S&P's Downgrade

There's a paragraph in their reasoning saying basically that S&P doesn't feel comfortable with a high rating for US Government Debt because of their concern for the politics of the Debt Ceiling debate we just went thru.

If I can take as a given my thinking that Wall St is moving away from the GOP because of the Tea Party nutbags, then it makes a lot of sense that the downgrade is actually S&P sending a signal to the GOP that they need to get their shit together.

If your interest burden goes up because of the S&P downgrade, and S&P says it's because they don't trust the political process, and it's the Tea Baggers making the political problems, then who ya gonna blame?

It's possible the Tea Baggers kinda fucked up in reverse tho'.  Imagine how popular they'll get when somebody figures out how to spin it back and say the Tea Party was absolutely right about everything because look - we scared Wall St half outa their socks.

The grand shift in power continues and it just gets weirder as we go.

Gotcha

The Day-Trader phenomenon is a part of the big myth - all it really takes is a little common sense and you can make anything work. No need for training or experience or intellectual rigor; just jump in and do it.

Intentionally Stupid

Better access to contraception = lower demand for abortion. It's a measurable and obvious cause-and-effect thing going on. If you're against preventing the pregnancy, then you simply are in favor of keeping the demand for abortion high.

So how can these guys be in favor of sustaining the demand for abortion? Well, first and foremost, it gives them a way to keep abortion as a political weapon; but the kicker is that they can hide their cynicism in the fog of being "against ObamaCare". The politics of fear requires the maintenance of as many perceived threats as possible. If you allow any real progress towards solving even small parts of any problem, then you have to concede that government is in fact good for something; and you start to lose an important way to motivate your contributors and your voters.

There's also a pronounced element of their outright fear of sexuality in general, and the sheer terror they feel when they have to contemplate female sexuality in particular.

Hang Onto Yer Hats

This shit just makes me sick to my stomach.

"The conventional wisdom on Wall Street was that the economy was growing -- that the worst was behind us," said Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital. "Now what people are realizing is the stimulus didn't work, and we may be headed back to recession." --CNNMoney

"Conventional wisdom..."?  That's Corp Code for happy talk.  They've been sittin' there in their Executive Suites jackin' each other off, collecting nice fat checks at taxpayer expense, pretending that what they tell the Press Poodles to say has some actual relation to the truth.

And the crap about "the stimulus hasn't worked..."?  What exactly do they think was holding this shit up in the air this whole time?  The stimulus is gone, and now there's nothing to supplement what little demand there was.

I imagine right now, Geithner et al are having lots of phone conversations in very blunt language and urgent tones about taking huge amounts of the cash that Big Corp has been sitting on for 2 years and pouring it into the markets tomorrow to try to stop the bleeding.

!Wild Speculation Alert!
I can also imagine a guy like Jamie Dimon lickin' his chops at the prospects of a leveraged buyout of significant government assets.  And we're not talkin' about the NYC Water Dept or the 10 biggest airports.  We're talkin' about dismantling the whole bureaucracy and auctioning off the pieces.

But where do we start?  The standard play here would be to ramp up the Blame-The-Victim machinery.  The narrative should begin with "The American worker just isn't properly equipped to compete in the global marketplace blah blah blah."  Then you need to point at the schools.  A lot of this is already in place of course; this just makes it easier to topple the whole system, and make us more accepting of a corporate-style takeover.

Disaster Capitalism is now here.

Reconstruction - In All Its Gnarly Glory

I couldn't figure out how to get a ruler in the shot to show scale - the scar's about 7 1/2 inches.

The dressing came off Monday, and it can stay off as long as the wound stays closed and doesn't start to leak. Shower tomorrow (post-op day 7).  Swabbing myself down every day with a sponge and baby wipes is a drag.

And BTW, Dammit

If anybody (particularly anybody who self-identifies as a conservative) really wants to do something that might actually prevent another Debt Crisis, one thing to do is pretty simple: Amend the War Powers Resolution to require real-world financing proposals be enacted before the 90-day Freebie Period lapses.

