VOTE

This one is for my work cohort who had her sign stolen:

Down the Tubez

Senator Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens is found guilty.

It is obvious to anyone that this is both good news for John McCain and it is non-controversial that it is a liberal conspiracy to embarrass him via Sarah Palin because she is also from Alaska.

Or something.

Submitted Without Comment

Priorities

In a follow-up to my last post, wherein I ponder the stupidity (maybe "gullibility" is a more accurate word to use) of your average conservative, GOP, Reich-wing voter by way of Charlton Heston as NRA President, I once again have to admire the deftness of Glenn-zilla. In his post from Saturday, he rips apart the corporate media for always playing along with GOP narratives about personality-driven politics, never using their journalistic training to separate the wheat from the chaff and otherwise constantly on their knees, slobbering on the knob of Rethuglican power. He doesn't actually use those metaphors, but that's kinda his overall point.

For the Reich-wing, you see, an appearance of authority abetted by a pliant media is sufficient to merit its granting. Which is why actors who exude an aire of authority do so well in their firmament. It doesn't matter how phony their front may be, if they seem like they are regular dudes, then a sycophantic press corpse gleefully plays along. Fred Thompson - his entire adult life lived as either a Hollywood actor or Washington lobbyist (with a brief stint as Congressman, elected presumably on the comforting believability of his furrowed brow and prominent jowls) - as a regular 'Mer-kuhn from Tennessee?

Puh-leeze.

So, Glenn rips 'em a new one. I love this man, in a totally straight kind of way. Here's yet another reason why:

One other point to note about all of this is that these fixations are as skewed as they are vapid. Barack Obama is an exotic elitist freak because he went to Harvard Law School and made $1 million from his book. Hillary Clinton can't possibly have any connection to the Regular Folk because her husband, who grew up dirt poor, became quite wealthy after being President. John Kerry was completely removed from the concerns of the Regular People because his second wife was rich.

By contrast, George W. Bush was a down-home, salt-of-the-earth Man of the People despite being the grandson of a U.S. Senator, the son of a President (who greatly magnified his riches in his post-presidency), and the by-product of an extremely wealthy, coddled life. Ronald Reagan was pure Americana despite spending most of his adult life as a very wealthy Hollywood actor (and converting his post-presidency into far greater riches still). And John McCain is as Regular a Guy as it gets, even though he dumped his first wife (the mother of his three children) after she was disfigured and disabled by a near-fatal car accident so that he could marry his much younger, much prettier, and extremely wealthy heiress-mistress, whose family riches then launched his political career and sustained a life of luxury for almost three decades (that's how McCain's rustic "Sedona cabin" -- i.e., his sprawling compound -- came to be).

It would be bad enough if our political press were obsessed with such trivialities. The fact that they do so in such a Republican-leader-worshiping manner makes it only that much worse, particularly given that it's this dynamic, more than anything else, that determines the outcome of our elections.

McCain is an asshole. That should be the personality-driven narrative that's out there, but the GOP base is always willing to forgive the serial philanderers in their high command because of Digby's Law (my name for her salient observations about the tribal mentality that dominates American, and particularly Rethugli-bot, politics). Also known as: IOKIYAAR.

A Turning Tide

The wheels of justice turn slowly, sometimes so slow as to seem like they don't move at all, but they do in fact turn.

Don Siegelman is a free man, again walking the street, breathing free air.

He isn't completely in the clear on the bribery charges, as his case still needs to be heard on appeal, but now at least he can appeal because the corrupt, Banana-Republi-thug judge Mark Everett Fuller (who, since the summer of 2006, has been holding-up the release into the public record of the transcript from his trial - which prevents him from even filing for appeal) finally had his decision overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta.

It was, naturally, a Karl Rove hit job and I think this might just be the one that brings down the Dark Sith Lord. But whether it does or not, America is just a little less of a banana republic that jails opposition party members on trumped-up charges than we were a couple of days ago.

Considering how bleak these last seven years have been for the rule of law and a just society, this is a welcome ray of sunshine. I'd like to think that this might be the beginning in a long string of chickens coming home to roost for the thugs, thieves and theocrats in the GOP. Whether a reckoning comes to pass or not, at least this man now has a reason to smile:

Iraq Planning

I don't know how he did it, but my friend Broadway Carl found some secret footage from five years ago of George W. Bush hard at work in the Oval Office planning the Iraq War.

It's pretty amazing:

O Happy Day!

