglas Holtz Eakin, former economic adviser to McCain and author of McCain's plan.

Obama's $275 billion program offers $75 billion in incentives to lenders to lower payments by at-risk homeowners to 31 percent of their income. The other $200 billion would be drawn from money approved by last year's Congress to bolster efforts by federal lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to offer affordable mortgages and bring stability to the housing market.

Holtz Eakin says Obama has recognized the need to stop foreclosures before they happen. It's an idea he says McCain introduced at his second presidential debate with Obama.

"I would order the Secretary of the Treasury to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America and renegotiate at the new value of those homes," McCain said.

McCain said he was following in the footsteps of Hillary Clinton, but her aides said his plan was nothing like hers.

Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan also says McCain's plan is not like Obama's, explaining that Obama's is "focused, targeted to those most at risk of foreclosure and would be far less expensive to the taxpayer than Senator McCain's plan."

Democrats said McCain's $300 billion plan would have had the government basically eat the cost of reduced property values.

"Taxpayers shouldn't be asked to pick up the tab for the very folks who helped create this crisis," Obama said on the campaign trail. "And that's the problem with Senator McCain's risky idea."

Now Obama's $75 billion plan would have the government and the finance industry share the cost of declining property values for a smaller group, though it envisions pumping $200 billion more into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which McCain criticized in the fall for supporting the Obama campaign.

"His pals there and the Democrats in Congress that refused to reform Freddie Mac and enact legislation to stop this crisis," McCain charged on the campaign trail.

Donovan, however, says the money is just a backstop.

"We have no expectation that the full amount would be needed, certainly not in the short run," Donovan said.

On that score, however, Obama officials say they are facing the problem of having to rescue institutions that are too big to fail. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are the mortgage market today, Obama officials say. They account for the vast bulk of mortgages and without them mortgage rates would soar and far fewer mortgages would be available.

FOX News' Wendell Goler contributed to this report.

Bank nationalisation gains ground with Republicans

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2ad3b750-fd27-11dd-a103-000077b07658.html

Bank nationalisation gains ground with Republicans
By Edward Luce and Krishna Guha
February 17 2009

Long regarded in the US as a folly of Europeans, nationalisation is gaining rapid acceptance among Washington opinion-formers – and not just with Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve chairman. Perhaps stranger still, many of those talking about nationalising banks are Republicans.

Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator for South Carolina, says that many of his colleagues, including John McCain, the defeated presidential candidate, agree with his view that nationalisation of some banks should be “on the table”.

Mr Graham says that people across the US accept his argument that it is untenable to keep throwing good money after bad into institutions such as Citigroup and Bank of America, which now have a lower net value than the amount of public funds they have received.

“You should not get caught up on a word [nationalisation],” he told the Financial Times in an interview. “I would argue that we cannot be ideologically a little bit pregnant. It doesn’t matter what you call it, but we can’t keep on funding these zombie banks [without gaining public control]. That’s what the Japanese did.”

Barack Obama, the president, who has tried to avoid panicking lawmakers and markets by entertaining the idea, has moved more towards what he calls the “Swedish model” – an approach backed strongly by Mr Graham. In the early 1990s Sweden nationalised its banking sector then auctioned banks having cleaned up balance sheets. “In limited circumstances the Swedish model makes sense for the US,” says Mr Graham.

Mr Obama last weekend made clear he was leaning more towards the Swedish model than to the piecemeal approach taken in Japan, which many would argue is the direction US public policy appears to be heading.

“They [the Japanese] sort of papered things over,” Mr Obama said. “They never really bit the bullet - and so you never got credit flowing the way it should have, and the bad assets in their system just corroded the economy for a long period of time.”

Administration officials acknowledge that the rescue plan unveiled by Tim Geithner, Treasury secretary, last week could result in the temporary nationalisation of some weak banks.

The plan sets out a framework for revealing the extent of the likely credit losses facing banks. Most private sector analysts believe the exercise will reveal that some banks have large capital shortfalls.

Policymakers acknowledge that if this is indeed the case, it will be difficult for those with the largest shortfalls to raise the required equity from the markets, in which case the government would probably have to take temporary control. Moreover, while nationalisation remains taboo in some political circles it is increasingly openly discussed among past and present economic policymakers of all leanings.

“In this country nationalisation of some banks – not the whole banking sector – should be a last resort, but it should definitely now be on the table,” said David Walker, head of the pro-free market Peterson Institute and a former senior official in the George W. Bush administration.

