Meh

Calhoun’s Cannons for Oct 5, 2012

To be persuasive, we must be believable.  To be believable, we must be credible.  To be credible, we must be truthful.

                                              Edward R. Murrow

I made sure I was appropriately dressed for the occasion by wearing my special Presidential Debate tee shirt.  The one with Meh emblazoned on the front, which is about all the enthusiasm I can conjure up for this overlong, overblown, overpriced, ridiculous Bataan Death March of a political campaign.

The debate was not without its moments.  The moderator was asleep at the switch while the President looked like a distracted boulevardier slouched gracefully against a lamp post, one leg casually canted behind him.  No need to stand firmly on two feet – this one could be phoned in.  And Mitt Romney nearly rattled his careful coiffure off center when he launched into his rat-a-tat-tat imitation of a frustrated but wildly agitated 11 year-old boy desperately trying to get his Dad to buy him a new pony – “All you need to do is raise the rates, lower the base, widen the top, cut the bottom, it won’t cost you a penny, it’ll be revenue neutral, I have a plan, I have another plan, I have two plans, I’ll explain later, just trust me, please, please, puhleeeze.”

Until I wanted to smack him and holler, “Get a grip, Mitt!” and send him to his room. I mean, wide-eyed enthusiasm is one thing, but the quivering near hysteria of a hyper-ventilating salesman desperate to close is quite another. Plus, I couldn’t help thinking, Jeeze, I don’t want that twitchy guy on the other end of a red phone at 3 a.m.

But the biggest Meh of all in this election is the utter refusal of all parties to address The Rest of The Story.  President Obama hasn’t “fixed the economy” for two critical reasons.  First, nobody could fix this mess in four years.  Boom and bust cycles have their own time tables and this one is particularly complicated.  Claiming otherwise is simply dishonest. And two, everybody keeps ignoring the one huge elephant in the room: a Republican Congress whose leaders had one – and only one– priority: Making sure this president would be a one term president.  Period.  That was it, from day one.  The result is we ended up with a Congress bent on knee-capping and monkey-wrenching, not repairing and rebuilding.   

Like all presidential debates, this one was filled with spin, fudged numbers and worse -- Big Lies.  That’s been a particular problem because we now live in Republican strategist Karl Rove’s World, where nothing is true, reality is simply what you say it is, and arithmetic is obsolete.  It’s all New Math now, baby.

Which makes it nearly impossible for a democracy to govern itself.  How can it when all information is politicized and branded as false, facts become fungible and Edward R. Murrow’s “credibility” is now an irrelevant anachronism. 

Wednesday night’s debate was a perfect example.  Both candidates came in for plenty of fact-checking smacks.  But what the hell was Romney doing dragging in the old infamous fake $700 million “cut” from Medicare story?  That lie had been killed off, debunked, ‘splained repeatedly, loudly, in public, yet there Romney was, shamelessly dragging it on stage like a dead zombie.  Or, worse yet, conjuring up the ghost of Sarah Palin’s destructively false “death panels” and “government takeover of health care.” Romney knows those fake talking-points are lies that have but one purpose:  to deceive rather than to illuminate. But he was willing to present them as fact to an audience he believes to be idiots.  

Or consider the poor voter having to try to deal with a candidate that believes in Policy as Vapor.  Debate night we in the TV audience were astonished to learn that Romney now has a “new” budget plan, the details of which are totally unknown because it’s, like, all new, with details to be added later. (Another plan?  Is Romney a Fuller Brush salesman with a suitcase full of little vegetable brushes, each one a different color? You don’t like blue?  Oh, well, here’s a purple one?) Shape shifting vague makes dishonest campaigning easy but it doesn’t work well if you’re a voter trying to decide which candidate’s stated policies you want to vote for.   

And that’s because the devil’s always in the details.  Which is where the real problems facing the American people lie and why this election is being touted as the struggle for the soul of America. 

