The Shoe Falls

Iran announced today that it would no longer trade its oil in U.S. dollars, instead using a basket of currencies, primarily the euro or the yen. They cited depreciating dollar value on exchanges. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last year called the falling dollar a “worthless piece of paper.”

If indeed the U.S. was primarily motivated by strategic concerns centered around oil in invading the Middle East, then this is a serious move on Iran’s part – it literally invites retribution. The next move will be up to Bush/Cheney. Attack? Invade?

Some cynics say that the Bush Administration is waiting on action against Iran until it can be done in such a way as to yield maximum impact on the U.S. elections in November. This cynic says the attack will happen before that time, and for bipartisan reasons, primarily oil.

Block That Ad!

I went to a baseball blog sponsored by a newspaper this morning, and was hit with the loudest, most annoying car sales advertisement imaginable. I could not turn it off, and a guy was walking all over the screen talking. When I closed the window it opened another and kept on going.

So I downloaded Adblock, a Firefox add-on that takes care of this sort of nonsense. But I also found this – a guy who writes these ads asking the annoying ad writers of the world to join together and boycott Firefox. He says that we are depriving him of revenue, and he’s pissed.

The Internet was first developed as a means of back-channel communication for the Pentagon. Later it was turned over to the educational community. In the early 1990’s not too many people saw the potential there, and when the net first went public it was a bonanza of free information sharing. That’s what it does best.

But the marketplace got hold of it, and it didn’t take too long before the penis-enlargers, sideshows, pornographers and carnival barkers came on board. The free market gave us viruses and spyware, pop-ups, intrusive ads along with the phishing and other schemes. When the first pop-up blockers came out, I jumped on them – surfing the web had become a tedious experience with ads jumping out at you from ever corner. Finally we had a way to block them.

But advertisers work hard every day to find ways to invade our computers. Adblock was developed by German programmer Wladimir Palant as open source, non-market, and does a marvelous job. Furthermore, advertisers cannot detect it and go around it. It’s priceless.

So web-browsing is again a pleasant experience and I’ve no doubt that, as advertisers find new ways to invade our privacy, open-source people will find new ways to block them. God bless open-source.

Republicans and Race

I had quite a roughing up over at Wiley’s place over a mistake I made in overreaching – I made the comment that all racists are Republican. It’s simply not true, of course. Racists come in many stripes, and as the Obama campaign forges ahead, we’re going to see many manifestations, from both Hillary Clinton and the Republicans. We won’t see overt racist commentary, but more of the subtle, sublime variety, as when Ronald Reagan launched his 1976 campaign for president from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were famously killed, and when he later coined the phrase “welfare queen” … as if it meant something else.

But I was trying in my clumsy fashion to make a larger point. The Republican Party owes its election success from 1972 forward to one simple factor: The south changed from Democrat to Republican. This trend manifested itself first in 1964, when the deep south voted for Barry Goldwater, one of 27 senatorial opponents of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In 1968, the same states voted for overt racist George Wallace and his American Independent Party, and finally, in 1972, the south went Republican. 1976 could be considered an anomaly, as Jimmy Carter was a southerner and evangelical Christian, and Watergate influenced the outcome. But in 1980 and in every election since, the south has voted solidly Republican.

Outside the south, the country is more or less Democratic, and this was manifest in the 2006 election when, outside the south, the Republicans took a holy beating. A full 42% of their congressional seats now come from the South. And the trend will likely continue – save for effective use of wedge issues, and electronic voting and election fraud, the Republican Party will soon be the party of the south, and not much more.

And it makes sense – this is the party that wants to do away with Medicare and Social Security, that took us into Iraq with no way out, that favors tax cuts for the very wealthiest among us while inflicting onerous payroll taxes on the working classes. It’s not much of a platform, and has only enjoyed the success it has due to their Rovian skill in exploiting wedge issues. I quote from Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter With Kansas (but ran across the quote in Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal – I haven’t read the former):

The trick never ages, the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion, receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make the country strong again, receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors, receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs, receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists, receive Social Security privatization efforts. Vote to strike a blow against elitism, receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEO’s rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.

This year the Republicans, with McCain at the helm, will be giving us a collective wedgie, just as before. But if 2006 is an indication, it’s not working as it once did. Kansas is coming back to the fold.