The time for biting the bullet may also be fast approaching.

In early April, big institutions will publish their first-quarter results. If the intervening Treasury stress tests have not by then revealed the true state of their balance sheets, then their first-quarter results may do so.

“The first week in April – that’s when the children’s party is over,” says Chris Whalen, co-founder of Institutional Risk Analytics. “That is when the obvious will become apparent.”

The Obama administration remains opposed to federal control. Mr Geithner last week said: “Governments are terrible managers of bad assets.”

Others say he may eventually face no choice. “The danger we face is a Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae scenario where government gives the banking sector guarantees and then socialises the losses,” says Adam Posen, an economist. “That’s the worst thing we could do.”

Beast of the Month - November 2008

Beast of the Month - November 2008
Sarah Palin
Republican VP Candidate

"I yam an anti-Christ..."
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"

"Oh! Oh! Remember the time he picked Sarah Palin? I totally get it now! She's totally unqualified, and he's so old! There's a really good chance she'd be president!"
Stephen Colbert on John McCain's wacky sense of humor

Well, the 2008 election is over, and, for the first time in twelve years, George W. Bush didn't steal it. This, of course, is worthy of celebration, although the celebration so far seems misguided, misguided in a way that seems by design.

The korporate media, which has shilled for Barack Obama shamelessly throughout the campaign, went into overdrive, declaring the election was confirmation of what an amazing and transformational figure he was. Oh, and by the way, did we mention he was black? The two lessons of the election, therefore, were that Obama is totally rad and America is no longer racist (the only reason anyone could possibly be opposed to someone as awesome as Barack Obama.)

It's curious that while the establishment media was so quick to give Obama all the credit for the victory, they failed to point (and give) the finger to the one person who deserves credit for John McCain's loss: George W. Bush. After all, it is really Bush who loomed over the entire election like a frightening specter, and it is Bush who has given the entire GOP a deserved bad name. It is Bush and his disasters that turned both houses of Congress decidedly to the Democrats, and it is Bush in the end who convinced American voters to reject a fairly well-liked former Vietnam POW for an entity whose magnetic charisma couldn't cover how decidedly untrustworthy he is. The impossible hurdle facing McCain was hilariously spoofed on a Saturday Night Live guest-starring Will Ferrell as George W. Bush. Sounding like George Jr., Ferrell declared in a fake ad for McCain: "John was there for me ninety percent of the time over the last eight years. When you think of John McCain, think of me, George W. Bush. Think of this face. When you're in the voting booth, before you vote - picture this face right here. A vote for John McCain is a vote for George W. Bush. You're welcome." With that kind of background, a ham sandwich labeled "Democrat" would've been able to beat John McCain.

This, of course, is no mere trivial fact. If the election was a referendum on Bush and the last eight years, then that would mean the public was demanding economics that serve the middle class, working class and poor rather than mere crony capitalism and Wall Street bailouts, an end to the Iraq quagmire and a rejection of the militarism that has led to potential conflict with Pakistan, Iran and even both Russia and China, and an end to the massive criminality that has led to legalized torture and big brother snooping. If, on the other hand, the meaning of the election is that Barack Obama is just totally bitching, then nothing is demanded of him, indeed, everything is merely demanded of us, that we cry at his transcendental speeches and cheer him on in his sheer perfection.

Aside from George W. Bush, there's another dude who has evaded much of the blame for the loss in the election of John McCain: John McCain himself. From the start of the campaign, he appeared clueless, delusional and desperate, pathetically clinging to every right wing talking point to convince (unsuccessfully) the dwindling hardcore Republicans he was one of them. Meanwhile, he tied himself more closely to George W. Bush on Iraq than any other elected official alive, dooming him to be linked to that gigantic failure. And while the financial meltdown unraveled, all he could do was repeat the same old Republican mantras, mantras that only reminded the public that they've already had eight years too many of this crap. Still, when the election was all over, the korporate media felt sorry for the guy that, until he faced off against St. Obama, was one of their decided BFFs in the GOP. He wasn't so bad after all, they insisted, just a good man in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The same couldn't be said about their treatment of Sarah Palin, The Konformist Beast of the Month, McCain's VP pick and the decided scapegoat of the 2008 election.

