Buddy, Can You Spare A Dime?

Also? Just for variety this year, there's a thought that the Worst President Ever and Terror Czar Cheney might be planning to offer us a December surprise.

An economic meltdown.

Like most of the rest of us, they expect a Democrat to take over the White House in January and I'm sure they're content to dump their mess in the Left's lap. Until then, though, they're doing all they can to keep it from happening on their watch.

Military spending as a share of GDP is expected to grow by $75 billion in fiscal 2008, enough to neutralize a 0.3 percent decline in GDP.

That will keep things from tanking early enough so that the Worst President In History might be expected to take action.

Dick Cheney was secretary of defense for Bush 41; just before the 1992 election he engineered a big run-up in outlays, as the military restocked following the first Gulf War. (It was exposed in the first Clinton "Economic Report.") Is the Pentagon up to that trick again? I'd be astonished if it were not.

So would I.

If that hasn't filled your urge for financial crisis news, try this Op-Ed about irresponsible Congressional behavior.

We Knew They Knew

Everyone knew.

Everyone knew it was torture, but they were more concerned with 'plausible deniability' than with blocking it. I mean, it's clear that there were objections, but they were all made inside the system. Sort of pro forma protests.

No one seems to have stood up and said, "No. I will not be a party to this and I will not sit quietly by and let you do it, either."

Almost linkless

Glancing at the headlines: George Carlin is dead. We'll all be less-amused and less-thoughtful for his loss.

It hardly seems fair that Dobson is still with us. (I guess we know which of "his" "children" god really wants to spend time with.) The man is a deranged crackpot. Why do major news outlets continue to give him so much free press? Without them, he'd be no one, living nowhere, and doing a little damage to just a few people.

Unlike, say, certain rightwingnut administrations. In today's news, people are shocked (Shocked, I tell you! Shocked!) to discover that liberal and Demovcrat job candidates didn't get a fair hiring shake under the Bush/Cheney regime.

The Mississippi is bursting levees and rolling over its man-made banks just as though it didn't understand that humans are the boss and nature should follow our rules. Too bad they can't get some of that water to the 800 wildfires burning in California.

One of McCain's aides said that if there was another terrorist attack on USofA soil, that would help McCain get elected. Now, of course, there's an 801st firestorm going. I don't know why. He only said what all of the wingnuts were thinking.

Consumer confidence has dropped to the lowest levels we've since the last extended Republican presidential run. Color me so surprised.*

You know me, I'm big on personal responsibility. (Sort of. Anyhow.) For instance, I think that if the Norfolk Southern Railroad officials think it's okay to leave that rail bridge down, if they've, in fact, removed the motor so there's no way anyone could lift it until after the waters recede, then that's okay with me.

Just as long as the people who made the decision are standing there, right behind that levee, as the river crests. 'Cause, if their position is that the bridge won't make the situation more dangerous, they should be willing to stand by their beliefs, right?




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* * My prediction? Another 8 years of warmongering Republicans in the White House and the so-called "military-industrial complex" will be such a huge part of our economy that we won't be able to afford to stop making, funding, and inciting war. (It's a significant part of our economy already but I haven't done any research to see if we've actually reached the tipping point yet.)

People Have Opinions

George Will kicks McCain's butt for memory loss, short-sightedness, and overall ignorance.

I almost feel sorry for McCain. He's struggling to win over his own party's base at the same time he's fighting to get votes from disenchanted-with-Republicans independent voters. He sounds schizophrenic at times. On the same day, he was bragging about differing from on global warming and proposing that we open up the country's coasts to oil and gas companies.

He's got a tough row to hoe.

Dana Milbank says he's dancing.

And, whether he likes it or not, Dick Cheney may hereinafter be known as the Torture Czar.

Don't Let the Door Hit You On the Way Out

I'm so glad that opportunities abound for the world to laugh at our president.

(Okay, not all the world. Some of it is busy dying.)

Typical

Just so typical.

Achenbach. Always worth reading.

In my next life, I want to be a public intellectual. I think I could specialize in generalizations.

Did you get your "economic stimulus" check? Did you spend it? Did you enjoy it? I hope so, because we're going to be paying it off for a long, long time.

In the aha! category, we have this story, which answers two questions for me. "No," Clinton supporters are not refusing to support Obama, and "yes," I am seeing a weird increase in wingnut Obama-bashing in the last 24 hours or so. (Because polls show Obama already has a lead over McCain.) And more electoral math!

