Taking a break

I will be traveling for the next week and postings, if there are any, will be sporadic. Check back on the 25th.

Hostage Taxpayers

I only occasionally post on economics, because I consider myself generally unqualified to have an intelligent opinion. And whenever I do, I always start with that disclaimer.

But the latest bailout of AIG, announced just tonight, has sent me over the edge. We are all standing around like deer with our eyes caught in the headlights while this Administration, on behalf of taxpayers for several generations, turns the economy of this country into some twisted kind of socialized capitalism: privatized gain and socialized risk.

Those 5%, who have gotten fat at the trough of the Bush Administration (the ones McCain will continue to favor,) are like terrorists standing in the middle of our public square wrapped in suicide vests. “Too big to fail” are the words on the suicide note. “You give me your money or I will kill you all.”

This really pisses me off.

Because of course we have to give in. And of course we can have no impact on these decisions because our Congressional leadership has abdicated all of that decision-making to the Treasury and Wall Street. And we are supposed to accept this because we aren’t qualified to have an opinion.

We are only qualified to pay the bill.

And maybe the “experts” are right. Maybe we are currently faced with no options, but I am sick of picking up the freaking bill while other people get rich. Where does it end?

This is going to cost us some of the best hopes for any upcoming administration. On top of the enormous financial pit dug by the current administration, and not even counting the “off books” cost of two wars, how in the world ANY next administration going to be able to afford to do anything?

And another thing……

Do you notice that another result of this debacle is that the companies that have survived are getting bigger?

So we can have even more companies that are too big to fail?

WTF?

Palin as a Feminist Nightmare

I have not always been a fan of Rebecca Traister, but her recent nightmares feel very familiar to me and many of my friends. A taste:

In this strange new pro-woman tableau, feminism -- a word that is being used all over the country with regard to Palin's potential power -- means voting for someone who would limit reproductive control, access to healthcare and funding for places like Covenant House Alaska, an organization that helps unwed teen mothers. It means cheering someone who allowed women to be charged for their rape kits while she was mayor of Wasilla, who supports the teaching of creationism alongside evolution, who has inquired locally about the possibility of using her position to ban children's books from the public library, who does not support the teaching of sex education.

In this "Handmaid's Tale"-inflected universe, in which femininity is worshipped but females will be denied rights, CNBC pundit Donny Deutsch tells us that we're witnessing "a new creation ... of the feminist ideal," the feminism being so ideal because instead of being voiced by hairy old bats with unattractive ideas about intellect and economy and politics and power, it's now embodied by a woman who, according to Deutsch, does what Hillary Clinton did not: "put a skirt on." "I want her watching my kids," says Deutsch. "I want her laying next to me in bed."

Welcome to 2008, the year a tough, wonky woman won a primary (lots of them, actually), an inspiring black man secured his party's nomination for the presidency, and a television talking head felt free to opine that a woman is qualified for executive office because he wants to bed her and have her watch his kids! Stop the election; I want to get off.

What's at stake

It's easy to forget that it's just the soul of the country at stake here.

First in a WaPo series into the 4th branch of government under Cheney:

The command center of "the president's program," as Addington usually called it, was not in the White House. Its controlling documents, which gave strategic direction to the nation's largest spy agency, lived in a vault across an alley from the West Wing [7] -- in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, on the east side of the second floor, where the vice president headquartered his staff.

The vault was in EEOB 268, Addington's office. Cheney's lawyer held the documents, physical and electronic, because he was the one who wrote them. New forms of domestic espionage were created and developed over time in presidential authorizations that Addington typed on a Tempest-shielded computer across from his desk [8].

It is unlikely that the history of U.S. intelligence includes another operation conceived and supervised by the office of the vice president. White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had "no idea," he said, that the presidential orders were held in a vice presidential safe. An authoritative source said the staff secretariat, which kept a comprehensive inventory of presidential papers, classified and unclassified, possessed no record of these. [emphasis added]

Get it? The Office of the President had NO RECORD of a Presidential Order authorizing the most sweeping expansion of domestic surveillance authority in history.

This is the danger of electing Presidents who are essentially tools of the neocons and wingnuts who wield them. Dick Cheney was, for all intents and purposes, the 43rd President of the United States.

Even the Supreme Court didn't choose him.

[UPDATE]

McJoan at DKos reviews a new book by James Pfiffiner with more on the subject of this dramatic expansion of Executive authority, and why it so threatens our Constitution:

--He created military commissions entirely within the executive branch and in doing so ignored U.S. laws that provided authority and procedures for establishing military commissions;

--He used the term "enemy combatant" to exempt the government from granting persons so labeled legal and constitutional rights;

--He denied the writ of habeas corpus to U.S. citizens as well as other detainees suspected of terrorism;

--He suspended the Geneva Conventions, which, because they were agreed to in a treaty, are the "supreme Law of the Land," according to Article VI of the Constitution;

--He authorized the interrogation of detainees using techniques that most of the world considers torture, and which violate the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law;

--He ordered the National Security Agency to monitor the communications of Americans without a warrant as required by FISA; and

--He asserted the sweeping right to ignore more than 1,000 provisions of public law because he deemed them to be in conflict with his authority as president.

A Day to ACT

Here are two items I am asking you to help spread around today. As part of a DKos campaign, the idea is to send these to people you suspect of falling victim to the lies and deceit of the McCain campaign. First, a video:



Then, here is The NY Times calling McCain out. A taste:

Mr. McCain came into the race promoting himself as a truth teller and has long publicly deplored the kinds of negative tactics that helped sink his candidacy in the Republican primaries in 2000. But his strategy now reflects a calculation advisers made this summer — over the strenuous objections of some longtime hands who helped him build his “Straight Talk” image — to shift the campaign more toward disqualifying Mr. Obama in the eyes of voters.

“I think the McCain folks realize if they can get this thing down in the mud, drag Obama into the mud, that’s where they have the best advantage to win,” said Matthew Dowd, who worked with many top McCain campaign advisers when he was President Bush’s chief strategist in the 2004 campaign, but who has since had a falling out with the White House. “If they stay up at 10,000 feet, they don’t.”

Up is Down

I have always loved Garrison Keillor:

So the Republicans have decided to run against themselves. The bums have tiptoed out the back door and circled around to the front and started yelling, "Throw the bums out!" They've been running Washington like a well-oiled machine to the point of inviting lobbyists into the back rooms to write the legislation, and now they are anti-establishment reformers dedicated to delivering us from themselves. And Mayor Giuliani is an advocate for small-town America. Bravo.

Pork and Pork

This from Josh Marshall is very, very good. Let's help pass it around.