Obama Missed Chances to Degas McCain

Barack Obama missed two great opportunities last night to pitchfork John McCain:

When McCain gimped around the debate stage warning “My Friends” that because of Wall Street’s financial constipation and panic “we’re gonna hafta cut back on entitlements,” Obama failed to point out that McCain means cutbacks in Social Security and Medicare–the two biggest entitlement programs after those dosing bankers and generals with hundreds of billions of borrowed bucks.

McCain certainly does not mean putting the rich and military on dollar diets. He is rich and he has been military. He would not spit in the fountains from which both classes suck their elixirs of life.

No, he means putting fogies like me on food stamps by cutting back Social Security and into pine boxes early by cutting back on our medical care.

Obama let these pass. Too bad. Many of McCain’s supporter are geezers living at or near poverty (one of the great American towns) and depending on government-paid docs to keep them walking and talking.

(McCain is still talking but his shuffling and the growing hump on his back makes one wonder about his arthritis.)

Obama missed another chance to pish McCain’s balloon when in the heat of Wall Street's self-immolations McCain avoided intoning what has been Republican mantra until just the past couple of weeks: Change Social Security to cause each sweating for wages to plop her payments for Social Security into the dry palms of Wall Street stock jockeys. These would have, for a fee, invested her financial future in such sure things as Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, AIG and other outfits that since Labor Day have gone bellybutton up.

Had McCain and Bush had their way on Social Security last year or the year before, most working Americans would have thrilled in the past week to see their Social Security deposits evaporate.

Obama missed these opportunities. Like McCain he instead dropped worm-size tidbits from stump speeches into the maws of onlookers. Neither candidate had anything new to say.

Fortunately for Obama, McCain shambled around the stage, looking the old man he is, while Obama, still lithe and fit, appeared upright, calm and assured.

Presidential elections to date (all between white men) have shown that the candidate who appears taller will win. If the candidates appear the same height, then the candidate who seems to have the most hair will win.

(A smart candidate, from the start of campaigning, will stand upright, wear elevator shoes, be trim and hide his pate under an excellent toupee.)

Obama seems taller, trimmer and more hirsute and upright than McCain. But in this election there enters Obama’s skin. In America, black trumps white. If like Obama you’re half white and half black, you’re black--and subject to the white citizenry’s prejudices.

Prejudice against black as opposed to prejudice for height and hair may put McCain and his intellectual mentor, Sarah Palin–one in dotage and the other a dolt-- in charge of the nation and the health of the world. We would have the depressing in charge of the depression. That truly would be the holistic pits.

Palin Polishes Her Skills as a Liar

Sarah Palin may be as ignorant of foreign policy as a malamute pissing on a Wasilla telephone pole, but she knows how to snarl and snap and lie–for which in Alaska she has earned a reputation as a first-class practitioner of prevarications and back stabbings.

Along with other Republican pit bulls with and without lipstick Palin Saturday accused Barack Obama of “palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”

She said it twice about Obama’s knowing a founder of the Weather Underground who led that organization when Obama was eight years old in Hawaii. Obama, it seems, lives in the same Chicago neighborhood, served on a charity board with the alleged terrorist, now a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago who long before Obama was old enough to vote became an ordinary liberal.

So far Palin has lied to Americans with a wink-wink and leer about the Bridge to Nowhere, which she hustled for but now says she stopped. She never mentions that as Alaska’s governor she has the state now building the Road to Nowhere, which will stop where the Bridge to Nowhere would start. It’s an old political ploy in Alaska, my home state, to build a road to where a bridge must be built and then say, see, we need a bridge or otherwise the road is a waste. She implied she sold a governmental jet on E-Bay; she didn’t, she gave it away to a campaign supporter. She said she welcomed a legislative investigation into whether she canned the head of Alaska’s State Troopers for not firing her hated ex-brother-in-law; she refuses to testify in that investigation and has ordered her staff and her husband, a yokel known in Alaska as “First Dude,” not to testify. The list goes on.

Palin’s Republican handlers, headed by one of Carl Rove’s chief henchmen, know that a giant smear campaign has started against Obama, thanks to the rich reactionaries who fuel the Republican Party’s private efforts to win and stay in office and damn the truth or anything like the truth. Palin is their resident Barbie Doll to wrap around the big lie. Soon she’ll be yowling that Obama is Beelzebub and Satan’s Mother.

Well, her handlers have finally found one thing she’s good at: Slander.

And what about that guy she’s allowing to run with her, John McBush, the self-anointed hero and self-baptized truth teller? Will he snap her garters and tell her to stop fibbing about Obama?

Damned unlikely. It’s plain he will do anything–anything at all–to be president of the United States and finally outrank his daddy, the admiral, including choosing a nincompoop like Palin to run for vice president on the Know Nothing ticket.

That choice alone and her obvious incompetence at anything except ruining reputations speaks to how we must overhaul the way we elect presidents and vice presidents. McBush and Palin are beginning to make Caligula look like a statesman.

Obama-McCain Do the Gonna, Gotta, Hafta Cha-Cha-Cha

When last night the debate between Barack Obama and John McCain piddled to its soporific end, I shuddered with dread–dread for pronunciation of English among the ruling classes in the United States.

“Gonna.” “Gotta.” “Hafta.” “Tuh.”

Two U.S. senators, one with a law degree from Harvard and the other with a degree from Annapolis, speaking with the commonplace accents of high-school sophomores after a few drags on a joint.

“Tuh” for “to” of course now slogs the tongues of those who don’t wish their speech to stand out from those changing tires or tossing hotdogs at stock-car races. “Tuh” hallmarks the speech of the present grease monkey in the White House, who despite his East Coast private-school and Yale educations now drools a quaky hick-Texas accent for the rest of us to try to translate.

“Tuh” also flops from the lips on TV of the richly suited former sports jocks gabbling forth endless details on the differences between crotch pieces for hockey and for volleyball and professional badminton.

How long will it take before American dictionaries offer “tuh” as an alternative for “to?” Just as long as it takes for lexicographers to recognize that most of the population cannot look up that preposition without first hunting for “tuh,” the only pronunciation they know.

“Gonna” for “going to” has even passed into newspaper writing and headlines. It won’t be long before “going” in the conjugation charts and dictionaries simply will show as “gon’.”

“Gotta” for “got to” (whatever happened to “must” and “should?”) peppered last night’s first head-to-head between Obama and McCain.

So did, lord help us, “hafta” for “have to.” None of these pronunciations will show spelled out in the transcripts, of course. Transcribers have a way of cleaning up sloppiness.

Is that all horrified ears could mark in what was supposed to a universe-shaking event, the clash of two political gladiators in the great arena of the American mind as conveyed by TV?

No, one could also hear no original ideas, no witty utterances, no humor, no epigrams, no semblances to oratory or formal rhetoric. The two senators to me sounded like two TV sports jocks hustling each other over luge statistics without the benefit of beers.

Yes, I know supporters on both sides swooned as one or the other senators dribbled forth bits cut, steamed and canned for and from former speeches.

I didn’t. I found both boring, commonplace and neither showing the slightest signs of rising out of the treacly trench of presidential campaigning.

Did last night show me one is more equipped than the other to preside over the government of the U.S.? No. Alas. I will vote for Obama because I cannot abide McCain and other Republicans, but I will vote without much hope for inspired leadership or good pronunciation.

Witches Banned When Palin's Around

This morning, after watching Sarah Palin being protected against witchcraft as she stood before a Wasilla preacher from Kenya, her back turned, holy texts in her hands, with two adept gents laying their hands upon her gently, I felt mightily relieved:

One more problem of American government solved, this time two years ago before she ran for the governorship of Alaska and won--not just because the witches bounced off her but because the incumbent governor then, Frank Murkowski, a fellow Republican and supremely stupid and arrogant, was despised most Alaskans, including those still wanting to secede from the Union.

As I savored feeling narcotized by this Pentecostal Church spectacle of getting anti-witch insurance in advance, imagine my delight when I chanced on an Associated Press piece--http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2008201741_apabsentpalin.html-- detailing how the governorship of Alaska is now being run by John McCain campaign staffers.

Even Alaska’s lieutenant-governor, in theory in charge of the state while Palin gallivants about the U.N. inhaling foreign policy, has to vet with McCain staffers whether he can turn off the office lights at 5 p.m. and trot down the street in Juneau for a quick shot with other politicos in the Baranof Hotel’s saloon.

Only in America can one gaze on such a spectacle of what a free people can do when they undergo cultural lobotomies.

Palin, in case you missed her latest, opines that the nation will dive into Depression if Congress does not give George Bush his way in wanting to rescue his Republican owners by handing them $700 billion that our descendants yet unborn have still to earn.

