I don't give a SHIT......

I can't resist..doesn't this picture just say, "Yeah, I know it's wrong to change term limits after the voters voted for it twice, but hey, I'm rich! So what if you have no voice in your own government. Fuck you....if you were rich like me, you too could do whatever you wanted..... idiots...."

Viva Miguel !

Today the New York City Council, by a 29-22 vote, agreed to extend the current term limits from 2 terms to 3. This opens the door for Mayor Mike Bloomberg to run for a third term. Since he is a billionaire and has unlimited financial resources to run his campaign, it will be very difficult for anyone to defeat him in 2009. The members of the City Council who voted for this are nothing more than political hacks, no one more so than Speaker Christine Quinn. What were these whores promised by Bloomberg? One can only imagine. This vote was an end-run around the voters, who have voted not once but twice in the past for term limits. This time, it was not brought before the people. So what does this say to voters? We are always told, "You must vote. Every vote counts. People died to preserve your right to vote". Well, not in New York City. In New York City, billionaires call the tune and the City Council dances like some old 1920's tap dancing stage hoofers. And the people? Why not listen to the people? 'Cause Screw 'em, that's why... Hey, let's vote this billionaire dictator out of office as soon as we can.

Christopher Buckley bounced out of National Review after he endorses Obama

Christopher Buckley, son of National Review founder William F. Buckley, was excommunicated today from the staff of the National Review after he endorsed Barack Obama for President.

"While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.
So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me."

Buckley endorsed Obama in a piece this week on http://www.dailybeast.com/ ("Sorry, Dad, I'm voting for Obama", found here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-10/the-conservative-case-for-obama/). He cites several reasons for doing so, not least of which is his disenchantment with the "kooks" who have taken over the Republican party. He also reveals why he is not only anti-McCain, but pro-Obama:

"As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.
I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.
But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.
Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for."

Yet another Conservative intellectual lamenting the mutation of the Republican party.

McCain defends Obama

This is the most bizarre thing I've ever seen during a Presidential campaign. McCain is forced to defend his opponent when some of his more frightened supporters announce that Mr. Obama is an Arab. Listen to the crowd's reaction when McCain defends Obama and tell the woman that she is incorrect and Obama is NOT an Arab. People like this are the reason why the Republican party has lost touch with real issues. The party has appealed almost exclusively to this type of low-information voter for decades. Why don't they cut it out so we can actually have a sane, rational choice when we go to the polls?

Nothing to say right now, I just like the wink...

The Demise of the Rabid Right

Two things happened today that lead me to believe that the rabid right-wing reign of error that we have suffered through for the past eight years is coming to an end (yes, I said 'error', not terror). The first is this piece from the Huffington Post on October 10, 2008:

"John McCain was booed by his own supporters during a rally on Friday after he described Barack Obama as a "decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States." McCain was responding to a town hall attendee who claimed he was concerned about raising a child under a president who "cohorts with domestic terrorists such as [Bill] Ayers." Despite the fact that McCain and his campaign have repeatedly used Ayers to hammer Obama in recent days, the Arizona Senator tried to calm the man.
"[Senator Obama] is a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared about as President of the United States," he said, before adding: "If I didn't think I would be one heck of a better president I wouldn't be running."

The crowd groaned with disapproval.

Later, McCain was again pressed about Obama's "other-ness" and again he refused to play ball. "I don't trust Obama," a woman said. "I have read about him. He's an Arab."
"No, ma'am," McCain said several times, shaking his head in disagreement. "He's a decent, family man, [a] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that's what this campaign is all about."

The second is David Brooks' column from yesterday's New York Times. Remember, David Brooks is a Conservative (in fact, he is an "old-school" conservative who is quite different from the right-wing nuts who are running the country today).

