We Are So Fucked

Back to a once-familiar theme of this blog from about a year ago: bend over and grease up, America.

Daily Censored (by Michael Collins):

Official unemployment is around 9%. That excludes the marginally employed and under employed. Adding those two groups takes unemployment up to 15.9%. Add the long-term unemployed and the figure climbs to nearly 23%.

When you have 23% real unemployment/underemployment among those willing and able to work, you have budget deficits at every level of government. Businesses fail or slow down. Governments reduce or eliminate services. People lose their homes and health insurance. Credit ratings dive, making it more expensive or impossible to borrow for any reason, including emergencies. The unemployed contribute much less to the economy, which shrinks substantially, leading to more under or unemployment. There future darkens. All that’s left is hope, a commodity of little use today.

If you’re part of the financial elite in crowd, you don’t need hope. You’re about to get another big payday. Much lower taxes and relaxed regulation of foreign exchange derivatives are on the way.

Wow

Brings a whole meaning to the phrase "holy crap".
(hat tip to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart)

A Prediction

Red State Update

A Terrible Secret

In the very short time she served as Alaska's governor, Sarah Palin's single greatest achievement was...wait for it...raising taxes!  There's a fair probability that it wasn't actually her idea - more often than not, it's the staffers who come up with these things - but she pushed hard for a program of taxing oil company profits in order to give Alaskans a share of their state's great mineral wealth.  And she did it by going out of her way to get the Dems to support her efforts.

via Joshua Green:

...she managed to solve, at least for a time, the problem that lay at the heart of Alaska's politics for a generation: how to break the oil companies' grip on the state and capture a fair share of their profits for Alaskans. Palin's major achievement was winning an oil tax that did just that and was called Alaska's Clear and Equitable Share (ACES).

Shocking, ain't it?

And here's where politics is so fucking weird that I just have to love it in all its perverse glory:  no politician is going to talk about it out in the open.  Obama can't point at it as a good example of appropriate regulation because then he has to give props to Palin for getting it done.  And Palin sure as hell can't talk about it because it directly contradicts the party-line dogma about government interference.

But the main thing is the same ol' crap that talking about taxation is considered political poison.  There's a program in place that fills the coffers of a (very red) state government, while not hindering the profitability of Big Oil, but it seems nobody anywhere else is allowed to make any serious effort at getting hugely profitable corporations off the dole, much less getting them just to pay the taxes they already owe.  This is just too weird.

Yeah, Um, About That Torture Thing

Osha Gray Davidson at Forbes:

“Listen,” he said, “waterboarding and/or other coercive techniques did nothing to contribute to our attempts to track down UBL (Usama bin Laden). What did succeed was weeks, months and years of diligent, laborious, and dedicated work – all within the bounds of legal and ethical boundaries….No torture, no waterboarding, no coercion – nothing inhumane – is considered a useful tool in our work.”

Straight up - Dick Cheney is a criminal.  I can be pretty forgiving of people in positions of power who fuck up if I think they made wrong decisions in good faith.  I can even be persuaded to ease up on a guy if he comes back to say he fucked up and if he had a chance to do it over, he'd do it differently.  None of that applies to Dick Cheney.  The guy is bloated with rot. 

The Partisan Abides

It's become impossible to talk about certain things because the discussion always breaks along very predictable party line fracture planes.

The killing of OBL provides a good recent example.  Obama's National Security Team rejiggers the doctrine for going after the bad guys; they start almost from scratch because Jr Bush just decided to let it slide; and we get some pretty spectacular results in about a year's time.

Now, of course, Dick Cheney and John Yoo are all over the place doing the Told-Ya-So dance, trying to convince us that it was their torture regime that cracked the case when practically anybody who knows anything knows that's bullshit.  But the point is that the discussion breaks down again according to which party you favor, because that's what we get from the Press Poodles and the Opinionators.

So while we yell at each other about The Torture Party vs the Party of Appeasement or whatever recycled crap du jour is on the menu today, we aren't paying much attention to some things that should be pretty important.  eg: Obama has stepped up dramatically the use of these RoboCop drones, pursuing a very aggressive program of targeted assassinations.  And not only does he not feel constrained by international conventions against such things, he seems to have taken to heart the whole Unitary Executive malarkey.  Are "liberals" now OK with a president who does all the shitty things Jr Bush was doing just because he does them better?  Are Dems feeling good about themselves because they finally have a guy who actually goes out there and kills people?  Is that it?

Anyway, I get the feeling Obama's finding it really difficult to do much about reversing some of the damage done to our little experiment in self government the last 60 years or so, partly because of the power trip that goes with the office, but also because of the same ol' political expediency these guys always think they have to serve.  ie: if he goes after any of the Bushies for torture, he first has to get over the huge obstacle of making the case that it's not just a political witch hunt.  I think he's made one political calculation that's totally dependent on the "basic decency of the American people" (always a gamble) in that he's counting on us eventually getting over the truly toxic affects of an ugly combination of 9-11 plus the Authoritarian Reflex, and realizing that doing evil things in the name of goodness is just fuckin' stupid.

Another one may be that he figures if he's careful enough about how he knocks people around; if he can make it look like a "surgical removal of a malignancy", then he's got a shot at balancing the Peace Prize against the Creeping Empire.  Not bloody likely, but there's a weird Yin and Yang vibe to it.  (then again, see "just fuckin' stupid" above).

Justice Delayed

Monica Marie Goodling, the key figure in the controversy about the political hiring and firing of U.S. Attorneys during the Bush Administration, has received a public reprimand from the Virginia State Bar.

A VSB subcommittee concluded that Goodling, a member of the VSB since 1999, had violated ethics rules by committing “a criminal or deliberately wrongful act” that reflected adversely on her “honesty, trustworthiness or fitness to practice law.”

Read the full decision.

But, hey - she was a douchebag for Jesus, so we're not gonna lift her license; and after all, she didn't really mean to break the law.

At a certain level, the power and the money and the position make it impossible for anybody to be guilty or to be held to account for anything.  The best we can hope for is that "nobility has the good grace to die by its own hand in matters of honor."  This is just all pretty fucked up right here.

South Carolina Debate

Coupla points:
1) Repubs (traditionally and famously and loudly) have long made the assertion that they don't much cotton to all this polling and focus group kinda stuff, but here they all are - for about the eleventy jillionth time - sitting for one of Lil Franky's circle jerks.  Hypocrites

2) These SoCo's made an angry point of saying they think they're being disrespected by those Repub candidates who didn't show up, so at the end of the clip, Sean (they call me Mr Obsequious) Hannity went way out of his way to say that he was physically located in South Carolina at that very moment.

3) These latter-day Repubs are authoritarian to the point where they're practically eager to vote for a Caesar.

Iran

Won't it be interesting if Iran implodes?  (The Guardian)

It's shaping up to be a classic struggle between Secular (Ahmadinejad) and Sectarian (Ali Khamenei).

So who do you root for here?  Typically, I'd have to go with Secular Guy because I really hate it when somebody assumes political power by claiming to be "God's Representative On Earth".  But two years ago, when Iranian kids were in the streets trying to stand up for themselves, and Ahmadinejad sent his goons out to stomp on them, it was Khamenei and his clerics who called on Ahmadinejad to cool it.

So, as always, politics makes for some pretty strange morality.  And morality seems oddly political at times.