There are two forces at work now: 1% Corporate America and 47% Useless Mooching Public America.  The vested interests of both do not necessarily coincide.  Indeed, there is more than ample evidence that the interests of one too often bring great harm to the interests of the other.  Bain Capital comes to mind.  So does Wall Street. The Koch Brothers.  Outsourced Jobs.  Tax breaks for the rich.  All great for Corporate America, not so good for Main Street. The Koch Brothers have their Congressmen in place to guard their interests.  But who is there to guard and defend the interests of We the People, you know, the Useless Mooching 47%?    

As it stand now, what we’ve created is a world of Karl Rovian fakery, dishonest math, shape-shifting policies, etch-a-sketch personalities, erasable histories, fantasy realities, ridiculous apocalyptic thunderations, missing time-lines, poisonous partisanship, predatory corporations and a total lack of common sense. Not to mention a Republican party that sadly sold its soul to a guy named Grover Norquist, a congress filled with corporate hacks (and genuinely science-challenged ignoramuses), and a population too willing to believe in fairy stories that always end with free candy raining down from the sky on all the good children.

And now a candidate who promises to fix the budget by killing off Big Bird. 

Which is why my Great Debate tee shirt says it all and says it best:  Meh.    

 

What's for Dinner?

Calhoun’s Ca(n)nons for April 5, 2012

            Mmmmmm. Yummy ground up odd bits of boneless meat scrapings from cow carcasses thoroughly mashed up and treated with ammonium hydroxide.  Mmmm.

            What do you mean, Eeeeuuuu!  We’ve been eating the stuff for years.  It’s been added to hamburger meat and we’ve been chowing it down with gusto.  Until some wisenheimers, some goody-two-shoed Food Police types decided that people might like to know just what went into that all beef patty started calling it “pink slime” and hideous pictures of this gloopy stuff started show up on TV. 

            After which, Obese Nation America, which had been scarfing up this stuff  by the daily ton, recoiled with the horror reserved only for a pencil-thin Food Nazi Vegan who’s been handed a dead cat on a dinner  plate.  The beef industry panicked and invited politicians in for a photo op at the beef-scraping factory to prove how safe and good and yummy this all was.  And beef officials declared that if we just called this goo “finely textured lean beef” everything would be fine.

            But the greasy die had been cast.  Consumers ran their tongues out and went “Ack-Ack-Ackkk!”  Fast food restaurants took out big ads declaring that they always never used the stuff.  And the companies that ran “finely textured lean beef” factories in at least four states quietly closed their plants and laid off about 1,400 finely textured employees.

            And, best of all for the beef industry, Pink Slimegate quickly slid off the radar before people could start asking the kind of question they needed to ask, which is:  Should I even be eating this hamburger in the first place, with or without the slime?

            Because that question would lead directly to others, like: What went into the cow while it was jammed into a huge feed lot and stuffed with . . . what?  At one time we fed cows other ground up finely textured cows.  And sheep, until mad-cow disease supposedly stopped that practice.  But we are still stuffing our feed-lot cows with pesticide-loaded grain and antibiotics to ward off diseases which are exacerbated by jamming a grazing animal into crowded pens and stuffing it with corn and other fattening stuff that turns its naturally lean, grass-fed muscle into bad Omega-6 laced fat.  After which we hack it up and eat it.

            And then get all pissy when we find out that finely ground pink slime bits of more cows have been added back in?

            The same food freak-out is taking place with the troubling “high fructose corn syrup,” the ubiquitous sweetener that’s been dumped into nearly every food product you can possibly think of, including ones that shouldn’t have anything to do with the word “syrup.”  And now nutritionists and scientists are investigating the possibility that high fructose corn syrup is somehow processed differently by the liver than plain sugar, and that difference is helping to fuel the obesity epidemic that’s killing us.

            But do food manufacturers declare that they will get this awful stuff out of our food supply?  Naw.  Instead, they’re busy renaming it, like they think that calling it “Smiley-Face Sweet Field Sugar” will solve the problem.  To date, their efforts have been met with the angry buzz saws of proprietary food-name lawyers from the “real” cane/beet sugar industry.  Sorry, you Fructose Syrupies,but  the word “sugar” has already been taken.  Move along.    

