Thinking about the election.....

I am thoroughly sick of the election coverage right now. This has been going on since November 2008. Sarah Palin is suffering from overexposure (and not just the Alaskan weather kind) and I can't keep track anymore of which vitriolic right-wing candidate's followers have arrested or beaten up people who disagree with the candidate. Joe Miller, Rand Paul, they all run together after a while. Personally, I think private retinues of political thugs is a rather ominous phenomenon. Alas, I'm not talking about Roderick Spode again.

The Tea Party is a formidable opponent, far more ferocious than the old-line institutional Republicans like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. They have a broad appeal to the people who feel they've been given short shrift by the system. Most of them are, however, probably mad at the government for what was actually done to them by their health insurance companies, employers, or banks, or the general and continuous slide in real wages since the 1970s, rather than the government.... but it is hard to get that point across. In any case, they're mad as hell and are lashing out at the most visible and vulnerable target. After all, you can't vote out the head of your HMO after your benefits have been slashed.

In that respect, they're not that different in motivation than the progressives who voted the Democrats into control of Congress in 2008, and into the White House in 2008. Some of them are probably even the same people.

Still, when the Tea Party puts the Republicans back in charge of the House, it won't be the hellraisers who get the prominent seats and the most power. We'll be back to guys like McConnell, Boehner, Cantor, et al., most of whom have been in DC for ages. Even if Christine O'Donnell, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina, or any of the other current crop of Tea Party heart-throbs get elected, they'll be reduced to cogs in a machine controlled by older men with very different priorities, including an affinity for corporate economics and an ill-concealed disdain for the people and populism, even as manifested in the Tea Party. There is seldom any gratitude in politics.

Thus the irony.

It also says a great deal about the respective priorities of the Obama White House and the Republican machine that while the White House has imposed strict new disclosure and access requirements for lobbyists and has fought for campaign finance reform, the Republican candidates in this year's election benefit from the Citizens United windfall, which opened the gates to a flood of unregulated cash from anonymous donors. The Republicans are outspending Democrats seven to one on media advertisements, and it hasn't escaped public notice that multimillionaires in New York are meddling in congressional elections in Oregon by essentially laundering money through a 527.

For all that President Obama and his supporters have accomplished in the last year and a half-- and the list is really impressive, to those who bother to read it-- it was unlikely the Democrats would retain even their nominal control of Congress after the midterms.

That the Democrats managed to accomplish what they did in the face of such entrenched, well-coordinated, and well-funded opposition is extremely impressive.

I call it a nominal control because of two things. The Republicans managed to get a great deal of mileage out of simply saying 'no' and filibustering at every opportunity, and because the Democratic majority was a paper tiger that depended too heavily on Blue Dogs, many of whom are 'conservatives in the wrong party,' so to speak-- leftovers from before Goldwater and Nixon turned the Republican party into what it is now. Once you stop counting the Blue Dogs as Democrats (which Reid and Pelosi might well have done, since they couldn't count on Blue Dog support without heaps of pork), the Democrats didn't have any kind of a majority at all.

Most importantly, the expectation that the Democrats will take losses in the 2010 election isn't sour grapes or pessimism, it's based in historical reality.

Incumbent parties almost always take a brutal walloping in the midterm after a new president is elected. The most recent such midterm, in 2002, was an anomaly, largely because of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Even in midterms in general, every midterm election for the last 70 years has resulted in the President's party losing seats in Congress, with exactly three exceptions-- 1934, 1998, and 2002.

I must admit, though, that the Democrats are actually doing better than I expected.

What I find exasperating, however, is how many Democratic candidates like Chet Edwards, Jason Altmire, and Joe Manchin have essentially given in to the right wing's demonization of the President, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and (perhaps most of all) Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Most of these guys are essentially Blue Dogs anyways, and fighting for their lives against Republicans, but it is infuriating nonetheless.

