Rogue Columnist

I have scene the future...

To think: All those years I was called the "socialist" columnist at the Arizona Republic, that it would come to this. Me, standing alone as the only defense of capitalism against the Red Tide. That was my role, at least, in a recent debate held by Socialist Alternative at Seattle University and attended by I'd guess about 100 people. Yes, this was one of those "only in a blue state" moments. The two or three socialists in Arizona are distinguished by carrying meek .357 magnum or smaller caliber weapons. These were real socialists, or socialist-curious.

They were very nice and polite, only booing me when, at a snoozy moment, I said that all who voted for Nader in 2000 could thank themselves for the "election" of George W. Bush. I had warned the organizers that I would not exactly be, well, a "Goldwater" Institute sock puppet in a debate over whether "free market capitalism" had failed in the recent crash. Of course it did, but as Voltaire would say, define your terms. Were I fit and twenty-five, I would seriously consider moving to a social democracy in northern Europe. Even this, however, seemed to qualify me to stand in defense of what my debate partner continued to derisively call "neoliberalism" (neoliberalism, neoconservatism...Neo is always bad except in The Matrix, where he gets to kiss Carrie-Anne Moss, too).

I'm happy to report that the republic (if not The Republic) is safe. Nobody marched off behind red banners to tear up the cobblestones and attack the ruling class. As far as I could tell, the program of this particular organization called for a state takeover of the 500 largest companies, which would be run by workers' committees (i.e., soviets, before Stalin ruined things). A revolution would be necessary rather than reform "around the edges." I pointed out that in revolutions, many innocents are killed and except in one case, 1776, successful revolutions trend toward the murderously radical. This was brushed off against two centuries of real and imagined American crimes against the world. The only time I was truly offended was when my opponent belittled the hundreds of thousands of American soldiers who died to liberate the world from totalitarianism in World War II. No, the Red Army did that, he emphasized, incomplete to say the least in his understanding of history.

Phoenix 101: Carl Hayden

This week, Sen. Robert Byrd will surpass Arizona's Carl Hayden as the longest-serving member of Congress. As Arizona's only congressman and later its fixture of a senator, Hayden was there for 56 years. The Info Center's Dan Nowicki provides a good primer on Hayden for the majority of Arizonans who have either never heard of him, or merely associate his name with a high school.

When he was alive, Hayden was the most prominent of the walking reminders of Arizona as a frontier state. He had been born when the Salt River Valley was barely settled, had chased outlaws on horseback as Maricopa County sheriff, then had become the Baby State's first representative in Congress.

"Ol' Carl Hayden," as he was known by the time I was alive, will forever be associated with the Central Arizona Project. The best book on Hayden and the CAP is my friend Jack August's Vision in the Desert. It was his life's work, and as it headed toward victory, Hayden realized it would not mean the sustenance and extension of agriculture in the Salt River Valley, but rather its transformation into a megalopolis. I have heard he was ambivalent about this reality, as many who fought for the CAP came to be. Ironically, many of the sustainability issues Phoenix and the Southwest face today were made in the 1950s and 1960s by the CAP adversaries in California -- although they were hardly angels.

Not like Ike

The nut baggers are right. Socialism has come to America. It is here, now. The government owns the "commanding heights" of this economy, as is the case in classic socialist doctrine. Citizens of this American socialism get free medical care, housing, food, clothing, even travel. They have abundant educational opportunities, including college. It promises and actually delivers both diversity and social mobility. It also has elements of fascism, just as the nut baggers have warned in their rallies attended by hundreds: The socialism has a heavy corporate component, with giant companies moving in lockstep with the regime's demands yet also holding strong political sway within the regime. In exchange for its benefits, members of the society give up certain freedoms -- yet they keep joining enthusiastically.

I'm writing about the military, of course, and not just to show the absurdity of the nut baggers' claims. In a nation where six people are chasing every job, where college is increasingly out of reach, the only advanced nation in the world where people go without health insurance -- in today's America, the military is often the only option open. It made news last month when a man who couldn't get insurance joined the Army so his cancer-stricken wife could get help. (When I Googled "joined Army to get health care," the second and third hits out of 53 million were Army recruiting sites). Military recruiters have more than met their targets -- ones raised for the Army -- since the economic meltdown. Even with the danger of war, many Americans just don't see another way.

Elements of this have long happened. There's the classic case of the directionless kid from high school who joins the military -- sometimes under a parent or even judge's threat -- and becomes an adult. I went to high school with young men who joined up, served honorably and succeeded as civilians -- I doubt most of them ever would have chosen the military as a first option. And we honor their service. But the Great Disruption's first act -- the crash and its resulting unemployment, combined with two wars seemingly without end -- is creating something new. New and unsettling.

Job One for America

As America faces its worst run of job losses since the Great Depression with no end in sight, one thing should be clear. Our federal government is being run by a coalition of the financial sector, lobbyists for entrenched interests and a disciplined Republican opposition of dubious loyalty. Barack Obama is not only very close to being a failed president, he could be on track to be a one-termer if the GOP snags an opponent such as Gen. David Petraeus or even a rehabbed Mitt Romney. (The Nobel will only hurt Obama without substantive achievements for average Americans).

Perhaps the problem is centered on Obama and the cowardly Democrats in Congress (Memo to Blue Dogs: You'll lose anyway, so do the right thing and maybe you can pull a Harry Truman; oh, wait, Truman wasn't getting millions from the moneyed interests and hoping to get a job with them after politics). Could Hillary have done better? Or is this just the latest evidence of a quiet coup and no individual can change America's trajectory to self-immolation. Read Jeff Sharlet's The Family and David Wessel's In Fed We Trust (and throw in Maggie Mahar's Money Driven Medicine) and you begin to see the financialized theocracy we have become. One facing unsustainability on every front, including in a military whose quiet evangelization by the Christian right should raise alarms never before heard in America (were it covered by the media).

As for unemployment, the best Washington can do is become aroused over a tax credit for job creation. This won't work -- it's not tied to real demand. And it will lower tax revenues, adding to the deficit. It's a stunning sign of America's enervation and institutional corruption that President Obama is not rolling out a crash program to modernize our rail system. It could be done now. It would create huge numbers of jobs, not only for construction but also for operating and maintenance. Real jobs that would last. And an infrastructure whose benefits would repay the Treasury many times over.

Say you want a revolution?

I was in Phoenix over the weekend to help celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Poisoned Pen Bookstore and mark the launch of the short-story collection, Phoenix Noir. For those of you with thin skins, be proud of the cool new restaurants downtown. And that Barry Schoeneman of Men's Apparel Club, who sells the best suits for the lowest prices in America and has toughed out a retail-hostile downtown for more than 4 years, is moving to a bigger store uptown, but still in the central core. And if you care (I don't), there are still plenty of hip, skinny, rich people at Snottsdale nightclubs despite the overall depression. More gravel. Less shade. More vacant lots. Fewer completed projects. Light rail still succeeds (gloat). Yea, my hometown.

