We're All Supposed To Pretend That This Is a Normal Man And That Was A Normal Election-- That Neither The Russians Nor The FBI Grabbed For Their Puppet?

It may be endlessly entertaining-- and even instructive-- to read about the discord in the Trump transition team, and Maddow certainly seems to have made it her beat, but the GOP knife fights, certainly part of Trump's managerial style, shouldn't take us away from the realistic goal we have to concentrate on: winning, winning, winning in 2018-- House seats and state legislative seats. Everything else-- delusions about getting the electoral college to overturn the announced results, delusions about getting "liberal Democrat" Trump on our side, delusions about impeachment...-- are just that: delusions. Winning back the House isn't. Winning more state legislatures before 2020 redistricting begins, isn't.

But Democrats need, desperately need, new leaders, not the failed, comprimised establishment Pelosis, Hoyers and Schumers. Yesterday we mentioned that Schumer "possesses the same impressive political acumen as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, sagely explaining 'For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.' [And that] Schumer’s done more than anyone except Bill and Hillary Clinton to intertwine Wall Street and the Democratic Party. He raises millions and millions of dollars from the finance industry, both for himself and for other Democrats. In return, he voted to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 and voted to bail out Wall Street in 2008. In between, he slashed fees paid by banks to the Securities and Exchange Commission to pay for regulatory enforcement, and eviscerated congressional efforts to crack down on rating agencies."

When I got a press release from Elizabeth Warren's office today-- and a follow-up from her political wing, the PCCC-- extolling him as the Senate Dems next leader, I sent back a 3-character reply (to Warren): "LOL." Schumer addressed the Democracy Alliance conference in DC a couple of nights ago. He boasted that he would work with Trump in several areas, including tax reform. As we reiterated yesterday, "Schumer has long been the Democrats’ point man in efforts to craft a bipartisan deal to slash taxes on multinational corporations." I'm sure he sees Trump is a boon for his cause on this and several other issues and will be willing to legitimize him at a point when, as Olbermann said in the video up top, it is crucial that we do NOT.

Seth Moulton (D-MA) seems ok to me. He's not a conservative but he's not a progressive. He's just kind of a middle-of-the-road, policey-wise a garden variety Democrat. The Boston Globe seems to be giving him credit-- not necessarily deserved in the whole scheme of things-- for the "mini-revolt" Tuesday against rushing into leadership elections in the House Democratic conference. Moulton was far from the only Democrat pissed off about that. The complaints I heard were all coming from progressives. But whoever made it happen, the leadership votes are postponed until Nov. 30, although no viable alternatives to Pelosi, Hoyer, Clyburn and Crowley have been presented yet.

Molten, reports the Globe convened "a dinner at Acqua Al 2, an Italian restaurant on Capitol Hill, with 20 other mostly younger House Democrats to strategize about the caucus. The uprising hints at the unrest and even anger boiling among rank-and-file Democrats in the wake of Trump’s upset, but it remains uncertain whether Pelosi’s tenure is actually threatened. The day after last week’s election, House Democratic leaders said they were moving the leadership election up nearly two weeks. That accelerated schedule did not sit well with many of their members." Suddenly even moderates like Moulton see the phrase "status quo" in a negative light.

There are rumblings among some caucus members that it’s time for the old guard-- many of them in their 70s-- to move aside for fresher faces. Still, no one has publicly thrown their hat in the ring to challenge Pelosi, a fund-raising powerhouse who enjoys strong support in the caucus. Rumors are mounting that Ohio Representative Tim Ryan might take a shot, but seasoned political analysts doubt he can muster enough support to topple Pelosi. Another possibility is Pelosi remains in the top spot but embraces new blood further down the leadership ranks.

If nothing else, some insiders say, Tuesday’s revolt will serve as a wake-up call for Pelosi and her team.

...The caucus meeting Tuesday morning was described as extremely tense by several people in the room. At the start, caucus leadership sought to allow lawmakers to speak for two minutes. Representative Michael Capuano of Somerville piped up that people needed more time to speak, prompting applause, according to two people in the room.

Moulton said he had come to the meeting with a motion prepared to formally ask for a vote on delaying the leadership election. After numerous colleagues spoke out in support of delay, he handed the text he had drafted to Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri, who then made the motion, Moulton said. Whether the motion would be ruled in order or not was hotly debated until Pelosi and her team relented and agreed to reschedule the election.

The unrest points to a deep frustration among members of the House Democratic caucus over how little they have to show for years of legislative knife-fights and endless fund-raising... “When does the economic message begin to take center stage in the party that I signed up for?” [Richard Neal] asked, describing his support for the delay.