The Republicans, for their part, generally wasted no time in running away from George W. Bush after 2006. I'm sure the world still wonders why.

I think part of the problem is that the public is just grossly misinformed about the issues.

TARP didn't start under Obama, it started under Bush.

So did the auto industry bailout.

The deregulation that allowed the crash of 2008 also happened under Bush, but Obama did something about that.

Most of 'Obamacare' consisted of strictures binding on health insurers, not the consumer, and were certainly more to the benefit of the consumer than the Republican bill of 2005, which forbade Medicare from negotiating pharmaceutical prices and gave Big Pharma the right to charge whatever it wanted.

The Obama administration actually CUT taxes for most people, which begs the question of exactly what reality most of the Tea Party howlers live in.

I'd particularly like to know how many people in the US actually understand what socialism is and how it works, as opposed to just parroting right-wing talking points.

In general, the election coverage as a whole increasingly begs the question of whether a non-conservative administration, candidate, or party can expect a fair shake from an increasingly partisan news media. Jon Stewart really IS the hardest-hitting journalist in the media, and I'm appalled by that fact too.

By partisan, of course, I certainly do not mean the mythical "liberal media." I point as an example, rather, to the network whose owner has donated millions of dollars to Republican party organs, and whose primary media outlet once used as a defense in court the argument that the media has no obligation to tell the truth.

The result ultimately remains to be seen......

Governor Palin Vs. The Spanish Inquisition

If you haven't seen the recent interviews of Governor Palin by Katie Couric, you're missing some hilarious footage. They're funnier than the Tina Fey skits on SNL, the "I can see Russia from my house" line nonwithstanding. I'm still laughing about her description of the evil head of Vladimir Putin floating into US airspace.

The September 25 one was one step up from the Monty Python skit featuring the Spanish Inquisition.

This Palin interview is like listening to a high school student try to bullshit her way through a class discussion without having done any of the assigned reading for the last year. It's irritatingly obvious that she has no idea what she's talking about, and is just regurgitating talking points. It's painful to listen to, and worse to read. Oh, she also flat-out lied about the trade missions she claimed were part of her foreign policy credentials. The last one of those was in 1997, and was conducted by then-governor Tony Knowles.

Katie Couric: Why isn't it better, Gov. Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries; allow them to spend more and put more money into the economy instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?

Gov. Sarah Palin: That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, we're ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health-care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the -- it's got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health-care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing. But one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we've got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.

It just resonates--the confusion, the cadence-- with the part of the Python skit where Michael Palin, dressed up as a Cardinal, barges in through the door and blasts off the following:

NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again.

I was just waiting for Palin to say ".... amongst our talking points are such diverse things as....."


I bet she'd like some nice red uniforms, too.

pure-strain (comedy) gold

Just when you thought you had heard every ridiculous, far-fetched, completely out-to-lunch idea there is.......... Republicans happen.

You see, dear readers and obedient minions, the Republican Party seems to be having a crisis of some sort, having realized that the last eight years were a complete disaster. Case in point, Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), who said "The Republican brand is in the trash can. I've often observed that if we were a dog food, they would take us off the shelf." Iraq- 'nuff said. Afghanistan-- people are remembering what that was all about, and wondering where Bin Laden is, closing on seven years after the 9/11 attacks. Eight years of Republican economics and banking deregulation not only brought us the housing market crash and the repeated plummets of the stock markets, but a rapidly increasing number of bank failures and the need for the federal government to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored banking entitites that have their thumbs in the pies of most of the housing mortgages in the country.

The end result is that Barack Obama is beating seven kinds of hell out of John "Bush's Third Term" McCain, who is so screwed up that his own essays get rejected by the New York Times (which solicted them) because he regurgitates endless mush and refuses to speak to the issue they wanted him to discuss (specifically, what 'victory' is).