But what caught my attention most was not this or even another well-intentioned civic project rolled out in the Information Center. It was an article on the front of the Viewpoints section, beneath pieces trumpeting this well-intentioned project. It was headlined, "A rebuttal: Why I am a conservative," by the "school choice movement" activist lawyer Clint Bolick, who now has what seems to be a well-endowed sinecure at the local Krack-Pot "Think" Tank. I thought: Why is this a rebuttal? The reactionaries have won in Arizona and the efforts of the latest well-intentioned project will go nowhere. They, not Bolick, should be the rebuttal to the ruling reactionary/growth status quo. But it was just bad newspaper design. Bolick was chastising my former colleague Richard Nilsen who had the guts to write an op-ed saying why he was not a conservative. In Arizona this is an enterprise akin to trying to teach opera to pigs (it's futile because it can't be done and it irritates the pigs).

Read and enjoy. But the biggest problem with the argument is that the "conservatives" that rose to prominence after 1980, and especially 1994, didn't want to conserve. As Sam Tanenhaus makes clear in his new book, The Death of Conservatism, today's "conservatives" are radicals, with little connection to the Burkean conservatives who sought to conserve the best of the old, showed respect for tradition and custom, etc. But thanks to the fecklessness and corruption of the Democratic Party, these radicals still control the agenda.

The doomsday machine

Two new books and an article in Wired are making more people aware of the doomsday system constructed by the Soviets during the 1980s, when they feared an American nuclear attack. Perimeter, nicknamed "the Dead Hand," went operational in 1986 and guaranteed that even if the leadership was killed and all command-and-control systems disrupted, the Soviets would still launch an all-out nuclear counter-attack. Like Skynet of the Terminator movies -- Linda Hamilton, call your office. And "the dead hand" is still operational, although Moscow officially won't discuss it. It's a good thing nothing ever goes wrong with complex systems.

As we observe a one-year anniversary nearly every day of some calamity from last year's Great Panic, I can't stop that feeling of grating ambivalence. Yes, Messers Bernanke, Paulson and Geithner averted a collapse of "the global financial system" and perhaps averted another Great Depression. That's the story line and even I buy it most of the time. But now the too-big-to-fail banks have gotten even bigger. The derivative boys are back at work. Promised re-regulation is being gutted. The pain has fallen on average Americans and the American taxpayer.

It's almost as if "the global financial system" built its own Dead Hand doomsday machine. So the question becomes: Did we avert apocalypse last fall and winter, fortunately shutting down this fearsome device. Or did we actually arm it by our actions. In other words, should we have called the bastards' bluffs in late 2008?

The Hispanic illusion

Progressives and liberals cling to the expectation that Republican antagonism of Hispanics will lead to electoral disaster. This was ever-present during the confirmation fight over Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Now the predictions of GOP doom are back. This time Republicans are slitting their own throats by using the health-care-for-illegal-immigrants lie to reignite the anti-immigrant (anti-Hispanic) hysteria in The Base. This is suicide to alienate the nation's largest and fastest-growing minority, and it will be especially lethal for Republicans in the Southwest, with its huge Hispanic population. That, at least, is the view from Washington, D.C. The reality can be summed up in two words.

Joe Arpaio.

The Italian-American sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, anchored by the nation's fifth-largest city, Arpaio waged a vicious campaign against illegals ahead of last fall's election. Egged on by talk-radio haters, the "sweeps" were part of a notorious climate of antagonism against all Hispanics, even Mexican-Americans who have been in the country for generations. Arpaio didn't go after the Anglo Republicans who employed the illegals. He arrested the weak, the vulnerable, the already exploited. Maricopa County is at least one-third Hispanic citizens who might object to this racist atmosphere. Risky, no? And it should be added that the incumbent was lacking in many ways that informed citizens of ethnic groups should have found deserving of a swift kick to the door. Arpaio was re-elected by a landslide -- and the sweeps mostly stopped, having served their purpose for a publicity seeking hotdog many other cops call "The Badged Ego."

The debates we're not having

As masterful as President Obama's health care speech was, he operates in a nation that is increasingly losing the capacity to govern itself. The blurt of the loutish South Carolina Republican congressman, calling the president a liar, something I have never heard in listening to presidential addresses before that body since JFK...well, that's the least of the problem.

Health care reform foundered on the vicious lies of a well-organized minority and, apparently, the simple-mindedness of the American people (all manipulated by the health industries' hundreds of millions of lobbying dollars). The side dish was the ongoing hyperventilation over the president's citizenship or lack thereof. Then came the hysteria over his "indoctrination" of schoolchildren from a harmless speech (two other presidents have done this, with no controversy). All this from a minority of nuts -- and their reactionary masters -- who nonetheless dominated the television from which most Americans get their "news." This is how we spent our summer. One would never know who won the election last fall.

Think of all we're not discussing. Not even thinking about as a nation.

Is it incompetence or the quiet coup?

It's gonna be a long three-and-a-half years.

When all the autopsies are completed on the Obama administration's early train wreck, all the shoulda-woulda-coulda, this is the most salient point. Whatever eloquence the president musters on Wednesday night, it's over -- or almost so. One wonders if the crew in the White House is still so dazzled by the whole West Wing thing that they don't even realize their peril, and hence the nation's peril.

We know a few things. Obama is no FDR. Not only does he lack Roosevelt's deviousness, but he also has no Harry Hopkins, Rex Tugwell, Harold M. Ickes, Adolf Berle, Tommy Corcoran or Raymond Moley. Rahm Emmanuel? Give me a break. He may be a tough guy in the tussle over office space, but he and the president's other advisers have done Obama no favors, much less provided the ideas, toughness and administrative savvy of FDR's Brains Trust and other close aides.

The closer comparisons so far are less flattering. Herbert Hoover -- another brilliant,  accomplished, initially beloved public servant who froze in the headlights. and became more detached as crisis progressed. Jimmy Carter -- elected in a spirit of hope and revulsion against Republican crimes (literally) who crashed early on the rocks of Congress and never recovered. Obama lacks Carter's insufferable sanctimoniousness, but he has revealed one ruinous similarity: weakness. Successful presidents are never weak.

When August goes

On June 28, 1914, a bumbling gang of assassins failed to kill Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, on his trip to the troubled region of Bosnia-Herzegovina. One disheartened member lingered at a coffee shop in Sarajevo, when up pulled the archduke's automobile. His driver had made a wrong turn. But Gavrilo Princip pulled his pistol and fatally wounded Francis Ferdinand and his pregnant wife Sophie. By August 1st, this tragedy in a small corner of Europe had ignited the First World War. By its end, at least 37 million soldiers and civilians were dead, three empires had been toppled and a fourth had been lethally wounded. In the imposing ossuary on the Verdun battlefield alone, you can look through recessed windows at the remains of 130,000 unidentified French and German soldiers.

For the rest of the 20th century we lived in the dark shadow of the Great War. The bungled peace of the "war to end all wars" led directly to World War II. Germany's dispatch of Lenin in a sealed train, like a deadly bacillus, back to St. Petersburg brought on the Bolshevik Revolution and eventually a nuclear standoff with the Free World that threatened humanity's extinction. The confidence of the West was forever shattered. Nationalism and tribalism were unleashed, usually with deadly consequences.

It was perhaps fitting, then, that the last British veteran of the Great War, Harry Patch, died on the cusp of August, allowed the gift of years that had been denied so large a portion of his generation. (A common inscription found on the war monuments dotting villages in the U.K: "When you go home, tell them of us and say, for their tomorrow, we gave our today.").