            Well, what’s in a word, really?  Nothing when you live in Fake Nation.  In that world, words are just useful tools to fleece the marks.  Toss in our uniquely American desire to remain deluded, our extraordinary tolerance for being lied to and the rest just comes easy.  From Madison Avenue to K-Street to the sacred halls of Congress, it’s all one big game of rebranding -- PhonySpeak  in  pursuit of the big bucks, the votes, the power. 

            And woe betide the smartass who comes along to point out the obvious.  Take poor Elizabeth Warren.  This hideous, terrifying scold wanted credit card contracts to be written in clear, plain language, the charges and fees all spelled out in simple, easy to understand language.  My God, can you imagine?  She also wanted citizens to be given some modest consumer protections in the marketplace, on Wall Street, in the automobile showroom.  It was beyond horrible and the Republican corporate shills in Congress reacted accordingly to make sure she was sidelined, and they’ve been busy undoing even the modest protections that she managed to put in place over their half-dead bodies.

            Or take Sarah Palin and her Big Lie of “death panels.”  There were no “death panels.”  What had been proposed was that under the developing health reform plans, Medicare would pay for seniors to meet with their own doctor and/or geriatric end-of-life experts, so they could get accurate information in order to make their own choices for their own end-of-life care.  No panels, no hooded judges sentencing people to death.  Just patients consulting with their doctors in order to make sure their decisions on their own care would be put in place when the need arose. That’s all. 

            Yet, thanks to Palin’s lie and fake name, that service was removed and now seniors are left on their own, which too often results in terrible suffering that runs contrary to what the patient wanted for themselves and their families.  Real suffering in a real world, thanks to Palin’s dishonest wordsmithing.   

            Well, why not?  It’s just words. Here in Fleeced Nation, a lie is as good as the truth.  Especially if it makes you rich and famous and sends the bill for any damages to the sucker public.

            So, America, eat up!  Here’s your wonderful and delicious ammonia-treated finely textured lean beef pink slime high fructose corn syrup hamburger.  Not only is it tasty and delicious, it’s good for you.  That’s right.  It’s very, very good for you. Trust me.  Would I lie to you?  Of course not.    

            Open wide. Yum.      

Game Unchanged

Calhoun’s Cannons for March 13, 2012

Humans are the only animals who will follow unstable pack leaders

                                                  Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer

            Sarah Palin and John McCain have both said they didn’t intend to watch HBO’s “Game Change,” an account of their run for president and vice president in 2008.  I’m sure they think the made-for-HBO movie would trash them and anyway, who wants to be reminded of  such embarrassments? While the film does hold them to account for their hubris and blind ambition, overall, they are treated with sympathy; players caught in a win-at-all-cost ethos that did not end well.    

            At the time, like most of the nation, I was stunned when Sarah Palin blew out of the north, her clueless optimism and oddly un-political family in tow, and with the first few national speachs, blew McCain’s train off the track and permanently shoved national politics into a lethal mash up: “American Political Idols Dance With The Stars.” 

            Overnight, Palin’s adoring fans overwhelmed the straight talking express, McCain became that-guy-with-Sarah, and Democratic candidate Obama suddenly had his star-power, media-savvy, crowd-stirring, Great Communicator match.  Yes, half the country watched Katy Couric ask Sarah what newspapers she read, saw her draw a blank and said WTF?? 

            But the other half flocked to her rallies, enthralled as she cranked up the dog whistle music.  Suddenly, those too often forgotten or dismissed by the Washington elite were being told that they were the real Americans, their values were the real American values. And they responded with adoration to their self-styled Mama Grizzly. Sarah! Sarah!   Even Tina Fey’s dead-on comic portrayals could get no traction with those crowds to point out the appallingly obvious:  McCain’s an old man, he’s had cancer once, Palin is one heart-beat away from the Presidency.  This woman is not qualified.

            Even Dick Cheney – Dick Cheney! – called the choice “reckless.”

            But Steve Schmidt, McCain’s political strategist “got it” right in the middle of the campaign, if this film is accurate.  The belief that his candidate had to win no matter what drove him and McCain to make that Hail Mary, stunningly reckless gamble on Palin. It was a choice that made a mockery of McCain’s campaign slogan, “ Country First.”  As they would sadly find out, it was always Palin First.