The deeper question, beyond wedge issues, the one we never speak of except in code, is racism. Is the south racist? Have the Republicans struck a deal with the devil? Predictably, when I broached the subject over at Wiley’s, I got Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell tossed at me, with the implicit point that if two really smart and successful black people are Republican, then the party is not racist. But that’s not what it’s about, and they know it. It’s still about welfare queens, income redistribution, about the large percentage of blacks who are poor and depend on the social safety net. There’s resentment. And this resentment, while existing everywhere, most manifests in those states with the largest percentage of blacks in the population – the south.

Katrina brought it to the surface – we were faced with the spectacle of natural disaster hitting an area with many poor blacks. We saw looting and helplessness and white flight, while blacks congregated in the Louisiana Superdome. We didn’t say it. But it was there in the pictures. These people can’t take care of themselves. They are dependent on us.

I find it all very troubling – like most Americans, I find welfare and handouts to be counterproductive, yet don’t want to go back to the days of private soup kitchens and Jesus as the only hope for the poor. I want to find that magical formula that prevents people from starving without creating dependency while at the same time lifting them up. Blacks have a lot on their plates – racist attitudes are embedded deep within our culture, and are hard to overcome. So-called free markets don’t advance social policies. Liberal guilt hasn’t helped them. Affirmative action creates a backlash.

These are hard questions, and we need skilled leaders to deal with them. I suppose Obama is such a leader – we’ll see. In the meantime, I know that the leaders we need are not members of that party that since 1964 has exploited white resentments of blacks to gain political power. Let the Republicans have the south, while the rest of us try to solve problems rather than exploiting them.

Lynching Barack Obama

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them. … Mark Twain

We live in a land where, officially anyway, we cherish freedom of speech. But notice on the blogs an odd phenomenon: People use fake names – very few actually say who they are in real life. There’s a reason for this: people want to express their true ideas with passion, but they are at work, on company time, they have a boss, or don’t want to be Googled in the future when they are looking for a job.

Freedom of speech is a nice concept. I’m in favor of it.

Lee Harvey Oswald did not shoot John F. Kennedy. Any damned fool can plainly see this. Yet today, 45 years later, if you work in or around the news media, you cannot say this or even hint that you suspect it. America’s elections have gone haywire – exit polls very seldom buttress official results, and those results are almost always skewed towards Republicans. No one in media (save Olberman) talks about it. During the 1990’s, the United States of America imposed onerous sanctions on the country of Iraq, this after bombing them into oblivion, and as a result over one-half million children starved or died of preventable disease. That’s written out of history now. We’re trying to rescue that country from …. us, I suppose.

These thoughts, these realities, are in the backdrop. Few of us but ever give voice to them. It’s a silent backwater. On some level, cloaked in denial, there is awareness of the ugly reality that is America, but it’s our alter-ego, our Mr. Hyde. We know these things. As evidence look at the screaming and breast beating that goes on whenever someone says openly what we know privately. It’s like a child caught doing something wrong – his first reaction is to blame his sister.

Well, someone has done it. Someone has spoken openly and truthfully. And the results are predictable – indignation, accusation and spurning, marginalization and shunning. That someone is the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Read his words:

I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday, did anybody else see him or hear him? He was on Fox News, this is a white man, and he was upsetting the Fox News commentators to no end. He pointed out, did you see him John, a white man, and he pointed out, an ambassador, that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Mohammed was in fact true, America’s chickens…are coming home to roost. We took this country by terror, away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Arowak, the Comanche, the Arapahoe, the Navajo. Terrorism. We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism. We bombed Granada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel. We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenagers and toddlers, pregnant mothers, and hardworking fathers. We bombed Qaddafi’s home and killed his child. Blessed are they who bash your children’s head against a rock. We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to payback for the attack on our embassy, killed hundreds of hardworking people, mothers and fathers who left home to go that day not knowing that they would never get back home. We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye. Kids playing in the playground, mothers picking up children from school, civilians, not soldiers, people just trying to make it day by day.

We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and Black South Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.