Yet the equally fitting verse came from Rudyard Kipling, who lost his son in the war: "If any question why we died, tell them because our fathers lied."

On the edge of Waterloo

Republican South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint says if Obama fails on healthcare, it will "break him"; it will be "his Waterloo." DeMint is right.

Those of a certain age remember the Jeff MacNelly cartoons during the Carter administration. As each day seemingly brought fresh setbacks, MacNelly's cartoon president shrank until he was a mini-me struggling amid the vast space of the presidential chair. Although he lacks Carter's tut-tut lecturing and, so far, foreign policy disasters, although Americans are proud of themselves for electing an African-American president, I sense Obama shrinking every day.

Many of the failures are not his. Obama inherited a nation in greater trouble than at any time since 1933, perhaps 1861. Not for nothing did the Onion have the headline: "Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job." In addition to the financial panic, Obama got two wars, foreign policy in disarray, a huge budget deficit, a government that had attacked civil liberties and enshrined torture as policy. He took over a nation that is in hock to China and the petro-states, that has been deindustrialized and seen its middle class devastated by policies to serve the corporate elite. And a nation ill-prepared for climate change or peak oil -- indeed, one digging itself ever deeper in the hole.

He and his party, however, continue to make critical missteps.

A giant leap, then the long fall

Amid the bitter war, in the Age of Aquarius, with fire in the streets, astronauts flew to the moon and stepped onto the trackless dust of the Sea of Tranquility... What's amazing is that I (over)wrote this sentence 20 years ago to mark the Apollo 11 anniversary. Nobody can outdo John Noble Wilford of the New York Times for his historic lede when the event happened: "Men have landed and walked on the moon." But my forgettable column from 1989 is a reminder of how fast time passes, for a man, for a nation.

You either got the space program or you didn't. I was a child of the Space Age, a rocket boy, minutely following every mission: Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, as America raced the Soviets to the moon. I had NASA Facts films that the TV studio downtown had given me, sheaves of photos and publicity directly from the space agency, models of every rocket and spacecraft. I watched Neil Armstrong step out that July night in the company of my grandmother, a woman who had been born on the frontier, who had witnessed the invention of the automobile and the airplane -- and now she had lived to see this.

It remains one of the most moving moments of my life. I also choke up re-reading about the Apollo 8 mission, with the revolutionary photo Earthrise, when humans first saw their precious blue planet from afar, alone in the vast emptiness of cold space. When the astronauts read from Genesis on Christmas Eve and concluded with, "And from the crew of Apollo 8 we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth."

You get it or you don't. But either way, at what a remarkable place we find ourselves 40 years -- 40 years! -- out.

Signed, sealed, delivered

Remember the Sarah Palin turkey moment? She had gone to "pardon" one bird ahead of Thanksgiving, and then, cluelessly or not, gave an on-camera interview while a slaughterhouse employee fed less fortunate beasts into a machine. Their heads were stuck into a funnel, their throats cut, and their blood drained.

The world is more complex than ever. Economic, social, geopolitical and military situations are full of nuance, contradiction and layers of gray. Still, I don't about you, but I am feeling more and more like one of those turkeys. Most of our necks are in that funnel, and the blood being drained out is the wealth of a whole society.

Where is it going? To ever-higher profit margins demanded by Wall Street. Profit margins that translate into greater wealth for an elite that makes its living off investments rather than wages. To the gamed market that is the world of politically powerful, highly concentrated industries, especially finance. And to tax cuts, the opiate of the duhs and ignos, that have become so deeply ingrained in our local, state and national polities that our society as we knew it is starting to collapse. Who, for example, would have thought 30 years ago that we would reach the point where we couldn't afford to keep Interstate rest areas open? Never mind that "we can't afford" the rail network found in other advanced nations, etc.

Phoenix 101: Conservatives

As we watch the Kookocracy engage in Easter Island cannibalism, it's a fitting moment to reflect on the changing face of conservatism in Arizona. I know it doesn't look as if it's changed: After all, these are the same clowns who have been in office for decades, or the proteges of the clowns before them. For most Arizonans, Fife Symington or Evan Mecham seem like ancient history.

And yet, conservatism has meant different things at different times. The Kooks down at the Capitol would be anathema to the lions of the dawn of modern Arizona conservatism: John J. Rhodes, Paul Fannin and, especially, Barry Goldwater. What later passed for Arizona conservatives could say, "Barry changed," when the senator criticized the religious right or the ban on gays in the military with his characteristic circumspection. No, he didn't. I had conversations with Rhodes late in his life -- the House leader who, along with Goldwater and Republican Sen. Hugh Scott, told Richard Nixon he must resign the presidency. Rhodes was aghast at what the state Republicans had become.

Can you imagine John McCain or Jeff Flake showing such independence or integrity?

While you were out

Obama's honeymoon, if it ever really existed -- remember, not one House Republican voted for the stimulus -- is over. Some have their theories as to the signs behind this turning point, but I have no doubt. It was the return of the Great American Freak Show, in the form of the wall-to-wall news coverage of the death of a song-and-dance man, once gifted, later creepy. If the triple-digit increase in television ratings are any sign, this is what you want from your news media. It is the "national conversation" you crave. Can a missing comely teenage blonde be far behind?

Obama's election gave us a moment of seriousness, to take stock of the troubles bearing down on us and make the urgent and consequential adjustments necessary to address them. Yet it is apparently not to be. Imagine if the outpouring for the song-and-dance man had been applied to universal healthcare or global warming? There would be no hopeless bottleneck in a Congress owned by big business, no Dianne Feinstein saying that criticism about healthcare legislation from the left "doesn't move her." No calling climate change a "hoax." As Paul Krugman pointed out in his Monday column, "The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected...And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course."

Our present course, sadly, is to find fresh distractions. If you care to take a moment, however, here's a bit of what you probably missed in the past few days, reported by that hopeless "old media."

America becalmed

For all the vigor projected by our appealing president, America sits strangely stuck. Healthcare reform seems all but dead. Even the whateverthehellitmeans "public option" is struggling. Tom Daschle, who proved such a formidable leader for the Democrats during the onset of the Bush calamity, is urging President Obama to drop it. There just aren't the votes in the Senate. Indeed, the Democrats seem in a dead run to lose the next election, which would be a certainty if a credible opposition party existed.

It's easy for the senators to be complacent. They are deep in the pockets of the healthcare and insurance industries. The wife of Sen. Chris Dodd earned hundreds of thousands of dollars and stock grants serving on the boards of Javelin Pharmaceuticals Inc., Cardiome Pharma Corp., Brookdale Senior Living, and Pear Tree Pharmaceuticals. And Dodd is one of the good guys? Daschle has his own conflicts. The for-profit medical and insurance industries, along with the U.S. Chamber and assorted business lobbyists can bring hundreds of millions of dollars to bear to maintain the status quo. The only people who think this is a good idea are the diminishing ranks of Americans who have good insurance. The suffering and fear of everyone else has no political power. Meanwhile, the media hype the costs of single-payer (ignoring that America pays twice as much for its system as any advanced nation) and the alleged horror stories of rationing abroad. Can you believe this trick is working?