Imagine a Depression, during which all those Wall Street high rollers would have to stand on street corners peddling Red Delicious apples at five bucks each while on the radio rappers yapped “Brother, Can You Spare A Ten Spot?”

Palin, of course, knows as much about economics as a poodle peeing on a fire plug. Even so that over qualifies her to serve in Congress and makes her more than equal to that guy running with her, McCain, who admits he knows nothing at all about economics and that’s why he should be president.

McCain hastens with his ignorance back to the Senate to solve the upcoming Depression problem, and Barack Obama plans to join him there for the same thing, the usual American political solution: If you don’t know what you’re doing, smother it in money–other people’s money, your money and mine.

The best investment one can make right now is in green ink, the green ink the government printing presses will be sucking as they run day and night rolling out more and more $1,000 bills worth less and less for the Wall Street bravos to pocket.

Maybe a decent contribution will bring that godly Pentecostal chap back from Kenya to preach by the presses, to beg God to save them from breakdown while outside in the newspapers and on TV witches gibber and in Iceland Palin compares snow machines and bones up on energy policy.

Republican Vandals Invited to Loot the Treasury

For the 50 years of my adult life I have heard, jaws agape, that Capitalism creates democracy, girds personal freedoms, demonstrates the unwavering effects of something called The Market, which corrects itself and solves all human problems except, well, maybe, poverty. (After all, doesn’t God ordain who shall surfeit and who starve for their sins?)

I kenned that like Religion, Capitalism is an excuse peddled by ruling classes to justify what they must do to remain in power. Put another way, Capitalism and the Market are abstractions to cloak greed. They are not the only such–Communism is another, Socialism is still another. In human hands, as opposed to the hands of the angels, all such systems grind away, under a cloud of lies, to distribute wealth in such a way that it ends up mainly in the pokes of a small number who use it to control the rest of us.

Yes, to keep the peasants from sharpening their sickles before they take to the streets, some shekels must trickle down to keep us underlings in bread and amusements, nowhere more so now than the United States where, until lately, Mammon provided his skilled devotees with wealth never before dreamt of.

But, alas, the golf-club regulars who run Wall Street and related gambling dens have so lied and cheated not only the lower orders but, inevitably, each other that now, thanks to a Republican regime representing the rich, they howl that to avoid disaster they must loot the Treasury to pay for their mistakes.

The President and his Secretary of the Treasury, himself until recently one of Wall Street’s most successful three-card monte dealers, have jettisoned all the conservative crap about the Market Correcting Itself and have sashayed forward in panic, crying the world will end unless the taxpayers give to Wall Street the biggest hunk of boodle ever grabbed in history with permission.

If the nation survives this monetary blooding, we and our offspring unto untold generations enjoy the pleasure of paying off this “legal” debt.

In an world where now and then justice occurs, such rapine of the public’s future might stir a decent public uprising, to decorate light poles with tarred and feathered bankers.

But no, the mainstream press and the Congress have prostrated themselves to the untested notion that if we let Wall Street banks fail the world will end. Neither reporters and editors nor members of Congress truly understand what’s going on and think we all must bow to the cries of anguish emanating from a White House that has showed unerring talent for lying, ignorance and error.

Republicans in Congress of course feed off the rich and support anything that resuscitates their patrons. Democrats, alas, know that if they do not go along with the Republican skin game and the economy coughs and wheezes, Republicans will blame them in these final days of endless presidential and congressional politics. So Democrats drop their pants to pleasure their conservative colleagues.

Our two presidential candidates have lashed themselves to the panic rocket. Obama agrees to the bailout, even though, if he becomes president, he won’t find a pfennig to spend for the social and economic reforms the country cries for.

As for McCain, my God, when he is not sounding like a high-school sophomore babbling about Americanism to the American Legion, he mutters like the village idiot. Yep, bail out the banks will all the money we can beg, borrow, steal or, worse, print; cut taxes on the rich and expand our wars against the infidels.

(War, finally, is cheaper than something else in American government. The bank bailout will cost more in a few seconds than wars have cost since the dunderhead now in the White House ordered our troops to attack Iraq five years ago. Of course, like the ancient Romans, we may find that we’re broke and we can’t afford to lift a sword anywhere against anybody.)

Yes, the politician mutter: Don’t let the bank boys pay themselves big salaries while they haul all those sacks of bucks out of the Treasury. Don’t pay any more to each than to support four or five families while in return they hand us all the failed mortgages they dreamed up or bought in hopes they could peddle them off to greater fools.

Well, the Greater Fools now are us, powerless citizens, who can only watch and groan while the mighty plunder our country.

Lay That Pistol Down, Babe, Lay That Pistol Down

John McCain’s choosing Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate proves that the American way to choose a backup president is broken.

Palin, as anyone with brain cells understands, would amount to a disaster were the actuary tables to kick in once McCain is elected president and suddenly he becomes a stiff eligible for a dandy funeral parade along Pennsylvania Avenue.

Ms. Palin has shown herself to be an unaccomplished liar (she had the hots for the Bridge to Nowhere until Congress severed the funding from it), vindictive (watch out former brother-in-law) and as ignorant about national affairs, international affairs and science as one can be and still admit to being an adult.

McCain and she claim that knowledge of Russian affairs steeps her since on a very rare clear day one can see Russia from the northwest tip of Alaska about 500 miles from where Palin lives and over 1,000 miles from where Palin is supposed to work as governor of Alaska. (Juneau is a place she avoids since she can’t draw state per diem for living in the governor’s mansion whereas she gets paid extra by the state for every night she snoozes at home in Wasilla, one of the suburban wonders of the Western World.)

Neither McCain nor Palin mention whether it takes only one glance across the Bering Strait at a distant form on the horizon to become expert on what’s happening in the Kremlin or whether constant exposure to the view increases one’s knowledge. In fact, Palin hasn’t yet admitted that she has ever seen the Russian mainland, apparently because no reporters have had the wit to ask. I lean to the constant-experience view, and believe that Native men, women and children living at Pt. Hope AK and looking across the strait toward Kamchatka are probably America’s leading experts on Russian affairs.

Palin has had a college education but as anyone knows who has endured the U.S. educational system, having a college education doesn’t mean you know anything about much, and probably means you know little at all about science.

Until the press spotlight hit her the other night, Palin pablumed to whoever would listen that humans have nothing to do with global warming, if global warming exists, and if it does exist and drowns all the polar bears, that’s OK with her because trying to save polar bears (or any other arctic creature dependent on ice) would irritate the Oil Boys, on whom her state depends for its socialistic economy of running on oil revenues (no state property, sales or income taxes anymore and most towns also have gotten rid of taxes, to depend on handouts from the state treasury).

She also touts creationism as something to be taught in schools, but has reserved saying a word yet in praise of astrology, palmistry or reading skull bumps for glimpses of the future.

She and McCain caterwaul about her using her persuasive skills as governor to get a pipeline underway to carry natural gas from the oil field at Prudhoe Bay down through Canada’s Yukon Territory, British Columbia and Alberta to markets in the U.S. Midwest.

The problem? Well, the Prudhoe Oil companies want a different pipeline and haven’t said whether they’ll peddle gas to such a competing pipeline that certainly will never be built without contracts in hand from the oil companies.

And again because no one seems to have brains enough to ask, the Canadian territorial, provincial and national governments so far haven’t even been invited to Palin’s pipeline party. Since her pipeline won’t travel one inch over Canadian territory without their permissions, the plain fact remains that Palin’s pipeline right now is a pipe dream.

By picking Palin, McCain got what he wanted: A public-relations coup and a small rocket up his political codpiece that he prays will boost him to the presidency.

By so choosing, McCain hollers that he doesn’t give a damn, he’ll do what it takes to get in the White House. And he shows that he doesn’t give a bucket of owl spit for whether, if he kicks off in the office he covets, his successor will have any talents at all for running not just this nation but for preserving the western democracies.

Ms. Palin, after all, says we’ll have to kick the Russian bear in the crotch if it gets uppity again about countries on its borders, like Georgia, run by a guy who has just found out the hard way what Palin, as an Alaskan, should know: Let sleeping bears lie if they have a den full of nuclear bombs.

Thanks to McCain’s cynical choice of Alaska's Pistol Packin’ Mama for his #2, it’s obvious the Constitution needs to be amended again on how to choose a vice president, so that another impetuous fool doesn't foist yet a worse fool on us and the world.