            And that, for me was the most puzzling part of this whole affair.  How self-blind do you have to be to get a phone call out of the blue asking you to run for the second highest office in the land and with nary a qualm say, “You betcha! Sure. I’ll be a great Veep.  Heck, I’d be a great President.  When do we start?” 

            A normal person would say, “Sorry.  I’m not qualified.”  But an egotistical narcissist with no capacity for reality checks would have no problem. Or somebody in the grip of some delusional religious mania: “God told me to run for office.”  Or maybe a cynically ambitious sociopath who knows the American voter can be Elmer Gantried into buying anything.

            Or, perhaps, it was as simple as the L.A. Times television critic, Mary McNamara suggests: “The film, obviously, belong to (Julianne) Moore, who works hard to make Palin not so much fatally ambitious as one of those naturally confident people who believe that confidence and faith are the most important ingredients of success; ability or even competence can be learned on the job.”

            Except when it can’t.

            As the movie makes clear, after trying to educate and fill in Palin’s gaping information void, her handlers finally gave up, realized she was a natural “red-light” actor, and just wrote Cliff Notes scripts for her – talking points, summaries, buzz words and phrases.  Which solved some of the most glaring problems of an extemporaneous Sarah, but sill left her handlers with a serious disconnect: Imagine an unprepared student who just skims the topic and memorizes key points and phrases but who then over reaches and overloads the mashed-up answers into nonsense.  That would go a long way towards explaining Palin’s distinctly odd and incoherent verbal rambles.

            Overall, the film was extraordinarily kind to Palin, showing a plucky woman working hard to do her bit but who was pushed beyond her capabilities and into overwhelm until she finally decides to go rogue and quickly becomes a distraction and then a liability to a campaign heading for the cliff. 

            But the film didn’t bother to do any more than hint at the deeper political problems the McCain/Palin campaign illustrated:  A cynical win-at-all-costs mind set, a philosophically bankrupt political party bereft of any new ideas but determined to cling to power for no other reason than a need to cling to power, and a dangerous conflation of bread and circus entertainment with cynical beltway politics, all tapping into America’s dark dog-whistle, social-values heart. 

            It is the same disease that’s infected the Republican Party’s primary election and the plague will arrive full blown in both political parties come November, all fueled now by unlimited, secret PAC money – Democracy as a fully financed corporate block-buster TV special.   

     Bring on the dancing bears.

Palinov's Dogs

Calhoun’s Cannons for June 3, 2011 

Humans are the only animals who will follow unstable pack leaders
                                             Cesar Milan, The Dog Whisperer

The political silly season – summer – started early. First we got the full-throated press pack baying after Donald Trump every time he popped his fox-red furry noggin up past the petunias. La Donald was flogging his TV show by pretending to run for the Republican presidential nomination. “ I’d be yOOOge, yuOOOge!” promised the Donald. But the only thing yOOOge was La Donald’s ego, his hairpiece and, as most people guessed, his 60-million dollar “Celebrity Apprentice” salary which trumped even fake political ambition.

This delightful romp was followed by the next distraction: the mystery of who hacked his Twitter account and publicly posted a photo of a crotch that may or may not be Congressman Anthony Weiner’s weenie. (Oh, Dear God, plueeeze don’t tell me we have another Pesky Political Penis running amok again. Are we going to have to only elect eunuchs in order to get anything done in Washington?) Well, the vital national security issue of Weiner’s Weenie will carry the 24/7 news cycle for a few days until it’s time for the Next Pointless Thing to distract and amuse an ADD nation.

And that rumble you hear comin’ over the hill, diesel fumes in the mornin,’ fumes that smell like . . . Victory, by golly!, well that would be the Queen of Silly, who has and will continue to top them all: Sarah Palin’s Yes I’m Not Running For President ‘12 tour is on the road in a ginormous bus with a huge “One Nation” and a flag painted on it, with the press pack, like Pavlov’s dogs, tongues running out, baying right behind it. And already La Palin’s faux complaining that the press is harassing her, that she and her family are on a little vacation, just like any other heartland family.