The Class War Before Palin
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: October 9, 2008
Modern conservatism began as a movement of dissident intellectuals. Richard Weaver wrote a book called, “Ideas Have Consequences.” Russell Kirk placed Edmund Burke in an American context. William F. Buckley famously said he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. But he didn’t believe those were the only two options. His entire life was a celebration of urbane values, sophistication and the rigorous and constant application of intellect.
Driven by a need to engage elite opinion, conservatives tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines. They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind.
Ronald Reagan was no intellectual, but he had an earnest faith in ideas and he spent decades working through them. He was rooted in the Midwest, but he also loved Hollywood. And for a time, it seemed the Republican Party would be a broad coalition — small-town values with coastal reach. In 1976, in a close election, Gerald Ford won the entire West Coast along with northeastern states like New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont and Maine. In 1984, Reagan won every state but Minnesota. But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.
Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts. What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect. Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.George W. Bush restrained some of the populist excesses of his party — the anti-immigration fervor, the isolationism — but stylistically he fit right in. As Fred Barnes wrote in his book, “Rebel-in-Chief,” Bush “reflects the political views and cultural tastes of the vast majority of Americans who don’t live along the East or West Coast. He’s not a sophisticate and doesn’t spend his discretionary time with sophisticates. As First Lady Laura Bush once said, she and the president didn’t come to Washington to make new friends. And they haven’t.”

The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.
The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community. Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.
This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.” (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin. Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite. She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.
And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.

So, what is happening here? Why does John McCain defend the honor of his opponent? This is unheard of. Why does David Brooks lament the fact that the modern Republican party has driven away intellectuals in droves? These two things are not unrelated. So we Liberals are not crazy. The latest incarnation of the right has indeed been engaging in 'social class warfare', as David Brooks puts it (This is just a finer way of pointing out what Hillary Clinton said years ago: there is a vast right-wing conspiracy). For years now, as Brooks rightly points out, the Republican party has been winning elections by demeaning smart people (especially if they lean left) and hammering the social issues to frighten the base and low-information fence-sitters into voting Republican. Bush gets elected because people feel they could "have a beer" with him. John Kerry loses because he is an effete Liberal who would allow our country to be taken over my Muslim terrorists. Barack Obama cannot be trusted because he has an Arab/Muslim sounding name.

McCain defends the honor of Obama because he senses the the fear and anger coming from the crowds at these rallies. He also knows that the more negative he gets, the more Obama pulls ahead in the polls. The old tricks are not working so well anymore. With the economy tanking, people are more willing to give a black candidate with a Muslim sounding name a chance. How about that reaction from the McCain crowd when Senator McCain defended Obama? They booed. As I have written here before, the rabid right (not all of the right, just the radical wing of the party) cannot stop at simply criticizing and disagreeing with Liberals. They feel compelled to call them names, call them un-American, and call a candidate like Obama a terrorist. This is most certainly borne of fear. What they're afraid of, I'm not so sure. After the past eight years of living in a country with no real leadership, how much worse could the next four be? In fact, I'll go even further - not only have we not had any leadership, we have had an administration that has had an adverse effect on our country. Many provisions of the Constitution have been torn asunder, we spend ten billion a month on a meaningless war, creationism now competes with science, our standing in the world has been diminished, and our financial institutions lie in near ruin. Why couldn't Bush and the neocons just follow the Doctor's creed and "do no harm"?

On the positive side, the tide is turning. The pendulum is swinging back the other way. People have had enough. Even some of the more serious thinkers on the right such as David Brooks, George Will and Kathleen Parker see what the past few decades of "red-meat politics" has done to this country. They want their party to return to focusing on serious issues that voters are affected by. I , for one, sincerely hope that happens. I would love to argue politics with people on the right who don't defend everything George Bush does and who believe in evolution and who don't call people un-American if they happen to disagree with them. This type of discourse makes all of us smarter.

David Brooks comes around

In an interview with The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg at New York's Le Cirque restaurant to unveil that magazine's redesign, Brooks decried Palin's anti-intellectualism and compared her to President Bush in that regard:
"[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices."

So Angry: Part Two

Yikes !!!

The McCain-Palin Mob: So Angry

Watch this video. Why are these Ohio McCain supporters so angry? How come it's not enough to disagree with Barack Obama's views and vote against him? Why do some McCain supporters feel compelled to call Obama a "terrorist" and a "Muslim"? Why do they scream at Obama supporters to "get a job"? I'll tell you why. They are afraid. They are afraid and they are angry. They are afraid that a black man will be President. This is not a traditional role for a black man. He is not supposed to be President. Also, his name sounds foreign. These people think they are struggling economically because their tax dollars are going to support minorities and immigrants. They continually vote for a Republican party that throws them the red meat of social issues and then leaves them out in the cold economically.