The New Yorker Finally Delights the Republican Hate Machine

The New Yorker prides itself on being the journalistic voice of the most literate and liberal population in the United States. Long time readers and admirers appreciate that “New Yorker” in the title does not refer to the state, not even to the entirety of New York City for that matter, but to Manhattan and particularly the Upper West Side thereof, where any pigeon poop dropped from on high is likely to hit the tonsure of a self-certified super sophisticate lately arrived from Pocatello with manuscripts of childhood novels clutched under each armpit.

So it surprises when The New Yorker’s editors join hands to take simultaneous pratfalls in public, as they do with the cover of their most recent issue–the cover notoriously showing Barrack Obama in the White House dressed in an Al Queda outfit, his wife lugging an assault gun and dressed as a terrorist, all while Bin Laden gazes down from a picture near a fireplace where the American flag burns.

Satire, says David Remnick, the eminent editor of The New Yorker, satire of commonplace beliefs about the Obamas. Strange all you pressies working for The New York Times and other crudities misunderstand it and think it’s a caricature instead of the Obamas.

But of course Remnick, who gave final approval of the cover and made the decision to run it, is one of the few who see the drawing as satire on the mistaken beliefs of the Great American Unwashed (i.e., those who don’t live in Manhattan).

The mob, alas, sees the cover as, for The New Yorker, a surprising attack on the new liberal savior and his beloved. The Republican Hate Machine is grinding out copies on the net and elsewhere as fast as it can, figuring journalism from the left can’t get any better than this. National Review and Wall Street Journal boys and girls are snorting with joy: Obama and Missus pegged, and by the haughtiest of the haught!

As for the rest of us disheveled in the hinterlands, we can laugh too, but with tears in our eyes, at a joke, a satire that doesn’t work. It was flat in the first place and only worked in The New Yorker’s digs where fresh air is in short supply. What was supposed to be a piece of savage wit, turned out to only half that: Savage. No wit.

At least Remnick should say: Shot the poor booger by mistake. Sorry. Deep regrets, and all that.

Obama Whores for Right Wing Divines

It flabbergasted this morning to read that Barack Obama has taken up whoring for the right-wing divines by announcing he will continue and expand George Bush’s so-called faith-based programs.

Those programs, in case one has been asleep for years, shovel money from the Treasury into the coffers of churches running what they call charities. The aim of this effort is to buy Catholic and evangelical votes. So much for separation of church and state.

What this unconstitutional award of taxpayer funds does, in effect, is to plump up church finances: Money that the federal funds replace Elmer Gantrys of all sorts can now use to recruit the heathens for the Lord.

Many of these church operations make sure those who need food, shelter and other sustenance don’t get any unless they say prayers, sing hymns, speak in tongues, handle rattlesnakes and otherwise profess to be believers. The Catholic groups have been noteworthy in trying to exclude homosexuals from coming on staff.

So suddenly the great liberal, Obama, who has been shunning Moslems as if their very presence might give him AIDs, announces he now leads the Panders Party, thereby joining John McCain, the great maverick who will pull his pants down for any conservative nastiness, including faith-based programs.

It will interest to see if Obama will say, sure, let the Moslems get federal bucks too for their charities (the ones not staffed entirely by FBI agents). I wouldn’t bet on that.

It will also interest to see how Obama’s new moving to the right plays out with liberal Democrats. Such still have Ralph Nader to vote for.

At this point Obama is beginning to prove himself just another do-anything-to-win politician. It may be that the only thing that gets liberals to vote for him may be their intense disgust with George Bush and fear that McCain may just a trifle worse than Obama when it comes to selling out.

But the presidential campaign has a long time to run yet. Obama’s sniffing the polls. Who knows what he might endorse next? Overturning legalized abortion? Nuking Iran? Banning gay marriages?

Maybe his campaign slogan should be: Yes We Cant. No apostrophe.

Bring Back That Old-Time Religion

It warms the soul to read laments about the our nation’s wickedness for abandoning the “traditional Christian values, in which this country was founded upon,” to quote a recent letter to my local daily, which prints every signed missive that arrives and that a phone call might verify.

One traditional 18th Century Christian value was slavery. Through silence the Constitution ratified by the 13 states not only sanctioned slavery but also, for apportioning taxes and congressional representation, graciously counted each slave as three-fifths of a human. This was not just a sop for the South but also for parts of the North, where many such 60-percent persons toiled in bondage.

In the slave colonies fervent divines of most Christian stripes (but not Quaker) preached that God had willed some people to be slaves and others to be slave owners and both should be thankful for it.

The nation’s largest Protestant domination, the Southern Baptists, did not formally give up finding Biblical justification for slavery until 1995.

(They still find Biblical justification for subjugating wives to husbands. It’s no wonder they oppose homosexual marriages, for in those jointures which partner would subjugate the other?)

Indeed, another founding traditional Christian value denied women the right to vote or hold legislative or other high office and in many jurisdictions the right to own property in their own names. Today’s semi-emancipation of women has helped lead us to where we are, ethically speaking.

Yet another 18th Century value was forcing children, often as young as five, to labor in coal and other mines, in factories, on farms, and as indentured servants leased out to strangers, for five and ten-year terms.

When the nation formed, few religious took umbrage at hanging six and seven year olds for picking pockets or stealing bread or at giving them a good skin-stripping flogging before tossing them into prisons to amuse sexually deprived adult felons.

No doubt the reinstitution of all these spiritually salubrious practices would improve our country’s morals.

Certainly Republican candidates and office holders see that. They call frequently for larding the federal and state judiciaries with judges who will uphold the morals of the Founding Fathers (not of no-account Founding Mothers, of course): Slavery, child labor, female bondage and like virtues.

Eight will get you five, when the Republican convention opens, before 15 minutes is up, the keynote speaker will be pounding the podium about the values of the nation in 1787 and how we must go back them; and across the land the heads of the millions of constitutional experts who people this country (most have never read the Constitution and therefore keep a pure mind about it) will bob up and down in agreement before their TV sets.

Bring back the past. Make it our future.

Bush a Felonious Clunk, McClellen Reports

It surprises not that archaeologists now think Stonehenge marks a burial ground for cremated notables of three millennia ago.

The place the only time I viewed it reminded me of several marble orchards I had visited here and there on the West Coast save, perhaps, for a handful of shabbily dressed middle-aged white folks performing incensed Druid rituals in and among the sightseers enduring the rain and wind that sweep Stonehenge.

The archaeologists say they’ve figured out the place was used by worthies with clout because a few objects signifying power have shown up in the holes containing ashes, bone remnants, teeth.

George W. Bush intends to be buried there, not cremated but whole, clutching a symbol of his presidential days, a copy of Mad Magazine.

This news about Stonehenge broke along with reports of White House counterattacks upon the sanity and sense of Scott McClellan, Bush’s former press secretary, whose new book reports that Dr. Goebbels could have profited by taking propaganda lessons from the President, VP Cheney, Carl Rove and other liars.

McClellan offers such tidbits as that Bush told a friend that the parties he used to attend were so wild he couldn’t remember whether he had snorted cocaine and that Bush admitted in private that he had authorized leaking the name of Valerie Wilson, an undercover CIA agent, to the press, as a way of getting back her husband.

Such leaking is a felony under federal law. No one took a direct fall for the leak. But Bush and Cheney generously let I. Lewis Libby Jr., Cheney’s right hand, go to prison for lying to FBI agents and a grand jury investigating the crime. Betting’s strong that Bush will pardon Libby, the good soldier but bad liar, before Bush leaves the White House next January.

Naturally these worthies and their flunkies now attack McClellan as a nut case for speaking of these family matters best left unvoiced, at least in polite Republican circles, where rich white folks dream up ways for poor whites, blacks, Asiatics and Hispanics to get themselves killed in Army uniforms.

They dare not attack McClellan, of course, of having been loony when he fronted for Bush, Cheney and Rove before the whining White House press corps. That would imply that Bush et. al. were lunatics too. So they do the obvious: Go tch-tch that McClellan’s lost his way and is lying about them now to make a few bucks, or worse, to get belly rubs from liberal elitist New York book editors.

Oh, the horror of it! The truth, that is.

New Air Screwum Fares and Fees Announced

Air Screwum today announced new fares and fees for its nationwide services-- prices bound, its officials said, to be copied by the rest of the nation’s domestic airlines.

“We learned from the oil companies that the best way to make money in the airline business is to conspire,” said Jocko Jacks, founder, president, CEO, CFO and CUB (Chief Union Buster) of Air Screwum.

“And the easiest way for airlines to do that, without talking about it other than at cocktail parties, is to rotate being first to raise fares and fees, thus avoiding the possibility of federal price-fixing indictments. Of course so long a Republican sits in the White House there’s no chance of that happening anyway, but it’s better to keep up the practice than lose your skills.”