I would recommend that before the vote, they all read and discuss among themselves Bob Scheer's scathing November 9 post at TruthDig:

The people Hillary Clinton derided as a “basket of deplorables” have spoken. They have voted out of the pain of their economic misfortune, which Clinton’s branch of the Democratic Party helped engender.

What you have is a defeat of elitism. Clinton’s arrogance was on full display with the revelation of her speeches cozying up to Goldman Sachs-- the bank that caused this misery more than any other-- and the irony of this is not lost on the people who are hurting and can’t pay their bills. This is a victory for a neofascist populism-- scapegoating immigrants and Muslims-- and if Bernie Sanders had been the Democrats’ candidate, I feel confident he would have won. We were denied the opportunity of a confrontation between a progressive populist, represented by Sanders, and a neofascist populist.

It’s a repudiation of the arrogant elitism of the Democratic Party machine as represented by the Clintons, whose radical deregulation of Wall Street created this mess. And instead of recognizing the error of their ways and standing up to the banks, Clinton’s campaign cozied up to them, and that did not give people who are hurting confidence that she would respond to their needs or that she gave a damn about their suffering. She’s terminally tone-deaf.

So too were the mainstream media, which treated the wreckage of the Great Recession as a minor inconvenience, ignoring the deep suffering of the many millions who lost their homes, savings and jobs. The candidate of Goldman Sachs was defeated, unfortunately by a billionaire exemplar of everything that’s evil in late-stage capitalism, who will now worsen instead of fix the system. Thanks to the arrogance of the Democratic Party leadership that stifled the Sanders revolution, we are entering a very dangerous period with a Trump presidency, and this will be a time to see whether our system of checks and balances functions as our Founding Fathers intended.

Make no mistake about it: This is a crisis of confidence for America’s ruling elite that far surpasses Nixon’s Watergate scandal. They were the enablers of radical deregulation that betrayed Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s contract with the American people in the wake of the Great Depression. The people are hurting, and regrettably, Trump was the only vehicle presented to them by either major party in the general election to register their deepest discontent. The Trump voters are the messenger; don’t demonize them in an effort to salvage the prestige of the superrich elite that has temporarily lost its grip on the main levers of power in this nation.

Thankfully, the Clinton era is over, and the sick notion that the Democratic Party of FDR needed to find a new home in the temples of Wall Street greed has been rudely shattered by the deep anger of the very folks that the Democrats had presumed to represent. That includes working-class women, who failed to respond to the siren song of Clinton, whom the Democratic hacks offered instead of a true progressive like Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Yes, we need a female president, but not in the mold of Margaret Thatcher.

Trump: "The Bosses Are Picking The People"

When are people going to just be so over the ignorant hogwash that comes spewing out of Trump that they just turn him off completely? "I'm no longer a Cubs fan, by the way, because I think they'll terrible," he told Fox & Friends Saturday morning as an aside to the fact that the team's owners, the Ricketts, oppose him. Pure silly childishness. BUT, Trump has managed to stumble onto and mine a real vein of anger and discontent that-- despite the racism, fascism and his bizarre ego-centric campaign-- really does need to be heard and grasped by voters. It's the corruption, stupid-- the rigged system. Hillary is as much a part of it as Cruz, Kasich and the Republican Party are. Fortunately, Bernie is presenting much the same case, although without the racism, fascism and bizarre ego-centric gibberish. And with the increasingly menacing tone of Trump's threats

"It's a rigged system. I see it; I'm a smart guy. Nodoby really understood the system until I brought it out." I can't imagine that Trump could this be that ignorant to think "nobody" ever saw that before him. Except I can imagine it. Certainly no one in his circles ever figured it out-- unless they were celebrating it-- and that includes this corrupt hack. It's more likely, though, that some of Trump's supporters-- though not these handsome fellas-- have been so turned off by the system for what the politically unaware Trump has finally figured out, and being the ultimate ego-ist, imagines no one ever understood it before he started shouting it. You know, just like no Republican ever heard of demagoguing xenophobia until he discovered it.