Double Dip

I'm tryin' hard to figure out how the Debt Deal doesn't make things worse.  An awful lot of people are stuck in this kind of economic limbo, where treading water is about all they can hope for in the near and mid term; and when the average age of the American worker is close to 52, "middle term" can easily mean the remainder of your working life when the economy is stuck in the doldrums.  So while there's a fair stack of good news for households in the $200K+ category, that leaves a huge number of "middle classers" at risk of losing buoyancy and slipping under.

Here's the thing:  There's no substitute for demand.  The law is the law, and no combination of ideology and happy talk is going to change the simple fact that demand drives inflation and inflation is what makes capitalism work in the first place.  You can argue all you want about regulating the thing appropriately, but that's a different conversation.  If your premise is false, your conclusion CANNOT be true.  Demand is everything.  Every time we've tried to move away from that bedrock principle, we've seen some extremely bad shit pile up on us.

So if we take this debt deal at face value (not particularly valid, but ya gotta start somewhere), then what I see is an attempt to remove about $200 Billion worth of demand from the system every year for 10 years.

Here's my clever representation of this dynamic as a DOS batch file:
10: demand goes down, prices go down
20: prices go down, wages go down
30: wages go down, demand goes down
40: GO TO 10

No matter what, Obama owns this thing now.  What exactly he owns is up for debate.  And of course, the main point is to look at what affect this acton and the politics of this action will have on campaign contributions for 2012.

Contributors get people elected.  Big Contributors (eg: Target) that have aligned themselves  too closely with political issues that proved to be unpopular have taken occasionally severe beatings.

I think the strategy is for the White House to continue sending very strong signals to the business community to the effect that "this next part of the shift is on; this is for real and the smart money is backing policy that is fact-based, pragmatic and market-driven - not the Looney Toons bullshit coming from the wingnuts who think everything'll be fine if we just close our eyes and pretend it's 1954."

What if Obama really is playing way over all of our heads?  Maybe he's giving us the impression of the rope-a-dope, or the 3D chess master (remember that the Press Poodles aren't really all that bright - their job is to smash-fit whatever is going on into a prepackaged narrative).  What if Obama is actually working towards a position that forces the Tea Party GOP to isolate itself to the point where it consists of nothing but Michelle Bachmann, Rand Paul, Pat Robertson and The Koch Bros?  But if that's true on the Repub side, then it can just as easily mean he's in the process of stripping away the the hardcore leftie base of the Dems.  All of which translates to the emergence of a "new political entity" - which probably isn't really new at all.

As always, we'll see.  Or at least we'll see something that may or may not be what actually happened.  Maybe we should call this Quantum Politics.  We see only the evidence that something MIGHT have happened, and we're left to theorize as to whether or not it was "real".

Reconstruction (update)

Pretty good day yesterday and a good night last night.  Up at about 5 this AM.

I had the first of what will be several home visits from Lee (nurse) and Laurie (PT) yesterday.  They both told me I'm doing a lot better than most of the people they see.  This is one of those things that you can't possibly take any credit for, but find it hard to say anything other than thank you.  Kinda like when somebody says you have beautiful kids:  "Why thank you - I made them myself, you know; and I don't mind telling you how hard it is to get all that genetic sequencing just right..."  Anyway, it's nice having a winning ticket on that little slice of Life's Grand Lottery.  Pain levels have been very reasonable so far, and the pain is what they worry most about.  If you can't knock down the pain, then you can't do the exercises, and it'll take longer to get back to a healthy state; and many times, you never get back to where you need to be.  So they send you home with a basketful of meds, most of which are aimed at the pain.

My drug regimen for the next couple of months has me taking a daily cocktail of 5 medications (all of which are added to whatever I was on before the surgery of course).  Luckily, I've always resisted the paradigm of Health Management by Prescription, so other than my One-A-Day vitamin supplement, I started with a more or less clean slate.