Jacks said the only way to view the new Air Screwum fares is to go to Screwum.com, where daily fare changes post each morning beginning at 6 a.m. EST.

“Mainly, thanks to the excuse of rising oil prices, we intend to double our fares by the end of summer.”

He also had flunkies at the press conference handout a sheet of new boarding and onboard fees for all tourist-class passengers:

–To check one bag: $50.

–To check on bag with a bomb: $500.

–Each carry-on bag (no bigger than a shaving kit under new rules): $25.

–Each use of flight attendant to cram a carry-on bag into a space too small: $25.

–Each seat with leg room: $50.

–Each aisle seat: $50, no matter with leg room or not.

–Each seat without a fat person sitting next to it: $100.

–Each use of a toilet: $10.

–Each pee in a toilet: $5.

–Each crap in a toilet: $10.

–Each sheet of toilet paper: $1.

–Each use of soap: $1.

–Each towel: $1.

–Each fart, whether in toilet or in seat, as measured by computerized Fart-O-Meters: $2.

–Each cup of water: $5.

–Each cup of coffee: $7.

–Each peanut (individually packaged): $1.

–Each 100-calorie meal: $10.

–Each heart attack: $1,000.

–Each resuscitation by electric shocker : $5,000 (paid in advance by cash or credit card).

–Each resuscitation by mouth-to-mouth: $10,000, in advance.

–Each hijacking: $1 million, paid before boarding, cash only, Euros only or Saudi oil futures.

–Each last will and testament: $10,000 if on standard flight-deck forms.

–Each in-flight prayer: $50, if Christian; $1 million if Moslem or other.

–Each drink of hard liquor: (Please ask attendants for daily price, minimum $15).

“There are other fees we’ve had to raise to keep ourselves solvent and to keep fuel tanks full enough to get each flight to an airport, even if it’s not the one you want,” Jacks said.

He said there will no cost for sitting for hours on a delayed flight. “We looked at that,” he said, “but couldn’t come up with a good figure for each breath of stale air. We will be charging in the future, though, for each rage by passengers crazed by claustrophobia, high temperatures, lack of air, water and toilets.”

“People make a lot out of little things,” Jack said, “an each attendant they beat up costs us money. So we’re going to have to charge for that.”

Air Screwum’s stock price advanced 40 percent today on Wall Street upon Jacks’ announcement.

McBush Sees Victory in Bottom of Teacup

John McBush McCain with a prescience unknown in the histories of statesmanship predicts the U.S. war in Iraq will end with victory in 2013–implicity, at the beginning of his second term as president, after a first term impressing the Iraqi rebels with how tough he is and by extension how tough the U.S. Army can become.

McBush’s reading of the of the bottom of his cup of Orange Pekoe refreshes. Most actual or would-be leaders–witness the man McBush wishes to become–predict wars, at their beginnings, to be over in a few days or months, with their side victorious. All of the leading brains of Europe knew in August 1914 the little spat between the Austrians and Germans and the Serbs, French and English and Russians would see the their troops staging victory parades just as Santa Claus or Father Christmas made his next appearance.

But McBush fought his war in Vietnam, where it took the Vietnamese six years to kick our asses out of their country. On no evidence whatever except the successful stubbornness of several of the sides in the Iraqi religious civil war, McBush hunches that this little dustup ruining his nation’s military forces and treasury and currency and economy may last a little longer–four more years than our defeat in Vietnam.

So far none of the press I’ve read has bothered to see what other sages say about McBush’s reading of the omens. After all, he is either a soothsayer or a fool and either eminently prepares him to lead this great nation where 70 percent of the population routinely report to strangers polling on the phone that they expect Satan to tapdance on the street corners and pitchfork passing souls into the eternal fires.

McBush Sucks for Monarchists' Votes

Sen. John (McBush) McCain spent May 13 near Seattle meeting with a group of superannuated local Republicans who still mumble lip service to the environment, though in practice for the past 20 years their efforts for the environment have chiefly been silence and sometimes error and even deliberate attack.

The session was closed to the public, for reasons neither major Seattle paper nor Associated Press made clear.

When reporters did question McCain none apparently managed to ask him why environmental organizations rank McCain’s efforts for the environment well below 40 percent.

Nor apparently did anyone weasel in a query about McCain’s recent harangue about “activist judges,” a Republican and otherwise reactionary cliche about judges who render opinions based on law that run afoul of conservative dogmas–such as, for instance, saying prisoners held by the U.S. must be afforded the Constitutional privilege of being able to have lawyers and be able to question witnesses. Oh, the horror of it! Especially since 60 percent of federal judges now sitting are Republicans, appointed by such Marxists as Ronald Reagan, George Bush I and George Bush II.

McBush made his pro-forma howl about federal judges to ear-suck votes from the many monarchists of the right who slaver to give the President, provided he’s Republican, the powers of Roman emperor. (What they will do when a Democratic president claims the same powers I dare not think: Fall on their martini glasses probably.)

Even when McBush made his announcement, no reporters then bothered to ask McBush whether he would appoint another Catholic to the Supreme Court, where five Catholics–Alito, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas-- now make up the conservative majority and usually strain the law through eyes of good Catholic boys who memorized their catechisms and think the present mob of self-annoited eunuchs in the Vatican can have nothing but the purest thoughts.

McBush so far has enjoyed a pleasant life with the pressies who follow him around, chiefly, by all accounts, because he likes to sit down with reporters to B.S. and have a snort, two things reporters love because it (A) makes them feel important, (B) may provide a news story with a new lead and (C) because in good conscience they may put the booze on their expense accounts.

Unfortunately, all that denies the rest of us a chance to see what McBush says when he has to answer an intelligent, hard-ass question and so reveal the qualities of mind and character he wants to elevate into the Oval Office, where he can snooze away his latter years, interrupted only when the Vice President comes by daily to take his pulse and blood pressure.

Is the Rev. Wright Wrong? Only Sometimes.

Over half of the U.S. voting-age population never lived when the federal government and states, counties and localities enforced racial discrimination against blacks, Asiatics, native Americans and others not so lucky as to be born white, and against Jews, so dumb as not to be born Christian, preferably Protestant.

They did not see citizens of Japanese descent herded, at bayonet point if need be, into dismal concentration camps in western deserts, put there during the Second World War by members of the stupidly and incorrectly labeled “Greatest Generation.”

They never saw signs in restaurants saying “No Colored Served” and sometime “No Niggers Served.” They never examined the tawdry furnishings, broken blackboards and tattered books (if any) nor inferior beans and other grub ladled up in the cafeterias of segregated schools for blacks in rich Southern and Northern towns.

The whites among them never went forth with children and cameras in hand to look at the body of the latest lynched black swinging in the wind.

They never read the articles in Time, Newsweek and other national magazines mocking the physical and intellectual attainments of people different from the owners and editors, never listened to radio programs mocking nonwhites and Jews or watched films in which all blacks, often portrayed by white actors, were clowns or crooks, and all Indians, usually played by white actors, were meant to be shot or sworded by some noble white guy, like John Wayne, who never served in the military.

During the war of the Greatest Generation, the American military was segregated and remained so until Harry Truman, as commander in chief, ordered integration–an order detested and often disobeyed by the generals and admirals of the Greatest Generation, especially the admirals.

What changed all that, somewhat? Chiefly the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of Lyndon Johnson’s many great legislative achievements, which couldn’t have come about had television not shown on the evening news police whipping, gassing, clubbing and whipping black men, women and children marching for their rights.

Many of us, however, still remember all of those injustices and have seen many injustices continue since 1964, not least of which remains the segregation of schools, now blessed by the Five Catholic majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Is it any wonder someone like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who did see and who did experience the racial prejudices and cruelties that exist to this day in America the Beautiful (for White Folks), might sail over the edge in his late years?

Is Wright wrong to say that America gets attacked because of injustices it has inflicted on dark-skinned people around the world? Hardly. All one has to do is read a good history of the CIA–Tim Weiner’s “Legacy of Ashes,” for example–to know that noble agency spends most of its time and wads of our money supporting tyrants and dictators ruling over and terrorizing people of dusky hue.

Is Wright wrong to say “God, damn America?” Note the comma. Does God in theory support all our wars? Note we’ve fought all of our recent wars against people of color other than white. Such people around the world and in the U.S. appreciate keenly that the country that preens itself as being the home of the brave and the land of the free spends its treasure and blood trying to make sure, in the name of oil and bananas, that many people never become free of kings and other tyrants.

Yes, Wright is wrong, very wrong, about AIDS. But note that many evangelical white preachers still yawp on the TV and radio that God created AIDS to give homosexuals hell on earth.