The excitement Trump and Bernie are generating has a lot to do with the legitimate anger ordinary Americans feel about the rigged system, both politically and economically. The Morning Joe crew pointed out that the same way the Republican political elites are fixing the election against Trump, the Democrats are rigging the system for Hillary. (Of course Mark Halperin defends the status quo in the video below:)



What's important to remember is that the rigged political system Trump is whining about, is just half of a rigged system that has rigged the economy for crooks like Trump himself. That's an important difference between Trump and Bernie. Trump might learn something if he watched the Bernie TV ad:



Bernie knows the Republicans, by and large, are worse than the Democrats-- with a few exceptions like Debbie Wasserman Schultz-- but he knows the Republican and the Democratic elites are into the rigging of the system together, or in conjunction. It isn't just the Republicans who are owned by Big Money. These are the dozen biggest crooks taking money from the lobbyists (since 1990):

These are the dozen biggest crooks taking money from the Finance Sector (since 1990):

These are the dozen biggest crooks taking money from the drug manufacturers (since 1990):

These are the dozen biggest crooks taking money from hedge funds (since 1990):

We could go on forever. Bernie basically says that the party elites are all owned by big money special interests. He's right and that's what "the system is rigged" means. Congress-- the congressional leaders of both parties-- do not care about the American people. They acre about the business of getting election, reelected and building power. That's why the lowest and most disreputable characters among the Members of Congress-- Mitch McConnell (R), Eric Cantor (R), Chuck Schumer (D), Steny Hoyer (D), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D), Paul Ryan (R), John Boehner (R), Steve Israel (D), Joe Crowley (D), Chris Van Hollen (D), John Cornyn (R), climb the highest in the system and fiercely defend the status quo (Democrats) or the status quo ante (Republicans). You can understand why Bernie was never really tempted to join the sewer of corruption euphemistically called the Democratic Party. A political revolution is what's needed to change the system. A Debbie Wasserman Schultz or a Hillary Clinton isn't going to change it any more than a Paul Ryan or a Mitch McConnell.

I think from one end of this country to the other people are ripe for political revolution. Fifty percent of the people do not bother voting in the presidential and statewide elections. The vast majority of those not voting are low-income people who have given up on America. The whole quality of life in America is based on greed. I believe in the redistribution of wealth in this nation.

We are demonstrating in Burlington the peoples’ contempt for conventional old-fashioned Democratic and Republican politics. The good news here is that the two-party system and corporate establishment are not invincible.

That may have sounded like Bernie speaking to a massive crowd in Washington Square Park in Manhattan or at Cony Island in Brooklyn last week, but it was Bernie in Vermont... in 1985. Help elect this man of the people-- the only man of the people running-- to the presidency and don't let another lesser-of-two-evils candidate ascend to the presidency. Lesser of two evils, of course, is still evil. Bernie isn't. In fact, Bob Scheer talks about the evil of two lessers below (my apologies in advance for subjecting you to a pathetic excuse for a moron like Torie Osborn, one of the dumbest, self-righteous and cringe-worthy political hacks in L.A. politics):

Robert Scheer proposes "We know everything but learn nothing" as a slogan for our "intelligence" agencies

"As The New York Times stated, the Benghazi incident has been billed as "the most significant attack on United States property in 11 years, since Sept. 11, 2001," an event that launched the much-ballyhooed war on terror. But as with that attack 11 years earlier, the perps turned out to be people the U.S. secret agencies had once trusted. . . .

"We have left it to the secret state agents to determine the nature of our enemies, "the evil doers," and never dare to question how often their "evidence" gets it wrong. "

-- Robert Scheer, in his first 2014 column, "NSA,
Benghazi and the Monsters of Our Own Creation"

by Ken

"Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi" was one of Noah's cases in point last night in Part 2 of "A Prayer to the Janitor of Lunacy," his 2013 "Year in Review" (which began Monday, and continues tonight at 6pm PT/9pm ET).

In Republikook world, President Obama supposedly either let the storming of the embassy happen or encouraged it, maybe with his supersecret Muslim underground decoder ring, or something. One thing Republicans won't tell you is that it was they who voted in Congress to withdraw security funding for our embassies. Nice goin', a-holes. Since then we've had madman Rep. Darrell Issa, doing his best Joe McCarthy imitation, running hearing after hearing after hearing, wasting mountains of our taxpayer dollars on some insane attempt to build an impeachment-worthy case against the president.  Again, people died, so let's exploit it! Ain't that the Republican way?

Now one of our most prized BS detector-rejectors, Robert Scheer, looks at the extent to which the Benghazi disaster, like many others of modern times, was produced by products of our own creation. He begins by asking, "If we are so smart why are we so dumb?," explaining, "I am referring to the 'intelligence' that our spy agencies have gathered at great cost in both massive secret black box budgets and, much more important, the surrender of our personal freedom to the snooping eyes of our modern surveillance state."

Bob is one of those writers I hate the try to ellipsize or paraphrase, so here is his case as he himself makes it:

"We know everything but learn nothing" would be an honest slogan for the NSA, CIA and lesser-known spy agencies that specialize in leading us so dangerously astray. For all of their massive intrusion into the personal lives of individuals throughout the world, it is difficult to recall a time when the "intelligence" they collected provided such myopic policy insight.