It didn't actually start out that way. When she was first announced as the pick by McCain, she became a populist sensation, a "hockey mom" turned Alaska governor who could match the celebrity cult devoted to Obama. It didn't hurt that "Caribou Barbie" was an attractive former beauty queen, looking MILFish with her trademark glasses and eerily similar to Tina Fey (something she would soon regret) or porn star Eva Angelina. Though there were nasty sneers about her in the establishment press from the start (for example, during the GOP convention, NBC blowhard Tom Brokaw could barely conceal his contempt for her) she gave an ass-kicking convention speech that cemented her popularity in the public, and suddenly, McCain passed Mr. Rock Star in the polls. This didn't appear to be a mere post-convention bounce, it appeared to be a game changer.

About right now, The Konformist should insert a little point: unlike most of the press which seemed stunned by her selection, we were indeed aware of her and not completely surprised. She was, after all, very attractive and charismatic, as well as the most popular governor in America according to public opinion polls. However, we pretty much dismissed her as a pick because, as any examination of her politics would reveal, she was a far right ideologue who, when exposed for what she was, would become quickly discredited, especially by a public with widespread loathing of the right wing policies of Bush, Cheney and co.

Tellingly, Obama didn't attack her on ideological lines. Instead, with his predictable level of smug arrogance (a decidedly notable trait of the guy) he mocked her as inexperienced, a curious claim from a dude with less than four years in the Senate and no record as either a mayor or governor. Why did Obama avoid pointing out that she was an ultra-right candidate? Perhaps because Obama's modus operandi is to evade all discussion of politics in politics, in hopes of reducing the campaign to a narcissistic cult of personality where issues are ignored.

What then followed from the Obamaheads were the predictable hack attacks, some laced with sexism in politics not seen since, well, since the Obamaheads went after Hillary. They were egged on by Obama himself, who took her now famous convention quote ("What's the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.") and declared about McCain-Palin less than a week after her speech: "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig." The smirky comment echoed his not-so-subtle middle finger during a speech while referring to Hillary in the heat of the Democratic primary, or this comment from him about Ms. Clinton's political attacks: "I understand that Senator Clinton, periodically when she's feeling down, launches attacks as a way of trying to boost her appeal." (No reference to female biology in that statement whatsoever!) As with the Hillary comments (which, unlike the Palin dig, were basically ignored by the korporate media, as they were clearly mean-spirited if intentional) Obama would later insist the "lipstick on a pig" comment in no way referred to Palin. (As if somebody using the word "lipstick" in a political context less than a week after the GOP Convention could in any way be referring to her or her speech!) The Obamamaniacs followed in kind, and Palin became a point of almost obsessive derision, leading to charming things like Obama rallies where t-shirts declaring "SARAH PALIN IS A CUNT" were on open display. (Good thing "liberal" politics have removed sexism from the political debate!) Meanwhile, a West Hollywood Halloween display had a Palin effigy in a hangman's noose, something that probably would have been labeled slightly politically incorrect if it was Obama instead. But the multiple cases of sexist insults of Palin were pretty much downplayed by the korporate media, who instead focused on the theme that Sarah Palin and McCain voters were a bunch of racist, hate-filled inbreds.

Indeed, the mainstream press seemed to have a hard-on for destroying Palin from the start, mocking her credentials while latching on to news her seventeen-year-old daughter was pregnant. The message behind these attacks: Palin was a cross-eyed hillbilly with a slut for a daughter who was unfit for office. Unfortunately for the korporate media, Palin-fever was so high after her convention speech, they toned down the criticisms.

This was merely a reprieve. As it turned out, Palin wasn't the big game-changer of the election, it was the financial crisis. As the economic downturn that hit Main Street suddenly swallowed Wall Street, derisions of Palin went into overdrive. The fixation of heaping hatred on Palin was so unhealthy, you'd think McCain's pick for VP had done something like shoot a friend in the face while drunk, or mastermind a pointlessly destructive war in the Middle East based on lies.

Okay, The Konformist no doubt knows what some readers are saying right now: this is the Beast of the Month prize here, you should be burying the bitch and not defending her. Fair enough. And we admit that many of the mockings of Palin were pretty damn funny, starting with the Stephen Colbert quote above. There's also this one from Matt Damon on Palin: "It's like a really bad Disney movie. The hockey mom, you know, 'Oh, I'm just a hockey mom.' And she's facing down President Putin... It's totally absurd..." (Personally, we think this is a pretty good movie pitch, and expect it to be in theaters in 2009, with Ice Cube in a supporting role as the goofy-but-lovable neighbor.) And then there's the increasingly hysterical performances by Tina Fey on SNL as Palin, performances that were so effective in mockery they pretty much trashed Palin's chances as a viable political candidate. Even a good-sport guest appearance on SNL by Palin couldn't stop the damage that had been done.