And, yes, Wright is a foolish old man–foolish to pull his pants down in public for the press to heehaw and for the many racists still among us to holler as a good reason for not voting for Barrack Obama.

Obama is trying to make the best of bad things–his former preacher slipping over the edge and the obvious message that deep in their hearts many whites fear and detest blacks and will not vote one.

Hilary Clinton is making the best of a bad thing–this racist backlash that may cause many blacks, main supporters of the Democratic Party, to refuse to vote for her if she beats Obama for the Democrats’ presidential nomination.

And can we expect the Republicans, who have deliberately practiced racist politics for the past 30 years, not to poke up racist fears if Obama does get the nomination? Hardly. They will try to liquidate him by parading Wright and any other black they can mock or make fearsome. That’s part of the standard Republican playbook. And merely a reflection of the American way, after all.

Age of Consent a Slippery Concept in Texas

When it comes to what’s the legal age of consent for having sex, whether you’re committing a local felony or just enjoying legal lubricious fun depends on what state or country you’re in.

Texas now puts the age of consent for sex and for marriage at 17. Just a few years back Texans lived with 16 for consent. But the Texas Legislature raised it to 17, it’s said because Texas authorities wanted to snare themselves a passel of adult members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, whose polygamous presence upset nearby boondocks Baptists.

Next door in Arkansas you can consent to canoodle at 14, for getting hitched, at 16.

(See http://www.avert.org/aofconsent.htm for a worldwide and U.S. rundown of legal consent ages in hither and yon.)

The Fundamentalist Church guys, who apparently screw every young thing that comes along, plainly aren’t too smart. If they’d set up in Arkansas they’d have given themselves three extra years of legal joy–assuming they delayed the pretense of marriage.

However, they didn’t. Now Texas has 462 of their kids in custody while Child Protective Services there (as in most states, fumble but not humble prone) tries to figure out which child is whose and when did the birth mothers actually conceive and undergo a marriage, probably polygamous and therefore also illegal. All this after an armed raid obviously aimed to jug the males involved and so bust up the community disturbing to the orthodox.

No one should tolerate sex forced on anyone, and if Texas can prove that many of the girls had no choice but to “marry” their uncles or the lecher next door a few minutes before being thrown down on a nearby bed, then Texas should apply its rape laws to those who did the dirty deeds. In prison they will learn what rape is like.

Equally, no one should tolerate that anyone is forced to marry once, much less 10 or 15 times, as may be the case with this particular specimen of the insanity of religion. That’s involuntary servitude no matter how you dice it–slavery.

Finally, there has to be a cutoff age enforced by law for consensual sex, with sex with any person under that age being statutory rape–a term much more precise that the current “child abuse.”

It escapes me, however, why willing polygamous marriages among consenting adults are illegal.
It’s quite legal now for 15 women above the age of consent to wive without benefit of marriage with a likewise consenting man and, though unknown, for 15 men to husband one woman. It’s exhausting but not felonious.

The only argument I can reckon against the civil issuance of multiple marriage licenses is clerical convenience. But now with computers surely the state can keep track of one man with his 15 wives.

The religious aspect is plain. If a church says we allow only one marriage at a time, then that’s that for that church’s blessing. But if as with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints a theology says as many marriages as you can service, then why should that be outlawed so long as the brides and grooms are adults who volunteer for that miraculous state? Why is that view less upright than that of the Holly Rollers next door who say that you can have only one marriage at a time but as many as you want so long as you divorce in between, that is, practice serial polygamy?

If Texas can prove females of any age were forced to marry and forced to have sex, then the state should hoosegow everyone involved for such rapes and slavery.

But I fear that’s only a secondary aim, that the first aim is rub out a deviant religion that upsets other godly folk. And that’s wrong.

Military Whores "Analyze" War News for Us

On Sunday, April 20, David Barstow of The New York Times unleashed his lengthy investigative piece showing that most of the “military analysts” on national TV and radio–retired generals and admirals, with a sprinkling of colonels and captains-- are whores for the Pentagon and the Bush administration.

Instead of giving viewers and listeners and their sometime employers on the networks unvarnished opinions about what is going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, they dish out propaganda prepped for them or prodded for them by Pentagon and White House flacks and political ops.
Many of these gents–no women among them yet–earn $1,000 a pop for appearing on “Meet the Press” and like thumbsucking and news programs.

Beyond that, many turn out to be top officials, often recently hired, of such companies as Blackwater which supply goods and services –often shoddy--to the military at high prices. Some even earn a few hundred thousand now and then as consultants to other companies also pushing and shoving to peddle their skills and manufactures to the Pentagon at inflated prices.

Few of these “analysts” wish to offend former colleagues in the high-ranking officers’ corps or to offend the Secretary of Defense and his lackeys, for fear they will find themselves cut off from the sweet, inside talk that gilds their expertise or, worse, find their companies cut off from sucking on one of Uncle Sam’s sweet money tits.

None of this should surprise, especially not surprise anyone with experience with the military. Used to giving orders, these hookers are also used to taking them. To get to where they had been with eagles and stars on their shoulders, they also had to be political. It is, after all, the current president who makes one a general or admiral in the first place (with the OK of Congress of course, something rarely withheld). And it is a secretary of defense who convinces a president to make your nomination in the first place. You don’t get to be a general or admiral by making waves against the establishment.

The saddest thing Barstow reports is the lack of interest and investigation on the part of the national news machines about whether their hired experts in fact are delivering the straight skinny instead of warmed-over pap from the military propaganda kitchens. Indeed, one fierce news outfit, CNN, refused to even talk to Barstow about their military toy boys. That tells me more about CNN that I wished to know. So much for that channel’s pretense to cover news. It does better trying to cover up its own stained pants.

President Dwight Eisenhower, in his valedictory speech to the nation, warned about the growing power of the military-industrial complex.

Now we should worry about the parasitical power of the military-TVNews complex, complete with house doxies pretending to be men of virtue.

Bush Finally Acts to Curb Global Warming: No Farts

George W. Bush today called upon the nation to stop farting by 2025 and so stop the emission of one of the worst greenhouse gases causing global warming: Methane.

“Every American, every day, blows out a liter or more of methane from his or her rear,” the president said in a speech in the White House Rose Garden.

“I’m today sending Congress a bill to cause the immediate tapering off of this flatus and outlaw it entirely, with criminal penalties by 2025 that will plug up this threat, when I’ll probably be dead from old age.”

For the first time acknowledging that global warming might cause a trifle of harm, the president also called for an income-tax break for every citizen who daily uses Beano. Beano stock today soared by 20 percent before the stock market closed and another 15 percent once the market’s final bell had rung. Until today Beano stock sold mainly to vegetarian mutual funds.

Bush, taking questions from reporters after his five-minute talk, said “as I speak there are 304 million Americans popping methane into the atmosphere. That’s a lot of methane. And we’re adding five persons every minute to our population, many of them from cultures that eat a lot of beans. It’s not hard to sniff a national emergency here.”

Though an outspoken believer that the Christian God created human beings in God’s own image on day one, the president deflected questions about whether his call for eventual criminal penalties against breaking wind runs counter to holy writ.

“I recognize there’s a good argument that farting is natural and necessary, heavenly. But it’s not as good as the arguments for the unrestricted burning of coal and oil and natural gas to light our houses and move our cars. God ordained those too.”

The Rev. Dooby Norwhale of Evangelicals Against Science said the president “is being mislead by other Ivy Leaguers on his staff, elitists. Global warming not exist. And if it did, it could not be stopped because God wanted it. Farting is a God-given right and necessity.”

Truckles Hortense of the Sierra Club said “it’s good Bush finally acts to curb what he has long denied even existed. I, for one, think we could do better though by piping our anal emissions into jars, for burning in stoves and fireplaces. We could set up special jars in our homes and offices and schools.”

Democratic leaders of Congress said they would withhold comment until they actually had a bill to read from the White House. “We don’t mind passing anything that won’t take effect until 2025,” one said. “But we do mind constraining Americans from a practice all indulge from birth. Expect long and serious hearings on this.”

Bush mentioned that his call for a ban on beans has the support of the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association. “Anything that will sell more beef is a good thing,” he said. The Cattlemen’s Association did not respond to repeated press telephone calls for comment.

Roscoe Ripweather of the American Bean Grower’s Association called the president’s call for a ban on beans “a poof that will below away in the wind. He’s truckling to the coal companies and the tree huggers and other cowboys. The right to fart is implicit in the Constitution. We’ll go to the Supreme Court on this if we have to. The Catholic majority there will recognize that once you ban farts you’ll ban incense next.”