The same Democrats who won a historic election are struggling to enact the mildest of measures to limit greenhouse gases, even as the government issues a historic assessment of the consequences we are already seeing and will see from climate change. The Southwest can kiss its ass goodbye. So can the Southeast, including the exurban office "park" where the rat bastards at NCR are moving, stabbing Dayton, Ohio, in the back.

No we can't?

Spring runs out and the American republic celebrates its societal strength and political will by regulating tobacco. That'll show the tobacco companies, long past their period of influence, and the diminishing ranks of smokers, primarily made up of the poor and disenfranchised.

Meanwhile, 10 big banks have begun repaying their bailout money to the taxpayers. Their primary reason is not to do the right thing or return to the business of funding productive enterprise. It is to gain the freedom to jack up the compensation of their 25 top executives. Like the Bourbons, the big bankers have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Unlike Big Tobacco, they not only retain their political clout -- defeating an effort to regulate dangerous derivatives -- but seem to largely run the federal government.

The consequences of this are manifold. The institutions that were "too big to fail" should have taught us that they are too big to exist. Instead, they have grown even larger. The secrecy of the Bush administration that led us into the Iraq fiasco has become the secrecy of the Geithner-Summers-Bernanke administration. We have only the tiniest sense of where the trillions in bailout money and "lending facilities" went, or who scratched the back of whom. We know, for example, that tax money went to help AIG repay Goldman Sachs which repaid...? You get the picture. Meanwhile, real unemployment is at least 16 percent, and millions may never regain their old earning power. Some may never be employable again outside of Wal-Mart.

Tortured justifications

By Emil Pulsifer
Guest Blogger

Recently there has been an aggressive media campaign to justify torture as a tool of official U.S. government policy: Attempts have been made not only by Dick Cheney and others implicated in past practices, but also by a variety of media allies who seem determined to soften up public perception in support of future imperatives. Most notably is the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer, who recently ran the second of two columns (to date) defending torture.

 

Krauthammer, like other advocates of torture as a tool of official government policy, begs the question: He assumes, in the premises of his arguments, that which he wants to prove: First, that subjects in custody know the location of a ticking bomb or a hostage; Second, that the authorities somehow know that the subjects in custody possess this knowledge (without themselves possessing this knowledge); Third, that standard law-enforcement interrogation techniques have not only failed to produce the information sought, but will continue to do so; and that torture, instead of eliciting a false confession (stopping the torture by telling interrogators what they want to hear), will produce the information which the subject is "known to possess".

The obvious question here is, how do interrogators know what knowledge the subject possesses without themselves possessing that knowledge?

Secession -- A good idea this time

The Republic is beset by many distractions: Dick Cheney running madly in the midair of potential war crimes prosecution, a la Wile E Coyote; cowardly Democratic Senators bowing to tales of Osama's boys living on welfare in Oklahoma City, watching for those "green shoots" that mean we can go back to business as usual.

I don't put the Texas secession dustup in that category. We should take it seriously. We should even look on it favorably.

Note that President Obama doesn't seem to dwell on Lincoln any longer -- the Lincoln who said that if he failed, he would be the last president of the United States. Obama's judicious mind has persuaded him that the crisis that seemed to engulf the nation last fall was overstated. He has been enveloped in the protective visions of his moneymen, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and, behind them, Bob Rubin. The Obama administration will be Clinton 2.0, without Bill's missteps and with the magnificent oratory -- as was done yesterday in the glow of the Constitution -- that makes one proud to be an American.

Two roads to the future?

With the exception of LBJ, Democratic presidents since 1960 have fared badly in their legislative agendas, even when Congress was controlled by their party. President Obama, for all his gifts, may be on track to fare little better. Health care. Cap-and-trade. Financial reform. Big-time tax evasion. Even for this cool-handed moderate, it's a tough sell.

Meanwhile, the media and the salesmen on Wall Street are in a constant search for "green shoots" -- signs this historic recession is over. Nobody is thinking through what these shoots will turn into, exactly what the road ahead looks like. But for many, including policymakers, we find a desperate assumption that the economy will pick right up where it left off in 2006.

Two schools of thought are at work here. One says the fundamentals are sound, as President Hoover put it, and the future will look much like the recent past. The other, found more among the outliers, argues we have hit a historic pivot point -- but will we realize it and save ourselves?

Dangerous party animals

Dear God, I wish America had a real two-party system. As it is, the Republicans have been reduced to a regional gaggle of angry white guys. They're opposed to everything but tax cuts and -- now that their profligate former president is gone -- government spending. One of their most prominent governors hinted that Texas ought to secede. I wish we could let them go, confiscating North Dakota's nukes on the way out. And given the Great Disruption that is only beginning, national breakup is not out of the question. But the reality is that what's left of the Republican Party are welfare queen states such as Arizona and Mississippi that need the federal Treasury even as they curse it.

The damage from the Republican crackup goes beyond the latest laff riot on Fox "News" or even the bottleneck in the Senate. I think about Seattle, where Democrats have been in charge for years, often with bumbling results. It would be nice to have a real opposition party that would provide meaningful competition. One-party polities are never healthy. But the Republicans can't be trusted because in power, even those who claim independent thought almost invariably become janizaries of the extreme right and its bankrupt policies.

Think about Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Big Finance). Wouldn't it be nice to have a Prescott Bush-style Republican to take him on (Bush defeated Dodd's father for the senate seat Connecticut in the 1950s)? Such a Republican wouldn't be focused on defunding Amtrak, denying global warming and voting in lockstep with the extreme right. We would have an alternative -- perhaps as much a creature of big money, perhaps not. But competition that would keep everyone more honest.

The bigger hostage drama

The rescue of the American captain from pirates -- handled with cool competence from President Obama to the SEAL snipers -- gives the nation a much-needed boost. This comes after eight years of "bring 'em on" grandstanding by the Bush administration. And now, as the company that once stood for American success and the rising middle class, General Motors, faces bankruptcy. At least we can still do something right.

This should not distract us from piracy that has been happening on Wall Street, and that the Obama administration seems committed to, at best, merely applying a nip-and-tuck. It emerges that Obama chief economic adviser Larry Summers not only received $5.2 million from a hedge fund and $2.7 million in speaking fees from big financial institutions after he left Harvard. He also was working for a hedge fund while he was president of Harvard. Frank Rich asks, "Can he be a fair broker of the bailout when he so recently received lavish compensation from some of its present and, no doubt, future players?" Ben Stein answers, "I know people and I know money, at least the basics. If anyone thinks that a man who has had a taste of honey from Wall Street on that scale will ever really crack the whip on Wall Street, he’s dreaming."

Larry Summers, the man leading Obama's reckless push into socialism; sorry, SOCIALISM!! (or is it fascism? -- the right-wingers can't figure it out). What's really happening is that the pirates are winning, and there's no SEAL team out of D.C. to protect taxpayers -- or the future of this republic.

Will AIG be Obama's Bay of Pigs?

The scandal over $165 million in retention bonuses paid to AIG executives goes beyond the rhetoric of cheap populism -- including among Republicans who steadfastly deregulated the financial sector, defended outrageous executive compensation and thought the Greenspan-driven housing-derivatives bubble was just dandy. I know this much: It is the biggest test yet for President Obama. Will it be his Bay of Pigs?