Take the revelations in The New York Times’ exhaustive six-part investigation published Saturday demonstrating that the devastating 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, was an intelligence disaster. The Times "turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault" that led to the death of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. Instead, a local militia leader on the side of the U.S.-supported insurrection in Libya with no known affiliation with al-Qaida is a prime suspect, and he and others allegedly responsible were not on the radar screen of the 20-person CIA station in Benghazi because they were part of the insurgency the U.S. supported.

As for the vast collection of phone and email intercepts maintained by U.S. spy agencies, it turned up only one bit of information, a phone call from someone involved in the mob attacking the U.S. post. He called a friend elsewhere in Africa who allegedly knew some folks in al-Qaida, but the friend "sounded astonished" at the news from Libya, "suggesting he had no prior knowledge of the assault," according to U.S. officials. In short, the only evidence turned up by the vast spying apparatus was evidence that inconveniently contradicted the al-Qaida connection, so it was not made public.

As The New York Times stated, the Benghazi incident has been billed as "the most significant attack on United States property in 11 years, since Sept. 11, 2001," an event that launched the much-ballyhooed war on terror. But as with that attack 11 years earlier, the perps turned out to be people the U.S. secret agencies had once trusted. The enemy here was not al-Qaida, but rather a homegrown menace empowered by foreign intervention. "The attack was led," the Times reported, "by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistic support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi."

These monsters of our own creation continually haunt us. It was, after all, the United States under both Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan that recruited and armed the anti-Soviet Muslim fanatics who later morphed into Osama bin Laden’s gang. Reagan even embraced them as "freedom fighters" in official ceremonies. So too did the U.S. recently rally an army of fundamentalists to oppose the regime of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya.

Gadhafi, like Hussein in Iraq and Assad in Syria, was a defanged dictator and -- inconvenient to the U.S. anti-terrorism narrative -- like his fellow secular dictators, an avowed enemy of al-Qaida. But that did not stop the regime change ideologues in the U.S. government from meddling once again in a society that they could barely comprehend. As The New York Times summarized the origins of the Benghazi debacle:

The United States waded deeply into post-Qaddafi Libya, hoping to build a beachhead against extremists, especially Al Qaeda. It believed it could draw a bright line between friends and enemies in Libya. But it ultimately lost its ambassador in an attack that involved opponents of the West and fighters belonging to militias that the Americans had taken for allies.

We have left it to the secret state agents to determine the nature of our enemies, "the evil doers," and never dare to question how often their "evidence" gets it wrong. In the process, debates about foreign policy are hijacked by those with access to secret information, be it Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction or Iran’s threat to the stability of the Mideast. This last is the source of greatest irrationality in the war on terror that has committed the U.S. to the side of Sunni fanatics financed by Saudi Arabia in a war against anyone the Saudi theocracy holds in contempt.

Just this week, the Saudi government pledged $3 billion to support the government of Lebanon in its confrontation with Hezbollah. That follows a $5 billion gift to the military dictators of Egypt who overthrew a democratically elected government whose Sunni leadership did not sufficiently cater to Saudi dictates. Then there are this year’s foreign aid bribes of $1 billion to Jordan, $3.25 billion to Yemen, $1.25 billion to Morocco and $750 million to Tunisia to docilely follow the decrees of the Saudi theocracy.

The idiocy of anti-terrorism as a substitute for foreign policy is that Saudi Arabia, the one nation most accurately described as a breeding ground for terrorism, gets to play an outsized role, along with outlier Israel, in deciding U.S. policy for the entire region. If people dare dissent, say any Americans who loathe having their taxes committed in this way, they can be branded as soft on terror. If they go online and express such a view, will they too be picked up in the NSA’s catch-a-spy network?

The excuse is that this sacrifice of our freedom will make us more secure, as in the misnamed "National Security Agency," by knowing more about our "enemies." But the record is unmistakably the opposite, that this relinquishing of privacy and transparency has stifled genuine public debate about the goals of our policy and left us both stupid and weak.

Ironically, the Republikooks are sort of right when they point a finger at President Obama, but not for any of the "reasons" they impute. No, the problem is that this president has continued a nightmarish tradition of misguided "security policy."