The British government failed, the Russian government failed, the Japanese government failed, the German government failed, and the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese decent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. The government put them in chains. She put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in sub-standard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education, and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three strike law, and then wants us to sing God Bless America…no, no, no

Not God bless America, God damn America. That’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme. The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent. Think about this, think about this.

For every one Oprah, a billionaire, you’ve got 5 million blacks who out of work. For every one Colin Powell, a millionaire, you’ve got 10 million blacks who cannot read. For every one Condoskeeza Rice, you’ve got 1 million in prison. For every one Tiger Woods, who needs to get beat, at the Masters, with his cap, blazin’ hips playing on a course that discriminates against women. God has his way of bringing you up short when you get to big for your cap, blazin britches. For every one Tiger Woods, we got 10,000 black kids who will never see a golf course. The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent.

It’s an emotional expression of opinion backed by fact and anecdote – he let his eagle soar. Slave ships were real, Indian genocide was real, bombs dropped in a Panamanian barrio killing … how many?… don’t know. We don’t count. (These were not important people, after all.) To be an American is to live in denial, to constantly have to reinforce doubt by extolling patriotism to block out the ugly reality of who we really are. A true-blue American never looks in the mirror.

The Reverend Wright is not “really proud” to be an American. He’s going down, and I assume he will be taking Barack Obama with him.

It’s a sad spectacle. This November we’re going to elect a man who made his reputation bombing cities and killing innocent civilians in a country that hardly had an air force. He was justly held captive for those crimes, yet we lionize him and demonized those who imprisoned him. We speak no evil of this man who graduated at the bottom of his class, lost three aircraft by means of stupid accident, who has an ugly temper. He is protected by the media. He has a false reputation, yet his veil will not be pierced. It will carry him all the way to the White House. While there, he will never say anything that is true. He’ll be safe.

In the meantime, as Reverend Wright has learned, speaking truth to power is not allowed. It will get a man lynched.

A Modest Proposal

A Proposal:

Whoever turned this kid

Into this kid

Needs to be summarily shot.

Jeremiah Who?

You guys may have heard of this fellow named Jeremiah Wright.  It turns out, he was Obama’s pastor for some time.  From what I understand, some of the things he said in a sermon or two sparked some kind of brouhaha.  Call me crazy, but I’m willing to bet very few of us in the Montana blogosphere (myself included) have either watched a full sermon of his or seen him interviewed.

Well, here’s our chance.  He’ll be appearing on Bill Moyer’s Journal (the best show on television) this Friday night.  It’s his first interview since this whole controversy was manufactured.

Like I said, I know very little of the fellow, but I have some thoughts about what we’re probably going to see from him Friday night.  First, I bet he’s not going to run around flailing his arms and bitching about America. He could even come across as thoughtful and reasonable, if we’re lucky.  I suppose I’ll just have to watch and draw my own conclusions.

Here’s another thought for those of you on the right who don’t know anything about the guy:  I know you’re not big fans of context (or using too many brain cells on this issue, for that matter…)  Maybe you should watch the interview to get a sense of what this guy stands for and what he believes in.  If any one of you can offer some sort of thoughtful critique on the issues brought up in this interview, you’ll get a gold star.

The question in all of this:  Is it possible to get you guys to think critically about something more complicated than a one or two-sentence soundbyte?

How Do We Pay for Iraq?

I got one of those viral emails that are going around, this one on taxes. It’s full of lies and fudging, is written in funny type and large letters and on a sixth grade reading level. I get these things all the time, usually don’t read them. But I should – this is where the business of the country is going on – it’s an incubator for public opinion.

Here’s are just a few excerpts:

Capital Gains:

MCCAIN: 15% (no change)
OBAMA: 28%
CLINTON:24%

How does this affect you? If you sell your home and make a profit, you will pay 28% of your gain on taxes. If you are heading toward retirement and would like to down-size your home or move into a retirement community, 28% of the money you make from your home will go to taxes. This proposal will adversely affect the elderly who are counting on the income from their homes as part of their retirement income.

Most people don’t have capital gains, though mutual funds often make capital gains distributions that affect small investors. The wealthy set has always been big on this – the type of income that they receive should be set aside and treated different than the type of income that ordinary people receive. Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute, funded as they are by wealthy patrons, each has servants on staff that will vouch for this – income that wealthy people receive is far too important to all of us to tax at regular rates.