So someone in the Republican Party's apparatus decided it was a bright idea to put out a call for conservative bloggers and laypeople on the Intersystemoftubesweb to submit ideas on stuff the party should include in the national platform. The basic idea seems to have been something like the 1994 Contract with America that Newt used, abused, and refused to win a Republican majority in Congress, except starting from the ground up rather than the top down (i.e. asking people what they thought was important, rather than telling them what they should think is important). The party leadership apparently thought the result would the the same old self-affirming menage-a-trois of God, guns, and gays that made Republicanland such a wonderful place to live, as long as you are a white, straight conservative evangelical Christian, e.g. Charlton Heston.

Bzzzzt. Wrong.

Ron Paul's supporters deluged the website with libertarian-leaning suggestions and sharp criticisms of the party's recent leadership for embracing needless wars, pork-barrel spending on a scale never before seen, and the systematic defilement of virtually every branch and office of government, from the Justice Department to the Air Force Academy.

Were irony not passé, I would call this ironic, but as we all know, hubris is the new irony. Permit me to indulge in a Biblical reference, which is somewhat apropos under the circumstances. Tom Delay and the other priests of Baal who preached of a 'permanent Republican majority' have had their day, Ahab's throne is tottering, the years of drought are here, Israel has taken to its collective tents, and now Elijah has marched back out of the wilderness … and he is not happy at all.

If there is to be any future to the Republican party, the leadership had better listen to the 'Paulites' and listen well, because the party as it is simply cannot go on. Bigotry and bile will only get you so far—eventually you have to show people that you can actually do something to make their lot better, and the last eight years of George W. Bush and the three most recent Republican-controlled Congresses show just how little good they can do when left in charge of a government that they pretend to despise as a hindrance to Truth, Justice, the American Way, and other useful fictions, and which they simultaneously depend on to support their system of political cronyism. "God, guns, and gays" does not keep banks from collapsing or maintain levees in New Orleans.

OK, I let the political hoof-stomping go a little longer than I had intended, I admit, but now on to what actually prompted me to write this post.

One of the linchpins of Ron Paul's agenda is to put the United States' currency back on the gold standard, or in other words require that all paper money or coinage be backed by an actual quantity of gold stored in Fort Knox or some such place, and thus has some notional intrinsic worth. Keep in mind that the use of the gold standard had for all intents and purposes collapsed by 1971, in large part because it was not flexible enough to accommodate the inflation and economic growth (or decline) going on at the time. Staying on the gold standard would have ruined the world's economies. Do I like the idea that governments can basically print as much or as little money as they want, and deliberately manipulate financial instruments as tools of political agendas or social engineering (e.g. China's artificial government-mandated exchange rate with the dollar, which keeps Chinese goods cheap)? No. Absolutely not. Do I think we could go back on the gold standard after almost four decades off it, in which finance has mutated and mutated again? Once again, no. Absolutely not. Even if it could be achieved without wrecking the global economy, it would be extremely difficult. In any case, remember Gresham's Law—bad money drives out good, because people hoard the good money for a rainy day (taking it out of circulation) and spend the bad money.

There are those, however, who embrace the idea of the gold standard as a touchstone of value, a thing by which all other things can be measured. If you assume that the intrinsic value of gold is fixed and that there is a finite and invariable amount of gold in the world, this would make sense. The actual value of gold is the buying power, however, and that changes in response to the demand for the commodities you'd use the gold to buy. For example, during a bad famine the price of grain would skyrocket, and the price of gold would correspondingly weaken, since the same amount of gold would buy less grain. Likewise, economies were turned thoroughly upside-down in sixteenth-century Europe by the arrival of vast new quantities of gold from the New World; the price of gold, and most other commodities, and labor, all dropped through the floor. The price of gold also fluctuates—during the 1960s, the Bretton Woods Accords required governments to try to keep the price of gold fixed at US $35 per ounce. The price today is US $967 per ounce, which is much higher than even fifty years of inflation could account for. Two weeks ago it was a bargain at $957 an ounce.