I May Be Sick

I just don't know how to deal with a story about this kind of brutality. (Warning: Link to story of brutal toddler murder.)

Clearly the man is crazy, and not in the "temporary" insanity kind of way. If passersby are trying to intervene and you push them off to finish--what you're doing--well, that's not someone who just 'snapped' for a second. That's big-time crazy.

Maybe I do believe in the death penalty after all. Because if I think about this for more than two consecutive seconds, I almost feel like I could execute the guy myself.

Well, no. Not almost.

Electoral Maps (and math)!

CNN has put together one of those cool, interactive maps. This one's speculation about the electoral vote in November. Right now, the map shows 190 electoral votes "safe" or "leaning toward" Obama and 194 "safe" or "leaning toward" McCain. 154 are up for grabs. (That's 538 total, so someone needs 270 to win.)

I really like it when they use colors because I like to see the patterns. (There's what I always think of as "the N", the block of western states that would vote for a tree frog, as long as it was running under a Republican label.*)

The country looked pretty blue in 1996. (Of course, the thing about those maps is that they don't tell you how close some of those state contests were.)

These maps show you the electoral votes for each state, as well as which way their votes swung:

1996

By 2004, The Porkie Boys, I mean BushBaby and his evil sidekick, had taken a chunk out of the country, thanks to voter stupidity. (Or was it something else? We'll never know for sure. What happened in Ohio?)

2004

And now we're seeing projections for 2008. Here's this month's speculation from CNN:

It's going to be an interesting race to watch, with some formerly "safe" states on both sides now up for grabs and already being contested.

My calculations give it to Obama by a small margin, but that's without factoring in race. As much I hate to say it aloud, I've been forced to listen to (or watch) too many 'news stories' quoting people who just won't be able to bring themselves to vote for a candidate whose skin isn't white to ignore them. Someone tell me--is this a significant demographic or just the press, searching desperately for some kind of drama to hang a broadcast on?

And what about all of those so-called Democrats who'd rather vote for Bush-lite than Obama? What's that all about? I heard an NPR story last night that said if McCain chooses a pro-choice VP, he could pull a lot of Clinton supporters. How much is race a factor in their preferences and how much of a factor is it that Clinton is very much a centrist (so that many of her supporters are just as happy to swing the other way for a candidate who also pretends to be a centrist)?

Side note:

In the arena of "too stupid to be interviewed," one woman they talked to bitched because Obama "came out of nowhere 2 or 3 years ago." Like Bill Clinton, hitchhiking his way out of Arkansas, was some kind of major figure before he started running?

End side note

Anyhow. Even if I weren't a liberal, I wouldn't vote for McClain. I've seen numerous television ads of his and the only thing they ever talk about is how his grandfather was in the military and his father was in the military and McClain was in the military and he was a POW.

I have yet to see a single ad that talks about positions, policies, or plans. He's running on something ghastly that happened to him 40 years ago and, as much as I regret it happened, it's not really a reason to hand him the White House.

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* A tree frog, but not just any tree frog. In '96, given the choice between Clinton and Dole, Arizona took their 8 votes and sidled to the Left.

Gag Me

Lest I talk about money lost, stolen, or just given away in Iraq.

In the run-up to the invasion one of the most senior officials in charge of procurement in the Pentagon objected to a contract potentially worth seven billion that was given to Halliburton, a Texan company, which used to be run by Dick Cheney before he became vice-president.

Unusually only Halliburton got to bid - and won.

Wow. Wotta shocker!

Porkie--I mean Georgie, may want to "pressure" Iran, no doubt in a desperate attempt to accomplish something not-entirely-evil during his highly regrettable White House tenure, but other sources suggest that his changes are slim-to-disappearing. He has lame duckness to deal with, along with his eight year legacy of general lameness and blinkered stupidity. Factor in his immoral war and, from what I've been reading, unsubtle attempts on the part of the gov'mint and cheney-affiliated oil companies to force Iraq to sign over control of their oil industry and--well, I don't know what you have, but certainly not a recipe for successful international diplomacy.

Maybe I'm imputing evil to the merely demonstrably stupid? Maybe it's just that the USofA's time has passed and Porkie the President was just lucky enough to be the one to push us over the edge?