The question is, do we let the Bush tax cuts expire and go back to the way we did things before the massive deficits that the cuts engendered? That’s an odd thing about right wing ducks – they talk about taxes on one hand, ignore deficits on the other. That’s far too complex for a viral email.

The part about paying capital gains tax on the sale of your home is a lie. The first $250,000 of gain ($500,000 for a married couple) is exempt from tax. Surely the person who wrote the email, probably somewhere in the depths of RNC headquarters, knew this, but in emails the truth is both incidental and inconvenient.

DIVIDEND TAX

MCCAIN: 15% (no change)
OBAMA: 39.6%
CLINTON: 39.6%

How will this affect you? If you have any money invested in stock market, IRA, mutual funds, college funds, life insurance, retirement accounts, or anything that pays or reinvests dividends, you will now be paying nearly 40% of the money earned on taxes if Obama or Clinton become president. The experts predict that “Higher tax rates on dividends and capital gains would crash the stock market yet do absolutely nothing to cut the deficit.”

Where to begin. One, allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire will not up the tax on dividends to 39.6%. That’s a lie. They would be taxed at normal rates starting at 10-15%, which is where low income people reside. Pensioners mostly fall in those rate brackets. It is true that if the Bush tax cuts expire, the wealthiest among us would pay tax at a top rate 39.6% instead of 35% on the last dollar earned – this is people who have taxable income of around $350,000 – and this is the group that the people who wrote the email seeks to protect.

Also, the experts who predict a stock market crash if the tax on dividends is put back at normal rates are again Heritage and Cato, servants of wealth. And retirement accounts are not taxed on dividends or otherwise. That’s a lie. Life insurance “dividends” are not income and are not taxed, and retirement accounts are not taxed until money is withdrawn, and then as ordinary income. (Dividends and capital gains received by ordinary 401K and IRA investors receive no special treatment now, and would not under McCain.)

INHERITANCE TAX

MCCAIN: 0%
OBAMA: keep the inheritance tax
CLINTON: keep the inheritance tax

How does this affect you? Many families have lost businesses, farms and ranches, and homes that have been in their families for generations because they could not afford the inheritance tax. Those willing their assets to loved ones will not only lose them to these taxes.

One, it is the “estate” tax, and not the “inheritance” tax, which sounds like it affects ordinary people, and two, only the very wealthiest people in the country, like Dennis Rehberg, have to pay it. But isn’t it interesting how they frame this as an issue that affects everyday Joe? Sneaky, eh?

NEW TAXES BEING PROPOSED BY BOTH CLINTON AND OBAMA
* New government taxes proposed on homes that are more than 2400 square feet
* New gasoline taxes (as if gas weren’t high enough already)
* New taxes on natural resources consumption (heating gas, water, electricity)
* New taxes on retirement accounts
and last but not least….
* New taxes to pay for socialized medicine so we can receive the same level of medical care as other third-world countries!!!

Notice how the email suddenly became vague? No more specifics. That’s because every single word in the last part is either made up or wildly exaggerated. Someone at RNC had an important appointment or something and had to quit work early and just slopped together some random lies to complete the email.

But that’s how it works in viralville. There are no rules.

And it leaves me with a question – something I find perplexing about the right wing. You gave us Iraq, but no way to pay for it except to borrow from our grandchildren. Shouldn’t you guys who are so willing to spend tax dollars be willing to pay them?

Protocols of the Elders of Science

As of late, Mike over at TLBP has been rebuilding the foundation of his blog (and his political leanings, for that matter) almost entirely on strawmen and flawed logic. From telling us that Obama is a Communist to informing us that he might as well be a member of Hamas, Mike keeps trying to outdo himself. At first I thought he was just trying to be inflammatory, but after having some conversations with him about his posts, it’s clear that he believes the bullshit he’s selling.

Mike’s latest gem is not devoted to Obama, but to “Global warming activists.” Here, Mike refers to Evo Morales, the leftist leader of Bolivia:

At the United Nations this darling of the progressive community gave a speech that seems to mirror many of the talking points of those in our local communities. You see, every once in a while the truth accidentally tumbles out on global warming activists’ real agenda. That’s exactly what happened at the U.N., when Bolivia’s leader called for ending capitalism to save the planet.