The bonuses are being paid out to "retain" executives at the Financial Products Unit at AIG that nearly brought the world economy to collapse -- leading the U.S. government to pump in so much taxpayer money to rescue AIG that we own 80 percent of it. These executives who created the house of cards of credit-default swaps are now government employees, for all intents and purposes. If only our teachers were paid so well. And "retain"? The teenagers working in the AIG mail room would be more prudent than these Masters of the Universe. But the government claims it has little ability to stop the payments. Contracts must be honored, don't you know.

Useful idiots

After seeing a bit of the Conservative Political Action Conference on CSPAN, I've concluded that the only thing Democrats have to fear is Democrats themselves. Admittedly a big fear, that, but CPAC was almost a parody of how out of touch, out of ideas and full of hate "conservatives" have become (the one exception being, perhaps, Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman). It would be a parody if these activists didn't still have the power to make mischief.

Watching Rush Limbaugh's keynote address was particularly arresting. A man who once marketed his own line of neckties, stood at the podium in an outfit that looked like a bathrobe, rambling on like an over-the-hill Third World dictator to the cheers of the true believers still down in the bunker. Of course, he wants Obama to fail -- nevermind the damage to the country. How else can reactionary politics rise again? It will require Obama's failure -- or decades of faded memory as to what the Republicans did to bring on the worst calamity in decades.

I was actually vaguely sad. I listened to Rush in the early years. He was funny. His blowhard personality held a wink of self-parody. The songs made me laugh. He often took listeners to an intellectual plane -- albeit a right-wing one -- that has remained missing from all the Rush copycats down through the years. When I've tuned-in in recent years, most of those redeeming characteristics are gone, especially the humor.

Say you want a revolution?

One of the greatest dangers to peace lies in the economic pressure to which people find themselves subjected.

--Calvin Coolidge

You can't handle the truth!

-- Jack Nicholson

The honorary Page One Editor of Rogue Columnist and I have been in a friendly argument of late over when, or whether, the riots will begin. He sees sooner than later, as people are faced with the worst economic crisis in 80 years -- perhaps in the history of the nation. Things will not turn around soon, and may well get much worse. And having worked around the world in some miserable and boiling hot-spots, he offers observations that should be discounted at one's peril. Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski echoed this on MSNBC's Morning Joe, saying, "Hell, there could be even riots" as the unemployed take aim at the rich bastards that caused the calamity and are still doing fine.

I've tended to say later or never -- the nation is too narcoticized by American Idol, Grand Theft Auto, endless driving, limitless digital distractions, the deadening civic isolation of suburbia. Human nature is unchanging but Americans have changed. They have become easily led. Short-changed of an education in history, civics and the humanities, too many Americans are just plugged into the matrix, sucking Wal-Mart subsistence, waiting for their next cog assignment.

Now, I'm not so sure.

Legalize drugs?

Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske has been selected as the nation's next "drug czar." His predecessor, Norm Stamper, argues for legalization, saying that the "war against drugs" has not only failed, but inflicted misery on people and undermined the effectiveness of law enforcement. (Watch an interview here). The divergence shows a blue divide little known to civilians, with a growing number of police officers who want partial or full decriminalization of drugs. I certainly hear it from the cops who help me in the research for my mysteries. There's an organization, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), dedicated to the cause.

Decriminalization is one of the last issues where you'll find both liberal and conservative supporters. For example, National Review, which at least once represented an intellectual brand of conservatism, urged legalization years ago. NR said "the drug war is lost." Chief Stamper put it this way:

It's not a stretch to conclude that our Draconian approach to drug use is the most injurious domestic policy since slavery. Want to cut back on prison overcrowding and save a bundle on the construction of new facilities? Open the doors, let the nonviolent drug offenders go. The huge increases in federal and state prison populations during the 1980s and '90s (from 139 per 100,000 residents in 1980 to 482 per 100,000 in 2003) were mainly for drug convictions. In 1980, 580,900 Americans were arrested on drug charges. By 2003, that figure had ballooned to 1,678,200. We're making more arrests for drug offenses than for murder, manslaughter, forcible rape and aggravated assault combined. Feel safer?

Why tax cuts won't stim this time

At the moment, tax cuts make up 42 percent of the so-called stimulus bill. This dooms it to be ineffectual, if not actually making things worse. The latter will happen because this is all borrowed money. Public investments provide the means to repay it by improving commerce and productivity. Tax cuts just piss it away. Where are the fighting liberals who are going to filibuster this mess and make the president realize his bipartisanship dance has only reinvigorated the Republicans, the party that wrecked America?

In 2003, Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman laid out the exhaustive case against the cult of tax cuts, in a must-read, must-keep article in the New York Times Magazine. Yet this remains the only idea of the GOP, the party that wrecked America. And it has been given center stage by a naive president and weak Democrats who don't know how to act as winners. As a consequence, public investments in infrastructure, the best way to generate jobs and a return for the future, have been pared back. The perfect should not be the enemy of the good. But this is a rotten bill, and it is the enemy of the good, whether the punked good has realized yet or not.

So much for the honeymoon

I keep telling myself that the woozy feeling that the Obama administration is already failing is mainly due to the 24-hour news cycle. We get to see the sausage-making in real time. And the sudden ubiquity of Republicans all over the corporate media, despite the public's rejection of their failed ideas. I keep telling myself all this.

Still, some worries. If Rahm Emmanuel is so incredibly effective as Obama's right-hand, he has yet to show it. The so-called stimulus is bogged down and deeply flawed. One cabinet nominee after another is tripped by tax or conflict-of-interest problems. It's nice that Obama admitted a mistake, but he has yet to focus, in simple, Reaganesque language what he wants and use it to go over the head of an obstructionist Congress.

Why am I not comforted that a group of "moderate" senators is trying to cut $100 billion of "fat" -- the media's term -- from the stimulus? In this supposed lard is mass transit funding desperately needed for systems that are already cutting back -- hurting the working poor the hardest. Transit and rail are my markers for real change, and given stable funding they would provide jobs paying family wages that couldn't be sent overseas. Fat? How about South Carolina's unremarked interstate to nowhere?

The Daschle scandal

As much as rendition, the Iraq scam and the looting of the Treasury for bank bonuses, Tom Daschle makes me wonder if the coup has already happened and America is under the control of a shadow government, whatever the outcome of elections. As you know, President Obama's choice to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services -- and point man on health care reform -- has a tax problem. He failed to pay $140,000 in taxes, as the New York Times genteelly puts it, "related to income for consulting work and the use of a car made available to him by a close friend who is also a generous donor to Democratic causes."

We have a task of civic rebuilding after 25 years of more-or-less "conservative" misgovernance -- chief on the list restoration of a fair and adequate revenue base for government, and teaching people there's no free lunch. Tax cuts are not a magic elixir. Taxes are the cost of a modern society. Daschle, like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner before him, is no better than a fat Republican tax cheat -- with the added hypocrisy of wanting (rightly) to raise taxes. These are the Ted Haggards of tax policy.

Yet more troubling is the window Daschle's "embarrassing" slip gives us into the permanent power elite.