Oh, absolutely. You see those heartland “real” Americans all over the road during summer: Dad, who’s been out of work for a year and Mom, who is working two jobs to keep their underwater house afloat, regularly rent a huge, incredibly expensive bus and then have it hand-painted with a flag so they can then take the family on a meet-‘n-greet celebrity photo-op tour vacation to eat pizza with La Donald in New York and make little impromptu stump speeches at various historical American sites. Just like all hard-working real American families do when they go on vacation, you betcha!

All of which, in Palin’s case, is reminiscent of Marie Antoinette who costumed herself and her ladies-in-waiting to look like milkmaids so they could all troop off to a newly created faux farm on the grounds of Versailles to play at being peasants.

And so the Silly Season Summer dance begins, as structured as a pas de deux: Palin pops up, the media bays. They can’t help it. Their jobs depend on it. To their corporate masters, La Palin is pure ratings gold. And to La Palin, those ratings translate into real gold as well. Fake political campaigns, as La Donald and La Huckabee and La Gingrich and the other assorted well paid La Pols on Fox News have discovered, pays waaaayyyy better than public service.

As for the public, well, they demand their daily dose of celebrity as well. It now seems hard-wired into our popular-culture psyche and we are helpless in its grip since the human eye is programmed to scan for and focus on novelty – that unexpected movement in the shrubbery that demands attention.

You see the phenomenon at work every time a TV camera is doing an on-the-street interview, for example. Invariably, somebody will pop into view making a face or yelling something or holding a dumb sign. And try as you might, it’s impossible to ignore that action. La Palin has that pop-up strategy down to a fine art form. Nobody knows how to effectively surf the 24/7 news cycle schedule better than she and her handlers do. Masters at the game.

Is our country on the brink of financial ruin? Default only weeks away? Are the effects of climate change already upon us and because we have dithered, we are totally unprepared and will pay a fearsome price for our folly? Is a nuclear-armed Pakistan riding the Taliban tiger and now can’t get off? Is an Al Qaeda-infested Yemen now on the brink of chaos and civil war?

Well, pay no attention. It’s not important. What’s important is fake news, Dancing With The Stars, missing wieners and now the constant novelty of pop-up, Wack-a-Mole celebrity political theatre. That’s what Americans want, and what Americans want, they get.

Meanwhile, Democrats, comedians and pundits are praying – praying – for a Palin/Bachman GOP presidential ticket. It couldn’t possibly get any better than that: Politics as Farce.

Just Another Day

Calhoun’s Can(n)ons for January 14, 10

The shooting was nothing special. Just another unbalanced, angry young man with a gun. A rapid-fire Glock-9 with a 30-round clip that can kill a great many people in a very short amount of time. In this case, six people, including a 9 year-old girl. Nothing special in a country awash with gun deaths.

Except for Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. That was a bit unusual. But not enough to make a real change in how easy it is for unbalanced angry young men to get rapid-fire guns. This particular shooting took place in Arizona, the Tombstone state, a state with one of the most lax gun laws in the nation, a state where armed citizens no longer even need a permit to carry concealed weapons. And Arizona likes it that way. It has even proposed a law that would allow college students to carry weapons to school. And the Congresswoman herself had a Glock-9 and noted that she was “a pretty good shot.”

Since it was a Congresswoman who was shot, the talk turned immediately to the possibility that this unbalanced young man’s anger had been fueled by the angry political rhetoric sloshing around in our polarized, angry nation. Clips and sound bites of “reload,” and being “armed and ready,” “blood of patriots,” “the Second Amendment remedy,” “if ballots don’t work, bullets will,” and Sarah Palin’s now infamous web page showing gun-sight “targets” zeroing in on various contested congressional races, including the Arizona district where Congresswoman Giffords was running for election. Indeed, a few weeks before the shooting Ms. Giffords herself was on TV complaining about Ms. Palin’s “targets,” saying that rhetoric like that was likely to result in “consequences.”

For Congresswoman Giffords, it certainly may have. A bullet through the brain. And six dead.