You can always count on the ultimate strawman argument to be coming your way when someone on the other side of an issue starts telling you your “real agenda.” The logic here is simply stunning. Let me walk you through it.

Step 1: Daily Kos Diarist praises Evo Morales

Obvious Conclusion: All lefties love Evo Morales

Step 2: Evo Morales speaks out against Global Warming

Obvious Conclusion: He is part of the “Global Warming Activist” agenda

Step 3: Evo Morales calls on an end to Capitalism to fight Global Warming.

Obvious Conclusion: Global Warming is fake. It turns out the Left is just trying to bamboozle everyone into ending Capitalism.

See, wasn’t that easy? It’s so much easier to be against a whole group of people when you’re creating their real beliefs for them. That way, you don’t have to engage in any real debates on the issue. You can just prattle on against made up agendas that don’t have any bearing on the issue at hand.

Having rather longstanding and civil debates with Mike over time, I had come to appreciate his intelligence and his writing ability, despite the things we disagree on. But at this point, I can only come to one conclusion about what’s happened to him:

You draw your own conclusions.

Power is The Ultimate Aphrodisiac

She is former gymnast and Athens Olympic gold medal winner Alina Kabayeva, age 24. The Russian paper Moskovsky Korrespondent reported last week that former Russian President Vladimar Putin had walked out on his 50-year-old wife, Ludmilla, and was set to wed Kabayeva.

Apparently she looked into his eyes … she was able to get a sense of his soul. He has this power over people….

Putin denies the engagement, and the Moskovsky Korrespondent has been shut down.

A Fun New Blog

I get bored with blogging, and it blog stats are an indication, I am boring as well. I make the rounds every time I can, and have the most fun at right wing blog sites. But even that becomes predictable. Now and then something will come along and spice it up. Currently that spice is Big Sky Cairn.

First let me state the obvious. Blogging is a small world. Even the busiest Montana blogs get only a few hundred reads every day, and very few of those who read choose to comment. Most who do comment are anonymous, as you never know if the boss (or future boss) is watching. (So much for freedom of speech – government doesn’t regulate us – the marketplace does.)

So when Jay gets after Wiley who gets after Matt and Lamindae chimes in, it’s a tempest in a teapot. I’m not saying it’s not fun. But don’t overstate its importance. Political fortunes are not made in the blogosphere. We’re just sharpening our claws, practicing wit on one another, and having fun.

So when another spearchucker comes along, it can only be more fun. And Wiley Cody at Big Sky Cairn is indeed fun. One, he puts out volume – there’s always something new up over there. Two, he’s got attitude. As I like to say, there are two types of right wingers – those who know everything and those who know nothing, and there is tremendous overlap within those two groups. Cody is of the former group – his ideas on various subjects are not only right, but he’s so much smarter than those he disagrees with that they are either stupid or dishonest.

So Cody has been spending quite a bit of time lately telling us that Jay Stevens is dishonest. Jay ought to take it as a backhanded compliment, given the alternative.

Wiley Cody is obviously very young. Politics is more like baseball than football – you don’t get 17-0 win streaks. It’s more like the best team winning ten more games than it loses. There’s very little of being “right” involved in politics, very little outright winning. It’s far more calculated than that. Wiley is talking now about Congressman Rehberg and SCHIP. He can’t see that Denny is playing it ever so carefully, not wanting to take on a popular program, not wanting to support it either. There’s not much victorious backslapping to be had in such an underhanded position, but Wiley is young and truly believes in Dennis, and, well, go read him and find out just how deluded he is.

Just as members of the other side of the coin are deluded about their own. Jay and Matt get starry-eyed about Tester, and the whole of Democratberg is currently taken with Obama. Politics is the art of straddling fences without falling and crushing your balls. But political camp followers are like sports fans – they are emotionally invested and looking for clearcut victory, and it just ain’t to be had.

But it’s not about winning. It’s about playing. It’s about positioning and getting in a good jab now and then, and even sometimes a knockout punch, though I must say that there aren’t many of those to be had.

Anyway, welcome aboard Wiley Cody, you in all your youth and naiveté. You’ve made it fun again.