The War Is Going Fine--All Over Again

I have lived long enough to experience as an adult commanding generals of U.S. foreign wars yammering about how, despite all evidence to the contrary, the war is going well and we will win it if the nation just pours more men and money and blood into the battle.

The first such commander was Gen. Douglas MacArthur, a vainglorious strut in command of U.N. (read mainly U.S. and South Korean) forces during the Korean War that President Harry Truman, a Democrat, committed American forces to out of military and diplomatic necessity.

When those forces under MacArthur finally staved off the invasion by Communist North Koreans, the Chinese joined in, fell upon the Americans and other forces and damn near wiped them out until MacArthur’s generals held them to stalemate.

Alas, that wasn’t good enough for MacArthur, who wanted to take the war into China (a few nuclear bombs here and there to tonic the Chinese) and couldn’t shut up about it, despite Truman’s orders for MacArthur to sew his tongue to his lips. Truman fired him, creating a great political stew while the stalemate went on.

It took a better and smarter general, Dwight Eisenhower, once MacArthur’s aide, to get himself elected president on a Republican platform that promised to shut down the Korean War–it was achieving little and costing too much in money and blood.

Our generals running the Vietnam War assured all of us over and over and over that more troops, more planes, more killing and bombing and, of course, more casualties, would let us follow that cliche’–the light at the end of the tunnel–right out into the sunlight of victory.

President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, believed them, until the View Cong and North Vietnamese started whipping us fair and square and angry Americans took to the streets to protest and riot.

Johnson decided not to run for re-election and a petty Republican crook, Richard Nixon, whipped the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, for the presidency because Humphrey couldn’t get his lips and tongue to say: I’m going to bring all our 500,000 troops home. Nixon said that, lied about it, and made the war go on until with Saigon in flames, our ambassador and other staff had to flee town by helicopter as North Vietnamese troops took over the streets.

Now we have Gen. David Petraeus, American commander in Iraq, and Ambassador David Crocker telling senators and the rest of us that George Bush’s war in Iraq is winnable if–guess what–we just continue to blow up dollars and American soldiers there. All the evidence is to the contrary, with Shiites of the government fighting Shiites of the streets, Sunnis blowing up and shooting us and Shiites when they can, the country’s civilians, including kids, daily dying violently from the war and suicide bombs.

As for Bush himself, he fiddles while Baghdad explodes. No American can leave the so-called Green Zone, our fortress under mortar siege there, to walk the streets of Baghdad one inch without getting shot or bombed.

Worse, Sen. John McCain finds that all jolly; and if he’s elected president, by God, he’ll keep us there fighting for another 100 years; no pansy he. In effect, he already pledges himself to be Bushette and a worse fool (something I never thought possible), because McCain should know better.

As for the Democrats, neither Sens. Hilary Clinton nor Barack Obama can bring themselves to say if I’m elected president I’m withdrawing our Army immediately–no, both maunder about phased withdrawals, supportive presences and other garble as they try to avoid the obvious: We’ve been whipped fair and square in a place we should not have come to in the first place and we’d better get our buns out of there before we ruin our Army and bankrupt our nation.

I expect someday, if I live long enough, to read that Iraqis have swarmed and overwhelmed the Green Zone, that Ambassador Crocker fled by helicopter and that General Petraeus has managed withdraw our forces into Kuwait, a maneuver so brilliant and so bloody that he soon will announce he’s running for president on the peace ticket.

It's Not the Price of Gas That's Going Up

Where I live in rural Washington State, gasoline prices edge toward $4 a gallon–a price that a year from now, I suspect, I will look back to with envy.

Naturally, a howl arises across the land for the government to do something: I.e., cause gas prices to drop.

A lesser growl provides a bass continuo for the government to punish the oil companies, or at least squeeze more taxes from them.

This latter aim remains within the realm of the possible. The first aim, to force down gas prices, our government, alas, cannot do.

Why?

Well, to begin with, it’s not that the price of gasoline is going up so much as it is that the value of the dollar is plummeting.

It takes more bucks to buy the same thing, especially something derived in large part from overseas. Who can blame Saudi princes for nominally demanding more anemic (and bleeding) bucks in order to maintain their standards for living lavishly? And to have enough of our bucks left to give to Arab terrorist organizations to use against us and any Arab regime that refuses to kiss the Saudis’ glutes?

Half of our present national debt–call it the national curse upon future generations–derives from the reigns of Presidents Reagan, Bush the First and Bush the Whacker. Whacker indeed has created almost a quarter of our national debt himself with his family-revenge war in Iraq, and still spending.

Since George McBush, the Republican presidential candidate, will continue the Iraq slaughter and futility and thus continue to open arteries on the dollar by spending money the United States must borrow from the Saudis and Chinese and now the Russians, there’s no chance if he’s elected for the dollar to recover. No, it will continue to expire and the price of everything from abroad, but especially oil and thus such derivatives as gasoline, will continue shooting for the stars.

Republican and Libertarian No-Nothings squawk that opening Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Range to drilling will oil away our problems with new supply and so dampen price.

Pure B.S. Even if it were smart to drill the range and bump off the caribou and bears and other critters there, and it’s not, oil from ANWR would not come into production for eight years. At best, according to estimates even from the oil companies, it might make up a quarter of America’s oil thirst.

But that implies the oil so produced would come to the United States. Why should it? Right now half of the oil now produced in Alaska ends up in Japan and other parts of Asia. Oil goes where people pay the most–or the most convenient--price for it. The Chinese have already started to shoulder us worthy Americans to the side in oil bidding, and the American companies producing the oil overseas have reveled in joy to sell crude to them. I hunch the Chinese would hustle just as hard for new oil from Alaska. Why not?

Since the cost of oil and its products goes through our domestic economy like a gulp of castor oil–the greater the cost, the greater our spasms–I expect to be paying $5 a gallon soon for regular. Government won’t be able to do anything about it except moan and borrow more dough from, well, if not our enemies, our competitors and certainly not our friends. Pray they don’t stop buying U.S. Treasury notes.

A Campaign Too Far--Far, Far Too Far

It shudders the soul to think that two years from now we Americans will flagellate ourselves with another presidential election the length of the one now on. Or worse, discover that a year from now another presidential election has begun complete with candidates good, bad and ninnies rasping our nerves with campaign gabble and shenanigans for the 2012 balloting.

We have brought the masochistic delights of the present campaign upon ourselves by not having a national primary–one primary, let’s say for argument’s sake. on the Tuesday after Labor Day.

If the candidates want to start stumping the nation two years before that, let them. Who cares, until the one and only primary pends? Some fool pounding on the doors of TV stations and newspaper editors and filling the internet with elect-me piffle 24 months ahead of time will be lucky to draw audiences of winos by serving free lunches along with the election pitches
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Further, we won’t have the yawners we have now of candidates picking the scabs of each other’s past: Your minister ain’t polite or your husband ain’t nice about skin color, and nah-nah-nah and so forth.

Candidates know the pressies cursed to follow them around under the present system are bored witless by the campaign speech or speeches. After all, what new can the news wretches write to placate their bosses about a speech they’ve heard and reported a dozen times before? That’s why candidates, generally through henchmen and women, toss bits of meat to the reporters, meat ripped from an opponent’s hide: Anything to stay in the news.

A set primary in the election-year fall would not stop candidates from dropping flapping canards, but it would at least shorten the suffering of the rest of us, who have to listen and read and kick the snivels, cavils and whispers out of our way.

It might also spare us the ennui of the modern political conventions by making them more useless than they are now. That alone justifies a national primary.

At Least the Romans Knew Caligula Was Nuts

The day after the 4,000th U.S. military death in Iraq, I listened to George W. Bush maunder about how these dead soldiers had died out of patriotism for the “honor” of the United States.

I almost pulled off the highway in disbelief. I had just realized that any politician–especially a politician who had dodged active military service-- saying something so trivial, so stupid and so callous must truly be delusional.

Then it occurred to me that’s probably the case with Bush: He's more nuts than ancient Rome’s Caligula. At least with Caligula his contemporaries could see the emperor needed to be in a looney bin.

Not so with Bush. He appears, superficially, to be just another country-club Republican jock who never evidences having read a book, never evidences empathy with the poor, never evidences having tried to think of anything but himself and his next pleasures.

Alas, in Bush’s case, that pleasure flows from pretending to be President of the United States. He actually can find profound the war advice of his vice president, Richard Cheney, who spurned wearing his country’s uniform. What do Cheney and Bush know about honor, except to mouth the word to palliate the survivors of the dead soldiers?

One grants that Bush’s acting works. The citizenry elected him twice. As the old Romans used to say, the voice of the people is the voice of God. So Bush must be deluding the Old Republican in the Sky too. By Allah, that's hard to contemplate.