Still, The Konformist is about honesty, especially when others are being dishonest. So granted, Palin may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but for a party that has had Ronald Reagan, Dan Quayle and George W. Bush as previous top two figureheads, is she really at the bottom of the curve? Sure, she looked bad in her interview with Katie Couric (so mock-worthy that Fey and SNL satirized her without changing her many bungled quotes) but did Couric suddenly get street-cred as a legitimate journalist by doing what was essentially a calculated smear job?

Let's compare Palin's treatment to her competitor in the VP contest, Joe Biden, a guy considered to be one of the more intelligent fellows in the Senate. Despite the gravitas he is given for his vast knowledge base, Biden is also known to be a virtual gaffe machine. Probably his most embarrassing one on the campaign trail this fall was declaring "the number-one job facing the middle class, and it happens to be, as Barack says, a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S, jobs." This gaffe was given a few chuckles in the mainstream press, but no doubt if Palin said the same, it would've turned into "Potatoe-gate II" by the media.

Here's something to give a clue how rigged the game was: a list (courtesy of the No Quarter Blog) of the questions asked by another anchor, ABC's Charlie Gibson, to both Barack Obama (after securing the Democratic nomination) and Sarah Palin:

Obama interview:

* How does it feel to break a glass ceiling?

* How does it feel to "win"?

* How does your family feel about your “winning” breaking a glass ceiling?

* Who will be your VP?

* Should you choose Hillary Clinton as VP?

* Will you accept public finance?

* What issues is your campaign about?

* Will you visit Iraq?

* Will you debate McCain at a town hall?

* What did you think of your competitor’s [Clinton] speech?


Palin interview:

* Do you have enough qualifications for the job you’re seeking? Specifically have you visited foreign countries and met foreign leaders?

* Aren’t you conceited to be seeking this high level job?

* Questions about foreign policy:

-territorial integrity of Georgia

-allowing Georgia and Ukraine to be members of NATO

-NATO treaty

-Iranian nuclear threat

-what to do if Israel attacks Iran

-Al Qaeda motivations

-the Bush Doctrine

-attacking terrorists harbored by Pakistan

* Is America fighting a holy war?


Meanwhile, here's a good case against Ms. Palin that could've been presented, but was mainly ignored:

* SHE'S A RIGHT-WING HARDCORE CHRISTIAN: Thanks to George W. Bush, the ultra-right fundamentalist movement is in shambles, and John McCain has almost no influence among them. Palin is the best hope for the "Moral Majority" crowd to remain a powerful voting bloc, rather than become increasingly marginalized and disappear as a force in the political arena altogether.

* SHE'S A BIG PUSSY: Despite being a major media sensation, the McCain campaign was notoriously paranoid about letting her do anything crazy, like, say, speaking to the press. Her only encounters with the media were her VP debate with Joe Biden, and her interviews with Gibson and Couric. (Sorry, Sean Hannity, your softball interview doesn't count.) She didn't hold a single press conference during her campaign. What, is Palin trying to hide that she's secretly an idiot or something?

* HER CLAIM TO BE A FISCAL CONSERVATIVE IS A CROCK: Despite her far right leanings, her boast of being opposed to "big government" is, like it was for Reagan and Shrub, a lie. Under her six-year reign as Mayor of Wasilla, the city's debt grew from $1 million to $25 million (which for a city of 7,000 residents equals an extra $3,500 debt per capita) despite receiving an extra $27 million in federal funds. The city's budget grew 55% during her reign, while taxes increased by 43%, fueled by a 0.5 percent sales tax increase she personally pushed for. As Alaska governor, her 2007 operating budget was a record $6.6 billion, and in 2008 it went up to $11 billion, a 67 percent increase. When she ran for governor, she supported funding the now infamous Gravina Island Bridge, known as the "Bridge to Nowhere" thanks to its dubious merits, for which Alaska received $442 million. As governor, she cancelled the project but kept the money. Later, during the GOP, she disingenuously claimed she said "thanks, but no thanks, on that bridge to nowhere."