So let us begin anew

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time; and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death... Yet sometimes grace bestows a tomorrow of soaring magic and hope, and so it will be with the inauguration of Barack Obama on Tuesday. Whether it began with his moving rhetoric or much of America's desire to simply be rid of George W. Bush, Obama has captivated this nation. The vast majority of people believe in him and, if polling is right, are willing to give him time to fix the disasters produced by the past eight years.

Just to have a president who can speak well and intelligently, who reads books and newspapers, who seems to have an interior life, calm center and an open mind, who's smart, who won't embarrass us in the world. A man who is willing to change his mind when the facts change. Just these things will mean much. America will no longer use torture as an instrument of national policy. Science will come center stage in guiding policy. Diplomacy will once again be worthy of a great power. This president's Christianity will be made manifest through humility and witness, not as a creepy "God talks to me in the Oval office" or as tactic of division and inciting the mob. This constitutional scholar will know about separation of church and state and separation of powers. His vice president will be a vice president. Just these things will be healing tectonic shifts from the scoundrel time we have endured. I, for one, will see the flag raised and hear the national anthem with tears of renewed pride rather than sorrow.

So you can stop reading here. Or come back after the inauguration and read further. Otherwise, we must brace ourselves for the extremely difficult work that will follow tomorrow.

The dog ate his tax returns?

I can't help but point out with satisfaction that the pilot who perfectly glided the stricken US Airways plane into the Hudson, saving all aboard, is one of those experienced Baby Boomers who has spent a lifetime perfecting his skills, doing something real and productive, rather than pushing financial swindles. He's also a union member. These are the people our economy can't dump fast enough. And we wonder why America is in trouble.

Then there's Timothy F. Geithner, President-elect Obama's choice to be the next Treasury secretary. I've been uncomfortable with Geithner since his selection, chiefly because he has been president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, the mother ship of the Fed, since 2003. This means he was in a position of significant influence as the financial portion of the Great Disruption was emerging. He apparently raised no alarms or did anything to stop the outright fraud running like a river of manure on Wall Street. He has been, as the New York Times put it, "a central player" in the $750 billion financial bailout. So he was a co-pilot who ditched the financial system, but unfortunately it keeps taking on water and the casualty toll is mounting.

Then there's the wee little problem with his taxes.

A stimulus mistake?

Much of the details of the new stimulus have yet to be known. What's emerging so far is cause for concern. For one thing, the $300 billion in tax cuts may be smart politics, but it's questionable economics and policy. Then there's the issue of how federal dollars might be used to prime the pump, with so much going to backfill basic programs being defunded by cash-strapped states, and lobbyists of the powerful highway-sprawl consortium lining up for the "roads and bridges" money.

George W. Bush and eight years of Republican misrule -- really more than a quarter century -- are leaving the new administration with the worst mess in nearly 80 years. And remember, all this was validated over and over by a majority of Americans at the polls (maybe not in 2000 and 2004). It's an open question whether any president can lead the changes really necessary to address the Great Disruption, of which the economic collapse is only part. We'll see. But the barriers to real change we can believe in are mammoth.

The Republicans look to magic

Much has been made of the candidate for Republican National chairman, Chip Saltsman, circulating a CD with the song, "Barack the Magic Negro": maybe it's racist, it's certainly bad taste. But most of all it's a sign that a party that has become a largely Southern/rural Western regional party has no inclination to change. Today, Paul Krugman writes about the larger collapse of the Southern Strategy and how Republicans still haven't realized the magnitude of their failure.

I'm fascinated by what we might call The Strange Case of Mark Sanford. The South Carolina governor was prepared to let 77,000 of his fellow citizens go without (meager) unemployment benefits, refusing to ask for $146 million in assistance from the federal government. He finally relented, with only hours to spare, under pressure from citizens, politicians and those still-important newspapers. This case tells us more about the prevailing Republican mindset than Saltsman's song.

The Big Lie about unions

Somewhere over the past few decades, Americans became something new: followers. They became, as an earlier generation put it with disdain, "easily led." Keeping them that way requires a successful propaganda offensive in the case of the Big Three automakers. You see, it's all the union's fault. It's all the workers' faults. Just keep repeating that, over and over. Who knows what might happen if you failed to believe. Belief in the god "free markets" has been shaken by the incompetence of the Bush administration -- and by the inevitable consequence of law-of-the-jungle capitalism: the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression. Who knows what might happen if working Americans were suddenly not so easily led.

They might follow the example of 240 workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago, who staged a sit-in after Bank of America cut off credit to the company -- and the company, in the way of today's America, laid off the workers without even a severance. They occupied the factory until the bosses and the bank capitulated. The action was hailed as a new sign of backbone, but there was a critical difference between these workers and most average Americans. A difference between them and the 35,000 employees that BofA itself is cutting. They were members of a union.

When presidents had class

In 1901, President William McKinley was attending the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo when an anarchist stepped forward and shot him, a mortal wound. As the crowd fell upon the assassin, McKinley said, "Don't hurt him."

Everyone has had a chance to see the shoe-throwing incident by now. This is the pathetic coda of a failed presidency, akin to the Jimmy Carter "killer rabbit." Yet the problem with the way many get "news" is that few will reflect on what the incident means. President Bush seemed clueless and callous as to why the Iraqi journalist might represent the rage of so many of his countrymen against America's actions in the country.

The journalist is now behind bars, perhaps already having been beaten and tortured, and he may face years in prison. He is also a hero in the Arab world. The shrewdest thing for Bush to do would be to demand his release. And I thought Bush was a Christian -- or at least that's how he manipulated the electorate.

Welcome to my world, guv

Asked how he was enjoying being a columnist, disgraced formed New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer says, "It sucks."

Obama's coming trouble (and it's not Blago)

Have we seen the future and it's ugly? I'm talking about the successful Republican effort to block the paltry $15 billion in bridge loans to the Big Three.

The hypocrisy should be well-known. The biggest Republican opponents of the bailout have large foreign automaker "transplant" factories in their states. Also, they are all terrified of attempts by the United Auto Workers to organize those plants (even though, contrary to right-wing propaganda, wages aren't that different between domestic and transplant factories). The bridge loans would have amounted to about $5,000 per job, while Alabama paid some $250,000 per job to lure Mercedes to build there. Overall the Southern states have paid about $150,000 per job in incentives to build a manufacturing base controlled by foreign automakers. Finally, this is political payback against Michigan, Ohio, what's left of the industrial Midwest and union workers for going for Obama in the election.

Republicans didn't filibuster the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, which has neither unfrozen the credit markets nor shown itself to be accountable or competently directed. It's a giveaway, not a loan. They're not raising a peep about $2 trillion -- with a "T" -- in funds dolled out to anonymous fat cats by the Federal Reserve. But given a chance to once again stick it to working people, especially in states hardest hit by Republican trade and industrial policies, they rush to the barricades.

I'm disappointed that the auto bailout as crafted seems to contain nothing transformative. But the only thing we need less than business-as-usual in Detroit is to lose the largest remaining piece of industrial base we have. Especially one so connected with building the middle class and at a time of such economic peril.

But the larger issue is that Democrats failed to win a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Unless Barack Obama finds a Reaganesque way to go over the heads of the Congress to the American people, it's clear that the Mitch McConnells of the Senate will filibuster and block his entire program. The danger of the moment means nothing to them. Democrats had better quit celebrating and wake up.