Bank Robbery or What the Fed Is Helping the Banks Do to Us

Ever since big Republican bankers began writhing and howling because of all the house mortgages going belly up across the land, the great minds of the world of finance have been trying to figure how to save their asses from being fried for all the bad loans they enticed the ignorant into signing in order to finance four walls and a roof.

Their answer–or least a main one of them–is loot the U.S. Treasury, itself a vault that if it didn’t have the power to print money and government bonds would be bankrupt, thanks to the drunken spending of the Bush Administration on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

How do bankers loot? First they have to convince fellow bankers sitting on the board of the Federal Reserve that if the Fed doesn’t make money cheaper for the banks to borrow from the Treasury, then the whole economy will collapse. It’s not as if such convincing takes place in public meetings. Nay, it occurs over lunches, cocktails and dinners, where the rich among us whisper of those terrible dangers that might happen if a new Depressions starts: Reform! Revolution! And worse, or maybe the same thing, Democrats owning the White House and Congress.

Given such fears voiced by old school chums and business buddies, the Fed governors then lower the interest rates that banks can borrow at, now down about 3 percent. In the next day or two that may go lower.

Can an ordinary citizen or even a business or General Motors borrow at the Fed prime rate? No.

So the big banks borrow the money low and lend it high, usually 100 percent or more higher, for mortgages, business loans, automobiles.

But better yet these days, there are credit cards. Yes, Bank of America may borrow at 3 percent and lend it to you in a risky fashion, via credit card, for upwards of 30 percent.

Granting the spread in interest rates between what a big bank can borrow at and what it can loan at, one might think the riches pouring in the door might make major banks what they are supposed to be, conservative. Yes, their officers are conservative, but only in politics. The easy greed fostered by the Bush Administration has washed away until lately all their concerns about bad loans.

It’s been come in suckers, sign here on this dandy mortgage that will double your monthly payments in three years. And then we’ll bundle this risky paper under some fancy name and sells of it to your betters.

Read the upcoming news stories. Read about how the Fed will tell the bankers to back semis up to the Treasury doors to load up with $1,000 bills. Read a few days later how the bankers will cry, it’s not enough! Lower interest rates again! Sell more federal bonds to the stupid Chinese and give us the dough! We’ll love you for it! And so will the children yet unborn who will be paying off those bonds 50 years hence. What do you care? You’ll be dead!

The American Way: When You Can't Swindle, Bitch

When Boeing discovered that it couldn’t swindle its way into receiving the Air Force’s $100 billion contract to build the Air Force a new fleet of aerial refueling tankers, Boeing then offered a plane clearly deficient in size and capacity (but not price) to the Airbus-based plane that Northrop-Grumman-EADS tendered in bidding that became open to that company only after Boeing’s efforts to suborn Air Force officials withered under public scrutiny and punishment.

Now Boeing, its unions and Washington State members of Congress squawk with surprise that Air Force generals could see that the Airbus ship offers a better deal to the service and to U.S. taxpayers.

Though Northrop-Grumman-EADS will assemble the tankers in a plant yet to be built in Mobile, AL, the howls of surprise come wrapped in Old Glory, with plaints that a U.S. military plane should be built in the U.S. and not in perfidious France.

Boeing never has voiced such qualms about civilian airliners. Big chunks of Boeing’s airliners are built overseas by foreign companies, then airlifted to the U.S. for assembly here.

Northrop-Grumman-EADS is only flying the same construction route Boeing pioneered. No wonder Boeing feels euchred.

Worst of all are the hero speeches still echoing in Congress about the need to investigate the Air Force’s decision–speeches that ignore that the contract, finally, was up for bid, that there were two bidders and one of them won. What’s the surprise here, except to raise false clamor?

Boeing yelps that Airbus is subsidized. Well, Boeing is subsidized. It hardly pays any taxes in Washington and Kansas, where it assembles planes, it hardly pays any federal taxes, it gets exceedingly cheap loans, pollutes hell out of the land and streams with hardly an official soul offering a mew, and until lately was subsidized by getting favorable treatment on winning contracts.

For me it would be pleasant if someday the manufacturers who hymn most loudly about the virtues of capitalism and free trade might get brave enough to practice same.

Henry the 5th at Agincourt He Ain't

Major media in the U.S. and the U.K. have been sniffing each other’s arm pits about the ethics of sitting on the story that Prince Hal was on duty with British forces in Afghanistan.

While so distracted about the morality of not telling the world the prince was there waiting to be kidnaped by the Taliban, newsies have missed the bigger story: That the prince’s withdrawal appeared on its face to be a great, staged propaganda coup for the British government, army and royal family.

What did the world see? We saw the prince as a second lieutenant (A) commanding a tank, (B) firing a heavy machine gun from a bunker, ( C) being jolly with the troops, (D) eating bully beef from a mess cup, (E) talking about how he would rather stay with his troops but. . ., (F) turning in his battle gear, (G) boarding a big transport and (H) arriving back in dear old England to be met by his grandpa while his father, the Prince of Wales, yachts in the Caribbean.

So what’s wrong with all that?

Well, if you’re not a trained tank commander, you don’t command a tank, and just sitting in one with battle gear on doesn’t make you qualified to order a tank hither and yon. If you’re an officer, you don’t hunker into a bunker or anywhere else except under extreme duress to fire a heavy machine gun. That’s work for experts too.

As it happens the prince’s military speciality so far is battlefield communications, not a bad thing, but nothing much heroic about it.

So all the TV coverage–allowed once the prince was back rattling around his home castle–to my eye seemed set up, to garner good press. And good press it was. Excellent press, though it had little to do with reality. It showed the prince as a brave soul, it showed Americans that Brits, even the most noble, are doing their part in Afghanistan, which for several hundred years has thrown the English out on their duffs. And for the British it made their army and their government look good. Nothing to complain about.

As for sitting on the story of the prince’s presence where he might get bumped off or beheaded, no one has ever said the British press can’t lick spittle with the best of them, especially for the best of them (by rank). As for the American press, shame on those who knew and kept quiet and yea for whoever leaked the story to the net. And yippee for the British Army press officers: Now there are warriors who know how to do their job.

McBush Raising Bush Up From the Dead

No matter whether Clinton or Obama receives the Democrats’ blessing to hoist the party’s banner in the character war to become president, John McBush will offer the Democrats one major issue to embrace or to avoid: War.
McBush, also known as McCain, now acts as Jesus to G.W. Bush’s Lazarus. Bush started and intends to continue the stupid, unnecessary and morally and financially bankrupting war in Iraq. So does McBush.
Bush whines and wheedles to continue tax cuts for the rich and tax increases for the poor, in order, among other things, to repay his betters and bettors for their support for his disastrous foreign policy. We forget that the rich not only are getting giant cash backs, as it were, from the government in not having to pay much in the way of taxes; they also are receiving from their disciple’s hand the environment that allows them to make oodles of more money. That environment boils down to letting them, in the form of their banks, borrow dollars via the Federal Reserve at low interest and lend it at high interest to the rest of us, often through such come-ons and deceptions as having us take out mortgages that balloon the interest into the sky after a couple of years and as having us pay bills with the credit cards they issue at rates that would have embarrassed a Medici.
McBush accepts all of this, want to continue it, and indeed, maybe bring on another war, with Iran. Like all who formed their character as military officers, McBush is, while pleasant, not too swift under the brain pan and sees the world as something to be tamed with pistols and whips.
That means Obama or Clinton have to say what they intend to do toward our wars ongoing in Iraq and Afghanistan and whether they are so stupid as to pick a fight with the Iranians, folks who over the past three thousand years have proved themselves stubborn and fierce and united when no matter how much they may hate each other they perceive their unique culture under attack. They are, in fact, very much like us when it comes to tribal unification in the face of the foreign attacker: Unthinking and belligerent.
Obama has less of a problem here than Clinton. He never voted for the Iraq mistake and has sedulously avoided votes on such humble matters as extending the military budget. Clinton, alas, has hedged war and peace from the start of her efforts to become president by becoming a U.S. senator first. She voted for to war on Iraq and has voted to support Bush’s constant repairs to Congress for more money–money that the Treasury borrows from the Chinese, Saudis and other pals of ours.
Even so, McBush, by running as Bush Redux, offers both his wattles. The only question is which has the courage to attack tooth and nail. In that, I bet on Obama. He’s not impressed by old warriors and has learned that millions of other Americans want him to revolutionize the country. Clinton, I fear, is still figuring that out and doesn’t seem to have much stomach for upending the established order.