Neither is the amount of gold in the world fixed-- the world's gold supply more than doubled during the 20^th Century, in large part due to industrial exploitation of existing gold mines in places like China and South Africa, and new discoveries in Siberia.

There are also those, including some conservative Muslims, who take literally the scriptural or traditional requirements to use religiously-sanctioned coinage, such as gold dinars, for religious transactions such as charitable donations, bride-prices, etc. For that matter, in 2006 Malaysia began minting dinars to the historic Islamic standard established by the 7^th-century Caliph Umar (an amount of gold equivalent to 72 grains of barley, or 4.25 grams of 22-karat gold; this is suspiciously similar to the Roman coinage known as the denarius) in an attempt to establish an international reference coinage for the Islamic world.

One of the more amusing proposals I found while browsing Wired's articles on the Republican Web Plea was this one, by one Bob in Clemons, NC:

"We need to abolish the Federal Reserve and go back to the gold standard. Not just any gold though, I heard about this stuff, pure-strain gold that has been around since God created the universe. That's what we should base our currency around since it is so close to God."

Hm. Is 'God, gold, gays and guns' too long of a mission statement?

Anyways, the idea of 'pure-strain gold' tickled my curiosity bone and off I went, using all my mad ph4T g00gl3 H4xx0R s|<1llz. There really isn't much out there on it, and even less of that is of actual substance. An alarming amount of what comes up stems from somethingawful.com, which is what it says on the tin. Heck, for all I know this could be some sort of internet meme that somebody passed off on the Republicans as a joke.

The idea seems to be this—that when some unmoved mover (thank you, St. Thomas Aquinas) that may or may not be a god created the universe, a certain amount of the matter created in the Big Bang (or whatever scriptural account you choose to believe) was in fact, Element No. 79 on the periodic table, one of the transition metals. Yep, gold. Large quantities of hydrogen also appeared, enough to apparently make it the most common element in the universe, but it is less clear where the second most common element, stupidity, came from.

Gold was always valuable because it had a somewhat otherworldly cachet—rare, shiny (this metric of value also applies to Gucci, Prada, Ferrari, and those cheap Christmas ornament toys parrots like to play with) invulnerable to most acids, not very reactive, extremely malleable, didn't corrode or discolor, very dense, and so on. Industrialized society eventually added electrical conductivity to that list. Supposedly this 'pure-strain gold' is therefore the purest and most unalterable form of gold there is, since gold is supposedly nonreactive, cannot be diluted and exists in a finite quantity, is a physical souvenir of the creation of the universe by the hand (or noodly appendage) of God Themselves. That would be Bob's ultimate benchmark of value—ancient magical gold from the dawn of time.

I'll leave it to the astrophysicists to determine whether or not 'pure strain gold' is even theoretically feasible; I don't know what elements they expect were first spawned in the furnaces of creation, much less can I fathom how a lump of Ur-gold could survive billions of years of time without being affected. Perhaps this is one of those ideas best left to people who know for an absolute fact that the world was created on the 21^st of October in 4004 BC (it was a Sunday).

For my part, however, one cannot work in the field I do and not pick up the odd bits of chemistry, especially important concepts like reactivity (the vital practical application of which is How Not To Make Things Go Boom). Gold is not very reactive by any standard, especially when compared with elements like sodium, which go bang when you drop them in water. It does, however, react with elements in the halogen family, (e.g. hydrofluoric acid * to form chloroauric acid, a process used in recovering gold from electronic parts) and bonds quite happily with chlorine to form various types of auric chloride, or with cyanide compounds (sometimes used in gold plating work). Gold readily forms alloys with many metals, including silver, copper, and so on. On top of that, there are (I admit, I googled it) fifteen radioisotopes of gold which are constantly shifting in their atomic makeup, since that's what radioisotopes do.