But Americans love their toxic talk and both sides of the political spectrum got busy pointing fingers at the other, though by sheer sound-bite numbers, the right wing won that contest. You can’t beat TV clips of armed “tea-party” folks showing up at political rallies wearing weapons and carrying signs lauding blood-spilling “patriots.” And those targets on a map, about which, Palin’s spokespeople spent a great deal of time explaining they weren’t, uh, gun sights, no, they were just “target marks” like you would use on a survey map. Thereby illustrating that the Palin camp must think Americans are truly dumb because nobody with any sense was buying that story. Not from the Moose-shooting Mama with her own “reality” show featuring her blasting away at furry animals for her cook-pot. If a person knows what a gun sight looks like, it’s Palin.

So, no, it was a lock ‘n load gun sight and part of the “armed and dangerous” right-wing rhetorical meme: We’re angry, aggrieved and armed and we’re gonna target and take “our” country back from, well, all those people, and if we have to use bullets instead of ballots, so be it. But that didn’t stop our Sarah from going on Facebook to play the appalling inappropriate “blood libel” victim card in response to left wing finger pointing. Then everyone ran for cover, pretending they knew nothing about anything.

So that discussion will soon fade from the airwaves and it’ll be back to attack-dog business as usual. Toxic, poisonous, raging talk radio is both popular and highly profitable to the sponsors and stations that carry it, and to the stations’ corporate owners. Asking people like Limbaugh or Beck to “tone it down” might cut into the bottom line, so that won’t happen. Rage sells. Fear sells. And paranoia is the American Style.

Lost in much of the partisan rhetoric was the mentally unstable young man. Speaker of the House, John Boehner has stated that America has the finest health care in the world. But I suspect that the shooter, the unstable young man with voices in his head, found that in his America, his finest health care in the world likely didn’t cover treating mental illness. Few insurance policies do and state-run mental health facilities are under-funded, or broke and failing. This is in part because in finest-health-care-America, we have the odd notion that somehow the mentally ill “choose” to be mentally ill and while completely insane have the right to refuse treatment, have the right to live under bridges, and the right to starve in the streets while talking to non-existent people. And, of course, the right to buy guns.

So there it all was. The usual suspects. Guns. A toxic, angry culture. A mentally disturbed angry young man. Lousy mental health care. Nothing special. Nothing unusual. It was just another day in America. Nothing has changed and nothing will change.

Except for six people, including a 9 year- old girl.

Take It Off, Take It ALL Off

Ah, where's Joe Namath when you need him?  Well, never mind, we now have Joe Miller from Alaska who's either trying to out-Nixon's five o'clock shadow or planning for a Noxema shaving creme commercial a la Joe Namath with a cooing blond babe holding a razor blade. Oooooo, take it ALL off!

So, there's the Big Question of the upcoming Political Silly Season:  Is Joe Miller's caefully clipped quasi scruffy semi-unshaved five o'clock shadow the result of careful two-day-growth manscaping like the macho undercover actors in the new TV series "Dark Blue?"  Or is he just so busy running around the northwoods in big-check flannel shirts hauling moose antlers by the armload that he just doesn't have time to shave?

Either way, it's the subtext that's so much fun here.  Especially in this season of Fox Noise/ Republican 24/7 FearFearFear! campaigning -- nonexistent headless bodies in the Arizona Desert! Deadly Killer Mosques at Ground Zero and in Tenessee and San Diego County! Black Helicopters coming to kill your Grandma if ObamaCare comes to your town! Communism creeping over America that can only be stopped by Glen Beck who's now speaking for God while raking in the filthy lucre of Mamon!

And with Russia right there over her left shoulder, deliciously rich speaking, book and TV contracts in her hand, here comes the Mighty Moose Killer herself . . . SARAH! SARAH! SARAH!

Ah, America is saved!

And fashionistas take note; Flannel is the season's fabric to watch.

Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow

Washington, D.C. is being dumped on, and not by angry Tea Party members. This time it’s snow. LOTS of snow. Record amounts of snow. To which I say, Good. Let it snow.

In his extraordinary book, “The Worst Hard Time; The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Dust Bowl, author Timothy Egan tells of the time that dust started falling on Washington, D.C. It was years into the man-made ecological disaster and devastation. Congress kept saying, it was a temporary problem, it would blow over, it wasn’t really happening, just a minor weather problem, the problem was being exaggerated, a conspiracy by Roosevelt liberals to tax and spend to try to fix the problem, and all those other deja vuish articles of faith we now hear said about “global warming.”