Obama Surfs the Wave of Discontent

Obama has fate going for him: Despite no Obama organization operating or being obvious in the six rural Democratic precincts I coordinated for Washington State’s caucuses on February 9, the Democrats assembled went for Obama roughly 65 to 35 percent. I hasten to add no Clinton organization manifested itself either in this area where resolutions for consideration by the national party beg for an end to gun control while begging for an end to the war. (A number of boys in these parts opted for the Army or Marines rather than calked boots, chainsaws and hard hats in the evergreen woods, and have come home from Iraq in wooden caskets, with a flag for their folks as a souvenir.)

Obama is surfing a great wave of discontent in the U.S. People don't just want change. They want new. And they want it now. Obama is the only personification, the only voice of that desire. I voted for him, but not because he has any philosophical depth deeper than a sheet of copy paper but because I'm weary of the establishment. I'm willing to support him, but no one should ask me to outline his policies or ideas, because I haven't experienced any of those yet.

He is atop the wave right now. Just hope that it's big enough, tall enough and wide enough and powerful enough to deposit him triumphant on the beach. Just hope, in fact, that Osama Bin Laden–the greatest general of the past century–doesn’t score another cheap triumph against innocents in this country just before the election and sweep John McCain with his miliary mien into the White House.

Mitt Hears a Heavenly Message

Mitt Romney got the message, the message that caused him to announce he had to quit campaigning to be the Republican nominee for president.

One can bet the message came the day after last Tuesday, Super Tuesday, and it wasn’t the one the voters posted, which gave John McCain a commanding lead in the Republican race over Romney and Mike Huckabee, the Arkansas quipster whose giggles give fellow evangelicals hot flashes of the Rapture.

No, the message had to come from big Republican donors and players on the Republican National Committee: Quit now, Mitt, and Johnny McCain–if you’re nice and raise some dough for him soon–might make you our nominee for vice-president.

After all, McCain’s the oldest old boy who might become president. If he does and you’re vice president, well, all you have to do is wait and you’ll be president. You can read the actuary tables as well as anybody. His chances of living through a first term are less than one in two. His chances of living through a second term are nearly zip, you know that, Mitt. Be nice, raise some bucks and tell all the Bible and Book of Mormon thumpers and other conservatives supporting you to switch to John. You don’t have to tell them that switching to John might give them you, if they’re patient. They’ll figure that out.

You do that, quit and kiss John, and we’ll crank up Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times and our blogmeisters to start calling for you as vice president and saying you’re proof John’s worthy of the vote of our hardheads.

And, by the way, Mitt, pat John on the rump, and our folks will begin polishing up Mormonism. You want a monument to Joseph Smith, with a fountain maybe, near the Washington Monument? Here’s your chance to start getting a marble pedestal for old Joe.

That’s what I think happened a couple of days ago, and Mitt, without even the necessity of a trumpet blast from Angel Moroni, had a revelation that he shared this a.m.: I quit (Hear me John McCain?).

McCain: The Dangerous Republican

John McCain, of all Republicans now, most endangers the chances of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to be next president of the greatest republic that ever was.

McCain appears to be a grey-haired warrior, which he is: For a man past 70, solid, muscular, a war hero from heros’ genes, witty, charming, tough, engaging, moderate on a few subjects–campaign-financing reform, immigration (no moats, just a fence), buying drugs from Canada.

As such, if Osama Bin Laden from his cave and kidney machine decides to help his favorite American political party, the Republican Party, again win the presidency by launching a few Moslem fanatics at some school or old-folks home in the U.S., McCain immediately would look like the best politician to lead a country under attack.

As a political liberal, do I think Clinton or Obama would be as good or better than McCain were the country seeming to be in military danger? No, frankly I don’t. Not if we speak of a brand new president. McCain already knows what military buttons to push. If an attack came a year after Clinton or Obama had been in office long enough to trust advisors and to understand the machinery of national defense, then I would say, yes, both have bigger and better brains than McCain and are nothing if not fast learners and gutsy people.

For this election, McCain, by seeming liberal, would attract independent voters, especially as the Republican Party’s hate machine spews sewage and venom at whoever the Democratic candidate will be, as it will.

McCain is not liberal. Ask him about abortion rights. Ask him about prolonging the war in Iraq that we can neither justify, explain, win nor afford. Ask him about kissing the fannies of Bible thumpers (if he can answer between puckers). Ask him about relieving the rich of paying taxes so that the poor can do it.

Though many Republicans already consider him an apostate because he does not want to ditch the country, fill it with water and alligators, to keep out impoverished Mexicans and other threats to the political powers of the plutocracy, McCain otherwise fellates the Republican philosophers without gagging.

What about Mitt Romney, you ask? I suspect after Tuesday coming, when California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts vote, Romney will ghost away, a footnote on Google searches about whether a nation drunk on Christianity would kiss a Mormon, a buss that like licking a toad leads to even greater lunacy.

No, it’s McCain Clinton and Obama should worry about. They should surround themselves with cigar-chewing retired generals and huzzahing prize fighters and hunky male action-movie stars to show that true heroes think they have the stuff to ward off evil from Bin Laden’s cave.

The Horror of It, The Horror Of It

During a recent battle with the grippe, which I won ( I think, one can never be sure at my age), I horrified myself with the feverish realization that the citizens of this great country will spend at least half their time from now on listening to–or trying to avoid listening to–the blather of candidates for president.

I horrified myself further by thinking that since this is the nation of wretched excess, there is no guarantee that this year’s two-year overt campaign may not metamorphose (morph, you all) into a three-year campaign and after that a four-year campaign.

My god, I thought, by the time my grandchildren are 40–thankfully, I’ll be dead by then-- the presidential campaign, complete with endless empty news reports and the belches and flatulences of radio and TV blowhards, may go on every day, night and day. Kurtz had it easy.

When I first came to awareness of presidential politics, as it had for nearly a century and a half, the presidential campaign started in the fall–call it two-and-a-half months long.

Our predecessors under this onerous limitation on speeches–in a time when newspapers, magazines, letters, word of mouth and much later radio and newsreels were the chief means of communication–managed to elect George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Mason, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, to mention the best.

We, with communications endless evolving toward the infinite, have let the election system mushroom into two years of extravagant spending and stupefying rhetoric and worse: The opportunity for weird folk hardly anyone had ever heard of shove themselves upon us as they run to preside over the United States and, by default, much of the otherwise world.

Most of the people who now turn out to become president hardly qualify to give a talk at a small-town Rotary. But we have to hear them and read about them, as more and more as the months go by the press magnifies them into important people. Individually we finally latch on to one to vote for, generally because this yahoo is one of ours--Democrat, Republican, vegetarian, nose-picker, whatever. We finally cheer for one because he or she is like a member of our high-school basketball team made up of over-testosteroned (both sexes) persons often of small intelligence but good reflexes. We end up shouting “Our Tribe Uber Alles!” and accordingly vote.

But to be jabbered at these people for half the waking days our lives? Or more? Forevermore?

Spare us, Oh, Lord!”

Obama Won't Get Snopes' Vote

Barack Obama’s win in the Iowa Democratic caucuses has triggered chatter in the national press, especially in The New Times, that his victory shows that in a state predominately white a black can garner white votes.

The commentary has its interests. First, note that Obama, though half white in origin, classifies as black in white and other eyes because he is half black. Indeed, for whites and even for blacks and other minorities, any genes that tint the skin automatically make you whatever that tint is. This prejudice applies with mathematical considerations to American Indians. The federal government through the Bureau of Indian Affairs and though federally recognized tribes sets all kinds of percentages on what makes one an Indian qualifying for tribal membership and any monetary or other benefits that may attend. I have met tribal leaders with white skins, blue eyes, red hair and last names deriving from Vikings but with an Indian progenitor to trump as far as classification goes.

In Obama’s case, he won among those recruited and otherwise who came to Democratic caucuses to vote for him. Many of these were liberals, for whom racial prejudice amounts to two dirty words.

That’s good, but not good enough to support a claim that his victory among them indicates that white Americans in general will not let racial prejudice color their final decision about him or any other black. Indeed, in Obama’s case, if he becomes the Democratic nominee, the Republican dirty politics propaganda machine will spend many millions sandpapering the body politic with reminders, overt and subvert, that Obama is well, you know, a. . .(whisper, whisper, whisper).
I can’t shed my cynicism that Obama through charm and education and culture will fail to overcome the rampant racial prejudice in the U.S. of A.

If he had just won a primary vote in, say, Alabama or Mississippi, my mind might change. I await the first such vote below the Mason-Dixon Line to see who voted for him, and who against. I hunch he won’t get much of the Snopes’ vote.