Coumadin (to prevent blood clotting)
Indomethacin (anti-inflammatory)
Tramadol (non-narcotic pain killer)
Oxycodone (narcotic pain killer)
Colace (stool softener - constipation is always number one on the list of side effects for pain meds)

Anyway, I have a set of 10 exercises that I need to do 2 or 3 times a day that are aimed at simply getting the musculature back into place to support the new joint.  God's design (particularly of the lower back and hips) became obsolete once we started walkin' around on our hind legs.  When the joint deteriorates to the point where you have to replace original equipment with steel and plastic, you have to cut away most of the tendons and ligaments, and rely on the body's amazing adaptive capabilities to substitute muscle as the support structure.  Obviously, they have to cut thru a good inch and a half of meat and then pry the muscles away from the bones to expose the parts of the joint that have to be removed and sculpted in order to accept the replacement parts. (Orthopods often refer to themselves as carpenters, btw)  So the rehab is all about training the muscles to take over the functions of keepin the joint in place as the wound heals and the muscles re-attach to the bone.

I'm still working on some of the different angles of this thing, primarily looking for the If/Then/Else algorithms that drive this weird system of ours.  Some of the costs outlined on the Explanation(s) Of Benefits we've gotten so far are a bit shocking, so more on all of that later.

Reconstruction (update)

Day 4 Post-Op:
OK night.  Still pretty stiff, and I've gotten some noticeable swelling going now in my left leg.

I came home with:
Coumadin (blood thinner)
Oxycodone (pain killer)
Tramdol (non-narcotic pain killer)
Colase (stool softener - to counteract constipation due to the pain killers)

Avoiding the oxycodone in favor of tramadol, just trying to stay as drug-free (and as uncomplicated) as possible.

Expecting first visits from Nursing and Physical Therapy this PM.

Debt Deal

The headlines are all saying a deal's been worked out; and of course, "the lefties" are up in arms because they see it as Obama caving to the demands of the Tea Partiers, while the wingnuts on the radical right say they hate it because it requires compromise and lacks the kind of purity they say God sent their guys to Washington to establish.

So I don't wanna be too centrist about all this, but when everybody makes a big show of being upset with something happening in DC, you can be certain of a couple of things:
1) Some very important constituencies are making loud noises about losing some of their clout.
2) Somehow, the really good politicians manage to stay in power through all this "upheaval and change".

Cutting to the chase, while not meaning to oversimplify: First, remind yourself that contributors are the ones who get a politician elected - voters are the people who go to the polls and confirm the results that the contributors have paid for in advance.

Second, that means we're talking about politicians representing their Contributors, while the Contributors represent various Voting Factions.  We've been more and more accepting of the notion that "government should look and act like a business" - well, we've largely achieved exactly that.  We've evolved a system that's installed a layer of Middle Mgmt (ie: Lobbying Firms, PACs, Think Tanks, etc), and those middle managers have taken on some very important tasks that used to be the responsibilities of the elected officials.  eg: We have Lobbyists who are hiring people to investigate, draft and negotiate legislation.  We have Representatives who are then acting like a Sales team as they try to convince the voters that this piece of legislation is a good thing.

There are many more wrinkles and convolutions of course, and I don't think I have a direct line to the truth here, but I think it's safe to say we're nowhere near the kind of democracy we were told about in school.

If I accept the premise that "government should look and act like a business", am I not also expected to draw the inference that "government should look and act less like a democracy"?

Taken together, I think this debt debate and the the fact there are Repub advantages in Governorships and Statehouse Majorities and on down to County Boards and City Councils means that Repubs believe they're on the verge of something pretty big.

I find it hard to disagree.  I think we could be one or two election cycles away from taking the final plunge.  They'll keep telling us this is what democracy is, and we'll keep trying harder and harder to believe we haven't completely fucked up the greatest thing ever - blue pills for everybody.  In a binary world, your only choices are conformity and death.

Hoping against hope that I'm wrong.