Then dust started fallin on Washington, DC. The sky darkened, literally, and the dust fell. For days and days. Dust from Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, the Panhandle. Dust falling from dark skies at high noon. For days. Scared hell out of the Congressmen who woke up and said, “We got a problem here,” and finally allocated funds for the CCC and various farm bureau programs to get to work planting trees, teaching and instituting soil conservation measures, and buying out near-dead farmers and excess, “toxic” farmlands that never should have been farmed in the first place.

Slowly, through human efforts and the end of a drought cycle, much of the land was restored and the dust blows stop. All it took was dust to fall on Washington D.C. Tons of dust.

Since we have a similar situation with this Congress (global warming is a myth, it isn’t caused by humans activity, it’ll blow over, it’s just a conspiracy by Obama liberals to tax and spend to help avert the coming disaster, & etc.) I say, Let it snow. And snow. And snow. Darkness at noon in D.C. is what we need now.

On the Other Hand

Tim Rutten, in his L.A. Times column presents a far darker problem. Congress itself. Do nothing Congress in the form of Senator Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala) “who has put a personal hold on more than 70 executive branch appointments until the Obama administration agrees to fund a couple of pork-barrel projects hehas earmarked for his state. One involves tens of millions of dollars for an FBI laboratory focusing on improvised explosives – something the bureau desn’t think it needs. The other involves contract specifications for an aerial tanker that Northrop Grumman and Airbus would manufacture in Alabama, if they win the deal. . . . Unless the administration agrees to give Shelby what he wants, he intends to invoke an archaic senatorial privilege that allows him to prevent the chamber from considering any of the administration’s nominees to executive branch vacancies, no matter how crucial. Without the 60 votes to force cloture – another archaic convention – there’s nothing the Democrats or the White House can do. . . . Outside the Senate, Shelby’s conduct would be called extortion: inside the chamber it’s a ‘parliamentary tactic.’

“It’s also the sort of shabby situation that brings into sharp focus both the sources of congressional dysfunction and the popular discontent on both the left and right with the congressional parties. Earmarks and pork are anathema to a majority of conservatives and independents; the Senate’s outdated, made-for-obstruction rules and susceptibility to special interests are a source of increasing frustration to liberals and some independents. Yet, here we have one senator from one Southern state obstructing with impunity an entire nation’s business – purely for his narrow constituency’s financial interest.”

Compared to what global warming will do to this country, the devastation of the Dust Bowl is miniscule. With a dysfunctional government, a clueless, asleep-at-the-switch citizenry, even a mile-wide glacier falling on D.C might not be enough to do the trick.

Get the rowboats.

Oh, Wait, That’s Right.

Republican Vice Presidential candidate and former (resigned) moose-shooting Governor of Alaska (who can see Russia from her house) announced on Fox News that she would consider running for President if she felt it was the right thing for her.

Thank Goodness. We are saved!

Psst, America

Before President Obama was elected, the voters were all one big whine, “Gaawww, we gotta have health care reform, we’re dying out here, dying! Help, Help, Help, We want single payer, we want a public option, we want, we want, we want.”

Then they elected Obama AND re-elected and elected a sufficient number of congresspeople who are philosophically and practically utterly OPPOSED to single payer, or anything even resembling real reform or any public options.

So Congress sets to work to make sausage without a veto-proof number that would enable them to actually deliver some sort of single payer, public option, medicare-for-all type plan the public said they wanted. The result was a sausage that sold the American public to the insurance companies, guaranteed their continued high profits with only minor tinkering around the edges instead of real “reform” in how we deliver health care, and a fat deal cut for big pharama – EXACTLY what one would expect when you have a non-veto-proof congress composed of anti-public programs, status quo, insurance company/big pharma water carriers.

At which the American people start whining, “Eeeeuuu, we don’t’ like THIS health care bill, we want ANOTHER one, we want a blue one, this one’s green, we don’t like green, plus we want a public option, we want, we want, we want.”