#

A Government Of The Rich, By The Rich And, More Than Anything Else, FOR The Rich

A bunch of slimy New Dems-- your father's Republican Party

Almost half the Members of Congress (48%) are millionaires and most of the rest are there at the sufferance of millionaires and billionaires who finance their miserable political careers. The median estimated net worth of all 535 Members is about $966,000, although higher among the freshmen-- $1,066,515. The richest freshmen are New Dem mega-millionaires who bought their seats in Congress the way you go out for a nice dinner on your birthday-- John Delaney (MD) and Scott Peters (CA), each worth a couple million bucks-- which goes a long way towards explaining why they don't vote for-- let alone comprehend-- the interests of ordinary working families. Delaney, for example, is all about wrecking Social Security... after all, who needs that pesky annoyance? A better question: why is he a Democrat? Or why did the DCCC recruit someone like that? Oh, yeah, they take any self-funder no matter what he or she thinks.

So it should be no shock to anyone's sensibilities who read the report from Reuters yesterday that Congress' top tax breaks benefit the wealthy... their own kind and the kind they're going to for money for their campaigns (and careers).

The top ten U.S. tax deductions, credits and exclusions will keep $12 trillion out of federal government coffers over the next decade, and several of them mainly benefit the wealthiest Americans, a new study from the Congressional Budget Office shows.

The top 20 percent of income earners will reap more than half of the $900 billion in benefits from these tax breaks that will accrue in 2013, the non-partisan CBO said on Wednesday.

Further, 17 percent of the total benefits would go to the top 1 percent of income earners-- families earning roughly $450,000 or more. The same group that was hit with a tax rate hike in January.

The benefits of preferential tax rates on capital gains and dividends, a break worth $161 billion this year, go almost entirely to the wealthy, including 68 percent to the top one percent of earners.

We've been talking about how the so-called "New Dems," conservatives who have sold out to Big Business entirely, have been working with the Republicans to gut Dodd Frank and overturn progressive achievements of the past. The dozen worst New Dems in the House, who are doing the most damage to ordinary families and must be defeated as much as any Republican-- from bad to worst:

• Ami Bera (CA)
• Jim Himes (CT)
• Dan Maffei (NY)
• Scott Peters (CA)
• Kyrsten Sinema (AZ)
• Jim Cooper (TN)
• Bill Foster (IL)
• John Barrow (GA)
• Sean Patrick Maloney (NY)
• Patrick Murphy (FL)
• Mike McIntyre (NC)
• Ron Barber (AZ)

Bob Scheer's latest column, Congress Still Puts Out For Wall Street, starts with a question: "What does it take to make a Wall Street banker squirm with shame?" Scheer implies that absolutely nothing makes the banksters feel any shame. Why don't the so-called Democrats-- or, rather, "New Democrats," on the list above realize that as well? Scheer asserts, correctly, that "[t]he Republicans, with the exception of a few die-hard libertarians, always do the bidding of the banks that finance them, but the Democrats are just as eager to pig out at the bankers’ trough."

Wall Street lobbyists were only too happy to hold a fundraising dinner last week for Democratic Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, who co-sponsored the Citigroup bill, one of several such events banking groups have organized for lawmakers who support their legislation.

What is at issue here is an attempt to gut the already tepid effort of the Dodd-Frank Act to control the runaway $700 trillion derivatives trading market. One source of alarm is the extensive in-house trading in these derivatives between affiliates of the too-big-to-fail banks. As an example of the profound corruption of our legislative process, congressional staffers turned to top corporate lawyers to draft the wording pretending to rein in their activity.

For example, as the emails reviewed by the Times revealed, House committee staffers consulted Michael Bopp, a partner at the elite law firm Gibson, Dunn who represents corporations involved in derivative trading, as to the verbiage he would prefer in the legislation. His language was well received, as the Times reported: “Ultimately, the committee inserted every word of Mr. Bopp’s suggestion into a 2012 version of the bill that passed the House, save for a slight change in phrasing.”

That last sentence, conveying the essence of America’s crony capitalist system, should stand as the defining epitaph for the death of representative democracy.

“I won’t dispute for one second the problems of a system that demands immense amount of fund-raisers by its legislators,” Jim Himes, a Democrat from Connecticut who supported the bankers’ recent bills and conveniently heads fundraising for House Democrats, conceded to the Times. Himes, who worked for Goldman Sachs before pretending to represent the people’s interest as an elected representative, is one of the top beneficiaries of Wall Street payoffs but claims to be distressed by the corruption that is his way of life. As he told the Times, “It’s appalling, it’s disgusting, it’s wasteful and it opens the possibility of conflicts of interest and corruption. It’s unfortunately the world we live in.”

No, buddy, it’s the world you guys make and wallow in. Other folks just lose their jobs and homes while you manage to slither out of the slime richer and more powerful than ever.

"I have been a harsh critic of Barack Obama . . . but on [every] matter of serious contention in this election, Mitt Romney is decidedly worse" (Robert Scheer)

Tom Toles in the Washington Post [click to enlarge]

"I have been a harsh critic of Barack Obama for continuing that bipartisan capitulation to Wall Street, but on this and every other matter of serious contention in this election, Mitt Romney is decidedly worse."