*Alchemists historically made much of this stuff, referring to it as aqua regia, or royal water, because it could dissolve metals such as gold and platinum, that were immune to the attacks of other acids.

You know what? If this makes me a goddam lib'rul left-wing east coast elitist, then I like it and so be it…since at least I know stuff and can think for myself. I'll pass on the lattes, though.

Tautology

To be honest, I'm no longer sure whether this is tautology, circular argument, or just plain stupidity, because my brain is somewhat addled by it....

Chris Matthews interviewed two talk radio hosts regarding the statements Bush made in Israel yesterday, in which he claimed that anyone who opposed him was the same as those who tried to appease Hitler in the years before 1939. The right-winger, the odious bigmouth Kevin James, spent five minutes trying to BS his way out of having to answer a question regarding Neville Chamberlain to which he quite obviously didn't know the answer-- he didn't know what Chamberlain did, even though he was the one who brought up the issue of Chamberlain and appeasement as a talking point. I mean, seriously, this was embarassing-- brainless repetition and just randomly yelling over everyone else without making any sort of actual sense.

Matthews finally gave up and said "your problem, Kevin, is that you don't know anything." SHortly afterwards, Matthews added "I've gotta go to someone who knows SOME history.... this is PATHETIC." Oh... and later "He's as bad as the White House press secretary who doesn't know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was!" And "You're wrong. You don't understand what appeasement is, don't use the word."

I'm no great fan of Matthews-- he threw Bush et al way too many softballs before November of 2006 for me to trust him entirely-- but he won a merit badge in this inteview.

James also told the other guest to watch The Path to 9/11..... I wonder if he is aware that that movie is a lump of propaganda that bears precious little resemblance to documented reality?

Olbermann Goes Medieval on Bush

Ok, really, I've been good. I have been a political junkie for years but I have managed to go months without a political post. Until now.

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who has done so much to drag from the murky depths the lies and sad truths of the Bush administration, seems to have really had it with Bush now... over golf.

You see, Bush claims that he gave golf up in some sort of show of solidarity with the people he sent off to Iraq and their families. That's trite enough to begin with. The problem is, however, that Bush also lied about it, as well as lying about the other usual things like Iraqi WMDs and so on, in a recent interview with Politico that seems to have lit Keith's fuse.

Here's the link, watch for yourself.

Link to Crooksandliars.com


Incidentally, mucho props to Crooksandliars for what they do-- they preserve in video all the stuff Bush, Cheney, Delay, and everyone else has said in recent years, so you can reference it-- it really helps keep things from falling down the corporate media's memory hole.

Are you there, God? It's me, Lurker...

I just wanted to know.... why did you put so many nimrods and twits on this planet?

Exhibit A-- Doug Feith, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and head of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, one of the chief architects of the Iraq debacle.

Here he is, getting thoroughly dismantled and spindled by Jon Stewart while trying to sputter excuses and ass-covering explanations for the Bush Administration.....

Link with video.

I look at this sort of stuff with a historian's eye-- personally, I think that thirty or forty or fifty years down the road, people will be writing books about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in much the same way they write books about Voltaire or Mark Twain now. Humor makes things stick-- and you know what? The right wing might have the Heritage Foundation and all those other think tanks slaving away to write their own version of history, but we progressives have all the comedians. ;)

Incidentally-- John McCain's campaigning in western Washington State today, and one of the events on the slate is a fundraising dinner for which people will pay $33,100 per plate to attend. That says a lot about where the financial base for his election is coming from-- how many people can drop a figure comparable to MY ANNUAL SALARY on ONE MEAL??? That's the Republican Party for ya-- the only thing they want from anyone but the rich is their votes. Compare that to the millions of people who donated less than $200 each to Obama, and you get a picture of what people actually want in a candidate this year.

Incidentally-- I got a sunburn today. I'm burned as red as Stalin's undershorts (tightie reddies?).

Anyone want to go see a battleship?