Sunday musts

Frank Rich raises important questions about the Obama economic team in Sunday's New York Times:

Summers and Geithner are both protégés of another master of the universe, Robert Rubin. His appearance in the photo op for Obama-transition economic advisers three days after the election was, to put it mildly, disconcerting. Ever since his acclaimed service as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, Rubin has labored as a senior adviser and director at Citigroup, now being bailed out by taxpayers to the potential tune of some $300 billion. Somehow the all-seeing Rubin didn’t notice the toxic mortgage-derivatives on Citi’s books until it was too late. The Citi may never sleep, but he snored.

And be sure to check out Timothy Egan's fabulous "Typing Without a Clue" tirade about "Joe the Plumber" and Sarah Palin getting book contracts:

Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to poverty, trying to say one thing well and true. Day in, day out, they labor to find their voice, to learn their trade, to understand nuance and pace. And then, facing a sea of rejections, they hear about something like Barbara Bush’s dog getting a book deal.

Writing is hard, even for the best wordsmiths. Ernest Hemingway said the most frightening thing he ever encountered was “a blank sheet of paper.” And Winston Churchill called the act of writing a book “a horrible, exhaustive struggle, like a long bout of painful illness.”

A new look at Goldwater and the GOP

What if Barry Goldwater wasn't the father of today's Republican Party? What if the patriarch were Joe McCarthy instead? That's the provocative idea by Neal Gabler writing in the Los Angeles Times:

...there is another rendition of the story of modern conservatism, one that doesn't begin with Goldwater and doesn't celebrate his libertarian orientation. It is a less heroic story, and one that may go a much longer way toward really explaining the Republican Party's past electoral fortunes and its future. In this tale, the real father of modern Republicanism is Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the line doesn't run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. It centralizes what one might call the McCarthy gene, something deep in the DNA of the Republican Party that determines how Republicans run for office, and because it is genetic, it isn't likely to be expunged any time soon.

Arizonans are blindly proud of Barry, and I'm not immune. But a school of revisionism is well overdue. It's true that Goldwater would have no use for the religious-based extremism and corporate kleptocracy of today's Republican Party -- which has come to dominate Arizona, too. Yet he was a product of the Intermountain West as it existed in my grandmother's lifetime, particularly the first half of the 20th century: tamed and made livable by the federal government, with a relatively small population and ample room.

His background and temperament, informed by and informing his philosophy, made him too impatient for the complexities of governing an advanced nation in the space age. He lacked any executive experience, beyond running a department store. Reagan had been governor of a large state, and a generally effective one, operating from the center. Barry was an individualist and a rabble-rouser. He didn't even particularly want to run in 1964, but was infuriated by the "Eastern establishment" Republicans. As president, he wouldn't have blown up the world. He would have been bored, jumping Air Force One for the first chance to sneak off with his cameras to the Navajo Nation. About the only thing Goldwater has in common with today's conservatives is a philosophy incompatible with effective government.

So let the argument begin...

Worth considering...

Andrew J. Bacevich, retired Army colonel and intellectual, offered some profound thoughts a while back to Bill Moyers. They have "reality check in the Great Disruption" written large on them:

Our foreign policy is something that is concocted in Washington D.C., but it reflects the perceptions of our political elite about what we want, we the people want. And what we want, by and large - I mean, one could point to many individual exceptions - but, what we want, by and large is, we want this continuing flow of very cheap consumer goods.

We want to be able to pump gas into our cars regardless of how big they may happen to be, in order to be able to drive wherever we want to be able to drive. And we want to be able to do these things without having to think about whether or not the book's balanced at the end of the month, or the end of the fiscal year. And therefore, we want this unending line of credit.

And

There was a time, seventy, eighty, a hundred years ago, that we Americans sat here in the western hemisphere, and puzzled over why British imperialists went to places like Iraq and Afghanistan. We viewed that sort of imperial adventurism with disdain. But, it's really become part of what we do. Unless a President could ask fundamental questions about our posture in the world, it becomes impossible then, for any American President to engage the American people in some sort of a conversation about how and whether or not to change the way we live.

Napolitano moves on?

If Janet Napolitano becomes President Obama's Secretary of Homeland Security, the only shame will be that the cabinet post was not eliminated. The very name sounds un-American, like something out of 1984. The department has represented more bureaucracy, more money for politically connected private contractors, more dangers to civil liberties...and, gee, I don't know about you, but I don't feel safer.

The ambitious Arizona governor has long hoped to get an escape route through a Democratic administration in Washington. She had little hope of winning a Senate seat, and Arizona is more hopeless than when she came into office, as a surprise winner because of the state's scary downturn at that time -- by today's standards it looks like a upswing -- and a weak GOP rival. She won and retained her office by never taking on the Real Estate Industrial Complex.

On the other hand, she mentioned inconvenient truths, turned back the worst excesses of the Kookocracy, and did some good for poor children. Until Arizona Democrats take the Legislature, this is probably as good as it gets. That may be a long time coming, because outside of congressional gains -- largely due to national issues and extra-crackpot GOP rivals -- the Arizona Democratic Party seemed to gain little from having a  "popular governor." As for Napolitano, perhaps she learned that even if you are the smartest person in any room, that isn't necessarily a career builder in today's Arizona. Now she joins a large cohort of fortunate ex-pats with means, who can come back to the state in the declining number of pleasant days, but not have to actually live there.

And I guess Kookocracy darling and Secretary of State Jan Brewer, who brought extreme partisanship to a job that oversees the integrity of elections, will get to run for governor as an incumbent. You go, Arizona.

They don't wish they knew how to quit him

Like the mistreated girlfriend who just can't quit the abusive fighter jock, the national press is again scritch-scritch-scritching at John McCain's door. His concession speech -- actually fumbling and average before a typically thuggish Phoenix crowd -- was "dignified," "his best speech of the campaign," and "where was this guy during the campaign?". Now the media are busy predicting the re-emergence of the "old McCain" to do good things for the republic, maybe even build bridges between the conservatives and the Obama administration.

Illusions die hard. John McCain worked hard throughout his career to cultivate the national media -- and for all our bravado, even the toughest in the working press can be seduced (whether they bend their principles as a result is another matter). He called them "his base" before the campaign required him to run as a hard-right extremist, right down to the media-blaming rhetoric.

Unfortunately for the media, they finally got a taste of the real, real McCain: a rather undisciplined, herky-jerky, shoot-from-the-hip opportunist, and most of the time a doctrinaire gunslinger for bankrupt, discredited conservatism. When he supported George Bush on torture after opposing him, he cut the last thread of my willingness to believe he was a "maverick" even on a few issues.

Behind the talk of Republican reinvention

We hear much talk now about the Republican Party trying to reinvent itself, fixing its "brand," facing an "identity crisis" or entering a period of internecine war. I'm skeptical about all this. We knew where the Republicans were coming from in the primaries, with a phalanx of middle-aged, rich white guys as candidates. All they had to offer was the same discredited mantra of tax cuts, theocracy and fear, with perhaps the exception of the entertaining libertarian Ron Paul. John McCain emerged as the perfect vessel for this exhausted, intellectually bankrupt yet madly power-hungry political party.