-- Robert Scheer, in his Truthdig column "Vote for the B-"

by Ken

As I wrote last Thursday, after work today I head straight the Samuel Friedman Theatre on West 47th Street for Doug Hughes's Manhattan Theatre Club-on-Broadway staging of Rebecca Lenkiewicz's adaptation of Ibsen's Enemy of the People, carefully scheduled to keep me out of the line of fire of tonight's electoral media circus, which I don't think my nerves are up to.

(The stress is certainly not made easier by the fact that, at the presidential level, today's contest has no good outcome. But as Robert Scheer sets out so eloquently in the column, "Vote for the B-," that we'll get to eventually, there is one outcome that is measurably more horrible, significantly more horrible, than the other.)

Since the show is at 7, and I gather is a heavily chopped-down "adaptation" of what Ibsen wrote, I'm afraid it will put me back on the streets a good couple of hours earlier than I would wish. One thing I hope I won't be doing as a delay tactic is any significant eating. Since we've been back in our long-blacked-out Downtown Manhattan office (most of us were here Sunday, the day the lights came back on, to do whatever had to be done to have several of our magazines ready for the printer Monday morning) the office has been overflowing with food. Our version of "crisis mentality," I guess.

Even as I write I'm thinking about the remnants of the lasagna and the meatless ziti baked by one of my coworkers, who explained that she figured those of our coworkers still without power might be happy to have something hot to eat. Well, I never lost power at home, while I've still been delighted by her thoughtfulness. It's amazing how much mass transit has been restored given the devastation we suffered last week, but the commute has remained, shall we say, a challenge, and with the frigid turn the weather has taken, either the lasagna or the ziti fresh out of the microwave has been a treat.

Yes, we have power, and our computers and Internet connections are humming. One thing we don't have, and apparently won't for a while, is phones that connect to the outside world. But then, doesn't everyone have a cell phone? (Not me, actually. It's buried somewhere at home.) Another thing we don't have is heat. (Our office manager thoughtfully ordered in a wagonload of little space heaters, but when a bunch of them were turned on, one of the circuts blew, and the heaters were promptly reboxed and collected.)

My original thought was that if I get home around, say, 11, I could just flip the TV on and get the lay of the land, then either unplug myself or resign myself to riding out the storm. Now I'm thinking maybe I can leave all of that to the morning. if I'm home early, I've still got some of my Sunday-night TV pile-up stored on the DVR. I've already watched the Good Wife, Homeland, Boardwalk Empire, and Upstairs Downstairs, but that still leaves the Dexter and Tremé, where it's safe to venture that neither President-in-Waiting Willard nor his Boy Companion Paul will be mentioned -- not to mention the hundreds of other people running for assorted offices today.

I hope the rest of the country is doing better than we here in NYC are. At my little two-election-district polling place in Washington Heights, by shortly after 8am both ballot scanning machines were kaput. I had already realized, though, nothing on my ballot was really being seriously contested; we had several bruising contests, but they were all decided in the primaries. (I see that we weren't alone in Northern Manhattan: "Uptown Voters Face Broken Scanning Machines and Confusion While Voting.")

FOR THOSE OF US BEING MADE TO FEEL THAT A
STRONG PREFERENCE FOR OBAMA OVER WILLARD . . .

. . . makes us unwitting stooges of the oligarchy -- made to feel so by people I suddenly realize may not be as smart as I once thought, not to mention nowhere near as smart as they think -- I'm hard put to imagine the stakes in today's election being explained better than Robert Sheer does it in his Truthdig column today (which I read via Nation of Change). Of course this pass-along comes too late to be of any pradtical value, but I like to think that sagacity has some value that goes beyond the time-bound practical.

Vote for the B-

By Robert Scheer
TRUTHDIG / OP-ED
Published: Tuesday 6 November 2012

It’s crunch time, and I want to be on record, just in case some still undecided independent voter cares what I think. And one might, since I did write a decidedly nonpartisan book on the origins of the economic crisis entitled “The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street.” I have been a harsh critic of Barack Obama for continuing that bipartisan capitulation to Wall Street, but on this and every other matter of serious contention in this election, Mitt Romney is decidedly worse.

A vote for Obama in a swing state is a no-brainer, because, on a host of issues, including immigration, women’s rights, gay rights, health care, campaign finance, income inequality, tax breaks for the rich and the legitimacy of trade unions, there is a vast partisan difference that should not be ignored. It matters greatly who appoints an anticipated two justices to the Supreme Court, which is already dominated by right-wing ideologues.