I'm not sure I'm ready to get this up close and personal with my computer. I'm glad I don't use public internet cafes. Who wants to sit down to a computer that a thousand strangers have already caressed?

I'd guess that fresh water is the most precious liquid commodity on the planet.
I do make an effort not to waste the seemingly limitless supply that flows from my taps, and I want me one of these.

I don't use a lot of milk, not because I have anything against it, but because if I buy it, even in just a pint bottle, it always seems to have an expired freshness date by the time I get around to opening it. From now on, I'm going organic.

Even though I forgot to study, I made 65 countries in the "how many countries can you name in five minutes" game. I'm getting better informed!

Well, DUH

Bush misused Iraq intelligence - US Senate report

U.S. President George W. Bush and his top policymakers misstated Saddam Hussein's links to terrorism and ignored doubts among intelligence agencies about Iraq's arms programs as they made a case for war

And, DUH again.

Statements that Iraq had a partnership with al Qaeda were wrong and unsupported by intelligence, the report said.

It said that Bush's and Cheney's assertions that Saddam was prepared to arm terrorist groups with weapons of mass destruction for attacks on the United States contradicted available intelligence.

Color me so surprised.

Memorial

I'm not sure what today's theme is. Maybe it's the upcoming weekend, but I feel like taking a minute of silence to mourn the death of common sense in this country.

A car dealership in the United States is offering a free handgun with every vehicle sold.

You think there's ever going to be a moment when these folks realize that choosing a stupid gun over a $250 gas card sort of proves Obama's point? Also, predictably, I think these folks should be just a little less militant about their wanton stupidity.

An audit of some $8bn (£4bn) paid to US and Iraqi contractors has found that almost every payment failed to comply with US laws aimed at preventing fraud.

Color me so not surprised. Honesty compels me to admit that any organization handling sums of money that run into seven, eight, or nine digits is going to have a little trouble tracking the destination of a few hundred thousand here or there, but paying out $8 billion without crossing the t's and dotting the i's seems a little careless.

In one example, investigators found a copy of a $5.6m cheque paid by the US Treasury to an Iraqi contractor, but no records to show what had been purchased.

Russia and China condemn U.S. missile shield plan

"Both sides believe that creating a global missile defense system, including deploying such systems in certain regions of the world, or plans for such cooperation, do not help support strategic balance and stability, and harm international efforts to control arms and the non-proliferation process," Russia and China said in a joint statement.

What is the world coming to when I find myself agreeing with Russia and China and opposed to my own government?

Rice warns of more U.S. sanctions on Iran

I'm not the first person to point out that our recent behavior toward Iran has some scary parallels to the Bush Administration's pre-war treatment of Iraq, but I console myself with the thought that not even Bush&Cheney are this stupid. (Besides, they don't have time.)

Inflation Can Be Fun!

It's Friday, so it must be dinking around time.

Baseline year 1980:

Cost of a 1980 first-class stamp: $0.15
That's 42 cents in today's money, so the USPS is right on target!

Cost of a 1980 gallon of regular gas: $1.25
That's 3.57 in today's money

Cost of a gallon of 1980 milk: $1.69
Adjusted for inflation, that's $4.82
Actual price today: $3.13
Poor dairy farmers.

The national debt in 1980 was about: $914,000,000,000 or 914 billion.
In today's money, that's going to be: $2,612,000,000,000 (rounded) or 2.612 trillion

Which sounds bad enough, but thanks to certain lunatic politicians, the national debt is actually $9,200,000,000,000, or a whopping 9.2 trillion.

What was the national debt in 2000, when GB arrived? $5,700,000,000,000 (5.7 trillion). He and his buddies have added $3.5 trillion to the mess.

What comes after trillion? Bazillion, right? And then gazillion.

And then my head explodes.

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Tom's Inflation Calendar

Random Links

I've had the urge to blog over the last few weeks, but never quite got around to it. Therefore, under the heading of, "things I found interesting," I offer a handful of links. (No time for proofreading, sorry.)

The Most Disappointing President from April 22.

To accompany that one, I offer The GOP's Ideas Deficit.

Achenbach is uncharacteristically serious in The Next Big Scandal from April 21. To accompany it, you might want to take a look at In Sadr City, Basic Services Are Faltering and the happy news that War costs could be under $170 bln: Pentagon. (If you're interested in a bit more background on the failure in Iraq, you might try How Much Did Rumsfeld Know?)