* SHE'S A WANNABE BOOK BANNER: This was such a widespread email rumor, it was even featured on the urban legends website Snopes.com. The korporate media, while quick to hack attack her throughout the campaign, were just as quick to dismiss this, even though the facts tell another tale. Here's the story: as a Wasilla city councilwoman, Palin had a hissy fit over the gay-friendly children's book Daddy's Roommate being in the public library. (Curiously, there's no word on her opinion about Heather Has Two Mommies.) When elected mayor, Palin asked Wasilla librarian Mary Ellen Emmons on multiple times if she would okay censoring library books with "objectionable" content if asked to. Emmons told her she wouldn't do this: Palin would fire her from the job in January 1997, claiming Emmons didn't give "full support in my efforts to govern the city of Wasilla." She reversed herself the following day after a huge public outcry. So the scoreboard reads as thus: Sarah Palin isn't a book banner, she's merely someone who was interested in banning books, then tried to fire someone opposed to such a move. There, doesn't that make you feel better about her?

* SHE'S FOR A BIG SISTER POLICE STATE: The book-banning is merely part of a bigger issue of a woman who is a petty tyrant and authoritarian. Besides the Wasilla librarian, Palin successfully fired the police chief and the museum director and forced out two others out as mayor. As governor, she fired Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan in what appears to be a vendetta over an ex-brother-in-law. In another political feud while she was Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Chairwoman, she hacked into the computer of a fellow commissioner (a Republican, no less) to obtain evidence of wrongdoing. Add to this her GOP convention dismissal of opposition to abuse and torture of prisoners coming from Democrats like Obama who are "worried that someone won't read them their rights." The pattern emerging is of a woman who believes she is above the law and enjoys destroying her political opponents. Writer Naomi Wolf, who has increasingly warned of the rise of fascism in America, has concluded "Palin Power" is merely a Rove-ian push for a continued Bush-Cheney police state.


Instead of all this, we got the equivalent of "You might be a redneck" jokes.

Why the crude insults of Palin? Certainly a lot of this involves the Obama cult worship which seems to be centered in the mainstream press. If a ham sandwich could beat a Republican thanks to Bush, anyone who gets in the way of Barky becoming prez would be thrashed by the establishment media as well. And it doesn't hurt that Palin is pure white trash, the only racial group that can be mocked without it being labeled politically incorrect.

But perhaps the bigger reason for the hack attacks on Palin has to do with something bigger, namely the Wall Street bailout. This was, after all, the turning point in the election when the cheering for Obama and the scorn of Palin went into hyperspace. This leads to a political fact that many progressives clinging to the Democratic Party must squirm over: though the bailout was proposed by the Bush Administration, it was the Democrats, and not the Republicans, who got it passed through Congress. Indeed, Barack Obama personally took the lead in pushing the bailout through Congress. Coincidentally, even though September was one the worst months in Wall Street history with job losses beginning to explode, it was the same month he raised a record $150 million, more than double his previous record of $66 million. One has to wonder where all this money came from at a time of economic crisis.

Meanwhile, it was the hardcore conservative Republicans who were most opposed to the bailout, albeit only for ideological "free market" reasons. It is this same group of GOPers that looked upon Palin as their answer to "Obama as a savior" in politics. Unfortunately for them, McCain had decided to support the bailout, and Caribou Barbie was forced to defend something completely inconsistent with her politics. (Perhaps that is why when defending the bailout she invariably looked her most clueless.) It is telling to note that after the Wall Street crisis dominated the news, conservative establishment hacks like George Will, David Brooks and David Frum joined the chorus calling Palin unfit and began to shill for Obama. Even a still-devoted neocon like Christopher Hitchens suddenly jumped on the Obama bandwagon. This leads to a simple question: did Colin Powell endorse Barack Obama because he was black (as Rush Limbaugh would froth) or because he knows a good fellow tool for Wall Street when he sees one?

The good news is Sarah Palin may be toast as a politician thanks to Obamamania. It appears Republican competitors are already joining in the backstabbing, as rumors (likely false, and likely spread by the Mitt Romney team desiring to take over the GOP) have been spread that Palin didn't know Africa was a continent. At least we hope she is toast, but concede that political memory is short and if Nixon could comeback in 1968, anything is possible. This is especially true since there are no real charismatic Republicans waiting in the wings with the star power Palin has. (And besides, after trashing Palin for two months, will the establishment media be able to pretend Tim Pawlenty and Bobby Jindal - two GOP governors deemed to be strong competitors with almost identical ideological slants - are any different in politics than Palin in 2012?) The bad news is if she was destroyed, it was for the wrong reasons, the end result of the thorough takeover of the Democratic Party by Wall Street plutocrats.

In any case, we salute Sarah Palin as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, Sarah!!!