In a state where a protest vote will not elect Romney, a vote for the Green Party’s admirable Jill Stein, the consistent Libertarian Gary Johnson, or the populist Rocky Anderson sends an appropriate but measured signal of contempt for the sorry state of our two-party system.

That disgust is warranted by the fact that this president has followed the broad ideological outlines of his predecessor on national security. Witness the continuing assault on due process that is the island prison of Guantanamo and the killing of innocent civilians through drone attacks, as well as the unwarranted Nixonian persecution of alleged whistle-blowers Bradley Manning and Julian Assange.

But on all of that, Obama is the lesser evil compared to Romney, who has promised to increase military spending to fight a new Cold War that might, under his stewardship, turn hot against China, Russia, the forlorn Palestinians and anyone else with whom he can pick a fight. Romney is as dangerous as he is inexperienced in such matters. To compensate for his ignorance, he has turned to the same pack of neoconservative ideologues that lied us into Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

On economic policy, Romney has attempted to smear Obama as some kind of big government socialist, although the former vulture capitalist would surely have wasted just as much money as Obama rescuing his friends on Wall Street. Neither candidate would stop the Federal Reserve from continuing to purchase toxic assets to save the banks from their own folly. The candidates split on a bailout of the auto industry, with Obama helping save some decent American jobs, and they disagree about how much the obscenely wealthy should pay in taxes, although sometimes Romney disagrees with himself on that score.

Obama sold out to Wall Street when he appointed Lawrence Summers, who had pocketed more than $8 million in bank and hedge fund fees while serving as a top Obama campaign adviser, to be his key White House expert on the economy. This was an egregious error vastly compounded when he appointed as his Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, former head of the New York Fed and faithful ally of the Bush administration in filling the lifeboats to capacity with bankers. However, Romney blasts Obama for not being solicitous enough in catering to Wall Street greed and defines the extremely minor reforms of Dodd-Frank as an attack on capitalism, when it is anything but.

As Gretchen Morgenson, the sharpest business journalist of our day, noted in a recent column in The New York Times: “Many Americans probably think the Dodd-Frank financial reform law will protect taxpayers from future bailouts. Wrong. In fact, Dodd-Frank actually widened the federal safety net for big institutions. Under that law, eight more giants were granted the right to tap the Federal Reserve for funding when the crisis hits.”

But Romney finds objectionable even the slightest improvement in transparency and accountability in Dodd-Frank, including a much-needed consumer protection agency championed by Elizabeth Warren. He absolves Wall Street and the Bush administration that let greed run wild of any responsibility for the economic mess and, indeed, seeks to cut funding for programs that aid its victims.

Romney’s talk of the deficit is specious. He would spend multiples of Obama’s stimulus on the military, alone, while relegating the unemployed, disabled and impoverished to the hope of charity and warm weather. Consider the millions of Americans kept fed by Obama’s hard-won extensions of unemployment benefits and food stamps during the worst lows of the recession. How would President Romney have handled such a crisis?

To employ the vernacular used in my day job teaching college students, I give Obama a generous B- grade for initiating a national health care plan that, while flawed, is a start, ending discrimination against gays in the military, easing the student loan crisis, signing equal pay legislation and appointing reasonable Supreme Court justices, among other achievements. Meanwhile, the rapacious capitalist turned candidate Romney—poster boy of the 1 percent—denigrates the less economically fortunate among us while growing filthy rich by slicing and dicing good American jobs out of existence and exploiting every tax loophole to aggrandize his own fortune. He earns a solid F and makes Obama look quite good in comparison.

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The Hopelessness Of Enforced Conservative Ignorance

Bob Scheer isn't looking any more forward to voting for conservative Democrat Barack Obama than I am. We both live in California, so neither of us presumably has to-- as we would if we lived in swing states like Florida, Ohio, Nevada or Iowa-- and I plan, for the first time in my life, in not voting for the lesser of two evils. And make no mistake about it: that is the nicest thing I can say about Obama. No one really knows what he thinks about anything; he's almost as bad, in that light, as Mitt Romney. How come America keeps giving itself such ghastly choices between proponents of the anti-working family Conservative Consensus? Oh, yeah-- campaign finance. I forgot.

Wall Street owns them both. Is Romney worse? Sure. Is Obama better? Sort of. But they have more in common that is absolutely horrible than they have significant differences, other than around the edges. Those edges are all we have to pin our hopes on. They hardly amount to Change, at least not on a societal scale. Scheer writes about it, eloquently, this week in a column called Obama by Default but which could have been called "The Perfect Sieve vs The Malfunctioning RomneyBot."