Errrkk, Sorry, America. Ya gits whatcher pay for. You elect people who do not believe the government has a role to play in people’s lives, who believe that the free market will solve all their problems, who believe that the status quo is just fine, who believe that their only job is not to actually govern but to do everything in their power to keep themselves in power, no matter how damaging that is to the rest of the country, then that’s exactly what you’ll get. So, zip it. There’s an election coming up. You want “real change,” America? Well, here’s your chance. Laws are made in Congress, not in the White House. In the meantime, stop whining.

Speaking of which . . .

How often have you heard the comment, “It doesn’t matter who’s president,” well last night’s State of the Union had an interesting example of how wrong that idea is. Right down front sat the Supreme Court who recently voted to grant “personhood” free speech rights to corporations. President Obama commented to their faces that he thought that was a bad idea that would open America up for more money corrupting the political process, plus allowing foreign corporations a huge foot in the door of our own home-grown national pastime: Buy A Congressman.

Weirdly, everyone stood up to applaud his whacking this recent Supreme Court decision, even Republicans who mostly remained seated throughout the speech, even when the President noted he had cut taxes, a Pavlovian phrase that usually automatically brings Republicans to their feet, cheering.

But there it was: Presidents who appoint Supreme Court members actually DO matter because the Supremes then go on to “legislate from the bench” and thereby impact real people’s lives long after the President who appointed them has gone.

How this recent ruling shakes out remains to be seen. But you have to admit, the idea of China, Inc. OWNING our Congress is delicious to contemplate. But that Chief Justice Roberts would make a ruling that would open the door for just such a “corporate” move should come as no surprise. Chief Justice Roberts was a “corporate” guy from day one. His promise to respect legal precedence during his confirmation was hokum designed to get him confirmed. But that’s how our kabuki theatre of Supreme Court confirmations go. As with all things, leopards don’t usually change their spots. And we shouldn’t expect them to do so. Once again, ya gets whatcha ask for.

Which is why . . .

America needs to stop whining about President Obama being some sort of flaming Liberal. That’s more hokum Republican talking points. Obama was and is a firmly planted centrist. And it’s no use whining that Obama needs to take the reins and just drive this wagon. He’s not a “driver,” either. Never was. He’s a “community organizer,” through and through. And while Sarah Palin sneered at that occupation, she failed to understand the basic mind set of “community organizers:” Bottom up, self-generated, consensus, centrist.

Community organizers don’t “lead.” They allow The Community to chose the path and the method and then enable movement. Which is exactly what Obama did with the health care issue. Congress was the “community,” representing the people who elected them, so it was up to Congress to craft a plan that would be bottom up, self-generated, consensus and centrist. And leaving aside the corruption of Congress by the health care/big pharma industries and other lobbying forces in removing key components (single payer, public option) even before the discussion began, that’s exactly the health care proposal they ended up with – bottom up, self-generated, consensus (all the wheeling and dealing designed to get everyone on board), centrist.

And, of course, that’s when the whining started. Eeeuuuu, it’s blue. I don’t LIKE blue, I want green. And so forth. Which is caused because the American people don’t seem to realize that our system of government is based on “community organization.” Congress IS our Community Organization and depends on all members seriously working together to craft laws that will solve problems. The system works only if all parties work to actually get things done (make sausage), understand that nothing centrist will please everyone, and know that pragmatic compromise is the name of any Community Organizing game. And the system fails to work if a sufficiently large number of organizers simply turn into a Party of NO and block any efforts that aren’t to their liking.

And seeing to it that our National Community Organization (Congress) functions properly is the job of the voters. If they want a functioning Congress, they need to vote in people who will actually work to get things done. If they want a dysfunctional Congress, they’ll vote in whole Parties of NO or keep electing or re-electing Wholly Owned Subsidiaries of Corporation X whose constituent isn’t The People, but is Corp. X, or they’ll keep electing strictly partisan, regional Bringers of Local Pork who don’t give a fig for the rest of the community (the nation).

In short, here in America, we get the Congress we deserve. The choices are always ours. So enough with the whining. Ya gits whatcha asked for.