In the wake of a crushing defeat, several bigwigs are meeting at the Virginia estate of Brent Bozell, including "prominent conservatives" such as Grover Norquist -- he of the lust to make government small enough to drown in a bathtub -- and the religious extremist Tony Perkins. Same old, same old. The reality is that the Republicans have been reduced to a Southern white regional party, with some appeal in Southernized white rural areas elsewhere and the rural white libertarian West. This was brought home in a remarkable map in the New York Times, showing party gains in 2008 vs. 2004.

It's not just that the party's limited bag of ideas have been shown to hold frauds, and has finally been soundly rejected by the public. It's not just that the politics of hysteria and hate don't work now. This is a party totally out of step with the country, which is more diverse and urbanized than ever -- even suburban voters recognized their essentially urban issues this time -- and becoming more so in the future. This is a party whose ruling creeds are incapable of dealing with a complex modern society or the multi-layered challenges of the 21st century. And whose hidden creeds -- policy crafted to ensure a plutocracy -- were exposed in the financial crisis.

This moment

And so it comes down to this. A day that will mark the most important election in my lifetime and certainly the most consequential since 1932. The polls show Obama leading and yet... One wonders how wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III, standard bearer for the Party that Wrecked America, could have even 41 percent support, much less higher, much less be, perhaps, competitive in Pennsylvania, Florida and Virginia.

This support for a candidate who wholly represents the ruinous governing philosophy of conservatism -- a set of ideas so discredited, exhausted and out of step with the values of most Americans that McCain's only strategy was a dishonorable campaign of despicable attacks on his opponent and riling up a hateful "base." The man who claims "Country First" picked -- or was forced to pick -- the most unqualified and dangerous vice presidential candidate in American history. Who are these supporters and what are they thinking? Has ignorance, television-induced brain damage and Republican hate finally pushed us past the tipping point? And election fraud, that determinative agent of the 2000 and 2004 elections, is an ever present danger. And the confluence of moneyed interests that fears Obama.

And yet, we have this moment, this last chance. John Adams reflected the realism of the Founders when he said democracies always eventually commit suicide. Decades later Lincoln rightly called this an experiment, not a fixed or secure order in human events. Now the American generations living will be tested at history's fulcrum.

Says a lot...

Barack Obama is holding his election night party in Chicago's Grant Park, a public space. Wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III will hold his at the exclusive, secluded Arizona Biltmore.

A new low in Phoenix's war on the poor

I supposed it's a small thing in comparison with a region that celebrates a sheriff ordered by a federal judge to stop "depriving jail inmates of adequate medical screening and care, feeding them unhealthy food and housing them in unsanitary conditions." This from the New York Times, another chamber-of-commerce moment for Phoenix. A small thing in a city where 15 percent of the population is below the poverty line, where wages lag far behind competing cities (yet living costs don't), the gap between rich and poor is one of the biggest in the nation and the homeless are left in the deadly heat, on the streets despite "get tough" few-benefits policies. A small thing versus the thuggish persecution of the immigrant population that keeps the economy running and gives the affluent their inexpensive lawn services and housekeeping.

Still, the decision by the Phoenix City Council to eliminate what it considers "late night and early morning" bus service should rank right up there in the Hall of Shame. All trips will be eliminated before 5 a.m. and after -- get this -- 10 p.m. The "nation's fifth largest city" won't have any bus service after 10 p.m. Dayton, Ohio, has bus service after 10 p.m.!

City council members who drive about Phoenix's 500 square miles in air conditioning and accompanied by their entourages seem to have no idea of how many Phoenicians live: in low-wage jobs -- often holding down more than one -- working overnight shifts and without cars. Much of this is part of the tourism, construction or retail economy that is about all this "city" has. Have these august solons ever looked out their SUV windows late at night to see a crowded central city bus stop -- or are they safely at home in their faux stucco suburban digs.

Who to blame

So Alan Greenspan is shocked, shocked that gambling was going on in the casino that he and his fellow radicals made of the capital markets. In his testimony before Congress Thursday, he talked about how stunned he was that the markets weren’t self-regulating, that speculation and greed led to this disaster, which he likened to a “once in a century” financial tsunami.

But this is no act of God. The ongoing financial collapse is the direct result of the deregulation, trade, privatization and tax policies enacted by Alan Greenspan and the other rigid ideologues of the Republican Party over the past quarter of a century. The longtime Fed chairman is a disciple of the author Ayn Rand, whose advocacy of a brutal individualism has been turned into a devil-take-the-hindmost reality that would make Atlas blush.

It’s important for the American voter to understand this. The collapse of their savings, the deferment of their retirement dreams, the loss of their homes, the decline in their earnings, the elimination of their jobs – all has been the result of very conscious policies. They were promised an "ownership society," but, as Barack Obama said, the reality is that most Americans are on their own.

If Americans understand this, the election will not be in doubt. And, God willing, the calamity will discredit this extremist philosophy, just as happened in 1932, for decades to come. For this orthodox ideological extremism is every bit as bankrupt and failed as all its false prophet predecessors. Alan Greenspan and company, including former Sen. Phil Gramm, the great – and greatly compensated by the banking industry – deregulator and economic guru to wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III, are the most dangerous of men: true believers.

Oh, yeah? Well, your mama's a socialist!

With all the screams of "socialism" by the McCain camp, a thoughtful electorate might shake its heads and move on, or perhaps use this as a teaching moment. I have yet to believe we have such an electorate, but who knows?

If you are of a certain age, when history was still taught in American schools, you know that socialists believed that the "means of production" should be owned by the people, not by private interests. Railroads, mines, utilities, banks, insurers -- it's a very 19th and early 20th century concept (unless you're the Bush administration and Hank Paulson). Real socialism also never took hold in America, not even in the Great Depression. For one thing, it was co-opted by the Progressives and the New Deal. Socialists weren't communists. The two detested each other.

Europe saw the evolution of social democracy, which combined a large welfare state and activist government with democratic freedoms -- this is pretty much the governing model in much of the EU today. In America, you could probably fit all the true socialists into a mid-sized tavern or faculty lounge.

No, when wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III and his running mate, the unqualified and dangerous Sarah Palin, yell that Obama is a "socialist," they're not giving a history lesson. They're engaging in soft McCarthyism.

Do pit bulls shop at Neimans?

Just an average hockey mom, doing battle for the "real America" against those liberal elitists. Except Sarah Palin was clad in $150,000 worth of clothes paid for by Republican contributors. We've come a long way from the time when Pat Nixon wore a "respectable Republican cloth coat." Cindy, wife of the wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III spent $300,000 on one dress for the convention -- but at least it was her money.

Keep up on the latest reality-based reporting on the "Arizona senator" and Sarah Palin on Rogue's McCain Page.

Steal the vote, 2008

Check out this "one-stop shop" to monitor election fraud. Meanwhile comes word that a report on the easy manipulation of electronic voting machines in New Jersey is being suppressed. In North Carolina, a close state, the ballot doesn't count your presidential vote is you choose a straight ticket. As Michael Carmichael on HuffPost notes, vote suppression is the end-game for the failed McCain-Palin ticket. It can happen in many guises. And for eight years, the corporate media have been asleep on this real threat to the fabric of democracy.