Afghanistan, the forgotten country, may be back on the radar. On May 9, I read that the Pentagon Is Open to Moving More Marines to Afghanistan.

They should never have left before the job was done, but don't let me bore you by repeating myself on that subject for the five thousandth time.

There's plenty of history to tell us what not to do. I can't help but wonder if any of our so-called 'leaders' know any of it.

I can't really say I'm at all sorry to read that one 'legacy' Bush is leaving to posterity is record-breaking disapproval numbers.

I've always said he was dangerously crazy (not really the point at this moment, but I'm having trouble getting past it) and a liar. Like with that Texas Two-Step he's dancing around what he's calling "appeasement"* when he's really just in a snit because someone said he was wrong, wrong, wrong, and public opinion is agreeing with them.

And it's not just Bush. Hypocrisy abounds. Check out Hypocrisy on Hamas, just to emphasize the point that more than one of today's prominent Republicans is as devoid of principles as he is of rational plans for the welfare of this country. (You know what's sad? What's sad is that in today's climate, he very well might manage to sell himself as a "moderate." I mean, I still remember the days when "I'm not psychotic" wasn't actually enough to get you elected in this country.)

On another site, I didn't even have to read the article. I read the headline and knew everything I need to know about McCain. McCain: Victory in Iraq by 2013 the article said.

I see it now. Entirely ignoring reality and common sense, he's declaring that if we elect him, he'll get us almost there by the end of his term, but we'll need to re-elect him in order to get us all the way to the finish line. It's as callous a piece of calculated manipulation as I've seen in this primary season.

Anyhow. I clicked through to see if my expectations were going to be met and found out that the real story was both better and worse than I had anticipated. No flat statement of actual success, but a hope that in another five years, "most" of our servicemen and servicewomen would be home. Most. Not all. He admits there will still be violence in Iraq and that the effects of the region's entire history and culture won't magically be erased. From what I gather, he's picturing some voodoo-based, magically healing version of democracy that will inexplicably grow out of our illegal and unwarranted (unless you believe we're trying to make up for having installed Hussein in office in the first place) invasion.

Eyeballing his predictions from a distance, what I see is an unstable society, divided and prone to outbursts of mass violence, with a frightened and divided population made up of factions that neither trust nor like each other.

You know, that reminds me of something...what is it?

Oh. Yeah. The whole Palestine-Israel situation.

I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but somewhere online I read that War Is A Racket would make good reading for those of us worried about what's called the "military-industrial complex."

More amusingly, I offer this little gem. I make no statement concerning the factual truth of the story and I certainly don't accuse Shrub of neo-Nazism*, but I do suggest that if you look at his behavior, especially in the last 8 years, there's a long string of events that paints a plausible picture of someone who would doesn't have much trouble imagining himself ruling over a chastened mass of obedient consumer-laborers.

The scary thing about Bush, is that his family had the money to whitewash him into the White House. He doesn't have what it takes (for reference, see everywhere) and everything he's done has been a catastrophe (ditto) but he's going to be living in an ex-presidential bubble for the rest of his life, so I doubt that he'll ever be forced to really face the consequences of his actions or to understand how very wrong he was on almost every point. Money can buy protection from that kind of reality.

I swear, the only thing that's saved him from impeachment is that the failures are coming so thick and fast--botched invasions, illegal wars, massive corporate frauds as the result of government indulgence, skyrocketing unemployment numbers, disintegrating housing market, collapsing infrastructure, natural disasters both national and international, and massive inflation--the failures are coming so thick and fast that there's just no time to work up a case around any one issue.**

Now all we can do is to try to keep the pieces wired together for a few more months until we have (one certainly hopes) a saner leadership in place to start fixing the damage.

Drat. I swore to myself I wasn't going to go on a rant, and I just had to spend ten minutes removing a lot of gratuitous insults from the last three paragraphs. Time to stop blogging.

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* Although I'm sure he'd fancy himself in jackbooks. (And now I have to go rinse my brain out with bleach.)

* * Also, as I'm sorry to say, as I'm always sorry to have to say, being extremely stupid and criminally short-sighted isn't illegal in this country. Doing the wrong things in the wrong way for the wrong reasons might be morally indefensible, but you don't pay for them in a court of law.