Stirling Newberry, who used to blog to great effect over at TPMCafé, has resurfaced at The Agonist. He is super-smart, understand the nuts-and-bolts of economics, is steeped in historical example and precedent, and always has a keen eye on the Big Picture from a socio-geo-political viewpoint. I constantly referred to his stuff over at my old LiveJournal blog, until he left TPM and seemed to drop out off the face of the earth.

Well, he's back and today he explains (as only a super-brainy economist could) exactly why we are completely fucked.

[T]he right wing came to believe that it could have a military machine without mass mobilization, but instead with a high tech smaller force, it also did not see the need to keep most Americans happy. Instead, their new vision was of a small, permanent and highly mobilized base, which included a core of military-industrial contracting, supported by a security apparatus and getting votes from a combination of resource extraction, disorganized labor, the wealthy, franchise owners, and theocrats. Their idea was expressed in the Project for A New American Century, and in Karl Rove's political apparatus. People who were a danger to this thesis were removed by whatever means necessary. While being a heavily socialist enterprise, in the right wing sense of being a national socialism, it relied on a propaganda of libertarianism. This propaganda relied on creating the meme of the late 19th century as the legendary golden age, where laissez-faire economics combined with piety, plutocracy, and military empire, in that time came the conquest of the West to create a rising America.

[...]

This neo-conservative plutocracy was intended to take the place of the Liberal Democracy. It had a war without end as its mandate, a Christianist ethnocentrism as its meaning to create context, and a monetary system which would, after the invasion of the Middle East, be based on a direct imperial control over oil.

[...]

As many, many, many commentators, many, many times have pointed out, the US was consuming too much, and exporting too little. The Neo-Conservative happy monsters said that this could go on for ever, giving other people our paper for their oil and goods.

While it is possible that we will emerge from this functional, the likelihood is that we are going to see a continued fall for the next 9 months, as the crisis deepens, a die hard illegitimate executive burns his last brands on our skin, and a feckless opposition folds its cards over and over and over again, allowing ordinary people to bear the brunt of the continued contraction.

We are riding this bucket down a ways farther, because there is nothing to right the equilibrium, and without the stimulus from war spending, on which we are so dependent, there will be no pick up in business activity soon.

Read the whole thing, really. Then check out his diary.

Go ahead. Read it all. Right now.

I'll wait.

Told You So

Greg Palast ("Armed Madhouse" and "Best Democracy Money Can Buy") agrees with me that the Spitzer thing was a political hit. Unlike me, he's pretty sure it was because Spitzer stood in the way of the money. (h/t to C&L)

This week, Bernanke’s Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks’ mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.

Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who stood in the way of this creepy little assignation at the bankers’ bordello: Eliot Spitzer.

Who are they kidding? Spitzer’s lynching and the bankers’ enriching are intimately tied.

How? Follow the money.

[...]

...when the Bush regime took over, Countrywide and its banking brethren were told to party hearty – it was OK now to steer’m, fake’m, charge’m and take’m.

But there was this annoying party-pooper. The Attorney General of New York, Eliot Spitzer, who sued these guys to a fare-thee-well. Or tried to.

Instead of regulating the banks that had run amok, Bush’s regulators went on the warpath against Spitzer and states attempting to stop predatory practices. Making an unprecedented use of the legal power of “federal pre-emption,” Bush-bots ordered the states to NOT enforce their consumer protection laws.

Indeed, the feds actually filed a lawsuit to block Spitzer’s investigation of ugly racial mortgage steering. Bush’s banking buddies were especially steamed that Spitzer hammered bank practices across the nation using New York State laws.

Spitzer not only took on Countrywide, he took on their predatory enablers in the investment banking community.

[...]

It was the night of February 13 when Spitzer made the bone-headed choice to order take-out in his Washington Hotel room. He had just finished signing these words for the Washington Post about predatory loans:

“Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.”

Bush, Spitzer said right in the headline, was the “Predator Lenders’ Partner in Crime.” The President, said Spitzer, was a fugitive from justice. And Spitzer was in Washington to launch a campaign to take on the Bush regime and the biggest financial powers on the planet.

Spitzer wrote, “When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners the Bush administration will not be judged favorably.”

But now, the Administration can rest assured that this love story – of Bush and his bankers - will not be told by history at all – now that the Sheriff of Wall Street has fallen on his own gun.

Read the whole thing, if you dare, but I warn you that you should have some Pepto Bismol standing by. It ain't pretty.

So, basically, Spitzer gets taken out of power in a political hit and may go to jail.

And don't think they won't do it. Don Siegleman of Alabama is nothing short of a political prisoner of the Bush Junta and Spitzer could become one as well.