These people are clinging to something that is already gone. The world has spun past them. They are watching it whiz by and they don't understand what just happened. In the larger sense, because of globalization, rising Asian powers and disappearing borders, what we know as America will no longer exist in a few decades. We will still be a nation, but we will become part of a larger global entity that cannot act only in it's own self-interest if it wants to thrive. This is happening right now. Take immigration, for example. Do you really think the current Republican administration wants to stop immigration? It is a source of cheap labor, just as it has been since immigrants started coming here. As a result, the traditional idea of borders is fading away. People may differ on whether this is good or bad, but it is indeed happening. And this scares people.

Anyway, nothing I could say could be more telling than watching this video.

Watch the Debate !

Watch tonight's debate!!!

Bush vs. Clinton on jobs

Click on the chart to make it bigger.

Look at these employment numbers from the website of the U.S. Department of Labor (http://www.bls.gov/). Compare the numbers of the Clinton administration to the George W. Bush administration. The numbers speak for themselves: President Clinton's record on this matter is far superior.

'Cause I'm a...Job Killa !"

U.S. loses over 150,000 more jobs in September 2008 according to U.S. Department of Labor

"I got my black suit on, I got my black shoes on, I got my daddy's job. This recession's been too long.
I got my tax policy sawed off. I got my economic engine off. I'm 'bout to bust some jobs off. I'm 'bout to dust some jobs off.
Job killer, better you than me! Job killer, f**k job creation! Job killer, I know your family's grievin'(f**k 'em)!
Job killer, but tonight we get even."

Pailn: Even dumber and more annoying than I had originally thought

Joe Biden revealed Sarah Palin for the complete novice she is. Her strategy was to avoid answering any questions and just give a prepared statement which usually had nothing to do with the question. This did give the appearance that she had some knowledge of the topics, and this did probably fool many of the low-information independent voters. Don't forget, America loves stupid (just look who is sitting in the White House). Conversely, Joe Biden had a command of all the topics and spoke directly to each question.
Palin is the kind of populist simpleton that the founding fathers knew would rise to power if citizens were not diligent. This is why we are a republic and not a direct democracy. And make no mistake, if she loses this year, this dim bulb will be back in 2012 to run for president. Also, I can't get past the fact that she looks a bit like a girl who used to blow me regularly in the late 80's.

Dictator for Life Mike Bloomberg

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has announced that he wants to run for a third term. There's one little problem though - New York City has term limits and Mike's two terms are up. Mike say, "No problem! I'll just get the City Council to extend the number of terms to three
instead of two so I can run one more time!" Of course, the frightened sheep who support this say, "Well, Mike's good with finance, and we're in deep financial trouble, so he's just GOTTA do one more term".
Well what about the will of the people? The voters TWICE voted in favor of term limits. Now the City Council will just disregard that voice and stomp all over it. Furthermore, once Mike announces his intention to run, you will see all other serious candidates drop out of the race, because they don't have the billions of dollars of personal wealth that Bloomberg will be able to spend on this campaign. And let's face it, what will be his solution to the economic crisis that will be different than anyone else's? He will cut services and raise taxes, just like anyone else would when times are tight.
Allowing elected officials to run again after their proscribed term is up is how dictatorships start. Now, this being the United States of America, I don't think a dictatorship will literally start. But, no one is irreplaceable. I'm sure in this city full of many intelligent public servants, we can find ONE person besides Mike Bloomberg to do this job.


More to come...all hail The Dear Leader Mike.

Tonight's Vice-Presidential Debate

Biden will take Palin to school in tonight's debate. She might even cry. But it won't matter for those who have already decided who to vote for. Even among independent voters, Palin's non-functional cerebral cortex won't matter much. The economy will be the decider here.

But watch the debate anyway. It will be like a professor debating a cheerleader.