The Republicans are a sick joke, and their narrow ideological stupidity has left rational voters no choice in the coming presidential election but Barack Obama. With Ron Paul out of it and warmongering hedge fund hustler Mitt Romney the likely Republican nominee, the GOP has defined itself indelibly as the party of moneyed greed and unfettered imperialism.

It is with chilling certainty that one can predict that a single Romney appointee to the Supreme Court would seal the coup of the 1 percent that already is well on its way toward purchasing the nation’s political soul. Romney is the quintessential Citizens United super PAC candidate, a man who has turned avarice into virtue and comes to us now as a once-moderate politician transformed into the ultimate prophet of imperial hubris, blaming everyone from the Chinese to laid-off American workers for our problems. Everyone, that is, except the Wall Street-dominated GOP, which midwifed the Great Recession under George W. Bush and now seeks to blame Obama for the enormous deficit spawned by the party’s wanton behavior.

Without a militarily sophisticated enemy anywhere on the planet, the United States, thanks to the Bush-bloated budget, now spends almost as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. Yet the GOP honchos dare claim they are for small government even as their chosen candidate champs at the bit to go to war with Iran.

They obviously learned nothing from the disasters of Bush the Second, who hijacked the tragedy of 9/11 to launch the most wasteful orgy of military spending in U.S. history in his failed effort to take out an al-Qaida enemy that had no significant military arsenal. That enemy was later eliminated by Obama, whom the Republicans still obstinately refuse to credit for accomplishing what Bush failed to. Can you imagine the explosion of preening self-congratulation that would have resulted if a GOP president had done the deed?

The red-ink deficits that had been stanched under Bill Clinton came to gush uncontrollably because of the swollen military budgets, compounded by the severe costs of the recession that occurred on Bush’s watch.

But the Republicans refuse to take ownership of the collapse resulting from their longstanding advocacy of radical financial deregulation that led to the derivatives bubble, hundreds of trillions of dollars of toxic junk, now a permanent, nightmarish feature of the world’s economy. Romney, who made his fortune through such financial finagling, even has the effrontery to call for more of the same and blame Obama’s tepid efforts at establishing some sane speed limits for the financial highway as a cause of our ongoing crisis.

So insanely gullible are Republican voters that they buy Mitt’s line that bailing out the auto industry to save the heart of America’s legendary industrial base was an example of big-government waste. Yet to them the almost unimaginable sum spent on the Wall Street bailout represents prudent small-government fiscal responsibility.

The incumbent president has his failings, but compared to Mitt Romney he is a paradigm of considered and compassionate thought. As Obama put it in a speech before a journalism group this week, we are saddled with a national debt “that has grown over the last decade, primarily as a result of two wars, two massive tax cuts, and an unprecedented financial crisis, [and] that will have to be paid down.” But instead of dealing with the causes of that debt, Romney has called for an increase in military spending, continued tax breaks for the rich and reversal of the very limited restraints on corporate greed that Obama managed to get through Congress. He has endorsed the House-passed Paul Ryan budget, which, as Obama noted, even Newt Gingrich once derided as “radical” and an effort at “right-wing social engineering."

Such radicalism leaves Obama as the "moderate" choice in the coming election, defending centrist programs that Republicans in the past helped originate. Indeed, the big attack on Obama will involve what the Republicans call Obamacare-- which was modeled in every important respect on Romneycare, enacted when the GOP candidate was governor of Massachusetts.

The overarching lesson of this primary season is that Romney and the Republicans he seeks to win over are incapable of embracing the very moderation that, particularly in the golden era of Dwight Eisenhower, defined the party. Instead, they are now a reckless force bent on destroying the essential social contract that has been the basis of America’s economic and social progress.

As Obama said Tuesday in addressing the editors and reporters: "... We’re going to have to answer a central question as a nation. ... Can we succeed as a country where a shrinking number of people do exceedingly well, while a growing number struggle to get by? ... This is not just another run-of-the-mill political debate. ... It’s the defining issue of our time."

OK, that's one way to look at it. But that isn't the only way. I hope you're already familiar with some of the brilliant work by investigative journalist Chris Mooney, two of whose books, The Republican War On Science and The Republican Brain are available at the DWT Book Shop. The Republican War On Science was just released and Thursday morning he was on MSNBC explaining it-- and arguing with an example of the problem, someone named Cupp. I embedded the little episode at the top of the page. The implications are dire because if Mooney is correct, which he certainly appears to me to be, there probably is no way this country is going to survive. Sounds apocalyptic, I know, but... maybe you should start thinking of what life would be like in a more rational environment... maybe even learn another language-- just in case.